hey, i have an idea!

hey, i have an idea! 

let's have an open house and invite friends and strangers to come and hang out. i'm sure that will really improve the mood around here.

yeah, that's probably just the thing to perk us up. do you think the nine-month old protest on the corner outside the church might put a damper on it?

nah, get an expensive banner printed up. people LOVE open houses at churches in conflict.

ok, then. i'll order balloons.

at least that's how i imagine the conversation going.

and it's certainly amusing to watch the faces of people passing on the corner as their eyes go from the banner to my sign and back.

cognitive dissonance.

i was only outside the williston federated church for about an hour and a half this morning, and it was mostly all the usual stuff, if maybe quieter.

but then as i was getting ready to wrap it up, the gentleman who had handed me the page of scripture last week came and asked me if i had read it.

he did not ask me what i thought of the scripture, which is good, because mostly what i thought of it was that i did not know what he was getting at, mostly because scripture can be used in a lot of ways to illustrate a lot of different points.

it was nice to talk with him and get a better idea of what he did mean.

i am just guessing that even in the days of my best and shiniest most ebullient faith, he and i would have had some theological and doctrinal differences, but it would not have been so different than that day when i visited among conservative mennonites.

the thing we would have had complete agreement in is probably the point that all are welcome and all are forgiven. it is a thing Jesus did not suggest to us, but commanded us to it.

i do not think i believe anymore in a god, but i am certain that i never stopped believing in the rightness of the message: all are welcome at this table. all who knock may enter. all who seek may find.

the man said he had talked with his pastor about it. he had some questions, maybe of his own, and maybe directed by the pastor.

the questions that struck me most were "how did they respect you?" and "how do they respect you now?"

when i told him of last night's email, he suggested i might find "a real church".

"good luck",  he said. "we will talk again."

and he went on his way.

the God i loved would have forgiven my my lapse of faith, and would have only required i come with my whole heart and let the details work themselves out.

i'll see you tomorrow on the streetcorner.

i don't even.

the fraudulent pastor-who-should-be-fired, the same joan newton o'gorman who has the ability to have the order of no trespass lifted has sent me a message through a third party offering to have the third party and an assistant serve communion to me on the streetcorner come sunday.

when a pastor with conscience offered me the same sacrament on the streetcorner previously, he had no other choice. the pastor-who-should-be-fired had taken it out of his hands to allow me to receive in the church, so he himself, man of God and man of compassion, came to me where i was.

he did this without sending an assistant or an intermediary. he did this without asking a third party ahead of time, like the eighth grade girls in the bathroom at the dance.

"hi, you're not welcome at the Lord's table. just to hit the point home, we'll  send out some people with the leftovers after we're done, 'k?"

this is what i want to know, fraudulent pastor: are you still going to have the nerve to stand up before the congregation and before God and say the words "all are welcome at this table?"

blah, blah, blah

so another couple of hours on the line. today i got my first fist pump power salute from a guy in a neatly pressed blue shirt and a snappy looking tie.

that made me smile.

and i forgot to list yesterday the two guys who went through the intersection shouting unintelligible things.

the southbound guy shouted something and the only word i heard of it was "judge" and then a few minutes later a westbound buy shouted a bunch of stuff, the only word of which i heard was "god".

today some guy heading westbound was shouting a whole buncha stuff, and i managed to be able to make out the words "get over it", and then "get over it", which is probably the advice he will give to his children when it happens to one of them.

i say "when" because statistically that's a probability.

other than the guy who went through the intersection while talking on a headset phone and READING, there's not much to report.

it's business as usual at the williston federated church.

oh, yeah. nearly forgot.

spent a few hours on the line today.

waved back at some thumbs uppers. talked to some people. the usual stuff.

business as usual at the williston federated church.

*snrk*

terrifying arsenal

i just checked my bag.

turns out today i'm carrying these items.

















and these.

















and in my car i have a leatherman tool, duct tape, assorted zip ties and bungee cords, some para cord, three gallons of water, a box of snacks, a set of bike tools, an emergency tarp and two spring clamps.

so essentially at any moment i might be able to find my way out of the woods, make simple repairs, perform basic first aid, and camp overnight if i get stranded somewhere.

yep, you should lock your doors when i go by because i might whip out a map protractor or a bandage or something.

flee in terror!

i'm not afraid to use a clinometer if i have to.


oh, no!!! not the tweezers!

run! hide your children! there's a NOTEBOOK in there!!!

