Tag Archives: Atheism

Before and After Synchronicity ► A Pastoral Letter

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A reading assignment from Pastor Ken Wilson.

Dear Pastor Kenny: I began this Pastoral Letter several weeks ago and have been tinkering with it ever since, trying to get it right. Then came the car crash. That’s why this essay is bifurcated into Before & After; before my accident and after.

BEFORE:

It’s been well over a month since my last Pastoral Letter and almost 2 months since I received your response. I have so much to tell you that I barely know where to begin.

It hardly seems like a year since I rediscovered you and wrote the first of my Pastoral Letters, which I called Finding An Old Friend. It was slotted under the Unpacking The Writer rubric because little did I know at the time it would become another series in the Not Now Silly Newsroom. I don’t know how they’re working out for you, but they sure are helping me. Being forced to turn what’s firing through my neurons into words, helps me get my thoughts straight on these weighty matters.

First let me thank you (I think) for your reading assignment and sending me “Changing Our Mind” by David P. Gushee. (I have so many books on my “to be read” shelf, that the last thing I needed was a reading assignment.) I’ve yet to crack it open, other than to look at the chapter titles, making special note of Chapter 20, Ending the Teaching of Contempt, the one concerning anti-Semitism that you felt I should read. However, I’ll be reading the whole thing.

In your last Pastoral Letter, which I called a Pastor Kenny Responds (in lieu of a better title), you said: 

One of the things I’d forgotten was just how racist things were growing up. You reminded me what it was like to grow up Jewish— and it all came rushing back, the horrible jokes about Jews, and Blacks, and Poles, and well, non WASPS. I remember being warned by someone not to attend a Catholic Mass because they spoke Latin and you didn’t know whether they were saying bad stuff or not.

It made me feel ashamed. Using the N-word was strictly forbidden in my family. Same with anti-Jewish rhetoric. But talk of “Injuns,” “Krauts” and “Japs” was tolerated. Now I’m ashamed. But I was also ashamed because of my forgetting. Forgetting how bad the Christian participation in anti-Semitism was in that era.

Back in college I edited the school’s alternative paper
(ie: the one not put out weakly weekly by the Journalism
students). This was the cover of our Revelations issue.

While I never participated in racial denigration growing up — perhaps because of my Jewish upbringing or the fact that Pops had a store on 12th Street, where I got to know a lot of Black folk — I have my own shame over the names I called people in the LGBT communities back then. I console myself with the notion that it was a different time and I simply did not know any better.

My children were taught to know better, which is one of the ways with which we CAN change the world. And, that reminds me of a story:

One day my youngest son and I were walking down the street when he was about 8 or 9. Suddenly he yelled, “LOOK, DAD! A FAGGOT!!!”

Just as I was about to blast him for using such an awful word, I looked at where he was pointing. There, waiting for trash pick-up, was a bundle of sticks. How can you not like word play like that from a child? He now owns a successful restaurant in Toronto.

Ken, you also told me:

I must say I have been honored by your interest in my little LGBT soap opera. Spreading the word about Letter to My Congregation,
being interested, curious, sympathetic.  But it has also been
comforting to reconnect a little bit with my Gilchrist past through your
reaching out. 

The cover design is a bundle of sticks

The fact of the matter is, Ken, that I feel you’ve written a very
important book, which I tell anyone who will listen, for as long as they
will listen. With your book you are on the leading edge of an important
Social Justice Movement within the church. Only time will tell whether
the masses will follow, and I mean masses in both senses of the word.

Books: another one of the ways with which we can change the world.

And, as I explained to you as we walked around downtown Ann Arbor in July, reaching back and reconnecting with my Gilchrist past has become very important to me because of The Trunk Lost In Transit.

What I find amusing, Ken — and your mileage may vary — is that I reject almost everything else you believe in. I identify as a non-evangelical Atheist. I don’t proselytize because I don’t care all that much whether people agree, or disagree, with me. Whether they do, or do not, affects my life not one iota. That’s why I don’t understand evangelicals, whether they’re about Jesus, Atheism, or FitBit. (Say Ken, have you heard about E.W.F. Stirrup and his house?)

Having said that, while you may be used to having your beliefs challenged, I am not used to having my disbeliefs challenged.

Which brings me to what I really want to talk about: Cosmic Synchronicity. But first, some definitions:

Merriam-Webster defines “synchronicity” as “the coincidental occurrence of events and especially psychic events (as similar thoughts in widely separated persons or a mental image of an unexpected event before it happens) that seem related but are not explained by conventional mechanisms of causality—used especially in the psychology of C. G. Jung.”

