productive day

i didn't have to stand on the corner too long today.

i have a few things i like to accomplish in my time and if i get those things done, i can move on. otherwise, it goes by the clock.

today floppy hat lady was there, and i also got to have a talk with a guy about some things.

he said he's been listening to sermons recorded in the williston federated church and he is convinced they need some serious improvement of attitude and leadership in there. he says we will talk again.

and because it was a productive morning on the corner, i got to move early to the second location, where i also had some productive conversations.

i have gotten to the point now that when people ask me who the perpetrator is or where he lives, i just tell them. i spell it for them if they ask.

not that the perpetrator is any concern of the williston federated church.

they make it sound like they sent him away for what he did, but in reality his wife took him away so he didn't have to be humiliated by having to hear about the consequences of his bad actions.

after i got thrown out i got a call from the wife asking if i would mind if they went back since they'd been invited.

so when the williston federated church tells you that the perpetrator isn't there any more, it's not so much because he's not welcome as his wife doesn't want him to be embarrassed.

that doesn't really qualify as making a safe environment in the church.

see you on the corner.

both corners!

twofer

this morning i went out as usual and the usual stuff happened.

a very angry sounding man shouted GET A FUCKING JOB! at me, but i notice he wasn't at a job at the time. i am not sure why people like to devalue whatever it is they don't like about what you're doing by shouting that you should get a job or a real life or asking pointedly if you don't have better things to do.

why, no. i don't have better things to do. this here is the most important work i can think of. if i had something more important to do than this, i would be doing it.

but this here is important work, this pushing to change a cultural climate.

and then when i was done i took my new sign ad i stood for an hour at a different venue, where new people stopped and asked questions and there were thumbs up and stuff.

and in between venues i talked with a nice young man who is a reporter for a news outlet.

that's about all there is.

see you on the corner.

woo! 4000!

we hit 4000 views.
that's a lot of yous
or just ones and twos
lookin' fer clues.



i'm making new posters to celebrate.

see you on the corner.

there was a thing.

yesterday a thing happened.

you'd hardly notice it at all, except that it made me think of maybe being more gentle in coming to the table.

but the thing didn't pan out. i don't think it will. i am still going to have to do the work i have been doing, but always there are choices when there is cooperation about how that work will go.

there was a hidden thing that might have brought unexpected mercies for some unexpected people.

i feel sort of sad.

otherwise engaged

if i am not at the williston federated church today, it's not because i have forgotten them.

today there is a public event nearby where the perpetrator will probably be in attendance, so i'll have to go protest that organization.

it makes me sad because it's an organization i approve of, but their vulnerable population should not be left open to the creepy old pervert. and because nobody else is particularly interested in keeping communities safe from him or even naming what he did, that job falls to me.

someone tried to tell me once that telling what he did in the driest terms was somehow tearing him down.

well, if you think the behavior of sexually assaulting someone is bad, then the problem is with the behavior, not the telling of it.

but nobody wanted to have the creepy old pervert have to be uncomfortable or feel embarrassed for what he did.

instead the blame falls on me for not bearing that more gracefully.

the only thing i can think of to do is to place the shame where it rightly belongs: on the perpetrator himself, on his enabler, and on the institutions that would rather let him and people like him prey on others at will because having a conversation about it would be awkward.

we wouldn't want the perpetrator or the enabler or anyone else to feel uncomfortable.

but you there, the victim: it's ok if you're uncomfortable, but can you please keep it out of our view? your assault is simply too uncomfortable for us to bear. and it would be really, really awkward if we were to have to speak with the perpetrator about it, so can you just be nicer to him? he doesn't understand why you won't talk with him when he follows you around. he doesn't understand why you won't be nicer to him.

this is really making us uncomfortable, and you're going to have to go.


anyway, i have to go today and identify him and his acts at a different venue at an organization i both respect and like. i wrote to them to ask if they were maybe going to not allow the perpetrator to work with their vulnerable population but heard nothing from them, so i have to go with posterboards.

it is frightening and i think the only thing that will ensure my safety will be the presence of the press. i am carrying the cards of reporters in my pocket, and if i have to give them interviews in return for their help, i'll have to do it.

there's always the risk that some asshat will whip up some fear and play the DANGER card and i'll end up arrested and i am totally going to need that news footage to help in the wrongful arrest lawsuit.

