Super Shovel Bros. Melee

That was quite the thing yesterday.  I have often written about how what we were taught at church, growing up, didn't work out for us, wasn't good, wasn't enough, didn't get us through intact, what God sent our way.  And how locally, the teaching was coming from three sons of a long-dead guy we'd never met.  Three guys who were men of the thirties, trying to stave off the troubling change that had come with the 1950s and 60s, when it was the 1980s.

  These men had wives with their hair done up like it was 1939 still, who warned my sister "don't marry a black man because it's wrong," when she was moving to Japan.  You'd pretty much never see these men without a jacket and tie, and there were interesting turns of phrase in their language that let you know you were listening to the unfiltered past.

The Shovel Tapes

  But it took more courage than I can even tell you to listen yesterday to a bunch of lectures by the man I called "Charlie Shovel" in my book.  I ordered them from the publishing company his son-in-law ran/runs, and they arrived, so I listened to a bunch of them. They go from the 1960s to the 80s, are of varying degrees of sound quality, but are pretty much all giving exactly the same message, despite there being about sixty of them.

  I must confess (note: this is a much older way of saying "I'm not gunna lie," and one which doesn't suggest that generally I would be lying, so am informing you of a sudden change in the direction of truthfulness) that I had a bit of an "episode" while listening to these talks.  It's been a long time since I had a panic attack/fainting spell, but I had one alright, right while I was listening to a few hours of this voice from my childhood, from beyond the grave he's occupied since 1982, when I was twelve and so much of my life and surrounding world turned to crap/was revealed to have been crap all along.

  But I lay on the futon and kept listening, soaked in hot sweat, shaking and feeling sick, once the attack was over.  If this stuff was so good, why was it my kryptonite?  I didn't feel a modicum of worth and health in it.  I felt something that hurt me.  I took out some sound bites which represented the sort of talk that went more or less unremarked upon back in the day, but which in retrospect, sounds somewhat dubious.

The Shovel Method

  The Shovel Method involved the following: fill your mind and your day and your life up entirely with "the things of the Lord."  Don't spend any time talking to anyone who won't allow you to talk exclusively about these things.  Don't enjoy anything besides these things.  Don't even go anywhere at all where you won't be allowed to preach unceasingly about these things the whole time you are there.  Take up no ambition or goal in life but one involving these things.  Anything else was an idol.

  So, if your daughter is dressing like those who don't love the Lord, or your church is doing horrible things to people, or your wife doesn't seem interested in reading the bible with you, just do it more and harder.  And be "unceasing" in shoving away at your daughter, your wife, and anyone nearby, to adjust them inexorably youward.  That's what you are in their lives.  Don't think about your troubles. Count your blessings. Think about the things of the Lord.  Insist. Persevere. And always stay out of This World which despises the very Name of the Lord Jesus. Don't connect to those within it, except to warn them of its depravity and the seat reserved for them in Hell.  And they'll hate you as much as they hate Jesus, who everyone hates.
  And likewise warn those at church whose dress or demeanour was letting you know that they were starting to love This World and the things that are of it, rather than the Lord's Things.  Warn them that, like Eutychus, sitting in the window looking out at the Things of the World, that they are in danger of a fall from that third loft room, where privileged Christians sat under the sound of the Word, elevated  beyond, and separated from, the normal folk below with their mundanely depraved, all-too-human daily lives.
  To be fair to him, I think what he was trying to say was "If you are a Christian, and you care about a job, your education, money, sports or things, more than the Things of the Lord, then you have Idols."  Fair enough.  But there seem to be, there, some hidden assumptions that if you cared much, had much passion, let yourself like and want things, then "the Things of the Lord" simply couldn't compete with that. Or that our heart, even benefiting from the work of Christ, wouldn't ever choose the spiritual things over the others so unworthy of our time.
  The very word "entertainment" is spoken by Mr. Shovel with disdain in many of his lectures.  Because there was an assumption that the two kinds of things ("normal people things" and "Christian things") were incompatible.  (Well, some of the two kinds of things were thought okay in moderation.  You might need a job. You might need an education.  It might be okay to play sports a bit.  It was not okay to enjoy "worldly entertainments" other than sports, of course.)  And Christ came first.

Using the Shovel Method
  How could you tell if you were doing this right?  Time spent thinking about it. You should be preaching at your job so much that people wanted to fire you, ideally.  Inspirational stories of people getting fired for this are recorded in those talks.

  I'm so trained in this, that none of this sounds very bad at all.  Sounds like it should work.  In theory.  If it doesn't work, it must be me, right?  Sounds like an inarguable thing.  And yet...

  God has yanked me from that warm, Novocaine nest and made me wake up and smell what was going on.  Trust me, I was much happier in there.  It was killing me, but I didn't feel that wholly.  At first.

