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.

Brief

I'm about to leave for a family reunion this next week... so I won't be posting again probably until Sunday.

I met with "Father Bob" this past week, and I really liked him. But much as I liked this parish and the rector, and much as people assure me that I would be good at it, I have a hard time seeing myself doing youth work full time. But I'm glad I gave it a shot.

Trip to Wisconsin

I took a mini-vacation to see my old friend, Monica. I needed a weekend away... I've been spending too much time in front of computers and mired in transition. It was good to actually be a transition and fly down the highway in a car, concretely in-between for three hours each way. And then to live suspended in someone else's apartment, life, and group of friends. A place where I was supposed to feel liminal.

Mostly, I truly do feel content and at peace in all this, but this has been a tough day. Probably because tonight I'm going to have a conversation with a local priest about a youth position at his church. I like what I've heard about this parish, but I really don't want to be a youth pastor. I hope this is not because I'm being a snob. I just don't feel called to it. I never really have. It's strange, I feel deeply sad! Deeply sad about a nice drive to Suburb Z to meet with Rector Bob, who is really a neat person, as I hear. But sad, all the same. We'll see, maybe God will surprise me - it's always possible.

I'll let you know how it goes.

In the meanwhile, here are some shots from Madison:

American Players Theater - outdoor Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chehkov, Wilde....
we saw Shaw's "Misalliance."
The view from the concessions courtyard, over the Wisconsin hills,
an hour outside of Madison.

Me, armed with blankets in case it got cold.

Me and Monica, in our seats!

And in her backyard, lounging... another important way to be liminal.

All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of thing will be well.
(overquoted from Julian of Norwich, I know.)

The biggest rubber duckie ever

Looks like some kind of bad dream, doesn't it? I wish I could claim my alma mater had something to do with it, but these folks in New York City have nothing to do with Wooster, Ohio... The Wooster Collective website with duckie

I think this could be called postmodern art, although who ever really knows what that is.

Dogsitting

This is Baxter and Thisbe - neighbors' dogs that I'm taking care of for a few days. They're fantastic. Baxter, as you can see, likes to carry his own leash.

And something funny from our walk... the USPS repainted a bunch of mailboxes when their Star Wars stamps came out this spring.

Blessed are those who wait

Well, I heard from St. X the other day. I sent in my essay questions and sermon - worked hard on the questions, felt good about the sermon. But I got an email yesterday saying that they won't be able to get back to us (there are six applicants now) until after August 20! That's over a month. Sigh.

But I'm getting used to my patchwork life... work on this, work on that, go to church, walk my neighbors' dogs while they're away, see my boyfriend when he's in town, miss him when he's away, see my brother and his girlfriend, go to the beach, see friends, come and go, etc. I worry about money, but so far, it's not too bad.

Ok, this is a totally boring post. I'll write a better one soon, hopefully today. I have to leave for a church meeting soon, and I'm a little anxious about driving in the severe rainstorm that's supposed to be opening up any minute.

Everyday sacred?

This is just a litany of boring everyday stuff... I suppose it's sacred, but it's also just a slow news day, as my parents like to say.

We got a big storm that cooled things down, finally. Here are the clouds rolling in...

I also took a photo with the contrasting blue-green of an old glass insulator (from an electric pole) I have in my window. I found it at Gould Farm, where someone must've once made it into a hanging vase. I hung it from a rafter in my cabin there because I thought it was beautiful, but my friends and I were always banging our heads on it. I never put flowers in it - they'd have to be tiny, and plus, I'm lazy and poor.

I made a quiche to eat all week. But eating a whole quiche by yourself is daunting. See, I have a bad habit of getting bored with things, and having eight slices of the same thing to finish before it spoils may not be possible. Anyone on the Block interested in helping me out? Let me know. It could use more salt, btw.


I finally used up all the hours Frank had to give me to work on his index... I did a person and places index, a scripture index, an authors cited index, and made a stab at a subject index. I could have spent like 10-15 more hours, I think (I've spent at least 38, so far). And now I know a lot about narratives of rape in the Hebrew Bible - Dinah, the nameless concubine, and Tamar, if you're curious. This is my working copy, peppered with notes.


And this is kind of gross, but I have plantar warts that I've been doing battle with for over two years now. My poor left foot. The latest remedy was recommended by the first dermatologist I've seen, just last week, after two years of nurse practictioners. He prescribed an extra strong salicylic film with lactic acid, and suggested I slap some DUCT TAPE over the top. Eat that, bandaids. It's sort of fun, actually. And I think THIS time they're going to go away. Otherwise, I have to have these awful, painful shots. No thanks.

So, that's my life lately, mostly. I think I'm going to be spoiled when I really get a job. My brother is already making fun of me. "Some of us are W-O-R-K-I-N-G." And I AM working, it's just part-time and inconsistent. I'll probably start babysitting soon to supplement things - I'll get to feel like I'm in high school again. So yeah, sometimes I'm bored here, but I also get to spend a lot of time over ordinary things, like meals, books, walks, and phone calls. It's pretty great.

Bless the Lord, fire and heat

It's hot in Chicago. It's supposed to cool down tonight... but it's been a tough couple days without air conditioning. I've inherited some disdain for AC from my dad, who loves to remember his adolescence in Iowa, sweating on his front porch, drinking lemonade, and watching summer thunderstorms roll in. My mom doesn't understand this at all. So, every year my dad puts a window unit into the living room for her, and she spends most of July and August there, reading, sleeping, and drinking ice water. She always tells the story of her first day in America, getting off the airplane in 1949 in New York City, fresh from Oslo. She was six years old, and her first breath of American air felt, she says, as if someone had just opened the door of an oven - a slow draft of hot, suffocating air. It was 99 degrees that day. Her Viking blood just can't handle it.