see you on the corner.

you know, unless i'm in jail for a legally protected protest in a public space. i have come to trust the williston police, but i do not know the police in south burlington, so it's a crapshoot.

but it's important. somebody has to start making a stand against the rape culture and the culture of silence. we do not get to have the world we want except where we create it.

ambivalence

i saw it probably seventy-five meters away, from the west side of the intersection.

i thought: oh, crap. whatever that is, it is for me.

i was not close enough yet to see what it was; just that it was a thing flapping on the signpost.

but i knew, you know? the same way you hold a letter and know it's bad news or you haven't seen the cop yet but you know he has his hooks into you and you've been busted for 47 in a 35.

so i drove past it to my accustomed parking place.

there was a fear to it, a dread. i do not like uncertainty. that's weird, right? because i do so many things in life where i go purposely into the unknown?

but it's different when you wake up in the morning and think: i am going to face an unknown today.

i couldn't identify it until i had walked past it. well, i could have if i had stopped, but i was wary of the thing and wanted to look at it on my own terms, from an angle where i could see it without having to stop.

you know, like it might be a tiger or something ready to leap out at me.

but yes, an envelope with my name on it. and some kind of gift bag. i did not know what to do, so i walked past it. i will keep walking past it, i thought, until i know what to do about it.


a couple of passes later i could sort of make out that it was probably some fruit, maybe some peaches. i was hungry. they were probably fresh and ripe.

but i did not know what to do.

i thought maybe it represented a good attempt at mending something broken.

i thought maybe it represented a one-time opportunity to accept that token before i am probably forced into talking on the record to news media tomorrow.

i thought: i may not ever have another opportunity to accept whatever possibility is being offered.

i also thought that i did not wish to be open to that, not to be vulnerable to the precariousness of hope.

because let's be very clear on this: the protest is not a means to an end. i am not using it for leverage to a thing i want. it is my last resort, but i am comfortable with it. i know how to do it and i know what to expect with it and i do not have to place myself in the hard position of having to hope for a better thing.

you maybe have no idea how dangerous it seems for me to entertain the possibility that there may be a solution different than the one i have settled on that will suit me as well as what i have.

sometimes i feel panic: what if there is a proposed solution that i accept because it seems like it is as good as what i have, but then it turns out not to be? the protest was not my first, second, or fifth choice, but it is what i have and it is good enough.

while i am walking, and especially when i am having to talk about what happened to strangers who stop and ask, i have a lot of time to think about what i really hope to accomplish here.

it's ironic, because before i got thrown out of the church, my work in it was the most important thing in my life. now my work against it has taken that place.

anyway, some days i wake up and what i really want is to push the williston federated church into being better than they were, to make sure that even though i can never come home again, at least there will be an actual safe harbor and that what happened to me will never happen to anyone else. that would make my suffering worth something.

other days i am the smaller version of myself and i just want those fuckers to pay. i want them never to be able to come into or go from that building without having to think about it forever and ever, amen.

those things, while related, do not rest together peacefully in my soul.

either way, the action that springs from them is the same: i walk the corner.

this afternoon i thought that while i walked i would figure out what to do about the note and the fruit.

i had a long talk with a nice young man about the walk, and about what happened. he thanked me for the work. he said he was sorry for the rest. there's a lot about that conversation and many of the others that you will not pry out of me, not even with steel.

but they're important conversations.

after that i made myself a general irritant to people in the building and entering the building. my presence has to be uncomfortable to be effective. it's sad, but demonstrably true.

in the end i decided not to open the envelope or even look for sure if it was peaches in the bag.

it came down to a thing i said to the pastor in person not long ago: i can accept nothing from you until i receive communion in the church, where i belong.

it is an odd thing, the present tense.

i know it is not my home anymore. i have no home. i can never go home again. i will never again be welcome at that table.

but it was my home. it is my home. it is my exile. i have suffered much for it.

so instead of knowing what it was in the envelope or knowing for sure what was in the bag -and do NOT make the mistake of thinking i am not wildly curious- instead of looking, instead of knowing, instead of having to figure out what to DO with it, not practically, since it would be easy enough to just take it, but harder to know what to do with it here, in my heart; instead of that i paused and i wrote on the envelope:

yeah, let's have a meeting and talk about that after christmas.

and i went home.

i say "fuck" a lot these days.

this morning on the corner was just more of business as usual at the williston federated church.

it was sunny and cool and of course when i went to take off my coat i
had a handy coat stand to hang it on.

since i go there every day more or less to stand with the sign, i have a lot of time to reflect. i used to pray, but now i do this.

