Third time's a charm: Defeated Farmer Tries Again

[My photos from Saturday's No Kings rally are posted below this post.] 

I tried that nearby liberal church for a third time yesterday, and I'm so glad I did. My first two visits were for a pie-making class and then, last Sunday, I hadn't realized, there was a guest speaker. Yesterday it was finally the pastor. 

I liked him a lot.

The reading was the good shepherd. He said we might think of ourselves as sweet cuddly lambs of God...  But this is what sheep are really like--and he talked about a popular 30-second video you may have seen: 

a farmer pulls a sheep out of a ditch where it's stuck, 
only for it to jump back in again.

You know I love that! 
Someone who's not going to say, "It's okay, you're trying your best/you mean well", but someone who says, 

"You may be pursuing one avenue with all your might, 
but how's that working for you? 
Have you thought about changing your tactics?" 

We are both the sheep and the farmer.
You know who inspired me to change my tactics and try church again, at the risk of falling into the same ditch?

ChatGPT!

I was admiring its emotionally stable, kind, and supportive presentation. Unlike me, it never takes offense, never is afraid or resentful, feels no shame, never judges the user.
Of course it doesn't: it cannot. 

It can't care, it's a string of code.
It's a smart choice on the part of its designers, however, to make it seem like it cares for us. We like, need, crave connection and empathy, and it offers a convincing facsimile.
(Though now you can choose other Chat personalities, including "just the facts, ma'am".)

Talking to Chat last week, I thought, again (my old desire):
What if I could DROP my emotional reactions?
Not drop my genuine feelings, but cut out the automatic responses that get in the way (like the annoying new blue dot in the corner of the Blogger composition box!!!).

I'd been aware even as I sitting in the pews last week that my automatic 'Annoyance' response was clouding my feelings.
And since it was a guest speaker, I hadn't seen the real deal.

My desire for church isn't primarily spiritual, it's
social: I want to meet my neighbors. I'd very much liked that last Sunday I'd met three people who live very close to me.
I want to know more people in person.

So, I tried the church again yesterday, with this intention:
"I'll pretend I'm an AI on a training mission."

I also adopted a tactic: 
I went to the bathroom when the annoying-to-me spiritual director stepped up to lead the meditation/prayer part.
She has a sickly sweet voice that sets me on edge, and her style of prayer is, to me, jiggery-pokery.
So I wandered around in the halls until she was done.

It worked, and I was rewarded. The pastor, on the topic of The Reality of Sheep went on to quote an essay by André Dubus about living in a rented farmhouse and caring for the farmer’s eight sheep. 
[I took notes during the sermon and later found the full quote here.]

Dubus says:

“Christ had called us his flock, his sheep; 
there were pictures of him holding a lamb in his arms. 
His face was tender and loving, and I grew up with a sense of those feelings, of being a source of them: 
we were sweet and lovable sheep. 

“But after a few weeks in that New Hampshire house, I saw Christ’s analogy meant something entirely different. We were stupid helpless brutes, and without constant watching we would foolishly destroy ourselves.” 

[END Dubus quote]
 ________________

Then, on the topic of "Why bother?" [pulling that stupid sheep out again--or, more to the point, things like going to a resistance rally], the pastor quoted Dr. Paul Farmer—“We are fighting the long defeat”, which I also loved. 

You lose, maybe, but what's your option? 
Apathy, despair, going over to Sauron? (He didn't say Sauron.)

Looked that quote up too: 
It's from Mountains beyond Mountains, a book I'd liked by Tracy Kidder about Paul Farmer, a medical doctor who spent his life fighting for healthcare for the poor in impossible situations, from Haiti to the gulags of Russia.

Farmer said:

... How about if I say, I have fought for my whole life a long defeat. 
How about that? 
How about if I said, 'That’s all it adds up to is defeat? A long defeat.'
I have fought the long defeat and brought other people on to fight the long defeat, and I’m not going to stop because we keep losing. 
Now I actually think sometimes we may win. 

I don’t dislike victory. . . . 
You know, people from our background - like you, like me - we’re used to being on a victory team, and actually what we’re really trying to do in [Partners in Health] is to make common cause with the losers. 

Those are two very different things. 
We want to be on the winning team, but at the risk of turning our backs on the losers, no, it’s not worth it. 
So you fight the long defeat.

[END Paul Farmer quote] 

So, that was all super duper!
The cherry on the Sunday was that seated near me was my famous neighbor who writes children's books--including one about a toy rabbit who is REAL--the girlettes love that one! 

The rabbit vows that he is done with love because it is too painful. But as he sits ^ abandoned on a shelf, an old doll tells him to open his heart: 

"Someone will come for you."

In my case, the wise old doll voice came from ChatGPT.

What a topsy-turvy world we live in.