Anaheim, Day 2

Got here yesterday at 9:30 in the morning, in time to beat the rush of folks flying in to go to the Michael Jackson memorial. Actually, most of them flew into LAX. We are in Anaheim, using the John Wayne International Airport, but if you think television has been inundated with MJ stuff where you are, I promise you that no one is turning on tvs in their room here; just passing them in the lobbies is more than enough.

For some reason, the Hilton did not want me to have a refrigerator. Mind you, I ordered it a few weeks ago and have to pay $30 for the privilege. At least the wifi is down to $5 a day; originally it as $12, but I figure they got an offer they couldn't refuse and suddenly we have a 'promotional price.' Anyway, I reminded the Hilton about the refrigerator when I checked in. No go. I came down to the desk again at 4:00; at that point they tried to say they might be out of them but would check on it.

At 7:00, a member of our deputation arrived and got a refrigerator in her room right away, while I was still waiting. We go to dinner, and then I come back and ask about it one more time. This time, the woman calls housekeeping and they send one up in ten minutes. So what was so hard people? For what we are paying, service should be a little better. And for the record, I was not threatening, loud, or rude.

Dinner at Morton's steakhouse. Overpriced, but very tasty. A $45 small steak should not come a la carte people.

This morning, several hundred new deputies woke up to go to an 8:00 meeting only to learn it was canceled. Later today we were told it was a mistake on the schedule. How did you miss this one?!!! Mind you, most of us from the east coast had no problem getting up for the event, but I certainly hope this is not the standard for scheduling. In the meantime, we had not bothered to look at what committee hearings we might want to go to during that time because we all know we were busy.

Started taking shots with my cell phone camera, but will carry my real one with me tomorrow. I love the gluten free communion station. Is this separate but equal? Is it really so hard to keep a few gluten free wafers at each station?

So nothing shocking or amazing yet, although the Presiding Bishop made it sound like we were all in crisis, and the President of the House of Deputies was almost as grim. Sorry folks, not all of us live in crisis world.

Pray especially for us Thursday. Two open hearings that afternoon and evening. The first is on same sex marriage and the second is on moving past B033 (look it up in the2006 General Convention archives.). Hopefully, that means the votes will come up by this weekend and we can get some other work done too.

Public narrative (sigh!). The next gimmick. Pick one part your story (personal experience), two parts our story (isn't that also called the Gospel?), add a dash of current situation demanding attention and there you have it. We called that a sermon in seminary, so I guess this is homiletics for the rest of the church. And I still don't know why we are doing it except the last GC said we need to do something. I'm not impressed.

Now off to the Black Deputies meeting at 10:00pm. Then we get to go back to it tomorrow at 7:00. And guess what. General Convention doesn't officially start until the Opening Eucharist tomorrow! You can anticipate some more pictures and probably some serious posts soon.

Seniority and the Church

As I prepare to leave for General Convention, I read some posts from a few younger members of the church. That means under 40, in case the word younger implies children to you. These are the thoughts that came from this reading:

40% of the deputies to GC this year are new. We were explicitly told we were not being assigned to legislative committees if we are new unless we had some 'specialized knowledge', whatever that is. So, basically, if you are under 25 (and there are several, including at least two high school students) you are locked out of the power structure before you even begin. The reasoning given for this decision is that GC is so overwhelming that they are trying to make it easier on us newbies so that we won't find it so difficult to maneuver. The goal is for more of us to run again. You see, something like 2/3 of us newbies won't if past history has anything to do with it.

Sorry. I just don't buy it. The reason people don't run is precisely the fact that their input as new deputies is not valued. Now we have institutionalized it in a new way. We've basically been told to let the old folks decide for us.

The reality is that this system perpetuates itself mercilessly. Returning deputies basically are those who were patient enough to ride out their powerless conventions and return after the people ahead of them died off (metaphorically and actually). You can't blame them really. If you don't have the ability to get the authority until you wait a few rounds, why would you give up your seat before you reach your goal? We tend to look at the more seasoned deputies as hanging on when, in many cases, they have only just arrived at the goal of the seats of power.