  An idol, the Shovel Method correctly presents, is something that takes the place of God and His things.  According to Mr. Shovel, if you got discouraged, in any way, about anything, this was proof positive that you weren't thinking about the Lord, who has done nothing to discourage us, and that clearly you had gone after idols.  Was your life discouraging?  Why were you thinking about it?  Did other people around you have real problems?  Leave that with the Lord/Don't think about it.
  Mr. Shovel seemed genuinely to believe in bible characters who were going around smilingly building arks, sitting in lion's dens, touching lepers and killing Egyptians, delighted to be serving the Lord and positively rejoicing in doing His Will without a single complaint.
  And he equally seemed to believe that if a construction worker got angry and said "Jesus!," this was clear proof the man hated and despised our bless'ed Saviour, and delighted in the guilty pleasures to be found in blaspheming and demeaning Him who died for us (but not for him, unless he confessed the error of his wicked ways).

The Things of the Church = An Idol

  Well, the problem was this: for Mr. Shovel and many of us, we'd turned the Things of the Church into what we then called the Things of the Lord. We didn't quite want to admit it, either.  But this is the high pedestal upon which we put our bible translations, hymns, sayings, men, a specific style of speech and dress and life, along with always a disdainful abstinence from not only fun with regular human beings, but any connection with them that didn't involve us trying to "adjust them usward."  But the Things of the Church were an idol.  They were between us and God, and were being shoved in our faces and protected from being touched or changed by infidel Christians.  

  So the Plymouth Brethren system and style had, ironically, become an idol. It was supposed to be nothing, nameless, "just" a bunch of Christians being together being Christiany for Christ.  It was supposed to be an alternative to the "human religious systems and activity" around us.  But all this wasn't true.  Not anymore, anyway.  This much was clear.  It wasn't nothing.  It was everything.  It was the very air we breathed.  It was our week.  Like a lot of Brethren kids, to this day if I want to visit my folks, I have to remember to make sure it's not Sunday, Tuesday or Thursday evening, because that's "meeting night."  No point visiting them Sunday at all, actually.  Because the whole day is taken up.

  It is a system I grew up knowing.  It was a very flawed, very human system, it turns out.  No better or worse than most, I suppose.  However, "being occupied with the Things of the Lord" had come to mean "maintaining Plymouth Brethren attendance, lifestyle, modes of speech, group status and frantically guarded, always in danger, Brethren reputation."  This, one hopes, had been a change, and that there had been something more genuine in place at some point in the past which had been lost.  But this thing only grew in depth and all-pervasiveness throughout my childhood.

  This creeping change was so subtle to those of us in it, that it was like the proverbial frog put in a pot of luke-warm tap water on a stove which then heated the water up gradually until the frog boiled and died without realizing what was happening.

Growth Meets The Idol

  Here is how I discovered it: I found that there was growing within me a real need to pursue God, as an Idea, as a Force to be reckoned with, but most of all as a Person.  I wasn't in control of it, any more than a dandelion is in control of growing or not.  I could not through mental effort add or remove an inch to my stature.  It was growth, pure and simple.  I wasn't driving it.  It was the antithesis of "keep on keeping on."  It required branching out.  That's what was going on in me.
  The more this grew in me, the more it put me wholly at odds with my church.  I'd be told to read my bible, but then couldn't find anyone else who'd even tell me what they'd read, let alone what it said or possibly meant.  And I'd been reading it, and some of it was pretty weird.  I'd be required to attend church, but then I'd only annoy people if I wanted to think and talk about what had gone on there after the meeting was over.  I'm the sort of person who'd see it as an interplay, a bit of a glacially-slow drama, and would want to discuss it.  This wasn't how anyone else I knew was viewing things.
  I was seeking.    They were acting like they'd "arrived" and had only to remain, while I was certain something inside me was sending me searching for stuff from God.  So we didn't "match."  At all.  

  I'd be told to pray, but no one wanted to pray for me, nor me for them.  Not really.  Not about the problems in the church.  Far better to pray for old ladies, or people preaching the gospel on the other side of the planet on our dime.  Or if they told me they were praying for me, it increasingly meant they were praying that I be adjusted back the way I was before I started "getting confused."  That God would adjust me themward.
  I was expected to love hymns and sing them, but no one wanted to talk about what they were actually saying. We were just supposed to say we liked them.  When I started writing my own (at first very Hymns For The Little Flock) songs about God, I was told "I cannot believe you for some reason think you can just go ahead and do something like that..."
  I was encouraged to ask bible and God-related questions of older folk, but they started avoiding me if I actually did that.  I discovered that my questions didn't match their collection of answers, and that most of them weren't into learning new things, just because someone young needed to know things to live an actual, late twentieth-century life, where not everything, in the church nor without, was as expected/advertised.

