Entries in the rough...

I couldn't find a black pen, but other than that, this is what blog posts here usually look like before they get typed up and edited. I've been thinking about the concept of obedience, and Mary. It may require more thought.

It is Christmas Eve!

...and I have no running water.

Everyone else seems a great deal more concerned about this than me. (Everyone Else: church family. They sneak up on you, with love and jokes and concern. I still am not sure how I got adopted by about half the church, but they are awesome people and I do not complain. Our rector teases me: "You've got about twenty-five showers to choose from in this town alone!") Anyway: I have never lived in a house that did not occasionally stop working in one area or another, so at this point in my life I have taken the stance that humanity lived without electricity (outside our bodies, anyway), running water, or non-open-firepit heat for most of our history on the planet, so I can probably survive a couple days in a house that is not doing those things. Concerned sort-of-parental-units have pointed out that this also means showering is not a thing. (I'm more worried about the toilet; my hair's been grosser, if it gets too bad I'll just cut it off or something. But using drinking water to flush seems wasteful, so I'm not sure how to handle that.)

Anyway! It's actually a beautiful day, and I've not got much to do (other than wrestle with the well/pump and try to figure out a way to wrap Dan's present... oh damn, and practice the passage from Luke I'm supposed to be reading tonight).

I'd forgotten about that; got a call yesterday while wandering through campus about doing a reading for the Christmas Eve service. I'm not going to freak out, except by worrying that there are more people than usual there (because Christmas). But mostly not going to freak out, just take the dog for a walk and poke tentatively at the strange inner workings of the well pump outside (turns out the plumber doesn't get back until the 27th, which means interesting things over the next few days).

In the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin's name was Mary. And he came to her and said, "Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you." But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. The angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end." Mary said to the angel, "How can this be, since I am a virgin?" The angel said to her, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God. And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. For nothing will be impossible with God." Then Mary said, "Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word." Then the angel departed from her.

I haven't actually been to church for Christmas... quite possibly ever, or at least not since I was very, very small. Even the little Baptist church that consisted of three-four families in our pastor's living room had our own family celebrations (or not, it being too pagan of a holiday for my mother). I remember going to our grandparents' house for Christmas night, a few times; I remember, very dimly, going caroling in the days before Christmas with our pastor's family. If we had a service for Christmas at the Pentecostal church of my adolescence, I don't remember it - ah, yes. There was a pageant, one year, in the Church Is Cool style that congregation embraced. Ouch. Anyway - that makes it about a ten or eleven year gap, which I am quite happy to close at last.

Merry Christmas, internets; may God bless us, every one.




Minor water update: after posting this, I shut down the computer and video-called my family to say Merry Christmas; upon learning that I had no running water, my dad and grandpa started brainstorming solutions. This is what we do, and possibly why my first impulse was not to call a plumber but to go poke at the well. My dad eventually had me look at the circuit-breaker, and turn the one for the well on and then off again. This initially appeared to fix the problem - the filter started filling up again, and the pump housing made encouraging noises - but after I hung up, we returned to waterlessness. Regardless, I am now optimistic about the possibility of fixing the running water once again.

Post-service update: our rector got sick - really sick - and the Ladies of the church - everyone who is his backup and support - rallied together and sent him home. The worship leader carried off the prayer service quite well; it was lovely and beautiful. I'm trying not to worry about Fr V, and so far mostly failing. I'm sure he'll be okay, but poor guy, what utterly rotten timing. (And I wound up reading Matthew instead. And no, the water still isn't working.)

Merry Christmas anyway; God bless and keep you all.

Sacred spaces, and persistent irony

I should apologize: this post rambles a little, before it finds its way. It comes of working this stuff out as I think it through, on paper, but I'm trying to do more editing between paper and keyboard. Meanwhile I am distracted, because it seems like the entire Pacific Northwest with the exception of this valley is covered in snow. Corvallis got snow; Seattle got snow; Spokane got snow - let me repeat, Seattle got snow, and here in Kittitas Valley I'm just watching the clouds roll in for freezing rain. Bah. Anyway, on to the blog:

...rereading this first paragraph, it's even more rambling than I remembered. I think even while writing it I knew it wasn't going anywhere - basically, it boiled down to a revisiting of the fact that a Christianity centered on love is not less than one centered on guilt or shame or sin - in fact, it's more full, and also tends to be more work on the soul. Which is a good thing.

It's easier to write than say. I've noticed a disturbing issue lately: it's hard to sincerely express certain spiritual realities, or understandings, aloud without a trace of irony. I find myself thinking, "I want to be a better person, to be more loving," but somehow it seems to come with that mental smirk, self-consciously, and I just - no! Argh! Stop it!

Which is... funny, because it's not something I smirk at, on any level, in church. When our rector says, "The point is not, or not only, to leave the world a better place, but to let the world leave us better people," irony is the furthest thing from my mind. (I'll try and write on that more - it's actually pretty simple. Christians need to stop thinking we have all the answers and that our job is to change the world, and start understanding that we're all in the same boat and letting the world change us. Love is a two-way street.) I don't feel like smirking when I talk about love to other people - only to myself. So how do I take that openness, that light, and that silence of a sacred space, and carry it with me?

Ah-ha-ha-- that's it, isn't it. This got talked about a bit at Convention: all spaces are sacred, stop thinking about an Inside and an Outside... how could it be that the rough stone floor, dark wood, and stained glass are sacred, but this glorious blue sky with stark snow-capped peak jutting forth across the valley, is not? (Well, that's what the window looked like when I wrote this yesterday; today, substitute "marbled gray sky, with cloud-wreathed hills flowing across the horizon," or somesuch.) I know the answer: it is the people, not the place, that make prayer.

And so, as I probably already knew somewhere in the back of this cluttered mind, the solution is to stop taking peace and understanding for granted, and realize that I have to consciously work on bringing my mind closer to that sacred place to be closer to God.

Stress, and its related problems.

It's funny*, the way stress takes up residence in your head, and the pit of your stomach. You may have a world of love and light surrounding you, and it may be a beautiful day, with a sweet dog to watch the sunset with you and a community of the most kind, loving people around you--

--but the burden, whatever it may happen to be, will be there still, rubbing against the edges of your psyche whenever you turn your mind. No rhyme or reason to it - it's just there. It grows if you think about it, but it looms even when you ignore it - it won't go away.

This** was probably about the right time to read that passage of Matthew: none of us can grow so much as an inch by worrying about it, so there's not that much point in it, is there? Acknowledge the problem and move on. Try to fix it, pray for grace to deal with it, breathe - don't let your mind, paralyzed, roil in worry and stress on and on.

So, so, so much easier said than done. But, y' know, "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me," and then there's the some hundred or so points of "Do not fear/fear not," yeah... yeah. It's still a struggle to do that, to just do what you can and stop stressing about the problem. Maybe someday I'll actually manage it.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to keep better track of these things. I know what's going on, more or less: I need to get a student loan for something like $11 thousand before the next quarter starts. It's such a simple problem, and yet it bloody... looms, and the actual solution seems so complicated. Because even simple problems, you see, are compound, made up of all parts.

Not least is the part where I am still quite resistant to asking people for help. You'd think, after twenty-three years and change on this planet, I'd have learned that you can't actually do some things anything on your own, properly. But actually saying "I need help with this" is incredibly hard - not least because asking someone to cosign a student loan takes a lot of trust on their part, and how can I ask them to trust me to get this all in order when I don't even trust myself to?

So it all comes back, as usual, to my own issues, and how I need to work them through and really I can either stress about it uselessly, or acknowledge the problem, do what I can, and pray for the strength/trust/grace that I need to work through it. *sigh.*

It's kind of funny - so often, people understand about financial issues... and then you have the people who somehow know you well enough to understand that the problem is a compound of financial issues and "oh my God I have to ask someone for help." I'm quietly glad there are only a few of those around, and very glad that there are a few of them around, because it's far too easy to forget about the "I have to ask someone for help" part of it and stress about the part I can't do anything about, studiously and mostly-unconsciously ignoring the part that I can.

So, to wrap it up: I called my stepmother today, and after talking to her, I applied for a loan on my own, and was instantly denied - the last screen of the application was the "Sorry, no" screen. Rather than continue to bash my head against the problem, I took the dog outside, started writing this, and am going to go back to this whole thing tomorrow. And pray about it.

There's another post I'm working on, about Christmas music, but it may just boil down to a paragraph in a list of observations. We'll see. Goodnight, internet.

*And here I use 'funny' in the sense of 'utterly irritating and frustrating,' of course. **Between the two paragraphs, I stopped, did a few pushups, took the dog I'm dogsitting outside, and read the first few chapters of Matthew because I really do need to reread the New Testament (and the Old Testament***, but that one takes a little more of a running start and planning). ***...and the Apocrypha, come to think of it. Now that that's actually a thing that pops up in readings and sermons, I should probably have at least a passing familiarity. But for that, I'll have to go afield a bit, since the only Bible I currently have is an ancient, doodled-on, water-damaged, Old King James. Has my name on the front cover in my father's best cursive, and then again in my own crayon'd scrawl, as well as the words "Holy Bible" repeatedly, I guess in case I forgot what it was? I think I was still trying very hard to be pious and A Good Christian Girl, and writing the Right Words probably seemed apropos.

On Queer, Androgynous, and Trans* Folks

Lord, let the pronouns we use be a balm, rather than a wound. Give us the strength of mind and the right heart to see loved ones as the people they are, rather than the often incorrect surface, and the courage to ask strangers, and not assume the easier answer. Amen.