QUAKE IN FEAR!

not my problem

there's a lot here i simply can't tell you besides that i had no time to protest today because i had to spend a long time on the phone with the mediator.

tomorrow i have to have some little surgical procedures; i'll try to squeeze the protesting in beforehand, but you know how hectic a day can get if you have engagements on both sides of medical appointments.

it doesn't really matter.

the tone of the protest does not over its twenty or thirty year span suffer if i take a day off to tend to business or go on a vacation. the streetcorner will still be there.

in other news, this blog got its 3000th hit yesterday while i was out on the corner, and in some search engines (not google) you get this protest ABOVE the church homepage in the search results if you use "williston federated church" as your search term.

in the long term rebranding of the church, i call that a gain.

someone looking for directions to the church ten years from now? they can read about this protest.

you don't have to like what i'm doing or approve of it for the negative emotional association with the corner and the church to form in your neural pathways. anyone who's ever read an article about negative political advertising knows this.

the protest is not a means to drum up support nor to compel some kind of action or force a consequence. it IS the chosen consequence.

it IS the present, and it IS the future.

the rest is not my problem.

still collecting data

i would like to table any discussions of stopping the protest until june of 2018.

by then i will probably have collected enough data to have an idea of how well it's working for me.

so far it's going really well but i want to give it a good run before i make any hasty decisions.

twenty-first sunday in ordinary time

it was most of the usuals today: the wavers, the honk-and wavers, the thumbs ups.

at about nine o'clock two young men in a silver compact car sped by, shouting something as loud and crude as it was unintelligible. i guess i'm sort of assuming the crude part, but there's a certain unmistakable tone to the crude things yahoos yell from speeding cars.

at nine twenty on the dot i started my singing, the objective of which was to cause the front door of the church to be closed. if that door is not open to everyone, it is simply not open, period.

at ten o'clock things got a little weird. a man in a dark grey suv pulled up to the utility pad parking place on the south side of the intersection and he lurked, hiding behind the power poles, taking pictures with a camera with a telephoto lens.

i don't know why he felt he needed to do that; most people who want to take pictures of me with my sign either just take the picture or they come up and ask.

can i get you to stand so i can get the church name in the picture? sure.

it was a very busy ten minutes, the five minutes on either side of ten o'clock. a couple in a brown sedan pulled up and the gentleman handed me a page of typed scripture quotations with a scripture bookmark stapled to it. "this is for you", he said.

i read it. i do not know what those people were getting at. i've read the whole bible, several translations, cover-to-cover. a page of scriptural quotations rarely makes a coherent point all by themselves. i'm sure those people had a clear idea what they meant to communicate by those verses, but i was left a little unclear as to their meaning. even if i assume they didn't mean it ironically, i am really uncertain what they were trying to communicate to me, or more likely, what they thought the Lord would communicate to me by it.

because scripture's like that.

scripture, speaking entirely for itself does not even agree with itself on thousands of points, so you kind of have to interpret it if you're going to communicate anything.

here's a random contradiction: in genesis 16:16, abram is 86 years old when ishmael is born. if both acts 7:2-4 and genesis 11:26-32 are correct, he's over 135. it's maybe not an important point, but scriptural quotes by themselves don't necessarily communicate what you think they communicate.

it would have been better for the people to write me a note telling me what they thought and referring to scripture, because then at least i'd have an idea what they were on about, and i'd be able to connect their thoughts with scriptural reference, which i think is a valid form of discussion.

so as it was, i was sort of all, like, "huh?" which i think is not what they intended.

also in those ten minutes a man pulled up in the south side of the intersection and just sat there for a long time looking at me. he did not appear either hostile or supportive, but as if he was thinking carefully. after a while he drove off.

and also in those ten minutes there were two cars going by who did not just smile and wave, but stopped in the intersection, roll down the windows and wave their whole arms until i waved back.

then after the service two young men came up and politely asked me a lot of questions about the whole story. then they appeared to go into the church to ask people there a lot of questions. i have no idea who they were or what they hoped to learn or to do with the information.

they were kind of sweet, though.

a woman waved and shouted "jesus loves you!"

i noticed that this week the elderly lady did not run over the crosswalk sign on her way out of the church parking lot.

an old guy from the church in a red car waved his hand at me in the dismissive way that old guys do when they wish to dismiss you with contempt. i resisted the temptation to wave cheerfully.

and then some stuff happened.

well.

that's pretty much it for today. it's business as usual at the williston federated church.

see you tomorrow on the streetcorner.

fun fact

go ahead and google "williston federated church". go ahead, i'll wait.

d'ya notice that this protest comes up on the first page?

make not your heritage a reproach, a byword among the nations. Why should they say among the peoples, 'Where is their God?'

