Hennesey

“Hennesey” aired on CBS from 1959-1962, and starred Jackie Cooper as Navy doctor Chick Hennesey, who is assigned his first billet at San Diego Naval Air Station.  Other regulars were Abby Dalton as nurse Martha Hale (who by the end of the series became Mrs. Hennesey), Henry Kulky as Max Bronsky, Roscoe Karns as Capt. Shafer, and James Komack in a recurring role as dentist Harvey Seymour Blair.

It’s not too difficult to look at “Hennesey” as a prototype for what would later be “M*A*S*H”.  Gene Reynolds, who was the executive producer for the latter show, directed several episodes of “Hennesey”.  Jackie Cooper would return the favor by directing several episodes of the first few seasons of  “M*A*S*H”.

Though “Hennesey” was set in peacetime, there was much of the anarchic feel of the 4077th at the San Diego hospital.  In the pilot episode, Hennesey reveals that he was an enlisted man in the Army before going to medical school, which would have put him in the Army during the Korean War.  It’s not that difficult to see him as an orderly at the 4077th.  He provided the function of being “the voice of reason” while all sorts of chaos surrounded him.  Harvey Seymour Blair, referred to by one character as “The Mad Butcher of Novocaine Row”, was a combination of Charles Winchester and Hawkeye Pierce (without the preaching).  Shafer had the military bearing of Sherman Potter, while maintaining more than a little sentimentality.  In one episode, Shafer dresses down Hennesey and Blair for taking unauthorized leave; but after finding out that the two doctors managed to deliver a baby aboard a plane, dismisses them and then looks out the window musing , “It’s a good day…a very good day.”

Sadly, this series has rarely been seen since its initial run.  Apparently the show’s co-producer, Don McGuire, refused to release it for syndication; though there was one brief run on TV Land.  A handful of episodes are available via tape traders, and one episode where Soupy Sales shows up at San Diego NAS can be seen on YouTube.

Ho ho ho oh no…

Well, we got through Fourth of July.  (more about that later)

This, to a church music leader, means only one thing…IT’S CHRISTMAS TIME!!!!!

The Wednesday BEFORE the 4th, the Sunday School director greeted me with, “Hey, remind me before you leave, we got some CD’s of sample choir stuff for Christmas…”.  What ran through my mind was something akin to what Harry Potter would think if he saw a nametag reading “Hello, my name is Voldemort.”

I suppose I must explain myself.  Asking the most politically liberal guy in a Southern Baptist congregation to put together the choir program for Independence Day (that would be me), is bound to cause some sleepless nights for the liberal.  I’ve had just enough Anabaptist influence to be a bit leery of mixing God and country.  I wanted something that would honor the memory of the soldiers who died in the cause of freedom and justice, without looking like the musical intro for Hannity’s America.   I couldn’t get any coherent ideas together at all.

So I did what any principled man would do.

I went back to the most vocal choir members who were asking for this and told them, “Hey guys, I’m drawing a blank here.”   (It was the truth, I’d been trying to put something together that would honor the Christian core values of freedom while trying not to use the flag as a shroud for the Cross.)  “You guys said you had some ideas.  Put ’em together and let me see them.”

It wasn’t too bad, though I had visions of Jerry Falwell’s ghost wandering in and saying “Hey guys, could you dial down the jingoism a bit?”

But we did it, the people enjoyed it, I even had a good time.

What I’ve got in mind for Christmas is something like this, though…

A disillusioned Christian bookstore clerk is closing up shop on Christmas Eve and growling “Bah, humbug.  I understand Scrooge’s motivation.  WHYYYYY are we doing this?”

Whereupon he is visited by three ghosts:  A Pharisee expert on the major prophets, that guy that took Paul’s dictation for him, and a third ghost of Christmas future with a Hawaiian shirt and red hair who goes by “Rick”.

Think it’ll work?

JFF’s misadventures in a fundy church

Now don’t get me wrong.  I like fundies.  Fundies are the people responsible for showing me how to follow Jesus, and for teaching me darned near everything I know about the Christian faith.  Any Christian tendencies I display can be laid squarely at the feet of fundamentalist Christians.

I’d love to say I’ve outgrown it, but I doubt I will anytime soon.

With this as a foreword, let me set the scene.  My church does not have a regular Sunday night service, so I ventured down to a local Bible church close to home.  What followed was a display of demagoguery that was almost frightening in its non sequitur jumps of logic.