A cacophany of circumstances, and a candle failure

Things that have happened since the last post here:

-brought home a Book of Common Prayer, because I was getting tired of guesswork
-wrote a letter to someone who I have not spoken to in months, painfully
-realized that I really need to step my game up in school
-wrestled with the concept of God
-wrestled with the concept of love
-wondered if we are not all deceived, and all of this meaningless
-listened to a sermon about how love is the force that animates the universe, even if we don't understand anything about the afterlife, or even this life, that is a thing that remains true
-realized I don't have to understand love to believe in it
-made it most of the way through Bishop Spong's Wrestling the Bible from the Fundamentalists, which definitely deserves a post of its own -was informed that I'm spending approximately 250% more time in the newsroom than my position warrants, and this probably has to do with the school problems
-subsequently found more time to do schoolwork and more time to pray and attend Scripture study
-was asked to help lead a Celtic Prayer Service, with two other kids
-proceeded to, with the two other leaders, make a complete hash of the service, including an eternal awkward two minutes in which every match failed to light the first candle, and the lighter I offered the attempting leader only sent up sparks and burned his fingers, until our rector finally took pity on us (or realized that we were simply not going to make it) and retrieved a working lighter from his office... and then we forgot the meditative silences (which, to be fair, were not outlined in the bulletin)

...like I said, we made a hash of it. I am not sure why this has not caused me to have the deep abiding urge to curl up into a ball of shame and die, besides that either the "oh my God we fucked up" instinct is, indeed, a 'we' and not an 'I' or possibly, the church has been established in my subconscious as a safe and loving place, and I no longer believe on some deep level that making a mistake is going to make everyone turn on me like angry wolves. Probably a little of both.

Anyway, I've go to sleep. The missing element on that list up there is "found a cheap monitor for my laptop, so it's actually usable again," so there's that. I can type up entries now, but I'll probably continue to write them first. That seems to work better for the brain.

Counting blessings, I think.

Personal Background Time. For six years, I worked in fairly close quarters with a friend, who was also my supervisor. (It was a small store, and I did love the job. But I don't recommend friendships between authority levels at work, for the record.) He never quite understood that I didn't mind having an ambiguous gender identity - in fact, our gender identity discussions usually ended badly both in and out of work. To that end, for the full six years that I knew him, he would comment, frequently, on my appearance, and how I could better feminize it. Sometimes it was teasing jokes about how my clothes/hair made me look like a boy, and if I would just try, I could probably look so much more like a girl! How if I would wear my hair long, or wear earrings, or wear makeup, and honestly could I really blame customers for getting it wrong? (No, I didn't mind so much, since my gender was quite ambiguous intentionally. But that was hard to communicate.)

After a while, it actually got to kind of hurt. I'd wear eyeliner because I had a meeting, or for whatever reason, and get SHOCK, or wear earrings and get teased, or wear feminine clothes and get backhanded compliments on how that was cool, if only I did it more often, and it just... hurt. When I got my hair cut, there would often be several minutes of teasing about how nice it looked, Young Man, and sometimes a "No, but it really does look good. More feminine."

So, in the grand scheme of things, it's not a big deal that the response to the haircut I got last Friday was positive. And there's no way to non-awkwardly thank people, sincerely and completely, for their words... because I don't think I can adequately say how grateful I am to be around people whose comment is "I do like your haircut. It's very... you." Or that, despite the teasing, my individual style, without makeup or fashion-directional things, is cool, is mine, works for me.

When you've had your identity constantly under barrages of snide comments for much of your life, it is incredibly awesome to have people who not only don't take potshots at your gender identity and appearance, but genuinely affirm it. I guess that's just not something I ever thought of as being part of life, but my God, I am accepted for who I am here, not only in the workplace but at church. Which is something I never expected at all.

I am so utterly blessed in this life.

Psalms and prayers and the like

Ah, damn. I had this post written up about the Psalms, but I left it in the notebook in my dorm room. Basically, the one for All Saints Day was really quite disturbing. Not having been to Scripture Study in ages, singing it on Sunday was the first time I'd seen it.

149:5 Let the faithful exult in glory; let them sing for joy on their couches.
Yeah, okay, with you so far...
:6 Let the high praises of God be in their throats and two-edged swords in their hands,
...okay, I guess?
:7 to execute vengeance on the nations and punishment on the peoples,
--wait, what?
:8 to bind their kings with fetters and their nobles with chains of iron,
whoa whoa whoa, what the hell are we singing?!
:9 to execute on them the judgment decreed.
NOPE.
This is glory for all his faithful ones. Praise the LORD!"
THIS IS ONE "HONOR" I COULD DO WITHOUT KTHX

No, seriously though, Psalmist what are you even doing. There's something terribly surreal about hearing a congregation sing words like that in unison, accompanied by organ, without pause. Like... guys? Guys? Anyway. I'm rather glad to, at this point in my life, have the understanding that these were written by a fairly large number of people over a long period of time, and are not the inerrant word of God directly inspired and literally true in every particular. I sent an email back the the awesome dude who runs Scripture Study asking how we're supposed to get past that kind of discordance, if there's some sensible and reasonable Episcopal explanation, or we just sort of... continue to delight in the paradox of faith. He indicated the latter.

'kay, then.

17:3 If you try my heart, if you visit me by night, if you test me, you will find no wickedness in me; my mouth does not transgress.
17:4 As for what others do, by the word of your lips I have avoided the ways of the violent.

That's from this week's. I cringe for entirely different reasons. Yeah... my mouth transgresses, alright. If you test me, you will find all manner of wickedness and folly and transgression. I may have avoided the ways of the violent, but I have not walked in the paths of the righteous, either. I think maybe some of the psalms are more honest and emotional than others - but that's songwriting for you.

The post I had written concluded with a few verses from one of the ones I particularly liked, and the prayer that's been floating around my head for a couple weeks now, but I don't remember the former. Lord, let my mind be strong to see the truth, and my hand quick to record it; let my heart see what is right, and my voice reveal it. ...Oh God, please don't let me fuck this up.

Prayer, and scenery, and youth groups.

I never noticed how beautiful the view from the Northwest side of the library is - I'm on the second floor. Three sets of big windows. In the foreground of the left, the yellow branches of a willow, with green scattered throughout; farther back and in the further right-hand part of the window, a dull orange tree in a rounded triangle. Along the bottom frame of the windows, dark pines and orange hardwoods rise a few inches up into bluish dusty pine-covered hills, halfway up the window comprising, as usual, the horizon. The next window-set starts with a bright, glossy scarlet tree throwing a few branches out towards the center. It's not the blood-red of a sugar maple, but the pinkish-deep red of a Japanese maple. There's another of the tall dull orange trees, and a yellow-orange willow fading into a more vivid orange tree of some kind or other, all in the background - the Psychology building, unfortunately, is the background for that one, all harsh concrete and sharp vertical windows, rather than gentle desert-pine hills. The last set of windows is a cacophony of color, just trees jumbled together against the background of wires rising over the stadium, which manages to be pretty and symmetrical, rather than harsh and discordant.

Last night, I attended the student Methodist group. It was interesting. Er. I don't know if I can fully express how incredibly uncomfortable "contemporary Christian music" makes me. There's just something that seems so hollow about them, the 'modern' hymns, and so your brain is free to fill in its own background meaning, and I suppose it will come as no big surprise that most of my past associations with Christian youth groups are overwhelmingly* negative. A circle of kids about my own age in a room with modern contemporary lyrics on a slideshow accompanied by an electric keyboard feels almost as unsafe as, comparatively, a stone floor and a group of people standing to sing the Doxology, does safe. It's fellowship, but it doesn't fit. It feels - not wrong, but shallow. I didn't bolt and run. But a not-insignificant part of me wanted to. I'm torn between thinking it's important to challenge that part of me - to accept that everyone has a different path and there's nothing wrong with youth groups and contemporary hymns have meaning for a lot of people and that's not a bad thing... but at the same time, I think it is okay to accept that that's a legitimate path for some people, but I am not going to force myself to feel the same way.

Relatedly, the Methodist p... priest? pastor? preacher? Oh God I don't know any terminology - anyway, she gave us some background on prayer beads and some interesting thoughts on them and the evening's activity was making a small set. I didn't know Anglicans had a prayer bead tradition. Er, a recent one, I guess. 'S interesting.

And unrelatedly, I have a somewhat massive and looming article to get in this weekend, if I can get the information together, and it's just news-big enough that I really, really don't want to put it off for another week. I've sorta been praying for guidance on this, which is... new. Normally "prayers for guidance" are a lot more general, and tend to consist of things like "I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm pretty sure it's wrong. HELP PLZ." Specifically asking for help and understanding and strength in the face of an individual task seems weird. Like I'm going back to the way we were Supposed to pray when I was a kid. Think I'm okay with that, though.

*I don't just mean individually, though I've got plenty of bad experiences of my own. I cannot think of a single anecdote in my entire lexicon that involves youth groups and portrays them in a positive light. Not one. Probably sample bias, though.

Aftermath (Or: Sausages and the Canonical Laws)

"So, what did you think?" said about everyone who I'd talked to at all this weekend. Our rector had a somewhat different question. "How has this changed the way you think about religion?" (Paraphrased. I don't remember his exact wording.)

