One-eyed Gods v. One-armed Gods & True Grit

My mind is blown, this is so awesome. We just can’t let go of our old friends, can we?

Feeling Run Down Finally Ran Me Down

I’ve been working all week on feeling like crap and it’s finally paid off! Too bad I can’t stay home and sleep it off. I’ll get to that tomorrow, I guess.

Anyway, here’s what I’ve been thinking about. Remember that mom who let her little boy dress like Daphne for Halloween? Well, her pastor took issue. Big time.

And I’ve been thinking a lot about that pastor. This is, I think, the hardest thing to get across about the ministerial life–how you hold authority, but with such fragility. He is, ostensibly, the moral authority at that church. And yet, the pastor and the elders met to pass judgment on the blogger. So, he’s an authority, but he’s not the authority. The elders have some measure of authority over him and the women the blogger has pissed off obviously have some measure of sway over them.

And the blogger, though it sounds like she’s honestly been dicked over, has a level of power because she has all those readers and commenters behind her.

I don’t know the truth of what happened. And I don’t read the blogger regularly. So, let me be clear about that.

But I am interested in whether an authoritarian who doesn’t see the bind he’s in can ever avoid getting sucked into this kind of nonsense. He’s asserted his authority and now he can’t make her do what he wants. The church has told him to go straighten her out and he’s failed.

Now who looks weak?

Ministers don’t have to get sucked into this kind of drama. There’s a strategy of adopting a more humble strength or of adopting a tendency to always take the side of the person people are aligned against.

But I have noticed, over the years, that the ministers who want to be in charge get very easily tempted into situations destined to prove how much of their authority is by mutual delusion.