In the same post I defined it differently:

Think of your own personal synchronicity as a blanket you are shaking rhythmically up and down. The sine waves created by the blanket is a two dimensional representation of your synchronicity in a 3-Dimensional space. However, everyone knows that synchronicity works in the 6th Dimension, where it interacts with the ‘waving blankets’ belonging to everyone else. Where these waves collide are where the EXACT moments and locations the FSM [Flying Spaghetti Monster] has stitched together Space and Time and Gravity and Dimensionality and Predestination. If, as they contend in Quantuum Mechanics or String Theory or Whatever They’re Calling It These Days™, that all choices are possible in the Alternative Universes that exist, then the chances of anything so improbable can be proven possible by multiplying boiling water with pasta and adding sauce.

So . . . where to start? Let’s go all the way back to the beginning, Ken. And, get comfortable, because this is going to take a while.

Barbara way back when

Back when you were visiting me in the early ’70s, my first ex-wife was going to school at George Brown College to learn all about the Sewing Arts, the field she eventually made her living in. There she met a gal named Barbara. I don’t think I met Barbara back then.

A few years later I lived and worked on Bedford Road. Barbara lived on Bedford Road, just up the street. I don’t think I met Barbara back then.

I finally met Barbara when I
was a freelance writer selling my words to any publication that had a
few extra dollars to spend. Among those was TO Tonight, Yorkview Magazine and a tabloid called Entertainment Weekly (long before and no relation to the tee vee show), where Barbara worked.

She was gorgeous and I asked her out. We went to a concert and then a
bar. Afterwards, full of liquor and hormones, we repaired to my place on Nassau Street, in Kensington Market, which makes me an official Marketeer. At some point — maybe we were discussing George Brown College, or maybe it just came out in casual conversation
— but Barbara realized she knew my ex-wife. Which explains why we
never did The Deed that night. Sisterhood Solidarity was more important to Barbara. She left shortly after that.

Later Barbara left Entertainment Weekly and I became its Editor and Head Writer.

Skip ahead another 30 years, or so, and somehow I became facefriends with Barbette Kensington, her online persona. She’s done community outreach for more than 3 decades in The Market and is often called the “Unofficial Queen of Kensington Market.” She’s posted a lot of pictures of herself and the various Marketeers at various locations in The Market. There’s The Stoop, The Office, The Office Annex, the Alley and Lola.

Every time I saw one of her pics, I would gasp. She simply takes my breath away. She’s gorgeous.

Knowing she’s an event organizer, when I needed to throw myself a party in Toronto, I went to her (digitally) and asked where she’d hold such a party. [Read: The Nuptial Nostalgia Tour and the follow-up, Love Makes The World Go Round.] In all honesty, I had no expectations, other than she might know of a place. I haven’t lived in Toronto in 17 years and Canada in 10. What do I know about entertaining in Toronto these days?

I certainly didn’t expect her to take that ball and run with it. As an event organizer she assumed that’s what I was asking. She found the perfect location in Kensington Market, Lola, and went about organizing the whole thing. Selfishly I let her because I didn’t have to do a thing. However, I did sent out the invites on the facebookery.

When Barbara and I met up I hugged her. Hugged her hard. She tells me was not the kind of hug one normally gives an old acquaintance, but she allowed herself to fall into it. We’ve been allowing ourselves to fall into it ever since.

I keep telling Barbara that “I don’t believe in any of that Mumbo Jumbo.” She’s Mohawk and deeply spiritual. I keep saying that because of all the coincidences that have built up to the point of cosmic synchronicity.

• Late last year one of Barbara’s face-to-facefriends messaged me requesting facefriendship on Barbara’s recommendation. I replied, “That’s good enough for me.” Little did I know that ever since this friend has been urging Barbara to go to me.

• One of the first conversations Barbara and I had at our reunion included an off-hand remark she made about her upcoming birthday and how she always thought she’d be married at that age. Without thinking I blurted out, I’ll marry you. And, I meant it.

• Days later, at my Coming Home Party, one of Barbara’s dear friends, who is downsizing and loves to give her things to random people, arrived at my party at Lola with a bag of jewellery. Some of it was real, some of it was costume. [I was on the other side of the patio, so I didn’t realize this was going on at the time.] She slipped Barbara 2 very simple, tasteful, wedding rings and said, “Here.”

