The Ryno Pen

So then, here we are again.

As a brief recapitulation of part one for those who came in late:

• Personal experience trumps absolutes: absolutes become conditional. You can have your absolutes if they work for you.
• My beliefs are mine: yours belong to you. Hopefully we can afford each other the mutual respect of not denying the other’s right to believe their own beliefs.
• Like the biblical drumkit of Seiki Mukwa, some things we know to be so, just ain’t so at all when we look for evidence.

Like the aforementioned ninny with a hammer, seeing a universe made of nails placed by God just for the purpose of being whacked (and divinely ordained to be whacked by nobody else!), your humble blogonaut was a zealous little convert.

The all-consuming, blinding white blaze of my zeal was fuelled by a dynamic mixture: the prompting of relatives and church-friends, egotism (can’t fool anybody, it was!) and natural tendency to pontificate about anything that takes my interest, I decided (after the usual times of fervent prayer and what ho, in which God, as always, did as he was told) that a brilliant future awaited me in the ministry.

Of course this fervour was helped along by a couple of visiting “prophets”, whose methods may well have been a combination of preparation and cold-reading: it takes less energy (and certainly less imagination) to think that Brother Sees-All-Knows-All has done a little info-fishing and preparation in his meet-’n'-greet with the senior pastor and other pivotal people.

There’s a book by Christopher Brookmyre, “Attack Of The Unsinkable Rubber Ducks“, which [despite being a work of fiction] describes in some detail the very real means of fakery used by prophet/psychic types, and still manages to be a fine comedy adventure read, like every Brookmyre I’ve encountered to date. Consider him recommended!

Now where were we? Oh yeah…

So, I wound up as yet another noodle in the Pastor Factory. I found a workable study arrangement, coughed up my year’s fees (discounted because I was nominally student pastor to Pastor Jolly, whose meagre delegation skills are mentioned here) and knuckled down for what I intended to be two years of serious learning and preparation.

I couldn’t afford to study interstate, and renting-out my house while I lived and studied elsewhere was not an option I wanted to explore.

With no fondness I thought of the first house I owned: the one I rented to a widow with two kiddies, at my mother’s insistence (and with one Mum’s glowing recommendations, just like she gave to Shriek a few years earlier).

It took both Mum and I a full three days to tidy up and repair after her church-friend left. There was also the matter of the regular “pastoral visits” her minister had been paying widow-woman. “Panting after righteousness”, meh: they were just plain shagged out.

Fortunately I found a locally-based extension program to the Big Cookie Cutter that turned out Leaders Of Tomorrow for my particular brand of nearly-Hillsong-ish fundies. In what seems to be a trend of sacrificing excellence on the altar of expediency, the “college” was an old building in the church grounds.

The instructors were not academics per se, but pastors or retired pastors themselves. There may have been some stretching of definitions to pass all these men off as qualified (not uncommon in charis-maddy circles, apparently!), and Pastor Malaprop deserves a post all to himself somewhere down the track.

So, for that matter, do my latter-day schooldays. Still, I’m not here to diss fundie minister schools tonight: I’m here to deal with….

Deliverance!

Okay, I’m not the first to make that joke, and I won’t be the last. Sean The Blogonaut has a pretty good background piece on the quaint custom here, and his stories from survivors of Mercy Missions (another member of the Hillsong cluster) are required reading for anybody unaware of the potential harm uninformed religious enthusiasm can do to the vulnerable.

Rather than give Euphemia a chance of being recognised, I’ll say she was older than fifty, divorced, a smoker, and lonely. Church had been part of her upbringing, and she had become a semi-regular attender at some of the happy-clapper franchises in our area.

I was introduced to Euphemia by my mother, as part of her Showing Off The Prodigal routine when I moved back to Queensland. I certainly hope neither Mum nor her buddy had any ulterior motive (I think E was older than my mother!), but E laid claim to me as a “friend” because I had some cultural referents in common. (That is to say I was among the 1% of our denomination in the area to have read Rudyard Kipling, or who could rattle off a few snatches of Gilbert and Sullivan from memory.

Whatever the back-story, Euphemia had no family in town, was a crotchety old smoker, and had naff-all in common with most of the old biddies, low-RAM Stepford mums and spotty girl-children who constituted the female part of our cluster of congregations. Result: lonely old woman.

I would occasionally cop a phone call when Euphemia felt down. Ostensibly she was calling to see how my mother was doing (“Oh, still in slowly deteriorating health: no change there! Still too crook to speak on the phone for long; you know how these degenerative lung conditions are…”) but it quickly got around to the many woes of Euphemia, from the horrid ex, through the disappointing career she’d given up to raise the children who had grown up and now avoided her, yadda yadda…

As an aside: “yadda yadda” loosely translates from Hebrew as “I know, I know”.

I spent most of a year in minister school and all I got was these lousy Hebrew jokes.

And here we are, almost at the thousand word mark again. It’s a good spot to break the narrative. Let the sun set on your humble blogonaut, sincere but deluded, clanking in his Breastplate Of Righteousness, Shield Of Faith and Bunched-Up Boxer Shorts Of Self-Importance across the dream landscape of imagined spiritual conflict that overlays this all-too-harsh reality, muffled by the dank mists of psychological implication…

To Be Continued…

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 18th, 2008 at 4:22 am and is filed under AOG, Uncategorized, charismatic churches, ex-Assembly, ex-charismatic, ex-church, ex-fundamentalist, exorcism, fakery, fundamentalism, hillsong, religion, scams, spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.