Get Her Words Out

Best Ever

I’ve had a few days to reflect now, about all the things that happened Saturday at the Presbytery meeting.  And, while one part of the day didn’t go the way I wanted it to, I believe I will remember it as one of the best days of my life.

I will always cherish the memory of the people who cared for me that day.  The people at the Presbytery that I had not met until that day who came to me after the vote and told me not to give up; the people who came from my home church and who spoke for me during the debate; and, especially, the people who came with me from Columbia, who gave up their Saturday and drove 150 miles each way to stand with me and support me and to show me and the world that I am not alone in this.

The support didn’t end there, either.  In person, in emails and in other ways people have told me that they believe in me, that I shouldn’t give up and that they want to help me.

That the vote went against me isn’t nearly as important as the fact that in the middle of Alabama, 51 people said yes to me.  And if six of the people voting had changed their minds, I would be a candidate today.  That does not tell me that I need to give up, or that I need to “shake the dust off my feet” and move on to greener pastures.

A commenter has said that this vote is a sign that I need to leave the church and move on to somewhere friendlier and more open-minded.  I don’t know where that would be.  What organization has risen up to do what the church does?

Seriously, if someone is going to leave the church, where do they go to replace the things that the church does?  I don’t mean theology or exegesis, I don’t mean prayer or preaching, I mean all the other things, community, fellowship, people who care for you and who will rally around you when you need them. If I were to leave the church as has been suggested, where would I find those things?

Am I supposed to hang out in bars?  Or hope that I meet someone at Barnes & Noble?  Internet dating services?  I don’t know where I would even begin to look.

It’s clear from the number of people who are leaving churches, that the church has been failing them.  But I firmly believe that the church is the best hope we have.

On a practical note, what the hell would I do with my M.Div if I were to leave?  Outside of the church there are very few job descriptions that involve Koine Greek.

Geeking out

Just in case my earlier post about my iMac didn't prove how big a geek I am:

The new Rent  DVD is here!

Is it a bad thing that I can't make it through "Seasons of Love" before I start crying?

A Prayer for My Journey

On reading the last post, one of my professors sent me this prayer by Thomas Merton:

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going.  I do not see the road ahead of me.  I cannot know for certain where it will end.  Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.  But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.  And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.  I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.  And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it.  Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.  I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

Examination. Not. Sustained.

Secret ballot:  51-62

Oh, well.  I mean, who really wants to be a Candidate anyway?

They asked me about half a dozen questions, then sent me out of the room while they debated for what seemed like more than half an hour, then they voted.

Everyone there who spoke to me was very nice, and very supportive.  And the people who came to support me from my home church and from Columbia were wonderful, I feel so blessed to have people like that caring for me.   As we were standing at the front of the sanctuary, waiting for the votes to be counted, they started to sing:  “Amazing Grace,” “Guide My Feet,” and “We Are One in the Spirit.”

It was a beautiful thing, full of the Spirit, of love and of grace.

I can take some comfort, I think, that I did everything I could.  The things I wrote and the answers that I gave during the Examination were well received and, I’m told, very good.  I don’t think I shot myself in the foot with any of them.

It seems that for a large number of the people at the Presbytery meeting what I had to say didn’t matter.  They were going to vote against my candidacy no matter what.  I think this is my first experience of being an issue more than being a person.

In the grand scheme of things I don’t know how much difference this really makes.  I have tried to look at this not as an end to the road but as a turn. 

It is frustrating though.  I feel like I have been following this call since I started Commissioned Lay Pastor training in 1999, and I know that I have learned an incredible amount and developed many gifts in that time.  But it is hard to have been on a journey for this long and not only to not know when the end is going to come but to not even know what that end is going to be.

Making conversation

I have never been very good at making conversation.  In the past, not as much recently, I have spent a lot of time having anxiety attacks because I didn’t have anything to say to people I was supposed to be talking to.  My mind goes blank as I try to dig up something interesting to say to and we have these long periods of silence.

The way I would handle this problem at my old job, is every morning I would watch Sports Center and read ESPN.com looking for things to say to my co-workers.  I knew Paul was a Pittsburgh fan who particularly liked hockey and NASCAR.  Matt was a college football and basketball fan, especially Bama.  Le was interested in all things Chicago.  Of course, there were people who weren’t into sports, but I knew where they were from and what TV shows they liked to watch so I could pay attention to the news to see if there was anything they might be interested in so I could have something to say to them.  Shanley was from Ohio; Sabra from Rochester; Doug was really into Farscape; Seay was a big Buffy fan.

