I can’t get this scent out of my head

I had a visitor to my office yesterday.  The person was obviously a chain-smoker who had to interface with the public and so employed various scent masking agents to cover the smoke smell.  We had an “interesting” meeting and not a pleasant meeting and the problem with this scenario is that the persons scent seemed to linger all day.

I should add in the interest of full disclosure that I have almost no sense of smell.  I had it at one time and not sure what happened to it.  My theories are that it shut down during the summer I worked de-beaking chickens.  What would your smell cells do if they worked in a very hot chicken barn/outhouse burning the beaks of chickens flat all day long day after day?  The chicken poop was absolutely horrible but only marginally worse then the burnt beak smoke.  The second theory is the cells went on leave during my job as a dishwasher.  There’s something about breathing in scalding hot steam for hours on end that my nose didn’t like.  My fingers and most of the rest of my body didn’t like this job either but that’s a blog for another day.

So I got this guy in my office and the scent doesn’t go away.  I started thinking about it more and more and then left my office for awhile and came back and I still had the same scent in my nose.  So I thought to myself, ‘Wow that scent was so strong it must have stuck to the inside of my nose.’  Then I thought about it some more and this seemed less and less likely.  I finally concluded the scent got stuck in my brain.  It was like a song you hear that just keeps playing in your head and won’t go away.  Think about it – your ears hear a song, you stop hearing the song, the song keeps playing in your head.  Why can’t the same thing happen with smells?

I don’t know why or how the scent seemed to last forever but by the end of the day, I was anxious to move on to any other scent.  The smell reminded me of the meeting and so I kept thinking of this meeting all day.  I finally escaped the scent by going to workout.  I am not sure if all the breathing cleansed the scent from my nose or the exercise cleared my brain of the thought of the scent.

So the next time you get a smell that sticks with you, see if you can figure out whether it’s a mental of physical manifestation.  Then again, maybe this doesn’t happen to you or anyone else in which case I am probably some sort of idiot (savant) or mentally ill.

Sirens

 

I have been hearing a lot of sirens lately (the police car variety, not the Odysseus type…although now that I think about I hear my share of those too).  I don’t know what the deal is whether people are more accident prone all of a sudden or maybe I never didn’t pay attention as much before.

 

I do tend to listen to the sirens closely though.  It’s an occupational hazard when you live across the street from where you work.  I always hope, the sirens don’t stop at the church.  I have really, really hoping they wouldn’t stop because we have been in a prolonged process to install an automated external defibrillator (AED).  The AED is a devise that pretty much anyone can use to save someone who is having a heart attack.  So I have been worried that someone would have a heart attack before we got the unit and their demise would be because it took so long to get the AED.

 

Fortunately, we have the AED now and so if there is a heart attack at the parish, we can assist the victim until help arrives.  I don’t know that it will cure my desire for sirens to go past the church, but at least we got the heart covered.

 

I started disliking sirens intensely after I started dwelling on what the reason might be for their speedy trip.  They don’t go to happy places.  There is someone in a rough spot most of the time.  It’s not something pleasant to think about the accident or illness or misfortune that exists at the destination.  I have, however, recently found a tonic for the bad feeling I get when I think about where a siren is going.  I say a prayer for whoever they are going to help. 

 I’d invite you to give it a try – it’s free – so if you hear a siren – say a prayer. 

 

Do you suppose flies or insects in general have a notion of family?  Probably not.  It was just a thought.  I mean ants and bees have their communities but I can’t see flies and mosquitoes having communities. 

I was thinking about this fly that was trapped in my car the other day.  He/she finally got out miles from where we started and I wondered if when he got out, wondered where the heck he was.  “I know I laid some eggs in the road kill in the street by the park, but nothing here looks at all familiar.  I sure hope those eggs turn into healthy maggots and grow up to make me a proud fly parent.”  I doubt anything like that goes through a fly brain.  Although you wonder if someone like Saint Francis of Assisi would squash bugs and mosquitoes as he seemed to have a very exceptional appreciation of all of life and creation.   

I was thinking if flies and mosquitoes had a sense of community they would have far greater regard for their lives.  A fly with a family would have the wherewithal to get out of Dodge after someone shoos him away and goes for the fly swatter.  Mosquitoes living in community would probably concentrate their blood seeking attacks on animals without the ability to squash them. 

