... and other questions I think about in church.

It would make sense if you could blink your ears. Your eyes blink which means that very briefly every few seconds you need to stop seeing and refresh your vision. If there's something in front of you that you don't want to look at you can turn your visual attention to one side or the other and see something else or close your eyes and see nothing at all. You choose to taste or not taste partly by keeping your mouth open or shut. You can avoid smelling something bad by holding your breath at least for a short time. So all of the senses that come through holes in your head can be directed at specific things or temporarily blocked. But not your ears. Your ears are always open and with one on each side you're stuck hearing pretty much whatever is making sound all around you. Why is that?

I'm sorry to say that I don't know the answer. I've been thinking about it from time to time since I was a little kid along with many other important questions. A lot of that thinking happened during church services and it still does. One thing I realized early on was that if I could blink my ears I probably would do it in church and occasionally I might close them altogether for a while and let my attention drift completely in other directions. If that were to happen I might get in trouble in the same way that I did if I closed my eyes for too long, so although I don't know why I can't blink my ears I realized that the fact that I can't has some benefit for me. It doesn't answer the deep roots of the question but it's better than nothing.

I learned all kinds of things by thinking in church as a kid. The church my family attended had a pastor who people called by the initials of his name – P. J. Froese. That was interesting to me and I also noticed that he referred to other people who only used their initials – A.W. Tozer and D.L. Moody stuck in my mind at the time. I had no idea who they were (and still don't for the most part) but it was interesting to think about men who apparently had names but didn't use them. None of my friends did that. I asked my parents about it and it turned out that both of my grandfathers were known by their initials – J.S. Thiessen and P.G. Dueck. It took a while to absorb the fact that their names weren't actually 'Grandpa' but once that sunk in it was interesting to think that there was a whole collection of sombre older men who didn't use their names. I pushed my parents harder about that and they didn't know for sure but they suggested maybe it was popular at one time. That was a whole new eye opener – all these men who stopped using their names and just used letters and they did it because it was cool in their friend group. It had never occurred to me that my Grandpas could be subject to peer pressure or would do anything to be cool. Suddenly they seemed more like people.

I learned to think about God too. Our church had a lay pastor (now my father-in-law incidentally) who had been a pilot in the north and worked as a mechanic and farmer. He once preached what seemed to me like an entire sermon on how the Trinity was like the hydraulic system on a tractor and I still think about the Holy Spirit using that analogy to this day. He also sometimes told stories from the pulpit about flying airplanes in the north which seemed adventurous and exciting to me. When I asked around it turned out that other people I knew, including my own parents, had lived exciting past lives that combined service in the name of faith with adrenaline, focus, adventure, and risk. It turned out that my boring parents and their boring friends had interesting lives and I would not have prodded for those stories if I had not heard some of them as sermon illustrations. I confess I have not one foggy clue what passage was being interpreted and applied with a story about landing an airplane with skis on slush during the spring thaw and I don't think it matters. However, I came to admire and respect my pastor as a result of the story and not as a result of the scriptural application.

Not all of our pastors had exciting adventure stories to tell. There was one who used an overhead projector beside the pulpit to write notes for the class/congregation which were projected on the wall behind him. I liked him personally and maybe the adults understood what he was going on about but I did not. However, I did come to realize that if I kept my head very still and relaxed my eyes in just the right way that I could make the microphone that the song leader used disappear and reappear. More questions over Sunday dinner taught me that I had discovered my visual blind spot and that my brain usually glossed over the things it couldn't see so that I wouldn't notice the blank space. There's a life lesson. With some practice I got to the point where I could make the pastor's head disappear completely into that blind spot and I could make the ceiling fans turn either forwards or backwards depending on how I looked at them. Not only were the things I saw not necessarily so but I could tweak the ways in which I saw illusion. I still think about that too. During one particularly extended exegesis of somewhere in the middle of Romans I discovered that not only could I make his head disappear, but if I relaxed just right and held my breath for a really long time rainbows and fireworks would pop out of his body and the direction his voice was coming from seemed to zoom from side to side and front to back and everything I had been worried about in school that week seemed to float away on a happy cloud. Some time after that a friend of mine played the Beatles song “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” for me and said that it was about taking drugs. It didn't seem that interesting to me - it sounded like sitting in church playing brain tricks with a vocal drone in the background.

I learned about music in church too. One of our neighbours who sometimes bought grain from my Dad and carried a round tin of Copenhagen in his back pocket played instrumental music in church with his brothers from time to time. My sisters and I looked forward to those Sundays because although the music wasn't what we listened to on our own it was clear that they enjoyed playing together and were good at it from years of practice. That was inspiring and I still crave and enjoy those moments of musical connection to another player or singer that I first saw as a kid in church. One of those brothers was my first guitar teacher and I clearly remember the day he told me that he played every day not in order to fill his practice chart but because he wanted to. My sisters and I learned to manage the expectations of playing instruments in front of other people in our church just as my own kids have done more recently. I couldn't tell you what the scripture reading or sermon was on most Sundays that I help with music in our church because the overwhelming thing for me is the music and the experience of playing and singing with others.

I'm a bit of a jittery person and I have a hard time paying attention to the same thing for a long time. To the extent that I pay attention at all I manage it by jumping through a whole bunch of thoughts at once holding on to each one until it's about to get away on me then moving to another one and looping back to the first. Eventually (most) things get thought about although the connections can get kind of crazy after a while. I'm certainly not saying that preaching isn't important or prayer or the reading of scripture. Those things are very important and at the core of what we do in worship. But if we expect those things by themselves to hold our full attention for the whole time every Sunday morning we may have a disappointing experience in church. If we feel like we have failed at church or that church has failed us if the things that the leaders say are not interesting, relevant, applicable, and inspiring every time it's going to be tough to keep at it. The range of ways that we can learn and grow in faith, love, and relationship with each other during a church service is deep and wide. I think it's OK if sometimes that includes making the pastor's head disappear and wondering why you can't blink your ears.