But they have also been trained and brought up by a system that perpetuates itself. Change comes from new elements (people?) being introduced into the system. In other words, the seniority system has to be scrapped. Yes, of course we need the expertise of people who have been around for awhile. But there are plenty of them around. It is not enough to open the door to letting younger people run; they had that privilege all along. Once they get there, you have to give them an equal seat and a microphone that works.

And, by the way, that goes twice for deputies of color, who think I am new in the system even though I have been ordained 25 years and have attended four other GCs. Just cause I am a new deputy does not mean I haven't been around! And I no longer quality as young; I'm 52, for heaven's sake. However, I work with young people all the time, so I know I do not think like them. But I sure want to hear what they have to say, and I am not afraid to give them power in the decisions that affect them--and us.

The Episcopalians are Coming! Hide the Women and Children.

Well, there are now less than three weeks before thousands of Episcopalians will be descending on the Happiest Place on Earth, Anaheim, California. No, we're not actually staying at Disneyland Hotels, but the mouse house is just up the street. And, from what I can see, there is already lot's of Mickey Mouse behavior going on.

First, my pet peeves: The Hilton Hotel (along with the Marriott) attached to the Convention Center, is charging $12/day for wireless. Mind you, we could stay at a Motel 6, a Super 8, a Holiday Inn Express, or virtually any other hotel in the area and get it for free. But we're special, so paying for the more expensive Hilton, which basically means not walking 5-10 minutes each morning, grants us this outrageous fee.

I might have gotten over it until I was told about the refrigerator fee: it's another $30. So much for saving money by having breakfast in my room. It's embarrassing to the hotel chain. I hope every Episcopalian who learns about it tell their friends.

Anyway, that's the rant. Right now, I'm just trying to work my way through the emails, Facebook messages and snail mail that are showing up on a daily basis. I usually ignore my spam file except once a week, but now all sorts of people I have never heard of want to share information with me. And every one of them wants to invite me to lunch/dinner/cocktails/church.

Except they really want to take me to the cleaners. These 'invitations' are running anywhere from $25-$50 per meal, and I am sure I could go to one or two each day. At least my seminary apparently actually wants to treat me; no one else does.

Even the invitations to Eucharist have to be treated with suspicion. The printed programs will no doubt tell us the worthy cause that our offering will be funding, and a second pitch will be made right before the offering is taken up. We're not being nickeled and dimed to death - this is serious money.

And, let's face it, Anaheim isn't exactly cheap to begin with. $24 for breakfast at Denny's? IHOP is a bargain at $17? Now you know why the refrigerator (yes, I already have one reserved) is so important.

And the reports. It is ironic that we will pass so many resolutions about the church going green this time around. The Blue Book (actually a shade of maroon), filled with Convention Resolutions, is over 800 pages long. Most people will probably ship it out west rather than be forced to carry it on the plane and pay excess weight fees. And it doesn't even include the proposed budget, which was a separate document. The Church Pension Fund sent me their own report, another fifty pages I probably won't be reading. And the paper keeps arriving. Yes, a rain forest was hurt in the making of this convention.

It would be nice if the rest of the world cared one whit about what we do out there. What will happen instead is that there will be one report on the day we deal with the resolutions about same sex marriage, a relatively small part of the convention agenda. But it is the, ahem, sexy part, so you can be sure it will hit the major news media unlike everything else. Condemn a war: who cares? Raise millions for fighting malaria: so what? National health insurance for church workers? Hell, the Presiding Bishop could probably swear up a storm, declare herself to be a Sarah Palin Republican, and smoke a cigar naked without gathering attention unless she was talking about same sex marriage.

Now, this is not to take anything away from the importance of that issue. BUT IT'S NOT THE ONLY THING WE TALK ABOUT!!

