Fish Bowl

(second installment of Seminarians Don't Blow Stuff Up)

While at seminary, I launched a promising but ultimately short-lived stand-up comedy career.  My jokes were aimed at church-going folk and therefore I had the perfect audience to test my skill.  Unfortunately, I found that Jesus was right: prophets will always be kicked out of their hometown.  Same is true for comedians.  My fellow Wesley students laughed at me; if I went and told my jokes at other seminaries, I was the funniest person they had ever heard (true comment I heard multiple times). 

            Anyway, many of my jokes centered around dorm life.  Current seminarians, I figured, would get a kick out of them, even the somewhat dirty stuff.  Probably many students living in a dorm at any school would at least giggle.  Or at least smile.  Or at least think to themselves, “Yeah, that’s funny.”  Or something. 

            I became interested in stand-up comedy through Mitch Hedberg, of all people.  If you know him, you might find it weird that a seminarian and prospective pastor would tell his jokes word for word, in Hedberg’s voice, with the same tempo.  I listened to his jokes constantly.  They’re short, stupid jokes.  My kind of comedy.  “When I’m on acid, I often see beams of light, and sounds a lot like car horns.”  Or, “I saw a wino the other day.  He was eating grapes.  I said, ‘Dude, you have to wait.’”  Hilarious.  Steven Wright, a hometown comedian to me, was also an inspiration.  “My grandfather once asked me how old I was.  I said, ‘Four.’  He said, ‘When I was your age, I was five!’  And he cackled wildly and threw his glass against the wall.”  That’s how I remember the jokes.

            Here is a sampling of my own comedy set: I hear your mother likes to play euchre.  Would you consider her an—eucharist?

            I don’t drink, but I go to parties where everyone is drunk.  So I crush beer pong.  No one ever said both partners have to drink.  Sure, my partner is black out drunk by the end of the evening, but I’m nailing it.  He’ll thank me in the morning.  Or the next evening.  Sometime.

            A friend of mine went on a second date with her seminarian boyfriend.  They watched When Harry Met Sally in her dorm room.  The next day, we’re all in her room asking how the date went.  I asked, “So, diiid Harry meet Sally?”  I threw in a wink.  She kicked me out.  I guess she thought it wasn’t an appropriate question.  I’ll take it as a yes.  I have a vivid imagination.  I mean, we all do.  Somehow we imagine three can be one.

            My girlfriend is always complaining about dating in a fish bowl.  Her life and our life should be her and our business only, she says.  It all started when people overheard my saying to her, “Put it back in.  It’s still good.  I’ve only worn it once.”… But that’s how I handle laundry.  If I’ve only worn a piece of clothing for one day, I put it back in the dresser.  It’s still good.  And then I assume that when I take clothing out of my dresser that it’s clean.  I mean, obviously.  Why would I put it back in the dresser if it’s not still clean?... I just need to remember how often I’ve worn things.

            When I first met my roommate, he was only wearing shorts and sandals.  He put his sandals outside the room to dry.  He also has a crazy-long beard, wild eyes, and massive amounts of hair all over.  My first thought was, “Man, I thought we deported you all to Vermont years ago!”

            I once saw someone’s mattress roped to the top of their car.  The license plate said they were from Vermont.  I guess that’s what they call a mobile home.

            This jacket is dry-clean only, which means—it’s dirty.  Oh wait, I’m sorry, I stole that joke from Mitch Hedberg.  Sometimes I forget.  Most of the time, actually.  I don’t have a great memory… (a plant will then ask me, if I have a bad memory, do I know how many times I’ve worn my shirt)  I don’t know.  Am I supposed to keep track?  I just took this shirt out of the dresser today, so it must be the first time.  I wouldn’t put something in the dresser if it weren’t clean.

You get the idea.  I’m particularly fond of the fish bowl joke because it’s a true story.  Well, they’re all true stories.  Comedy is real life told over again.  Most of the time the least funny people are those who try to exaggerate stories to add humor.  If a story isn’t funny, it’s not funny.  It will become less funny when you exaggerate because we will all know. 

            Most of the time, also, dorm life can feel like a fish bowl.  You see the same people every day of your life for at least a year.  In seminary, chances are good you’ll see the same people every day for two or three years, since wherever you are going to seminary, even if it’s at a big school like Harvard, the housing for theological students is likely not to encompass a dozen buildings.  And what they don’t tell you about going to seminary is that the seminary dorm fish bowl is a lot of pressure.  Whether it’s true or not, you feel like people are judging you.  At college, if someone thinks you’re re-using a condom, they’ll just think you’re making a poor life choice; at seminary if they think the same thing, they’ll not only judge you for getting someone pregnant out of wedlock but also for having sex in the first place.  Plus, why do you still have the door open?  Geez!

            Living in a seminary dorm is like around Jeremy Bentham’s theoretical panopticon: one central institutional tower overlooking everyone else as they live in glass houses.  Every action and statement is policed.  As Foucault adds, social policing doesn’t even need to happen overtly—in fact, policing is more effective when it is silent and self-propelled.  You think everyone around you will judge you if you don’t wear a button-up shirt.  Indeed, the girlfriend who complained about the fish bowl once flew into a rage because one of our friends said to me one day, “John John, you’re wearing a button-up shirt.  Doing big things, doing big things.”  I had to pull my girlfriend out of the room and calm her down but she kept saying, “I’m sick and tired of people’s judging every little thing.  So what if you don’t wear nice clothes?”  It’s true.  I don’t wear nice clothes.  Nor do I care.  She did, though, and society’s policing effect is strong enough to make most people care.

