Disconcerting

I don't know if you see the time I post things or not. But I do and I know my post timer is on Pacific Standard Time--there hours earlier than when I really post stuff. I don't know why and can't figure it out and don't care anymore.

But Friday I'm going to San Francisco for three days and plan to take my laptop which I haven't used since September at the beach but believe will let me post while I'm at the Mastery Foundation board retreat in San Meteo. So, for a few days, the time my computer tells you I posted something will be accurate. The rest of the time it will be three hours before I wrote it. (That's a disconcerting thought, that you might read something three hours before I wrote it....There's a short story, if not a novel, in there somewhere....)

I've been a part of the Mastery Foundation for, as closely as I can remember, about 26 years now.

I went to a workshop called "Making a Difference"in 87 or 88 of the last century (I don't know about you, but having lived most of my life in "the last century" is a tad disconcerting....) I went with the 'intention', which we were asked to come with, of renouncing my priestly vows and moving on with my life. What I got from that workshop was my priesthood Transformed, made new, giving me life and joy instead of tension and anxiety.

So, why wouldn't I have spent the last quarter century of my life paying back a bit of what I got from them.

I was a pain in the ass for several years because back then things were horribly formal and deathly designed. But over the years, we realized "the workshop works" and stopped having so many rules and protocols.

I am, by process of aging, now the Senior Leader of the workshop except for Ann, who is the Executive Director of the Foundation and has been there from the beginning. I have met so many remarkable, astonishing people in this work that there is no way I could ever deserve what I've been given by the Mastery Foundation or even begin to pay it back.

I help lead a couple of workshops a year--one annually in Ireland, except my role in the past couple of years has been to help train the Irish to lead their own workshops. They are almost there, which pisses me off a tad since it means they won't need me and I'll lose my annual trip to that lovely, magic island.

The Foundation has gone far beyond the Making a Difference workshops to do work in Mississippi, Ireland and Israel in community building and conflict intervention. We also have a School for Leadership which is beginning its third iteration, training folks from the US, Ireland and Israel in the leadership tools for transformation that are at the core of the Foundation.

I'll stop. Someday I'll blog for a week about the Making a Difference workshop and the other work of the Mastery Foundation. Maybe starting Friday since I'll be at the Board retreat.

I can't say enough about the Foundation and its work. It gave me back my priesthood in a transformed and empowered way and it has enabled me to give transformation to hundreds of people in ministry over the years.

Did I say I was humbled by it all? If so, I'll say it again.

Google The Mastery Foundation to find out more.

Be talkin' with you....

Lordy, lordy...

My friend Charles sent me a link to another blog he reads because he thought there were some similarities in our styles.

(At least I think he's my 'friend', not in the Facebook way, but really. But I'm never sure if people I think of as friends are, really....)

But the blog he sent me blew me away. It's by a hairstylist in Texas and we do, obviously agree on political and social things, but the truth is her blog compared to mine is Los Vegas compared to a rainy day in Cheshire.

She has all these visuals and connections and hundreds of comments (I seldom get one--once every four months, I'd say) and pictures and incredible stuff. She and I do agree on politics at any rate, but her blog looked like a Hollywood Blockbuster and mine looks like a phone booth that hasn't a working phone in a small town in Tennessee.

I don't mind for two reasons. First of all, I don't know how to do that stuff for my blog and second of all, I'm not sure I would, if I could.

I'd like more people to read what I write, surely--and she has hundreds and hundreds. But my stats are way up--over a hundred page views 3 days in the last week--and I'm just not ready emotionally or technically to be big time.

So, I'll keep doing what I do, thankful for every soul who reads anything I write and not worry about being splashy and wondrously creative and graphic.

Good enough for me. I'm just humbled and honored that Charles compared me at all to that fancy blog in Texas.....

Ylvis

It started like this: I get two joke emails a day. One of the websites is guaranteed to be 'clean' and the other is a little risque.

