The scary cupboard, revisited

So, this is what the inside of the scary cupboard looks like. (For the original post, check March 5, 2007... if I knew how to link it, I would!) Still sort of scary... and I could only take one picture before tearing back up the stairs to Junkin Common. My friend, Heather, was with me, thank goodness. Perhaps if we'd had a flashlight we would've looked more. It smelled pretty awful - wet, mildew, dark, damp, close. And there was a huge silverfish on the back of the cupboard door.

Why are we so afraid of the unknown? Seems like we should be used to it. Life, every day, is unpredictable. But I pretend I know what's going to happen tomorrow: I'll wake up, take a shower, go to morning prayer, go work at the ATR, go to Eucharist, go to lunch...

But, really, I don't know what could happen. Even if I do all those things tomorrow, I don't know what someone might say to me, what small events will color my tasks one way or another, what email I might get, what might get bombed, what might happen to people I love, or whether lunch will be any good. So I find ways to cope. Every morning I do the same things: wrap myself in the same afghan, feed the cat, check the weather. Singing psalms every day at chapel helps a lot.

But lately, I feel like a hermit crab outgrowing my shell. I don't want to come out, but I also sort of want something new and roomier. So, I have to let go of a lot of my own survival instinct - the instinct to keep myself safe. I've started opening scary doors. Even if all I find is pipes and dirt and junk and who knows what else. But I don't think I'll actually find that in many other places.

Survey says...

This makes me feel better about next year:

Survey says clergy have highest job satisfaction

(They even quote our FABULOUS ministry advisor from the div school, Cynthia Lindner.)

My front door

I'm moving soon. It's sort of difficult. I've gotten used to living around other people, going to church with them almost every day, eating lunch with them almost every day, seeing them around, hanging out with my neighbors regularly, and sharing so many similar things about our lives. Of course, maybe if I lived here longer, all that would get stifling. But after nine months, it's still really great.

This is the stuff I keep by my front door. Just a collection of objects, mostly. I was inspired by my hall neighbors, who have a beautiful entry space (see below). I keep meaning to give that stick to Pax, my downstairs neighbor's dog.

I'll be living on my own next year. But maybe there will be other neighbor dogs. I've decided to stay in Chicago, so it won't be too far away. I think I'm afraid of all the newness and the unknown. When I moved to Seabury, I had already taken classes here - I knew people already. Next year is still such a blank. I think my growing stress about where to go is founded in fear that my next move will be much much harder. Of course, there will be new neighbors, who may also be kind and interesting people. But I don't know what it will be like to live, most likely, in the suburbs, with few young, single people. Much less young single Christians. I hope I won't be too lonely! A professor once said that my congregation would keep me company... but I'm not quite sure it's the same thing.

Pretty flowers

Ok, so a couple cheap shots of pretty spring flowers.

The Seabury steeple behind some forsythia. It looks kind of threatening! Reminds me of Sleeping Beauty's castle surrounded by the briars.

I had a good meeting with the Canon today, but I'm still thinking over what we talked about. I'm not quite ready to blog about it yet. Sometimes I wish I hadn't put my whole name on this blog - I feel more of a need to censor myself.

God and the mail

My mailbox is the one with the white label, the empty one! Our names are all color-coded by year and/or degree. The white circle on the left is the end of a candle that my friend Jim keeps in his box.

Tomorrow, I'm meeting with Clarence Langdon, our Canon for Deployment here in the Diocese of Chicago. Which means he deploys clergy, or matches clergy up with parishes that are looking for clergy. So, we're going to talk about jobs. Because of mismatches or perhaps even laziness, I do not have a job yet. I like to think of it as the work of the Spirit, personally. But mostly, I'm just not clear on what God wants me to do next, or even what I want to do.

When I lived at the Farm, I once told my friend Monica that I wanted God to send me a letter to tell me what to do next. Strangely, the next week a letter came from my undergraduate college nominating me for a fellowship application process to live in Asia for a year! I was floored... but excited. I made it all the way to the end of the process. However, towards the end, I began to pray that God would not make me go. And in the end, I didn't win. It all felt like some kind of planned distraction! Instead, I ended up pastoring the Monterey Church, in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, for a year. Which was much much better.