"pray" and "protest" both begin with "pr", so for the moment i will call them similar.

i think about a lot of things. i think about the leadership vacuum in which joan newton o'gorman, the pastor who should be fired, is much more in love with her authority than she is with her call. you know, if she actually has a calling at all.

i think sometimes about what it feels like to take the single worst thing that ever happened to me and make a public statement out of it every day. and no, i am not talking about the assault. while the assault was bad, what happened to me in the church as a consequence of it was far, far worse.

when i was still having the nightmares, they weren't about the filthy old pervert. they were about the church.

what maybe you need to know about me is that apart from a year or two during my college career when i learned to swear proficiently but before my junior year when we all cleaned up our language because, hey, the juniors go out student teaching and you want to break your swearing habit before you spend too much time in the classroom under stress-

anyway, i have always been the kind of person who says things like "this is all going to hackensack" or "goodness, gracious! WHAT in the name of all things kind and merciful is going on here?" or "jumpin' jiminy!" or "holy honkin' hounds of hades!" or "it was hotter 'n satan in longjohns".

but then during the time i was being thrown out of the church i started to say "fuck" a lot. not just "fucking this or that", or "those fuckers" or "little fuckaroos", but "fuckity-fuck-fuck-fuck", and for no fucking apparent reason.

among my friends we would joke "is it time to say 'fuck' yet?"
"FUCK yes", they would say. "it's never too early in the day to say 'fuck'".

and i sort of wondered why the sudden change in my vocabulary, but i'm mostly a self-aware person and i mostly know why it is i do things. my operating theory is that this stunning change of language is an attempt to try to distance myself emotionally from my life in the church.

it was THAT painful.

maybe later i will clean up my language again. for now it's fucking fine insulation against that damaging clusterfuck, the williston federated church.

you should try it.

it's going to be a long afternoon stand tomorrow. see you on the corner.

leadership vacuum

today it was sunny and cool on the corner.

it was most of the usuals, except with a lot more time talking with reporters than usual.

sometimes it goes that way.

and it was very nice of the church to provide me with a coat rack for when it gets warm and i need a place to hang my coat.

honey, i'm home!

i have returned from my fabulous weekend of maine seacoast vacation and today i was back on the corner.

i had a couple of conversations with some people, including someone who expressed the opinion that surely if a certain person knew about this thing in the church, it would not have been such a disaster.

sadly, that certain person is the lay leader of the church and in the complete vacuum of adequate church leadership from a competent pastor, the lay leader actually wrote the astounding letter that tells me i am still a member of the church even though i'm not allowed on the premises.

i take that letter around to parties so people can laugh at it.

so no, the lay leader wouldn't have changed things much if she had only known about what had happened, because she knew right up front.

it was disappointing, i said, because i would have expected better of her.

but it turns out the williston federated church and its fraudulent pastor joan newton o'gorman and its congregation of sheeple aren't any better than any other large organization with a culture of silence and victim-blaming.


some days i do not know why i bothered to be surprised at this.

other days i am heartbroken about it.

it is an uneasy ambivalence.

i'll see you on the corner.

run-up to the weekend

it was raining this morning and i only stayed an hour or so on the corner.

rainy. and besides, i have stuff to do for my fabulous weekend.

one does not simply walk into mordor.

so it was a lot of the usuals, only moister.

and with a lot more TV cameras than usual. the guy gave me his card. it says "senior photographer". a news organization you would recognize.

i do not not how many minutes of footage he shot, but it seemed like a lot.

not everything is benefitted by news coverage, but in a week or two i will probably start accepting broadcast interviews when i am asked.

i bet my sign looks spiffy next to that expensive open house banner.

yeah, an open house. THAT won't be awkward at all.

i am still laughing about that.

see you on the corner.