At the time, I wasn’t aware that I was doing it.  I thought that I really liked those sports.  It wasn’t until I left that job that I realized I really didn’t have any interest in most of those sports, I haven’t watched Sports Center in four years, and I don’t miss it. 

I like to think that I have been getting better at conversation, too.  I really have been trying to learn.  I’m much less prone to panic attacks when I try to talk to someone.

The reason I bring all this up is I caught myself doing it again this morning.  I turned on Today, and the lead story was about the mudslide in the Philippines.  My first thought was not “oh, how awful,” or “God be with them.”  My first thought was “Hana spent time in the Philippines.  I’ll have something to say to Hana today.”   I even started more of the old behavior: I went and looked up the story online so that I would have details when I talked to her, and started scripting the conversation in my head.

Do other people do this?  Another thing I have been learning is that many of the things that I thought were peculiar to me really are not.  I just never connected with people enough to know that they did them too.

I’ve realized this week that one of the reasons that I have trouble with conversations and with participating in class is that I am just not fast enough.  By the time I have figured out what I want to say and formulated how I want to say it, the conversation has moved on.

That’s one reason I like blogging, I have the time to say what I want to say, without feeling pressured to keep up.  I think people would be surprised with how long it takes me to write and edit these posts.

Umm, what?

What senses do we lack that we cannot see another world around us?
-The O.C. Bible

So, I guess I’m really oblivious most of the time.  Apparently there are things going on all around me that I have no idea about.  It’s happened twice in the last two days and it kind of bothers me.

First, we were discussing something in a committee meeting yesterday and another student on the committee commented that the thing we were discussing was related to things that had been going on in the Senior class since Greek School.  I’m part of the Senior Class; I’ve been here since Greek School, three years ago.  I have no idea what she was talking about.

Then, in addition to the objection to announcing awards (see “Of the Awarding of Prizes,” above), there has been an objection to the publishing of the names of the recipients of scholarships in the school’s quarterly newsletter, The Vantage.  The objection was based on “how this affected the community.”

Again, I don’t have a clue what that’s about.  I remember when the issue of The Vantage in question came out, I remember seeing that the names of the scholarship recipients were in there.  Knowing that I was not one of them, I glanced at it and tossed it.  That was the last I heard of it or thought about it until this week when I read about the trouble it had caused.

I don’t think I’m a complete hermit, I eat almost all of the meals in the Refectory, I sit outside, I don’t hide in my room all that much.  But it seems that there’s a whole world of trauma and troubles out there that I don’t see.

I’ve always known that I am completely out of the loop when it comes to who is dating whom.  I know that is not part of my world.  People can get together, break up, get together with other people, break up again and move on to a third relationship and I won’t know about any of it.  I’m mostly okay with that, the less I see it going on the less I have to think about why I’m not participating in it.

Now, though, I wonder what else is going on that I don’t know about.  I’ll probably never know.

Of the awarding of prizes

It’s been the school’s tradition to announce the recipients of various awards and fellowships during the graduation ceremony each year.  They are awards for scholarship in various disciplines, or for preaching or for a variety of other things.  I had never given much thought except for a vague feeling when I went to graduation last year of “well, that’s kind of nice.”

Now, though, there has been a suggestion (and a petition) to end that practice. It seems that when we recognize particular people, we make other people feel bad about themselves and the feeling is that we should always strive to avoid that.  The original suggestion, and I think it has evolved some since then, was that recipient’s names would be published in the graduation bulleting and that the certificates, checks, etc. should be distributed in the campus mail.

I was surprised at myself by how strongly I felt about not wanting to abolish the practice of handing out awards.  It’s taken me a few days to sort out my feelings about it and realize what was going on.

My initial reaction was that I was willing to have a few people feel bad in exchange for others being able to experience a little joy and pride.  Part of the question seemed to me to involve balancing experiences and I think that a small amount of joy outweighs a larger amount of upset.  But I also don’t know that I understand the depth of bad feeling that this practice causes.

But, I was upset enough that I knew that there was something deeper going on.  After much reflection, I realize that a lot of my self image and my dreams are wrapped up in this issue.

