Must be preaching time again...

... 'cause Spud's back online! That's right, folks, camp is almost over and I'm preaching at my home parish on Sunday, so I thought it was about time to get back to procrastinating. I mean, blogging. Blogger tells me I haven't posted since May 28, so here's a brief recap of the summer before I revive my RevGalBlogPals status with a Friday Five.

~Graduated from seminary. Have apparently mastered divinity.


~Got ordained to the diaconate.

~Trained staff

~Directed two core camps and two day camps (Sorry, don't have pictures of that yet. I forgot to bring my camera cable with me this summer.)

~Worked as nature specialist for a day camp that I didn't have to direct

We clean up the camp Monday and Tuesday, with an end-of-camp staff dinner Monday night. Before that I have to finish my sermon for Sunday and write staff evaluations. Oh, and my cousin's wedding shower is tomorrow. And my future sister-in-law's is next week. And I'm moving soon. But before I do that I need to organize and turn in some reflections and recommendations for next year's camps. So, I'm not quite out yet - but there's light at the end of the tunnel. If I can just manage to survive the next four days, I should be able to handle the next couple of weeks after that.

For what it's worth

I really thought that a nice benefit of not being an undergrad anymore (at least not officially, Les) would be that I wouldn't have to deal with 3 am fire alarms any more. 3 am fire alarms are among my least favorite things in life. They do very little to make me well-rested or to reduce my general fears that Bad Things Will Happen to those I love.

For those of you who are sleeping comfortably in the apartments, get a nice few hours. You're about to wake up to no heat again, in which we dorm-dwellers will be joining you this time. Hurray for pipes bursting.

Having voiced these objections, I'm going to try for a few more hours before I have to finish writing Sunday's sermon. Which will apparently be something I do from a coffee shop or something. (Here's hoping that the pipe break/heat shutoff at my field ed parish is fixed before Sunday....)

[Later: Ok, there seems to be heat after all. Apparently they were wrong about it killing the heat, or they fixed it really fast, or I imagined it all in a sleepless haze. I don't much care - I'm just glad to have the heat.]

happy happy

So, I admit that when Seabury and Garrett worship together, I usually attend out of a reluctant commitment to ecumenism. That is to say, ecumenism's fine and good, but if Garrett students aren't required to attend Garrett chapel, I don't think I should have to give up my own chapel service to go to theirs. But I go, because I (generally) do what I'm told.

Today, however, it was so, so worth it. Today, we sang praise music. Without murdering it. It's been a while since I got to do that, and I'd missed it a lot - especially since my most recent worship experiences have turned me pretty well against the high church stuff for a while. (I'll come back to liking it - but not for at least a couple months more, maybe not until the fall even.) I haven't been that happy in church for a long time. I didn't even care that I didn't know most of the songs. (Of course, the beauty of praise music is that you don't have to - they're musically predictable enough that you can just hear the intro or first line and have a pretty good sense of how the rest of the song will go.)

Now, of course, those of us who went "ooh! ooh! praise music!" are trying to figure out "wait - when do we get more of that?" Still - I got to sing praise music today! Yay for that!

Feast of St. Brigid

I preached tonight at Seabury, which I love doing, even if it scares me. This one certainly scared the hell out of me, mostly because I preached it without notes (something I've only ever dared in class before) but a little because it's more vulnerable than most of mine.

I'm not sure that I've ever had such a powerful experience preaching before. The whole service was really powerful, actually, in a lot of little ways. I had an especially hard time distributing communion - a couple of times I had to try twice to get the words "the body of Christ" to leave my mouth. But the preaching was a lot of it. Preaching always takes something out of me, and at Seabury it always takes a fair amount, but this one really took almost everything I had. From the feedback I got, the sermon seems to have worked for the congregation also.

I did write a text for organizational purposes, and I'm putting it below, though I'm not sure this sermon works as well in text form as it does spoken. It's obviously not exact, since I didn't use the text, but particular words stick in my mind, so it's pretty close. Oh - the biblical text is 1 Cor. 1:26-31.

