no blood

The last time I was all set to go to San Francisco for a Mastery Foundation Board Meeting, I got up to find significant blood in my urine.

I've had prostate cancer surgery and weeks of radiation. The radiation scars the bladder which causes, from time to time scar tissue to tear off and cause blood clots which leave your body the only way they can causing you to cover vast expanses of bathrooms with blood. Not a pretty thing--I should have included a warning at the beginning to alert the faint of heart.

I called my urologist and he said, most definitively, not to get on an airplane. 24 hours later after drinking more water than a horse would need in a day, I was fine. But I didn't get to go to San Francisco. Unfortunately, I didn't have flight insurance (because I'm cheap) and lost the money for the tickets.

This time I got flight insurance, wondering if 'going to San Francisco caused the blood. So (cheap me) spent a little more money and though I waited all day, no issue of blood happened.

Maybe I'll get there tomorrow. Hope so.

Won't be taking my laptop--too much trouble. So I'll be back on Monday.

Be well and stay well.

4 days, little sleep

So, my friend Fred, who is going with me to JFK on Friday so I can catch my flight and drive my car back to Cheshire and then come get me on Monday after I ride what people call "the red eye" back from San Francisco told me I should pick him up around 6 a.m.

He's right, I know, since my flight is at 10:30 am and we need to fight the rush hour in NYC. But I don't recall the last time I was up that early. I'm retired, you know, and sometimes sleep until 10:30 am or so, because I can.

I actually overslept on Saturday and missed the Cluster Council Officers meeting. I forgot to set my alarm. My alarm is only set on Tuesdays and Sundays so I can make it to my Clericus meeting and to whichever of the three Cluster Churches I'm scheduled to serve. Otherwise, if my alarm isn't set, I wake up when I do and take the dog out (he likes to sleep in as well) and make breakfast and read whatever book I'm reading and sometimes go to the gym (not much lately) and then do whatever I want to do.

That's retirement--and I'm so good at it I should have done it years ago!

But I forgot to set my alarm on Friday night and when I woke up when I woke up, the breakfast meeting wasn't in my head. I started my breakfast--ham and home fries that eventually I planned to break an egg over--and took the dog out.

When I came back, my cell phone had a message from Jean Anderson, the chair of the Cluster Council, wondering where I was since I'm almost always the first person at a meeting.

I almost killed myself driving through the rain to get to Durham after Jean and Nancy and Ann had finished breakfast and done all that needed to be done to make sure the Cluster Council meeting the next Tuesday would happen without incident.

What an idiot I am.

 But then, I am 'retired' and not expected to be more than forgetful and a tad vague and always a little sleepy.

So, I'm leaving to San Francisco on Friday at 6 and I'm coming back on the red eye which means I won't sleep much on Thursday/Friday and not at all on Sunday/Monday.

So, don't expect a lot of me next week. I'll be napping.....

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....