Given that, here's what happened: each of the websites have links to videos and stuff and one of the links said, "What does the fox say?" and, since that's been something I've pondered from time to time--what IS the call of the fox--I clicked on it.

I've now watched it half-a dozen times (once with Bea at the Cluster office) and I will probably watch it ever few days from now on.

I've not had a group to follow since Chicago and Crosby, Stills and Nash. Now I have Ylvis.

Ylvis is actually two brothers who are a comedy team from Norway and have TV shows there. But I watched four of their music videos and all of them are wondrous and funny and a little bawdy. One was about Stonehenge and another about Massachusetts and one was Pia Jesus--a comedy routine in Norwegian except they sing in Latin and all of them were fabulous.

Probably everyone reading this knows all about Ylvis already, but, if you don't, google it and enjoy. I mean, like Chicago and Crosby, Stills and Nash, ENJOY...except these guys are funnier.....

The luck of the Irish

I've gone to Ireland every year for 6 or 7 years to lead a workshop. All the Irish folks think I look Irish. With family names like O'Connor, Sadler, Jones, McCormick and Bradley, I wasn't sure how much of my DNA was Irish but I was sure it mostly came from the British Isles. After my DNA results came back as only 11.9% Irish/British and most of the rest Scandinavian I'll be able to talk to the Irish next year about the Viking Invaders!

But my 11.9% somewhere near Ireland blood has given me the luck of the Irish.

Ever so often, when I'm listening to somebody complaining about their job, I realize I've never had a job I didn't love.

Through a lot of my childhood I worked for my Uncle Russel in his grocery store. I stocked shelves and filled bags and was a cashier in the later years of high school and got to cut cold cuts from time to time. It was always fun. To this day I rue the days I don't have to go to a grocery store.

One college summer I worked for the WV Highway Department in Welch, keeping track of where all the vehicles were and making sure what they did each day was recorded correctly. I loved talking to the truck drivers and road repair guys. It was always fun (though I must admit I only got the job because my father was a Republican--it was a 'political appointment' as the 'Yellow Dog Democrat' I became I feel a tad guilty about that.

Two other college summers I worked at a summer camp. Since I had no particular camp skills, I was the "Nature boy" and took kids on discovery trips through the woods, naming flora and fauna. And I helped at the archery range since I could shoot a bow. All the kids were sons and daughters of coal miners and so was I. So I loved being with them.

My senior year of college, I was a Resident Assistant in a Freshman Dorm. Loved it, even holding the heads of up-chucking freshmen as they worshiped at the toilet shrine after a hard night of beer drinking. (You could drink at 18 in those days....)

My second year at Harvard Divinity School, I was a member of the staff of the Radcliffe Library and assigned Dewey Decimal numbers to new books. I once cataloged a book called, I kid you not, Planning Spontaneity. That was the highlight of my day. And I loved the people I worked with. I love all bookish people.

After Harvard I was a PA (Production Assistant) at a Public Television Station--WWVU in Morgantown. I made so little money that Bern and I were on food stamps, but I got to run a TV camera and be on the sidelines, hauling wires, of all the WVU games. Plus, the people who worked there were all creative and wondrous. I loved even a poverty level job.

After that I was a Social Service Worker for the WV Department of Welfare. I was a child protection specialist which meant I investigated and often took action in child abuse cases. It was difficult and stressful work, but I came to believe it was better I was doing it than someone else. I hurt a lot for the kids and for their families, but I believed someone who 'hurt' doing the work was better than someone who didn't. And I saved some kids and reunited some families. That was pretty special. As emotional as it was, I loved it.

Then came the three churches I served as a full time priest. I must say that I was always amazed that they paid me for doing something I loved so much.

And I taught English and was Center Manager at the Regional Council for Education for Employment, working with Welfare Moms mostly, who were smart and talented and had fallen through the cracks and after 16 weeks we found them jobs at Aetna and IBM and Yale, places like that, plus I adored all the people I worked with. How good was that.