I’m glad crows have a posse they run with.  Imagine if crows behaved like mosquitoes. All we need so some sort of Hitchcock like situation where crows give up on road kill and start ganging up on live things because they got nothing to lose.  If they didn’t have their buds or family, they’d probably pluck out our eyeballs first and then chow down on some fresh flesh when we are defenseless. 

I am not sure what the point of any of these observations is but I guess I wonder if our biggest failures as humanity reflect our inability to understand and see one another in community and in family.  Do murder, war, assault reflect behavior more fly like than human?  Perhaps what we need to do is emphasize the fact that we belong to a very large community comprised of numerous smaller connected communities.  

Bad News

I went to the doctor today.  It’s been a while. I don’t like doctors or dentists or barbers or mechanics either.  To get right to the cold, hard truth of the matter, I am writing with some very bad news.  I am dying.

The blood tests haven’t come back yet, but I guess I knew.  I knew it when I looked into my doctors eyes.  In fact, while not exactly a hypochondriac, I guess I knew it all along.

The prognosis was a little fuzzy.  It might be today, it might be awhile from now.  He was certain.

I am struck now with what to do.  Do I quit my job and live large for my remaining days?  Do I spend my time in the chapel hoping to improve my odds?  Maybe it’s time to make amends with all those I’ve harmed. 

I will probably plod along as I have for my first forty-three years.  I suppose I’ll take time to smell the roses, enjoy the sunsets, hug my loved ones.  I guess I don’t expect a dramatic change in lifestyle.

I’m told I am improve my condition by eating better, sleeping more, not letting the small things bother me.  I guess that would have been the same advice if I wasn’t dying but now that I know, I guess I’ll re-examine my lifestyle and potentially prolong the quantity and quality of life.

Don’t get all upset.  I am just one person.  People die every day.  Life will go own well with or without me.  I’ll keep my head up and try to appreciate the days I have available and I would implore you to do the same even though I’ve burdened you with my awful situation.

What would you do if you where given a lethal diagnosis?  What would you do if you were at the doctor this morning and he told you that you would probably die in around 35 or so years from now? 

 

Fishing for answers

The past weekend I was one of the desperate fisher people who elected to sacrifice comfort for the opportunity to trick a fish into biting something that looked edible but wasn’t.

It started out raining and cool and got significantly worse by the end of the day.  At times I thought I was snowmobiling as we moved from place to place across the lake.  Is it really worth it, I kept asking myself.  Surely, there would be better days to fish especially considering that many thought the water would not be warm enough to have fish biting in the first place.

I did learn few things during the day.  My rain jacket is far from water proof.  It slowed down the rain but I was soaked through four layers of clothing on three different fishing shifts.  I learned that fish don’t really bit if the temperature of the water is in the high forties – at least not on Lake Ida.  I learned, once again,  that to catch fish, you must think like a fish. 

In the end I caught eight fish.  My two fishing companions caught one collectively.  Of course the debate for the day and the night was whether fishing is based on luck or skill.  My mates naturally were attributing my relative success to circumstantial factors and luck.  I basically said countered with saying something like a four to two score could be explaining by random factors, buy me catching fish at the rate of 16 to 1, indicates skill was very clearly the factor at play.

Per usual, I wondered if there were parallels in other arenas of life.  One thing that has been on my mind lately is attending church services.  From my perspective, it might be akin to reading about fishing and conscientiously fishing versus throwing a line in the water and hoping fortune favors us.  Is the person who makes the decision to attend church regularly better equipped to make decisions that will benefit society in the long run (i.e. morally sound decisions) then someone who doesn’t?

Attendance at services is down and the surveys done indicate that it is getting worse.  So how do you convince someone to attend more often?  They must obviously not place a value on attending and so the question is what value does attending have and how would you communicate this to others?  Further, you would probably have to make the case in mostly non-religious terms in that if the non-attenders had a strong faith relationship, they would likely already be attending.

From a resource allocation point of view, I wonder about the non-attendance issue relative to the amount of our resources we invest.  The parish invests a large amount in the school and we do so, in theory, to best equip our youth to practice and carry on our faith.  At the spring concert last week, I looked at the faces and started wondering who some of these people are and why don’t I ever see them at weekend masses.  The parish is investing heavily into the faith development of their children but if the parents don’t value practicing the faith, are we wasting the investment? The school is important in faith development but I would say the parents are going to have greater impact then the school will likely have. So are we wasting our investment if a good percentage of the families are closer to seeing our school as a cheap private school rather than an additional way to have their children grow up morally equipped because they practice their faith?

