Eschewing A visiting Minister

THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURH where I attend as a sporadic but perpetual visiting Uniterian pantheist is having a guest minister today. For that reason, I'll stay home, drink coffee,catch a little boob toob, and accept Father's Day gifts, garden snakes and mice,from my loving kittens. (I call all cats "kittens, affectionately, like retirees calling their middle aged children "kids"). I am told that the guestminister is of the highest quality, and I am sure that he is. I'm guessing that by "high quality" my fellow congregants mean that he is embued with fervant evangelical enthusiasm, preaches an inspiring sermon, and captures his eclesiastical audience, holding them in rapt attention, by reputation and widespread agreement. Of this, I have no doubt. If I were an actual Christian, rather than a Uniterian pantheist agnostic in occasional Presbyterian drag, I'd doubtless be all in. Apparently this man has no permanent pulpit, but serves as a sort of wandering fill in preacher in our local college town of approximately one hundred thousand souls. I don't think Christian votaries adore guest ministers the way school children adore substitute teachers, as if they are plotting and savoring the opportunity to get away with an enhanced amount of sin. I am wondering in general,ifalla crosss America's fruited plain guest minsiters tend to draw more people to church, or fewer. I can see it both ways. Attend church to respect the guest vicar of Christ. Stay away, disappointed that the beloved regular guy won't be leading the flock. To me its six of one half a dozen of the other. With each passing Sunday,my interst in divergent spirituality and religiosity strengthens. On my ecumeical bucket list is an intent to visit an Islamic mosque and Jewish synagogue, both of whch are extant if our thriving college town. college town, moreproperly major university towns, have as as an attraction enormous cultural variety. Our history department faculty has an annual end of the spring semester softball game, professors versus graduate students. Over the years, in my career in both categories, I have played center field and shortstop for both teams I keep thinking about becoming a member an actual member of the Uniterain Church, but would rather self identify as a card carrying pantheist. What the Uniterians have as their primary attraction is their universiality, their embrace of any and all forms of religiosiy, spirituality. They can rightfully claim to cover all bases. I could embark on a long journey to visit a house of worship of all the world's more than four thousad, (or is it eleven thousand) formally organized religions, circle the Earth, and end up right back where I started, on a small roughly round planet, wheeling around the edge of an ordinary galaxy, in what is evidently a nearly infinite number of galaxies in a universe which we now believe to be finite, but unbounded. My usual ride came by to pick me up for church. I told him I hadn't asked for a ride, he told me I had. We refrained from fist fight in in my front yard, a physical altercation I think I would have won. When the time is right, when he's cooled down and gotten his blood pressure under control, perhaps he can accept that I am more than a warm body to be used to occupy a slot in a pew, for appearances. If he gave an actual rat's ass about the salvation of my eternal soul, I might be concered about his distress at my lack of church attendance today. But I am more than a prop to make an mptry pew lok filled up with a warm human body. I am an eternal soul, as he would agree, only, I am one who never falsely claims to have any answers.