Sandy avoids Cheshire

Perhaps it is the oh-so-perfect suburban setting, or the righteousness and loving kindness of the residents, or just some accident of meteorological happenstance. Whatever it was, Storm Sandy ignored Cheshire while battering the shoreline from the Carolinas to Maine and lots of places inland as well.

Here--loaded up with batteries, water, non-perishable food and candles and flashlights--we waited and waited for the Godot of a storm that never came. Electricity all the way through. Internet service as well. Our furnace doing it's job of keeping our house at 62 degrees F.

Just after six, thinking we'd be eating salad by candlelight, I decided to cook dinner. Watching TV later, having imagined we'd be reading books by flashlight, it suddenly dawned on me--Sandy is avoiding Cheshire.

Lucky, you might say. Or, blessed, as I would prefer, the storm of the century made it's way northeast and simply overlooked this little town in CT. Not even any trees down, that I know of. Almost no rain. Wind, certainly, but no more than I remember from a dozen other storms.

Lucky and blessed. Though I watch post storm TV and listen to post storm NPR and their is a nagging feeling in the back of my mind. What is it exactly? "Survivor's Syndrome" perhaps?

We were so prepared and didn't need to be.

Cheshire--one of the forgotten spots on the Eastern Seaboard. Lucky. Blessed.

Waiting for the big blow

It's a little (no, 'a lot') eerie to be sitting around waiting for the storm. All the hype has given me some unease--should I move my car from under that tree? do we need to clear the porches? what will we do with the dog who hates even a drizzle or a light wind and doesn't want to go out in it? how many batteries are enough? is there a battery operated stove somewhere? can I get to see my Dr. about my foot at 10 a.m. tomorrow or will Cheshire already be blowing away?

Once, when the lived in Charleston, WV, the snow storm of the millennium was coming. Gov. Rockefeller closed roads and forbade being outside. The stores were stripped down to bare shelves and everyone hunkered down. The day of the storm came...and nothing happened! I mean NOTHING!

We wandered the streets like homeless people wondering what had gone wrong. I mean, we were spared great inconvenience and hardship and possible danger and we wandered around, looking at each other, bathed in cognitive dissonance, filled with shock and awe.

It didn't snow a flake.

I'm wishing and hoping that will happen this time--but I don't think so....

Stay well and ride out the storm safely.

Shalom.

He's the President after all

I just wrote my daughter--my light, my wondrous being, I love her so--and told her not to worry about the election. I may be the last Democrat who believes Obama will win big. The popular vote might be close indeed, but the electoral college, I believe, will be a convincing win--say 300 to 238.

Think was, my spell check rejected 'Obama' as a word.

The choices it gave me were: Baa, Barn, Badman, Bagman, Barman, Batman and Bema (what the hell is that???)

Hey, he is the President, after all. Why doesn't his name pass the Spell Check function?

And what about Barrack? Why doesn't that deserve a Spell Check?


(my foot) I stubbed my foot two weeks ago today. My last four toes were black and blue and green for a week. Then I put on a sock with some Medicated powder in it and went to the Diocesan Convention. The next day, my foot was covered with blisters--half a dozen of them, between the toes and an inch long. I blamed the powder. It took me another week of doing what they asked me to do at urgent care, to remember that I've had 3 previous outbreaks and eruptions of  blisters and rash on minor injuries. So I called the dermatologist who couldn't figure out what was up with those eruptions and told me to call her when I had another--which I didn't want to have--so today I remembered all that and called her and have an appointment on Monday early.

I'm also on an anti-biotic for the foot that causes remarkable bowel movements--but I've been asked to not discuss bowel movements on my blog....

I'm beginning to feel old--talking about Dr. appointments and bowel movements (though I'm not going to say no more about those.....)


By the way.I've noticed the readership of my blog has fallen off. So, if you don't mind and you really get some enjoyment from it, tell people to check it out. Embarrassed to ask, but I would like to know I was spending time writing this stuff so that people could read it.

Just today someone told me at UConn in Waterbury that she was reading my book. Well, I stopped putting chapters of The Igloo Factory on the blog out of forgetfulness and since nobody seemed to be reading it, left it half-finished. Stuff like that.