This hand shook the hand of Bob Marley

• After the jewellery had been divided up, there remained one piece which was handed to me. It spoke to me immediately. It’s the colours of the Jamaican flag and the Rastafarian religion, if a religion is said to have colours. I slipped it on my right wrist, where it has remained. Since returning to Florida several people have taken note and remarked on it. Now I get to say with more emphasis than ever something I’ve been saying for many years anyway: “This hand shook the hand of Bob Marley.”

That’s as far as I’d gotten with this Pastoral Letter.

AFTER:

And, then came the car crash. Long story short: I was sideswiped by a car turning right on the red as I motored through a green light just a mile from home. After all those 3,000 mile road trips it seems ironic to be taken out of commission so close to home.

That was more than a week ago and I didn’t know where to take this essay after that. Therefore, I’ve just let it sit and stew in its own juices hoping I would be inspired.

The problem was: I no longer felt inspired. I’d read this and re-read this, not knowing where to take it, what to add, what to subtract, and whether to start all over. Yet, this morning I woke up inspired by the word “bifurcated.” Here’s where I’m taking this now:

I returned from Toronto feeling better than I have in decades. 

It wasn’t just being back in the city that I love and call home, no matter where I happen to be. It wasn’t just how Toronto feels as comfortable as a Johnny LaRue‘s smoking jacket. It wasn’t that, as a Marketeer, this was like a homecoming. It wasn’t even that Kensington Market, in which I spent most of my time while in Toronto, revitalized the Hippie slumbering in me. And, it wasn’t that I fell in love with one of the most fascinating women I’ve ever known.

Me in Johnny LaRue’s actual smoking jacket

No, Ken. It’s that one of the most fascinating women I’ve ever known fell in love with me and calls me handsome. It was such an ego boost to know my affection was being returned. It made me feel good right to my core. It made me forget all the trials, tribulations, and challenges I have in Florida taking care of Pops. It gave me something to look forward to after feeling my life has been on hold for so very long.

Then came the car crash. Like an elastic band, it snapped me back to where I was — what I was — before I went to Toronto. I was morose. I was filled with ennui. While I put one foot in front of the other, I merely moved through life, life didn’t move through me.

During the interregnum between returning from Toronto and the car accident I had more than once wondered, “What’s it going to be like when this good feeling goes away as it inevitably will? What will the bubble-bursting feel like?”

Now I know.

However, and here’s the important part: I don’t feel as if I have regressed completely. Barbara has provided an important spark, which won’t be extinguished. I told Barbara I was seeking her healing energy, which she gladly gave. Her spiritual beliefs go far deeper than my deeply held Atheism.

I feel spiritual when I’m banging two wooden sticks together in a drum circle when the rhythm takes me to a place where I’m not thinking any longer. I call that my Zen space, but I don’t really know squat about Zen because I also say that driving with the tunes cranked up is also my Zen Space.

UNITY

I won’t even begin to describe Barbara’s spirituality (because that would be unfair to her), but I have on several occasions felt the need to say, “You know I don’t believe in any of that mumbo jumbo.”

Which is, I guess, the worst I can say about your beliefs, Kenny. While we appear to agree on so many Social Justice issues, we have a giant disagreement about the core belief driving us. I act in a socially conscience manner because I’ve long come to the conclusion it’s the only way to live, both with the world at large and with myself. I don’t need a God in my life in order to know the difference between right and wrong. You know I don’t believe in that mumbo jumbo.

Maybe it would be easier if I could ascribe all events to a higher power. Reconnecting with Barbara after all these years certainly feels fated, predestined, kismet. Yet, the car accident does not.

My happiness can only be found within myself, as opposed to the belief that praying to a higher power brings me fulfillment and makes me happy. That thought, and that belief, makes me happier than I’ve been since the accident.

Two headlines that crossed my electronic transom yesterday couldn’t be more diametrically opposed:

Now, that’s funny. We’ll see if I’m still laughing once I start fighting with the insurance company of the teenager who hit me.

Your childhood friend,
Marc Slootsky

Pastor Kenny Responds

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Pastor Kenny. Pics stolen from his facebookery.

A Response to Your Pastoral Letter (Or How One Pastoral Letter Begets Another, Begets Another, Begets Another)

I’m a FB neophyte, so it took me quite a while to dig out your last pastoral letter once I had a little time to respond to it. I’ve not known how to respond to your pastoral letter because I wasn’t sure if or what might have been expected of me.  Was it an invitation to dialogue? In what forum?  I was just a little befuddled.  SO I figured, heck, I’ll just write something down on word doc and if Headly wants to publish it, so much the better.

