Pastors have crushes. I don’t mean romantic crushes, although that certainly happens too. That’s a problem. That’s a whole other topic.

That’s not what I’m talking about.

The crushes I’m talking about are strictly platonic. It’s when a pastor’s interest in a parishioner and a parishioner’s interest in a pastor are as personal as churchy. It’s when they become friends.

The former pastor of my parents’ church was my dad’s fishing buddy before he was his pastor. That’s what I’m talking about.

I’ve had pastor crushes too. At a birthday party for a former congregant, we played a game of trivia about his life. I won.

My seminary training equipped me with a healthy respect for boundaries, and so my first response to winning was shame. I feared that my knowledge of my congregant’s life was a result of too much time spent with him socially, doing things we both enjoyed, making beer and playing softball. I was sure I had violated professional boundaries in becoming his (gasp!) friend.

That seems ridiculous to me now.

It is part of the richness of life in a church community that some members feel especial affinity for one another, and that includes the pastor. There are people in our churches who, were we not their pastors, we would seek out socially. We get on well together. We like them. There is no fault in that.

There are faults lying in wait, for sure. Church folk need friends just like anybody, but they also need pastors. A friendly relationship can make it hard to be pastoral in times of crisis or in times that call for relational distance, like when a pastor’s relationship with a congregation ends.

Also, being friends with congregants can make it very difficult for pastors to distinguish between their professional competence and their personal worth; effective pastoring is more than making friends, and you can be a good person and valuable friend while also being a lousy pastor.

Of course, pastors need friends too, and we are routinely urged in seminary and at professional development conferences to find them outside the congregation. This can indeed be a lifesaver. My best friends during my first call were the people in my wife’s medical residency program, people who had no relationship with my church. When one of them visited unexpectedly one Sunday, I felt an acute collapse of contexts, like some important barrier in my life had been breached. He never came back, and I didn’t want him to.

But the people pastors spend most of their time with are in their churches, and so it is unavoidable that some of their friends will be there too. If they are married and have families, then their spouses and kids have friends at church too. Insisting, for the sake of healthy boundaries, that pastors and their families don’t make friends in the churches they serve is not only silly, it’s unhealthy.

Pastors don’t have to be friends with their parishioners, but they certainly can be.

Some of us need to be doing the thing to feel at ease about the thing; thinking about the thing makes us fidgety and irritable.

Case in point: Christmas Eve worship. I’m supposed to do a children’s time, which I haven’t done in at least two years, and which will be for kids I mostly don’t know. It’s prepared. I’m ready. I spent plenty of time designing it and sharing it with colleagues for their input. I even have help.

The hours and minutes beforehand, though, I’m a nervous wreck. My stomach hurts and all I can do is imagine ways it goes wrong. I can’t focus on the first several moments of the service for all these jitters.

Then the time comes and all the stress just melts away. Standing before all the people and addressing the fidgety kids actually reduces the tension and puts me at ease. Doing the thing is fun, and, of course, it’s not the disaster I’d scripted it to be.

Nervous energy isn’t super useful, but some of us need a thing to be doing so that we don’t think ourselves into doom.

The worship services I went to during my teenage years employed a rock band with a full drum kit, a massive gospel choir, and a preacher who literally would sprint from one side of the stage to the other waving a handheld microphone. He shouted. Worshipers shouted–and waved their arms and leapt up out of their seats at intervals. When prompted, dozens streamed down the aisles toward the front to be saved.

Compared to the staid, pipe organ-fueled affair I now bring teenagers to, the church of my youth would seem like heaven. Filled with energy and urgency, interactive, and deeply personal, that church should have hooked my adolescent soul, but it didn’t. All of its spontaneity felt contrived and predictable, and all the emotion felt offensively manipulative.

I wonder how my students experience the hymns and unison prayers of the church of their youth. When I ask them, some say it’s “fine,” others complain that it’s boring. I’m not bothered by the boring complaint, though, because the church is playing a longer spiritual game with them as disciples, one in which excitement is not the most important play and where the stamina to sit through a 15 minute sermon and to recite the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostle’s Creed is a critical component of a grownup faith.

Studying some of their faces during yesterday’s service, I found myself wondering not only how they are experiencing worship today, as teenagers, but also how this present experience of worship will affect them in their 20’s and in their 30’s. Because it should affect them after today. I want for them to receive something durable here in these readings and litanies, something deeper than the ephemeral emotional charge that did so little for me when I was their age.

I know it’s not an either/or, though.

Phase 1

He says unbelievable things, literally un-believable things, like that he’s the most popular kid at his school, like the ball you just caught was actually dropped, like “I have money stashed in a place where no one will ever find it.” These are lies. You pump virtuous rigor into exposing them.

Phase 2

He says unbelievable things, literally un-believable things, like that he’s moving to where you live, like the mechanic who easily diagnosed your car’s busted clutch doesn’t know what he’s talking about, like “You’re an uncle.” These are lies. You no longer think of them as lies, but rather as distortions of reality that can’t be helped. You repeat them to anyone who will listen in a posture of smug superiority.

