caleb walker

instant clergy (just add holy water)

In the latest article at Intrepid Media, titled you really can have a wedding for $1000 or less, I learned that the Universal Life Church Monastery offers on-line ordinations. I've bookmarked that page in case a friend needs a minister immediately and can't find one. I'd suggest you do the same. Be prepared, as the Boy Scouts say.

Apparently (if your state government agrees) you will then be a full member of the clergy, permitted to perform marriages, funerals, communions, and more.

know your islam

Through some lucky guessing, I scored 12 out of 18 on the Test Your Knowledge of Islam quiz. Better than I expected. Try it out.

passing

"I love it when you pass," KR said to me tonight. We were sitting in a pew in Temple Sinai. I was clutching the bulletin as if I were in a Presbyterian service. The bulletin said, "[Our neighbor's daughter] WILL BECOME BAT MITZVAH." I thought this was a Bat Mitzvah service. I had no idea that she was "becoming" Bat Mitzvah. I guess if I knew what those words meant in English it might make sense to me.

Obviously this was our first Bat Mitzvah. And our first time in a Jewish service. As we walked to the temple from the car KR said, "You'll have to wear a yarmulke." (My gentile readers might need to be told that that is how you spell "yomm-uh-ka," the little skullcaps that Jewish men wear. I first saw that word in print only recently.) So I'd have to wear a yarmulke. Great, I thought. I'm sweating in my too-tight suit and having something slipping off my head will only add to my self-consciousness. Since KR just gave me one of her prison haircuts last night (I love my haircut, babe), I couldn't imagine how I'd get a yarmulke to stick to my head. (In response, she said, "If Dooce's daughter can get hairclips to stick on the dog, then I can make them stick to your head.")

We went inside and in the foyer there was a basket of yarmulkes. The man ahead of us took one and plastered it to his head using both hands. While I paid close attention to his technique KR asked one of the ushers if I had to wear one. She told us that, no, I didn't have to wear one. "We're a Reform congregation," she told me, "You can do whatever you're comfortable doing. Whatever you usually do." She thought I was Jewish. She assumed I was, anyway. In the pew, just before the service, KR told me, "I love it when you pass."

She does enjoy my passing. She likes when I pass for Turkish when we're in Turkey. She likes when I pass for a rug dealer so I draw merchants' attention away from her and she can do her thing without interruption. She liked it when we used to walk to work together and an old Orthodox Jewish man would clutch his Torah and stare at me every morning as we passed. "He's praying for you," she would say. She was convinced that he thought I was a lapsed Jew, married to a redheaded goy-girl. She got an unimaginable amount of pleasure from that.

Thank God for wikipedia: Bat Mitzvah means "daughter of the commandment."

happy write in your blog day

There is no day of the year that makes a blogger feel the necessity of writing more than New Year's Day. But I've been dry lately. You could tell, couldn't you? FridayQ is uninspiring, and none of the other "meme" sites that FridayQ points to is able to break through the blockage. (Is it just me, or are they using the word meme incorrectly?)

You know those Christmas letters you get from family and friends? We (or I) usually don't get it together in time to write and send a Christmas letter, so we write an Epiphany letter. Epiphany falls on January 6 every year, after the twelve days of Christmas. It commemorates the arrival of the wise men at Jesus' manger bed, signifying God's revelation of himself to the world (in the ironic guise of wise men). Epiphany, in a more general sense, means revelation. It implies reflecting, seeking, and finding. January 6 is also the anniversary of my wedding to KR. Fifteen years in twenty-oh-five.

So, with the new year, the epiphany, the letter, and the anniversary, this season affords some serious thinking about the past, the present, and the future. But can I get my mind to focus on any of those things right now? Obviously no.

silence

I was introduced to the nervous blog when its creator left me a complimentary comment here. Her latest post, Crying, reminds me of a recent event.

I have had limited experience with the Quaker faith. (By "limited" I mean "one.") A couple used my wife's shop as the site of their Quaker wedding. I fussed around beforehand, setting up chairs and trying to be more useful than in-the-way. Once the ceremony began I sat in the back and listened.

