A few times M, N, and I have visited a Saturday evening church in town that reaches out to the homeless, the down and out, the addicted. Not that we’re homeless, or even down on our luck right now, or addicted to anything other than life’s simple pleasures, but the unpredictable services in an unconventional meeting place aren’t without a certain luster absent in some of the more staid services we’ve attended where a gilded Bible is raised above bowed heads and a gilded cross precedes robed priests while a pipe organ blasts hymns of processional glory.

One night before Christmas found us on the ragged carpet of the “sanctuary,” late-arrival gleanings from the pre-service supper of burnt soup and crackers on our plates, people sitting about on pulled-up chairs, and kids lounging on a big beanbag in the center of the floor. The crude podium at the front presided from behind a candle stub deposit box filled with sand for later in the service.

At least once a frisky cat, frantically exploring everything from the piano player’s shoes to the idling computer on the cluttered desk in the corner, required ousting from the sand, which it was preparing to use with complete disregard for the riveted congregation’s gaze.

This may sound dismal (and in a way it was), but what enlivened the emotional momentum of the Christmas story retellings was one person in particular. He’d been watching the playing children earlier and laughing loudly in a slightly intoxicated manner, and so I and probably every other parent in the room had had my eye on him all evening.

I’m guessing he’d never heard the Christmas story before. At least it appeared he’d never heard the lyrics of “What Child Is This,” because when we sang “where ox and ass are feeding,” he let out such a guffaw–he laughed and laughed and laughed–that although I knew the tenor line well I couldn’t bear to move my eyes from my hymn book for fear of losing composure.

But what is composure worth, anyway? I’m reading Gone with the Wind, now, for my personal edification, and so far it sounds like an all-American Portrait of a Lady, what with propriety and composure worshiped to absurdity. Most refreshing in that book so far (I’m only into chapter 10) is Rhett Butler, the blockade runner who improperly initiates and then wins a bid to dance with the widowed Scarlett. He tells her, “What most people don’t seem to realize is that there is just as much money to be made out of the wreckage of a civilization as from the upbuilding of one,” scandalous words indeed in that Atlanta hospital for combat-wounded fundraising ball.

To be sure, Mr. Butler is the epitome of self-assured composure, but he scoffs at his fellow dancers’ Southern pride and aristocratic propriety—actually, he riddles it with his contempt. The much-believed-in and celebrated cause he has supported with his excessively high bid for the dance with Scarlett is the very effort he mocks and knows ultimately will fall—the Confederacy.

Gallant, self-confident composure would not last long for those Southern gentlefolk, maybe just as won’t the rituals and sacred habits shrouding some church services, for the truth of the crèche rests with its discomposures. The slimy, messy emergence must have been dismal, the horrific conditions made less tolerable by an onslaught of crude and dirty men most likely steeped in barnyard humor, all there engulfed in the sickly sweet smells of cattle butts and asses. It is perhaps best remembered as a disarrayed scene of desperate making-do where composure’s only value was its diversion of panic.

Indeed, if the manger scene’s human misery were not so palpable, the first Noel would have been laughably ridiculous.

First as a single male and later as a married-at-24 male, I have had a number of conversations with friends single and married about the sex dilemma faced by single adults.

The traditional Christian stance on sex is that it belongs in marriage. However, the median age for first marriages appears to be rising; in 2000-2003 it was 27 for men and 25 for women, a substantial increase from 1960 when “the bride was just over twenty and the groom was under twenty-three.” While a variety of social factors are at play in these figures, what is certain is that teens once commanded to hold out until they get married in their early twenties are now growing up into adults who are presumably also told to abstain for even more years until tying the knot.

This practice is not without certain benefit. There is no such thing as safe sex–pregnancy and disease contraction are both potential results of any coupling, protected or otherwise. There is also perhaps no such thing as emotionally casual sex, either; I can’t imagine that intimacy flung nonchalantly aside does not leave at least one party feeling used, forsaken, or otherwise downtrodden. So abstaining until within the boundaries of marriage is not necessarily an unhealthy approach. Perhaps it’s ideal.

The trouble is that all adults–even single ones–are sexual beings. Even when idealistically hopeful, they can’t simply turn off their sex drive until entering into some sort of illusory marital unity of eternal sexual bliss. Here’s the question: How can conscientious, single people maintain practical sexual health without compromising their ideals, endangering their health, or harming others?

One answer, which I’ve heard many times, is that single people should just throw themselves into creative endeavors and use their sex drives to do great if asexual things. However, while single people are uniquely unfettered and therefore more suited to the sacrifices required by great thing doing, I bet they still feel a little excitable at times.

“That’s when you pray,” some might say, “until you fall asleep too exhausted to think about anything impure.”

(I’ll just mention here that this doesn’t work; there’s nothing like a little impurity to wake me up. Not that any of us should subscribe to that notion that sex is impure. Hell, it’s how humanity’s made it this far.)

