This gets kinda long, but hey--you asked!
Questions from deaconobvious...



1. Goddess is in us, and around us, and peeking up our collective skirt. Where do you find Goddess on a daily basis?

If by Goddess you mean Discordia, then everywhere. There is naught I can look at, but that I see Divine Chaos. If by Goddess you mean the androgynous force of interconnected compassion, love and goodness that also often goes by the name of God, then almost everywhere, except where the world hurts me or fails to live up to my standards, and even there I consider it more a flaw in my perceptions than a lack of Goddess in the perceived. If by Goddess you mean a specifically female force that stands in contrast to a similar male force, then almost nowhere--I only ever end up with lots of people pissed at me when I start speaking in terms of gender, so I try to avoid seeing the world that way.

2. Everyone finds themselves not wanting criticism sometimes. How do you mentally limber yourself to accept it when you feel it's necessary?

I either think of my mother (who is talented at harsh criticism, though I love her to death anyway) or of Jesus Christ (who patiently suffered criticism to the point of accepting crucifixion, but loved us to death anyway.) My problem is usually not with my ability to accept criticism, but rather with my ability to recognize my limits: I'll go out of my way to engage with people who criticize me, enjoying the refining power of critical debate, until I crack...and suddenly I'm all deeply wounded and bawling my eyes out and shouting "How dare you judge me!!!1!!" I'm slowly learning to back down from a debate and say "Your criticism is unwelcome and unnecessary" when I really need to, before things come to blows.

3. Do you feel that you are bringing more mysticism to Christianity, or more Christianity to mysticism? Why?

Tough call. In the past, I appealed to Christian symbols simply because they were the primary symbols of the mysticism I was taught; in the same way that a quantum physicist picks up some of the terms of Newtonian physics and transforms their meaning to suit modern discoveries, I think of myself as doing the same with Christianity. Preaching as a Universalist has been an attempt to reframe these old symbols in terms that are acceptable to folks who have been burned by poorly practiced Christianity, and I'm not ready to abandon that endeavor. But I have found myself wanting to preach more at specifically Christian churches lately, just so I can cut all the Remedial Christian Symbolism 101 out of my day-to-day teaching. And I'm starting to see hints that, once I digivolve into my Ultimate Form (Pope SuperMechaJack), I'll be pretty openly and blatantly Christian: I'm starting to find that far too many folks aren't merely rejecting the words of Christianity, but rather they're rejecting the worship of forgiveness and loving self-sacrifice in ANY language or symbolism. And at that point, I might as well just grab a soapbox and start telling them about the hellfire that awaits. So I'll go with "more mysticism to Christianity."

4. From personal experience I know the 'great sucking joy' of long distance love. What are some of the things you do to help cope between fixes?

Well, there's webcams and message clients and cell phones. By the time I'm all "plugged in" to chat with him, I feel like I'm in a rudimentary VR suit. I think there have been times when this has actually helped our communication, rather than hindering it: I haven't been able to use frequent sex as a substitute for authentic relationship building, and it's great dating a fellow geek who can understand that sometimes the most difficult things to say are best said in text.

But having just last weekend gone through what was the most-difficult-to-bear goodbye I've said to him yet, I found myself clinging to two general concepts:

* The joy of togetherness is always followed by the pain of separation; to paraphrase Lorien from B5, there's cause to envy those who live short lives, because only they can maintain the illusion that love is everlasting. Best to enjoy what I've got while I've got it than to bemoan its temporal nature. This helps the philosopher in me cope.

* It doesn't hurt so much that I'm packing my things and moving to Pittsburgh, but it feels Good and Right enough to keep forking out dollars for plane tickets. This helps the pragmatist in me cope, and hopefully Jason can forgive me for running an economic cost-benefit analysis on our relationship.

5. What was one of the keystone books that opened you up to your current spiritual life?

More often than not, I read a book because it's a good explication of something that's already opened in my spiritual life: I studied the Bible because I was Christian, rather than becoming Christian because I studied the Bible; I read the Principia Discordia long after embracing the philosophy of Discordianism, almost as an after-thought; I read The Book of the Subgenius because I was already sucked in by SubGenius radio. If I wanted to recommend books to people that would open them up to my current spiritual life, I'd recommend these, but the books themselves weren't what got me here.

Though honestly, now that I think about it, I could probably say Harry Potter had a pretty big influence on me, especially from book three on. I'd never had a good paradigm for thinking about or practicing magic until Rowling pointed out that things like laughing at something scary or thinking of my happiest memory can have downright magical effects on the world around me. Whereas I usually encounter keystone stories in other mediums before turning to their book forms, the emotional subtlties of Rowling's magic system don't really come through well in the movies, so even though I saw the first three movies before reading the books, the books were the actual keystones.