But now I want another letter. (Although I don't want a fellowship in Asia.) I may be hoping that Canon Langdon will, in some way, tell me what to do tomorrow. Act as the Spirit, perhaps. But I also feel like I'm still not ready to know - that I need to live between all the possibilities for a little longer. A friend emailed me and said, "It's your way of showing respect for all the things before you." Or I could be afraid of who I really am. Or a gambler?

I see four possibilities:
1. Leave the diocese and get an assistant position at a large to medium-sized wealthy church in another city. (I've run out of assistant jobs here, as far as I know.)
2. Stay in the diocese and become a first-call rector. Probably in a small suburban church.
3. Start an emergent-style house church in the city somewhere.
4. Something else that God has yet to reveal.

In my experience, the likely outcome would tend to favor #4.

Liturgy of the hours

Here at Anglicamp, we do morning and evening prayer every weekday. It's one of the things I'm going to miss the most - and one of the best things about coming to live here this year. It sets a rhythm to the day. This is the service record we keep, of all the services, the attendance, etc. It's sort of a way to keep time, I think - both the service record and the services. Time is so top-down in our lives, for the most part. Clocks, jobs, set schedules... but I think we still all find ways to keep time in our own, personal ways. How we start our mornings, what we do on public transportation, how we take our meals, how we end our days, maybe even how we approach spending time alone in the bathroom?

This is what our weekly ordo looks like. It's really confusing-looking for most visitors to our chapel. We use half a dozen different books, plus inserts that we might pick up on the way in, we stand up, sit down, sing antiphonally, sing responsively, sing in unison. Sometimes I wonder if being Anglican is about making liturgy as complicated as possible, while keeping doctrine or beliefs as personal, intuitive, or just plain unknown as is practical. For me, it's a perfect combination.

OK, one more chapel image... behind the scenes. You can see into the sacristy, where we keep all our liturgy "stuff": chalices, little places and bowls, linens, incense, candles, vestments, music inserts, flower vases, holy water vessels, etc. You can see Susan looking in drawers for the right linens to use for a liturgy class later in the day.

But you can also see the little piano that plays some of the bells in our carillon. We only use one key - there's a tiny piece of paper with a red cross drawn on it that's taped onto it. It's the far left key. One morning, that bell broke in mid peal! And so we used the second key from the left for a couple weeks, until the maintenance crew could get up in the bell tower and fix the broken bell.

The bells are rung three times a day, usually. Five bells five minutes before a chapel service, and three bells just as the service is beginning. Another very monastic thing about this place. Another way of keeping time. Although all the people who live around the seminary have to be subjected to our way of doing it! Which was probably especially annoying at 6:30 am on Easter morning.

Seventy times seven ≠ 32

I'm listening to the radio, and hearing that Virginia Tech tolled their bells 32 times today. And I heard that they're holding a vigil. For the 32 victims of the shooting. But 33 people have died. One of them murdered the other 32, yes; I don't mean to exonerate him from responsibility. But he's still dead. He's part of the tragedy, too.

I remember last year, when a gunman killed five Amish schoolgirls and himself. According to CNN, a member of the Brethren community living nearby said to a reporter: "I don't think there's anybody here that wants to do anything but forgive and not only reach out to those who have suffered a loss in that way but to reach out to the family of the man who committed these acts."

Another said:
"We must not think evil of this man."

I think we risk turning Seung-Hui Cho into a subhuman Other - some kind of animal - by excluding him from the mourning. And we shun and further alienate his family by excluding them. We are all human. We are all capable of evil. The easiest thing to do when dealing with great evil is to choose a group to punish and isolate as "the evil one," rather than accepting that we're all in this together here on planet earth, here as children of God.

Six weird things about me

Like you needed any more after reading this blog! But my friend, "more cows," has tagged me - and, sucker for attention that I am, I'm going to respond.

According to the rules I must:
1. Reveal six weird things about myself on your blog, and
2. Tag six people to do the same.

Weird Things About Me
1) I refuse to fold my underwear - it just seems like a total waste of time.