I'm trying, still, to sort that out. While listening to a presentation about - some international relief fund, anyway - I found an answer to a question surfacing. The question, never quite verbalized, but lurking semi-permanently under the mental surface for several hours, went something like: "But what is the point of all this administrative stuff?"

It's really hard, as an individual, to have a good answer to "What have you done, today, to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the prisoners, comfort the sick, the lonely, the widows and poor..." As a body, we have a far much better... a... well, we have the avenues to answer that question, anyway. I don't know that it's ever "enough." But it's a hell of a lot better than trying, and failing, to do it alone.

At the same time, though... a lot of talk about organization, development, and mammon, and not so much talk about Love? I'm torn. On the one hand, "feed the hungry" is pretty damn important. Yes, I think, more important than "make sure the hungry also convert to Episcopalians." Or even Christians. That's a - a thing a lot of more hard-line evangelicals do that drives me crazy. "We'll feed them, but only if they agree with our doctrines [out loud]."

But... there's a weird undercurrent in some of the conversations about "bringing in the Sstrangers" that seems to go back to the same flipping numbers game! Bring people in, get them into the church, and add them to the tally - even if they don't actually agree with or understand or care about what's going on in the service. Presto! Better numbers - look, the church isn't dying, isn't struggling, attendance is up! Bah.

So I guess I'm with our rector on that one. Social justice is awesome. It's necessary. It's something we absolutely should be doing. But it cannot be empty of the gospel. We should still be looking for Love in that effort. Love must be the center of our missions, of our outreach, of our works, or what the hell is the point? Likewise, sitting around staring at our navels and contemplating theoretical love without ever doing anything about it isn't much better. Gah, I don't know. Like everything else, it's a paradox and a balance and the Episcopal Church seems to be looking, always, for that balance, rather than just shrugging and letting it go. Which is the important part.

And I'm sitting up [or I was last night, when I wrote this out], having gotten out of the newsroom at a reasonable hour, turning this over on paper with the hope that ink will make it make sense, as neurons tend not to. I do know that this doesn't change my belief that I am in the right place here, at the Episcopal Church. Solidifies it, to some extent. Yes, it's an organization that is made up of flawed, broken humans, and therefore--
but maybe that's why we have so many prayers asking God to look favorably on the Church, and the church.

And I am coming to believe that schism really is a greater sin than heresy. That it is far, far better to stand in the company of a people willing to strive for love together, in all our broken flawed selves, than to seek love alone-- how can we see God if we do not look with and in each other?

Environmental influences, Reflector

For the past day or so, Arcade Fire's Reflektor has been rattling around in my head - alternately loud echoes of the refrain and quiet demands to be played again. The guys in the newsroom have rather more diverse (and, I have to admit, just plain better) taste in music than I do. I've learned a lot of stuff and started listening to bands I'd forgotten existed.

Yesterday morning, we finished layout on the paper over an hour early, so when the .pdfs had been sent, I headed down to Scripture Study, for the first time on time (or really at all) since the quarter started. It was... I shy away from the word 'edifying' as a general rule for various reasons, but... yeah. Spiritually fulfilling? God, I love these people. (Things to work on: loving the world outside the people I know. That's about a million times harder, I can't help but notice.)

It's strange how we can take solace, soul-nourishing fellowship, from such completely different settings. Sitting in a polygon circle talking about Jacob's blessing and arguing with God and the nature of pain with the church study group is an atmosphere that, on its surface, could not be more different from leaning against the brick wall outside of the newsroom, late at night or very, very early in the morning, talking through wreaths of smoke before we go back in to finish the week's edits. But there's something in my soul that craves both.

The Diocesan convention is this weekend. Our rector is having some minor (we hope) health issues. I'm trying to redirect static nervous energy into prayer instead of worrying... but worrying is a lot easier, comes more naturally, than prayer. Apparently no one bothered to inform humanity while it was evolving that worrying is a completely useless impulse. (Seriously though, what kind of an evolutionary advantage could anxiety possibly have? Bah.)

This was originally written longhand, and typed up over three different devices - two borrowed from school, and the last a two-inch touchscreen. I do humbly beg pardon for any loss of coherency. There was another paragraph written, about call-and-response, but I'll think leave it off for now and poke at that idea later.

Unrelatedly, layout housekeeping:

...more recently, it was pointed out to our class at large that light text on dark background is very, very difficult to read. I think I knew that on some level, but had forgotten. (I'm running a news blog for class, in theory. In practice, it hasn't really got any content yet. I doubt I'll ever link the two, but it's cool to be picking up the knowledge.)

So I'll be tinkering a bit with the layout here. I like it where it is now, but might fool around with it further. I hope it's a bit easier on the eyes with this background and such.

Uncentred rambling.

I am sad, and afraid, and the world has taken on a lot of very sharp edges in the past few days. A conflict has been growing in my life, shadowing larger and larger segments of thought, coyly, vying for attention; I have been trying in vain to ignore it.

It was pointed out to me some time last summer that I did not have to allow my profession to define me, that the immense stress I was under had quite a bit to do with an identity crisis. I had somehow managed to hold the impression that I had to choose humanity or reporting – to grieve for a life lost, or to cheer at a story told right. A false choice, in that respect, but the worldview it represented was more or less accurate, as far as I can see. Wrong, but accurate.

Wrong, because obviously I do not have to choose profession over humanity; that doesn’t even make sense. Accurate, because the way my mind usually works, I throw myself utterly into whatever work I have – even more so, when it’s something I’m passionate about. It was easy over the non-class summer, to spend six to eight hours at a time doing yard work, because that is honestly my natural inclination – to go overboard, to take one aspect of life and make it the whole.

It’s a good thing sometimes. I do believe that work can be a sacrifice to the Lord, if we put our hearts to it. That’s no less true now than it was over the summer, I don’t think – making a layout line up perfectly, spacing an article and a headline, spending a night working at an article that needs editing, that’s not less holy than making the facing edge of a juniper bush line up perfectly along the center of a parking lot, or raking leaves, or pulling weeds.

The problem starts to show up when the work starts to consume life – and it does, always, trend in that direction. I don’t know how to stop halfway, and I don’t know how to find a balance. So now I’ve got reporting at the center of my life, and I’m pretty sure there is Someone else who is supposed to be there. No amount of prayer by the side of the river in the night seems to carry into the newsroom in the evening, where the paper reasserts itself as the center of my heart.

Is that blasphemy? That God does not reach with me into the newsroom? I’m not saying God is outside; the blame lies with me, with my inability to change. I have been trying to remind myself that Love is the reason I am a journalist. From Love springs all light, from Love springs all that is good. From God, light, love, all. The problem is… I lose sight of that. Constantly – and I do mean constantly. I can’t seem to keep that fixed. It slips out of perception, leaving me with no center, and the first thing I come across slides in and takes its place. Which, I am pretty sure, is blasphemy. Of some sort or other – allowing something other than love to take the place in the center of one’s heart? How could it not be? (On the other hand, I’m also pretty sure it’s the origin of most human failings, and, well, Grace.)

The more I think about it, the more obvious it is that asking for grace, admitting that I need forgiveness, need grace, not only to reach for perfect love but to reach for love at all… is sorta massively necessary. I can’t look away, I can’t avoid it, and my pride is such an idiotically useless thing. It should be the easiest thing in the world to give up, and sometimes it actually makes me angry that it’s still clinging. (Which is, of course, a prideful reaction in itself. Damn it, can’t anything ever be simple?)

Anyway.

I am sad and afraid, because I am making mistakes and not doing every part of my job right, and because I have allowed my job to become the center of my heart (again), this shakes me more than it should.

The worst part is, it does need to be near the center. I just need – balance. Maybe this year I can actually work on that. Maybe.

Beauty and delight and other such things

It's been utterly beautiful, the past few weeks. Even when the sky is overcast, cold raindrops blowing sporadically out of the West, the world seems to have this ethereal beauty, surreal... glorious. It's Autumn. Colors, frost, the shapes of the sky, so enormous out here, and the dorsal curves of the hills rising up to meet it, some outlined in spare desert rock, some carpeted in dark pine trees... oh, I don't know. (Also, the blue spruce. They're such gorgeous trees, and the wind through them is really... musical.)

The other day, I had the thought, "I was made for this," meaning reporting - and that all else, beauty and laughter, was a sort of gift, outside of my purpose. Sort of a bonus to life. Ridiculous, of course, and arrogant to think a purpose could be that clear (and I'm just as prone to mistakes in reporting as anything else, of course). And... well, I am more than a one-purpose tool with the strange ability to occasionally appreciate non-utilitarian things.

But it was interesting, because beauty is a gift, really. And I think it's really easy sometimes to miss that, to eschew that gift. Some churches seem to regard it - delight - as almost sinful. It still astounds me sometimes, to think ghat God meant us to laugh, to delight in Creation. It also makes beauty that much sweeter, though. This is a gift, this ray of light through a fluttering cloud of red and gold, this spray of sea on rock, this rill down a cliff side, this flock of flashing waxwings...

This is the world the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.

It's especially easy in the fall, though.

Life is so much easier on paper.

So I'm writing a carefully nuanced apology to someone who got burned in my article last week. The entry from "Forward Day by Day" yesterday was all about forgiveness, and the vague undertones about not carrying a world's weight of guilt on our backs. That's a hell of a tough thing to take on mentally every day. Taking it on at the end of a day might work. You've made your mistakes, committed your sins, and now it is time to embrace and seek forgiveness and call it a day, rather than beat yourself up. Yup.