Phase 3

He says unbelievable things, literally un-believable things, like that he and his friend, neither of whom have any money and both of whom live their lives in wheelchairs, are going to buy property and build a house on it, like you don’t know how real estate works, like “We have a couple of investors, and they don’t want to make a profit. They just want their money back.” These are lies. You know they can’t be helped. You know they serve a purpose. Repeating them to others doesn’t do for you what it used to. You keep them to yourself.

I read a lot last week, because my parents generously gave me three deeply engrossing books for Christmas.

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering The Elements of Good Cooking by Samin Nosrat is not a cook book. You can’t really read a cookbook, can you? You have to approach it as a reference book to hunt for specific recipes when you want them.

This, though, is a read. I sat on my parents’ couch and read straight through Nosrat’s explanations of how salt, fat, acid, and heat work in cooking followed by her instructions for how to layer them. I’ve been practicing salting by finger wag ever since and asking, “How can I get some acid into this?” about everything I’ve made this week (hint: mustard in mashed potatoes is goooood).

Nosrat did the “I Think You’re Interesting” podcast back in November. Listening to that is a fun point of entry into her book.

Dinner in an Instant: 75 Modern Recipes for Your Pressure Cooker, Multicooker, and Instant Pot by Melissa Clark is a book I coveted the moment I learned of its existence. I’ve subscribed to the New York Times cooking website for over a year now, and Clark’s contributions there have taught me a ton. I prepared Thanksgiving dinner for 20 people last year using her stuff exclusively.

Also, I have an Instant Pot and it is amazing. So when I heard Clark on The Upgrade talking about this book I started dropping hints for the holidays.

I said before that you can’t really read a cookbook. But I read this. At least I turned every single page and scanned every single recipe (there’s barely an introductory material). Every recipe has a pressure cooker and slow cooker option, and the images are gorgeous. I made the chili recipe from it right away when I got home, and it’s going to be my entry in this weekend’s chili cookoff for sure.

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer is another book I’d been eager to get my hands on that my parents gave me for Christmas. I finished it on the plane ride home. It’s not a cookbook.

Foer wrote one of my favorite books of the past decade, How Soccer Explains The World, so when The Washington Post published an excerpt of this book and Jeff Jarvis pummeled it I was deeply intrigued.

There is nothing new to Foer’s anxiety about how digital technology is affecting us, its users. This kind of writing is a genre all its own. But World Without Mind is valuable for its focus on the companies driving most of that tech: Amazon, Facebook, and Google (Apple escapes the most serious charges of spying and monopolizing Foer levels at the other three).

Amazon has destroyed publishing just because it could. Facebook has ruined journalism without a care. Google is deploying all the things it knows about you in increasingly non-search engine ways.

What did I do after reading this? I switched my default search engine to Duckduckgo, put Firefox back on my phone, restarted three paper magazine subscriptions, decided not to replace the Kindle I left in Dallas last month, and started free trials of Fastmail and Zoho Docs, alternatives to Google services on which I am quite dependent.

Reading: one of the best things about vacation.

“Saudi Aurora” is an offensive dis of my hometown that I’d completely forgotten about. I heard it all the time growing up from relatives who lived in more remote suburbs of Denver than the one where my parents bought a brand new house in 1978. They still live in that house, and those same relatives are still dissing Aurora.

I heard it again from one of those relatives on Christmas day, just last week. It kind of jolted me. He’s a police officer. Last month he participated in a training exercise at my old middle school. Recounting the exercise over apple pie provided the occasion for the disparaging moniker.

He elaborated on it: Aurora is full of crime. Cops want to work there for the challenge of it.

That’s not the Aurora I remember, and it’s not the impression I get of it when I visit. “Saudi Aurora” exposes a distance between my youth and my adulthood that is more than geographic.

I have a sympathetic reflex toward protests of police brutality. I’m horrified by the stories of Eric Garner and Laquan McDonald and Tamir Rice and Philando Castille and all the other mounting incidents of mostly unarmed African American men being shot by police. My instinct is outrage. When football players kneel during the national anthem to bring attention to the problem, I’m encouraged, not offended.

That’s me: a politically progressive 41 year old white guy.

That’s not where I’m from, though. Where I’m from shines a blue porch light in support of the police. Where I’m from is the police. Where I’m from was perilously close to a horrifying attack on police officers just days after offending me over Christmas pie. Where I’m from wore the same uniform as the deputy who died in that attack. Where I’m from sees things and risks things I have the luxury of reading about later.

Where you’re from shapes where you go even long after you’ve left it.

I accompanied my dad to the park by my parents’ house to walk their Greyhound, Lady, and on the way he jokingly threatened to turn on Rush Limbaugh. “I wouldn’t have stopped you,” I said. I pressed into the opening; we rarely speak of politics, and we’ve never spoken about Trump or last year’s election.