The subject for this evening was the evils of an institution that pays me, the infamous Godless Public Schools (hereafter known as GPS).  According to the pulpiteer this evening,  the GPS is a monolithic institution of social engineering that is destroying America by trashing the family unit and subdividing it by age grouping.

About five minutes in, I had gone into full “Seth and Amy” mode as the preacher decried the falling birthrate among Christians and comparing it to birthrates of Islamic families; noting that this was a harbinger of Muslim conquest.  Really.  REALLY? What about the little rugrats born to young hormonal kids of no religious affiliation at all?  Are they merely cannon fodder doomed to fall to the Mohammedan hordes?

Even modern-day youth ministry came under fire as an accessory to the destruction of America’s families.  Really.  REALLY? What about those kids who WEREN’T raised in good Bible-believing homes?  Instead of being decried as part of the problem, could these ministries not be part of the solution by building a “resistance” movement, if you will?

The usual rightwing boogeymen made their appearance as well in this diatribe:  Global warming and the scientists that believe it, the global warming champion Al Gore, the mainstream media, and those ubiquitous gays and their “agenda”.

The bottom line: America is dead.  Only a “Holy Ghost sent revival” can save the day.  But what hope the minister held out in one breath, he took away with the next with a dismissive “but I don’t think it’s going to happen”.

Hoo boy.  This is how the culture war, if it’s a legitimate battle anyway, will probably be lost.  The warriors, instead of praising what light is there, will go around pissing on the candles and cursing the darkness as the sign of a lost cause.

Still here…

I am shocked at the amount of time it’s been since I posted last. In the last couple of months, I’ve moved back to my hometown, left the Christian bookstore to spend more time substitute teaching (not to mention making more $$$$$), plus finding myself assuming responsibility for the youth and songleading at a small church. It’s really done a lot for me emotionally and spiritually to have made these changes.

The church, one I formerly attended with my ex-wife and daughter, generally takes the attitude, “we’re all in this mess together, God help us.” To have your fellow Christians look you in the eye, instead of down their nose, makes a world of difference.

New stuff I’ m reading

I’ve put in two more books lately…

The first is “Not the Religious Type” by Dave Schmelzel.  Dave is a Vineyard pastor in the Boston area.  Boston not being a hotbed of evangelicalism; one can be sure Dave’s got some interesting stories to tell.  The ones who like Donald Miller’s writings should put this on their list as well.

The second one, “If God Disappears” by David Sanford, darn near saved my faith right now.  At a time when everything and everyone I’ve loved is slipping away from me; to have this reminder that God is still there AND still loves me couldn’t have shown up at a better time.  I cannot thank Mr. Sanford nearly enough for writing this.

The Scarlet Letter

No, I haven’t taken up reading Hawthorne just yet.  However, in the last couple of weeks, my wife and I have decided to seek a divorce.

So between working for an evangelical organization and simply trying to go to church in a new neighborhood and hang on for dear life to my faith; I see myself wondering if I tell folks what’s going on exactly how they’re going to react.  I’ve already had some old friends trying to “save my marriage” without realizing it takes two to tango and the other half wants to sit this song out.

All of this brings me to the pondering of how, in our current evangelical climate of “family uber alles”, we find a place at the table for those who for one reason or another cannot realize this dream of happy marriage and family.   Is this simply going to become another niche market, along with cowboys and bikers, that perhaps a separate church needs to be created in order to give us somewhere to fit in without having to cringe?  That would stink.

What if when you saw the name “Family Church” in a church’s name, it meant “we will be your family” instead of sending the tacit message “only intact families need apply”?  The Testaments say that “God places the fatherless in families” and rage against the idea of those outside a nuclear family are exploited.

BUT, they say, if we go down that road that means we’re condoning something less than God’s standards.  In a word, DUH!   The whole thrust of the gospel is that life in general goes to a default mode of something less than God’s standards!  We’re all broken people and we all need Jesus!

End of rant.

A new lesson in sharing faith from an OLD TV show

I had received a couple of episodes of Dr. Kildare through a tape trader I have been working with.   One of these episodes dealt with a nun who had been admitted to the hospital, but wasn’t about to waste time recuperating!

The chief of staff thought it might be a good idea to put this nun in with a patient who needed to have her leg amputated in order to survive a bout of cancer.  The patient, a young mother, insisted she’d rather die first.