2) When I was about 9, I believed that God was turning me into a "sorceress," someone with magic powers. I still have the diary entries to prove it. I think I had a deep desire to be special - I used to go out on our apartment porch at night and look at the stars, and think purple thoughts. I asked my mother, who has no memory of this, if I could become a sorceress. She told me that it was "against the laws of nature" and I was deeply disappointed. Probably this all plays some heretical role in why I'm becoming a priest.

3) I love tempeh and tofu. Although I don't eat it nearly enough, anymore! I have all these comforting associations from my organic farm days, in my early twenties at Grailville and Gould Farm, where my friends and I would make stirfries, veggie burgers, and all kinds of homemade, earthy-crunchy dinners - with things like Swiss chard, beets, radish greens, brewer's yeast, Bragg's amino acids (which is like soy sauce), and sea vegetables (i.e. seaweed, hijiki, dulse, kelp), all over brown rice. Yummers. Soy milk is good, too.

4) I worked on the aforementioned hippie cult commune for two years, and continue to miss my cabin in the woods with wood heat, no bathroom, and no insulation. It did have electricity. I also got to work with people with schizophrenia (REAL schizophrenia), which was amazing and humbling. Some of my classmates call me "Goody Haverkamp" because, among other reasons, one of my jobs on the Farm was making butter. But it was with a giant electric mixer, not a churn. I am never going to get over living on the Farm, and I just need to get used to that. Adrienne Rich has a poem about "the dream-site" - for her, New York City (An Atlas of the Difficult World). I think Gould Farm is my dream site.

5) I talk to my cat, Lilith, in a stupid high-pitched voice mostly about nothing. Sometimes, she talks back.

6) I have mild agoraphobia. Sometimes I wake up in the morning, and the thought of going out into the world, navigating the grocery store, going to a meeting or even the movies, and especially facing finding a job and MOVING, especially, seem like frightening and impossible tasks. I inherit this from my mother. And yet, I can also be terrifically restless and long for adventure and travel. But I hate air travel, and I struggle to force myself out of the house even to take a walk.

I'm tagging Lauren, Raisin, Court, Harold, David H., and Laurel...

Life without flash

So, I've fallen in love with taking photographs without my flash. Weird, huh? What a dorky blog you read...

Flash can make the colors seem all wrong, or light up the wrong things, or make everything harsher. Like, here are some scilla down the street, taken with flash:

Here's the same shot, without flash:

Isn't that awesome???

Here's The BookShelf, the Seabury bookstore where I work a couple days a week, with flash:

The BookShelf, au naturel:

I suppose it could be called overexposed, but it looks warmer and more real to me. Often, taken a photo without flash means that you risk being blurry.
Like this:

But I guess I feel the light plays more of a role in the photo - like it's one of the subjects, instead of being manipulated by the flash. Mostly, I just like the colors better in a photo without flash.

There's probably some lesson about life here, but I think it might be too cheesey to unpack. So, I will leave it at face value.

Two more to illustrate how stark it can be:

With flash.

No flash.

(the refectory, after an event in January called Boar's Head) I couldn't believe that, in the first shot, you couldn't see a thing! But in the second, the electric lights light up the whole room, just fine.

Easter recovery

It's snowing catywumpus outside. April in Chicago. You can't see the snow coming down in the photo, though... I think I would need a camera that would let me take a longer exposure.

I'm still getting over an Easter hangover. I overdosed on joy, if such a thing is possible, via food, music, emotion, energy, and caffeine. I was eating grilled lamb, chocolates, and pancakes before 8 in the morning! Good stuff. But singing my heart out through two church services, driving back and forth across Chicago, drinking too much coffee, chatting and socializing with people at Seabury, St. Paul and the Redeemer, and my family... I wore myself out.

The Seabury chapel smells like hyacinths and lilies. Wonderful. Enhances the usual smells of old, wet stone and faint mildew.

So, I'm going to apply for parish jobs again. I think I just got a little lost there - albeit, lost in some very good questions. Sometimes I don't understand why I have to wrestle with everything so much, but over time, I've realized I just have to roll with the self I've been given. Wrestling is part of the Heidi job description. I think I would get bored if all the decisions in my life seemed really obvious. Maybe that's why I'm religious, even - although that's not how most people see religion. I can't deal with easy answers or a cut-and-dry existence, I need lots of questions, depth, complexity, and something to push me.