Personally, I am looking forward to what Brian McLaren has to say to 10,000 Episcopalians. That should be funny. I wonder if they will even understand what he has to say?

Anyway, be sure to bookmark the Episcopal Church home page for an opportunity to see daily updates about what is actually going on (http://www.episcopalchurch.org/index.htm). You will have to go through the silly "I Am Episcopalian" cover site, in which various church members prove they know nothing about Christianity except the word 'welcome', but then you'll get some actual reporting.

Or you can go to this blog. Or my Facebook page. I am going to try to write some things from my experience.

Now, let's get out there and starting talking about sex, shall we? We do it so well. Or at least so loudly. Or, well, anyway, frequently. It took the Episcopal Church to make sex boring. Go figure.

Proud Shoes, Indeed

What's on your summer reading list?

Well, besides the utterly fascinating (NOT!) 800 page Blue Book (which is Maroon, but so what) that contains the reports for the Episcopal Church's General Convention, I have recently reread Proud Shoes, a wonderful biography/history of the family of the Rev. Pauli Murray. I was asked to write a book guide for it recently (one of my previous lives was as a writer of book guides), and went back to read it again as part of the process. Reading a book to write on it is a different activity from reading for enjoyment, though I have to say I did enjoy it maybe even more this time than I did back in the 1980s when I first read it.

Pauli was born in 1910 in Baltimore, Maryland into a family that blended northern free blacks and southern children who were part slave, part master--thanks to the peculiarly accepted and shunned practice of white men going down to the slave shacks and raping women. We have lots of other names for it, but, stripped of euphemisms, that is what happened. If this sounds like Murray was attempting to cash in on the Roots phenomenon of the 1970s, you need to know that the book was originally published in 1956, and unlike Roots, it does not fill in known history with fiction - no Chicken George in sight. Murray does not go back as far, staying with her grandparents and great grandparents for most of the story.

What you get, instead, is one of the earliest books to examine in detail the challenge of color in the black community, specifically they way that lighter skinned blacks enjoy privileges within both the black and white communities that darker skinned black do not, but also suffer some consequences in terms of loss of community. Also of great interest is the way the South moved from hopefulness for blacks in the post Civil War period to the tragedy of Reconstruction and Jim Crow.

One of the things that make the book so wonderful, though, is the sense the reader gets that this family, told with all the warts showing, continues to triumph and maintain hope even in the midst of setbacks. Like when the grandfather gets shot during the war and continues to lose his sight even as he establishes classrooms all over the south; years later he must fight for a pension because the army won't acknowledge that the injury occurred while he was a soldier. Or the great grandmother who is separated from her husband because the master wants her for himself. Or the brothers who fight the elements to prove their trade as brick makers and, for a time, are more successful in Durham than the Duke family.

And if this story is not sufficient for you, check out Pauli's autobiography (yes, we were on a first name basis before she died), Song in a Weary Throat. Pauli's life is American history that you have never heard before, unless you are one of the lucky few. An orphan at the age of three, this family combined its efforts to raise her in Durham, North Carolina.

Her life includes the following: she refused to attend a segregated school in the south (she graduated from Hunter College in New York); she was then rejected for entry to UNC graduate school due to race, a school sitting on land given to it by her family; she was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat long before Rosa Parks; while studying law at Howard University, she organized a successful lunch counter sit in in 1943, well before other such demonstrations; when she applied to Harvard Law School, she was rejected because of her gender, later attending the University of California at Berkeley.

Let's not forget co-founding the National Organization for Women or becoming the first African American woman ordained to the priesthood in the Episcopal Church. She celebrates her first Eucharist in the Chapel of the Cross, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; the Chapel is next to the university and is the place her grandmother, born a slave had been baptized. Oh, and did I forget to mention she was the first woman priest to celebrate in the entire state?

Yes, I admit she's one of my heroes, made no less so from having met her in the last few years of her life as I was heading off to seminary. At that point, she had returned to Baltimore, the home of a father she could not remember.

