Conference Voice

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“Conference voice” is a phenomenon that began with my career malfunction.  While teaching I attended the AAR/SBL annual meeting every year but one.  Even the year that Nashotah House fired me I attended, through the generosity of a seminary colleague who’d left for a parish and who used discretionary funds to help me afford it.  (Churches can actually help people from time to time.)  In any case,  I always met many colleagues at the meeting itself, and had many conversations.  Besides, I taught a full docket of courses every year.  Then the malfunction.  I was eventually hired by Gorgias Press but I had to do adjunct teaching to make ends meet.  I taught up to about ten courses per year at Rutgers, all in the evening.  Then I was hired by Routledge.  The commute to NYC precluded any adjunct work, so I settled into the quiet world of editing.

I also began attending AAR/SBL again.  I came home with “conference voice.”  After going for days, or even weeks, with no substantial conversation, I’d lost my lecturing vocal stamina.  At the conference I had five days of back-to-back meetings, often in a crowded and noisy exhibit hall.  I’m a soft-spoken individual (I can project when teaching) and my larynx was stressed by the concentrated five days of constant conversation.  My voice had dropped in pitch by the time I got home and it took a few days to get better.  I would lapse into cenobic silence for another year.  After the conference I’d return every year with aching vocal cords.  My family sympathized, but I really just don’t talk that much.  Especially at work.

Recently I met a friend for lunch.  I hadn’t seen him to chat for a few years so we spent over two-and-a-half hours talking.  Part of it in a restaurant where I needed to raise my voice.   I awoke the next morning with conference voice.  This bothered me because I’d been invited to do a podcast episode about a horror movie and I faced an existential crisis: what does my real voice sound like?  In my mind, my profession is teaching.  The voice I had at Nashotah House, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, Rutgers University and Montclair State, was my real sound, such as it was.  Life has landed me in a situation where I seldom speak, and almost never to groups where I need to project.  Conference voice is a reminder of what I was meant to do and what I, of necessity, must do.

No Agency

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I’ve worked in publishing since 2006.  That seems like a goodly time, but the industry is a complex one.  I started trying to publish again around 2010—losing my job at Nashotah House sent me into a tailspin in that regard, although I wrote a novel or two in the meantime.  My first post-dissertation book was published in 2014.  I soon learned that academic publishers each have their strengths and weaknesses.  Most have trouble with marketing—people just don’t know about your books.  (And can’t afford them if they do.)  If the publisher won’t advertise, well, the voice of one ex-academic isn’t very loud.  So I wrote on.  My sixth book has existed in draft form for a few months now.  I know that to get a publisher who knows how to market you often need an agent.  I also know that as an unknown writer it’s difficult to get an agent’s attention.  I finally found one, however.

Agents change books.  Mine asked me to rewrite yet again.  All of my books have been rewritten multiple times, so this was par for the course.  I had to leave out a lot of the stuff I liked.  Then the agent changed his mind.  Hey, I get it.  Agents live off the advances their authors get so if they don’t see enough zeroes they shy away.  That’s just how it works.  I’ve found what looks like a good publisher (not an academic press) but I couldn’t simply go back to the version I really liked—I’d made improvements for the agent—so I had to blend the two versions together.  The problem is, that’s difficult to do on a computer.  I know from working in publishing that side-by-side comparative screens in word processing programs are difficult to find.  Of course, if you just print both versions out all you need is a table and a red pen.

I wasn’t born into the computer era.  Flipping between two screens doesn’t come easily but printing out two three-hundred-page manuscripts is time and resource consuming.  So I’m flipping screens.  I hope to finish this book soon because the next one is already brewing and I really can’t wait to start getting the ideas out.  And I even have a publisher in mind—one that doesn’t require an agent.  I don’t think agents really get me.  Or maybe I’m just not a “commercial” enough thinker.  There are plenty of presses out there, however, and if you do your research you can find a home for this project that’s taken years of your life.  It’s just difficult to do the screen flipping.  But then, I’ve only been doing this for about a decade.  I’ll get the hang of it soon.

Thinking Teaching

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I am a teacher.  Although no longer employed as one, my entire mindset is geared toward the profession.  Those hiring in higher education have no clue about this sort of thing.  Apparently nobody else does either.  I’ve worked in business now for over a decade and a half.  During that time only one employer has shown any inkling of understanding the importance of clear teaching.  Instead, most promote busy people trying to explain things in sound bites that lead to confusion, compounded daily (sometimes hourly).  The immense waste of resources this entails is staggering.  It is the most inefficient system I can imagine: in the rush to convey sometimes important information, necessary pieces are left scattered on the floor like seeds under a bird feeder in migration season.  In our rush to do our jobs, we settle for half-baked rather than paying a baker to make proper bread.

