The Long And Winding Road - Part 3

And then there's the "gay thing," the elephant in the living room.

In spite of the fact that the Canons of the Episcopal Church state

No person shall be denied access to the discernment process for any ministry, lay or ordained, in this Church because of race, color, ethnic origin, national origin, sex, marital status, sexual orientation, disabilities or age, except as otherwise provided by these Canons. No right to licensing, ordination, or election is hereby
established. CANONS III.1.2

there seems to be an unofficial hierarchy in many dioceses, and queer folks are at the bottom. We are grilled more thoroughly about our personal lives than even the most promiscuous single heterosexual men.

For a long time in my diocese there was an unofficial don't ask don't tell policy in place. When I first applied for postulancy, Ledlie (my rector) and I wondered about the fact that I edited the newsletter of my Integrity Chapter, and Bishop Coleridge, as Bishop of Connecticut, was on the mailing list. Ledlie spoke to a member of the Committee on Ministry who told him that the newsletter could be on the bishop's desk, and when he received the application, he would intentionally not link the two.

So I sent in the application, which Ledlie and I whitewashed to some extent. There was a surprising, to me, amount of ministry work. But nothing about my involvement with Integrity, my activism with the Connecticut Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Civil Rights, being a founding board member of the Triangle Community Center, and of course, absolutely nothing about my relationship with Brian, which had ended about midway through my initial discernment process. In due course was scheduled for an interview with Bishop Coleridge, the Canon to the Ordinary, and newly elected suffragan Bishop Smith.

What they saw was a single man living his mother at the age of 37. I could tell him that my mother was uncomfortable living alone after my father died, but I couldn't talk about my recovery from and having nowhere to go after what was essentially a divorce. A great swath of my life experience hidden. It was quite clear by the "not yes, but not no" letter I received less than a month later that the Bishops and the Canon didn't think I was strong enough to survive the rigors of the process. Because of Bishop Coleridge's don't ask don't tell policy, they wouldn't know how much I had faced and survived before I walked into his office.

Brian and I separated 16 years ago this month. My being in discernment for ordination was the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back. He's now happily married to the man he's been with for several years. I'm still single. There are a variety of reasons for that, but the vast majority of those reasons have to do with being in the ordination process. Some men aren't willing to be involved with someone so deeply involved with the church. Some tried to talk me out of it. And I haven't been all that certain that I want to subject a significant other to the quagmire of the process.

In the last 18 years the Episcopal Church has come a long way, a slow long way, on the issues of its queer members. But it's still an issue to be queer in the ordination process.

It is still an issue.

Pride Day

Traditionally the last Sunday in June is Pride Day--originally Gay Pride Day. Now June is Pride Month, although celebrations take place before and after June. This is the third of fourth year that I have not attended a Price celebration for a variety of reasons.

This year I planned on going to the Fairfield County Pride event sponsored by Triangle Community Center, but this year they planned a party with a $30 admission charge. Too rich for someone on unemployment! I was on the board of TCC when the organization took over the county's pride event, and i expressed my disappointment in what they made of it this year.

I thought about going into the City for today's parade, but I wasn't sure I was up to the travel and crowds. Instead I spent Pride Day at church, with my religious community. It was our bilingual service where both congregations worship together on the last Sunday of the month. We also had a work day and picnic. I was where I needed to be today.

Next year I'll worry about next year.

An Added Celebration for Pride

The New York State Senate gave us a present for Pride Weekend. Marriage Equality is now on the books in New York, effective in 30 days. It didn't come without strings, however. It includes a religious exemption. Quite frankly, the bigots hiding behind their religion didn't really need the exemption, but it did get the bill passed.

New York becomes the sixth state with Marriage Equality on the books. New Jersey and Maryland didn't make it this year, and we're still waiting on the court decision on Prop 8 in California.

There is a long road ahead of us, but for today, we celebrate!

So Why Ain't* I Straight?