So, if you need a sense of triumph in your life or a perspective that reminds you where the difficulties you face fall in the scheme of things, check out both of these books. And in a few weeks I'll be able to tell you where to get the book guide (because I know everyone reading this has a book club you'll want to discuss these books with).

This and that

Been a busy time. Robbie, one of my students was assaulted and landed in the hospital with a badly broken leg. Lot's of people have been gathering support for him now that he is home, but it has taken a great deal of potential blogging time. Pray for him. He will be on crutches for a couple of months.

Last night, my ministry held the second annual worship service in support of Pride Week. James my soon to be seminarian preached a great sermon. Too bad the church has so alienated the GLBT community that most of them stayed home.

Wouldn't it be great if church officials thought their job was to support and enable new ministries rather than to simply figure out what the problems will be and therefore try to block them?

What kind of school would make students have to work/go to class from 10:00am to 10:30pm without a single break? Guilford College apparently.

If we did not want Supreme Court justices with empathy, we could program a computer to make our rulings.

People who object to national health insurance have not looked at 1) the complete insanity of what we have now, 2) the better examples of how it works, and 3) the satisfaction rate of people even in the so-called failure countries (e.g. Britain).

Free pulpit available to anyone who can come up with a lively sermon for Trinity Sunday (June 7).

Anyone want to bet on whether I get dismissed when I go for jury duty in June? (Yes, of course I will wear my collar!)

Don't buy an Iphone right now! They are dumping their stock in anticipation of a new model in July.

Why hasn't someone in the Episcopal Church realized that, with a new Lectionary, we need new collects too (sorry for the confusions that sentence is causing the non-Episcopalians.)?

What level of stupidity must yo possess to try to text while driving?

Today is the proposed feast day for John Calvin in our new list. But you already knew that didn't you?

On Beer

Just one more difference between Anglicans and some conservative churches. We drink on occasion. Almost any occasion, actually. We are not ashamed of it. Jesus wasn't, so why should we be? Remember that wedding in Cana with the wine? That was a lot of wine he made. A whole lot. Go back and read the story, and realize those urns contained gallons of wine. Strong wine. The kind they usually diluted before drinking. Wedding parties went on for days back then. And no, it was not "new wine" -- i.e., grape juice. No one has a grape juice steward. And no one says something like, "Most people serve the good grape juice first and then wait until the guest have had their fill of it and can no longer tell the difference. But you have saved the good grape juice for last!"

And then there was that Passover thing. Only someone who has not been to a Passover meal (I mean a real one in a Jewish home or community, not that Christianizing crap some churches do) would claim Jesus used grape juice there, or did not drink it. The number of cartwheels and hoops you have to go through to reach that conclusion are absurd. Let's just take it on face value this time.

The reason we can be certain Jesus drank? Because water was unsafe. The ancients did not understand bacteria. But they did know that fermented liquids were not going to kill them (no cars on the roads to worry about). No wonder virtually every culture developed some fermenting process.

Drinking too much could get you in trouble, to be sure (see Noah), but drinking wine was still safer than drinking water. And Israel had grapes to spare more than grain, so wine was more plentiful than beer.

Well, we have both grain and grapes, although so many fields got planted with corn that we had a hops shortage last year. Just another fall out of the too-quick rush to corn-as-fuel binge we went on. If you noticed your local microbrew not serving up as much of you favorite double IPA, that's why. Things have settled out a bit now.

So it has become brewing season for me. FIRST INTERLUDE: Before I go any further, I should point out that, yes, I do work with college students. And yes, I am extremely careful about who gets to have any of my homebrew. I'm not kidding myself about whether those under 21 drink or not, but I like my job, and a I like being able to get a job. And anyway, I don't particularly like the drink to get drunk culture of undergraduate parties.

That said, have you noticed how many guys will cook things on the grill but not in the kitchen? Or maybe they will make chili or spaghetti sauce, but not potato salad or peas. And forget about those guys ever baking. All that measuring and precision seems beyond them.