Nothing happened. Nobody stood. Nobody processed. Nobody spoke. Nobody opened a book or sang a song. It was silent. It was beautiful. After several minutes of silence my mind began to wander. I thought about things I had to do at home, at work. I thought about other weddings I had been to (including the antithesis of this one, an Indian wedding where kids ran around and people chatted so it was hard to hear what was going on up front). I looked at the other people and judged them. He looks like a jerk. She's wearing a terrible dress. I wish he'd stop fidgeting. The usual ramblings of an unoccupied mind.

But soon my mind began to wander into uncharted spaces. I don't remember much about those spaces now, but I remember being refreshed and at peace afterward, as if I'd had a long nap. I haven't experienced anything like that since. But I should. I can call it meditation. I can sit in a place where I have no distractions and let my mind wander off. Maybe it will tell me stories. Maybe it will simply clear itself so I can operate better in my waking life.

During the wedding a couple people did stand and speak. After some time - forty minutes? fifty? - the bride and groom stood and signed a paper, then everyone else in attendance signed it.

Then the mariachi band, dressed in beaded black costumes and huge black sombreros, began playing, and led the whole group through the streets of Squirrel Hill to the home where the reception was held. I'm not kidding.

hip christian teens

This post at Meta Filter sparked a memory.

I grew up in a Christian home, and once I left home for college, I got involved in the college fellowship group at a nearby (very wealthy) Presbyterian church. The group was called Time Out, and was more to my liking than the more conservative InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. Time Out sponsored working trips to local soup kitchens and men's and women's shelters. The overall message from the staff members was that we could live a balanced life - that we could be successful professionals and still be good Christian folk. (This was the appropriate message for a group made up primarily of Carnegie Mellon University students, we bunch of uptight wannabe professionals.)

Every winter Time Out held a retreat where we learned and sang and cried and played snow football. One of the most vivid of my retreat memories is getting a massage (fully clothed, of course) on the floor of the assembly hall from two women at once. I was quite a wild man in those days, I tell ya.

The retreat was an event to which we were encouraged to invite outsiders, both Christian and non. During one retreat I was watching a game of pool when one of these visitors approached me. He had punked-up hair, wore a black U2 t-shirt (this was probably in 1982), and was drinking a can of Coke. He walked right up to me and said, as if he had been preparing and rehearsing all morning, as if he had been watching me from the doorway working up his courage, he came right up to me, looked me in the eye, and this young guy said to me, "So, what do you think about God?"

I usually think of my 1982-self as a miserable dork, with barely enough social skill to talk to the people I knew, let alone strangers. But I have to give my 1982-self credit for this: I laughed. Yes, I laughed before saying, "God's okay." I was still smiling as the kid turned and left the room.

rapture

Once in a while, when we're out and nobody else is - the roads, sidewalks, and stores are all empty - KR will speculate that the Rapture has come and we were left behind. (What's the Rapture? Jack Chick describes it.) Heh. Yeesh. Way to tap into those childhood fears.

Tonight was one of those nights - sort of. I drove to the Food Hole (Whole Foods) for a few things, and the number of cars on the roads and people in the store seemed to be diminished by about 25%. And I thought, what if the Rapture happens and it only takes away a handful of people? In fact, what if it's already occured and not enough people were holy enough to make much of a difference? What if it happened on February 27, 2003, and the only one to disappear was Mister Rogers? Ha ha. Joke's on us.

halloween horrors

"For a positive alternative to a Halloween haunted house, visit HellStop with its graphic scenes of an alcohol-related car accident, death, judgment, and hell."

It seems there's some wiggle room in the definition of "positive."

everything you need to know

It's all here, at godsaidmansaid.com. It turns out that God is for, and man is against:

• bi-racial marriages
• breast-feeding
• church-going
• the existence of giants

God is against, and man is for:

• homosexuality
• carbon dating
• tattoos and piercings

So it appears that God is in favor of hyphenation.