*****************************

Last week my roommate stopped writing, looked around her room, and said. “Every flat surface in this room has a book on it. I think I’m looking for the words I can’t seem to find in my head.” Boy, did that ring true for me. My gut reaction to most problems, certainly most writing and thinking problems, is to look for another book to fix it. Someone asks me, “What do you know about…?” and my first instinct is that I know I have a bookshelf. I start thinking about what I’ve read that I could give them, not what I know about x. In fact, if someone asks me about my own experience, I’m likely still to reach for a book. I’m likely to ask someone else to explain it for me, to flip through pages until I find someone who has.

Words hold wisdom. In words, the wisdom of one time can be pinned down and passed forward to future generations, and we can pick it up again a hundred or a thousand years later. Words are what let me in on all the marvelous thinking that people far more insightful than I are figuring out. Words are how I figure out what I’m thinking. That’s a lot of why I feel so at home in this place. The seminary often wants to tell us that words, especially written words, are of immense worth – are, in fact, worth more than experience. And I already tend to hold words over experience as a source of wisdom, so that becomes a pretty comfortable place for me to live. I get to hide out in my love of books, and call it wisdom.

But the things that mean the most to me, the things that show me God most clearly, are not, in the end, books. In fact, maybe part of why I look so quickly to books is that when it comes to God, words don’t come easily to me. I want to hear how someone else has taken a smell, a glance, a texture, and translated it to the written word, because I need to put it into words somehow in order to preach it.

The closest I can come to articulating my desire for God is very often to open the hymnal and sing “Lord of all gentleness, Lord of all calm, whose voice is contentment, whose presence is balm, be there at our sleeping, and give us, we pray, your peace in our hearts, Lord, at the end of the day.” The closest I can come to articulating what I believe, what the Church believes, about God, is usually to quote Scripture or Augustine or Madeleine L’Engle. For the same reason, I was never much good at writing Happening affirmations or psych notes or love letters. I was always better at collecting quotations for my friends and lovers than writing out my own sentiment.

But even there, even with the most articulate words I can find, they don’t go far enough. No words can convey to you the way that I know God by the touch of your hand, by the taste of fresh chamomile, by the smell of my grandmother’s perfume. Maybe some of you know something about what that’s like – maybe words can take us far enough to meet in the middle between our experiences of God – but they’ll never take us all the way across. How can I tell you about the particular glow of a torch on the lake, when it’s not really about the glow at all but everything that brings me to the place where I see that glow? How can I tell you?

I can’t. But I find a little comfort, and a little clarity, in wondering whether maybe God couldn’t either. Whether maybe that’s why the Word became flesh; as Paul says, “became for us wisdom from God.” I’d like to think that God can shape words to do exactly what they ought to do; that God’s eloquence far outshines any of ours. But after centuries of speaking to us, maybe even God couldn’t explain God’s love for us without coming himself and looking us in the eyes.

In the House of Grapes

I'm blogging tonight from the House of Grapes, where I'm poodle-sitting for Maggie while her humans are off at Diocesan Convention. I'd written more to this post earlier, but my battery died faster than I expected and I lost the post. (Really, I ought just to get a new battery - it's now lasting less than 20 minutes. Maybe over Thanksgiving break.) The gist of it is that I find the House of Grapes a very warm, calm, and centering place, despite being made of cinder block. I think it will be a good place to be this weekend. That's about all the quality I can give in a second go at this post tonight. I'll try to think of something more scintillating to offer tomorrow.

In praise of heat and light

You've heard me write here before, I believe, about my deep gratitude for the days when we have heat in the winter. Tonight I want to praise whomever invented the sticky heating pad thing. Seriously. The idea that you take the plastic off from around something, peel off the back, and have a perfectly safe and useful heating pad that can go with you anywhere? That's just brilliant.