Just when I think I've seen the last of it, I stumble across that old argument against openly queer people in positions of public responsibility. It is often most virulent where our school systems are concerned. The premise is that an openly queer teacher will influence our children and youth to become queer.

Really?

I went through my entire time in the Darien Public Schools without encountering a single openly queer teacher. Years later, I learned there were some queer teachers, closeted of course, but I was never in their classes. No teacher ever made an inappropriate approach toward me. No teacher ever even so much as hinted that there were queer people out there in the world. I was so naive that I didn't even know what was going on between a large number of my fellow students, in school, in spite of the watchful eyes of the teachers. Everything around me supported the heterosexual norms of society.

So why ain't I straight?

Because obviously, according to the conservative argument, someone in a position of authority or influence influenced my choices.

Male bovine droppings!

My brother actually had at least one of those closeted teachers in the classroom, and he's straight. I never did, and I'm gay. In fact, I didn't knowingly meet any openly queer people until I was in college, and the first one was actually younger than me. He never laid a hand on me either, except to cut my hair. We weren't each others' type. But he, even as effeminate as he was, showed me that there were many types of gay men. He was also one of the first people I knew to die of AIDS.

It's time to put this old, ridiculous, bigoted argument away. Our queer children and youth need positive role models. They need to see that there are all sorts of queer folks, just as there are all sorts of straight folks.

*A note to all my elementary school and English teachers: Remember that dictionary you were always telling us to look things up in? Ain't is in it! It's the contraction of "am not" and is more correct than aren't, even though it's frowned upon as a sign of being uneducated.

The Long And Winding Road - Part 2

So after that afternoon experience on the Madison street corner, I did the next logical thing. I called the chaplain at Rockford College and made an appointment to see him. I planned on spending Homecoming Weekend with friends, so I was going to be there anyway. And while I had graduated the prior Spring, I still hadn't settled into First Congregational Church in Madison quite enough to know the clergy there yet.

David and I had a good conversation. He asked the right questions. And then he did two things. First, he told me I needed to go and have some life experience before pursuing a call to ordained ministry. As I traveled this twisted path, I learned that it was a common thing told to young adults of my generation (and those just before and just after) who expressed an interest in or a sense of call to ordination. "Go away and come back when you're older," we were told in large numbers. Of course, now the church is crying out for young clergy. I'll come back to that shortly.

The second thing David did was try to steer me into Christian Education. Back in the early 1980s, Christian Education was still primarily Sunday School and considered the realm of women in the church. Not that it made a difference to me, if I felt that had been my call. And ironic, considering my last professional position was with the Episcopal Church in Christian Formation.

When I did get to know the clergy at First Congregational better, I talked to them about my call, and they told me pretty much the same things David had. There were plenty of other things to do, and I remained active in the church.

Then I dropped out of graduate school because I couldn't find a job in Madison at that time (early 80's, bad economy). I came back east, spent a few months living with my parents while I got back on my feet, and started looking for a new church. That search took about five years.

I'm going to skip part of the journey for this post because I want to focus on the age issue.

Flash forward 12 years or so. I'd been in the ordination process for a few years. I hadn't been told "no," but neither was I being moved forward. Circumstances both at my parish and in the diocese caused delays. The parish got a new rector, and I was finally able to pick up the thread again. Bill and I had continuing conversations. He had difficulty seeing a call, I had difficulty articulating things with him. He expressed concern about the way my spiritual director was working with me, "Not the traditional method of spiritual direction." If I'd been quicker on the draw, I'd have told him that he wasn't exactly following the "traditional method" of discernment.

Eventually, he ended our conversations by saying that he really thought I was too old to be starting this process. It was the day before Ascension Day, 2002. I was 42. A couple of weeks later I went to Hartford to see one of my friends ordained to the Diaconate--she was part of a group of 12 heading for ordination as priests. As I sat there looking at the twelve I realized that 10 of those postulants were older than me, many by a good 10 years. Those 10 were also all women. The two MEN were younger than me. That message came through loud and clear.

So I've been caught at both ends of the pendulum's swing.

More about what happened in the middle later.