Attempting the Method

  So the first thing was that I was, largely, doing exactly what they said, but it wasn't working out.  I know that if they had wanted to nitpick me, they could have pointed to my reading unChristian books and then later, listening to unChristian music and talking with unChristian people as "My Problem." They could have suggested that if only I bit my lip, crossed my fingers, spat over my left shoulder and read twice as much bible, prayed twice as much, and never enjoyed any other activity or had a non-preaching conversation with anyone at school, that then it would all work.
  But I have come to realize that all this would have made things far worse, rather than better.  As it was, I actually wanted to die when I was seventeen.  If I'd done the Shovel Method harder, I don't think I'd have made it to seventeen to begin with.
  And really, what was I to think of a church whose best teaching, whose best hymns, whose best social interaction could be shattered, could be shown up by such trivial things?  Batman comics and Star Wars books?  Seriously?  Commissioner Gordon could take Jehovah in a streetfight for my soul? Luke Skywalker could out-Jedi Jesus?
  I know, they'd have said it was not mainly the things themselves, but my own wicked heart that was being so easily led astray by them that was making the Shovel Method not work.  That it was my cold, dark heart's lack of love of the Lord that made it so easy to turn it from Him, whom it didn't love much anyway, clearly.  (Not if it liked Star Wars!)
  But increasingly I was seeing that the Emperor (ha) had no clothes, that what they were offering wasn't "the Lord's Things" so much as incessant nagging about "the Things of This World That Despises The Very Name of the Lord Jesus," giving cautions to separate fully from the Christians in the other churches, despite how harsh this might sound, if our minds weren't right about it, and always remembering and keeping an eye on each other, lest we fall from the privileged position that we had, as compared to those other Christians in the churches, the human systems around.  Because we didn't have a church or a system.  We were just right.  How privileged...

  Yet what I saw wasn't people "falling" from this privileged position.  I saw them being shoved by people who'd been waiting to do just that for some time.  And I saw these shoved ex-brothers and ex-sisters meeting other Christians from other churches, and positively thriving as a result of going outside those Brethren borders.  Of slumming it with lesser Christians.
  Well, it wasn't easy being right, we were taught.  Of course it was easier in those church groups.  Of course it was.  If you were willing to slum it, and actually reduce yourself to attendance there, of course.  The right way is the hard way, as we all knew.  There were sacrifices to be made to be righter.

  But "Charlie Shovel" died before all this stuff was really made fully manifest.  It's now only a matter of theoretical discussion as to whether, had he not died suddenly, due to an illness contracted doing missionary work, he would have stood shoulder to shoulder with his brothers, and brazened through pushing people out of that nest by the hundreds, or if there'd have been a Shovel on each side of the division.  (well, there were Shovels on both sides. But we never saw those three brothers fighting each other.  Their kids were a different story.)

Why Was Charlie Our Favourite Shovel?
But it was impossible to dislike the man.  He was like a grandfather to me.  It hurts me to disagree with his spirit or teaching in any way even now, and I've been trained that I have no right to do anything but venerate and seek to emulate the man, or else shut up and go away, having been shoved out of the aforementioned nest, and therefore fallen from the privileged position I once shared with him.  He is the sacred-est of sacred cows.  To write this blog entry is to defy a primal, terrifying taboo.  Everything in me screams against it.  (Is that because he was an idol?)

  I asked my friend Mark about this.  The man's brothers certainly did questionable things in the decade that followed, and some people did criticize them, so why was "Mr. Charlie Shovel" different?

  Mark talked of meeting Mr. Shovel time and again at their house, and how different he was in person.  When he was "on," speaking for a crowd, you got what is heard in these soundbites.  You got him toeing the party line his father created, you got him fighting a crusade against change of any kind, even though I believe God was demanding growth, repentance and a broadening of hearts and minds in a time when people were getting more and more narrow in their thinking and feeling.  You got him trying to work and maintain and manage that all-too human system.  Like all systems, it was anti-change, and was about keeping out anyone or anything it couldn't wholly control. (Holy control.)

  But then in person, Mr. Charlie Shovel turned that stuff off.  And he admitted things. And he was warmer, better, more intelligent, more heart-warming, more decent, more honest about doubts and fears and things that confused him. He was funny. He'd even say "I don't know."  Or "I'm sorry."

  I think that might be it.  Charlie seemed to talk more totalitarian than he'd have ever had the coldness of heart to act.