I am going with Headly at your request, though I knew you as Marc.  I think we lost regular connection before you became Headly so it was good to hear your story about how the name came [about] and took.  Ken or Kenny works for me. Only my sisters, Marilyn and Nancy call me Kenny, so it reminds me of my past. (The name, btw was ruined by association with Barbie, and if it’s not too insulting to a fine musician, Kenny G. Nobody seems to name their kid Kenneth anymore.  Someone told me in Scottish (?) it means “handsome,” which [may] also account for its unpopularity. Who would want to name their kid “handsome”?  Alas. Mark has fared much better as a name, and the variant Marc (short for “Marcus”?) is a little exotic, given that we’re in the 1950’s Tom-Dick-Harrry-Mary-Deborah genre of Wonder Bread Names to begin in. But I digress.

I must say I have been honored by your interest in my little LGBT soap opera. Spreading the word about Letter to My Congregation, being interested, curious, sympathetic.  But it has also been comforting to reconnect a little bit with my Gilchrist past through your reaching out. 

Pastor Ken Wilson with wife Julia

My wife, Julia, grew up in Holland Michigan, where her dad still lives in the house she grew up in. (Her dad was an English Professor at Hope College.) She can go back to the house and stay overnight, as we have a few times since we got married.  Recently, at her moms memorial service, she met all sorts of people from her growing up years—people who babysat for her and for whom she babysat, teachers from high school, old friends.  It helped me realize how the decline of a city like Detroit can disconnect you from your past. 

Going back to the old neighborhood recently was stunning—urban blight such as I’d never seen just a few blocks South of where we grew up. Such an empty feeling. And no one from the old neighborhood to share it with. So reading your posts—especially your history of the Detroit riots—triggered all sorts of memories for me. Thank you.

One of the things I’d forgotten was just how racist things were growing up. You reminded me what it was like to grow up Jewish—and it all came rushing back, the horrible jokes about Jews, and Blacks, and Poles, and well, non WASPS. I remember being warned by someone not to attend a Catholic Mass because they spoke Latin and you didn’t know whether they were saying bad stuff or not.

It made me feel ashamed. Using the N-word was strictly forbidden in my family. Same with anti-Jewish rhetoric. But talk of “Injuns,” “Krauts” and “Japs” was tolerated. Now I’m ashamed. But I was also ashamed because of my forgetting. Forgetting how bad the Christian participation in anti-Semitism was in that era. Remembering how my late wife Nancy and I came to visit you in Toronto talking all our Jesus talk without remembering how your ears would have heard Jesus talk, having been called, as was common in that time, “Christ killer.” I can’t imagine what it would be like to associate the Jesus that I’m so ga-ga over with that kind of treatment from people who claim to be part of the religion he started. I have to admit, it’s a pretty reasonable thing to judge a religious figure by the behavior of the religion that he founded. So I can’t blame you for not picking up what Nancy and I were laying down in that trip to Toronto. 

Pastor Kenny’s very important
book, which got him thrown out of
the church he founded 45 years ago

By the way, it was fun to talk about that Toronto trip and to hear you say that you found it kind of interesting despite the fact that the God talk went on a little too much for your tastes. New converts to anything are a trip and I imagine I was one too. You should hear me talk to my friends who show any interest in my Fitbit. I get enthusiastic about things and want the whole world to adopt them. (Say Headly, have you tried the Fitbit? It’s amazing how it helps you be more active—I walk so much more now that I have one of these little wonders.)  But I digress again. I think you bring the elementary school of me, the Kenny locked up in Pastor Ken. 

I do know that there’s a connection between the mistreatment of the LGBT community and the Jewish community. In much the same way that anti-Semitism was tolerated in the Church for millennia—based on a handful of biblical texts taken out of historical context—a handful of texts taken out of historical context have propped up teachings that are harmful to vulnerable sexual minorities. The Second Vatican Counsel—which took place while we were growing up in Detroit—signaled an important reversal on this. Now there’s virtually no respectable Christian tradition in which it is OK to refer to Jewish people as “Christ-killers.”  Maybe the same reversal is underway today when it comes to sexual minorities. I certainly hope so.