What a wimp I am, begging for people to read what I write.....Sorry....But DO tell you friends.....

There are some things you don't need to know

So, probably like you, I get lots of emails from places I never asked to send me emails.

Today, I got one from some group NEWSMAX or something, titled, "Five signs you will develop Alzheimer's."

I was about to click on it, just for the information value, when I said to myself, "Why would you want to know that?"

I'd bet at least one of the five--if not more--would be something I experience. "Difficulty opening things" or "losing things" or "wondering why you opened the refrigerator" or "What are you doing in this room when you came here intentionally" or "Forgetting names of people you know well."

So, if I read the 'signs' and had some of them, I'd be spending the next few years waiting for Alzheimer's to arrive....

There are some things you don't need to know.

I deleted it and moved on with my increasingly diminished life....

Facebook is the Anti-Christ

I get all these email from FACEBOOK about posts, messages, updates, stuff like that. "My timeline", whatever the hell that means....

I've been on FACEBOOK for, I don't know, 5 years and have looked at it exactly three times. Each time I had no idea whatsoever what I was looking at or why or to what purpose.

There was an email thing tonight about Monica Tiso, who I adore, being sorry she watched the debate on her I-pad, or something like that. So I go on Facebook for the 4th time in my life and find a list of people who want to be my "friend" that is so long that I never got to the end of it--though I scrolled for five minutes.

I knew about 5% of them! Some of them were institutions, colleges, businesses.

Who are these people?

I have enough friends that I actually 'know'.

FACEBOOK has got to go. The stock is going in the toilet. That's where the whole thing should go!!!

(Apologies to anyone who knows what it is about and loves to have 600 'friends' you don't know.....)

I WON'T BE LOOKING ON FACEBOOK FOR AT LEAST 9 MONTHS. OK? SO DON'T MESS WITH MY TIMELINE OR WALL OR WHATEVER ELSE IS, FOR SOME GODFORSAKEN REASON A PART OF MY VIRTUAL EXISTENCE ON THIS DEMONIC INSTRUMENT. AND DON'T WAIT TO BE 'FRIENDED'. IT'S NOT GOING TO HAPPEN IN THIS WORLD OR THE NEXT OR ANYWHERE IN BETWEEN. BELIEVE ME ON THIS....

Coming down where you're meant to be....

Tonight, I went to the third and final forum, hosted by the Cluster I serve and led by Ian, our bishop, about the work and missionary concepts of Roland Allen (a late 19th Century and 20th Century Anglican Missionary. Allen developed a way of 'being church' called Total Common Ministry or Mutual Ministry, depending who you're talking to.

The Middlesex Area Cluster Ministry--three churches located in Northford, Higganum and Killingworth CT--seeks to practice (and you're always 'practicing', you never get it right) Total Common Ministry. My contract requires I spend 13 hours a week in my ministry as Interim Missioner. Sometimes, I do more. Sometimes, I do less. So it goes. It mostly averages out.

There are two 'Sunday only' priests--Brian teaches liturgy at Yale Divinity School and Molly teaches at Hartford Seminary and is the Secretary of our diocese. They both have Ph.D's. I have a humble D.Min. But we're all "The Rev. Dr...." These three small congregations have an uber-educated group of clergy. Brian and Molly are remarkable and wonderful, each in their own ways. Brian is British and has one of those British senses of humor that dry and droll and self-deprecating all at once. Molly is young and full of energy and passion. I love them both and am honored to work side-by-side with them in the Cluster.

The meeting tonight made me realize that I have, in some blessed way, come down just where I''m meant to be.

In my years of priesthood, I've served three remarkable congregations. St. James in Charleston, West Virginia--an African-American parish full of people with Masters and Doctoral degrees since St. James was near a historic Black College. St. Paul's in New Haven, CT--a richly diverse parish with both town and gown and black and white and well to do and poor. Finally, I served St. John's, Waterbury, CT for 21 years and retired from there. St. John's was also wonderfully diverse--including a large Hispanic congregation. What all my places of service shared was rich diversity, an urban setting and a profound commitment to outreach and service in God's mission in the community around them.