light and easy heart

i didn't have a lot of time to stand on the corner outside the williston federated church this morning, but really over time it's not going to matter how many hours a day i can show up, but how many years i can keep showing up.

since i started protesting at the church, i have gained important things in my life: i no longer have the nightmares about the humiliation at the hands of the church. i don't have nightmares at all. i sleep like a stone.

but in the time after the assault and during the stalking and the humiliation and ostracism by the church, my blood pressure and cholesterol and blood sugar all went up. my blood pressure was crazily, dangerously high.

all those things have abated since i have been walking the corner. i don't even have to take the blood pressure medication anymore. and my stamina and endurance have increased dramatically, so it's working out for me.

today on the corner i was photographed twice that i know of, once by a person driving a black sedan with no license plates, front or back.  hey, pal! if you can afford that camera, you can afford to replace your plates when they fall off or get stolen.

a guy in a truck wagged his finger and asked me if i wasn't judging people. he didn't seem like the actual churchgoing type or even the nonjudging type but rather he seemed to be making some kind of joke.

but ok, i'll bite.

i'm just telling what happened. if you think it sounds like a harsh criticism, you are also then judging the behavior and climate of this church. they are their own indictment.

fraudulent pastor drove by on her way east on route two. same unctuous smile.

a woman across the street asked me to show both signs so she could read them. "i'm sorry", she said.

a woman in a blue car rolled down her window and hollered across traffic. "stay strong!" she said, giving a thumbs-up.

"i promise!" i answered.

this sunday is going to be open house at the williston federated church. i wish, oh, i wish i could be a fly on the wall inside that festive gathering!

me, i gotta go. i have things to do to get ready for my awesome weekend. if i have time i'll go back this evening to be on the corner during choir practice.

i don't know- it's so close to bedtime and tomorrow morning will come up early.

i'll see you on the streetcorner.

another day, another protest

i only spent an hour on the corner today, but it was a lovely hour.

it was nice and sunny this morning, which was nice after yesterday's rain.

there's nothing terribly special about the day; just another one of the thousands in the queue.

there were a bunch of wavers, one honker, one steely eyed and angry church lady, and one guy who rolled down his window to shout "they're all just a bunch of hypocrites, ain't they?"

"you got that right", i answered, and we waved and smiled at each other as he passed.

a woman called me over to the other side of the street to tell her the story. "i see you out here all the time and i told my husband the next time i was out here i was going to ask you."

the fraudulent pastor came out for some reason or other and offered to buy me a bottle of water, but the last time i spoke to the fraudulent pastor i told her that i could take nothing else from her until the day i receive communion in the church.

so i didn't have anything to say to her today, but since there were people going in and out of the church, i got to sing.

where i stand on the corner or whether i stand still or walk has a lot to do with how i judge the traffic, and where the message will have the most ears and the most eyes on it.

people using the church within earshot = singing.

there are some very interesting social and communications dynamics involved with protesting over a long period of time. if i were a sociology or communications grad student, i would have a thesis project going here.

it is really fascinating and over the next twenty years or so, i will be really glad that in year one i decided to take notes.

see you on the streetcorner tomorrow.

rain day

if there was something going on at the church i'd go stand on the corner nonetheless, but it's a slow day down there and who wants to stand in the rain?

it's kind of limited return on my investment and i'm getting ready for the weekend.

it's going to be an awesome weekend.

plus over the course of twenty-some-odd years of a protest, nobody will remember if i took off one tuesday in the first year because it was raining.

and oh-by-the-way: if the fraudulent pastor is allowed to retire before this is cleaned up, the protest will continue on.

see you on the streetcorner.

today on the corner

on my way out to play today i spent an hour on the corner outside the williston federated church.

everybody who is surprised raise your hand.

nobody? ok.

anyway, there's not much to report.

there was a guy who honked his horn a lot and gave a thumbs up. there were five very elderly little ladies in a sedan who slowed way down in the intersection and appeared to be pointing at me very firmly, but i was unable to decipher their meaning. it looked a lot like the gesture road cyclists use to point out a deep pothole or other road hazard to people following in a line, but i do not think that wa the intent.

a hipster dude rolled down his window and said something unintelligible while waving a cigarette in front of his face. while the anciennes were probably disapproving in intent, i have no CLUE what hipster dude was on about. i could only make out three vowel sounds, no consonants, and i was unable to parse out any of his body language.

i was asked (again) if i would like to be interviewed for broadcast media but said that for the time being i am still declining interviews. i advised the person to ask again in a week or two.

i am very much looking forward to open house weekend, and i am enjoying the cooler weather. soon enough i will need to start wearing long johns while i stand on the corner, but the time goes a lot faster than i'd have guessed.

see you on the streetcorner.

and upon this rock

here is possibly the best illustration of the lie upon which the williston federated church is built:

the door is open, and yet it is not.

the door is latched open in a rictus of false welcome, but there is nobody to greet you and you can't come in.