Problem is, the next day, you get up, and keep making mistakes, and keep sinning, and hurting people, and doing things wrong, and basically screwing up your life and every other life in reach on a cosmic level. And... that's where it's no longer a matter of asking for forgiveness and letting go of the beating-yourself-up impulse. In this world we're all pretty closely tied together; it's nearly impossible for our actions to effect only ourselves. We need to seek forgiveness from everyone else, too. Frequently. Constantly. Which means humbling yourself. A lot.

See, this article I wrote talked to a handful of people about the resignation of someone on campus. What they told me was that he'd been asked to resign over a fairly nasty scandal that had happened to folks in/under his authority, which he hadn't stopped. No one would give details on the record, because one of the principals of the story was still in proximity. So I had a story that was supposed to be a little brush-up that turned into a scandal half-told. What I should have done was told my boss that we couldn't run the article until I had a chance to dig the story up in full. But it was two days to print, and I had another article to finish, and classwork, so I printed it - as much of it as I could back up without delving, I thought, into overly personal issues - and left it.

There are a few people who were mentioned - necessarily - in the first two paragraphs, who are quite unhappy about the tone. Understandably so. I didn't have enough to give the full story, so I gave what I could: folks were unhappy, sources say the environment was negative, and HR investigated and fired people. And then I talked about the positive forward movement in the new staff they're hoping for.

I've now heard from two of the people who are unhappy about it. I'm trying to work out a way to apologize - because honestly and sincerely, that is something I need to do. My haste to get the story out led to them both getting an unfair rap, and my name is on that article. Those are my words, and I used them wrongly. That requires an apology.

But... at the same time, there was a scandal, and telling "the other side" does not mean I can just brush off what I've been told. So I'm trying to figure out how to word an apology that says, sincerely, "I screwed up, and I'm sorry, and I will do anything in my power to rectify that," but also to clarify that there's nothing I can do to change the facts, and the answer to telling a story without one side is not to go back and tell the story again, but without the other side. "I screwed up, but I can't screw up again intentionally in your favor?"

Or the simplest, "I'm sorry. Please give me another chance to write this and piss off all sides equally."

Life is just so much easier as a theoretical exercise.

The Illusion of loneliness?

Sometimes I think there must be an army - no, a nation - no, an entire planet's worth - of us, stumbling through life unawares. That was how the sermon yesterday morning closed, with a quote from Einstein about the distinction of consciousness being an illusion, which I'm probably badly misrepresenting. I can't recall the correct words at the moment. (It was really good, though, the sermon. Homily. Reflection. Is there a word that's more correct than the others there? Faith, and how it's a growing thing we must bring to life within ourselves, like love, rather than a static thing that is given to us, which is sorta what the disciples seemed to be asking for.)

Biological Anthology is slowly picking up speed, though we're still spending a lot of time on building blocks. Our prof today, in explaining mitosis and meiosis and diploids and haploids and somatic cells and gametes, paused after explaining the X and Y chromosomes, and what they mean, to point out that this referred to sex and not gender, by the way. Y' know, I've sat through the lecture of gametes and somatic cells more times than I can count, and I have never, ever, ever had a prof or teacher make that distinction. It made me absurdly happy - afterwards, I stopped by to talk a bit, to thank him for that and attempt to clarify a disagreement about mathematics.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, at this point, when conversation with people turns to gender identity and religion and all the deepest points of what constitutes our humanity. But it still takes me aback sometimes. (He accused me of being politician-level of evasive with regards to poetry - I hadn't realized, I have developed the habit, or possibly skill, of dodging certain sensitive subjects. "What makes a poem good, for you?" is one of them. "Well, that depends on the poem, that's like asking what makes a person good, isn't it?") Talking religion is an odd thing, and an interesting one, and one that makes sense for a conversation that started going around about Creationism. What throws me for a loop is when it veers, unexpectedly, into gender. Oh, shit. But it... well, I dunno.

There must be a world of us, stumbling through life so very alone, trying to figure out where and how we got to who we are. Queer, and trying to first admit that to ourselves, and then to each other, and then staring down the world with the scarlet rainbow flashing over our hearts...

Anyway. Daniel is in California for the week, so it'll likely be two more weeks before I see him - having not seen him since before his birthday. I'm going to resist the urge to grind my teeth at reality, and take two weeks to do something somewhat spectacular. Letter-writing is a dying art, I have been told (sometime, not recently). While talking about gender today, and the way some people fall in love with minds, and gender doesn't much enter into it, I explained that I'd come out here for a boy whose mind I fell in love with before I ever laid eyes on him. Thinking about Daniel makes me grin like an idiot, and I don't even care. Talking about him, even in passing, I suspect leads passers-by to imagine me some sort of defunct sappish fool.

I have two weeks, and an elaborate plot involving baked ziti and a ridiculous amount of cheese and sauce. (I was going to make it tomorrow and freeze it until Saturday - now I'm glad I asked, I'll hold off and do that next week.) The other part of the plan involves moss, waterfalls, and books, and is approximately half complete (it takes a full month to work all the way, but I didn't have the funding to start a month before his birthday). And in the meantime, I'll haunt the library at night to talk to him, or sit in silence with the invisible wires of internet and thought between us.

There must be worlds of us, stumbling through life under the painful illusion that we're all alone, in parallel journey with a thousand thousand great-souled companions.

Pendulums

The theology in which I was raised was overwhelmingly physical - divorced from the spiritual, or nearly so. God was Spirit - we were to trust Him to deal with all that, and steer clear of meddling too much with that side of the line, lest we be led astray by evil spirits.

The opposite of this, of course, is New Age religion, in which spirituality is basically all that matters, and half the point is (or seems to be) to get as far away from physical being as possible, moving towards 'pure' spirituality. (C.S. Lewis had a villain of this bent in Perelandra.) And that - or very close to it - is where I wound up in my rambling journey.

So now, having been all over the map of both realms, I find myself at some odds with the Episcopal Church doctrines, very solidly betwixt and between. (Not that the church is lukewarm. Far from it - firmly, solidly, and beautifully embracing the paradoxes of faith. But... those paradoxes necessarily mean being in the middle.) As a Baptist, I understood Baptism and Communion to be symbolic - the physical reminders of our faith, and no more. As a whatever-on-earth I was in the time after, I didn't think about Baptism or Communion, except in occasional memory. I thought about vision quests and sweat lodges (look, I said I was sorry). (I should note that I have since been made aware that this is not the case - of course - in ALL Baptist churches. But it was in mine.)

Coming back to church, my old habits quickly re-asserted - although acknowledging the Spirit, even welcoming... I have no idea what pronoun to use there really - I still thought of Baptism, at least, as a symbol of faith, and it was entirely startling to hear that it is... otherwise. Sacraments... take some getting used to, as a concept. That the action, this physical action, is not merely symbolic, but is a direct... conduit? Uh, path? Bridge? A way of opening oneself to the Spirit. Literally. Literally!

That's the part I'm still not quite... I mean, literally. When they - when we - say it, the Spirit, all those prayers - they mean something. They mean a whole lot, actually, but the big thing, the major part of it all, is that God is present. I guess it's just been a long, long time since I thought seriously enough about that. Childlike faith? Oh God, please. Please.

Anyway, today I talked for a while with our senior warden about sacraments, and priests, and what the deal is with administering sacraments, and why, if priests are not uber-humans (in the literal sense there, as 'over'), it is always/only a priest who can administer sacraments. She clarified that no one will strike down a layperson for administering a sacrament. Priests are just - sort of trained? To open themselves to the Spirit, I guess. The way I put it, after, trying to word it all, was that we trust priests to be doing that, to be able to - they were ordained, and thus we trust them to do the work of it in faith. I am making a hash of this point, and so I am going to close this specific discussion, because I think I understand this, even if I can't exactly put it into words.

It has been difficult to retrain myself to think of God. To think of God as neither a distant, modernist clockmaker, nor as... well, there's the fundamentalist too-literal Always There in the sense that if we have "Enough Faith," God will reach down and make our lives easier. It's gospel-of-wealth-ish. And that's one I run screaming from. But then you've got that paradox of if God is here, why doesn't he reach down and Fix stuff? Us? But, y' know, that I do understand. Kinda. So thinking of God as here in Spirit - in a literal sense - argh, how do I put this? Spiritually here. Here in spirit. It's really easy to start thinking of that in really lukewarm/wishy-washy terms. "Here in spirit" we say often in secular terms to translate to Really Not Here at All, but maybe thinking about us. Which is most certainly not what is meant by God being here in Spirit. The Spirit - the Holy Spirit - is a real and present... er, presence. Person. Being. Real and present. And ministering to our spirits. Which, y' know, Eucharist. And prayer. And everything.

Like I said, it's a struggle. But it's a struggle I enter with joy. I'd rather wrestle with these concepts, work towrds a greater understanding of God, and spend my whole life asking these questions (even ever unanswered) than dodge away, back to one end of the pendulum or the other.

The missing piece of this narrative is the part where part of my fleeing the church, and eventual wanderings through New Age stuff, was a rejection of all things... er, church-ish. I believed myself sundered from God, I guess. I remember thinking, very seriously, that part of the reason I would not go back to church was because I could not. I was only half-joking, if even half, when I would joke about bursting into flames if I stepped across the threshold of a church. God was Up There, and His strength was behind the Church, which had cast me out for being... whatever I was, not entirely human, I thought.