And now, in my dotage, I teach every other semester or so at UConn in Waterbury in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (Olli for short). I teach weird classes on the gospels and Gnostic Christianity and people come and want to learn.

Then their is MACM (the Middlesex Area Cluster Ministry) where I am Missioner to three churches working with two other priests I love dearly and with three unique and wondrous congregations. They are so very different from each other--the three congregations--but they blend into a remarkable and so lovable tapestry. How blessed I am to know St. James, Higganum and Emmanuel, Killingworth and St. Andrew's, Northford.

So in all my decades of working--working hard most of the time--I have loved my work intensely. And here at the end of my life's work I am loving it still and maybe most of all.

The luck of the Scandinavians, I guess....My LUCK anyway. My Blessing and My Joy.

the moon, the moon....

The moon is full tonight, through scattered, ghostly clouds. How differently does the full moon strike me now than 3 or 4 years ago.

I spent my full time ministry in urban churches, as odd and different as they were. And those 30 years of working in cities (Charleston,WV and New Haven and Waterbury) taught me well that the word "lunatic" really does refer to the moon.

In my 21+ years at St. John's, Waterbury, the staff of the church and the soup kitchen always knew when the moon was waxing. Things got stranger. Odd people became odder. Apparently 'normal' people became a tad 'abnormal'. The whole spectrum of life got pushed to the edges. I kid you not.

Full moon days meant lots of disruption in the Soup Kitchen and a vast increase of people wanting to talk to me about stuff that was often troubling.

Folks in urban settings are much more in sync with stages of the moon's cycle than folks in the suburbs and country. Or, at least that is my experience. Maybe if I had been in suburban or country churches long enough I might have noticed the lunar effect there too.

Full moons, at St. John's, were a mixture of dread and delight. Some of the lunar changes were amusing and moving--lots more street people wanting to confess to me, for example. The confessions, which I dutifully heard, were always less serious than the one confessing thought, it seemed to me. But of all the confessions I heard in my years as a full-time priest, I assure you that 95% of them were during the full moon!

But some of the effects of the full moon were dangerous and daunting. Almost all the potential violence in the Soup Kitchen and in people who passed through the church was confined to the five days or so around the full moon. I kid you not.

A guy we'll call Harold was drunk most every day, but as the full moon approached, he was not only drunk but mean. He went for me a couple of times but was too drunk to hurt me. And then some young men who were dangerous in the waning of the moon, did horrible things to Harold in the full of the moon and he eventually died from all that.

Don't tell me the full moon is a benign moment in the ways of human beings.

Don't even begin to tell me the full moon doesn't give meaning to the world 'lunacy'. It just does, I'm serious.

But in Cheshire it is just a lovely sight through the ghostly clouds, that full moon....

today's sermon

So, I've been really heavy about this WV water stuff. Let me share with you the sermon (very short) I preached today at St. James, Higganum.

Still heavy but with a positive spin.

BAPTISM OF OUR LORD 2014

I know we have an annual meeting to do, so I'm preaching one of the shortest sermons I've ever preached.

There is a Sufi saying I love a lot—a saying I think we need to keep in mind in our lives. It goes like this: “when you hear hoof-beats, look for a Zebra….”

The Sufis are trying to tell us to look for the extraordinary, the wondrous, the unexpected, the mysterious in every common moment of our lives.

Good advice, I would say.

One of my professors in seminary, Jess Trotter, who was as gentle and genuine a man as you could ever hope to meet, told me this: “wherever you are, whoever you meet, tell yourself this: ‘that person is the one for whom Christ died’.”

I’d recommend that bit of wisdom to us all.

Imagine what a difference it would make in how you encountered and reacted to the people in your life—your family, your friends, you acquaintances, even total strangers—if when you came in contact with them you imagined that each of them was the ONE—the ‘very one’—for whom Christ died.

Good advice, I would say. Advice to transform our lives.

