Labor Day Worship and Creepy Liberal Prejudice

Last Sunday was the day before Labor Day, and so many people of faith of a sort of a liberal bent took advantage of the weekend’s worship services to celebrate work and workers. There’s an outfit called Interfaith Worker Justice that puts out worship materials every year around this time for Christians, Jews, and Muslims. This was my first year I knew about it and decided to participate.

My congregation is in Guadalupe, Arizona. It is small–approximately ten to twenty people on most Sundays with more Easter, Mother’s Day, and the Sundays around Christmas (I’m only part-time). Over half of the town, and the congregation, are Yaqui Indians. The others are new immigrants from Mexico and Central America with a few white people thrown in, including me. If you are not familiar with Yaqui history, they are a tribe from northwestern Mexico that fairly recently settled in Arizona because of intense persecution under Porfirio Diaz, the dictator of Mexico from 1876 to 1911. Most of the Yaquis are bilingual in English and Spanish. Others in the congregation speak either one or the other of the two languages. Our worship service is conducted bilingually. Probably needless to say, everyone in the pews works hard. They have done and do manual jobs with few exceptions. They are janitors, construction workers, landscapers, homemakers, childcare workers, and work in other service related industries.

So, I thought going into the Labor Day service that this would be a great opportunity to celebrate all the hard work that they have done in service of their families and their community. But when I opened the Labor Day materials from IWJ and the Presbyterian Church (USA)–my denomination, they weren’t right. Most of the prayers and liturgies were terribly clunky. When liberals get a hold of the liturgy, they mangle it with their words, words, words. Here’s an example (warning: .pdf file). And the emphasis of the whole kit-and-caboodle was to remember the poor underclass that provides our every need that we so often forget or neglect. Surely I support remembering the people who put food on the table and clean the streets, and I most definitely support union efforts and important boycotts. But this kind of talk doesn’t belong in a Labor Day service, at least not in Guadalupe. And here are the reasons:

• The Guadalupe Presbyterians are the service workers. Yes, they consume services as well, and should be reminded to remember other workers. But the liturgies and prayers sent out were almost universally implying that white, upper middle class Presbyterians don’t work–that’s for other people! On Labor Day, we remember the hard REAL work that brown people do. The rest of the time, we don’t need to trouble our pretty heads about it. And of course, no brown people might actually be saying these prayers with us, right?
• This one’s the doozy. There is absolutely no theology of work in simply remembering people who work for you. The sad thing about this is that we actually have a very compelling theology of work. Here it is: God the Creator invites us to be co-creators in our work. We are called to create alongside the Holy One as stewards, as craftspeople, as people who delight in all that was once called good. The work that the people of Guadalupe have done, though they are numerically few, has changed and enhanced God’s creation in faithful and mysterious and tangible ways. Even in our work, God calls us to relationship. This is a theology that also includes the work that fussy, rich, Republican white Presbyterians do. They should pray for themselves and their own faithfulness in work.

Anyway, I didn’t just blog about it. I called the local representative of IWJ and shared my concerns. She’s bringing them to the national board this week. Hopefully we’ll get something a little more Christian and little less bleeding heart next year. Sheesh! It’s getting complicated to call yourself a liberal Christian these days. I feel like I’m being forced into a curmudgeonly orthodoxy well before my time by a bunch of touchy-feely leftwing Christians who have forgotten to fear the Lord.

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We’ve made three of the 22 recipes in the big freezer project.
1. Fish with cilantro and lime;
2. Crock pot beef with peppers;
3. Meatloaf.

The fish was definitely the best. After defrosting, I grilled it outside. I’m guessing that the marinade frozen with the meat doesn’t actually function when the meat is frozen, but while the meat freezes and as it thaws, the marinade has a long time to penetrate the fish. Very tasty.

The crock pot beef would’ve been better if I’d used better meat in the first place, but this is a budget project. I haven’t had much success with cooking meat in the crock pot–it always seems to get dry and stringy.

I hated meatloaf as a child. Grand dramas and traumas occurred in our household when meatloaf was served, and I devised various ways to dispose of the stuff without eating it. A few times I got away with stuffing my whole serving in my mouth, saying, “I hah to guh to duh bahoom,” and then spitting the whole mess down the toilet. They got wise to that scheme pretty fast, though. After that, I settled for cutting the meatloaf into horsepill-sized chunks and then swallowing them whole with various glasses of milk and water. If I could control the gag reflex, this worked ok. So, I had promised myself long ago that I would never, ever make meatloaf as an adult. But now I’ve done it to stay true to the project. We ate it, too. To tell you the truth, it was just fine. Still not my favorite food, but I guess the weight of adult responsibilities has dulled my tastebuds. That, or everything tastes better when you can eat it with beer. I can’t believe my parents never suggested that–they were pretty desperate to get me to eat meatloaf!

