iPhones and pastors: opinions, please!
So my husband is an only child, and his parents are much better off than mine. He can get them to buy him anything, even if it's not his birthday or Christmas. This weekend when we were back in the Midwest for my grandfather's memorial service, he convinced them to buy him an iPhone. I'm kind of upset about it. I have been of the persuasion that pastors ought not to have very expensive gadgets. Shoot, my laptop I use for school is a $400 Toshiba bought on sale and I run open-source software on it; I'm using the same iPod shuffle from 2005 that my mom got for free after opening a new savings account. I don't see a need for an iPhone or spending money on expensive cell-phone plans... I actually see it as wasteful. I guess I just don't think pastors ought to spend their money that way.
I know DH's parents got it for him, but still, that iPhone projects an image I'm just not comfortable with. We don't have cable and we pirate our internet... we don't even have renter's insurance! And now he has an iPhone?!? Am I a bit extreme here... or do you agree that pastors should live frugally and without "frills"?
Is it unbecoming of a pastor to have an expensive gadget like an iPhone? Or if a pastor refuses such technology, is s/he no longer culturally relevant?
A personal report on the memorial service, the insanity of my mother's family, and other things after the jump.
On an unrelated note, my grandfather's memorial service went quite well. I co-presided with my mother and the Evngelical Free pastor who knew Grandpa from Bible study. We split the speaking parts three ways. I ended up with the Psalm... since a lot of the folks there had never sung a response to a psalm before, I did it Marsh Chapel-style and demonstrated the first time around, then motioned for all to join in. Neither Mom nor the other pastor had ever taken a liturgical presidency class or preaching class before and were both wooden during their readings, out of nervousness. Stephen (my most honest critic) felt that I, by comparison, was so relaxed and comfortable that it appeared I was the chief presider.
Stephen also reported that my idea of presenting my "theological reflection" at the end of the open mic time was excellent, because he thought I summed up all that had previously been said very eloquently and concisely. That was quite by accident, since I wrote it on Thursday morning. He said that I glowed, as I always seem to do in the pulpit, for the whole service.
The recieving line afterward was, as is always the case with my mother's family, a bizarre experience. Folks said they didn't know how I "got through it" and that they were glad to see me even though it was such a sad occasion. Strangely, during the service itself, I felt the joy that always wells from within whenever I do a service. My mother cried when she read Romans 8:35-38, and Mary (my aunt) could hardly keep it together enough to get through her 3-minute-exactly speech during the open mic. Yet I was so happy, and I even employed my usual sermon stunts in my never-ending quest to get white folk to laugh in church.
At any rate, the folks who came through the line all loved the serivce, my singing, and my reflection... those who didn't approve of me made it a point to skip me. Except one, who directly engaged me. He asked about my seminary, and then called it "a hotbed of liberalism." I told him that our reputation isn't entirely earned, and he said, "I meant the Gospel." I said, "If you're talking about Biblical literalism, no, we're not Biblical literalists, and neither am I." He got a deer-in-the-headlights wide-eyed look and ran away. Mom said later that this cousin-in-law of hers is used to manuvering people to agree with him, and when I stood my ground, he didn't know what to do.
My mother's family was unbearable, as usual, and thankfully Stephen's many food allergies saved me from almost 7 hours of hell following the service. We were hungry and he was unable to stay for the dinner following the service, because the only thing he could have eaten was the raw vegetables. We went to Applebee's, where he found a good meal, and then we trolled the mall for awhile and went Meijering. It was like old times in the Midwest. When we were in Meijer looking at the men's sweatpants, Stephen declared all of them to be unsatisfactory for sleeping in, and I said, "I feel like we've done this before." I meant that we had visited Meijer in Michigan before on the same quest and found nothing suitable then either. A lady near us turned to me and said, "I know what you mean! I feel like I've moved in!" Wow. Later, looking for mudslide ingredients, Stephen said to me as he picked up a package of ice cream, "You know, I can see how it can get stifling out here. It seems like in suburbia you can get stuck in a rut." I think that might have been what the lady meant.
At any rate, I escaped with very little of the misery that is visiting with mom's relations, due to spending all evening shopping. The two hours I was forced to endure were bad enough, though. Her generation is just absolutely off the deep end. What I didn't expect, however, was for Stephen's noticing neuroses developing in my generation as well. I had noticed their changed behavior, but his outside perspective brought to my attention that these were not normal developments. One example is my brother's behavior: he is extremely unpleasant unless he's the one driving or he possesses the remote. Yet he drives iwth his earbuds in, even after Stephen told him how many people he scrapes off the pavement as an EMT who are still wearing earbuds when he puts them on the stretcher. Stephen pointed out that this is Ted's need to control what's going on all the time. I haven't figured out what it is that Ted is not in control of that makes him need to control others.
Last night, Stephen mused that perhaps Ted's neuroses are getting steadily worse as I steadily collect more achievements. He thinks Ted might, as the younger sibling, have a need to surpass me or prove himself/ prove something to me. Yet he cannot, as I surpass him in every area. I had never thought about that before. And it parallels what's going on with my cousin Patrick: soon after I got married, he acquired a girlfriend who had a son by another man (two years ago), and now he has proposed to her and calls the boy his stepson.
I think this might be due to my nullifying the script that Patrick, Jim, Ted, and all my other cousins repeated to me over the years: that as a girl, I could never expect to achieve what they expected. I wouldn't amount to as much as they would because "girls can't do math" and "no man would want me" and other such notions. Yet I have amounted to more than all of them combined, with my master's, my happy marriage, and my expected ordination. I have left each one in the dust, which would explain why everyone's acting so strangely. They had their superiority complexes get shattered.
I'm sure it sounds as if I have a superiority complex, but understand that I have only begun to think these thoughts after having been provided with outside observations from my husband and my therapist for many months. I have always ordered my thoughts using an assumption of myself as inferior to my brother and cousins, and as a person oppressed by their nasty treatment. Suddenly I am seeing things from a different perspective: they are insecure people whose sister's/cousin's achievement threatens their self-image. The dynamics of our relationships have changed. I am no longer The Dumb One and The One Straggling Behind or The Outsider. Now I am The Smart One, The Leader. I am secure in my place in the family, because I Belong. Stephen and I have defined our own place in my family, and we spend our time at family gatherings together. My brother and cousins find themselves unable to define my status because I am defining it for myself. Suddenly they are the ones running to catch up.
This means a few things:
1) I have power within our generation, even though these family members still hold patriarchal views, and this power does not extend outside our generation.
2) They seek my approval, not the other way around.
3) This power gives me the ability to be the oppressor, if I'm not careful. I could choose to be very unkind to them, or I could choose to break the cycle of verbal abuse in the Olin family. That is a huge amount of power.
4) If this trend continues (aka earning the ultimate "family cred" by being the first of my generation to procreate), I will become the spokesperson of my generation within the family.
Hoo, that's a lot to sink in. Life in my mother's family may have changed drastically, right under my nose. Bizarre.