So to return to a flock, to forsake the spirits I tried to chase down for so long, and kneel to receive the Holy Spirit and believe, honestly believe, that it is no symbol, that the Spirit I believed would strike me down is in fact there to strengthen and uplift...

Like I said, it's taking some serious thought, and some getting used to. Maybe I never will be used to it, and maybe that is a good thing.

Rain, and newsprint, and Grace

The sky continues to lighten behind the steadily falling rain outside. It's rained here more in the past week than it usually does in a month. I still have the trailing edge of the sinus bug, but I can live with stuffed sinuses more easily than with the mental haze of a fever, and anyway I'm trying not to bitch about such things.

Last night was our first Production Night of the year. We were missing a couple editors, but by and large, it's a good crowd. We staged and shot the cover (listed as a "photo illustration," rather than a photo) around a noise violation story, News and Scene continued what looks like it's going to be a more or less permanent friendly rivalry, the idea of a newsroom D&D group was thrown around... and we all got out in time to catch Breaking Bad.

The sermon yesterday was strong. Challenging. Not even remotely comfortable, and I do mean that as a compliment. Because of the nature of mankind, it can be really easy - it is really easy - to set ourselves on the side of Lazarus, nod sagely, and stand around discussing the wicked rich man. Yesterday, our priest focused instead on what he saw as the focal point of the parable: the chasm. The chasm between rich and poor, commonly called an income gap, that we have generally decided is beyond our power to do anything about. "What kind of a heart must this man have had, to walk by Lazarus every day, with the dogs licking at his sores, and not even see him?" Which, when followed by a point about the learned ability to walk past homeless people without even seeing them, and winding up resenting them for their existence infringing on your own comfortable reality...

It was the kind of sermon that you're grateful closes with something like "and this is why, in prayer, we say 'We have sinned against you in thought and in deed, in things done and left undone,' so that we can acknowledge our shortcomings and, through grace, work towards being better."

I'm paraphrasing and bastardizing. Point is, grace is important and every now and then or every day constantly or whenever, it's good to be reminded why we need it. Not just as forgiveness, but as a bridge to be better.

There's a long thought in the works about sacraments, and how and (possibly) why I have been struggling with their concept. But that's for later, I think. Enjoy the week's morning, internets.

Back to School, and all that entails

I swear, every year it's the same thing - twice as bad when you start the year with a heavy cold and fever, apparently. The first few days of school, I'm confused, apathetic, listless, and terrified for what all of this means. And then I get to the first straight-up journalism class, and it's like a bolt of lightning, and suddenly the year is not going to be long enough for all the badass stuff I'm going to do with it.

...unfortunately, enthusiasm about my major does not fix having a godawful head cold, so even though the fever is ebbing/nearly gone, my hearing is still wonky from my head being full of mucus, and my nose is chapped and bleeding because I've been blowing it all week, and my tongue is swollen where I've been accidentally biting it apparently? And I'm still in a room with a handful of people who don't seem to understand that a living space needs to be a retreat from the world, not a place to engage in it even more enthusiastically, so getting work done has been problematic. I'm trying to tell myself that the year is going to be better if I get all this stuff jumped on right away. Gotta get two articles written for the paper going out this Wednesday, plus track down three books ASAP for two classes, and then start pinning down financial aid stuff before it gets too late in the quarter...

but my body is going "now is time for huddle in bed and sniff miserably." So we'll see if I can get anything done anyway.

Went back to church during scripture study to drop off a few bags a friend had lent me, but she split immediately after the discussion had closed, without saying much. I'd be worried, but I know exactly what she was thinking - most of us, I'd guess, were thinking the same. The man who runs the group is crazy smart, knows more about ancient history (and non-ancient history) than you'd think possible, pulls out a new language seems like every week, and has a lot of really interesting thoughts about theology - coming from a Catholic seminary background, he often trades jibes about differing theologies with the rest of us non-Episcopalian-upbringing folks. This sounds like a recipe for an epic discussion group, doesn't it? And frequently it is! The problem is, there's a few people who are really good at going on, and on, and on for quite a ways, and they have a tendency to monopolize the floor for ten to twenty minutes at a time, not letting the group leader get a word in edgewise, and talking over him when he goes to speak up. I've been guilty of it as well; it's something I need to watch for, a behavior that can be really obnoxious - especially as, hypocritically, I notice it in others and not myself.

NaNoWriMo is coming up, and I'm excited. I'm writing about Crows. I have a world-ish, and a very sketchy main character, and something that might be a vague plot. If I can get a laptop screen by the time November starts, I may actually have a novel! In the meantime, hopefully I can figure out some way to make school happen.

New Quarters

I keep trying to remind myself that everything will look different when I am not suffering a head cold; right now, the entire year looms like a threatening volcano. I have two roommates, one of whom is in the same bedroom as me, and both of whom are talkative, outgoing, and... is there a word? Normal? The girl with whom I share sleeping quarters also happens to be a morning person. Her boyfriend lives in the room directly under us. Both of them are friends with our neighbor across the hall, and a group of other folks who enjoy going out to party. My bed and desk are closer to the door. Anthropology looks like a good class - the Observer is, I'm sure, also going to be good. The rest of the world looks pretty bleak, but maybe it will be easier to handle when I have enough energy to face the world.

...okay, between the cologne and the noise I think probably I am going to have to inform my roommate that her boyfriend spending multiple hours here is Not Cool at all. This is why I was looking to grab the solo room! The two of them are okay hanging out in each other's room and I am not okay with this.

Yeah, just gonna die this year.

A Journey on the Equinox

It's a pleasant day; this morning, Daniel and I got up fairly early, and cooked a few omelettes; spinach, onion, and pepperjack for me, spinach, onion, sausage and pepperjack for the rest. Dad hassled Daniel about disliking scrambled eggs, and Daniel quietly voiced a dislike of my father's leaving a pan of sausages to be cooked by a vegetarian (not because I couldn't - he simply thought it rude). Overall though, a good morning (my older sister is massively jealous of Daniel's ability to make pretty omelettes), followed by an excellent walk with the dogs over the ridge at the park. Now I'm sitting at a departure gate, having said goodbyes to family, and a see-you-later to my best beloved, who's on another airline.

I have two bags so full of books I can barely carry them, and a suitcase with the rest; my little sister gave me the coolest painting for my birthday last month (a raven on a background of kiwi fruit), which she'd done over the summer. Yesterday was a barbecue with most of my family - two aunts and an uncle, one of my cousins and his wife and daughters, and the grandparents. So missing... maybe five people? It was pretty awesome to see everyone. Daniel now has near-universal familial approval. All the aunts like him, Grandpa likes him, and that's about all I could ask for; the cousins and siblings and (mostly) parents like him, too.

He also put his finger on something that has bothered me about a more distant relative for some time: "He has different sets of boundaries for girls and guys." And he puse girls' boundaries. Huh.

I'd like to have had more time to visit with everyone, buuuut at the same time, I was reaching my limit of tolerance with my dad, a bit. So that might have been a good time to head out. Anyway. School starts in three days, my family is healthy and happy, and I'll be home tomorrow. Life is good.

Is it a bad sign that my father's disapproval of Al Jazeera only strengthens my ambition to work there someday? I have very little tolerance for hearsay; I still read the Blaze, and glance through the Drudge Report, even if I know Fred Clark's take is going to be twice as well-written and ten times as honest, because assuming I know what they're going to say is intellectually lazy, and eventually dishonest.

But the reaction to them here is, "Well, I imagine Goebbels' radio broadcasts were popular at the time, too." Which, yeah, no. Al Jazeera is one of the few - possibly the only - truly independent news source in the Middle East. "How do you know they're true? Who do you confirm it with?" ...any other international media outlet, two days later with all the context sawed off?

His remaining arguments were: 1) they're anti-Israel (how does he know? they're staffed by Muslims. Duh, don't be naive.) 2) What am I, some kind of Muslim sympathizer? To which it's honestly not worth marshaling an argument; any logic will fail against a worldview that puts millions of people into a "Generic Enemies" category without hesitation.

(I wrote that last on my sister's laptop yesterday evening. I dislike it; it falls trite and pointless and pseudo-philosophical. The thing about words is they're actually quite useless when they're most needed. It comes to this: I am sorry, deeply sorry, for the grief and pain caused by death. And what more is there to say on that?)

It’s been an odd couple days. Back home, a man has passed away after a battle with cancer that lasted years. He was much beloved by all the congregation; I have heard no ill words spoken of him since I joined, and many bright. We never met, and yet the world is darker for his loss - the way every single person would brighten when talking of him, just that. But even in grief, the folks I am in contact with back home say rather, that Heaven rejoices in his life. I would have mourned with them; instead I am here, with my family, so removed from grief and mourning that I have reminded myself of the fact. It’s a strange dissonance.

Monday I went to a cemetery to write. It was a small, grassy plot, encroached a few yards in the back and corners by the surrounding woods and overhanging grapevines. There were no stones apparent - a little ways in, I found a marble plaque set into the ground. At the back, obscured by the trees, was a tall cross, in pink rough granite. There was a small shed, open and empty; all else was untouched. It was one of the most unsettling places I have ever been.

The only information I could find on it explained that it was where the almshouse buried their dead, many years ago. The almshouse is no longer standing. The graves were never marked.

I am glad that at Grace, they celebrate the life of the loved one who has passed beyond this world, and rejoice for the peace he will find at the end of his journey, even as they grieve and mourn his loss. I am glad that such a man, who gladdened every person who knew him, who was so deeply loved, will be remembered so well.