And y'know, now that I'm thinking about children's stories rather than scripture or philosophy, there is one book that simply cracked my reality wide open. I read it in third grade, which is why I often forget about it, but I've never found another story quite like it, and its impact on me has been undeniable. It's called "The War Between the Pitiful Teachers and the Splendid Kids" by Stanley Kiesel, and it opened me up to views on authority and authority figures that I've carried with me ever since. It's the story of a bunch of kids at a "special ed" school, each with their own unique behavior and learning "disorders," who initiate what becomes a worldwide war against teachers. The teachers' secret weapon is the "Status Quo Solidifier," which turns ordinary kids into perfect Young People. This book inspired the "Titu the Terrible" type stories that I wrote throughout middle and high school, which themselves have played a large part in the Jack mythology that courses through my head today. It's the book that taught me how to be a rebel. You'd love it, Deacon.



Questions from logodaedaly...



1. With MDMA upon us, I'm wondering—where do you see your ministry headed in the next year or so?

Oh Good Lord, let me get through MDMA first! ;-) But seriously, I spent the past year focusing on "worship" in a Unitarian Universalist context, which pretty much meant writing sermons, and I'm gonna be setting some of that aside. That path will be splitting in two, insomuch as I hope to explore more sacramental forms of worship with you and Gary while diverting my sermonizing into essays and short stories rather than live performance (think "direct to video" where video==the web.) Institutionally, I'll be taking on greater responsibility at Channing-Murray while setting aside some of my Green St commitments, but I'll actually be doing so in the interests of greater ecumenicism; C-M is turning into a nice base of operations for working with several local churches and religious organizations, and I want to start branching out. I'm also hoping to explore ways in which I can better ground my ministry in practices that I find personally spiritually fulfilling, so that I can avoid some of the burnout that left me feeling hopeless and undirected for large swaths of this past year.

2. Where did the original idea for MDMA come from?

This one is very easy. The Midwest Discordian Ministry Assembly is a direct descendant of the Great Lakes Pastoral Ministry Gathering, a now-defunct convention of mostly lay hippie/yuppie/liberal Catholic ministers that I attended for several years in my teens. It was the highlight of my year, the one place where I could swap tricks of the trade with other lay ministers, and so when at the last Gathering we were told, "Now is the time for you to go out in the world and create your own Gatherings," that's exactly what I did.

3. If you had a choice between being a major religious figure (Dalai Lama, Pope, whatever) with power to influence billions or an unknown mendicant crank roving the streets preaching, which would you choose? Why?

I wonder how much power the Dalai Lamas and Popes of the world really have to influence billions when their positions can only be achieved by agreeing with billions in the first place. The real power seems to lie with the mendicant cranks, the ones who sow the stories that take on a life of their own and ultimately demand recognition by the Popes and Dalai Lamas. And even then, things tend to end very poorly for the known mendicant cranks: the various saints, martyrs, Jesii, Buddhas and such who usually have to die horribly before being reborn as highly influential myths. What I'm kinda hoping is that Jonathan Prykop can live out his life slackfully and peaceably, knowing only times of prosperity and fading into obscurity after death, while Reverend Jack remains behind to endure the inevitable suffering born of influencing billions of people.

4. What's your favorite irreligion? :-)

On the one hand, any answer other than "my own" would run contrary to every reason why I embrace neophilic irreligion in the first place. On the other hand, The Church of the Subgenius.

5. Where did you get the confidence to just ordain yourself and start ministering?

The church I was raised in took a very broad view of ministry: Pretty much anything in the church that involved doing good for other people was considered a ministry. Religious education was a ministry, lectoring was a ministry, helping to distribute the Eucharist was a ministry, helping the poor was a ministry, cleaning up the church grounds was a ministry, dancing and singing at Mass was a ministry--even dressing up like a clown and entertaining kids was a ministry. So that laid down the basic empowerment to view my work as religious ministry.

My mother has been Director of Religious Education at my home parish since I was seven, so that opened me up to the "behind the scenes" aspects of religion, and took the edge off the awe & wonder many folks have for religious ministers. I got to see that even priests crap and drink and get angry and make mistakes; I didn't have to become disillusioned about such things because I was never illusioned in the first place.

The ordination itself was a matter of legal technicality when an old friend asked me to perform her wedding ceremony; I probably wouldn't have gotten ordained at that time if it weren't for legal necessity, because I was doing just fine on my own authority and I didn't want to posture as if my authority were greater than anyone else's. The fact that this ordination coincided with the time in my life when I was deciding to pursue religious ministry as a vocation has simply been a great convenience for discussing the arc of my ministerial development. Whereas the fact that this ordination occurred on 5-5-2003 is the kind of parsimony that myths are made of: "It is proper for us to do this to fulfill all righteousness" and all that jazz.

But if you're asking where I got the cojones to stare bishops and popes in the eye and speak as if my words carry all the weight of divinely inspired scripture...I couldn't really tell ya. Pride? Hubris? Maybe I'm God's Chosen? I keep waiting for that moment where the world humbles my unrepentant messiah complex, but every mistake I make and every weakness I suffer only seems to make me more divine. Go figure.



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