These answers are unsatisfactory, I think, as are many others. All I’ve been able to come up with is the notion that until marriage, when both can be addressed in the same setting of relationship, physical and emotional needs are best met separately. Meeting purely sexual needs (although some would argue that there are no such things) should be worked out individually (minding addiction dangers) while fulfilling emotional needs should happen through nonsexual, intimate friendships.

At bottom, perhaps, sexuality in singlehood is a process inevitably muddled through–and one neither to toss about lightly nor to condemn by the many who have ourselves survived, scathed or otherwise, through our own muddlings.

I would be glad to hear additional ideas. And so, probably, would a whole lot of singles out there.

This Sunday at my parents’ church, in honor of Missions, a parishioner whom I’ll call “R” told about his recent trip to the local Veterans Affairs hospital to “minister” in the waiting room.

He’s a large man, physically imposing yet soft spoken, who experienced a high-impact conversion a number of years ago and has been tearfully grateful ever since.

At the hospital, his Gideon New Testament in his back pocket, R chose the middle of five vacant seats, and waited. Soon there entered a tall man with long hair, piercings every which way, Vietnam badges patched all over, and grubby. R said a quick prayer assuring God that this man wasn’t the one he was supposed to talk to.

“He talked too loud,” said R. “Everyone in the whole place could hear him. And guess where he came to sit–right beside me. He looked at me and he said, ‘How are you serving God today?'”

Since my theoretical qualm with missionaryism is that evangelizers don’t necessarily hold any more divine truth than the evangelized, this story was a refreshing burst of irony, an irony that I see as meaningfully parallel to that of the biblical stories of the woman at the well and the Bethesda healing.

In the woman at the well story in John 4, Jesus asks a religious and cultural underdog for a life-giving drink; she proclaims that he is a prophet. Truth wells from the invalidated? How ironic.

The irony in John 5 falls into the form of sarcasm. Jesus heals an invalid and instructs him to carry away his mat. The healed man protests to the accusing established religious authorities that he was only breaking the Sabbath’s anti-work rule because his healer had told him to carry the mat. Later, Jesus and the man meet up again, and I can just hear Jesus virtually spitting out the words of verse 14 in contempt: “See, you are well again. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you.”

In my dad’s version of the Bible, by this verse’s word “sin” is scrawled, “What does this imply?” I’ve always heard that maybe the man was paralyzed because of sin, or he was healed but still sinful. Hearing Jesus speak this sentence contemptuously puts “sin” into a different light that condemns religious establishment as so skewed that its own truth and exclusivity shuts out real truth and freedom. Through his sarcasm Jesus is saying, “Yeah, right, you’re such a sinner. Whatever. Don’t cross those sinless people ever again, or they’ll do worse than scold you, in order to prop up their self-made, righteous authority!”

Could the healed man taste biting sarcasm?

In some way I think this is not unconnected to Peter’s Acts 10 vision of the sheet descending from heaven. About to be confronted with Gentile contact, Peter was instructed not to write off the unclean, for it just may be clean. While this challenges us today to reconsider that which many in the church have labeled unclean (homosexuality, perhaps?), it also calls for missionaries to be open to divine activity outside of entities routinely considered divine.

In other words, it tells us to welcome the irony.

It’s a mixed bag, religious practice, but somehow we pick and proceed, each of us with our own sort of universal sincerity.

Last night our friends A&P&C came over. They brought us supper: fresh corn on the cob picked by A’s parents, veggies, new potatoes, tea; M and I had made a peach tart for dessert, with peaches picked by a local farmer. After eating, they whipped out their toothbrushes to spruce up while I cleared the table and M fed N. N takes forever to nurse, so we had to catch up with A&P&C later.

“Just look for the big tent with lots of cars,” they said. And the “Tent Meeting” and “Tent Revival” signs. He would be leading the hymns before the preacher, a former New York City Puerto Rican gangbanger turned conservative pastoral counselor, would take the stage for the sixth of ten straight nights of preaching.

The breeze wafted through the tent and fluttered the drapes marking off the women’s and men’s prayer rooms and silently permeated all with the smell of the sawdust aisles and invitation area before the platform. “The service will end with an invitation, probably,” A had told us.

“I’m going to pick on someone tonight,” began the preacher, at almost exactly the same moment that he similarly dealt with his wedgie. “What did I preach about on Tuesday?” (Nobody remembered; it was “sin.”) “What did I preach about on Wednesday?” (Nobody remembered; it was “salvation.”) “Alright, who was the 16th president of the United States?” (A guy with a dark beard answered.) “Alright, how old am I?” (Lots of people knew; the previous night he’d told his life story.)

“Our ability to remember is a marvelous thing,” he said, and thenceforth followed the account of Lot, or rather Mrs. Lot, since it was her example, of turning back to the past and therefore into a pillar of salt, that we were to tuck away in our hearts, and other conveyances of whatever the Spirit laid on the preacher’s heart (“Speaking off the cuff,” M called it later) made imperative by loud vocalization and emotional appeal.

