Just another Thursday...

 I've been trying to stop saying, "Today was odd..." - because the truth is, every day is odd in its own way.

Today you get two old cartoons from last year that I ran across while digging though old papers and wishing I had a shredder.

"Holy Moly!"

I don't usually - well, ever - write about my patients. I won't write the personal details of this fellow, except to say that I spent maybe a half hour, maybe forty five minutes with him this morning. We didn't say much; he's been in the hospital for over three weeks now, and hasn't wanted visits from the chaplain - which is also to say, I've been by to see him a few times.

Today, I stopped in because I hadn't seen him in a while, and he's still in the hospital. When I say I spent some time with him, I don't mean we talked: I sat with him while he was in pain, trying to regain his composure, hoping the pain would pass. It didn't, not today.

I saw again him before I left work this afternoon, after his family had arrived, talking about hospice. I'm a big fan of hospice, as some of you know. I wish I could have ministered more to his family, though. Mostly I'm just sitting here this evening with his pain: I don't think you could identify him from this sketch, but this is what's in my mind's eye this evening (the Cartesian Theater, for the Dennett fans out there; I could write about the tiny robots, but I've written about this before.)

That's not what I was thinking about this morning, or this afternoon with his family, or this evening. Mostly I'm just picturing his eyes. Another day, I might draw several pictures and combine them into a horrible gif - the piercing pain, the exclamation, and then the dullness as he waits, waits for it to pass. But not this evening. Now, I still see those eyes, trying not to catch mine, but still in some small sense appreciative that I was there, with him.

Quarterly cartoon

we didn't sing, and I didn't have a hammer...
but I did have a pen, and doodling kept me (more or less) awake through a lengthy discussion of a ramp.

Thursday night

It's been a long week, and I'm ready for the weekend. This is an old (well, oldish - I haven't been posting regularly after all) cartoon that I discovered while going through my weekly reflections.

Apparently, the Beastie Boys have replaced the Pixies for my classroom days.

Cartoon Tuesday

It's funny how a scanner seems to have re-opened the cartooning gates of my mind. With no further ado...

Carolina on my mind

I started to write a post about stuff in my head this morning, but then I realized that I had already written some of this before. I had trouble sleeping last night, partly because it's getting warmer - too hot in my apartment, like SC - but also because I've been trying out new recipes (even though I don't like my kitchen), and some of what I was thinking about was when I first started cooking Indian food. Also, I'm anticipating moving again, which is both exciting and intimidating. 

But I was also thinking about books. If you'd asked me what books I liked when I was living back in Columbia (besides philosophy, where I was mostly reading Foucault and the Frankfurt School) - but, I was also reading fiction at the time. I might have referred to something vaguely contemporary and international - Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being, or Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in Time of Cholera (I think these are the books John Cusack's character mentions in High Fidelity, which is either embarrassing for me, or shows that Nick Hornby really captured the zeitgeist, or both). Or something vaguely pretentious, like Tom Stoppard's play Travesties, or John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse. Or something more classic, like Stendhal's Red and Black; and I had spent a semester devouring most of Kafka (not Amerika, but everything else) - and that's continued to have a big impact on me. I hadn't yet read Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, although I knew about it from listening to Laurie Anderson. 

I hadn't yet heard of Michael Chabon, and he was years away from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which I still name as my favorite book. But the book he'd already published at that time - The Mysteries of Pittsburgh - makes me think of Portland (as does Lucky Jim). And that's something for another post, maybe.

Finding Ourselves in the Story

On the plus side, I now have a scanner, so I should be able to post cartoons of reasonable quality once more.

On the negative side, I seem to have more or less stopped writing sermons. I make an outline, jot down bits and pieces, and talk my way through my notes in the same way I would if I were teaching class. The congregation appreciates this, but I no longer seem to have sermons to post here.

But maybe that's not a negative thing after all.

Just a cartoon

I'm a little embarrassed that the first cartoon of the year is showing up in February...

No Cartoon, Chapel Edition

I have temporarily lost the ability to post even poor pictures of my cartoons - which is unfortunate because I've been drawing more cartoons lately. Look for them in the New Year!