Picking up My Flute... Again

It's been three months since I practiced, or even picked up the flute to play a few tunes. For some reason I felt like playing today. While it feels good in many ways, it's also frustrating to pick up after a few months of not practicing. Pieces that were close to being performance ready are once again a struggle. The daily scale exercises are a series of misfingered notes. It wasn't a total disaster. The short piece from Frederick the Great's 100 Daily Exercises that I started today actually fell into place pretty quickly. It's not perfect, but today anyway, my closet perfectionist is locked in the basement with Robert (of Robert's Rules).

I do like to pick up my flute and play music that I like--Taize instrumentals, traditional dance tunes, some of the baroque sonatas and other pieces that I'm drawn to. But practice is necessary to really play them well, especially the baroque sonatas. There's also a romantic piece (Donjon's "Pan Pastoral") that I'd like to get to the point of being able to perform. It takes me a lot of work with a metronome to get a piece to the point where I could perform it. Especially since I'm not taking formal lessons, and haven't in 25 years or so.

Performance and lessons. Those are the two things that would give me the structure to practice more regularly. Lessons will have to wait. I'd just started looking for a teacher when I lost my job. Until I'm working, and have built up some savings again, lessons will have to wait. Performing comes now and again, mostly at my church or an occasional gig at a wedding or memorial service. There are amateur bands and orchestras in the area, but there are more flute players than there is demand for them.

Ideally, it would be nice to find a couple of other amateur musicians to get together and play some chamber music. I've put out some feelers, but so far no response.

So I'll practice for a few days, and then off and on for a while. Followed by a fallow period. At least that's been the pattern so far.

And I'll keep my eyes and ears open for places to play.

Knit 3, Purl 3

Two Saturdays a month a group of men and women gathers in the Memorial Room at Grace Episcopal Church. This is our Prayer Shawl Ministry. As a shawl is completed, it is placed in a cedar chest donated by one of the group. One Sunday At the end of the summer the shawls will be spread on the altar to be blessed before being sent to the local hospital for distribution.

The gathering is as much social as it is a ministry. Our deacon provides coffee and snacks. We begin arriving half an hour before the scheduled start time. Conversation flows. Today the big topic was yesterday's storm. Most Saturdays we are treated to our Music Director practicing for the next morning's service. Many of us stay beyond the scheduled end time.

Most of us knit. Some of us crochet. Some of us just come for the conversation and fellowship.

Knitting has a rhythm all its own. It's very different from crocheting, which I've been doing since I was 11. I crocheted the first shawl I did as part of this ministry. I decided I wanted to try knitting this second one, which meant relearning to knit. The pattern is fairly simple--knit 3, purl 3 over 63 stitches. I've pretty much mastered it, though I can see some of the mistakes back at the beginning of the piece. I've also reached the point where I can hold a conversation or watch TV without pausing the knitting. And if I run into a problem I can't figure out on my own, there are plenty of people to help me.

I'm already thinking ahead to the next two shawls I'll be making. Why two? Because the first will be crocheted and the second knit.

Or is that knitted?

The Long and Winding Road - Part 1

It seems hard to believe that it's been nearly 30 years since that afternoon on a Madison, Wisconsin street corner. And it's been nearly 20 since I tentatively approached my parish priest about ordination. For those 20 years the path has been complicated by transitions: transitions in the parish, transitions in the diocese, transitions in the church as a whole, and transitions in my own life. Along the way I've watched numerous friends and acquaintances start and finish the ordination process. Some my friends, only half-jokingly, refer to me as a catalyst.

Along the way I've been blessed by some incredibly compassionate, wise, and wonderful friends. They've seen me through the sorrows and joys, defeats and victories, and the every day, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other walk through life. I hope that I have been as much to them on their own journeys.

Going through a job search involves looking through your past experiences to see where you've been and position yourself for the next leap forward. For the most part, that means looking at your professional life. But you can't ignore the rest of your life experiences. Sometimes you find that something outside your professional experience brings you to that next job. Sometimes.