Also, I'm tickled pink that Seymour left the hallway lights on late. Usually I come out of class at 9:30 and all the lights are off in the hallways between class and my suite. I trot back and forth turning them on and off so that I'm never in the dark but I'm also not leaving them all on, and that's a pain. (Plus, I don't love wandering about dark buildings alone in general.) So I was thrilled tonight just to go home like I would any other time of day.

Homecoming

People are coming! Yay!

Peace offering?

I've been mostly silent on here in recent days, and still don't have much to say here. So in lieu of my usual posts, here's the sermon I preached in Seabury's chapel yesterday - more or less as I actually preached it:


Last week after Matriculation, a few of us ended up in the chapel looking at the space, and talking about it. And one of the things that came up for me as we talked was the importance of where I sit in this chapel. I need to be able to see things to give them my full attention a lot of the time, and it turns out there are only about five seats in this chapel where I can reliably see the pulpit, the crossing, the presider’s seat, and the altar. So I sit in one of those. But it would actually be important for me to sit on that side of the chapel even if sight lines weren’t such a problem for me, because it matters to me that I sit on the side of the theologians.

Now, that’s partly a positive statement, in that I think of myself much more readily as a theologian than as a missionary, something I’m sure is shocking to many of you. But it’s the flip side, the negative of that statement, that really makes it so important to me. It’s less a matter of needing to sit with the theologians than it is of needing to sit facing the missionaries. I’m in very little danger of forgetting about the theologians, or of forgetting that doing theology is part of my call. If I’m going to forget something, I’m going to forget that I’m also called to mission. Even when I remember, I often feel as though when Jesus says “You also are to testify,” he can’t possibly mean me - he means you all. So as I worship in this chapel, I need to look up and remember both how much the church needs its missionaries, and that I too have a part in God’s mission. I may be theological in my reasons for why mission is so important, but my theology becomes incomplete, maybe even false, when I neglect the missional elements.

I think this is part of the church’s message to all of us on this particular feast, the feast of Latimer, Ridley, and Cranmer. By lumping these three bishops together, the church reminds us not only that they knew each other, but that we don’t get one without the others. Cranmer was a scholar and theologian who more or less had to be pulled into the public life. Latimer railed against clergy who stayed safely in their studies and universities and never preached the gospel. The whole calendar of saints operates this way, to a certain extent. The Church put Ridley on the calendar for his reforming zeal in tearing out images and altars – but in only a few weeks, we’ll celebrate the feast of John of Damascus, whose Defense of Holy Images helped ensure that icons and liturgical art would have a place in the Church. And the church tells us that they’re a package deal. Not Cranmer, or Latimer, or Ridley; not liturgy or preaching or theology; but all of these together, all at once.

mensch

I think I understand now why Davies makes a habit of following every night class with a nightcap. Night classes M-T-W, with GOE prep on Thurs, will be a significant challenge this term.

Done

Orientation = done. There will be a follow-up meeting of some sort so that Court can drill Raisin and me on what he needs to know, but as now, I'm basically no longer an orientation chair. I like being an orientation chair, but this is an intense relief.

If you must

I can hear murmurs across the hall. I want to poke my head in over there (a surprisingly easy thing right now, since their suite door doesn't close, but we'll work on that) and say "No, you silly things, go back to bed! Sleep while you can!" I understand that even if they're not morning people (which they may be), it's the first morning of orientation and they both want showers and probably breakfast before morning prayer. I'm sure I wanted the same two years ago. But I personally would rather not have been up before 7, and therefore feel as though they ought to sleep as late as possible.

I'm going to make either a terrible or an excellent mother someday (I hope). At any rate, I do have to be up now, because I am a Mighty Tri-Chair and must ensure that the newbies have breakfast to eat. So off I go.

Back

I've returned safely to Evanston, and have convinced my wireless to work again. I'm grateful to have returned to a suite that wasn't covered in an inch of dust, and to keys in my mailbox, and to friends who helped move my things in from the car. I've also started Hebrew class, and am hard at unpacking and cleaning and grocery shopping and other tasks of moving back in.

