When I was 15 years old, I went on a Carnival cruise with my family to the Caribbean.
“All good stories begin with a boat.”
-Science
There are few things that more aptly embody the zeitgeist of the modern American experience quite like cramming upwards of 5000 heavy-set white people onto a boat.
This boat is likely named“ The Carnival-It was weird to see my 3rd grade teacher hammered outside a Jimmy Buffet Concert” and probably features most if not all of the following:
24-hour-pizza-buffets, croakies, 13 salt-water pools, stateroom-towel-art, gambling, Hawaiian shirts, wind, nausea, steel drums, sun-burnt-tuxedo-night in the many-chandeliered-dining-room, lounge acts, and, not to mention, a duty free shop where you can buy crown royal, cigarettes and cologne.
However hard it may be to believe this, being trapped on what amounts to a floating teachers’ lounge for upwards of a week with nothing to do except gorge oneself on the fat of the boat and ceaselessly climb, much like Sisyphus, the rock wall range up on the lido deck,
our cruise was not:
“fun for all and all for fun.”
So, much to my dismay, it’s been rather difficult to come to terms with the fact that despite 7 years of higher education in the humanities-(I KNOW WHAT A MAX WEBER IS BUT I’M STILL NOT SURE HOW TO USE IT)-I have managed to stumble into an industry that could mostly be described as an experience in Christian cruise directing.
I joke, I dance, I speak, I serve and I program good moral entertainment for mostly bored people in business casual.
A tableau:
Recently, I overheard some folks in their late twenties discussing the intricacies and nuances of transitioning from one song to another during a Christian worship service.
“I mean, we’ve GOT to do a better job in-between songs!!! It’s taking way too long,
and honestly, I wish our band could take some cues from this group
I heard at my friend’s church in Nashville, they were, like, SO on point.
I think Steven Curtis Chapman’s brother runs sound there.”
-Dissatisfied patron of a local religious institution.
Oh, and before I forget!
That wasn’t a typo, GODLESS NARCISSISTIC MILLENNIALS, you know, of GENERATION SELF-BOOK, were of their own accord, discussing not only church and Jesus and God and Christianity, but discussing it exactly as they’ve always been instructed to by their generational forebears:
couched in platitudes about musical preference and small group meeting times!
(wipes tears from eyes, lifts hands to the heavens, and proceeds to trap 30 random strangers in a group message containing the terse yet powerful exclamation GOD’S NOT DEAD AND, I THINK, NEITHER IS LARRY THE CABLE GUY)
And all God’s people said: I didn’t know Kevin Sorbo had such range!
However, my burgeoning euphoria at the discovery of at least TWO Christians under 50, much like it did during that week I spent head-first under a frozen yogurt machine on the “Carnival Mandals*” 15 years ago, quickly devolved into migraines and weird gas
(*NOTE: “mandals” is a mostly pejorative term for man-sandals.)
Largely because there are few things more existentially deflating than fully functioning human beings, in the prime of their lives, with the information superhighway at their fingertips, living in what people keep telling me with pulled pork sliders tumbling from their mouths IS. THE. GREATEST. COUNTRY. IN. THE. WORLD.
WOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!
(sorry everyone enjoying a quiet breakfast in this Panera.)
Yet here they are, filling the ever fleeting moments we have together on this earth with a profound level of dissatisfaction at the length of time it takes the Christian cover band playing for them each week at both 9:00 and 11:00 am, to stop one song and begin another.
Leaving me to wonder: “Wow, did you guys, like, have a dental appointment you couldn’t get out of on the day the universe was handing out things for all of us to complain about?”
Sadly, this isn’t really an altogether novel experience I’ve found on the great bloated boat that is Christianity here in America. It seems as if we’re all listlessly wandering from activity to activity, eating too much, doing too little, spending too much and mostly complaining about the help.
Because when you’re bored, you can’t quite stop yourself from embarrassingly dressing-down the pizza chef over at the 24-hour-buffet for NEVER HAVING ENOUGH HAWAIIAN, I MEAN SERIOUSLY MAN, THIS IS THE THIRD TIME!
Or, that guy who seemingly always finds a way to beat you to the last shaded deck chair each morning.
Or, the people you’re probably friends with stiltedly strumming their way through a Third Day number that the Mega-Church down the road gives some dude full-dental to practice all week.
In my experience, I’ve found that boredom has this way of cauterizing the reality-receptors in our brains, as it keeps us from actually tapping into the fundamental crises besieging the world outside our arguments about worship or building plans or sound systems or beliefs about the bible, the end of things, the beginning of things, and whether or not the Lutherans should manage to beat us to the Olive Garden every Sunday afternoon.
Maybe we could put it this way:
the world needs your anger and your frustration and your passion and your determination and your bravery and your energy and your dissatisfaction and your creativity.
so please stop wasting your best stuff on 5 Christian radio singles and a 35 minute lecture.
cause we got work to do, and most of it doesn’t involve your opinions about the music.
peace.