Weird Bird in Love

So as of this morning, I have two parishes that want me to come visit, and one parish that wants to send several of the people on the search team (the group charged with evaluating candidates to be their new priest) to come visit me and watch me do my thing at St. Cosmus’. Visits in either direction are both ways of getting more serious about considering me for a job.

It’s possible, of course, that none of them will offer me a job. I can imagine a dynamic where I look really attractive on paper, and seem interesting and fun in person, but where ultimately they worry about my experience level and offer the job to another candidate. That would be OK; I’m not in a hurry yet. This is all moving a bit fast for me, really. We shall see….

I swing back and forth between being totally preoccupied by all this (spending hours poring over real estate listings in various towns, trying to imagine life there – Tilt sometimes joins me or incites me in this), and not thinking about it at all – throwing myself, instead, into wholeheartedly planning our big crafting evening in late October… And I swing back and forth, likewise, between being excited and curious about what this next step will bring, and feeling keenly  how much I love our life here and the people we know and the place we live, and how much there will be to miss…

Wheeeeee.

1. How much stuff is the right amount of stuff? I read something in the Times last week that made reference to a movement to own only 100 things. I can see the appeal of having an orderly and austere material life. I look at small and tidy houses and think, Lovely. But then – what about art supplies, and musical instruments? And, God help us, books? I really like having the right art materials to start, at least, almost any spur-of-the-moment idea that comes along…

2. What’s with the guilt? So I blog once a month. So I’ve abandoned several sewing projects half-finished, and am now on a knitting tear. So I’m making extremely intermittent progress in my self-paced study to become a La Leche League leader. Why feel guilty about all these things? Nobody is being harmed. Why can’t I just blog or sew or read about breastfeeding when I feel like it and have time, or else, not?

3. I love my son so very much. He’s a wonderful kid. Why do I spend so much of evey day yelling at him? Well, only rarely yelling, but a lot of that sharp unfriendly parent voice. Is there something i can change in myself – given all the constraints of the rest of life – that would help our day to day relationship have more of the texture and tone of my real feelings about him?

Please submit your responses below.

1. I love my iPad, but it isn’t going to revolutionize my life as a blogger until I get some kind of keyboard for it. Typing with the onscreen keypad is just too slow and erratic. And I cannot just ignore the typos and keep going. Even in notes to myself.

2. My son is so much like me. He’s been in swim classes at the town pond, the past couple of weeks. I took him to class on my day off, last Monday. Before class and in the car, he was fretting about whether the teachers would make him put his face underwater, like they had the previous week. I tried to comfort and encourage him. Then we got to the pond and he went straight into the water and put his face under, a couple of times. I recognize that thought process: “Somebody is going to make me do something hard and I hate that, so I’m going to either avoid the situation, or take control of it and do the hard thing myself before soembody makes me.” We don’t like being bad at things, Zag and I…. including, irrationally enough, things we have never done before in our lives. I believe that Tilt is more at peace with being a learner, when occasion warrants, than I am. I hope some of that rubs off on our kids.

3. There is more death around these days than is quite comfortable. My church has had five funerals or memorials within three or four weeks – very, very unusual for us. No real pillars of the community, but one such pillar is in hospice care, so that’s on the horizon. And my boss’s daughter, a young mother in her late 20s, is really really sick. I have been giving serious thought to how to handle Sunday morning if she does not pull through. Phew. Dealing with death is part of this vocation, and a very important part, precisely because normal people do not usually have to deal with clusters of deaths or crises. Guess I’m on the steep part of the learning curve, here.

4. I’ve just been off work for nearly a week. It’s been terrific. Day trips, berry picking, playing and reading with Zag – I’m feeling much more in touch with him than I was a week ago. Holding my daughter while she falls asleep. Talking with my husband. Lots of sewing, and some very rewarding shopping. An eye exam and new glasses, ordered today. Bedroom rearranged and babyproofed. Yard sale accomplished and mostly cleaned up after. It’s been so good. Going back to work tomorrow will be really hard for a out 15 minutes, then I’ll remember that I love my job….

I’m typing this post on my brand spanking new iPad. My laptop has a wonky connection that renders it a desktop… So with help from various quarters, I am now the proud owner of a new and highly desirable mobile device. I love it. So does the Bean. She is much enamored of a program that simulates a pond with fish. She can splash in it. It makes her squeal.

Maybe this will mean a whole new era of more frequent blog posts, here at Weird Bird central. Maybe it will be easier for me to get around to posting stories and thoughts more often, on my cute little laptop device. They will have to be rather brief stories and thoughts, since the typing is rather more cumbersome than on an actual keyboard. Perhaps it will be a useful corruptive for my tendency to verbosity.

Let me see, what can I post now, to celebrate? I ran into a neighbor today who has a five year old relative visiting. The neighbor and said relative ran into Zag and Tilt today, out and about. Upon learning that the other child was also five, Zag remarked gravely, “Lots of people are five, at around this age.”

I started out crocheting. Well, I suppose if you go back far enough, I started out with hand-sewing. I remember learning to stitch neatly to close some little stuffed thing we were making at Girl Scouts. My friend J opines that we should have been learning knots or fire-starting or something useful; undoubtedly she has a point. Anyway.