Well, take a trip to your local homebrew store sometime and just listen. It's all about measuring grain, which brand of yeast works best, the bitterness of various hops, and extract versus all-grain brewing. If beer is 'bread in a bottle' then there are a lot of guys baking out there.

Ever since I began making beer, I have learned how many friends either have also been brewing or want to start. And brewers will talk endlessly about their last batch and what they will do with the recipe next time to make it better. Mind you, there was a period in time (through the 1990s) that home brewing was cheaper than buying a quality brew. Not any more. We can rightfully claim that we do it for the unique tastes we can produce. But, really, it's a lot of fun.

And truthfully, brewing beer smells great! And saying you brew your own is big time bragging rights, especially when you show up at the party with a few varieties. Which is why some of us obsess on getting labels made. Or setting up a separate area in our home (I gave my realtor a six pack and told him to find me an extra room. He not only found the room but a second refrigerator so that I could begin brewing lagers!).

SECOND INTERLUDE: I need to point out that no one brews beer to get drunk. It's too much work, and brewing in 5 gallon batches would have you working all the time. If an alcoholic is sad when the last beer is gone, let me tell you that homebrewers are almost distraught when we reach then end of a batch. That last bottle or two can stay on the shelf in the refrigerator for weeks just to say we still have a little of that batch left.

Now, there are plenty of women who brew beer, though I don't think I have ever seen one in the homebrew store without a guy who is also clearly into it. There is clearly a male culture about all this. Which is funny because, apart from a little heavy lifting, it's really cooking - serious cooking. Like the kind that people who make homemade candy have to do, checking temperatures and precise measuring. Well, there is a little bit of added science in measuring specific gravities, but really, it's cooking. Which means we should never be allowed to get away with claiming we don't know how to follow a recipe.

And the great thing is that the skill bleeds over to other items. I am making my second batch of wine right now, which has a few extra steps but doesn't have the time on the stove. And my hard cider recipe, which is truly easy--if you want a true English cider, not that sweet junk you find in the market, make your own--is a favorite among friends. And my great research project has been figuring out how to make a gluten free beer for people who have those allergies. And my next big project is mead.

So, I have a double chocolate stout brewing now, and a shiraz fermenting. A chili IPA is probably next because that is easy and fairly quick. And I'll be wearing my "What would Jesus brew?" T-shirt when I brew it.

This Just In...

The Anglican Consultative Council (ACC), one of the chief centers of governance for this loose affiliation we call the Anglican Communion has decided that it really believes in the Windsor Document after all. This was the document that followed the Episcopal Church's consecration of Gene Robinson, and openly gay man (See article just below this one.).

The Windsor Report said that The Episcopal Church should refrain from further gay consecrations. But is also said that Bishops should stop intruding in the internal affairs of other dioceses. This part of the Report has been routinely ignored by dioceses who choose to accept North American clergy who have been deposed or have abandoned the Anglican Communion over the issues related to sexuality.

Typically these clergy align themselves with bishops and dioceses in Latin America and Africa who claim to be providing 'missionary work' in North America because they believe the Episcopal Church (USA) has abandoned any kind of sensibility about Jesus' message.

So what happened. Well, the ACC has chosen to tell the Church of Uganda that they cannot be represented by an American priest living in Georgia who remounced his orders years ago because then the ACC would be sanctioning a violation of the portion of the Windsor Report that chastises the attempts to establish jurisdiction by a foreign bishop in a diocese where there is already an established church. It has been a chief complaint that everyone has been making demands of the American (and Canadian) churches but this equally critical issue has not been faced. Well, now it has.

Read all about it here: http://www.aco.org/acns/news.cfm/2009/5/4/ACNS4603

Thank you ACC. We are glad the admonishing is now going out to someone other than us: You cannot keep shouting 'Windsor Report' and simultaneously ignoring the parts of it that apply to you!

Okay, enough Episcopal Church and sexuality stuff. Next week, a report on beer making!