This is a constant frustration for someone who has the soul (and mind) of a teacher.  Our society undervalues educators of all stripes.  And, yes, many people go into teaching without the requisite gifts or motivation.  I’m certain I’m not alone in having had a high school or college course where the teacher was completely disengaged or perhaps in out of their depth.  Students shut down, hate school, and then spend their lives making uninformed decisions on everything from politics to profession.  Teachers—good teachers—are the future of any nation.  I know our young are our future, but if they’re inadequately taught, take a look at the headlines and see what happens.  Why is it so difficult to see that if children aren’t taught well, institutions will perpetuate that model until everything is a barely contained pandemonium?

We see this happening in history.  A people or culture gets to a point where they just begin to implode.  Too many things that just don’t make sense have been built on top of other things that just don’t make sense.  The whole thing begins to collapse.  I see this happening all the time—the hurried email that simply doesn’t explain anything, sent in haste before moving on to the next sophomoric task just to get the job done.  When businesses take a look at budgets and feel a little scared, some of the first positions to go are those of trainers.  “People will figure it out,” they seem to say.  And we see the results.  Evolution has made teachers of some of us.  Many of us, of necessity, are doing something else for a living.  If only all jobs came with a blackboard.

Old Oak Tree

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Trees have much to teach us, if only we’ll pay attention.  They are fascinating plants in their own right, living longer than just about anything else.  During our years in New Jersey we made pilgrimages to two ancient trees in that state: the Basking Ridge White Oak (unfortunately cut down in 2017), and the Great Swamp Oak in Lord Stirling Park, also in Basking Ridge.  Naturally enough, then, when in Charleston last month we had to visit Angel Oak.  Our Charleston visit was not a solo venture, therefore our timing was somewhat off.  Our flight to South Carolina was delayed by about three hours, cancelling our plans for that Saturday afternoon, one of which was to see Angel Oak.  When we arrived at the oak on Sunday we discovered the venerable tree had visiting hours that started after we had an engagement on Sullivan’s Island.  We had to see it through a fence.  (In our defense, several others arrived at around that time, equally surprised to learn they couldn’t get in.)

Regardless, there’s something awe-inspiring about being next to a being four-or-five-hundred years old.  Unlike its departed cousin, the Basking Ridge White Oak, Angel Oak is of the live oak variety.  (Live oak is the rather awkward name for a type of oak tree, not necessarily a designation that the tree is alive.  People sometimes have strange ideas about naming things.)  Like many ancient things, folklore has accumulated around this tree.  Although the name derives from former estate owners, lore has it that ghosts of slaves appear at the tree in the form of angels.  Folklore has a way of saying something important in this materialistic era.  There can be something spiritual about trees.

Although we had only a few minutes outside the fence to appreciate what we were seeing on John’s Island, the experience is one that sticks.  One of the most hopeful things a person can do is plant a tree.  Back at Nashotah House I planted an apple tree that I’d grown from a seed.  I planted it the year my father died (2003) and I often wonder if it’s still there.  After buying our first house we planted a scarlet oak.  A local nursery indicated that oaks help the environment by providing the habitat for the highest number of species here in Pennsylvania.  We used A Tree to Remember after my mother’s passing to plant a memorial.  (Other trees I’ve planted have been snipped off by squirrels before they can live on their own.)  Although outside the fence, I reached up and touched some of the outer leaves of Angel Oak and connected, if only for a moment, with something great.

Friendly Bug

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The Beetle and I go way back.  I’m unapologetically a child of the sixties and I’ve always loved Volkswagen Beetles.  My second car was a used Beetle, one of the older kind before they were discontinued.  I had to sell it to pay for seminary.  Since things tend to happen in cycles, I was teaching in seminary when we could finally afford car payments and we bought one of the New Beetles before they discontinued them.  That was back in 2003.  I mentioned in a previous post that I had to trade in a twenty-year old car for a new one.  That was the Beetle.  Cleaning it out was an exercise in history.  And it brought a few tears.  We’d only put 113,000 miles on that car—it had electronics issues that kept it in the shop a lot—but it was more the years than the distance.  There were memories.  It wasn’t unlike having your dog die.