And drum circles. I found it fascinating that you’ve gotten into them.  I’ve always thought they would be a blast.  I walk through the Diag sometimes and there’s a drum circle happening. They don’t seem to be looking for people to join them, but I’d like to. I always think of you now when I see them.  The feeling of connection with other people that happens with a drum circle has got to be pleasurable. You could do a lot worse for a communal spiritual practice than a drum circle. He said, approvingly.

OK now I have to figure out how send you this word doc via FB. Oh crap, is that even possible? 

Grace and peace to you, fellow pilgrim and pastoral letter writer.

Editor’s note: Kenneth John Wilson is my oldest friend in the world. We grew up together on Gilchrist Street in Detroit, catercorner from each other. We lost track of each other in the early ’70s.


Last year I was made aware that Pastor Kenny is shaking the foundations of organized Christianity with his book A Letter to my Congregation, which argues for full inclusion of the LGBT communities in all congregations. We have since reconnected to my extreme happiness.

There has been some slight editing of this Pastoral Letter for clarity and spelling.

Desperately Seeking Spirituality ► Another Pastoral Letter

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Analog writing

Dear Pastor Kenny: 

I’m not feeling terribly pastoral these days, yet it seems time for another Pastoral Letter, so here we go into the dark abyss of my soulless psyche. 

I’m starting this in longhand on the night of the Summer Solstice as I catch a breather before heading out to the Tequesta Summer Solstice Drum Circle. It’s a drum circle so crowded that trying to find any kind of spirituality seems foolish.

So why, you may ask, am I going? Good question. Bad answer: I’m not entirely sure, but I have equated drum circles with serenity and the search for something pastoral, as you know. Which, if nothing else, explains why I am writing a Pastoral Letter, Ken, even if I’m not feeling it.

Recently I revealed to a drum circle buddy that I was going to the Tequesta Summer Solstice Drum Circle to see if I could find spirituality. I was surprised when they told me that they were a Nihilist, something I never would have suspected of them. I think that’s one of the few philosophies I haven’t tried on yet.

As an aside, I learned this morning that:

[T]he meaning of the “the shruggie” is always two, if not three- or four-, fold. ¯_(ツ)_/¯ represents nihilism, “bemused resignation,” and “a Zen-like tool to accept the chaos of universe.” It is Sisyphus in unicode. I use it at least 10 times a day.

I’m feeling more nihilistic than pastoral because of last week’s church massacre in Charleston, South Carolina, cradle of the racist south. I’m not feeling very pastoral because, as soon as it happened, so many people on the Right became heavily invested into denying that racism had anything to do with it, instead blaming the War on Christianity, video games, and the evil Left Wing Libruls, as opposed to the twin scourge of Racism and easily available guns in this country.

Even after Dylann Roof admitted it was a racial attack — that he was trying to start a race war (echoes of Charlie Mason and Helter Skelter) — Fox “News” and others were still denying the obvious. It’s that denial that allows incidents like these to happen time and time again in this country.

Coming so close on the heels of Ferguson, Baltimore, McKinney, and more, the senseless slaughter of 9 innocent people — at a Bible study class — is simply an overt example of the pernicious racism that pumps through this country’s bloodstream. It’s in our DNA. It’s baked in the cake with the Constitution’s 3/5ths compromise. Black folk were chattel, property to be bought and sold, owned by anyone who could put up the cash at the many Slave Auctions through the south.

When slavery was outlawed — following the Civil War — and Reconstruction was abandoned, Jim Crow took its place. Redlining folks into ghettos, refusing home renovation loans, lower wages, worse schools, a lack of opportunity, and White Flight — not to mention lynchings — kept Black folk in enclaves as tightly controlled as those that existed during slavery. This as Black folk did most of the back-breaking work that built this country.

As you know, Pastor Kenny, I use these Pastoral Letters, for the most part, to kick around ideas about religion and atheism that I’ve had my entire life. This one will also address some of my ideas about race relations in ‘Merka.

Bottom line: If there was a God, She wouldn’t have allowed 9 innocent people to be slaughtered in Her house. Yeah, yeah, I know that’s been said a million times before me, so many times that religionists have a ready answer for it. I forget what it is because I just think it’s a bogus rationalization.

Oh, wait! I remember now. It’s God’s will. Got it.

I had been on the verge of tears all week following the massacre, but I totally lost it when the families of the victims started giving their impact statements at the bail hearing. Every one of them spoke about God’s forgiveness and Jesus. Their capacity for forgiveness was more than my already over-wrought emotional capacity could bear.

