A Bishop for Chicago, 2

I didn't say anything about something, and all the news outlets haven't really mentioned anything else. So, I don't want to seem as though I'm avoiding it. Yes, we have a nominee who is living in a same-sex relationship. And I wish we didn't have to live in a world where that was what made CNN, or upset people who don't know her. Because she's also a phenomenal priest and dean. And a faithful, devoted Christian. And not the only nominee for the next Bishop of Chicago.

A Bishop for Chicago

So, the labor of over a year's work is almost coming to fruition! I've had the privilege of serving on our diocese's bishop search committee, and we've finally announced the slate of nominees we've been working to discern for the past six months. It's an exciting list! Three women, two men, and all have substantial experience in anti-racism work, which I'm excited about especially. We elect a new bishop on November 10... all the nominees come to visit the diocese during the week of Oct. 21.

The five Bishop Nominees, here.

In the Episcopal Church, a bishop isn't just your boss, as a priest or a layperson. In fact, they're not really your boss at all - a bishop can't tell a rector (the priest of a parish) what to do, unless you're breaking liturgical rubrics (not following the Book of Common Prayer). And the only person who can bar someone from communion (which pretty much never happens) is a rector. Bishops do a lot of administrative stuff, they ordain new deacons and priests, they do confirmations, they meet in the House of Bishops and discuss theological and ecclesiological problems, theoretical and concrete, and they're our spiritual figurehead. Maybe like Queen Elizabeth II, but with a little more power and a little less bling. They do have to retire at 72, though.

So, electing a new bishop is like getting a new lease on your Church's vision and potential! It's exciting. And the Episcopal Church USA is one of the few Anglican Churches that elects their bishops, democratically. Most others are appointed - like in England, Parliament and the Queen choose bishops. I like our process better, although there's no campaigning allowed, no speeches, no receptions, meet-and-greets, fundraisers, or direct mail campaigns. We try to keep things clean and simple. It's supposed to be a discernment, rather than an election, really.

The Via Negativa?

This from the BBC:

Astronomers have found an enormous void in space that measures nearly a billion light-years across. It is empty of both normal matter - such as galaxies and stars - and the mysterious "dark matter" that cannot be seen directly with telescopes.

Now, that's BIIIIIIG empty space. As one of the scientists says,
"If you were to travel at the speed of light, it would take you several years to get to the nearest stars in our own Milky Way galaxy; but if you were to go to this hole and enter one side, you'd have to travel for a billion years before you would get to the other side," he told BBC News.

This completely weirds me out. A huge hole in the universe? It just begs for theological interpretation. Like, you know, God wanted some flex space - sort of a Zen thing, perhaps. You know, it opens up the place. Nice for meditation. Or you never when you might want to add on - an extra cosmic bedroom or den. But imagine: what if the absolute biggest room in your house was just EMPTY? Kind of cool, I think. Although I'm sure, if it were me, I would quickly start dumping stuff in there. But God is probably a better steward than me.

I'm sure it's scientifically strange for there to be a pocket of the universe with so much nothing in it. Theologically, it doesn't seem so odd to me. God likes surprises - just read the Bible, and blesses Nothings as well as all of us Somethings.

Anyone got anyone interesting Scripture passages that might speak to some Nothing out there?

Almighty Power

You may have heard on the news that Chicago had a gigantic thunderstorm yesterday. 70-80 mph winds, apparently. I was working in my cubicle, when the lights flashed once, then went dead. My computer blinked out, too, of course. So I wandered out into the hallway where I found the music professor and the registrar, and we looked out the hall windows at the ongoing deluge. Then the lights flicked back on for about five seconds, and then there was a huge FLASH in the street - a transformer exploding, as it turns out, and everything went dead again. Then Wolf, our wirey and wise maintenance man, came tearing through and yelled at us to GO TO THE BASEMENT because a tornado had been sighted. So, with my yellow legal pad still in hand, I went down to the basement with everyone else. We all went to the laundry room (which is for students who live in the seminary dorm rooms) and stood around the washing machines, listening to WGN on one of those mini-boomboxes, which I think were in vogue in perhaps the early 90s. WGN went back and forth from the Cubs game (in California, I think?) to the tornado and weather updates.

Eventually, we could go upstairs. But there was no going back to work - no computers, no lights, no copier. So I went home. Dug out my candles and matches so I would be ready when the sun went down. And finished a novel sitting next to the window.