I remember buying the Beetle on Blue Mound Road.  This was back in Wisconsin.  Waiting for it to arrive (only a matter of days instead of months).  Driving a stick-shift again.  It was basic driving.  Each little artifact I pulled out from under the seat, or tucked away in the trunk, triggered another memory.  A tear or two escaped, I confess.  We were unaware that just a couple short years after buying it that Nashotah House would turn savage and we would have to drive the Beetle halfway across the country to find work.  Registering a car in New Jersey is a surreal experience.  I used it for commuting to Gorgias Press until that ended, then commuting to Rutgers and Montclair State.  Then came the long, long years of commuting by bus to New York when the Beetle sat mostly neglected in the driveway.  All those trips up to Binghamton, then Ithaca.

The move to Pennsylvania involved yet more paperwork, since cars are more complicated than any other commodity.  The Beetle became our short-trip car.  I love shifting gears manually.  Feeling a sense, however illusory, of control.  Of longevity.  We kept the car for two full decades, making memories along the way.  It was alas, aging.  At twenty it was like fifty in dog years and the check engine light was on again although it just passed inspection.  It felt wrong pulling all the accoutrements out, getting ready to hand an old friend over to a stranger’s care.  We’d been the car’s only owners in three states.  Through four presidential administrations.  There was a lot of personal history there.  It’s the end of an era.  Goodbye, old friend.

Life Semesters

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Some people have a school calendar in their blood.  For me, that was one of the great appeals of the teaching profession.  I worked a lot during summers—class prep and research take a lot of time and the two go naturally together.  I didn’t mind the ten hour days, and more, during the semester either.  When you’re doing something you love, you become your job.  It was quite a shock when the job counselor at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh told me that I had to separate myself from my job.  The two were one.  I would sit in that Oshkosh office researching for classes I’d never taught before.  My first year at Nashotah House I was writing 90 pages of class notes per week.  Anxious, but loving it.  There was so much to learn!  But that calendar has some natural breaks.

Academic careers involve sprinting that goes on for about four months straight.  Then you get a break of a month or two before sprinting again.  For those of us with my mental condition, that way of living just fits.  The 9-2-5 job is parsimonious second-pinching.  I’ve talked to other professionals in the field and they say the same thing—when your job involves thinking, there are no such things as fixed hours.  When I’m out on my jog before work and my mind comes up with a solution for that intractable problem that awaits me once I fire up the laptop, I’m working.  It’s just not “on the clock.”  It’s gratis.  Part of the problem is I don’t cotton onto sitting in front of a computer all day. Being “in the office” ironically hurts productivity.  In the teaching world you walk around and talk to people.  Summer days are spent with your nose in a book.  What’s not to like?

Not everyone, I know, is stimulated by that kind of lifestyle.  For me, it just works.  Some years I’m able to carve out a week’s vacation in the summer.  I try to save up enough vacation days, however, to get the week between Christmas and New Year’s off—a mini semester break.  When a person’s mind works in a certain way, finding employment that coincides with it is important.  Many people like the structure of a work day.  It tells you when to sign in and when to knock off.  It tells you when to eat lunch and when to take breaks.  Others prefer alternative work arrangements.  The 9-2-5 has never sat well with me.  It’s because the school calendar is in my blood.

In the Air

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It’s a strange but strong connection.  Between Halloween and me, that is.  I’ve always loved the holiday.  I don’t like being scared, however, and gory horror movies aren’t my favorites.  Still, I’m not alone with my fascination.  Lesley Pratt Bannatyne has written a couple of thorough books on the holiday.  Halloween Nation: Behind the Scenes of America’s Fright Night looks at various aspects of Halloween as it’s celebrated in America.  It’s both an imported and exported holiday, of course.  The raw materials came in mostly from Celtic countries—Ireland in particular—and got mixed in with other traditions here before being sent out to the rest of the world as it’s now known.  The thing about Halloween, or any holiday, is that it’s impossible to capture all of it in a book.  Halloween has many associations and a good few of them are explored here. Halloween’s in the air as retail stores know. So let’s take a look.

Bannatyne’s chapters on ghosts, witches, and pumpkins are particularly good.  The pumpkin connection, which is an American innovation, is particularly telling.  It’s been a few years since I’ve carved a jack-o-lantern, but it is one of the fond memories of childhood.  The challenging orange palette that has a wonderful evocative smell and feel.  Bannatyne gives good information about pumpkins and how they’ve become central to the holiday.  Indeed, the symbol that gives Halloween away is the jack-o-lantern.  I found many little gems throughout the book.