And... yet, I wonder how many lives were grieved, under that unmarked ground, and how many loved, and how many celebrated and mourned. It’s a strange and scary thought, that there were an untold number of people whose ends went so unremarked, because of their places as the castoffs of society.

But then I think about the folks mourning at Grace today, and tomorrow, and I believe - I know - that if the poorhouse was still part of that town, if there were people living and dying there, they would reach out to whatever lives they could, to rejoice with the light of life, and they would mourn when those lights passed.

Structures fall, and graveyards are swallowed by trees and vines, and streets crack and fade, and hospitals and almshouses close or burn or are torn down. But people are still people, and I think that with or without grave markers, every life in that grassy plot was celebrated and mourned here, as well as above.

Theological Roots - they go deeper.

So today, I biked out to a church a few miles down the road; the bike is a hybrid, even tires and a big frame. The shoulders of the main drag here in town are really more like gutters: broken pavement, sand, glass, litter, and occasionally parked cars or trucks. I was on and off the sidewalk half the way out. The church was small, comfortable, but not home. The way the house of a friend might be more comfortable - bigger sofas, better paint, softer carpet, but your house, with its bare floors and tight corners and freezing north bedroom, is home. (That's probably not a healthy way to feel about church; it's not an exact metaphor, but it works.) The liturgy was different, but I think that might be the fact that it just changed anyway, because of the calendar (no, seriously, it takes me about four weeks to get used to the rhythm of a service and then it changes and I love this church and it is challenging and crazy) and the melody of the Psalm and the Offeratory are different. But also I'm thinking that, for all I have thought while reading literature that Grace is pretty laid-back, I realized today that it's a lot more formal than we could be. (I typed "it," but that didn't work, and then "they" feels wrong. We? We. ...huh.) It's hard to put an exact finger on it - there's just quite a bit more... ceremony, perhaps? The sermon, the hymns, the prayers, are said a bit more formally. But the sincerity of the church is exact. Maybe it's the way the building is. This church - Grace & St. Peter, I think - is small, carpeted... homey. The building at Grace is quite bigger, for an equal or smaller (and significantly older, on average) group of people, and it sort of echoes. Then there's the massive imposing organ, the wall faces, the stone floor, the long, immovable pews, the altar rail... yeah, I could see the building influencing worship.

Anyway.

After the service, I talked for a bit with a few of the folks - you can't slip out immediately after an Episcopal service. I mean, you can, technically, but it's quite difficult to pull off, and it doesn't feel right? It feels like a Proper Service involves talking and coffee afterwards. So by chance, I wound up talking to the woman who has written the Sunday School kids' lessons for the past fifty years or so. I was quite impressed - our Senior Warden had me read the few of those she had on hand, when I'd asked her for "as much information on the Church as possible," because she said she'd found that the way they were written often broke down the lessons brilliantly, good for adults as well as kids. That week, for example, had been the one - I'm not going to remember it all - where Jesus heals on the Sabbath. It was good, anyway. Not an easy lesson for kids, because it involved the "God loves us, but sometimes we do things that cannot be loved," thing, which is tough to teach.

And so we come to the point which is the most important, and the central I think, for me. After church, when I got home, the family was preparing to go to Farm Fest, which is an annual get-together for my dad and stepmom's workplace. I suppose I should clarify at this juncture that my dad's boss was, for a good seven or eight years of my life, our pastor. Have I explained the church from which I came? My friends will know. My friends may remember my rants, sometimes in anger and sometimes in sorrow, about how painfully misled and horrifying my early Christian education was. How huge of a part Biblical Literalism, and Bible-Worship, by which I mean idolatry, played in my life. How I feared God, and was taught to fear God, more than love or respect. How very broken I was by the time I would have been old enough to be a consenting Christian. My friends may also remember me talking about how our pastor said this, or said that, or taught these things that led me into such a spiritual trap.

It was with no small amount of trepidation that I sat down with him and his daughter, who was once my closest friend or so, to talk. About life, college, what exactly in blazes I was doing out in Washington, had I turned into a peacenik hippie (well, it depends on your definition - by his, no not even a little), and so on. And what was he doing? His life was good. Is good! Is really, really good - is centered in his faith in God, and love, and so even though his oldest son (my age) had brain cancer a few years ago and is now in remission... well, his faith is strong and his life is love and good. And now, how was I? With, you know, that.

I told him that yes, I was more liberal politically, but my politics are always formed by my theology... and my theology has also become more liberal. He nodded. So I told him that I had started going to church again. That he would perhaps not approve, but it was Episcopal-- and he interrupted me to say, Why would he disapprove of that? That he doesn't care about denomination, and never has: what matters is the Word. Now, my mother would go on, and on, and on, and on, y'all, about this corrupt denomination, or that corrupt denomination, and this poor misled flock, and that poor bunch of fools... and I always figured that was his preaching. Nope. He was staunch about transubstantiation (which I actually totally get), but the rest of it, yeah. That one hit me hard.

So I talked for a little while, about how I'd come to Grace and finally, finally come back to faith in God. That I'd never stopped really believing in God, but faith... was another story. He nodded.

"It's hard, because as humans, we cry out for love. We need it. And when that is shattered - it can take years to pick up the pieces."

"I - yes. Yes, it did. Ten years, at least. Maybe more."

"Some people never get that far."

Now - those lines sound like three lines that could be said a lot of ways, by a lot of people, to a lot of people, in a lot of places. Those few lines of dialogue could be fit into a long and meaningful sermon. But as big as those lines are, they are of equal size with what went unsaid between them. I don't know that I can clarify that any more. Perhaps I could, but it would take at least ten years.

Do you know, for the past five years - stretching out past that towards ten, but definitely not as long as ten - I thought that most of the painful, hurtful, bitter and biting and spiteful theology that formed my childhood was him. Was his preaching. And certainly his sermons were not... what I'd agree with, entirely, now. I'm pretty sure he's still a [young-earth] Creationist, for example. But. But, the more I think and try to remember now, the more I can remember my mother - who, remember, as our homeschool teacher, was with us all day every day - as the one to preach to us the gospel of fear and hate. And the little things: she filed the 'pentagrams' on the hubcaps of my little brother's army jeeps off. Lest they tempt us, or invite demons into our home - their kids had a freaking racecar rug - you know the type, with a road map laid out all over, and you'd push little cars around it. His kids played soccer - yes, with secular outside educated kids. For pity's sake, his girls wore shorts! The more I think back, the more I realize that it was her who was the influence of isolation and scary Quiverfull sort of life aims. He was just a fairly conservative Baptist.

Even the sermon that was based mostly on two punctuation marks was actually one of forgiveness, at its heart. One of our lay preachers gave a long speech during the last study to similar effect... er, with significantly more actual biblical background, but same overall message.

And now, I wonder, as someone who realized too late that his friend's wife had become dangerously insane and, rather than try to intervene, simply asked the family to remove themselves until they were whole, how does he think about how it all turned out? Does he know how bad it got? Would he want to? Probably not. I don't know that I'd want to.

I have drunk my fill of bitter anger, aimed at my mother. I have none left to offer at this realization that it was her who perverted the Love of God into a scourge to straighten her children. What could I say? She tried to kill us all; she made us homeless and destitute, she put us in a living situation with a pedophile, she ignored us until we became wild and uncontrollable, she broke our hearts and betrayed our trust and shattered our faith in love. And I say this all - now, fifteen years later, I can say this all - dispassionately, and with only an old, faraway ache, rather than an urgent hurt. I made my peace with her memory (though she still lives, technically, the odds that I will see her again in this lifetime are pretty small - and if I do, it would be on her deathbed, belike) some time ago - and what is spiritual abuse and toxic theology to weigh, added to the litany of hurts outlined above? She was worse than I remembered; he was better.

It makes me happy to see him, our old pastor, happy. He lives his faith, and lives in love, and that is good. I'm not going to grouse about the fact that his theology is more conservative than mine. He lives in faith and in love - isn't that the whole point?

What a bleeding holiday...

I am writing to you, internet, from my cellphone, in my parents' basement, and I am sitting here - no longer sobbing. I might be again, I will try to control it. Just barely made it over the 48 hour mark. My sister, after repeated warnings, got into politics with our grandparents, who happened to be over for dinner. The talk then was immigration. Specifically, of course, undocumented immigrants/illegal immigration. My sister, of course, got terribly upset (I just stopped listening to them to avoid such) and stormed off. Somehow we then started talking about bankruptcy, and I mentioned the new trend of debtor's prison. Long story short, I wind up listening to my grandmother say people should live within their means: they couldn't afford to send their kids to college. I explain that cannot go to college without ending up in debt, that I have no choice. At this point, given that I am all too cognizant of the fact that I am already in debt and only going to get deeper before I graduate, I am holding back tears. My grandfather wonders, aloud, why everyone needs to get a college degree anyway, since aren't there jobs out there that you don't need a hugely expensive degree to hold?

So I excuse myself, go to wash my face, and wind up sobbing because ever since I was sixteen, all anyone in my family would talk about was how I was wasting my potential and I should go to college and Dad, on and on about how my job didn't pay enough and I needed to get a Real Job, nevermind that I was making $12/hr at a retail store, and saving to pay my own tuition through community college.

Looks like I should've just offed my supervisor and spent the rest of my life as a manager of a retail store, wondering what would have happened if I had taken a chance and moved out west.