fun party games

here's a fun party game you guys can play down at bishop booth while you're waiting for me to arrive:

it's called guess which of the smiling party goers scuttled the mediation and then hung the pastor out to dry!

you could play it twenty questions style or hot-and-cold style or even pin-the-tail-on-the-weasel.

because SOME of you had advance warning of what was coming and chose not to do anything about it.

hmmmmmm. which happy smiling handshaking "oh, we missed you" people might it be?

oooh, it's a brain teaser! i LOVE brain teasers!

twentieth thursday of ordinary time

when the deadline passes tomorrow and the mediation has failed for good, i will not suffer one bit. it will be no different than the solution i chose for myself.

but there are people in the church who had high hopes for the mediation, because apparently something about that protest isn't sitting comfortably on everyone.

the person with the most to lose is arguably the pastor.

if you knew the mediation had tanked on tuesday and watched the daily protests resume on wednesday and by thursday you still hadn't called the pastor to let her know what shitstorm she'd just returned to, you'd be a weasel.

if you were prepared to let the mediation fail and toss the considerable investment the church has in it be thrown away, you'd be a weasel AND you'd be fiscally irresponsible.

you're probably the sort of person who sends anonymous letters.

you're probably the sort of person who will show up to welcome back the pastor and not tell her you were going to hang her out to dry.

because by not telling her what you had done, you left her unprepared to face this, and since she's the person with the most to lose in this situation, if you were a faithful supporter or a good custodian of your congregation's resources, or a decent person, you'd have given her a heads up.

but you didn't.

you know how much money this mediation is costing, right?

you know what's at stake, right?

yeah, i thought so.

clock is ticking

today is a free day. the deadline is sometime tomorrow.

since nobody knows exactly what time tomorrow the deadline is, i'm going to suggest that anyone who has an interest in not wasting the church's investment in the mediation might could get busy on the task and make sure it gets done.

if, when i see her tomorrow, the mediator cannot tell me what happened on tuesday and why you understand it was inappropriate, there will be no more mediation and no possibility of starting it up again.

i have to go now. it's time for today's daily protest, because with the mediation dead the protest will be daily and at every church event being held anywhere, and beginning next week i will stop declining media interviews.

it's your move, and clock is burning.

same day, second verse

it was a little weird to go back on the line today with the yellow sign, just like before. same corner, same yellow sign.

WILLISTON FEDERATED CHURCH
COVERS UP
SEXUAL ASSAULT

i do not know if i was on the line for a half hour or for forty minutes or what, and i will get to that in a few lines when i tell you the sequence of it.

today there were a surprisingly high number of thumbs ups. not waves, not honks, just thumbs ups. sometimes the patterns of a day are weird. twice that i know of people took photos with smartphones, which means probably some social media exposure.

when i first got there i had gotten just far enough on my approach to start crossing the street and the clock on that side isn't working so i was making a mental note to myself to check the time on the other side and then i saw standing in the window right there joan newton o'gorman herself, honest-to-harald and i was suddenly so scared that i nearly peed myself.

it's just nerves, right? because there's totally nothing actually physically frightening about her i don't think, but the fear was there all the same.

and she smiled at me the falsest smile i have seen in a long time- like since maybe the last time that joan newton o'gorman smiled at me.

but really and truly, she'd have to be out of her honkin' head to see me with that sign and have a smile on her face that was sincere.

i'm just overly sensitive to the dishonest smile. i do not take it as a sign of offered peace. it stirs in me contempt. it does not matter to me who smiles the false smile; i simply read it as an indicator that the person making it is dishonest and therefore up to no good.

i bring it up here by way of contrast, though, because after another false smile passing me on the corner, joan newton o'gorman went home and then returned. she went into the store and came out and approached me.

this time she was not smiling. this time even though i do not know what was behind her eyes or in her heart, i had a sense that it was genuine, that whatever it was, it was true under the circumstance.

she called me by name and offered me a bottle of cold water she had clearly bought for the purpose.

"i have nothing to say to you", i said, not meeting her eye.
she asked me if she left it there, would i drink it, since it was so hot in the sun.
"if you did, you'd be littering", i said.

and she left me there.

there are some what-ifs to this story.

if it hadn't been for last night, i would have taken the water.
if it hadn't been for last night, i wouldn't have been out protesting today.
if it hadn't been for last night, the mediation would probably be wrapping up in a satisfactory manner in a couple of weeks from now.

that was an expensive thing, last night.

see you tomorrow morning on the streetcorner.

twentieth wednesday of ordinary time

after last night i have informed the mediator that i do not wish to continue the mediation. i will still keep my scheduled appointment on friday, but it will be an exit interview and not a discussion (as it was going to be) of how to proceed gracefully.

