So wait, what was I saying again?

I been creepin' all up in this Holy beeyatch.

Greg:

It's been about two and a half years since I last posted here, but I figure hey, what better time to reinvigorate the long-form blog (a' la 1997) than one year before the Mayan Apocalypse of 2012?

No better time. None. (This post will also be available on clay tablets, so that those survivors of the aforementioned apocalypse who shamble the barren hellscape in search of human flesh will have a little after dinner reading. -Ed.)

So, to make a really awkward segue, I've been going to church. I know that saying that sounds both radical and benign, like saying, "I've been huffing acrylic paint". And you'd think the combined facts that a) you and I are preacher's kids and got churched harder than most minor saints, and b) I'm a non-theist would make the idea of ever entering a church again utterly anathema to me. You'd think so, right?

Well that's before they started combining Jesus H. Christ with beer. (Contrary to what you may have heard, mixing beer with Jesus and lemonade does not make it a "shandy". -Ed.)

Let me back up. Here's how all that came about:

I work all damn day by myself doing my marketing thing talking about marketing stuff writing marketing stuff talking to marketing people about marketing stuff. Do that for six months and see if you don't want to kill yourself in the face about two hundred times.

So I was searching the interwebs for something - ANYTHING - to do socially or otherwise that wasn't related to marketing or advertising, and lo! What should appear in my search results but Theology Pub. Yep, you read that right. Beer + Jesus. So I was thinking to myself that what did I have pounded into my head for years but loads of theology, and how could I possibly not hold my own in both the "beers consumed" and "bullshit spewed" columns at a shindig like this?

There are two that I attend now, one in Capitol Hill and the other in West Seattle. People, a lot of them theology students or certified theologians, actually get together, get a skinful of belabored grain in 'em, and debate theology, Jeebus, Gawd, JHVH and what have you. I tell you, the amount of passion that pours forth in those gatherings is just goddamn scintillating. Where else can you hear somebody scream, "You are literally taking the cock and balls off of God"? (You mean aside from on the bus...every day...directed at no one in particular? -Ed.)

So how I started going to church again was that I got invited to come to hear Matt Lyon, founder of the West Seattle Theology Pub, deliver the homily at St. John the Baptist Episcopal on the First Sunday in Advent. And I was all like, "Hey - I dig the smells and the bells, and know all the hymns and the hand-jive, so why the F not?" The fact that he got up and totally dunked on the reading from Revelations ("Not sure I agree with this..." Yeah, he said that. In the pulpit. And did not spontaneously combust.) was just icing on the communion wafer.

Oh and then - and THEN - I have to tell you all the other ecclesial adventures I've had, like "outing" myself as Buddhist to the minister, knockin' 'em dead at compassionate listening practice groups, and getting told repeatedly by Theology Publicans that I am, in practice, the most Christian person they've ever met.

Yeah, I know. Me, the prong-horned non-theo-Buddho-ag-nostic preacher's kid. Pick yourself up off the floor and stop slapping your knees. I'll give you all the deets later.

Peace,

-Thaddeus