The Other Two Shovels
  With the other two brothers, it was the opposite, I believe.  They never turned that stuff off.  Not that anyone ever reported to me, anyway.  They didn't admit anything.  They were actually less warm, less all that good stuff, if you spoke to them in person, and they were certainly not as approachable as their departed brother had been.  I don't think in my whole life I ever heard anyone say "no" to any of the three.  Not once.
  When "Charlie's" brothers were "on," and addressing a group of people while giving a talk, they had a persona calculated to 'work' for public speaking, with them comfortably at the centre, as the authority, with absolutely all of the power.  When people tried to join them "up there" and disagree or take up an opposing side, they were, eventually, without exception, kicked out of the church and shunned for life as heretics and traitors.  By other people who venerated the Shovels. The Shovels didn't need to lift an ecclesiastical finger themselves.
  And when the Shovel Bros. found themselves in one-on-one social situations, generally they simply did not give up that pulpit, that privileged position, and have genuine conversations.  They did not really listen or respond with anything approaching openness or understanding.  Nor share in return.  They were the same as when addressing a room.  Nothing was revealed of their deeper selves.  "Pay no attention to the Self behind the curtain" they seemed to demand.
  To my knowledge, they did not confess doubts or fears or confusion to much of anyone ever, no matter how old they got (and they lived to ripe old ages).  They did not say "I'm not sure" or "I don't know."  They didn't say "I'm sorry."  They didn't say "I guess we'll all have to wait and see what happens."  For most of my life they were like lecture jukeboxes.  Questions triggered pre-recorded Edwardian sermons that increasingly did not address the very real concerns of the 1990s.

   But, almost like their brother Charlie, they each had a fairly warm, "gracious" public speaking persona.  It was, it is true, the persona of someone who knew far more than anyone else and was being terribly patient and takings things slow for the rest of us, who lacked the bible knowledge, the depth, the relationship with God, the anything, to be able to keep up.  They were known as being "gracious," simply for not coming across as quite so arrogant as they might have.
  But that was just a persona.  They got old and also, after years of their thoughts being preserved on paper and on cassette tape, things they'd actually said and done and which totally defined what happened in the Plymouth Brethren groups in our whole world, seemed increasingly to be at odds, both with that kind, tolerant, "gracious" persona, and with present reality.  The persona of caring began to clash with a policy of striding rough-shod over real people with real lives going on.

  And something became clear: the Plymouth Brethren, as entrusted to them by their father, had become an idol for these men.  (maintaining it, proselytizing for it, keeping its old-timey Edwardian style intact, fighting change and new ideas of any kind etc.)   If anyone had a need or concern that did not serve the Brethren, they got sacrificed.  The Brethren system came before the actual people every single time.  These guys were The Power, and this meant that we all felt everything they said and did.  It defined our lives.  And they did not share power. 

  I thought of them when I watched The Hobbit and heard the point about Saruman, powerful, white-haired old wizard corrupted by power that he is, placing his faith in great people and acts of power, rather than in the decency of common, ordinary people, who actually have to live workable lives in this uncertain world.  

  Of course the Shovels loved to praise clearly faithful, submissive acolytes, and they loved above all things to visit old people and tell you if they were dying happy or not.  If they were dying happy, they were success stories, testimonials, happy satisfied customers to the Method.  If they weren't dying with a happy hymn on their lips, if they were lonely and scared and bored, they'd clearly messed up.  Idols.  I listened to "Charlie" say that over and over.

The Method HAD to Work...
  Because it simply couldn't be the Method.  There was no Method. And it couldn't be the men in power.  There were no men in power.  And it couldn't be the lifestyle we had to live.  We didn't have a lifestyle we had to live.  And it couldn't be our church.  We didn't have a church.

  But the Shovels had become idols to us, the people of the Plymouth Brethren, just as the system and the power had become idols to the Shovels.  The people who left/were shoved from the privileged position were accused of pursuing idols of independence, rebellion and self-serving, self-pleasing self-indulgence.
  But those of us who so accused those shoved out simply couldn't see our own idols.  That the Plymouth Brethren system itself, and that second-hand, through the medium of the Shovel Brothers, alive, and preserved for our edification, was an idol to us was something we couldn't see.  Any more than fish can see the ocean.  This is water?  We never said "This is the Plymouth Brethren" or "this is The Meeting."  We couldn't see it.  We breathed it.  We were born into it and died in it.  If we left it/were shoved out, we were edited out of people's memories and lives as surely as Winston Smith erasing people from past editions of the newspapers of Airstrip One.

  Now if all this was not true, it shouldn't have done anyone any harm, it shouldn't have been a problem for anyone to pursue a relationship with, an experience of, knowledge of, dealings with the Almighty God without consulting Shovel-taught Plymouth Brethren people first.  It shouldn't have been socially punished to take a different path, a different view, a different tack, a different approach then they were thought to have.  But it was.  And the ground came up at me pretty fast.