I met two Immokalee farmworkers yesterday, who came to Seabury to talk about their work. They've been asking fast food conglomerates to pay a penny more per pound for their tomatoes, and to ask that their suppliers stop beating and refusing water to their workers. Now, that's a cut-and-dry I can believe in. It was neat to meet them - to have migrant workers be more than photographs and statistics.

My cousin, aunt, and uncle from Oakland, CA are coming through today so she can visit Northwestern. I'm having lunch with them - it's been ages since I've seen them. I hope their tour isn't too miserable in the weather.

Ecumenical follies

This post by Micah and all the comments are pretty hysterical... on differing pieties between Episcopalians and Methodists on uses for leftover bread and wine.

Easter around town

Easter Altar 2
Originally uploaded by heidi_haverkamp.
At St. Paul and the Redeemer. (It's such a pain to post vertical photographs!)

Easter deacons in their snazzy dalmatics, following our 5:30am service.
Yes, we're hardcore here.

Easter Brunch.

Brunch at 7:30 am? And we look so cheerful!

K.'s husband made her gluten-free pancakes!

J., our student carillonneur and C., an Easter Vigil "MC," finally relax.

Blurry but happy.

Sorry B. and K.! I should've taken another one to get you all smiling.

Holy Week Photos

The Chapel... empty.

Empty chancel...

Empty tabernacle...

The cross for the Good Friday service waits in a conference room (!).

The chairs from the chancel, also waiting in the conference room, for Easter Sunday.

Holy Week Groupie

I love living in a place where everyone who lives around me goes to church with me, especially during Holy Week. A friend who is a Presbyterian pastor has been disappointed that her parish doesn't much show up for Maundy Thursday. I'm not sure how good attendance is even among Episcopalians, who tend to be sacramental junkies. So, maybe I live in a bubble, here at Anglicamp, but I sure do like it.

Sometimes I wonder if people who become clergy are needier than people who don't - that we need three years (or more) of immersion in seminary, then a public ordination, and then a job where we are explicitly working for God, to feel sure we are Christians, to feel holy, to feel fulfilled as religious people. We need the whole kielbasa! I hope that means we are then able to be available to other people, that we know our holes, that we know how to use our weakness as a strength, as Paul would say.

An alb with a hood

I got my new alb in the mail last week. For my nonEpiscopal readers, an alb is a long white robe you wear to celebrate or assist at a service with a Eucharist. You wear a stole over it - a long, decorated scarf that goes around your shoulders, and perhaps a chausable - like a big poncho that matches the stole. My alb is a lovely, shiny polyester blend! Perhaps a little tacky, but as a deacon friend pointed out, you don't have to iron it and it's stain-resistant. I think it's beautiful. I got one with a hood, like a monk's habit. It makes me feel a little like a romantic, but maybe there's nothing wrong with that.

This past weekend, I saw a movie about the life of the Carthusians, an austere monastic order devoted both to community and strict solitude. It's called "Into Great Silence." A long, basic, almost silent movie - just like the lives of the monks.

I miss life in community - it's been seven years since I lived at the Farm. Living at Seabury is somewhat like living in community, which has been great. But the monastery in the movie was quite a bit more intense. I'm also reading a book about Carthusians, which is full of monastic craziness. It's amazing how rigorous a serious commitment to spiritual life can be. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to give everything of yourself so fully to God in that way - what happens to you? It must hurt, but it must also be joyful in some way, or people wouldn't do it. My friend, Julianne, says she has "Carthusian delusions." After seeing the movie, I think we've both had some cold water thrown on our romantic ideas, but there's still something very compelling about monastic life in this day and age.

We're talking about becoming oblates somewhere - a kind of associate to a monastic community - maybe at a newer community called the Order of Julian of Norwich in Wisconsin? They wear some heavy-duty habits, but I think they're pretty progressive - and they're co-ed, which is interesting. We're trying to figure it out.

Neighborhood sculpture

Calm Before the Storm, Micki LeMieux

From the art center website: "oversized protean organisms [with] elastic sky-blue bodies." I find these sort of captivating. They remind me of anime forms - something from a Hayao Miyazaki movie maybe. They're right down the street from me, by the beach I like to walk to. They remind me of hands, or aliens, or anenome... or something.