They were forgiving Dylann Roof, but it sounded to me more like they were forgiving God for allowing it to happen in the first place. 

To me this was incomprehensible. More incomprehensible is that this fellow Jesus, by all accounts a pretty good guy, was the God of their Slave Masters. Why would anyone adopt the God of their Masters? Still more incomprehensible to me: The same Bible used by the Slave Masters to justify slavery was used by the slaves as a prediction of their eventual emancipation. They identified with the Jews and the motto “Let my people go!”

It’s a tricky book that can be used by all sides to justify whatever people want. Right now it’s being used to deny LGBT communities basic human rights. I’m glad you’re fighting against that, Ken.

Tequesta Summer Solstice Drum Circle at sunset, June 21, 2015

The overriding reason I go to these drum circles whenever possible is because I felt an irresistible spiritual tug to it when I covered the Coconut Grove Drum Circle marching in the King Mango Strut.

Tonight I went to the Tequesta Summer Solstice Drum Circle, but I wasn’t feeling all that pastoral either. I had had an intermittent stomach ache all day, that only got worse once I arrived at the park. That kept me from getting inside the rhythm, which is my comfort zone within a circle. I’ve yet to achieve that at Tequesta, because of how crowded the field is with 3-400 people in it. For some reason I still want to see if that’s even possible.

You see, I’m still trying to figure out why I have such a visceral need to bang 2 pieces of wood together. Is this a desire on my part to replicate the human heartbeat? Or, in the alternative, am I just another case study for Dr. Oliver Sacks. While standing and watching the crowd on Sunday, I couldn’t help but feel a weird kind of cultural appropriation.

When I first experienced a drum circle, at the 2013 King Mago Strut, I couldn’t help but think of Kebo. Apparently Kebo was a village in Africa. It’s also the name some of the original Bahamian immigrants gave the enclave that is now known colloquially as West Grove in Coconut Grove. On that day I was struck with the fact that I was standing in modern day Kebo and listening to a bunch of White folk bang on drums. I couldn’t help but wonder what the ancestors buried in the Charlotte Jane Memorial Park Cemetery would think of this development.

Now, I don’t want to say that only Black folks have rhythm because
I’ve heard a lot of amazing White drummers in these drum circles. What I
will say is that I see very few Black folk at these drum circles. I find that interesting and worthy of note.
Before I left Tequesta (at 9:30, long before the crowd would have reached its zenith) I decided to walk around the circle 3 times,
which isn’t easy when it’s so crowded. While I did so I counted the Black folk I saw. I
counted 14.

For reasons I can’t even describe it didn’t help make me feel pastoral.

I’m still recovering from whatever stomach bug I picked up, but am starting to feel better, Kenny. Well enough to try to organize the rest of my thoughts and finish this latest Pastoral Letter before it gets too old.

Some people see things through Rose Coloured Glasses; Since leaving Detroit I see things through Race Coloured Glasses. It may be a blessing, or a curse, but my mind almost always immediately jumps to how Race plays into whatever sitch-eee-ay-shuns I’m observing. There are many reasons for this. However, I believe it all goes back to the awakening I had when Pops lost everything in the ’67 Detroit Riot.

I didn’t have the words for it at the age of 15, but these were my first inklings of White Privilege and Black Rage. I’ve been piecing the rest of it together ever since.

Read: The Detroit Riots, Part Five
of the Unpacking My Detroit series

Ken, yesterday I went to Barnes and Noble to get your book. There’s only 3 weeks before we get together next month and I wanted to have digested it before we talk about it.

It turns out A Letter to my Congregation is not one of the religious books Barnes and Noble stocks, so I had to order it, pre-pay for it, and pay an additional $3.99 shipping fee for the experience. Just for shits and giggles I told the clerk that I didn’t want a book that I couldn’t examine first. Couldn’t they have it shipped to the store so I could make an informed decision on whether I really wanted it or not by holding it in my hand?

No. That’s not something they do. But, I was given a choice. I could either buy it, or not buy it. I chose to buy it. Furthermore, I was told your book will be shipped to me anytime between a week to a month. It may not arrive before the 3rd Annual Sunrise to Canton Road Trip for Research, so I may not know what’s between the covers before we meet again. Worse yet, how will I get it inscribed by the author?

So, I am still forced to read discern your Biblical reasoning from your posts and the book reviews I’ve been reading.