What Are You Waiting For?

I finally got a decent scan of a cartoon, and that's all you're getting today.

Short Update

I've been busy, but the real hold-up lately has been the cartoons: not that I haven't been drawing any, but I can't get a decent picture of any of them (and you're probably thinking, when has that stopped me before?). Anyhow, I've got cartoons and sermons (and other observations) that I will post at some point.

They Might be Cannibals

I work with Seventh Day Adventists (I think I've mentioned this before). And, as individuals, they're very nice. But many of them also strike me as naive. 

So, I asked one the other day about the SDA dietary restrictions - among other things, they don't eat pork or shellfish. (That should ring a bell for you.) I asked about Peter's vision, in Acts, and she replied, "Well if you read it in context, it's about people, not food." Which is her polite way of saying, you're reading it wrong, and pretty much every Christian since Paul has been reading it wrong. Oops. 

I see two ways to approach this. One would simply be to reply, "you're the one who's not really reading it in context, you're just focusing on Acts 10:28, 'God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean.'" I'm not sure what her reply would be, and I really don't care if she eats pork or not: I'm a vegetarian myself. 

But the other approach is more intriguing: what if we do take the larger context into account, but read it as being about people, not food? What exactly does the voice say in Peter's vision in Acts 10:13? "Get up, Peter; kill and eat." 

I think I'll stay away from their food at the next potluck.

Literal and Metaphorical

So many of the things we learn in school, we forget, because we have no context for them...

I'm rereading some things I first read eight years ago, and have largely forgotten, but which are relevant to my current context. It's interesting to read about them (I may talk more specifically about this in a future post) when I'm in the middle of things, rather than seeing it as something abstract, far-in-the-future.

But the other thing I have recently come across was a passage from Ezekiel 28, in a Seventh Day Adventist booklet, about the King of Tyre. (I realize that the Seventh Day Adventists aren't the only ones who look to this passage in particular, but this is how I came across it.) I'm sure I've run across the passage before, and might even have some notes from my Old Testament class, but it doesn't ring a bell (which is to say, it's not what I remember about Ezekiel).

This passage cannot be read literally. Just for starters, it's addressed to the King of Tyre, a mortal, and it says, "you were in the garden of Eden." I know that the literalists want to read the Bible straight through, literally understanding all the passages literally - well, it just can't be done. But even they acknowledge that some passages have to be understood metaphorically. How might we read this? That's where things get strange. They say that this is really - really - about Satan. Well, why in the world would you think such a thing?

Because that means taking the description literally, rather than metaphorically, but taking the identity of the king as (at least partly) metaphorical. And why would you do such a thing? There are various reasons why you might make references to someone metaphorically. The primary one, in this context, is if you're talking about someone who really could just send out troops to kill you, without any trial or anything, maybe while you sleep, and maybe your whole village too, just because he can. And if you're writing about that dude, you might think, "hm, if I refer to this guy as a giant bear with five horns, or a dragon, people will know who I'm talking about - wink wink - but I'll have some deniability." That really makes sense if you're living under foreign occupation. I can almost imagine someone making the counter-argument, "but we are living under occupation - from Satan!" Must our references to Satan be veiled, or coded, somehow? Or are you really a Zoroastrian who wants the Christian Bible to support your viewpoint (and I realize that the actual Zoroastrians don't do this).

It doesn't make sense to be oblique about identity if you're directly calling someone out, though: you want that person's attention. "Hey, you! Knock it off!" But how do you get this guy's attention, without just making yourself into a target? "Well, Mr. Putin, in addition to being handsome, you're a powerful man, someone to be reckoned with. However..." And that's really how I read this passage: Ezekiel has a prophecy against the King of Tyre, wants him to actually hear it, and not get squished himself. But the description is metaphorical, a hyperbolic flattery to get this guy's attention. How is that difficult to see?

The alternative - taken by Ellen White and the Seventh Day Adventists, among others - is to see this as only metaphorically referring to the King of Tyre, but actually referring to Satan - because the descriptions aren't metaphorical, but literal. What? Why in the world would Ezekiel bury condemnation of Satan in the middle of all this other stuff? It's not as though the "King of Tyre" is a made-up designation, either.