            One day a bunch of girls at seminary promoted going a day without wearing make-up as a statement.  I heartily encouraged said statement.  Why do girls wear make-up just to attend class, anyway?  As the day approached, a bunch of those who thought the event was a great day pulled out, including my girlfriend.  People would see, after all.  So I started wearing make-up to make the same, but opposite, statement.  Unfortunately, I had developed a reputation by then as a weirdo, so people simply thought I was weird.  Around the second week, for instance, my favorite professor paused mid-sentence and then asked, “John, are you waiting guyliner?”  I responded affirmatively and he smirked as if to say, “Of course you are.”  I looked good, I can tell you that much.

            The point is, one way or another, even if no one is actually judging you, living at a seminary dorm can be hard work.  I took the approach of not caring but, truthfully, some days that was more of an act than a reality.  Plus, it's not always good not to care.  I didn't care when I went on a first date with my soon-to-be girlfriend at a breakfast joint.  I proceeded to engage our waitress in a five minute conversation on how many kids she thought she'd have and why.  The biggest why in that story is why my date agreed to another one.  Therefore, if you’re thinking about attending seminary or encouraging someone else to go, this must be said: prepare your mind for a long haul.  The theological challenges are one thing, sure, but the emotional rollercoaster of dorm life is the worst.

Perhaps most of all, though, the fish bowl of a seminary dorm should force us to reflect on how we understand the role of pastor.  To oversimplify: is a pastor someone who comes in and tells us what to do; or is a pastor someone who journeys along with us?  Our answer to the question will greatly influence whether seminary dorm life is an obstacle to hurdle or a preparation for the life to come.

            Granted, not all seminarians are planning on being pastors.  The oft-mentioned girlfriend was one of those people.  Maybe that’s why she struggled with the fish bowl idea so much.  For everyone else, however, I think that the fish bowl nature of dorm life is good and necessary preparation.  Anyone who attends seminary as a second-career person misses a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be judged as a pastor will be.

            Don’t get me wrong.  I don’t think pastors should be more judged than anyone else.  Nor do I think we should be judging anyone’s life in the sense of looking down on them.  Jesus says that’s wrong.  And what Jesus says, goes.  There are, though, good aspects to the process of judging and being judged. 

            God loves us wherever we are on the journey.  At every moment, though, God is also offering grace in abundance so that we can live the life God intended for us to live in which we are not (in the sexual sense) putting it back in, it’s still good, with the door open, without being married, in the middle of the day.  It’s better to receive and live in God’s infinite grace out of love and our own desire to remain close to Him, but on occasion the worry, “What will my dorm neighbor think?” is a good alternative.  As Paul says, the law does serve a function as it shows us how we are sinners.

            Sometimes, I think, in pastors’ efforts to no longer be placed on a pedestal, we forget that we are still the primary model for churchgoers in how to live like Jesus.  It is true that we are not some extra holy person who swoops down saying, “Do this, don’t do that,” but it’s also true that if we are going to remove ourselves from the pedestal, we have to open our lives up to our parishioners.  If we don’t, then we aren’t giving them a real-life, tangible model to replace the pedestal-pastor.  And if we do open our lives up to our parishioners, it will probably feel like we are living in a fish bowl.

            Our fish bowl for pastors needs to have boundaries, of course.  I don’t know that we should set up our pastor’s bedroom with a livestreaming, 24/7 webcam.  Nor should we think that our pastor should be available to us all day every day in the first place.  We all need a break from people.  That includes pastors.  Yet there must be, I believe, a healthy balance between, a) knowing and understanding that our pastors are not extra holy, that they are on the same journey with us, as a human being, asking for and needing God’s grace, and b) asking our pastors not to put up a barrier whenever they are with the church, so that we can ask and hear personal stories and have a living, breathing disciple who’s making the path to Jesus a little more well-trod. 

To achieve the balance, pastors must and should even be expected to be somewhat holy, to be striving toward the perfection Christ himself commands and promises (as we Methodists put it), because otherwise part (b) will simply encourage people to remain stuck in the mud.  Our lives need to be a gentle nudge toward greater and greater holiness in Christ.  As if we are saying to our folk, “Yes, I am a sinner, too, and I know God’s grace; but here’s the next step or two God will carry you to.  Don’t be afraid.” 

Indeed, in a way, I think all Christians should accept the fish bowl.  If our personal lives do a disservice to Christ when the personal becomes public, then we should maybe pray about why that is and ask for God’s help.  I’m the first to say that my seminary life did a major disservice to the holiness journey of many people.  At first I tried to hide it, which made things worse, because publicly hiding my personal life just meant I didn’t address the harm my personal life was doing to myself and others.  From experience, then, I say it’s probably best if we all change our understanding of what we mean when we say, “personal life.”  If our personal life made public would shame us, then we should do something about it.  Considering judgment in this way, as a comparison between the life we are living and the life God intends for us to live, then it is beneficial to our lives as disciples with a destination to our journey.  Thankfully, we have One who can help us reach that destination.

In a way, too, we should acknowledge that a Christian’s life will always be judged.  If we are truly following Christ, those who are not disciples probably should think we’re weird.  That is a judgment we should accept.  Why, yes, I do wear my clothes three days in a row to save the environment; I absolutely would consider myself a eucharist; and even, on occasion, Harry meets Sally because I love my spouse and we build one another up spiritually.