I have said more than once that those who believe in God have it a lot easier than the rest of us. How nice it must be, whenever one is buffeted by the injustices in life, to be able to place everything in the hands of the Lord and just go on. Even more interesting to me is that whole “Get out of hell free” card religions offer: Make a confession, do a few Hail Marys, and poof! You’re good to go again with a clean slate.

An Atheist like myself has to live with the fact that I screwed up. Only I can make it right. A prayer won’t fix it. Yet — as I take a quick self-examination — I’m not breaking any of the 10 Commandments anyway. At least none of the biggies. I don’t need a book to tell me what’s the right thing to do. None of us should. I don’t need a promise of Heaven to do what’s right.

Nor do I have to find justification in the Bible for treating people with simple dignity. That you have had to spend all those pages to say, in essence, “What would Jesus do?” seems like a waste of time and energy. That you are considered an outlier in your religion should tell you something. It tells me churches have been wrong — about so much — for centuries and that’s not about to change in our lifetimes.

If there really was a God it would change tomorrow. She’d kick some ass and get ‘er done, to quote a Redneck comedian.

My receipt: Barnes and Noble
didn’t stock your book, but it still
tried to sell me books it did have.

As fresh as today’s Headlines Du Jour, because it was published today, is Pastors want to create a Christian community open to all, your interview on Michigan Radio:

Ken Wilson founded Vineyard Church in Ann Arbor and served on the national board of Vineyard USA for seven years.

Then,
he and co-pastor Emily Swan left Vineyard to form Blue Ocean Faith, a
new church that seeks to create an evangelical Christian community in
Ann Arbor that openly welcomes lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender
members.

Wilson says that leaving his congregation at Vineyard was difficult, but it’s a move he’s proud of.

“The
denomination I was a part of rejected my move toward being fully
inclusive with LGBT, and so that necessitated our starting a new
church,” he says.

How many breakaway churches are needed before we reach the least common denominator?

In that interview you are making the same point as I did above before I even heard this, about the church being wrong:

Absolutely. We were wrong on interracial marriage, we were wrong on slavery, we were wrong on the full inclusion of women. For 2,000 years the church taught a very, very strict line on divorce or remarriage, where virtually no one who had a living spouse could be remarried. And this was just — didn’t square with reality.

However, we look at these previous errors of church doctrine differently. How could God let Her creation be so self-deluded? Over and over again? How do you know you’ve finally got it right?

Over the last 2 days we’ve have seen a seismic shift in our treatment of the Confederate flag in this country. Soon  the Supreme Court will hopefully rule in favour of LGBT marriage and equality. Eventually, the church will either have to embrace LGBT equality, or die. I believe it will be the latter.

Until that happens, I’m not feeling very pastoral. Maybe I can find some of that at Saturday’s drum circle.

See you next month.