Ockham's razor, paraphrased, says that we should prefer the simpler of two explanations, if they otherwise do an equally good job. Satan gets the boot. And I should probably stop reading Ellen White.

Cartoon Saturday

Kinda like a Drive-In Saturday, but with less Bowie and more cartoon.

Mostly thinking about the end of the world today. At some point, I may post an edited version of this sermon with the previous two. But first I gotta write it.

Electric Pacifist

This seems more like a preliminary sketch rather than a finished piece - however, given the size of the audience, it seems unlikely that I'll really come back to this and put a lot more time into it. So, this is what you get: if you think it deserves a more "professional" treatment, let me know.

"Just" cartoons

I will probably write more about being a "bad chaplain" at some point - but for now, let me just offer these cartoons, one of which was actually written during someone's sermon in chapel at the hospital.

Bad Chaplain

I've been thinking lately of Graham Greene's novel, The Power and the Glory. For those of you who haven't read it, it's set in Mexico in the 1930's, a time of persecution of Catholics. The anti-hero is a priest who is a drunk and a coward, who has a child that he doesn't quite acknowledge (but he won't give up the priesthood to marry the mother of this child, even though that's one options the redshirts are offering, albeit accompanied by much ridicule). If I were to summarize - keeping in mind that many people think this is Greene's best novel (not me, I still prefer Travels with My Aunt) - I'd say it's about God's ability to work through us despite our flaws.

I don't think I'm a bad chaplain in the sense of not doing my job well. I'm sometimes surprised at how well I seem to be doing - bringing comfort to people in distress, offering the hope, or even just the attentive ear that they need. I think I'm a pretty good chaplain, and working to be a better one.

But I worry about the rest of my life, outside the hospital. I don't quite feel the same sort of pressure that a pastor of a church does, since I don't have a "community" in that sense, looking over my shoulder and (potentially) whispering about what I'm doing. I do recognize, though, that many of the patients I see have an image of the clergy that I know I don't live up to: at the very least, they probably think I sing hymns, or listen to K-Love rather than cranking up Black Sabbath and Grand Funk. I'm not really worried about the music of course - it's the other things.

Even after I've made a mess of my personal life, though, it continues to surprise me that I can walk into a patient's room and make such a big difference in their day. And once in a while, being a "bad chaplain" - breaking the rules in order to meet the needs of a patient - makes me a really good chaplain.

(That's not really where I thought this post was going to end, certainly not where I thought it was going when I started it, but... here we are. And it's probably time to go to bed now.)

Second post

Well, the second post for September, and at this rate the last one as well.

My biggest news is that my supervisor asked me if I had considered being a supervisor - something I'm pretty sure he wouldn't have asked if he didn't think I could do it. So, that's a strong vote of confidence. But other than that I've just been busy, and the cartoons are few and far between (except when they're really dark - this one isn't so bad, but based on a true story).

At some point I need to revisit the "self-care for trauma helpers" guide. Probably not tonight, though.

Falling behind

So it's already mid-September, and I haven't been posting as much as I had hoped. Part of the problem is a lousy internet connection at my apartment (there's supposed to be a wireless network throughout the building, but I have to go sit in the basement to actually get a signal) - but honestly, most of it is just being tired. I haven't even drawn a cartoon in a while, even though I've had several ideas (most of which are admittedly pretty dark - not that I won't draw and post them at some point).

I have been painting, although obviously not working too hard on my photography - I need to take that more seriously if I want to reopen my etsy shop. And I think that's all I'm going to say for now.

End of the Week

This past week wasn't as busy as I feared (I didn't have to be on-call on consecutive nights!) - and I'm painting again (and I'll post pictures when it feels finished). I have this odd persistent cough that is aggravating; I keep thinking it's going away, but it doesn't. Next week will be busy again, but after that it should get better for a while.

I feel as though I should have some sort of profound thoughts this evening, but I don't. And if I did, I should probably write them down for tomorrow's worship service rather than posting them here.