Now, going to bed with a candle is kind of romantic. Even fumbling up and down our pitch-black, windowless stairwells wasn't too bad. Since our stoves are electric, my neighbors and I went out for pizza - while the weather still resembled a monsoon - and when we came home - to an apartment building whose windows were only ever-so-faintly glowing from the odd candle here and there - they lent me a flashlight to get back upstairs and find my keyhole. All that was kind of fun. But then in the morning, there was no hot water to shower, wash dishes, or wash my face, no stove to heat water, no radio for NPR, no microwave, the refrigerator was starting to warm up, my cell phone was running out of power and so was my laptop... and I couldn't really go to work to earn money for my poor little unemployed self because I need a computer to do most or any of my work, there.

It's amazing how a minor crisis can introduce a general feeling of urgency and scarcity. I heard sirens on Sheridan Road last night - and there are ALWAYS sirens on Sheridan Road - but last night, they felt pretty unsettling to me. It seemed like the world might be unraveling at the edges in all kinds of places. What if this lasted a long time? Everyone was saying, "Well, replacing transformers takes a LONG time, blah blah blah." What if I had no hot water for three days? What if people starting looting? What if people were getting hurt out there because of... bad things???

I can only imagine what it must have been like to survive something like Hurricane Katrina, or the 2005 tsunami, or even the terrible flooding happening in other parts of the Midwest. I was so thankful to have a dry mattress, a working toilet, food, and a town full of stores that still had electricity, no problem. I bought ice and a cafe latte this morning! Woo hoo. And civil order seemed to be in place, just fine. But it was scary for a while.

Next, we just started trying to adapt and normalize the whole situation. We stood outside in the parking lot, joking about the noise the generator was making (Wolf was trying to keep the sump pumps going to drain the four inches of water out of the library stacks in the seminary basement - luckily, the books are a foot off the floor). We had a seminary community meeting with donuts, plenty of Bible jokes, and brainstorming and problem-solving. Our liturgy professor went to get out the candles from the sacristy for people who still needed them. And then my neighbor Jennifer and I packed ourselves up to go to a coffeeshop. We wanted to power our laptops and cell phones up - I was going to write my sermon for Sunday (which, ahem, I still haven't quite written yet) and Jennifer was going to rewrite her ordination service bulletin (her personal laptop and journal was stolen yesterday, and the only copy of her bulletin was on the laptop, and her ordination is in a week, but that's a whole other story).

And just as we were heading down into my pitch-black stairway... all the lights came back on! It was GREAT. It'll sound kind of trite or dramatic, but it was just such an amazing moment. Our lives could go back to normal. But you know, it was also a little anti-climactic. We'd gotten ourselves so psyched up to live with adversity, and then boom, it all dissolved with one banal, fluorescent poof.

But we decided to go out for lunch to celebrate, and stuffed ourselves with eggrolls, crab rangoon, chicken with peanut sauce, and Thai pork with noodles. It was pretty great. Then I worked for several hours. And now everything seems back to normal.

What a weird day.

Flowers at Seabury, a series

So, I wandered around the seminary parking lot and took pictures of all the flowers around here - I just LOVE pretty pictures. Total sucker for them. And pretty in the parking lot is even better - that contrast between beautiful living thing and slab of asphault. Love it. It just feels more like real life that way.

Lily of the Sidewalk

There's a petunia growing up at my apartment doorstep. I can't imagine that it just sprung up itself - someone must've planted it there, to see what would happen, maybe. But maybe petunia seeds really are that tough? Anyone out there with a horticulture background? So both Laurel and I took pictures... although you may notice that Laurel dramatized hers a bit more, since it was going to be a sermon illustration. I really like her angled shot with the parked cars in the background.

Here's the front step. With resident grill. There's a whole little row of green friends who have moved into the crack, there. This is my favorite little straggler:

I've always liked little green things that grow in strange places. Some trite symbol of hope or something, said the jaded seminary student. But in high school, I wrote a (terrible) poem about a little weed growing all by itself in a corner of a dark alley downtown. There is something so forsaken about those alleys - I still find myself stopping to stare into them and gawking at that empty, ugly, loneliness. Still the high school poem was dreadful, I'm sure - I have no idea what happened to it. I'm sure most high school kids feel like little weeds growing in forsaken alleyways. Hopefully my pictures aren't quite as cliche.

My cubicle

At first, it looks like a normal office. This is where I've spent about half my summer, sorting through charts, lists, and stacks of paper in order to make more charts, lists, and stacks of paper for the accreditation process at Seabury. Last week, I spend way too much time here, working out an especially tough set of tables. Sitting in that very chair. It got pretty old. How do people survive desk jobs?