“You voted for Trump. So what is it about him that you like so much?” He answer was swift and clear.

“I like that he’s not a politician and that if says he’s going to do something he does it, like with cutting our taxes. I like that he’s standing up to Kim Jong-un. And I like that he’s going after those football players who are kneeling during the national anthem.”

Everything my dad likes about the president is an opening for an argument. Every  virtue he sees looks to me like a vice, or at least a deception: he is a politician; he lies reflexively; he is intensifying a potentially catastrophic conflict for the sake of his ego; his opposition to NFL protesters is overtly racist.

But I kept those arguments to myself. Instead, I let curiosity lead. He remarked that, given all the terrible things he said during the campaign, his electoral win was a “miracle,” so I asked: what could the president say or do to lose your support? This answer was less swift but just as clear:

“Nothing.”

I’m listening.

Mouse Books is my favorite thing of 2017.

I learned about it from Kickstarter last spring and became a backer immediately. David, one of the project’s founders, lives in Chicago, and he emailed me within a day of me backing the project, offering to send me an early preview. The catch? He wanted my feedback.

Talk about engagement. I was hooked. I burned through the little yellow edition of James Joyce’s The Dead in a few short train rides. After that it was a few months of email updates before the project actually shipped, and when it did I made quick work of it: Melville, Austin, and Dostoyevskey on paper in your pocket is kind of thrilling.

I gave them as gifts. I signed up for the Drip service that launched on Kickstarter in November. I had coffee with David, the founder. I received a special bonus collection of speeches by Pope Francis. I listened to David’s interviews with literature professors on Soundcloud. I backed their special holiday “Giving” collection.

I kind of went all in on this.

The very attractive “Giving” volumes arrived yesterday. “The Happy Prince” and “Miscellaneous Aphorisms” by Oscar Wilde; “The Gift of The Magi” by O. Henry; “Russian Christmas Stories” by Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Chekhov. David asked me over coffee last month for titles to include in this collection, and I had nothing. That’s fine, because this is perfect.

I read “The Happy Prince” to Laura last night as she lay in her makeshift bed in the living room, lit by the Christmas tree (I tried “The Gift of The Magi” first, but “the silent imputation of parsimony” in the first paragraph indicated that the vocabulary is a bit advanced for a fourth grader).

It was a delight. I may just read it again tonight.

What discovery did you make this year that most delighted you?

I’m trying to be bored and brilliant on the train, but I made this playlist I called, “The Albums: A Life,” and ever since I never don’t want to be listening to it. It’s full of surprises, which is a delightful quality in something you made yourself. I made it by porting all of my best-of album lists from the past five years to a new playlist and then adding individual albums that I have played to death during some season of my past. Every song that pops up on it can immediately be identified, not only by the album it belongs to, but immediate visual associations connected to where and with whom I used to listen to it. I’m still adding albums to it every day.

Let me demonstrate by shuffling it right now and listing the first five songs.

“Lump Street” from Frightened Rabbit’s Painting of A Panic Attack. I’m walking down Chicago Avenue to my still-new job at Fourth Presbyterian Church, texting Marci and Landon about the band we all love.

“My Name Is Liar” from Highasakite’s Camp Echo. Early summer in Chicago, strolling the Gold Coast, where I’m living for the final two months before Meredith and Laura join me to begin the next chapter of our life.

“Note To Self” from Modern Baseball’s Holy Ghost. The commute to Fourth again, but this time past the Starbucks on State and Pearson on an unseasonably warm Autumn day, nodding again to the guy on the corner with a cardboard sign.

“Trouble” from Hey Marseilles’ self-titled 2016 album that came out in March, right after I moved here. I’m in two places with this one: the empty Rogers Park condo where I’m spending my first Windy City winter alone. There’s an empty Giordano’s box on the counter. I’m also on the 147 bus turning onto Lakeshore Drive on a grey, rainy morning, anticipating the view of the lake from my warm perch in the back corner.

“Rabid Animal” from Lake Street Dive’s Bad Self Portrait. Finally something from California. I’m listening to this in the sunny living room of our Pomona condo while Laura plays upstairs. Meredith is at work. I’m texting Landon about it, who can’t get into the “Bonnie Raitt” feel of it, as I Google video of the band’s appearance on Colbert. 

I wish something older would have come up in the shuffle, like one of the tracks from Erasure’s Pop! that makes me think of Jared Hamilton and Andy Patterson’s basement dorm room at Sterling College or Day At The Beach by Sonia Dada, which takes me back to the streets of Aurora the first summer home from college, driving around with Chip, trying to outdo one another with music we’ve discovered since we both moved away. He’s claiming Sonia Dada, but I was into their first album while we were still in high school. It’s such a Chip move.

Can you see now why I can’t just sit on the train and not listen to my new/old compilation? It’s a nostalgic season, for some reason.