Halloween Nation is amply illustrated, in full color, no less.  Bannatyne has a good idea of what Americans do for fun.  Capturing the fulness of the holiday in one book may be impossible, but here you’ll have tours of zombie walks, fan conferences, the Greenwich Village parade, over-the-top haunted house attractions, naked pumpkin runs, and pumpkin beer breweries.  You’ll learn about the history of trick-or-treating and how grown-ups came to embrace what really took off as a day for childish pranks.  Halloween is an expansive occasion.  Holidays also have their own local flavors.  My early memories are of small town celebrations where even poor folk like us could join in the fun.  Nashotah House, for all its problems, did Halloween well when I was there.  To really do it right takes time that seems difficult to come by these days.  It’s just as easy to cue up a horror movie and promise to do better next year.  Still, every year I hope to cut through the jungle of obligations and give the holiday its due.  It’s usually a work day (Tuesday this year), but at least now I’ll be better informed about what I wish I were doing instead.

Seminary Daze

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It’s surprisingly easy to throw away an expensive career that once held much promise.  It really involves just a two steps: spend thousands of dollars earning a Ph.D. in religious studies, and take a job in a seminary.  It’s disheartening to watch colleagues going through this as seminaries contract, then close.  I know how it feels personally.  You’re suddenly aware that your years and years of training have made you practically unemployable.  If you do find a job it won’t pay as well.  Chances are you won’t enjoy it either.  Having taught in a seminary will mark you in academia as one of those “uncritical believers,” and, well, nobody wants to touch one of those.  While I would’ve taken a regular seminary job after my doctorate, my wife remembers me lying awake at night asking “Am I cutting off my career if I take a job at Nashotah House?”  The answer: yes.

I’ve been watching colleagues have their worlds torn apart as seminaries try to figure out how to stay open when institutional churches are dying.  Megachurches don’t require a seminary degree to run—natural grifters do it quite well with no advanced education, thank you.  But mainstream churches have been losing members, and therefore financial support, for years now.  And seminaries supply a commodity no longer in demand.  This may have been a trend when I started out back in the eighties.  If so, nobody told me about it.  I walked into this career naive and came out jaded and cynical.  My motives were to help other people.  It’s getting harder and harder to find jobs where you do that any more.  At least while being able to keep body and soul together.

Thing is, it takes years to earn the degrees you need to teach in a seminary. You have to think ahead.  When I started out, trends suggested a huge glut of jobs in the teaching market.  That never panned out, of course, as human predictions seldom do, and the decline in jobs has been pretty steady over the past thirty years.  Back in the eighties seminaries were doing okay.  Growing, even.  I do hope it didn’t have anything to do with me, but I hit this surprisingly fragile market at just the wrong time.  After having been overboard without a life preserver myself, it pains me to watch colleagues facing the same fate themselves.  Religion hasn’t disappeared—it’s simply taken on new forms.  Those forms don’t require seminary. Those of us who followed the rules on how to teach religious studies, however, somehow find ourselves in disposable careers.

Here and There

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There’s nothing like forgetting to make you remember.  Although we could scarcely afford it, we made many budget trips once we moved to New Jersey from Wisconsin.  As a family we used to keep detailed travel logs and we’d type up the results so that we could remember our trips.  For some reason, drifting about after losing a career, I stopped taking such notes.  Fortunately our digital camera time-stamped the photos.  I spent months organizing them only to have the external hard drive on which they were stored fail.  I’m now getting around to piecing together a bit of a chronology.  “Blog” was originally a portmanteau for “web log,” and since I’ve had no instruction on how it should be done, I mix an actual log with mental musings.  I’ve been doing so daily since 2009. Results may vary.