Jesus would be so proud.

another day.

there's not much to report. it was the usual sunday crowd.

wavers, blah blah blah.

early in the morning some guy stopped to say he's very sorry what happened to me, but it's getting old.

ha.

not nearly as old as it's going to get.

so everybody just get used to it, ok? nothing's going to change. ever. this is what the williston federated church looks like for the next twenty or thirty years.

i'm pretty good with sticking to a plan.

like a thing i promised i would do and have been doing without fail since 1985.

or that little thing i still do that i promised i would keep doing back in 1976. how long is that? jumpin' jiminy! my, how time flies! 37 years ALREADY?

it's only been nine and a half months on this new thing.

it's a drop in the bucket.

i don't care if it's getting old for you. i'm just getting warmed up.



see you on the streetcorner.

daily dues

surprise! i spent an hour on the streetcorner this morning.

it was fairly uneventful.

before i even got to the corner, a hostile man shouted "get a job!" a little while later he drove back the other way and shouted it again. why is it that these jokers are never at a job when they shout this at me?

scripture man was there. we waved at each other.

there were a lot of people who do not know how to use a four-way stop. maybe there is a remedial class for them, along with those classes on how to use a door.

one grey minivan went through the intersection westbound without even bothering to slow down, and i'd have to estimate the driver was going forty miles an hour, which is pretty firmly in violation of the speed limit in williston village.

there were some waves and some thumbs up. there was a guy who honked the "shave-and-a-haircut" thing.

two thuggish young men went by, hooting and aggressively flipping me off.

there's a feeling to a lot of these interactions. not everyone who waves is a supporter. sometimes a wave is simply someone who wishes to recognize that i am there and to recognize our shared humanity.

not everyone who flips me off are thuggish. i realize that what i am doing makes some people angry. that's to be expected, and a flipped bird from a person who is particularly angry, while it is not a classy gesture for church ladies to be making is not alarming or particularly saddening.

but there's a frat boy mentality to rape culture, the idea that a woman standing up against harassment or assault is an affront to them, an impediment to their ability to own and dominate other people, particularly women.

these guys are the heart of the problem. they are precisely why it is important to make this stand and keep making it until either something is made better or until i am laid in my grave some decades down the line.

but while the scariest and most prominent of the rape culture supporters are mostly men, it is important to note that many of the most outspoken against rape culture are also men.

it gives me hope for the future of people in general.

the last thing that happened before my ride came to pick me up was a man who slowed down coming through the intersection and looking at my sign he said "don't they all?"
"one would hope not", i said.
"yeah, that's the thing, though", he said, waved, and drove on.

tomorrow is the festive opening of sunday school for the season.

i am looking forward to seeing if the fraudulent pastor has learned how to use a door.

i have new songs to sing.

i'll see you on the streetcorner.

school's in!

wooo! sunday school classes start tomorrow at the williston federated church!

in order to celebrate this awesome event, i have taken the liberty of drawing up a sample curriculum.

• we don't have to talk about anything uncomfortable. (lesson on ezekiel 3)
• we are better than the people we cast out! (lesson on  1 corinthians 11)
• god wants us to exclude people. (lesson on isaiah 56)
• jesus only welcomes SOME of us. (lesson on the gospel of luke)

and there will be practical life skills taught, too, every day.

the church will be teaching the young and old alike that when YOU are assaulted, you must keep quiet about it, because while we forgive you for having been touched inappropriately and we will forgive you for being stalked by the perpetrator, we will NOT forgive you if you tell, because it is not ok to cause disturbances in the church by telling what happened.