MACM (pronounced "Mac-Um") and it's congregations also have a deep commitment to outreach and service in God's mission around them. But they are rural, not urban, and not at all diverse in the ways I'm used to . (Someone asked me what was different about MACM and the churches I've served. I told them "I'm not used to being around so many white people!" Which is true but not a problem.)

Here is the astonishing difference between MACM and my service to my three dear and wondrous parishes: MACM seeks to practice Total Common Ministry.

Wherever I've served--and I hope you notice I always say "the churches I've served" rather than "My parishes, reveals that I've always had the intuitive notion that I serve rather than possess. I have always had a role in the communities I've served AND I've had the "authority" in those communities. I've done all I could to give that authority away to lay folks and staff members, but it has always been true that the authority was mine and mine alone. Div-vie it up and pass it around as I could, it always came back to me. In those three astonishing churches, I--an outsider--HAD the AUTHORITY.

Total Common Ministry is another creature altogether. In TCM, the 'authority' does not lie with the priest but within the community. The priest serves as a sacramental minister, but the model is not 'a congregation gathered around a priest. In Mutual Ministry, the community has the 'authority' and the priest 'serves' within that authority.

It is a remarkably different way of  'being church' and one I have come down within and realized it is where I was always meant to be.

I do other things now, out in the world, instead of having my world be the parish I served. I teach at a UConn branch and lead workshops for the Mastery Foundation and live and move and have my being--part of which includes participating in the three congregations and in the Cluster as a whole as a sacramentalist. I tell the story and tend the fire and pass the wine. But the day-to-day life and being of the three churches and the Cluster is under the 'authority' of the people who ARE the three congregations. I get to hang out with them but I'm not "in charge" in any way that matters.

I love this way of 'doing church' and 'being priest'. It is just the best.

I'm not sure most seminary trained priests could lean into it the way I do. There is a distinct 'privledge' and 'entitlement' most priests expect to receive. And that simply doesn't exist in Roland Allen's paradigm. The priest is simply a member of the community with certain obligations to fulfill in the sacramental life of the community. The priest is 'part of the whole', not the straw that stirs the drink. It is a radical shift from the normal model and paradigm--but one I find to be liberating, empowering and transforming.

What a joy to find that you've come down where you were meant to be at last....Joy and Wonder, no less than that.....

So how was your weekend?

I went to Holy Cross Monastery this week end, up in West Park, NY, which should be a happy thing. And the silence and reflection was good, but nothing else went right....

Friday evening, I went up to my car to listen the Yankee Game against Baltimore. (It was, by the way, the only game they won this weekend!) On my way back, in the dark--and it is Very, Very dark in West Park, I was walking toward the lights of the Monastery and turned to soon, tumbling over into the weeds, hurting my wrist, stubbing my toes and cracking my head on a rock. It was right in the middle of my forehead so I bled (as they say) like a stuck pig. (I don't know how a stuck pig bleeds, but by the time I got up and into the monastery and into a first floor bathroom, my moustache and beard were both full of blood and it was running down my sweater.) It took about ten minutes of paper towels and cold water to stop it and clean off my face. Then I went to Compline with a cold paper towel against my head--but everyone was either too holy or too polite to mention it.

The next day, besides a small goose-egg on my forehead and a tiny wound where my third eye would be if I were Hindu or Buddhist instead of Episcopalian, my middle three toes were black and blue and quite painful. That day, by the way, West Virginia University lost in football for the first time this year (dropping from 5th to 14th in the college rankings) and Derrik Jeter broke his ankle and the hearts of Yankee fans everywhere. (I did see on the game this evening--which the Jeterless Yankees lost to the Tigers to go down 2 games to none in the best of seven--a fan in the stands with a sign that said "What would Jeter do?" And interesting twist of the WWJD craze that drove me crazy a few years ago.

You notice, I'm sure, that both my injuries and despair are caused (directly of indirectly) by sporting events....

Maybe I need to get a life without sports....That or get a flashlight when walking outdoors in the dark Hudson Valley night....