This blog has helped me keep track of travel, but those hazy days after the Nashotah House incident in 2004 up until blogging in 2009 remain undocumented.  Looking at the time stamps on those photos, it’s clear we traveled quite a bit.  Of course, New Jersey is a somewhat of a feast and it’s within easy reach of quite a few fascinating places.  Even a weekend was enough to explore someplace exotic, relatively local.  We used to make literary road trips on Memorial and Labor Day weekends.  Sometimes even later into the season.  Somewhere in that fog we made road trips to Maine, Connecticut, and upstate New York.  And although I grumble about technology sometimes, were it not for those digital timestamps the dates would be lost forever.  Of course, if we’d kept up our travel notebook…

As an historian, looking back comes naturally enough.  Gorgias Press downsized in 2009 and for a couple of years I made a living as an adjunct professor.  Even so, we managed a few trips (some of them mentioned on this blog).  Things must’ve been less expensive then.  Or else having a mortgage changes your perspective (the roofers are coming yet again this summer).  And the pandemic kept us at home for three years.  Whatever the cause, the urge to stretch wings and see new places remains.  Of course, it’s important to recollect where you’ve been.  In the meantime, I’m trying to piece together what happened those first few years in New Jersey.  That’s the historian’s task—putting together the events of the past from bits of evidence.  It’s pretty clear why historians get excited when they have diaries or notebooks from which to work.  We are, after all, the historians of our own lives.

Private Therapy

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A friend recently introduced me to the YouTube channel, Cinema Therapy.  While I had some vague notions already that cinema therapy was “a thing,” I had never looked into it.  This was so, even while consciously knowing that I use movies that way.  Most of what I’ve seen on the YouTube channel has been about Disney/Pixar movies, especially those that tug at emotions.  These have never been my favorite movies since I have unresolved issues from childhood.  Still I learn a lot from watching their analyses.  It can still be difficult to watch these films, though.  As a family we recently rewatched Finding Nemo.  It struck me pretty hard how growing up without a father figure left me the anxious, quivering mess that I often am.  I prefer movies where I can find a father, no matter how odd the choices may be.

Photo by Denise Jans on Unsplash

In fact, in my own form of cinema therapy, I use horror films.  (Even the YouTube channel parses M. Night Shyamalan.)  Part of this is clearly because such movies take me back to my childhood.  I’m not sure why I found monsters so comforting, but I did.  We had no father and I latched onto the strong men—particularly if they didn’t smoke or drink—that dominated movies  (it was the sixties, after all).  Somehow I felt that this made the world seem alright.  Or a little less scary.   I didn’t understand the biology of parenthood, I just knew that I needed a man in the family.  One who would protect me and show me how to be a man.  Well, that never really happened.  My step-father was verbally abusive and I seemed to be his special target.  I watched horror and listened to Alice Cooper.

Sublimation, in psychology, is where you put difficult feelings aside, acting as if everything’s normal.  I did that for many, many years.  College, seminary, doctoral program, full-time professorate.  Then it all broke down.  After the tragedy at Nashotah House, I found myself watching horror movies again.  It took about a decade of doing that to realize that I could write books about the connection between religion and horror.  With three published (the third about to be, actually), I have a fourth nearly finished.  The writing is therapeutic as well.  I have to wonder, however, if these Pixar movies that are so painful for me to watch are really helping me.  I don’t always feel refreshed afterwards, as I do when I see a good horror movie.  (Bad films are their own kind of therapy.)  I’m an amateur psychologist (no license), with a most intractable client (myself).  My way of dealing with him is to watch horror and call it therapy.

Optimism

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On the homepage of my website (of which this blog is a part) is the statement that jaded optimism lurks here.  I’ve been thinking a lot about optimism and hope lately.  Trying to change the way you think is difficult.  Musing with my wife the other day I realized—and this should’ve been obvious—that my optimism became “jaded” when I lost my job at Nashotah House.  You see, our lives have been uncertain since then.  The steady income of an academic job with a retirement plan, a future mapped out (at least a little) with summers free for research and travel, the flexibility to have time to contemplate; all of this fits my neurodivergent way of thinking.  Having suddenly to cope with finding an apartment, finding jobs (not vocations), losing retirement options, all of this has led to a turmoil that has lasted going on two decades now.

I need to challenge my jaded optimism into becoming real.  I keep coming back to Mark 9.24, “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.”  I’m not a materialist, although academia led me close to it a time or two.  The universe, however, is an untamed place.  We don’t know the trillionth of it, let alone the half.  We’ve figured out a good bit of the physics of this world and think that it applies the same everywhere in this infinite, expanding space-time.  Then we discovered quantum physics and quantum entanglement which looks more like religion than science.  It seems to me that optimism—hope—lies in a combination of what science tells us and what is traditionally called religion tells us.  You may call it “belief,” “intuition,” or “hope.”  Yes, when Pandora’s box was opened, only hope remained.