Drug addiction

I’m the pastor of a small Presbyterian church in a very economically depressed area of metro Phoenix. Two members of the church who I love very much have a middle-aged son who has been a heroin addict for over twenty years. He’s a sweet man when he’s not high or drunk, though his personality is hard to make out given the years of abuse he’s done to himself.

Since I’ve been the pastor in this church, this man has been in and out of jail several times, he has had his head bashed in with a blunt object and spent time in a coma, and most recently, he has been suffering paralysis and seizures. Through it all, he has maintained his habit. I’ve visited him in the hospital, thought often that he was going to die, and prayed and prayed and prayed for him and his family. His most recent bout of seizures, according to his doctors, is probably going to end things for him. He will take the drug, have a seizure, and then he will die.

His parents are beautiful and complicated people with several other successful adult children. His mother today told me that she wished she could commit her son to keep him from killing himself. But there is no where for poor people to go. It costs thousands of dollars a week for a residential dry-out program. Jail is a lot cheaper, but hardly a good alternative. This man, who is lot like a boy, is going to die soon from drug abuse, from poverty, from racism, and from really stupid choices. His mother’s grief and fortitude break my heart, and she is an example to me of how strong and constant a parent can be.

On a personal level, I have at least two profound fears. I look at my sweet babies and know that I’m hardly a better parent than my parishioners. I fear for what may happen to them, what choices they may some day make. The second has to do with my best friend in college. For various reasons of her own, she always entertained an unhealthy fascination with heroin, though she never used the drug when I knew her. She and I kept in pretty good touch for several years after I moved away from her. Then, a few years ago, I quit hearing from her. She didn’t return my calls and letters. I worry often that she began to use heroin and is gone from me now. I hope so much that it’s something else–that she just got angry with me, or disillusioned with our friendship.

On a professional level, I have prayed every Sunday for two and a half years for this man’s deliverance from his addiction. I have prayed for him as an ill man, as a victim, as a person responsible for his own problems, and nothing has changed. In fact, he has gotten worse and worse. Perhaps the only positive is that I love his parents more and more every time I pray. But that is not enough. I get up in front of the congregation with my alb and stole on, with my prayerbooks, with the Bible, with my formation, with my arms spread, and my strange liturgical acts. I pray for the man, I want him to stop this, stop killing himself, and stop destroying his mother and father. Lately, I feel more sure than ever that I will pray for him at his funeral. I’ll tell whoever asks that I’m not a good pastor, and this is the reason: I’m not sure that the joy of the gospel is greater than the crushing grief of this addiction.

The freezer is full

Yesterday I wrote about our family food activity in which we bought tons of food to pack it away in the freezer in little pre-made meal packs. We’re following an online meal service. This service claims that once you have all your ingredients together, it should take you approximately TWO hours to do all the prep work and get the food up in the deepfreeze. Now, I’m no slow-poke in the kitchen; I mean, this isn’t my first rodeo. But it took me FIVE straight hours of constant chopping, processing, stuffing, packing, etc. to get all twenty-two recipes ready.

In any case, hopefully the time spent in the kitchen today will be worth it as we enjoy lovely meals around the dinner table en familia. In coming posts, I’ll let you know how the food actually tastes. For your review, I include below a photograph of our freezer. The upper shelf is now stuffed with meal packs. Please note on the lower left the giant box of dinochicken.

Our mega-menu project

Alex discovered an online recipe service for harried working parents like us. For 9 bucks you can download this big packet of information that includes 22 recipes. For each of them, you do most of the work ahead of time and put everything in the freezer until you’re ready to eat it. Included is this great big shopping list divided into categories. I’ve been looking through the recipes, and it seems like the basic steps are defrost the packet, cook it, add a couple of side dishes (they suggest which ones).

So tonight after supper we packed up the kids and headed to the supermarket to buy all the ingredients for our 22 meals. They have these carts now that are like race cars. Both of the children cram into the cab of the race car and fight their way through the store with a brief pit stop in the shouting when we get to the bakery, where they may each have one cookie. We bought everything on the list, except for the lamb shanks, which our store didn’t have–not surprising since their meat section is subpar. It all came to $170. So with the side dishes and libations, it’ll probably be around $10 a meal with leftovers for the next day’s lunch.

Sometimes I wish I had the kind of life where after I eat my breakfast in the morning, I then browse my cookbooks to find what I plan to make for dinner. Then I spend a good part of the rest of the day strolling through specialty shops and small markets to get the ingredients and the perfect wine. I cook everything slowly and serenely in the late afternoon, and then we dine to light music and fascinating conversation. Instead, we eat dinochicken (see previous post). I think this frozen meals thing will improve our eats around here while keeping us sane.