What am I supposed to say to the ex-con parishioner who has been kicked out of her housing because she was accused of theft? I offered her the number that we give to anyone who comes in off the street, the clearing house number that’s supposed to give information on a whole host of services, including emergency shelter. I suggested that she could also call the Salvation Army because I know that they have cheap, allbeit temporary, housing.

I did not offer to let her stay with DJ and me. I’m not sure why. Part of it is that I don’t want to have to keep the house guest-clean, and deal with having someone I don’t know well left alone in the house while DJ and I go to work. Part of it is because I don’t want to cross that blurred line of boundary that is supposed to surround priests. Part of it is because I just didn’t want to. I’m not that close to her, and I’m not sure that I should be. She has other friends, I know, and perhaps I think that she should become/remain closer to them.

How can she get a job when she’s an ex-con, and one now accused of theft at that? She has a meth addiction. She’s got no control over her anger sometimes, and so she’s got a domestic abuse conviction. She’s gay in a straight world, with no idea how to be normally gay, whatever that means.

What am I supposed to say to the transgender parishioner who seems to have thought that becoming the woman she knew she was would change the essential person behind the wrong gender? You are who you are, and you can’t escape that, no matter how you change the package. How am I supposed to explain to her that the reason she doesn’t come across as a ‘real’ woman has more to do with missing the early socialization clues than anything else? Girls talk about hair care and makeup and how to interpret what others say and do, and all of that is missing for her. And so she gets upset with herself for that, and makes it into a reason to beat herself up. I can’t be sure if she would be depressed in any case, but she doesn’t need this added ammunition. She doesn’t even see that she needs these things, and wonders why she misses so many cues in her relationship with her partner, when those cues are fairly obvious.

There’s an awful lot they don’t teach you in seminary!

So… it seems as if all my friends on Facebook are posting pictures of the kids they’ve had since last year… all kinds of people, and all sorts of friends… As a priest whose primary ministry is to Children, Youth, and Young Adults, I’m called on to do a fair amount of baptisms.

I never counted on how much it would hurt to look at my friends (pregnant/with kids) or hold a baby to be baptised, knowing that it’s not possible for me. I thought that this would be a passing thing, that as I got older and eventually began menopause I wouldn’t care so much, or the pain would lessen, or something.

I was wrong.

Noemi Mena in Soujourners’ magazine:

How do we, as people of God, respond to the complex issues surrounding immigration? God puts it simply: “You all have been there and done that. You all know how hard it is to be away from home. You know the challenges of being a foreigner in a strange land. So you ought to know better. Be good and help out the foreign people in your midst.”

And now remember that Joseph fled political persecution and took his wife, Mary, and their son, Jesus, into exile in Egypt. Since Jesus (and therefore God) was an immigrant, how do you think he would feel about the punitive treatment of undocumented immigrants in our country today?

Today the theologian’s cafe asked: “Do you pray before you eat your food?”

My answer was that yes, I do, sometimes. If it’s just me and my husband, then I don’t, but if it’s with other folks, then yes, I do. And I’m very sure it’s got something to do with being a priest.

Imagine being married to a priest — I mean, it’s a hard thing to be married and have a good marriage to begin with, albeit that the benefits outweigh the difficulties, or at least they do on most days. But for a priest’s partner, and I’m completely generalizing now (with all the warnings that contains), there’s the expectation that you will participate in worship at the same church. And that you will participate in the life of the parish — after all, that’s now your church, and you would most likely participate in the life of your church anyway.

Add to that the greatly increased visibility that goes along with being married to the priest. Before, you could fade into the background as much or as little as you liked. Even as a married person, both of you could choose your level of visibility and involvement. Howsomever, when you are married to the priest everyone knows who you are because everyone knows who the priest is. You have entered under the microscope, and everything you do becomes public.

So, you end up having to walk the talk chosen, not by you, but by your partner. Now, women have been coping with that for years, granted, but it is not easy. You never said that you would try to model Christian behavior. You never said that you would become a mainstay of a parish. You never said that you would become involved in parallel ministry. And yet, because your partner did say they would, because they answered “yes” to God’s call, now you’re stuck with it. Most partners are glad to support their priest-spouse in this call to ministry, but that doesn’t stop it from being hard.

My husband understands that my commitment to God includes taking the best possible care of God’s good creation, and that means being as green as possible. Even though he might prefer only to attend one service on Sunday, he comes with me early for the 8AM service, and stays until well after the 10AM service as I usually have meetings that extend until the early afternoon. Sometimes, like Holy Week, he ends up feeling all churched out. So saying thanks before a meal in a formal prayer can be too much for him. Grace on those occasions ends up being a spoken line of “Thanks for this food and the hands that prepared it.”

When other folks are present, however, there comes into play that unspoken pressure of expectation > Of course a blessing will be said over the meal, after all, she’s a priest, for God’s sake!

Trying to walk one’s talk in a way that’s genuine to one’s self is much harder than you might think…

A few days ago, The Theologian’s Café site referenced a couple in Sweden who were attempting to raise a ‘gender neutral’ child. I submit that there is no such possibility. Gender is hardwired into us, regardless of physical characteristics – if you don’t believe me, then there are many transgendered people whom you might believe that would tell you the same thing.