I don’t want to pick on school parents because non-attendance is prevalent among other parish groups as well.  Children and adults participate in various activities but do not attend and many neither participate in activities or attend mass.

I don’t want to come across at being judgmental of people who don’t attend mass, but we as a church must come to terms with either expressing the value and importance of attending mass, or we need to be prepared for an increasingly casual attitude by our members with respect to adhering to the faith. 

Do you attend mass regularly why?  If you don’t why don’t you go more often?  What is the value of attending mass in your life?  Does it prepare you to deal with decision-making in your life?  Do you think the people that attend mass are better for having done so?  In what ways?  Do you think our parish would be better if more people attended regularly?  What would you do or say to get more to come?

Are there parallels between an increasingly casual attitude toward practicing one’s faith and a decision-making by individuals and society that emphasizes the immediate and personal well-being over the long-term good for the greatest number? 

 

Time…

How would your describe time and your relationship with it?  Think about it, what is time and maybe the more important question for all of us is what should our understanding of time be?

I woke up at roughly 3:45 this morning and was in some sort of recurring half asleep/half awake cycle with the same thought/dream blending together.  I don’t remember all the particulars but when I was more awake then asleep, the cliché, ‘time doesn’t not stand still,’ was the thought I had. 

I started thinking about references to time as in, time goes by, time races by, time stands still, time is on your side.  From there I wondered into thinking about how we track time with respect to clocks and calendars and birthdays and stages of life.  This lead to thinking about trying to comprehend eternity relative to a day or hour.  At this point, I fell back to sleep for a couple of hours.

When I woke up I was thinking about time in relationship to economics and salvation.  How does our treatment of our available time reflect our values?  Does our treatment of time reflect an appropriate perspective?  You can’t really treat every day as if it’s your last day on earth but you can’t go through life thinking you will live forever.

From a professional point of view, I think some of the art of the ministry of administration is being able to balance the spectrum of time perception.  On the one hand, you need to keep the lights on and the doors open at the parish but on the other hand, you have to comprehend that decisions can have eternal consequences.  You want to provide opportunities for people to improve their lives and assure the eternal wellbeing of their soul but you also must spend time thinking about some short-term, less meaningful aspects of parish business like getting rid of dandelions.

On a personal level, I like to use Bill Murray’s character in, “Ground Hog Day,” as a model for a healthy perspective on time.  The movie is about a guy that gets stuck living the same day over and over.  He evolves in his understanding of time and life as he continues to live the same day over and over.  Eventually he comes to understand that each day is an opportunity to grow and to build and create relationships and to love.  His metamorphosis to this understanding highlights some unhealthy perceptions of our time.

I am not sure exactly what the point in all this is but I guess I would recommend that we all think about the eternal in the context of a day or a week and reconcile our behavior in light of these two perspectives.  Does our lifestyle today reflect an understanding of the eternal life of our soul?  Do we really believe in eternity our is that too abstract to impact our lifestyle?  Even if you have trouble with eternity, is does your lifestyle reflect an understanding of an improved self/world in five, 10, or 15 years?  What do you/we need to change in our behavior to reflect a longer-term approach?

 

Thank you very little or much

A church really depends on the goodwill, trust, and some would argue guilt as the means to stay afloat.  No one is forced to give their money and so to keep the doors open; donors must have faith and then trust that their contribution is being used to do good things.

Many non-profits are in a similar situation although they typically don’t play the guilt card (not that we would ever do this) wherein members are reminded that there is an ample moral foundation to share what you have with those in need.  Non-church, non-profits typically have a more sophisticated approach to cultivating donors and a broader array of ways on how they can recognize donors. 

Church’s might put a plaque or have minor ways of recognizing donors, but most typically don’t issue annual reports categorizing donors by amount given and recognizing their largest donors.  These activities might be effective for non-profits but the perception is that they are inappropriate for churches.  So my question is what is appropriate for churches?

How should or maybe should parishes recognize the people who contribute?  Some would clearly say no that giving to a church is a response to faith and giving is and should be its own reward.  Recognizing donors is potentially tainting the motivation most have when they give and publicizing donors or donations is inappropriate.