It's been noted that my entries this summer didn't tell much about what I'd actually been doing. I'll try to remedy that now that I'm back without the distraction of family.

Popping in...

No, I'm not still stuck in the paper. Yes, I finished it. Yes, I have my doubts about it, but I'm not enumerating them here where my professor can read my doubts before my paper. Yes, we've finished both classes and graduation. I've also done three parties, one Official Trustee Dinner, and an ordination; tomorrow I'll go to an installation, Monday a curriculum meeting and lunch, Tuesday a lunch meeting about my field ed, games with Pippa, and Tuesday night dinner... etc. I leave for Cleveland-y parts on Friday, then Saturday I go shopping for summer clothes that aren't camp-appropriate, and Sunday I start my internship - which is an 11-week parish gig.

So while I think I'll be around more starting tomorrow (heck, I haven't even read blogs since Wednesday, I don't think) - if I'm not, you'll know why.

Status messages

Middler student: "five more days of torture"

Senior student: "1 blessed week until graduation!"


Ah, perspective....

Long time passing...

I've been away a few days, and I'll probably be away a few more. It's that time of the term, and finishing off the Awards Night service last night really only means it's time to buckle down hard* and finish off the last couple of papers (which unfortunately are more sizeable than most papers here). I've just scheduled out every hour between now and Wednesday morning, and blogging doesn't make an appearance.**

*What Seabury needs is Davis Center. That is, not really, because I'm probably much healthier for not having easy access to Davis french fries and Seattle's Best Coffee, but in an ideal world. (And yes, I know that Smith no longer has Davis either, which is a travesty, and that NU's Norris Center is not that far away, but Norris doesn't have quite the charm that Davis Center had, not being located in a big yellow 19th century New England house with a ballroom upstairs.)

**Well, every hour between 8:30 this morning and next Wednesday - I refuse to count the next two hours as real time, since by all rights I ought to be asleep. I am, however, about to go see what I can magically accomplish in that time on no sleep.

Oh, well...

The Seabury Saints lost their playoff game tonight. We got pretty soundly whupped, actually, but I guess that's what you get when you pit seminarians against Navy ROTC undergrads. I'm sad that the season is over (except for an all-Seabury game), but pleased that we made it to the playoffs at all - a first in Seabury history, I think. And we made up for it afterward with a team pizza party and fire circle, which was lots of fun.

The weekend as a whole has been a lot of fun, actually. I've gotten appallingly little done, but I really will buckle down tomorrow.

On a side note: Community Church of Wilmette has a new Senior Pastor! Yay, Tripp!

Pleased

I've had a lovely (also busy) last couple of days. I successfully preached in chapel on Thursday and received some very kind feedback on the sermon (which is posted below). I helped with a bridal shower that was a lot of fun. I scored a run (for the first time ever) in a softball game (albeit a very informal game against ourselves). I am scheduled to preach at my home parish Labor Day weekend, when a good chunk of family will be in town for my grandmother's 90th birthday. (I don't know how many will come to hear me preach, but my grandmother will be very happy that her family came to see her and her granddaughter is preaching, even if she doesn't actually hear most of the sermon, which is possible.) It's reading week, and today I am taking an Official Day Off. I'm doing lots of laundry (which I actually like doing), but otherwise I'm reading for pleasure, drinking coffee, watching movies (maybe even a baseball game tonight if I can get the TV in Junkin Common to tune it in). Tomorrow is back to work, but today is sabbath time.

Feast of St. Monnica

The Sheil Center, across the street, has a new copier. It’s a very helpful copier, from what I hear – very polite, and not at all passive-aggressive or confrontational the way copiers so often are. This one simply tells you its state and its needs, very calmly. For instance, “Please be patient. I am warming up.” Or – my favorite – “The job you have selected exceeds my capacity.” And I have an image in my head of standing at that copier, asking it to run off the lectionary readings for today, and an image coming on the screen, a digital image of Monnica, that says “My capacity exceeds the job you have selected.”