Dr. Kildare, meanwhile, kept beefing at this nun (can’t recall her name…) that her reliance on faith was spreading false hopes.  After one such argument, he and the Sister returned to the room to find the prospective amputee fixing to jump out the window.

At this point, the nun started in on her and asked, “Think about this.  If your daughter were to lose a leg, would you stop loving her?”

The mother replied, “No, I’d love her all the more.”

Whereupon the nun exclaimed, “God’s like that!”

I couldn’t hold back the sniffles when I heard that.  What a word picture of how God loves us extremely imperfect sorts!

Half-life crisis

Fifty.  Or as my students back at the middle school where I taught would say, “Fitty”.

1/2 Century.

Five-Oh.  The Big Hawaiian.

OK, midlife whining over.  I still have another half-life to go!

Other things I’m reading

“Crazy Love” by Francis Chan.  Quite frankly, this book just didn’t do a whole lot for me.  Chan whipsawed between “you’re all miserable failures in Jesus’s eyes” and “Jesus loves you”.  The end effect is a mixed message of “Jesus will never leave or forsake one of His…BUT…how do you KNOW that you’re one of His?”  I have decades of memories of Southern Baptist revivals to do that for me.

At the other end of the spectrum is pastor Matthew Woodley’s “Holy Fools” (thanks for the correction, Hugh Hollowell!), or “Don’t Judge All The Desert Fathers By One Loony Flagpole-Sitter”.  While Chan thinks we need to suck it up and be more hardcore in our holiness; Woodley finds in the Desert Fathers of the early church another antidote based in loving God and loving each other likewise.  “Holy Fools” is one I’m going to have to read a couple more times until it sinks in.

The final book for this group is “Six Prayers God Always Answers” by Mark Herringshaw and Jennifer Schuchmann.  Prayer is something I struggle with on a regular basis.  I don’t know why; it may just be an innate cynicism borne of seeing too much of the dark side of institutionalized churchianity, but it takes a LOT to get me to even offer up a short prayer.

Probably the only exception to this rule is when things just reach a point where I blow up; then I drop back and find myself praying what a friend of mine, Jeremy Dale, calls “the real sinner’s prayer”, “Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner.”

At any rate, the authors break the situations that lead us to prayer into six categories:

1. Bargaining prayer “God if you get me out of THIS one, I’ll…”

2. Questioning prayer “God are you there?”

3. Prayers for justice “God, it’s so unfair!”

4. Desperate prayers “God, please don’t let her die!”

5. Audaciously selfish prayers “God please let me win the lottery…”

6. Prayers of beauty or thankfulness “Oh God, this is great!  Thank you!”

The book makes a great primer for those trying to get a handle on praying.

Book report # 1–The Almost True Story of Ryan Fisher

Recently I have entered into a pact with Mike Morrell of the Ooze, along with some other bloggers, to review books on a periodic basis.  This is the first entry under this arrangement…so hopefully I can improve on the lame book reports that dotted my elementary school years…

Rob Stennett’s first novel is “The Almost True Story of Ryan Fisher” (Zondervan, 2008, ISBN 978-0-310-27706-4).  It is probably the best laugh I’ve had in a couple of weeks; until I pondered the fact that as an employee of a Christian bookstore, it’s WAY too close to home!

The title character could best be described as the product of an illicit union between Elmer Gantry and Lady MacBeth.  Fisher is a real estate salesman who notices that the Christian subculture in Denver is a largely untapped market among his peers, so he places an ad in the Christian Yellow Pages.  All this, in spite of the fact he’s never darkened the door of a church before!  So he and his wife begin attending a church to establish some credibility with his new target demographic.  Ryan’s sales skyrocket, and he becomes established as a successful Christian businessman.

But after an offhand comment by the church’s pastor that “all Christians are called to be ministers”, Ryan is inspired to launch a church plant in Bartlesville, Oklahoma; deciding on the location from a marketing survey.  After some false starts, the church takes off beyond expectations; and Fisher faces scrutiny from the other pastors in town.  To cover his lack of credentials, he creates a fake home church, a fake pastor to whom he is “accountable”, and a fake website for both.

And the more success Ryan enjoys, the more everything spins out-of-control…leading to an outrageous climax.

But for anyone wondering about whether or not we’ve taken the operational model of “church as business entity” WAY too far; or anyone who just would enjoy a good satire; get the book.  NOW.