On the other side of the coin, many donors are subjected to sophisticated cultivation techniques by other non-profits and presumably respond to these techniques which may decrease their giving to the church.  If their college or high school president asks them to go out to lunch and tells them about the grand vision they have and that their name will appear here or there.  Doesn’t this seem more motivating than a form letter from the pastor and a listing of your contributions for tax purposes?

Should churches do anything to make their case?  Ideally, the people running the church believe in what they are doing and should believe that if they did more of it the world would be a better place.  So shouldn’t church leaders be motivated to get as many contributions as possible to do as much good as possible?  Shouldn’t we be cultivating people who have the potential to further our mission and vision?

Our parish decided to have several events to give supporters a chance to meet our new pastor and hear him talk about what he sees as the potential vision for the church.  If you were going to start having these meetings, who would you start meeting with first?  We decided to sort people by the amount they contribute and this has caused some hard feelings.  I don’t know what the answer is but I guess I think we are doing the right thing.

I also think it’s important to give all parishioners the same opportunity however and so it’s a matter of who goes when.  Above all we want to make sure we are supportable (people will be motivated to support what we do) and that by one means or another we have the resources to continue the extremely valuable work we are doing.

 

The Bunny Easter

My kids tended to screw up nouns with two words when they were younger.  Not sure why – it just happened.  Two that remain are “belt seat” and “Bunny Easter”.  So around our house, the Bunny Easter made an appearance last week providing a basket full of candy for each child (who of course had to endure a house-wide search to find it).

I started thinking about the Bunny Easter (or Easter Bunny as some of you more sophisticated readers probably know him).  What the heck is the deal? Why would we celebrate Easter with an egg delivery rabbit? I then started thinking about the relationship between Santa and the Bunny Easter and wondered why our culture has chosen to couple the two most religious days with two gift bringing characters.

The cynic in me would attribute it to some cigar smoking industrialists who deviously introduced a way to hawk more of their collective wares on an ignorant and unsuspecting public… 
“Sales are flat people.  We need new ideas – big ideas – on how to improve sales or there’s going to be more than a few heads that will roll.  How can we sell more toys and candy?”

“Why don’t we try to introduce the tradition of giving freedom toys on Independence Day?”

“That’s crap. – but wait a minute you might be onto to something…”

“Why don’t we invent some characters who bring our products on days people celebrate most…like Christmas…”

So that was one theory that probably has some merit but I think there must be some deeper reason that reflects some collective dysfunctional behavior on the part of everyone.  Why would everyone chose to go along with a tradition that undermines the meaning of the two most important days of the year? 

I wonder if we were and are afraid of coping with the real meaning of the days as a group.  Maybe we have trouble expressing to friends and acquaintances the true meaning and importance of the days so we came up with a lived cartoon we use to mark the significance of the days.  We all agree the day is special but we don’t really want to confront this reality forthrightly with one another so we have created diversions to cope.

I think it would be a broach of personal space to say to an acquaintance that you are looking forward to celebrating Christ coming to the world and giving all new hope, it’s easier to buy a toy and wish them, “Happy Holidays.”  We are afraid of talking even with fellow Christians of importance and meaning of Christ dying and rising so we scatter some M&Ms around the house and head to brunch.  We all know these days are very important but somehow we’ve decided we can’t deal with their meaning head-on as a society.

I guess I don’t have any answers I sure is heck am not going to serve my kids stewed rabbit next Easter and tell them things are going to be different from now on.  I do think we must be very careful in not becoming a completely secular society when so many people are Christians and believers in other faiths.  Maybe we should change our language a little to send a subtle reminder of the true importance of these days.  How about, ‘Christ is risen’ instead of Happy Easter or ‘Christ is coming’ instead of Merry Christmas.

I suppose we should also take some comfort that we don’t have Thomas the Turkey bringing candy corn and sleds to most grateful boys and girls on Thanksgiving.  Just you wait though.

Return of the Saint

So let’s say we have a church where everyone – at least most people – understand the purpose of a church and they understand in broad terms how this purpose is being defined in particular location (per my last post).  Then what?  