And she’d be right. Whoever put together this set of lessons selected a job for Monnica that’s pretty disconnected from the capacities for which we remember her in our calendar. We started with an Old Testament reading – all of three verses, sort of cobbled together – which tells us: Hannah weeps. Hannah asks God for a male heir. Hannah receives a male heir. That’s apparently all we need to know about Hannah. (The psalm is, well, a psalm – as well matched as most of our Lesser Feasts and Fasts psalms are. ) Then we have the Gospel reading, where Jesus tells us what childbirth is like – sort of a strange lecture to be getting from a man, and a single one at that, but ok. To hear it from these lessons, one gets the impression that there was one very important thing to know about Monnica: that her uterus was in good working order, so that she could give birth to a son.

That’s a strange sort of legacy. Certainly, there are plenty of famous men who presumably all had mothers, and most of those mothers don’t get their own feast days. Luckily, by the time the powers that be got around to writing a collect and biography, they seem to have gotten a better picture of Monnica’s life. Our collect points out her spiritual discipline, her perseverance, and her talent at sharing the Gospel. We don’t have a ton of information on her, but we know that she never gave up on bringing her son and her husband to Christ. In his Confessions, Augustine thanks God that she brought him “from her heart to life eternal.” He tells us also of her incredible discipline in her own life – how she would not gossip at all, for instance, and how she exercised such patience even with her difficult mother-in-law that the two women eventually became friends. Her capacity was great indeed.

Her capacity was great, and her example to us is great, and they far exceed the job the lessons have selected for her. But the most troubling part is not even that the picture these lessons give us is historically problematic, though it is. The most troubling part is the way that picture lends itself to being generalized. The calendar of saints is there to be generalized – to provide models of life and piety for all Christians. If Monnica’s achievements and contributions as a woman of deep prayer and absolute perseverance warrant less attention than her ability to give birth, we have sold not only her but also ourselves short. We have cheapened her example by turning her from a model for all Christians to an example of a woman’s proper place, just as we cheapen the work and the value of motherhood when we make it a woman’s only choice.

For Monnica’s sake, for the sake of all the women of the church who get painted with the same brush, and for the sake of all the baptized, we need our calendar to give us lessons that match her capacity. Perhaps we might consider the story of Abigail, who patiently negotiated what was in her husband Nabal’s best interest when he was too stubborn and boorish to do so himself. We might consider the parable of the unjust judge, who agreed to do justice for the persistent widow, who would not stop her prayers and her pleading until she received it. We might consider the story of Lydia, who also worked to bring her family to Christ. With such lessons, such stories, I could go to the Sheil Center and stand fearlessly in front of that copier, knowing that Monnica’s image would just smile at me as the copier did its work – for then her job and her capacity would be well matched, and her memory truly honored.

yip!

I've finished and sent off my final paper for my Galatians class, and have even received notice of its receipt. This means my Galatians class is now DONE. I also have a Matthew reflection and a sample evensong ordo to turn in tomorrow, which means all of tomorrow's work is finit, fine, beendet.

It's only a yip, and not a yippee, because I still have a paper due Tuesday (for which I've yet to read, though I've started at least), a sermon to fix up for chapel Thursday, and a sermon to create from scratch for class on Friday. Still, I'm relieved to be as far along as I am.

And tomorrow, I will get to do something I haven't done in a couple of months now - sleep until 8 on a Monday morning. Then I'll go to Monday morning meetings and mass, which I haven't done since fall term. And then I'll go to the refectory, and eat lunch there like a normal person (well, ok, a normal seminarian), and go to class without a to-go box.

So maybe that's a yipp....

STOP!!!

Someone is doing descending scales on the carillon - over, and over, and over. My window is directly across from the carillon. I am trying to write a paper. I am annoyed.

(Ok, they finally stopped. I'm confused still, because the scales stopped and then the person rang three bells, as though for chapel, and as far as I know we have no Friday night 7:35 service. But it's quiet again.)