Sit Down Comedy … May 29th, 2020

Jonathots Daily Blog

(4424)

Responsibility.

The ability to be responsible.

Sounds just a trifle old-fashioned. For after all, in this modern era, how can we determine the true height and depth of our ability? And likewise, what are we responsible for, given that our power is limited by the circumstances of the world around us?

Yet many years ago, when Darren and Karen (with rhyming names), after twelve years of marriage, suddenly found themselves on the verge of a divorce because Darren was spotted at a motel twenty miles away, with the high school choral teacher…

Well, literally the whole affair set our village ablaze with controversy, disagreement, judgments and opinions.

Karen was greatly wounded by the sexual misconduct of her assumed loving husband, but was also warned by the local minister that divorce was a “horrible sin in the eyes of God,” and that their two children could be damaged beyond repair if there wasn’t some way to bring about reclamation to their relationship.

Darren was embarrassed—almost appeared to be sorry, until three weeks after the temporary patch-up of their marriage, he was again spotted, at a different motel, with the choir lady–just humming along.

Darren and Karen decided their responsibility was to stay married.

Their further responsibility was to pretend it was working out really well.

No one would put up with such restrictions nowadays.

We’ve come up with the notion that our only responsibility is to be happy, and then, because we can’t seem to be, we permit ourselves many experiments to attempt to uncover our pleasure.

Meanwhile, responsibility has been carted away to the garage and set next to other words, which also seem to have no current relevance. Like “sinner”—that being one who gets too near sin.

Time pushes on.

Or does it march?

Perhaps slip on its greasy surroundings?

Or does time do a Rip van Winkle and just go to sleep, and wake up later, when the problem that existed is no longer considered problematic?

For we used to have a responsibility to tell the truth.

Now we have a responsibility to offer a convincing lie.

We had a responsibility to love our fellow-man. Now, all we have to do is “treat our families really good.”

We had a responsibility to feel guilty about the bigotry that existed in our country. Now we accept a cultural divide, which keeps us from thoroughly understanding one another.

We had a responsibility to be honest in our business practices.

Now we favor the old saying, “Let the buyer beware.”

Perhaps that’s what we should do at this season in our nation—have a deep-rooted discussion about our responsibility.

For certainly, threatening such a maneuver is a great way to terminate interest in this essay.

Sit Down Comedy … October 19th, 2018

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Mack Smack

 

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Jesonian… June 24th, 2017

 Jonathots Daily Blog

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“Go.”

But where?

Into all the world, Jesus said as he was about to ascend into Heaven.

Although most theologians like to focus on the Ascension based upon Jesus’ arrival to “sit at the right hand of God the Father,” I would like to discuss what we have called the “great commission”–to go into all the world.

Was it not actually the ludicrous commission? After all, Jesus had traveled with his twelve disciples for three-and-a-half years. He knew they were Jewish, bigoted, disrespectful of women, indifferent to children and completely bound to their home base. How could he possibly anticipate that these immovable religious boys could ever take a message anywhere?

There were three keys to the success of the early church:

• The Holy Spirit
• The Apostle Paul
• The destruction of Jerusalem

If you remove any one of these elements, Christianity becomes a cult of Judaism, therefore suffering the fate of the Jews when the Romans destroyed their Temple.

Peter, Andrew and John had no intention of doing anything but hanging around Jerusalem and aggravating the Pharisees. (You may notice that I left out James because early on he mouthed off and lost his head–literally.)

So the Holy Spirit arrived on the Day of Pentecost and gave Peter the boldness to speak about the murder of the Messiah in front of Jews visiting from all over the known world. Three thousand of them were saved that day, went back to their homes and began the process of reaching the entire planet.

Meanwhile, a Pharisee named Saul of Tarsus became quite adept at killing Christians, therefore terrorizing them. He was on his way to crippling the movement when Jesus signed him up on the road to Damascus, to take the message to the Gentiles. Why? Because the original twelve were not going to do it.

And even though Paul was a Pharisee, he was a rabble rouser–a fire-brand of intellectual and spiritual energy. He found himself criticizing the original disciples because they would not eat with the Gentiles, deeming themselves better.

Paul took the Gospel to the Greeks, and since the Romans always followed everything the Greeks did, they made excellent evangelists. He ended his life in Rome, teaching, knowing that the Romans were going to reach the Germanic tribes and the Germanic tribes would evangelize the Angles and Saxons, and the Angles and Saxons were going to climb into boats, land on rocks near Plymouth and begin a new nation called America, which would generate the technology to reach the whole world.