Then I came downstairs and plugged in my laptop.

The screen is cracked. The whole display is gone.

It took me something like four months to save up for that, three years ago. Right now, my parents - after a financially stressful summer - are going to spend a bit more than they're entirely comfortable with to get my stepbrother a laptop he really needs for school. I cannot, in good conscience, say a word about this to them. Which unfortunately includes weeping about it or complaining.

But seriously Lord, why? Was this really necessary? All at once like this?

Cleaning, Maps, Tortured Metaphors

So tomorrow night, Daniel is going to give me a ride across the pass, and the following morning I'm catching a flight back East for ten days. Outside of seeing friends and family, which is (of course) massively important, and saying goodbye to my cat (I really, really would rather bring her here. But it'll be another year before I can have a place for her, and it would not be even remotely fair to deny her a happy and loving home out there so that I can keep her with me. Letting her go is still one of the hardest things I have ever had to do; she was my companion and friend for eight years.) my goal there is to go through any and all material possessions that are not books, and disperse them among friends and family.

In the meantime, I'm looking around this room and trying to get it cleaned up before check-out tomorrow. It's been an odd couple of days. I foolishly assumed I'd be able to just stash all my stuff in the dorm for next quarter, but it won't be open - so a friend from church offered to let me put some stuff in her garage. I am more glad than ever to not have tons of stuff. Four boxes or so of clothes, a folded-up blanket, and a pair of half-height bookshelves. Done. God, I never ever want to have lots of stuff. I probably shouldn't be trying to lug this many books back out here, but ye gods do I miss those things. There's so many people I know out here who would really like some of 'em, too.

Anyway. It's half past midnight, and I'm procrastinating because I don't want to vacuum. I should really vacuum. *sigh.*

I have about a million questions about various things about the Episcopal church, and the thing is, although a lot of them probably have simple answers, what I really want to know is why. What translation is the Sunday lectionary done in? Yes, I know there's probably a definite answer for that. But why is that the translation? Is there an official tr okay by now I know how ridiculous it probably is to ask if there's an "official" or accepted/official translation for the Episcopal church, but there must be some common ground - I mean, there's a Catholic Church of Japan (that falls under the umbrella of Anglican Communion), so obviously there's some differences, but for the US Episcopal church is there a standard? Is there a standard with acceptable deviations ranging off in every direction, which seems to be the case generally for all the things? Why? How? Why?

I could probably go into lengthy introspective detail about why I'm so obsessive about learning as much as possible about this church. The simple version, I suppose, is that I don't want to get blindsided ever again. I was deceived for so very long, and although young, at some point I think I was complicit in my own deception. But that faith - such as it was- got shattered... no, not shattered. Bludgeoned repeatedly over several formative years. The painful part is how every figure in my life that was supposed to be trustworthy turned out to be not so. The part that still galls me is how the truth on which my life was founded, from my earliest years, was-- well, not a lie. Well. Yes, a lie. I don't know how to express it. I believe in God, and I do believe in the Scriptures (and in Reason, and, well, I suppose I'm coming around to Tradition), but the things that I believed in then were not God, nor Scripture, nor even truth. It was the false idol of a book with no context and the depth pounded out of it, and the Great Law of Obedience. And because I obeyed and trusted and didn't ask questions, I was deceived for many years and still have not found all of that trust, and in many ways I am still tied to the fear of that idol, and I am still reacting to and against that law.

And there is something, somewhere in me - perhaps the Inner Journalist - that has sworn to never fall into that trap again. I will never follow a church or a priest or a bishop or any authority without question. And yes, that's probably a reactionary way of life - but I want to know. I feel like I was raised on - oh, I don't know, the metaphor breaks down. Like I was raised on mud instead of water, and I stayed away from streams because I thought they were all mud and now I thirst for that water more than ever. Wow, that is an overwrought metaphor. Let's try again.

I was raised in lies - mixed in with truth, yes, but not Truth. And I broke away from that and tried to find the truth on my own, but with no guide and no map and no light - or such a little light as to make almost no difference - and, unsurprisingly, made very little progress. All I managed to find out was how lost I was. Sort of. And now, I'm surrounded by folks with maps and lights and a detailed knowledge of the terrain (okay, sort of, again, not a perfect metaphor), and I don't want to just walk along with them and trust that they know where they're going - even though I'm sure they do! I want to look at the maps, and shine the light around and see the path, and talk about the topography and the geology of the land until I understand it, or at least I have an understanding of it and about it and around it, like they do.

And I'm sure that somewhere, deep down, that's because a part of me is thinking about what the hell I'm going to do if they all disappear - I'll be alone in the dark again. And a part of me is questioning those maps suspiciously yes, not because of a thirst for knowledge but because I almost can't quite believe that they're really there. That they will turn out to be as untrustworthy as the map I was raised with, a ruler-straight line through a very tricky and complicated world with straight lines all at odd angles and forms.

And now I'm going to go vacuum before the screams of the tortured metaphors wake the RAs.

On Family

I have been alone for a long time. There's a post around that theme, that has to do with faith and questions and the ache in my heart that twinges when I come across a new doctrine - in literature or speech or liturgy - that resonates, and think "Oh God, I was alone for so many years and they were here all this time."

(But that is not this post. That post is still just a few pages of cursive.)

When I was ten, I lost my mother. Let's not get into the how. For a little while, my older sister tried to fill that function, but she had school, and was not really suited for motherhood anyway, being fourteen or so. Then she went off into her own life, and we were left with my father to function as best we could. By the time I was fifteen, I had just about withdrawn into my own life; my dad was preoccupied with depression, and I was used to coming home from school, cleaning what I could, cooking dinner (or making sure dinner could be cooked), and then going to my room to write, until it got dark enough that my family was asleep, and I could go out. I'd walk for miles, sometimes barefoot in the summer, sometimes with a jacket in the winter, just alone. Sometimes with music, sometimes silent, frequently to the woods to cry, or pray, or both. By the time I was eighteen, I bought much of my own food, all of my own clothes, and transported myself to and fro and yon, to work and wherever. When I was twenty, I bought a plane ticket to Seattle; my dad disapproved, but understood that he could not stop me, being an adult. I don't remember when it occurred to me that, if I did choose to disappear, fatally or otherwise, I could be gone almost an entire week before anyone noticed. This was an abstraction only; I was never fully tempted to carry it out. (I should clarify - my family was always there. Mostly. It was just that my life was its own thing - I did as I pleased, when and where I pleased. I failed three highschool courses, and I doubt to this day my dad has any idea. This would never have struck me as odd, except that all my friends had parents who were... involved. And were occasionally very sad that I did not.)

Then I moved out here. I had no roommate the first quarter, so I had to rely on life being awesome/interesting enough to keep me going. (That was not a conscious thought - it just was.) Up until the final two weeks, when the depression started going stab-stab-stab, it worked really well. Then the thought kept coming, occasionally at first, then frequently. I could just kill myself. In my room. Nobody would notice for at least a week. If I did it outside, way off campus where nobody would find the body, it would be more than a week. Two if Daniel wasn't-- and the thought would stop right there, because the thought of Daniel finding my body, or getting a call, or whatever the end result was, would stop me cold.

But the thing is, I had no one... watching me. If I didn't show up to class, the negative result was the same as it had been in highschool: I would miss class. Which was, as a general rule, enough of a reason for me back there, both in school and college, and remained such out here. I showed up because I wanted to learn, I wanted to pass the tests, I needed to write and to be able to work on the newspaper. It was never because I thought folks would - I mean. I'm pragmatic about school, and work for the most part; I show up, I do work, and yes, I care about people. But my role in a workplace (or classroom) is, for me, fundamentally about the quality of work I do, and not myself as a person. It came as a fairly huge shock when the news editor gave me Most Valuable Reporter for the quarter; I'd half convinced myself I was the worst fuck-up on the paper.

When summer hit, I had a roommate - Shizuka, from Tokyo. We couldn't communicate hugely, having not a whole lot of words in English, but she was someone I was living with, and someone about whom I cared. I could still disappear when I needed - I still stayed out for hours at a time, wandering barefoot and singing. And when she went back to Japan, I was thinking I was back on my own.

I've been working at church this summer. Showing up in the morning - anywhere between eight and ten, usually - and then working, and working hard, until somewhere between six and eight. Pruning bushes, hauling underbrush, weeding, clearing pine needles, shoveling, sweeping, raking, basically anything that needed doing. Five days a week, that's what I did. For the first part of summer, I'd spend the first few hours of the day walking town, looking for a job, and then the afternoons working. Saturdays, I'd do nothing - clean my room, walk down to the river, write - chill. Sundays were church. Church, I am used to thinking, is a place where you go, engage in worship, smile at people as you head out. That is... not what the Episcopal Church is like. Church is people hugging and smiling and generally being happy and awesome and occasionally-frequently shoving food at you regardless of your excuses/responses. And suddenly I found myself pulled into a circle of people who, to all appearances, were actually happy to see me.