John William Waterhouse, Pandora (1896), public domain, via Wikimedia commons

There’s a parable in the story of Pandora.  As told by Hesiod, Pandora’s jar contained the gifts of the gods which escaped when Pandora opened it.  Thereby evil entered the world.  Yet one gift of the gods remained for humankind, and that was hope.  Arguably the most valuable gift of them all.  I have been letting my career malfunction at Nashotah House dominate and drive my outlook for far too long.  It will never cease to hurt, I know, but it’s time I learned the meaning of what the Pandora myth teaches us.  Myth, please understand, functions like religion.  It provides insight and guidance.  And the tale of Pandora, especially when things turn unexpectedly frightening, reminds us that hope is the only necessary gift of the gods.

Miracles

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“Expect a miracle,” Oral Roberts used to say, “and a miracle is yours today.”  The famed Evangelical probably didn’t have Catholic-variety miracles in mind, although a story on the Catholic News Agency does.  Miracles come in big and small varieties.  In case you’re feeling encrusted in materialism, there are plenty of things science hasn’t yet explained.  It helps to have a little wonder in your quotidian routine.  So what was this miracle?  It took place in Hartford, Connecticut.  Specifically, at St. Thomas in Thomaston.  In case you’re not Catholic, or high church Episcopalian, a brief explanation: after the consecration of the host (communion bread), ordained clergy pass communion wafers to those who come forward to receive them.  Believing in transubstantiation, this is done with a great deal of attention to detail.

Photo by Josh Applegate on Unsplash

The vessel that holds communion wafers is called a ciborium.  (My years at Nashotah House were good training for this.)   Since consecrated wafers should never be defiled, only a certain amount are consecrated at a time—enough to cover those present for the Eucharist, usually.  Any extras are locked in a tabernacle for future use.  In this miracle, a minister handing out the wafers noticed he was running out.  Believe me, this is something to which clergy pay close attention.  Then suddenly there were more wafers in the ciborium.  A multiplication of loaves, but in much smaller and pre-ordered form.  One child called them, I once heard, “tiny little quesadillas.”  Perhaps a small miracle, but we take what we can get.

A miracle is defined as “an extraordinary and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore attributed to a divine agency.”  Since we can’t observe all phenomena all the time, they do occur now and again.  What happened in Connecticut?  I don’t know.  No scientist was observing, and no vestment cams were in use.  We have the word of a clergyman with no cause to lie.  Maybe something unusual did happen.  Yet I can hear the evangelicals protesting that if God were to perform a miracle it would have something to do with Donald Trump rather than some popish fetish.  That’s the problem once religions get involved around miracles.  Too much is left to interpretation.  Sometimes I think of the miracle of the sun at Fatima, Portugal.  Or of people miraculously healed from late-stage fatal diseases without medical intervention.  These things happen and when people are pressed for an explanation they tend to turn to the divine.  Perhaps, however, things just aren’t what they appear to be.

Friends and Dreams

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The mind is a labyrinth.  Ever since the time change (especially), I’ve been waking with the weirdest dreams.  One involved someone I haven’t really thought about for years.  Someone I knew in college and who was a close friend, but who’s fallen out of touch.  (And who would likely not approve of my evolving outlook on things.)  Why she came out in a dream is a mystery to me.  It does give me hope, however, that all those things I think I’ve “forgotten” are really still in there somewhere.  A friend once told me that it’s not a matter of “remembering” but of “recollecting.”  He claimed that the memories are still there.  Ironically, I can’t recollect who he was, although I think it was someone I knew in college.

My generation’s ambivalent about the internet.  Most of my college friends I simply can’t find online.  I recall one of my best friends saying he would never use a computer.  I suspect he’s had to backslide on that, for work if for nothing else, but he’s not available online at all.  The same goes for people my age at seminary.  Some I occasionally find through church websites, but honestly, most of them have better pension plans than I do and have retired to become invisible.  We children of the sixties are likely the last generation that might be able to make it through life claiming never to have given in to computers.  It took quite a bit of effort to get me over the reluctance.  One of my nieces set up this blog for me nearly 13 years ago, otherwise I’d still be hard to find.