To ensure that those “stay-at-home disciples” would eventually leave Jerusalem and follow in Paul’s footsteps, Jesus warned them about the coming destruction of Jerusalem–to make sure they left town before the Romans arrived with their deadly foreclosure.

By 70 A. D. there was no Jewish synagogue, race or movement. Christianity survived because the followers of Jesus literally “headed for the hills.”

In the process of touting the power of prayer, the value of meditation and the worth of Bible study, we need to understand that Jesus intended us to be a “go” people.

He wanted us to view the world as a whole instead of just our little village, and he desired that his children would be the most tolerant, non-bigoted, caring and clever people on the face of the Earth.

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Untotaled: Stepping 10–December 31st, 1965 (The Watch Night) … April 19, 2014

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(Transcript)

There is certainly not much to do on New Year’s Eve in a little village of fifteen hundred people.

Some of the folks of our town would actually make the trip down to Columbus to take in a show and imbibe some alcohol, feeling as if they had flown to the moon and could disguise their drunken condition without fear of community scrutiny.

But most of the citizens of our little burg were devoid of entertainment or ideas for ringing in the New Year.

So our local church planned a Watch Night service, so as to prohibit–or at least impair–the possibility of the young kids falling victim to the beckonings of “demon rum.”

Watch Night services were a tradition of Dixie which had been transplanted to the Buckeye State via those who floated north. It was in four parts:

• First there was eating–the best potluck of the year. Everyone tried to outdo one another both in culinary skills and appetites.
• Then there were a couple of hours of gospel singing, featuring local talent (or at least local persons).
• This trailed off into some preaching, warning all present of the dangers of increasing sin in our nation and the hopes that revival would break out in the coming 365 days provided..
• And finally, the twelve o’clock hour offered the opportunity for hugs and handshakes.

This year I was thrilled. My group, The Gospels, a quartet of young teens, was going to participate in the singing portion of the evening. We had lobbied the previous year, and even auditioned for the church elders, were weighed in the balances and found wanting. This year, apparently we were in tune.

The ironic part of being welcomed into the songfest was that our group was about to break up. Actually I was breaking it up by kicking the Connelly brothers out of our team and replacing them with two of my friends who I liked better. This caused quite a stir in the church. Matter of fact, I was called in for a conference with the pastor’s wife, as she tried to explain that human beings had feelings and the Connelly brothers deserved better treatment.

I listened politely and then did what I always did. Ignored her. You see, the Connelly brothers didn’t mind. They sang their hearts out that night.

I don’t know if we sounded good or not, but we sure had fun. It was one of those times when I felt really grown-up, in charge and important. That’s hard to come by in a tiny town.

I thought a lot about what the pastor’s wife said on how to treat people and how to conduct your affairs in a way that would not upset anyone else. I came to the conclusion that this was going to be difficult.

I think many people thought I was a real dick when I was a teenager. But without being a little bit of a dick as a teenager, you can grow up to be a dickless adult.

So I decided to try to continually improve what I do and what I work with without upsetting people too much.

Yes, that should keep me really busy.

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Pockets… March 27, 2014

Jonathots Daily Blog  

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Safe places to hide

Perhaps an escape

Surround yourself with fellow-agreers

Discourage strife through eliminating discussion

A consensus of repetitive ideas

A unity in smallness

A feeling of blocking difference is divinely inspired

A request for hope to depart from your village

A surrender to adequacy

A jarring alarm over being challenged

A corner where enemies can be easily detected

A decision to remain uncertain

A selected night without fear of the bump

A purposeful retreat with no battle in sight

An exclusion of simplicity to extol the glory of complexity

A requirement of a unanimous vote

Squeezing a dollar bill, pleading it will not leap from your grasp

Laughing at transition

Criticizing creativity

Believing that belief has no responsibility to become more believable

Grasping at straws but never drinking

Imitating emotion in favor of true encounter

Praising darkness for fear of the light

Praying to gain silence

Silent to acquire peace

Peaceful to run from questions

Pockets, not resistance

Reservation

Avoiding the exposure to ideas

Which just might revive the dead.

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Save Your Village… March 6, 2014

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I like to go to public parks to work on my writings and stuff. The scenery, atmosphere and intrusive clatter–well, I find exhilarating. Yet you do have to share the space with every living creature who habitates within.

Such was the case yesterday when a guy named Bunky came into my three square feet.