Over the past six months, when people have asked me about ordination, I've responded by telling them that I've been pretty beaten up by the institutional church during the past few years, and this isn't the time to be making decisions about this particular path. However, that doesn't mean that I haven't been thinking about and reviewing the labyrinth of the past 30 years of discernment both in terms of my job hunt. In doing so, it's hard to escape also thinking about the future of the ordination path.

One foot in front of the other, carving out the path as I go.

Dictionaries

One of the features I love about my Kindle is its dictionary feature. When I run across a word I don't know, I move the cursor to the word, and the definition appears at the bottom of my screen. No need to run to the shelves and pull out the big dictionary!

I grew up with dictionaries. As long as I can remember there was one in the house when I was growing up. The Christmas of my senior year of high school my parents gave me The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, so I would have one to take with me to college. I still have it. A few years ago when I decided I needed a more up-to-date dictionary, Mom gave me The American Heritage College Dictionary. I'll probaly get myself a new one in another few years because language changes.

As each of my brother's children graduates from high school, I give them a dictionary (I still owe the middle nephew one).

The summer between having to leave our first apartment because the lease was up and moving into our condo, Brian and I put most of our belongings in storage and stayed with his parents. One day I needed a dictionary, and there wasn't one in the house. I was flabbergasted.

Then there are misuses. I was a pretty good speller in elementary school. I could usually figure out how words were spelled by breaking apart how they sounded. But there were times I got stumped, and I'd ask the teacher. "Look it up in the dictionary," she'd tell me. Really? If I couldn't spell it, how was I going to find it in the dictionary?

One year I had a teacher who from time to time used the dictionary as a form of discipline. For some infractions you had to sit at your desk during recess and copy the definition of the word run. In most dictionaries that's at least a page of small print to be copied out by hand. Set usually has as many, or more, definitions in most dictionaries, but I don't remember being given any word but run to copy out. Maybe it had the most definitions in the dictionaries we had in our classroom. I wonder how many kids learned to hate dictionaries that year?

I always have my dictionary and my thesaurus by my side when I'm writing. Although I have to be careful because I can get sidetracked by etymologies, idioms, and other words and information. I'm an incorrigible researcher.

Some other time maybe I'll tell you about times I spent reading the set of encyclopedias in our house.

Straight Men Behaving Badly

In case you missed it, Rep. Andrew Weiner (D-NY) held a news conference yesterday afternoon to admit that he had indeed sent the risque pictures of himself from his Twitter account.

Okay, he did something stupid. Then he lied about it, which only compounded the stupidity. He's not the first man to send or post questionable pictures of himself. And he's certainly not the first public figure to get himself into trouble for inappropriate sexual behavior. Remember any of these guys?

Larry Craig
John Edwards
John Ensign
Ted Haggard
Tim Mahoney
Mark Souder

With our elected officials, as soon as one of these scandals comes to light, whether the man is a Democrat or a Republican, the other party uses it to make political points.

I don't deny that gay elected officials have been involved in improper behavior. Gerry Studds and Barney Frank are just two I could name. However, straight men far outnumber gay men in the sex scandal department.

It's not just elected officials, either. Take a look at the "Casual Encounters" section for any city on Craig's List and see how many straight men are looking for homosexual sex and married men looking for sexual encounters of many different kinds. There are even a number of men who blog about it (Google it, they aren't hard to find).

And the self-named family values folks are worried about gay marriage threatening the sanctity of marriage?

I Passed. Could Sarah Palin?

After reading about, and seeing, Sarah Palin get the story of Paul Revere's ride all wrong, I wasn't particularly surprised. But then I read the story, which I'd missed last week, of Representative Michele Bachmann's mistake, in a prepared speech no less, telling an audience in New Hampshire that their state was where the first shots of the American Revolution were fired. My surprise at that goof was topped moments later when I read about presidential candidate Herman Cain's campaign announcement where he quoted the Constitution as saying not only "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," but also "whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it." You will find neither of those phrases in the U.S. Constitution. They are both from the Declaration of Independence.