so you better keep all that to yourself. you better not try to claim any dignity back for yourself, and you better not stand up to the perpetrator when the pastor (who has known about the assault for over a year) decides to have him stand over you during a service with the collection plate.

if only you had kept quiet, not told, not cracked when he followed you around, not tried to take back your own dignity it would have been all right because we forgive you for letting yourself get assaulted, but we will NOT forgive you for speaking up.

we will turn you away and you will be outcast forever. you will not be welcome at the Lord's Table, even though the fraudulent pastor will say the words "radical welcome",  even though the church says ALL ARE WELCOME on all its materials.

it is a lie.

part of the church school curriculum has been the central lie: all are welcome, but they are not.

it could happen to you. you'd better keep quiet about it, because all are not really welcome. you'd better be quiet. you'd better behave.

Jesus loves and welcomes all.

except those who speak up.

it is a dangerous indoctrination.

i'll see you on the streetcorner.

there. isn't that nicer?

this morning i spent a couple of hours on the corner. nobody crashed into anybody else, although a disturbing percentage of drivers were on the phone wile crossing the intersection. one driver did fail to see a cyclist and fail to yield right of way, but the cyclist (who had come to a full stop, signaled clearly, and waited his turn in traffic like everybody else) had a handle on it and tore off a little trackstand so he didn't even have to foot down when he got cut off.

tan car man was out there today. i am always happy to see tan car man, who always rolls down his window and always says good morning.

an old guy in a blue car turned left, making that "crazy" sign. see, now that's really the root of the problem. when you tell what happened, or you demand better behavior, you get called crazy or dangerous or both.

it's a well-known phenomenon of perception of any kind of resistance. there are some very good articles and studies about the medicalizing of the civil rights movement and the classification of both resistance to gender and race inequality as pathology.

go look it up for yourself.

a lady from the church drove by and very discreetly flipped me off in a dainty ladylike fashion.

way to stay classy, church ladies.

there were more waves and thumbs up than i was able to keep track of, and a couple of honk and waves.

the one that really caught my attention was the two women, probably a mother and daughter by the look of them. they read both signs and they waved. they also thumbs-upped, nodding vigorously.

sometimes a wave is just a wave.

sometimes it looks like a promise, like a resolution.

yes, they say. we will demand better.

we will demand it for those who came before you, for you, and all who come after us.

see you on the streetcorner.

scoring rubric

full document

not as funny. still satisfying.

this morning i spent a few hours on the corner. i think i only meant to spend an hour or so at it, but it was an interesting morning.

sometimes just the patterns of the pass are worth the observation.

i made some casual chitchat with a dog walker and a woman who came to put up yard sale signs.

if you spend a lot of time standing there or walking that corner, you get to know the rhythms of the day.

there were some waves and some thumbs up but the thing that about broke my heart was the red haired woman in the blue car. she didn't even roll down her window, but i could see her face when she read my sign and i could read her lips clear enough as if she had spoken right out loud next to me.

"i'm sorry", she said.

i do not know why that one moment was the heartbreaker of the day.

in other news, while most drivers through the intersection are polite and alert, too many of them are on the phone or going way too fast. just as i was getting ready to go home for jam and toast i was watching a westbound car while traffic passed in front of me.

and then there was the unmistakable sound of one car hitting another.

a white car, turning left into the store maybe, had slowed down and a blue car coming through the intersection plowed into him. neither driver was hurt and there looked to be little damage to the white car but the blue car got a crumpled panel.

it all happened off to my right, and after both had passed me, out of my view until i turned my head when i heard the sound, so i'll be no good as a witness.

see you on the streetcorner.

stand up comedy

although the background of the story isn't funny at all, telling the recent developments gets a bucket of laughs, from friends and strangers alike.

today in the hour i spent on the corner, a woman came by to talk. first she pulled up, started to get out of her car, got back in, made a phone call, and then got out and came over to me.

we talked for a long time. we laughed and cried and laughed some more.

it turned out the phone call had been to someone who didn't have the luxury of standing on the streetcorner when it happened to them, who still is afraid to go stand out on the corner.

she thanked me for my courage, for my work. she asked me never to forget that people do notice, and some of them are very grateful.



but when i tell the story of my treatment by this church, this week i am choosing to call it comedy because sometimes sorrow doesn't serve you very well.