He was thirty-one years old and just as slight as I am husky, and wiry as I am cumbersome. We shared very little in common, but since proximity dictated either conversation or further social distancing, I jumped in.

Once I made my preliminary inquiries about his well-being, Bunky launched into a thirty-minute discourse on his life. Here are the highlights:

He had a nineteen-year-old girlfriend who is a junkie and needed him to go to work every day to get the money for her fix, so that she would not become violent and attack him. (In alternating presentations, she was referred to by Bunky as “lover, friend, enemy and bitch.”)

He had once been in a gang–I think it was the Crips–and told me he had killed a man, although he eyeballed me carefully to see if I was questioning his credibility. I didn’t. I saw no reason to authenticate a tale in progress.

He talked to me about the use of marijuana being helpful in relieving his back pain, brought on by years of working on cars, lying flat down on the hard concrete.

I wasn’t sure how long he was going to share, or if there would be a stopping point whatsoever–until his friends showed up. And then what had been a very intimate exchange was terminated as he rose to his feet, accepting the invitation of one of his cohorts, to go to another bench where they could smoke.

As quickly as it began it was over.

Being raised in a spiritual climate, I incriminated myself that I had not more sufficiently impacted Bunky’s world. It’s what we do best, you know. As human beings, we often “strain at the gnat and swallow the camel.” We criticize ourselves for what we don’t accomplish, while simultaneously failing to achieve what is set before us as our daily bread.

Let me share with you candidly, which is always my goal:

• You are not going to change the world.
• Jesus Christ didn’t do that.
• He was smart enough to leave behind an example of exactly how things work.
• Start where you are.

For you see, Bunky is not my problem There are many more qualified people to share, care and be aware of him than me. Here’s what I’m supposed to do:

1. Find my village.
2. Teach my village.
3. Save my village.
4. Let it travel.

I raised six boys in my household. For a brief period of human time, these young men sat at my table and listened to me expound on life. They also watched carefully to see if I followed up with my own choices. They were my village.

Also within that village was a handful of friends and comrades. They, too, were exposed to my experience.

I didn’t worry about changing a whole town, state or country. I found my village, I taught my village, I saved my village and then I let it travel.

Those young men met women and now their influence spreads from Miami to China to New York to Nashville to Dallas to Los Angeles. with films, music, business, ministry, recording, procreating and acting.

While some folks encourage me to spread out my influence as far as I possibly can, I would much rather have a thick spreading of peanut butter on a cracker than a thin application on a four-foot-long piece of French bread.

It’s simple–stop trying to change the world. Stop criticizing yourself for being ineffective.

• Find your village, teach your village, save your village–then let it travel.

And always remember–leave your image in the puddle provided.

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Three Freaks… August 29, 2013

Jonathots Daily Blog

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Slipping out of the encampment of the sleeping carnival crew, three freaks make their way down the hill, into the unsuspecting village of the townsfolk beneath.

They mean no good.

They are mischievous, self-motivated, bizarre and willing to do whatever is necessary to usurp their opinions, feelings and antics.

The same “attack of the freaks” is being paralleled in America.

We have released three freaks onto our families and children under the guise of pseudo-intellectualism and open-mindedness–or maybe because we want to come across as always being in the flow.

I don’t know about the motivation. But the three freaks are wreaking havoc on the spirit that has made America great.

1. Self-esteem. You can tell people who lack ability, motivation and talent that they are good, but you can never make them better by your words. Confidence is awarded to those who cross the finish line.

2. Getting even. Although we insist we are a Christian nation, we tout the Middle-eastern philosophy of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth“–a belief system, by the way, which has proven to produce nothing but wars. Here is a piece of gold: the best way to overcome mistreatment is to leave it behind and refuse to take revenge.

3. Stressed out. Somehow or another, the criterion for being an adult is having a countenance wracked with worry and fear. History disagrees. All the great men and women of the past learned very quickly that stress is where success begins. Without a need, there is no creativity.

These three freaks who have escaped from the “carnival of errors” will continue to plague us with their pranks until we take them back to where they belong and view them from either afar or when we’re in a mood to think about foolishness.

Let me give you three freak-killers:

1. Work for joy and self-satisfaction, not praise.

2. Forgiveness heals the mess.

3. No blessing without testing.

You put those three concepts to work and see if your self-esteem doesn’t naturally grow, your sense of justice and fairness is not appeased and your productivity does not tolerate a few minutes of feeling crunched.

Beware the freaks. They do not mean you any good whatsoever. They are trying to bring the philosophy of the carnival to the simplicity of life.

 .

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