Today, there was a social justice forum at church, involving folks from all over the diocese. I was flat-out exhausted when I got home last night; I didn't actually leave the church until about dusk, because I know I'm running out of time, and I knew folks from all over the diocese would be there, and I'm not sure what it means, but I had a not-insignificant part of me going "Okay, this place is going to look damn well presentable when they show up in the morning, ain't nobody gonna be thinking Grace Episcopal is run-down or shabby." And with the flash flood the other night having thrown the outside into a bit of a lot of wreckage, I had a lot to do. So I got home late, ate dinner late, forgot to take meds until late, and fell asleep well past midnight - woke up after the forum was supposed to start. Still sore, still tired, decided Eh, fuck it, and stayed home to write. (And to read. I got partway into "A People Called Episcopalians," a book lent to me by our Senior Warden, and started sobbing. But again - that's another post, and needs to be transcribed first anyway.)

I finally got around to checking the internet-shaped things at about three or four, and there was a message from our Senior Warden, wondering if I was okay, because folks had missed me there and were concerned. I put the phone down, hung my head against the wall, and cried. I have not, in something like eight years, had someone go "Hey, we missed you at X, are you okay?" My step-mom would have, if I'd been living with her; I wasn't. I have not had a mother in almost fifteen years; suddenly, I have several. I have not had a parental figure who actually looked over my shoulder and... watched out for me, in perhaps ten. I'm twenty-three years old, and suddenly I have folks* who... I don't know. Care. My family cares about me - I don't want to make it sound like they don't. I love them all, and they love me. But. This is the first time in my life that I have not been... alone.

*footnote: Daniel also cares; that is not a thing that stopped happening, or is unsteady. And I care about him. A partner who you love with all your heart and wish to spend your life with, though, is different from... I dunno. I don't know how to word it. (Bryn put it well. Partner caring is like within-unit caring. Family caring is like units caring about each other.)

So...

I think I'm an Episcopalian now.

And let me tell you, that came out of left field. If you'd told eight-year-old VM that she'd someday be attending an Episcopal church, and loving it, she'd not have believed you. Well, first she'd try to remember what "Episcopal" meant, outside of "One Of Those Poor Misled Not-Real Churches," then she'd probably have asked her parents, who would've told her anything from "Not A Real Church" to "Basically Catholics, Who As You Know Are Actually Secretly Satanists And Just Don't Know It." And then, so armed, she would have told you that she would never attend such a church, because that would be Wrong.

If you'd told thirteen-year-old VM that she'd someday be attending an Episcopal church, she would have looked at you skeptically and told you she didn't really want to talk about it, but she had a lot of ideas about Greek Mythology and Norse Mythology and the newly-discovered writings of C.S. Lewis that you might have a better conversation about.

If you'd told me, three or four years ago, that I'd be attending an Episcopal church, I'd have either snorted derisively and informed you that churches were deceptive haughty places where souls looking for redemption had the individuality stamped out of them and were led instead to the conformity of today's corrupt society. God, haven't you read your history? Churches just support wars and hurt people. That would be my response by day. My response by night would have been less flip, more honest: I want to believe that there's a church that would have me. But I'm more animal than human, I'm more wild than tame, I'm hurting and alone and I don't want the empty, shallow platitudes that the 'safe' churches have offered me, but I can't go back to the 'true' church because they would burn me and cast me out, unless I lied and hid who I am. I don't want to attend a church, and I never will again. No church would have me - not even Episcopals, or whatever you just said.

Then I moved to Ellensburg. As is my practice whenever I find myself in a new location, I started wandering. During the day, first short little walks around campus and to figure out where downtown was, then longer, and later, until I was walking for hours at a time in the darkest hours of the night, under a chill wind. Evening was best, though - I'd leave maybe an hour before sunset, pick a random direction, and start walking, usually out until well after dark.

Somehow, no matter what direction I started walking in, I always wound up coming back to Kiwanis Park. I'd sit by the creek and pray, or just think in silence, or occasionally write. I had walked past Grace Church a couple times, so in the back of my mind I knew what it was, and I knew, or thought I knew, that I wanted no part of it. But that's always where I wound up. In the depression at the very end of the quarter, when I was plagued by thoughts of suicide every minute of every hour of every day, I was there somewhat frequently, sitting on the rocks at the edge, my pocketknife a steady weight in my hands - bringing me back towards life, not away from it. The form of the building, tall and steady at the back of the park, did not occur to me as a shelter, but as a shadow. But it grew, in my mind, and occupied a steady place.

And then this happened. Specifically, this:

Our doubts lead us to question; and questioning is okay, it’s how we learn. I think the trouble comes when we demand immediate answers to our questions; or we desire easy answers that make us feel good. This, I believe, is at the heart of church shopping and hopping. People say they are looking for a place that feeds them. What they often mean, I think, is that they want a place that only offers what they like. But if St. Luke’s is a place of peace, then the admonishment to not move from house to house applies to us as much as the missionaries. Jesus tells us to remain here. Remain in this house of peace. Remain with your questions and doubts. Remain with those already here and struggle with us as we work through our questions and doubts together. Remain here and eat and drink that which you are freely given. Remain here and eat and drink with us those holy mysteries which are the body and blood of our Savior Jesus Christ.

I'd been reading his blog for a while, but that one was a bit of a thwack upside the head. And I went, "SIGH. Okay, fine, Lord, I'll give it a shot." And at that point, given that ReverendRef there had been commenting on Slacktivist for a while, and had generally been a voice of kindness, empathy, and some dry humor, and was known as an Episcopal priest, I had decided some time back that if I ever did give church a shot, it would be the Episcopal (also because of this, which I didn't fully believe, but did appreciate). So I showed up on Sunday, and an older woman with a cane who'd arrived a bit late as I, escorted me in. We sat in the back, and I stumbled my way through the liturgy. The sermon blew me away. I don't remember most of it, but I do remember waiting for the line about Hellfire and Judgement and The Dangers Of Secular Society, and being somewhat confused that I had nothing to push against. At one point, Fr. Vern identified the evil's of today's society as "extreme poverty, homelessness, drug addiction, the ever-widening gap between the very rich and the poor," and my jaw hit the floor. I still wondered whether I should go back. Something in my mind was convinced that a sermon which gave you nothing to push back against was theologically unsound, or un... something. Too complacent, maybe.

The next week, at about one o'clock in the morning, this happened. I got the alert call from campus safety, woke up, took it, and then got up and wrote down the details on my notepad. I got a text from my editor maybe five-ten minutes later, asking if I'd gotten the call and could cover it. The following morning, at maybe six o'clock, I got up and walked down to campus police - the crime scene was in their parking lot. I took a picture, asked the cops for details, got my contact, and wrote the story. Short, you see there, but... big. I emailed it to the editor, and spent the next two hours in painful, tense alertness. Finally, at nine o'clock, I left. Walked past the church two, three times, sat at the edge of the park and stared across at the trees, trying to keep the panic attack at bay, with varying levels of success. At about quarter of, I walked into the narthex and service and I honestly do not remember what the homily was. I should. It meant a lot to me at the time. I remember - ah, talking about Lazarus and Martha and Mary as a very, very unorthodox household, and why that was important.

And then I went home, telling myself that it was okay. That I would be fine. That I'd written the story and sent it in (it was up by now, and our site's hits were skyrocketing by the minute), and the current wavering tension between "someone just died last night" and "that was a damn good, quick story that I wrote" and "what the hell is wrong with me" and a general hyperactive manic phase making things all worse, I walked back and forth in the room, pacing and tearing at my hair and on the verge of tears, probably driving my roommate insane, until I finally realized I badly needed to talk to someone, and walked down to the church. God was with me; Fr. Vern was still there, which is actually somewhat unusual. There was a couple leaving, and I stepped in the door, knocked on the office door, and asked if he had a little time.

One of the things he told me, in that long talk at one of the lowest points of my life, was that I had a choice in how I saw the world. That I could choose to see it as a place of light, not darkness, and that this was by no means the easy choice, but it was a better choice. He told me he'd been there; people often say that, when you are hurting and they want to help, but from him it was not an empty pat on the shoulder. And, for the first time in my life, the choice not to commit suicide was framed in terms of light, not duty. That had never occurred to me. The way I had stopped myself, for the past ten years, had been out of guilt: I can't leave my siblings alone, someone will have to clean up this mess, I will hurt too many people too badly, or at the very first, when I was young and relatively obedient, I cannot throw away the gift of life. However badly I wanted to. Not exactly wrong reasons... but that was not what he told me. "Choose to use your gifts in this life, to keep living, not because it would be a waste to throw them away - though it would - but because it will be a delight."

Twenty-two years old, and it had never occurred to me or been told to me that the choice to continue living could be a positive thing. It was always, as Hyperbole and a Half puts it:

...it felt like I had been dragging myself through the most miserable, endless wasteland, and — far in the distance — I had seen the promising glimmer of a slightly less miserable wasteland. And for just a moment, I thought maybe I'd be able to stop and rest. But as soon as I arrived at the border of the less miserable wasteland, I found out that I'd have to turn around and walk back the other way.

That's what deciding not to kill yourself looks like, when you're depressed. I have a feeling, that if I wind up there again - if my strategies for stopping things from getting that bad don't work, if I find myself that far down without help, it will still look like that. But I will strive to know better - to remind myself that the universe is a place of light.

Holy crap did this post get away from me. I intended it to be a brief introductory "Hi! I was raised Baptist, really strict Baptist, but then a lot of crazy shit happened involving my mother's insanity, and Pentecostalists, and then I wandered alone and angry and very very lost for a bunch of years, but now I'm Episcopalian! And this is my blog."

So now you know. I'm Episcopalian, I like to talk about faith, and I have a blog with which I will address questions of faith and reason and grace and love, as I understand them, imperfectly. I'll also probably talk about church. And journalism. And birds.