From my perspective as an administrator the question is, how do you allocate resources in the most effective way to move the organization to embody the mission.  To me you need more definition beyond a mission.  You need to define more specifically what you need to do but you also need to why you are going to do everything.  Why do we have a school relative to what we see our mission as?  Why do we have Bible study, Vacation Bible School, and Life Teen?

Once a church defines what is doing and why it’s doing it, then it must continually refine these activities.  What do we need to change, improve, adjust to better realize our potential.  

Very abstract isn’t it.  Let’s take a look at some examples – all very hypothetical.  So let’s say we understand our mission to be to form mature Catholic Christians by offering education, spiritual development, worship, and service opportunities.  So we decide we want to offer faith development opportunities for all but since our parishioner base is largely families we want to put more resources into the faith development of children and youth.

We offer a day school since having seven hours a day to help the children grow in their faith increases the chances that they will grow up mature in their faith development.  We should also offer classes to the children and youth not in the school.  These classes should make the best of the time they meet to develop the faith of the students.  There should be an identified pathway on how the collective attendance will lead the children to understand and practice their faith as they mature into adulthood.

So you could go on and on and analyze each of the activities and tie it to understanding of the mission.  Unfortunately, this is an exercise that few parishes undertake.  They do what they did last year which might be great but they tend to skip the part and ask themselves what does the activity do to further the mission.  Moreover, the participants themselves can lose sight of why they are participating.  We go to class because that’s what you are supposed to do.

There is one other notion about church activity that needs to be understood but seems to be mostly forgotten.  The notion is that people are at very, very different places in their faith lives and you must conscientiously plan your activity to get them from one point to another.  Some people are completely unchurched.  Some show up once in awhile as a novelty.  Others come to daily mass and volunteer hundreds of hours at the church and elsewhere.  These different categories of people are going to need different experiences to get them to the next stage of faith development.  

When a parish tries to determine what to do, it must very deliberately construct a strategy to address where different people are at with their lives.  The collective activity should clearly define a pathway toward becoming a person of faith.  Shouldn’t a church’s goal be to make people saints?  If we do what we are trying to do perfectly, wouldn’t we want to have members who are so in touch with God that they are able to act like Christ would?

I guess it’s something to think about.

Unity

So I got to thinking about what I wrote yesterday and from my lofty penthouse office suite, decided that I should start figuring stuff out in my own head and maybe it will spread to the organization somehow if it’s good or be silently ignored (which has been my experience for many of my ideas thus far).

There must be a defined and understood, UNITY OF PURPOSE.  The unity of purpose would come in two forms.  One would be an understanding of what a Christian church is supposed to do and the other would be a more defining statement on how it intends to do it.

I would suggest a Christian church should use Jesus’ direction to his disciples as a basis for their existence.  He said something like, go into all the world and make disciples of all peoples . . . teaching them to obey/observe what I have commanded.  -Matthew 28:19.

So the church is to make disciples who do as Jesus commanded.  The church, therefore, would be successful insofar as it has members who do as Jesus taught/commanded.  The purpose is then to get people to behave better and the better they behave, the better the church is at meeting its reason for existence.

The second part of the unity of purpose is the mission statement which obviously varies from church to church as each of the institutions respond to their purpose in ways unique to them.  At Holy Name, we have defined our mission as, “Sharing in the Body of Christ, we seek to: Know the heart of Christ, See the face of Christ, Be the hands of Christ.”

While this is memorable and directive on an individual basis, I don’t know that we have delved into sufficiently for it to guide us.  If you are going to discuss what the parish does and why it does it, does this statement on its face distinguish our parish from others?  For my money, I think we would have a greater unity of purpose if we were to unwrap the mission statement more. 

I could see equating the “Body of Christ” as the need to have community, build community, emphasize that we are not individuals and should do things that build relationships between parishioners.

I could see understanding “Know the heart of Christ,” with the need to encourage parishioners to develop knowledge of their faith and the issues of justice affecting the world.  This is why we have a school and faith formation and Bible study and why we should seek to educate parishioners in all activities.

“Being the hands of Christ,” could be defined within the parish as doing.  If you believe you must ACT.  We provide some opportunities for parishioners to act and we also include activities within our ministries so parishioners get this experience. 

There are other many other interpretations of the mission statement and I am not suggestion mine is the one but what I am suggesting is that if we are to have a unity of purpose we must come to a commonly understood and clearly articulated understanding of it.