But minds.  Minds can, and do change.  My mind was dead-set against computers in college.  For one class I was required to do one assignment via computer, and I did that task and that task only.  Seminary was accomplished with a typewriter and snail mail.  Even my doctorate, done on a very old-fashioned Mac SE, was purely a feat of word processing.  Nashotah House was wired during my time there, but that was mainly email.  My mind was slowly changing at each step of the way.  I wasn’t becoming a computer lover, but I was realizing that I was learning something new.  Now I can’t get through the day without writing and posting something on this blog and sharing it on Twitter and Facebook.  And checking email—always email—to see if anything important has come in.  And, perchance, someone I had a dream about might actually email me out of the blue.

Silicon or Paper?

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Most of us follow blindly through this tech jungle.  We do it, I suppose, because there are rewards for having the world of information and entertainment at your fingertips.  The problem is that the constant upgrades are expensive and as you approach retirement age—even if you can’t afford to retire—you have to keep spending in order to meet your tech needs.  A few years ago I purchased an app because apparently my laptop was running too slowly.  I do tend to have more than one app open at a time, I confess.  Maybe too many.  But apps take up so much operating memory these days that you can either constantly quit and reopen (if you have a mind like mine) or you can upgrade.  And even then you’re not sure of what you’re doing.

I’m old enough, you see, to remember having to load the program you wanted to use via floppy disc when you booted up.  We all assumed the swapping of discs was the price you paid for being able to, say, type a dissertation without using white-out all the time.  Then we started hearing these rumors of an “internet” with “email.”  I found my first (and it turns out, only) full-time professorship via letter.  Delivered by the post office.  A friend wrote to me about the opening and I sent a fateful letter of inquiry to Nashotah House.  The rest, as they say, is history.  I’ve kept much of the paper of those early days.  The movers always complain that I’ve done so, but I’m between worlds.  I was born in a paper world and I don’t trust this electronic one.  That’s why I still buy physical books.  I’ve had too many devices die on me.  And now I keep only one or two apps open at a time, and forget to look at the stuff on the others—I keep them open to remind me.

It is a jungle, this virtual world.  We like to think it’s civilized but what do we really know?  So I deleted the app that pops up telling me that one app open at a time is too taxing for my computer’s memory.  Then I remembered that I pay an annual fee for such annoying reminders.  I had to reinstall and await the notices again.  Yes, some of my files are big.  I write books, and that’s just the way it works.  So I put up with those yappy reminders because, well, it’s better than swapping discs a dozen times just to type a sentence or two when I have time.

Not Over

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It’s not over, you know.  Halloween, I mean.  We may have made it through the actual night of trick-or-treating with all of its build-up, but like many holidays from olden times, Halloween was, and still should be, part of a complex of holy days.  People have long believed that something was transitioning at this time of year.  Halloween spun off of its more sacred sibling, All Saints Day.  Before Christianization, Samhain perhaps spanned more than one day.  As a result of relentless capitalism with its parsimonious counting of days off, like pre-conversion Scrooge, has made all holidays one-day events.  Sometimes you need some time to sort out what’s happening and this three-day complex is one of those times.  Día de los Muertos begins today—this holiday’s just getting started.

I’ve frequently suggested to the few who’ll listen that we need to take holidays seriously.  Culturally we tolerate them as days of less productivity.  Who actually gets Halloween off work?  And how many of us work in places where “Happy Halloween” is a regular greeting on the 31st?  I don’t know about you, but in all my Zoom meetings yesterday nobody was wearing a costume.  And yet, at Nashotah House I learned that today is a “day of obligation.”  Attending services isn’t optional (of course, it never was optional at Nashotah).  But this one was really serious.  The Catholic Church moved All Saints Day to November 1 to counter Samhain celebrations encountered in Celtic lands.  People are reluctant to give up their religion, however, and the day before All Hallows allowed for Samhain to retain its identity.  And even today’s not the end of the season.  Tomorrow has traditionally been All Souls Day.  But what company’s going to give you three days off at this time of year? We’re gearing up for Black Friday.

Holidays serve to give structure to the passing of time.  Winter with its privations is on its way.  This autumnal complex of holidays, whether celebrated as Samhain, Día de los Muertos, or Halloween-All Saints-All Souls, reminds us to take a pause and ponder what all of this really means.  And not only ponder, but also celebrate.  Halloween is fun with its costumes and candy and spooky decorations, but it’s more than just that.  It’s a season of existential questions and of preparing for the inevitable cold days ahead.  We ignore such things at our own peril.  There are reasons for holidays, but those who find meaning only in mammon see no reason to offer even one day off, amid a season we most deeply, intensely need.