Man. It’s been two weeks since I’ve posted. Aside from a couple of colds and an adrenaline crash (following a two-week adrenaline rush), life as been good. But onto other things…
I was called into the ministry at the ripe old age of fourteen at summer camp at Oral Roberts University—as were fully one-third of the other boys at camp that night. Needless to say, for most who went up to the altar that night, it didn’t take. Ten years later, as I was finishing seminary, I figured out it didn’t take for me. (But you can read all about that here.)
Going back a little further. When I was ten, I got my “prayer language” at a revival led by Gospel Bill, the rootinest tootinest cowboy for Jesus this side of the Mississip. (For those of you who don’t speak charismatic, that means speaking in tongues.)
Okay, so jump to last month. I was talking to my dad on the phone, and he said that I was “the old Chutney”—original recipe?—while I was home over the holidays, in a way he hadn’t seen in many years. This kinda shocked me. Exactly who had I been these last few years?
But I had to agree. The previous few months—being intermittently un(der)employed and getting a diagnosis of bipolar II—had thrown me for a loop. They were the kind of months were soul searching happens, with or without your permission. The meds didn’t hurt either. I was more myself at Christmas than I had been in years.
We kept talking. He dropped the first whopper. “Do you still have a prayer language?” Well, I don’t know. I guess not. “Well, if you had a prayer language, you’d still have it. That’s not something you lose.” Huh-oh. Here we go. Click to continue reading “How my curse was lifted”
I posted the text of this a bit back, but here is the mp3—I’m the first seven minutes. (You can pick up our podcast here.)
Matt Tittle has a great article up about the meeting point of humanism and panentheism. Good stuff.
Wow.
I was hoping to place in two or three, but I won two firsts, four seconds, and two thirds in the UU Blog Awards.
Wow.
Thank you to everyone who voted for me! Go team Chutney!
First Place!
Second Place!
Third Place!
- Best UU-Themed Blog
- Best Lay Blog
Born to hardscrabble coalminers in the plains of rural Oregon, Sparticus “Sparky” Glencove, the man who would one day be known to his readers as Chutney, found himself split between the demands of a latter day fundamentalist sect known now as the United Monrovian Brethren of God, Reformed, and his passion for fishing for miniature crappie in the icy mountain streams that dotted the family’s back hectare like so many geese without nests. The Monrovians frowned upon mountain streams, and, in the fullness of time, Sparky set to the road in search of mountain streams absent Monrovians but found only mountain streams absent miniature croppie.
It was at this time that, while confronted in Wichita by a gaggle of angry white ethnic hooligans for his Monrovian accent, Sparky met the lovely and resolute Whiski Tufmussels, who roundly ran off the unruly ne’er-do-wells with one of her haymakers. The two would later marry, after Sparky’s study tour of the great capitols of northeastern Europe.
Europe was unkind to Sparky. He found that he did not care for vodka—or perhaps that it did not care for him—and that, though the Peace Corps could provide meaningful work teaching lead-poisoned orphans to read, he could not abide the arora borealis, which excited his excema, a family condition. He left Europe a year early. Click to continue reading “Chutney comes out of the blogging closet”
Poor Arbitrary Marks. She thinks she can beat me.
And so she’s challenged me to a little bet. If she wins, I have to write story about Lion-O‘s conversion to Unitarianism.
If I win, she has to write a series of haikus about how great and super wonderful awesome Making Chutney is.
So go vote already! Time is a-wasting.
I just love haikus.