And Ellen and I are still not exactly done (she's the professor who's in charge of this nightmare data-collection process). Maybe in a couple weeks? I'm just following her lead. There's something nice about having a job where you just do what you're told. Although I probably only say that because I know this is temporary. It's funny, this is sort of a variation of working at the law firm - a sort of reprise, five years later.

Here are the bank boxes where we put all of those finished charts, tables, lists, and stacks of paper. They're gold - the result of lots of searching and compiling. Sometimes I get the shivers because I imagine how awful it would be if I forgot to shut the windows before I left one night and it rained in and turned everything to pulp. But so far, so good.

This is how it's NOT like the law firm. My office is not just an office... it's actually the sitting room of a (now empty) dorm suite! So, if I needed to take a nap, I could just sneak in here. There's even a mirror in the sitting room, so when I'm worried about my hair or have some time to kill with my camera, I know where to look.

For those who are curious, I am still waiting for an interview at St. X. But the rector is coming back from vacation this week, so hopefully there will be some kind of development soon. As it is, I'm planning on hunkering down here at Seabury for the next couple months. New students are moving in and old ones are starting to come back, which is a strange feeling. I'm glad to see my old friends, but it's a little disorienting, since I hadn't exactly planned to still be here! I guess I'm not sure how I belong... although I'm sure I belong just because I am here.

Blue fountain

While I was at my family reunion, some cousins and aunts and I went on a shopping pilgrimage. One place had this awful fountain outside of it... with water dyed dark blue. My 14-yr old cousin, Hannah, and I were pretty grossed out. But I think the owners meant for the fountain to look beautiful.

The food in grocery stores is always perfect-looking - and you don't want to know what they have to do to make it all look that way. Why do we have to have everything look so excessively beautiful? Here are the tomatoes I picked yesterday from my Dad's garden (they away on vacation). They ain't pretty, but they taste amazing:

Maybe life is ugly, so we try to make as many other things beautiful as we can, and we shy away from the things that remind us that life is suffering, and that we're all going to decay and die. An ethics professor I had once said that people understood death much better before refrigeration. Maybe before we started living in the suburbs, too. Now we're sheltered from a lot of ordinary ugliness. Do we expect life to be the same way? Are we ruffled by ordinary ugliness, or the lack of perfect, unadulterated happiness in our lives? Do we get angry with ourselves because we don't have a life like a perfect tomato? Or a dyed blue fountain?

All I know is that I find that I can't stop thinking about how I'm going to spend the real paycheck I hope to be making sometime this year - on new clothes, a new car, a new cell phone, new housewares, new shoes... that will all make my life better. So there you go.

The boyfriend

So, I haven't been blogging much lately, and well, a big reason for that is named Adam. Just thought I'd post a photo of him to show him off to you guys. He's great - also a budding clergyperson, starting his second year at my alma mater, and currently hiking part of the Appalachian Trail.

Reunion and re-engagement

Here are a mess of photos to show you some of my family, and views of the beach cabin my parents have been renting for twenty-five years. I miss it there already. You can see the light from the sunset over the lake coming in through the windows.

It was a great week, although it's also tiring to hang out with twenty of your relatives for a whole week. But I got a lot of sun, swimming, good food, walking, and loafing in. But even so, I came home feeling sort of sad about my continued unemployment. It didn't help that I had to leave my cat with my parents in Michigan because my brother's car was overloaded on our trip back (my parents are staying on for another two weeks). So I'm home alone! No Lilith. It's very strange not to have a little cat following me around all the time, or waking me up at 6am for a back rub, or reminding me that her bowl is empty.

So, I was feeling sad and useless and lonely. But then I got a call from out junior warden at St. John's - the church where I'm deaconing to keep myself out of trouble this summer (near Irving Park and the Kennedy, if anyone wants to know). One of our elderly members died Friday night, and it looks like I might be doing the funeral, because Kara, the priest, is away on vacation. Wow. I suddenly feel very official. I'm going to give the family a call back tonight to see how they're doing. I feel so hungry to be helpful. Even if that means I get swamped this week - I'm preaching on Sunday, too, and I have a bishop's search committee meeting almost all day Saturday, and Adam is coming to visit. Suddenly, everything seems more like real life than a sabbatical. It's great. Things are MOVING.

I also had a long, great talk at church today with a woman who's elderly mom also died last week, and had a lot of other, really good conversations with various people. I felt like I knew what I was doing - during worship and during coffee hour. I felt a little like I used to feel on Sunday mornings at the Monterey Church, back when I was their lay pastor, six years ago.

It's nice to feel like a pastor again.