Dunk the Chaplain for Cereal's Sakes!

June marks the month of our annual VA hospital cereal drive. The goal is 15,000 boxes of cereal donated for children in our community. We are most of the way there. Over 2000 dollars was raised just this past Friday via our dunking booth at the Little Rock and North Little Rock campuses. A huge success, yours truly can't claim any credit for the dunking booth's windfall. Always eager to take one for the team, I volunteered to represent the chaplains for a 15 minute shift atop the homemade dunking booth. This was the first year the chaplain's department would get to mount the booth. We were excited. We broke into the priest's closet and got a candle-snuffing brass scepter and a baptismal robe. My boss coughed up a clerical collar. I dressed in black and was ready to go. I was ready to taunt my fellow employees in King James English while watching them delight in taking out their frustrations on a minister in a dunking booth, all for a good cause. Such was not the case. After jettisoning my robe in order to keep from drowning, I sat lonely and embarrassed for 10 long minutes of silent dunklessness. The administrator before me? Dunked more than a dozen times rapid fire. When the clergy took the stage, however, the dunking ceased. My prophetic calls to "Dunk Thy Neighbor!" fell on deaf ears. One lady paid her money walked up and then immediately sat down when she saw who was up for dunking. "Aw, Naw, I ain't gonna dunk him, I'll just wait." "That just wouldn't seem right," another said, as my fellow volunteers tried to feverishly prime the pump by dunking me. I shouted to the lady, "Aw, C'mon, I know you've been done wrong by a minister at some point in your life!" To no avail. After towelling off my embarrassment, I realized a painful truth. People talk smack about ministers all the time. They often gossip about them, vote them out of their churches, and blame them for causing them to leave the church. But when the get a chance to get even publicly, they balk. Is there still a healthy respect for clergy despite all the scandals and abuse that ministers have been involved in for millenia? Or do people not want to make public their realization that ministers are humans too and worthy of a good dunking. Are they taking ministers too seriously? Or are they taking themselves too seriously? I remember a family member chastizing his wife in a hospital room several years ago. She said "damn!" and was quickly rebuked. "Can't you see this is a man of the cloth!", her husband retorted. He then tried to make an appeal for her to give up her chair for me. I felt a bit ridiculous, much the same as i did when the dunking booth screeched to a halt and they unloaded me 5 minutes before my shift was up. I felt like a bad stripper who cleared out the bar in one routine. I wanted to make a final plea for all ministers before leaving the dunking booth. "Stop treating us with kid gloves and stop hiding behind our supposed moral superiority." We Baptists call it the "priesthood of all believers." The VA cereal drive calls it, "Go ahead and dunk the chaplain for cereal's sakes!"