Part of my self-image, not a good part, and a part that my therapist really wants me to work on, is that there is nothing special about me.  Other people have talents that make them extraordinary, they can sing, play musical instruments, dance, create art, play sports or any number of other things.  I have never thought that I have any of those kinds of talents; I have never thought that I was extraordinary, at least not in any good way.  I have really believed there is nothing I do that anybody else couldn’t do just as well or better if they were interested in trying to do it.

Even when I have done well, and been complimented, my feeling has been that I just happened to be there to do whatever it was, not that there was something special about me.

I realize now that part of me has always rebelled against this idea because through the years I have spent a lot of time daydreaming about winning awards.  In my dreams I have won Tonys, Oscars, Emmys, even Nobel Prizes.  Now I realize what all those dreams were about was that I wanted to have something tangible, something I could hold, something I could show to other people that was proof that I had done something special, that I had done something more than what just anybody could do.

Now that I have thought about it and put all those things together, I realize that my initial negative reaction to not awarding prizes at graduation was some part of me yelling, “No!  This is my chance, at last.  You can’t take it away from me!”

Really, I don’t think I care all that much about whether prizes are awarded at graduation or not.  I’ll survive either way and if it makes other people happier to not have them, then so be it.

My First Post. . .

. . . using my new iMac!  I have finally gone over to the dark side.  This is my first Mac, but not my first Apple.  My IIe took me through college, I had it all tricked out:  dual 5-1/4 floppy drives, color monitor with an 80 column card so I could do word processing on it (even though I really couldn't read the text when it was in 80 column mode.), an Epson dot matrix printer and a whopping 64K of RAM!

I have wanted a Mac for years, but never had the opportunity until now.  Even this time I had convinced myself that I was going to have to stay with Windows.  There are a couple of programs that I use that don't run on Macs and I didn't want to give them up.  But Wednesday night when I finally had the money to buy a new machine, I just couldn't make my self buy a pc.  I had spent a lot of time the last two weeks looking at different systems, Dell, Alienware, Hyperkore and Apple, researching different setups  trying to get the most for my money.  I had finally settled on the Hyperkore, but when it came down to actually spend the money, I couldn't do it, I had to go with the system that made me smile every time I thought about owning it, and that was the Mac.

It's a beautiful thing, my 20" Intel Core Duo iMac, and I love it.

Too much Heaven on my mind

I have been having a conversation about the nature of Heaven with a couple of friends recently.

The question comes down to:  is Heaven the place where we get what we wanted, or is it that when we get there our desires will be aligned with God to the extent that we don't want the things we can't have.

I have spent a great amount of time in this life wanting things that are impossible for me to have in this world.  Sometimes, when the pain of "I can never have that" is too much, I have taken comfort in the idea that maybe it's not never, it's just not here.  I have leaned heavily on the idea that if I wait, if I make it to the end of this race, part of the reward will be that I will be able to experience those things that I can't here.

The other idea is that in the completion of our justification and sanctification we are freed from our earthly desires and our desires become one with the desires of God and that is the ultimate reward.

Another way to ask this is, in the day of the resurrection when we rise with our spiritual bodies, as Paul tells us, will my body be male or female?  Will I be female and be happy because I have received the thing that I have wanted so desperately, or will I be male and be happy because I no longer want to be female?

I don't think it makes any difference here and now, but I have a hard time finding comfort in the second idea, primarily because I don't understand what it means to talk about me without these desires.  To a great extent the desire to be a woman defines who I am, if I don't have that, am I still me?

I think it's done

I think that I have just finished my Exegesis Ordination Exam.  It's my second try, I failed the one I took in the fall.  I don't know if this one is any better, I'm not even entirely sure that it is coherent, but I have answers for all the questions and an outline for the sermon that's supposed to be included.  So I am calling it done. 

I've noticed several times recently that the academic papers I write that I like least tend to get the best grades.  I don't know how much I can rely on that, but the readers didn't like the Exegesis Exam that I like, so maybe they will like this one.

I really don't want to have to take it again.

On a completely unrelated subject, I just saw that Capital One commercial where the guy tries to celebrate a years worth of holidays on one afternoon in August.  Do you think Capital One has someone on the staff who reviews their commercial to make sure that they are stupid and annoying enough?