It’s odd to go to such a tent meeting among cape dresses, coverings, buttoned-up white shirts, to sing along with the hushed “Just As I Am” during the altar call (no one came forward). It felt like time travel, going back to our parents’ childhoods, back to a black and white era of strict boundaries of separation. Somehow I feel a common bond with these people, but I don’t know if that sense is reciprocated. Instead, maybe I fit into the preacher’s category of “wannabes,” people who want to be Christian but also want to be of the world. I probably don’t yet qualify as a hypocrite, since you have to be “in” before you can be inconsistent.

This feeling of historical visitation or my perhaps certain–in their book of judgment–eternal uncertainty remains unbroached with our super-conservative friends. I’ve had consciously to decide not to take personally or become personally offended by anything religious that I could construe as exclusionary and instead to perceive it as but a sincere attempt to do what is right. After all, as the elder’s sermon (delivered before the preacher’s sermon) last night suggested, it’s not where we’ve been but where we’re going that matters.

And for this week’s visitation, we’ve picked a Lutheran church.

You can tell a lot about a church from its sign out front: “You think it’s hot here? Beat the heat with Jesus.” Or, “God is as big as you make him.” Or, “Islam and the West.”

I only remember where–at a Unitarian Universalist church–I saw one of the above quips (Can you guess which?), but each is revealing. Hellfire and brimstone avoidance, divine creation (best perfomed after looking at self reflections in bowls of mushy Lucky Charms), intellectual complexities of abstraction… Where might one find a home?

One of the biggest downers about our upcoming move is leaving behind our beloved church. It’s small, with people of many backgrounds and persuasions, with good music, with supportive friends, with opportunities to contribute. It’s the only one of the denomination around, too, whereas we’re moving to the Megatropolis (note the capital M) of denominational sogginess and–my new word here–perflusivity.

Figuring out how to find our place in church among the denominational repletion in our new hometown is going to take time, and a lot of tentative scouting. I’ve decided, for starters, to look for a few key elements in the churches we visit, such as these:

1. No territorial flags, U.S. or otherwise. Unless, perhaps, they’re all there.
2. No crosses. I don’t worship the cross.
3. Good music. Accapela. In parts.
4. Friendly people. We’re toying with the idea of repeat attending a church for as many times as we’re invited home for lunch afterwards.
5. Down-to-earth sermonizing with an ear to the real world.
6. Potlucks. Lots. But only on Sundays when we’re not otherwise invited to lunch.

It’s not just me, or you. Joseph in Genesis, Pip in Great Expectations, Jane in Jane Eyre, Hamlet in Hamlet, Jack in All the King’s Men, Jed in A Place to Come to, perhaps even Precious in The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency–all are pinballs negotiating obstacles and bouncing off zingers and charged interactions that craft destiny and possibility.

The certain constancy of reckoning with forces beyond individual control shapes life into paragraphs and chapters and sometimes even books. Within that reckoning are dreams and visions, dreams built upon the clues of the past, visions built of emergent goals shaped by all that has come before and, we hope, all effected beyond.

In a culture proclaiming the virtues of pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps and being self made in the image of the divine, living our own visions is considered the high road. In reality, though, the high road is constantly molded by the befuddled muddling of endless variability surrounding our every decision.

Which keeps things interesting.

“Well, we’ve been praying for you,” the lender of our current, private mortgage said to me recently. I’d just asked about another possible scenario involving deviation from scheduled payments as we transition through buying a new home and (hopefully) selling our current place. “I’m sure God has something good in mind for you; I can’t see why he wouldn’t want that for you.” (Except what he really said was probably, “I can’t see why He wouldn’t want that for you.”)

God as my personal lobbyist, attorney, and house boy? Sign him (err, Him) up! Sweet!

Now, of course I would be grateful for any divine intervention leading to personal financial, geographical, and relational success (and a cheap electric car), and certainly I am not suggesting that God is incapable such miraculous action, seeing as how God can probably do just about anything, except maybe make a stone too heavy for God to lift.

The problem is, however, that asking for, expecting, or assuming God’s beneficent response to my current situation is, well, arrogant. Indeed, with all due humility, why should I be blessed any more than the next dude (or, hypothetically but not unfathomably speaking, the starving Nigerian child whose parent was killed by an oil fields guard)?

So when our housing “crisis” is resolved (if it ever is) and, I hope I hope I hope, we’re in a multi-acre, clean and comfy home, and I am tempted to thank God for beautifying my life, may feel smugly humbled by being proven “in” with the “in” crowd, may that be but a temptation.

I admit that part of me cringes at writing this, since maybe by saying that God doesn’t bless me I am forfeiting future fruits of fondness. If that is truly true (and some would say there’s a chance it is, and so I shouldn’t write this, just in case), then I may suffer blogger’s regret–except that if I can’t blog, then God wouldn’t have to suffer such free speech, and so maybe he/He might just send me out to the boonies, since most country living is not blessed with affordable DSL.

It sounds like a win-win situation to me!