I'm beginning to think that the crisis in our public education system is even more serious than I previously believed. Otherwise, how could these three highly visible Republicans make such basic mistakes about our nation's history? Could these folks even pass the test given to immigrants wishing to become citizens of the United States of America?

So I went looking for sample Citizenship Tests online. I found several and took two. The first one I found on The Christian Science Monitor's web site. You can find a link to it in this article, which you might find interesting to read. (Be warned, the CS site seemed to run slowly for me, and it took quite a while for me to complete it.) I answered 95 of 96 questions correctly (99%). You needed to answer 58 questions correctly (60%).

The second test I took was here. (I was able to take this one in less than 10 minutes.) It included a question about Connecticut (you have to select your state of residence before it shows you the questions). I answered 46 of 50 questions correctly (92%), which means I probably moved to quickly through it given my score on the first test. At least one of the wrong answers was due to clicking on the wrong button! A score of 60% was needed to pass this test also.

The questions on the two tests were not identical, though there was a great deal of overlap. And some of the questions that were identical had a different right answer. For example, both tests asked you to name two national holidays, but in one the correct answer was "Labor Day and Thanksgiving," while in the other it was "Presidents' Day and Columbus Day."

When two darlings of the Tea Party make the kinds of mistakes Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann did in the past week, one wonders what Tea Party members themselves really know about the history of our nation and how it operates. Add to that Herman Cain's confusion about the two founding documents of our country, and one wonders about the Republican Party.

Hurricanes, Tornadoes, and Floods

It is the second day of the official Hurricane season, and I've yet to hear any forecasts or predictions as to its severity. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Climate Prediction Center (CPC) does have a 2011 Atlantic Hurricane Season Outlook on its website, but there has been nothing in the local and news outlets. I'm pretty sure that's because the space allocated to weather related news has been taken up almost entirely by the devastating tornadoes throughout the eastern half of the nation and the flooding in the Midwest.

News coverage of these events has not included any real discussion about global warming. But it is on everyone's mind, either to attribute the severe weather to it, or deny that global warming is an issue. Our climate has warmed and cooled over the centuries. Sometimes as severe enough to cause things like the Ice Age. Sometimes only enough to lengthen the growing season in traditionally cooler regions. But while the so-called global warming is probably part of that natural process, I most definitely believe we human beings have been helping it along more quickly and making it more severe than it might otherwise be. Between polluting our planet and trying to control water resources, we are damaging our habitat.

Here in the United States, as we've become a more urbanized culture, we've forgotten what it means to live with nature. Flooding rivers enrich the soil in their flood plains. We try to control the flooding, but we have to use chemical fertilizers to enrich the soil. And we still can't prevent floods. In fact, as recent events in Louisiana showed, preventing flooding in one area can mean deliberately flooding another.

And where did we get the notion that tornadoes don't happen in cities? I remember one Summer when we were visiting my grandparents in Chicago--I couldn't have been more than six or seven--when we stood on the back fire escape of their two-flat watching a funnel cloud skip across city rooftops in the distance. We probably should have been down in the basement.

Maybe we ought to be seriously rethinking how we live with nature.

Summer Is A...

...Here!

I don't do well in summer weather. The heat and humidity sap my energy and make it almost impossible for me to sleep. Sunday night I broke down and turned on the air conditioner only to find that the air conditioner had broken down. It served me well for six years, summer and winter. I leave it in all year because I have no control over the heat in my apartment, and sometimes I needed the fan. But I definitely got my money's worth out of it.

Replacing it? A late birthday gift. Or maybe it's an early half-birthday gift. In either case, tomorrow Mom and I go out to buy a new one, which will probably cost less than what I paid for this one, be smaller than this one, and be more energy efficient than this one. Energy efficiency is a good thing because electricity costs more than it did six years ago when I moved into this apartment.

I wonder if I could hook a generator to my bicycle or the Nordic Track?

Summer is a time to slow down and catch up.

And maybe find a new job?