Your childhood friend,
Marc Slootsky

Finding An Old Friend ► Unpacking My Detroit

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EMAIL TO: Pastor Kenny
SUBJECT: Long Time No See
Dear Pastor Kenny:
Lately my life is in turmoil. I am in need of something pastoral. Tag. You’re it.
I think back to the last time I saw you. If I’m not mistaken you were on your honeymoon with Nancy.
You visited me in Oakville, Ontario, Canada, and, from my point of view, it was a very strange visit. Now that I think about it, it was the very last time I saw any of my childhood friends.
[I understand that Nancy has passed and that you’re remarried. Condolences and congratulations. I’m a sucker for love and it sounds like you have had decades of it.]
It was a strange visit for me because during much of your visit you and Nancy were trying to sell me on Jesus, despite knowing I grew up in a Jewish home and had even thrown off that religion years before. I had never known you to be evangelical before.
We had an amicable discussion, but neither of us convinced the other. When you left, you left behind (no pun intended) a Good News Bible, which you inscribed to me. I carried that Bible – along with a pilfered Gideon’s Bible, an Old Testament, and a book on Scientology – with me until about a decade ago, when I lost my small religious book section in my last break up.
Before the internet made biblical text searches much easier, I would refer to that Good News Bible occasionally for research, or just to rifle through it and read passages. Each time I couldn’t help but think of you and wondered what happened to you. I’ve thought of you often over the years and not always when reaching for that book. Just this summer, when I last visited family in Michigan, I went to Gilchrist. However, after taking a picture of my old house, I stood
and stared at yours for a while.
Outtake from While Detroit Crumbled, Gilchrist
Street Hung On. That’s Kenny Wilson’s house on
the far right, across the street, with Danny Harris
of the Gilchrist Block Club in the foreground.
This visit prompted me to write While Detroit Crumbled, Gilchrist Street Hung On.
I visit Gilchrist often because I’m still looking for something there. Me, I think.
As mentioned above, I have found my life to be chaotic as of
late. Pops is 88 and, after my mother died, I moved from Canada, where I lived for 35 years – taking out citizenship in the process – to take care of him. I’ve been in Sunrise, Florida, for the past 9 years. Some days are harder than others and on Friday I expressed my opinion to Pops at full volume.
Skip ahead to Sunday morning. I was still feeling remorseful that I lost my temper with Pops when I got an IM on Facebook from a name I didn’t recognize. She said she had lived on Fenmore. After exchanging a few messages it turns out I didn’t know her or her brother Randy at all. But then she asked me if I knew you.
I said “yes” and that you were one of my best friends growing up, and that I had been looking for you for years with no luck. Do you know how many Kenneth John Wilsons there are in this world? The internet was no help.
She told me you were a pastor in Ann Arbor, which I did not find surprising, considering our last encounter. However, what she told me next surprised me a great deal. She told me that you were the first person in Michigan to wed a same sex couple. I thought, “WAY TO GO, KENNY!!!” I am a long time supporter of the LGBT communities, believing they should have the right to marry in every state. Sadly I read today that all the Michigan marriages that happened in the interregnum are null and void. How sad for those people. How sad for love.
This book seems like a game-changer for evangelicals.
The internet was an immediate help in finding Pastor Kenneth Wilson, but I’ve still not confirmed you were the first to marry a same sex couple, or that you have actually wed any same sex couples. No matter. I have since read about your book ‘Letter to My Congregation’ and several interviews with you. It’s a brave stance.WAY TO GO, KENNY!!!
I have a hard time squaring that with the evangelicals I am always reading about. I know the squeaky wheel gets the ink, but I keep reading of evangelical hate for various factions of folk in this world, whether it’s The Gay, or the poor, or people of colour, or immigrants both documented and un. While the religion preaches love, there’s a whole lot of hate expressed quite openly. One shudders to think of what might be said in private.
Right after having this Facebook conversation I left for a drum circle. This is a new hobby/habit I’ve developed in the past year. It turns out that I still have no rhythm in my left hand, something I should have remembered when I tried to play guitar as a teenager. That’s why I was the singer in the band that Dean Donaldson drummed in; I couldn’t play an instrument. After 2 attempts at a drum circle I remembered that my left hand will simply not fire when I want it to. It’s pretty useless. However, I managed to find my niche within these drum circles by playing claves, which only needs one coordinated hand, while the other is passive.
What does this have to do with anything? Almost nothing, except this particular drum circle meets in Snyder Park, an oasis in the middle of a heavily industrial area of Fort Lauderdale. You would hardly know you were in the middle of a city. While in the park I took a panorama which I sent to my Facebookery with the caption “How pastoral.”
As I played the claves, and zoned out into the rhythm, I suddenly realized why the word “pastoral” came so readily to mind. By the time the drum circle had ended, I had already written parts of this email in my head.
So, what’s new with you?
Your childhood friend,
Marc Slootsky
P.S. I’m a writer and it looks like you are too. I’m planning on printing this email at the Not Now Silly Newsroom. Unless you expressly forbid otherwise, I plan to share your response, if there is one.

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Headlines Du Jour ► Wednesday, June 18, 2014

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Hello again, Headliners. Today’s birthday belongs to Bud Collyer, who most people know as a game show host, but he was also the first voice of Superman. Here are some Headlines Du Jour of yesteryear:

Let’s get to today’s Headlines Du Jour:

GUNS, GUNS, GUNS:

THE “G” IN GOP STANDS FOR GOOFBALLS:

SO GLAD WE’RE LIVING IN A POST RACIAL SOCIETY:

FREE THE WEED!!!

TODAY IN ATHEISM:

ANTI-SOCIAL NETWORK:

CNN IN THE NEWS AGAIN:

MORNING JOE IN THE NEWS AGAIN:

FOX “NEWS” IN THE NEWS AGAIN:

OUTNUMBERED IN THE NEWS AGAIN:

VIDEO DU JOUR:

Headlines Du Jour is a leisure-time activity of Not Now Silly, home of the
Steam-Powered Word-0-Matic, and your rest stop on the Information
Highway. Use our valuable bandwidth to post your news comments in
today’s open thread.