In conclusion, is only the conclusion of the rants that I have collected over the years, written on various book covers and cast off materials. I haven’t felt free to write in such an obsessive way for a while. I have been trying to be less rant-y and more “emotionally and spiritually healthy.”
I have been under a doctor’s care. Well, it says doctor on his door and business card and the skin on the wall, but he is a physiologist. He does, however, seem to have the power to prescribe some medications…so. Anyway this was all part of the terms of my returning to work at the church—my re-employment (it does seem like a ploy). Before I re-entered (re-mount, re-turn to) the pulpit I had to under go a month long inpatient program and participate in weekly sessions with Dr. Percy. As a result I have been convinced of the necessity of actually accepting the world as it is and making a healthy choice to participate in it with out critique, to embrace it and its ways. “Because, after all,” Dr. Percy is fond of saying, “If the rest of the world needs to change for you to feel O.K. your chances don’t look good—easier to just change yourself.”
Yes. Easier? Well, I have been working at it. I have developed a strategy. Whenever I start to feel disconnected from this culture, when I look around and vacuous ness is all I see—I find the nearest line I can get in to buy something. Whether Cinnabon or powerball, Joel Osteen or Hot Pockets, what ever is closet, what ever line I see first. By the time I am done with the transaction, I feel a little better. At least I am reminded of what it means to be a part of something bigger than me.
Lately, however, this has not been working as well. My posting all those old rantings about preaching is, I think, a symptom of a gradual slipping, slippage, sliddage….
Russell Rathbun 