I'm no aficionado of hot weather, but I guess I prefer to let my body get used to it. Ever noticed how the feel of your body changes with the weather? I feel like the biochemistry of my skin shifts in the summer, and moving from cold to hot all the time screws with that. So, I have electric fans everywhere. I take cold showers. I go to the beach. I make peace with sweat. I drink ice water. And I use a trick my brother and I discovered when we were little and trying to sleep without air conditioning... you take a towel, either a full size or a hand towel, run it under the faucet, wring it out, and then sleep on top of it or under it, and the moisture on your skin combined with a fan = GREAT. I even get cold at night when I do this. Yes, the mattress gets a little damp, but it dries pretty quick.

I'm also addicted to fresh air. One of the 240 things I hated about working for the law firm was being sealed inside a high rise office building eight hours a day, especially in the summer, where it was absolutely FRIGID inside our building. I wore sweaters more in the summer than in the winter. Plus, super hot weather is sporadic in Chicago, so if my windows are sealed up with an AC unit, I don't get any fresh air when it's in the 80s or 70s.

I love winter, but I miss fresh air then, too. A coworker at Gould Farm, Tamsin, used to sleep out on her screened-in porch all year round... even in the winter. She loved it. I don't know if I would go that far, but I would feel like a bad ass if I could.

4th on the 96th

I spent the evening of July 3 with my friend Anna and some of her friends at the top of the John Hancock Building - it was her birthday. You can see the sun furiously setting behind our heads, out over metro Chicago. Most of the party stayed to watch the fireworks, but with my earlybird sleeping habits, I knew I wasn't going to make it that late AND then make the hour-long train ride back to Evanston all by my lonesome and be very happy about it. So I enjoyed the sunset and bid them adieu. I had a great time, though.

I've lived in Chicago for most of my life (saying that always makes me feel so provincial, even though it's a major urban area), but I've never been to the top of the Hancock or the Sears Tower. When we walked out of the elevator, this is what we saw - WOW. The Lake - all that blue with white boat dots - that took my breath away.

More diners, high above the city... with me looking like such a tourist and taking pictures while leaning over the lounge balcony - too bad you can't see me in the huge mirror at the top of the picture.
It was amazing to be up there and look out over the city and pick out all the things I recognize. Makes me fall in love with my hometown all over again. And there's nothing like an eleven-dollar pina colada, either.
Here you can see the dark roof of St. James Cathedral, where I was ordained last month. Nice rooftop swimming pool, too!
Even the view from the women's bathroom is amazing.

Maybe I'll have to visit the top of the Sears Tower after all... although I don't think they serve pina coladas up there.

God is good

St. X in Cute Suburban Town has asked me for essay questions and a sermon! Yippee!!!

Writing

So, as I descend into working day boredom here, I've been trying to think of ways to still feel creative and engaged... and I've been wondering if this summer would be a good time to return to the wrestling match I've had most of my life with the question of whether I'm "a writer."

People have been telling me that since I was in grammar school, when I started writing short stories, mostly about little girls. My family's favorite was "The Floppy Flowered Hat," which was about a little girl whose new hat was eaten by her pet goat! In middle school, my friend Margaret and all my classmates all got really into this fact about me and they kind of made it my "thing." Heidi was the writer. One kid, Brian Lewis, always made me promise that I wouldn't use a pen name he wouldn't recognize, so he could look for my books when we were grown ups. I messed around with writing in high school, but more in college, where I worked on the student literary magazine, did an English major, TAed a creative writing class, wrote my two theses on women's use of language (around their bodies and then politics) and read manuscripts for a professor's literary journal, The Artful Dodge.

Since college, I've messed around with words in my journals, in sermons, and in grad school papers, sort of, but I don't know if this really all adds up to "I'm a writer." I always thought that if writing really was my passion, I wouldn't be able to not do it. I haven't written a short story in almost a decade. I haven't written a poem in years. "Writer" feels like some elusive, romantic label for a person I'm not sure I ever was. Now, I feel this pressure to FIND something to write about - a topic in ministry, a passion, whatever lesson it is I think I have to tell the world about. What am I supposed to sit down at my desk and work on? Nothing like that has ever revealed itself to me. So, I'm not sure if all this business about "writing" is really part of my sense of call or just some kind of pressure that follows me around.

It was easy to "write things" when I was a kid. I just wrote about whatever was around me. I didn't mind that I was unfocused about the whole thing. I remember once, Margaret challenged me to write 100 words about a science experiment in class that was boring us to death - just a piece of potato in a test tube of water. And I did it! And it was fun. I remember she was impressed, and she was excited to watch me do it. That makes me think of preaching actually, take a random, obscure text from the Bible and find something to say about it. Some scripture can seem about as inspiring as a piece of potato in a test tube.

Blogging is really great in that way. I can write about random stuff, just like when I was ten, fourteen, and twenty. I can experiment with all of you, and find interesting things to say about ordinary sorts of things that exist around the edges of my life. I like the photography aspect a lot, too. (Actually, I started begging my dad for a camera when I was about ten, too.)

So maybe I don't need to find a Grand Subject or go searching for my Poetic Voice, so much as I'll keep doing this, writing a blog, taking pictures, and just ruminating on the world. And maybe that's the thing - that this is the kind of writing I can't stop doing?