I started crocheting early in grad school, I think, in my mid-20s. Then I became dissatisfied with the clunkiness of crochet (at least, of my crochet) and learned to knit. I liked knitting; if I picked a simple-enough pattern, and used a chunky enough yarn to enable me to finish the project before my attention span gave out, it came out looking nice and polished and professional. Read the rest of this entry »

Zag, our Zag -

As of a few days ago, you’ve been in our lives for five full years. You’ve made us into parents –  from those first astonishing panicky hours when we suddenly had responsibility for this fragile pink demanding little creature, to the day-to-day ebb and flow of parenting your preschooler self – sorting Playmobil together, arguing over brushing your teeth, negotiating snacks vs. candy, reading before bed. I can neither remember or imagine life without you, life before you. What on earth did we do to keep ourselves busy?

I want to write something about what you’re like at this age, but it’s hard to capture you in words. You are bright and imaginative and lively and always off on some mental track or another. Read the rest of this entry »

I share responsibility, with some other folks, for coordinating youth and young adult ministries in our diocese. I fell into this by making the mistake of having opinions about youth ministry. Like, It should exist.

The youth & young adult ministry umbrella includes campus ministries, since college students are either youth or young adults (exactly which may have to be decided on a case-by-case basis).

About six weeks ago, a panicked priest who does campus ministry stuff contacted me (for lack of anyone more knowledgeable to contact) to see how she was supposed to get her annual funding for her ministry from the diocese. Our 2010 budget included some amount of money to continue supporting several existing Episcopal or ecumemical campus ministries around the state, and there was no clear process in place for disbursing those funds. In conversation with our diocesan CFO, who is a very good soul, and with the person who did campus ministry stuff for the diocese until his position got defunded, also a very good soul, I managed to put together a letter and a rough application process and get it out to the people associated with those ministries. In the course of this process, I learned how many campus ministries we have and who runs them or works with them. I still don’t have all the campuses and people straight in my head, but thanks to the CFO, at least I’ve heard of them all. Let me stress: I knew nothing about all of this until someone from diocesan headquarters filled me in.

So why, exactly, did I just have to spend fifteen minutes on the phone with the administrator at diocesan headquarters, strenuously arguing (in the face of some opposition) a) that campus ministries DO exist in this diocese, and b) that they should be represented on the new diocesan website? Why, o why, o why?

(Part of why is that the CFO is out of town. But I find it pretty disturbing that apparently nobody else at HQ knows about these ministries which do, in fact, exist, and are, in fact, supported – at least a little – by our annual budget.)

This is a good diocese in lots of ways & I’ll be sorry to leave it. But this just seems like the latest installment in their really remarkable corporate short-sightedness regarding ministry for and with young people.

I’m reading A Hat Full of Sky, one of Terry Pratchett’s young adult series about the young witch Tiffany Aching. I just read a passage in which Tiffany is trying to describe her grandmother to the witch who is training Tiffany. That witch, Miss Level, observes that Granny Aching sounds like a good witch, and asks if she helped people. Tiffany thinks about it, then answers, “She made them help one another. She made them help themselves.”

Miss Level is silent a moment, then sighs. “Not many of us are that good,” she says. “If I was that good, we wouldn’t be going to visit old Mr. Weavall again today.”

This is why I love Terry Pratchett. His books are fun and funny and peculiar and surprising, but what wins my loyalty and love is the dash of keen insight he tosses in here and there, almost incidentally. Right here, in that little exchange, he has nailed pastoral leadership.

If you’re a good priest, you help people. If you’re a really good priest, you get them to help each other, and to help themselves.

Just like Granny Aching. Or, well, Jesus.

This post is dedicated to my friend Jen, who was ordained to the priesthood yesterday! May we both manage to be really good witches, friend.

Tomorrow I go back to work after a week-long vacation. It was Zag’s vacation week, and I have lots of vacation to use up (my clock resets in July), so I just took the week off. We undertook a few minor expeditions – the gardens of a local stately home; fabric shops in a nearby city; a trip back to Cambridge to brunch with the Bean’s godmamas. Mostly, though, we just bummed around the house. Craft projects, playdates, walks in the woods, snuggles, elaborate meals. Many small bouts of sorting – we are planning for a garage sale soon and it’s amazing how I’m suddenly looking around my home thinking, “What do I not need, that somebody might pay  me $.50 for?…”

I was a little worried that a vacation spent right here in our home sweet home would not feel sufficiently vacation-y. Turns out it was splendid. Read the rest of this entry »

Hey, where is everybody? I’m blogging again! Look, lots of new posts!

So the Bean and I took a walk this morning, she riding like a queen in her expensive stroller. (Embarrassed as I am about owning something as yuppie as a Bob stroller, it really is pretty damn nice.) And because, as usual, I cannot find my cell phone, I had to just think about things instead of calling and chatting with my mom. And I thought about the initial phone interview I have scheduled this afternoon with a parish a few hours’ drive from my parents. I’m not in love with it, but they seem nice and it has potential, and it will be good practice, if nothing else.

And then I started thinking about my trajectory of development as a pastor, and what I want and need from my next position. I feel like I’ve had reasonably good opportunities to grow and improve my skills and deepen my understanding in a lot of areas at St. Cosmus’ – as a preacher; as a liturgist; in the areas of Christian formation for kids, youth, and adults; as a collaborative leader sharing projects and responsibilities with the lay leadership of my parish. The biggest piece that’s been absent here, for me, is sustained meaningful engagement with outreach. Read the rest of this entry »