and people screech with laughter and disbelief.

no. they didn't!
oh, wait, i tell them. it gets BETTER.
and they howl. we howl together.

we shed a tear or two for the losses, for the silence.

but we laugh where we can find gold.

and this is comedy gold.

this is the gold rush.

see you on the streetcorner.

educational progress

so today on my way to the grocery store i stopped off to walk the corner for an hour.

at some point the fraudulent pastor came outside, maybe to talk with me, maybe as a test of her awesome courage in the face of a song and a poster.

i don't know what she wanted.

but i do know this: in order to come outside she had to correctly operate a door, so that represents some progress in her demonstrated skill level.



outside the williston federated church on the street today i was not looking drivers in the eye, so the only ones with whom i had any interaction were drivers that went out of their way to flag my attention.


there were two enthusiastic wavers, one thumbs up, and a triple beeper.

one pedestrian said hello.

and a guy who may or may not have been homeless stopped and we had a short chat.

"i'm enjoying the countryside", he said.

see you out on the corner.

course listing

little lessons

well, now that i've been taught a nice sharp lesson, i am duly chastised. what a terrible embarrassment.

...for someone, i guess.

but not me.

me, it's business at usual at the williston federated church.

i only spent an hour on the corner today, but it went by quickly.

there were two thumbs up, two waves, one power fist salute, one shout of "get a job!" and one carload of women who stopped long enough to be outraged that a church would throw the victim out.

hey, how's that show of power workin' for ya, fraudulent pastor? you couldn't just shut the door? you needed to really show everyone who has all that authority you love so much? it's nice to see you're all about peace and welcome and a contemplative environment. it's nice to see you really care about people.

armed officers. in the church. on a sunday morning.

to take care of a little lady with a sign, singing songs. was i that out of tune? surely the lyrics did not displease you, since they are your own words.

you've heard of a "doorknob", right? it's that thing you use to close the door. that might could'a' been a handy tool for you and if you were a real leader instead of being in love with your own authority, you might have realized that.

oh, wait.

if you'd been a real leader instead of in love with your own authority, it wouldn't have come to this.

at choice point after choice point after choice point.

so.

more songs, more signs.

in the meantime, i suggest you learn to use a "doorknob".

i am thinking of moving to twice-a-days. that open house is going to be AWKWARD.

remember: "doorknob". if you do not like my musical selections, you can use the "doorknob" to shut the door.

i know, it's a revolutionary concept. google is your friend.


http://www.ask.com/question/how-does-a-door-knob-work


see you on the streetcorner.

this is what sundays look like from now on.

if the door isn't open for everyone, the door isn't open.

i keep saying that here, i keep saying it out on the street, and i have said it to the fraudulent pastor.

this morning all she had to do to make herself and the congregation immune from the terrifying prospect of having a little middle aged lady with a sign sing songs that made them unhappy was close the door.

that's it.

problem would have been solved.

and the lyrics of the song?

no matter who you are
no matter where you are on your spiritual journey
all are welcome at this table.

Lord Jesus would be so proud of you
Lord Jesus would be so proud.

the first part, of course, is simply what the fraudulent pastor, joan newton o'gorman, says every communion sunday. the second part is me making a conjecture.

still, it's just a song. it may be annoying, but all you have to do to protect yourself from it is to close the door.

but the fraudulent pastor was not interested in that. the fraudulent pastor was only interested in teaching me a little lesson.

so at somewhere near a quarter past nine this morning two armed officers of wiliston's finest were summoned to deal with me. after talking with me a few minutes they went inside. i simply resumed my singing.

the officers wished me a good day when they left.

near nine thirty the door was closed.

i imagine THAT set quite a tone for the worship service. did anyone say that thing they always say in the williston federated church? that thing about practicing radical welcome?

i bet that also made an impression out on the street. i bet that looked really cool next to the expensive banner advertising the open house.

we're the FRIENDLY church.

so how'd that go for you? did bringing armed officers into the church at the beginning of the worship service have the intended effect, or was that just more bad leadership?

how's all that talk about love and peace and welcome going?

the protest, by the way, is both legal and constitutionally protected. there is a crapton of case law about that.



if one is forbidden from that table, none are truly welcome.

see you on the streetcorner.