Indiana Teacher Fired for Duct Taping Kid’s Mouth Shut

See story here. Where was the law when I was in the first grade? Yup, tape on the mouth. I still remember it as the milk and cookies passed by. I also remember getting the tar beat out of me in the second grade by the teacher.  And I didn’t even go to a Catholic school!!!!

Five weeks until Lent

Ash Wednesday is Feb 25. My free-form Protestantism eschews the “legalism” of liturgical seasons. I was raised to be suspicious of ceremony, read prayers, seasonal observances, and short sermons. My spirituality has been more like the immediate experience of sticking your finger in an electric socket. It’s all about the jolt. My liturgy was confined to looking for the next electric outlet.

The upside of this? The evangelical search for powerful moments has yielded creative, energetic and crowd-swelling experiences as churches have assured “life-changing-never-to-be-the-same” events. You can’t beat an evangelical church finding the wave and riding it to shore. But that’s the downside. The wave does reach the shore and you have to find that next wave or drift into irrelevance. We have turned our people into sensation junkies. And sensation junkies need more of the same to get the same high. The constantly new, different and even strange have to be mainlined.

Of course, what happens is desensitization. It’s like becoming insulin-resistant. The overload put on the spirit by constant sweetness builds up resistance to the life of rhythm, listening, and routine. In fact, we find that we can’t do it. It’s like walking out of a room with a fire going. No matter how warm the rest of the house, all the rooms feel cold after the blasts of heat from fireplace or stove. Everyone starts living in that one room. Until we get tired of living in a house with one room and then slowly start repopulating the rest of the house, maybe event to escape the experience of constant heat.

What I have found in giving a tip of the hat toward the liturgical seasons is that my spirituality is a flighty and moody thing. It’s not so much that my free-form Protestantism is so strong that liturgy can’t contain it. It’s more that my spirituality can’t measure up to it. I would have to stretch too much, concentrate too long, mean something good and deep too carefully.

So what I am finding is that while Lent is a preparation for Easter, I need to prepare for Lent. I have to rehearse what it means, commit to what I am going to do, get ready for the shock to the “do-what-I-want-when-I-want” lifestyle I lead.

Five weeks and counting.