Just imagine what a difference it would make if in this Annual Meeting and in our lives as a community and individuals we always 'looked for Zebras' and knew in our hearts that everyone we met 'was the One for whom Christ died....”

Ponder that, if you will as we move forward.....

H2O

Day four and counting and 300,000 West Virginians still can't drink, cook with, wash with or shower in their water that was horribly spoiled by a chemical spill. (I talked about all this in a post the other day, go down to read it....) And remember their are only 1.2 million people in WV. So a quarter of the people in the state are water-less....

I also had a post about feeling guilty about being blessed a few weeks ago where I wrote about my dis-ease with the water I waste when many--perhaps most--of the people on the globe don't have unlimited access to clean water. I was writing about the Developing World but now West Virginia seems to be there, which, in a way, it has always been along with Eastern Kentucky, Eastern Tennessee, South-western Virginia and North-western North Carolina. That is about the limits of what is called Appalachia.

The first argument about Appalachia and all the poor, ignorant, misbegotten mountain people who live there is how to pronounce "Appalachia".

I guarantee you that 99.5% of the people who live there or grew up there pronounce it "Ap-pa-latch-a". But back in the 50's and 60's of the last century when the rest of the country discovered that there was a pocket of poverty in the rural mountains of "Ap-pa-lay-cha", that's how the world came to pronounce it with "lay" instead of "latch" and the accent one syllable too soon.

(Funny thing, even I grew up talking about "the Ap-PA-lay-cha Power company" that serviced vast expanses of "Ap-pa-LATCH-a" because the power company was owned by people in Philadelphia who mispronounced it from the get go....)

I spent a lot of years embarrassed about where I came from, but I got over that three or more decades ago when I decided I was sick and tired of being sick and tired about where I came from....

That's something that distinguishes Appalachia from the North East. When you meet somebody from back there for the first time, your first question to each other is 'where do you come from?' Because poor, ignorant, misbegotten mountain people have a sense of 'place' that borders on genius, you could learn a great deal and have profound insight into a new person just by knowing 'where they came from'. You understood the character and civilization and people of each little hollow and valley. The next question would be 'who are your people?' and the answer to that would reveal volumes....

I'm still not used to the North-East's obsession with asking people, on first meeting 'what do you DO?' It is the distinction I'm fond of making between 'doing' and 'being'. Doing involves us in tasks and career paths and activity. Being is about 'who you are' and 'where you come from' and identity.
What you DO and who you BE are world's apart. I'd rather begin becoming friends with someone's 'identity' than with their 'profession'.

My friend, Jim Lewis, who was Rector of the big, downtown Church in Charleston, WV, once said to me about our mutual acquaintance, Denise Giardina, "Jim, can you believe someone as talented and gifted as Denise grew up in McDowell County?"

Jim Lewis was from Baltimore. Folks in Charleston (the 'city' of West Virginia) were exotic to him, but someone from McDowell County, for God's sake, was downright primitive...

"Jim," I replied, "I grew up 9 miles from Denise. Our parents knew each other."

He looked at me as though I had shown him the crown jewels without him asking. "I can't believe this!" he said, genuinely having trouble computing that he knew two people from Appalachia (which he always said with the accent on PA and a LAY sound) who, of all things, weren't poor, stupid and misbegotten.

Here's the Truth. Those of us growing up there and those who are still there, essentially agree with the assessment that people 'from there' are 'poor, stupid and misbegotten'....That's what we were told by the media and the sociologists and the politicians and since they were the media and the sociologists and the politicians, we believed them.

After all, if smart, urbane, sophisticated folks like all the Ivy League Vista workers thought we were poor, stupid and misbegotten, it must be True.

What you learn being an Appalachian and learn fair well is this: humility.

And that might be the greatest gift being an Appalachian could give. Just maybe.

But will all you people stop ruining our mountains with strip mining and stop poisoning our water with chemicals.

Is that too much to ask?