full bore daily protesting at the church properties and church events will resume today and continue until i'm too blasted old to hold up the sign.

i will still get what i want out of it and after last night i no longer care if the church can get anything decent out of it, nor do i care about their leviathan timetables.

if - and this is a big IF- someone from the church wants to explain to the mediator what happened and why it was totally inappropriate before the scheduled meeting, i will be willing to entertain offers of what concessions might be made just to get me back to the table.

otherwise we are done and you are all on your own.

business as usual, from now until i'm too old. considering that i am not yet 50 and in good shape, by the time i stop holding the signs on that corner, people will be serving on the official board of the williston federated church who haven't even been born yet.

twentieth sunday in ordinary time

standing on the corner with the sign is physically draining, even if you haven't spent the day previous doing a twelve hour adventure race.

at about twenty minutes to nine, a woman came up and introduced herself. she asked if she might lay hands on me and pray, to which i consented because there was a time in my life when i had such a vibrant and joyful faith that the first thoughts i had in the morning were prayers and the last thought before i went to bed at night were prayer and  a great deal of the in between were prayers, too.

i miss that feeling.

but then she talked with me a bit and she offered to take me to her church, a church that will not blame victims or throw people out.

i'm not so sure about that. before it happened to me, i would have bet my life that the williston federated church would not have done any such a thing, either.

i told her that for all of the foreseeable future, i have work to do here, on this street corner.

she asked God to bless me again and gave me a hug and she went on her way.

at about ten to nine, a man driving by stopped his car and said "i never liked that church anyway!" and he waved and went on.

a couple of people raised their coffee cups to me as they passed.

at about a quarter to ten, a woman stopped and offered to take me to her church, right NOW. "i'm going now, she said. you can hop in."

i thanked her and i said that while i still have work to do on this streetcorner, i have an obligation to stay.

i do not know when this work will be finished. i expect it will take a long time, maybe years.

but i am steadfast and i am strong.

and this is the right thing to do.

i'll see you out on the corner.

nineteenth sunday of ordinary time

it was a nice day for a protest, cool and fair. there were the usual waves and thumbs up.

the scary moment was where a car proceeding through the intersection southbound after stopping was very nearly t-boned by a driver with out-of state plates going WAY TOO FAST who completely failed to stop at the stop sign even though it has a flashing light on it.

but mostly i was thinking: some days i don;t really feel like taking the single most painful episode of my life and putting it out on the streetcorner. sometimes i do not feel like being in touch with that.

but it is important work, and i am in it for the long haul. i will do it, if necessary, until i am simply too old to stand with the sign.

today at the end of my time on the corner a young man came and asked if he could take my picture. and he asked about my story. and he asked if i would mind if he posted it to facebook.

by all means, do.

while it is a personal thing, i am trying to communicate something about a problem not just of the church community of the williston federated church, but a cultural norm in which the victim of an assault is blamed for the consequences of the assault.

"if you had only kept quiet about it", they tell us, "it would have been fine".

"we were ok with it until you started to talk about it", they tell us.

let me be blunt about it: when it happens to your son or your daughter or to you, the problem will begin at the point of the assault, with the bad behavior of the perpetrator and not at the point at which you or your child speak up, or even at the point where they fall apart under the strain of trying to keep it quiet.

the problem is very firmly the act of the assault and secondarily the attempt to keep it all nice and quiet, because people would be uncomfortable.

i was also thinking today about how it will feel at the end of october when the protest will be a year old, and i was thinking about how cold it will feel come thanksgiving and how lonely it will feel standing outside the church on christmas eve.

i was thinking how it will feel to be standing outside while the pastor gives that "welcome home, everybody is welcome" sermon that she aways gives on christmas. i was thinking how it will feel to look at the candle light and the expressions of goodwill and hope from out in the darkness, on the street.

seasons turn. years pass. i am not yet fifty years old. there are a lot of years in me yet.

i'll see you on the streetcorner.

off course

heh. that's a funny title if you know where i was today.

i had some other work i needed to do today, and let's face it: if you're going to mount a protest over multiple years, sometimes you're going to have to miss a sunday or two.

but there will be next week.

and next month.

thanksgiving, christmas, and easter.

and thanksgiving, christmas, and easter.

until i'm too blasted old.

it's funny, because when i started walking the line in november, i thought a lot about how that would go in the cold of winter, if i could stand it.

and now i have walked the line through the cold of winter and through the hottest part of the summer.

seasons turn.

years pass.

i'll be eighty before i even know it, and i'll wonder where all the time went.

see you on the corner.