In 1966, David Reimer was undergoing circumcision at the age of 6 months when the procedure went awry. Penis damaged beyond surgical repair, the 22-month-old David was sexually reassigned to be female by a doctor who was at the forefront of the movement that said gender was primarily a learned behavior. You can go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer which will tell you how that experiment failed. John Colapinto has written a book, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised As A Girl, further detailing Daid Reimer’s sad story.

There is a vast difference between honoring someone’s gender by trying to instill gender-neutral attitudes towards behaviors, and denying the importance of gender outright. It is a good and joyful thing to have gender, to have a sexuality which is rooted in gender. It is the attitudes and behaviors surrounding genders that can be hurtful, not gender itself. Denying that something so fundamental to humanity that it can transcend the body in which it is housed is not only doomed to failure, but can cause a sick/twisted self-image.

God help that child and that couple…

Two years have past since my last post.

No, I’m not dead but I’ve felt like it quite a few times. The summer of 2007 was perhaps the most difficult summer of my life — too much growth, too much work… I served as a chaplain intern at an Episcopal hospital in Far Rockaway. I worked in the ER department, the various clinics, ICU, CCU, and OB/GYN/Maternity. I met people, all kinds of people, talked to many of them, some for a long time, some just in passing. I learned an awful lot about myself, and I’m not sure which was harder to face, the situations of those in hospital or the things I learned about myself. The commute was 1-1/2 hours each way, the hours were 8 hours per day/5 days per week, there was theory as well as practical application, and 1 day out of the 5 was spent at a nursing home in Bensonhurst. I still worked on Sundays at St. Luke’s in the Fields, so the only time I saw DJ was on Saturday, and not every week at that…

Then my final year at seminary began. I took a course, Being a Christian Minority in an Islamic Majority, taught by the Bishop of the Diocese of Peshwar (Pakistan), and found myself immersed in Islam, Islamic law, and Islamic culture. I even wrote my master’s thesis on the plight of women living under shari’a law as practiced in the world today. I was supposed to spend January in Peshwar, but the assassination of Benazir Buhhto changed that. I graduated, with honors, in May 2008 and now have my MDiv.

DJ and I moved completely across the country and are now on the Left Coast. I was ordained to the Episcopal priesthood six months ago.

What a long strange trip it’s been…

so, ok… i’ve made it to the end of classes.  now we are hitting papers.  i finished a 10 page one this past week, rushed home for a stress test (passed with flying fitness colors, thank you) , rushed back to make my field placement committment, and now am working on a 12 page theology paper.  it’s a real challenge since i aim to take this person’s summary of modern science up to and including quantum physics and discuss how this impacts the concept of incarnation (the presence of God) in the world and in Jesus Christ in particular.

this author, arthur peacocke, doesn’t see how the virgin birth is credible since Jesus could only have had human DNA, so how could Jesus be both human and divine?  if Jesus was only human, what would the implications be for salvation theology, if any?  this is a very difficult paper…

then i have a 25page exegetical (explanatory in a certain style) paper that i am to write on 1 Corinthians chapters 12, 13, and 14 about the gifts of the Holy Spirit and their manifestations today.  yes, people still speak in tongues in biblically correct ways, and there is still prophecy, and discernment of spirits all going on, pretty much as it did in paul’s time.  even within the episcopal church…  both of those papers are due on tuesday.

then i have to write a final exam for my intro to christian ethics course > 3 sections, three single-spaced pages per section.  due on the 14th.  this will not be a fun 2 weeks…

i
am sitting in a  library carrel, wrestling with  feminist  theology and the themes of vulnerability and kenosis (self-emptying) as they relate to God.  it seems that every 15 minutes (or about every 4 pages) I have to get up to look up a word (antinomy, diremption, semiotic, apophatism, depotentiation, noetic) and it’s only when i do that i am aware that there are others in the library as well, that others even exist…  or occasionally, when a friend sticks their head over the carrel wall, reality intrudes and i recall that there is an external world.  suddenly i am reminded of the musings of a sixth grader walking home from school for lunch — i wonder if these people have reality outside my perceptive acknowledgment of them…. or is this a case like the white king in “Alice Through the Looking Glass”?  are they part of my dream? or am i part of theirs?

if a tree falls in the forest with no one to hear, can it make a sound?

it’s raining again.  it’s been doing that for 24 hours now.  anyone who thinks new york city looks beautiful in the rain has only been in the parks, not the residential areas, and definitely not the subway.  the rain comes on a slant because of the constant winds, and the gusts kill your umbrella.  going to and from field placement yesterday i saw many umbrella carcasses careening down the sidewalks, since the wind just snatched them from people’s grasps.  at times i felt like i was on a sailboard, being shoved across the pavement by the wind against my umbrella.

and still the rains come. 

my husband and mother-in-law got a phone call from the police in our town yesterday evening suggesting they might want to evacuate because of the flooding.  not too long after, they got a second call saying that all of the roads out of our town were impassable, so evacuation was no longer possible.  fortunately we live on high ground, so we should be alright.  dj would never evacuate anyway because they would not let him take our pets.

tonight we remember the victims of the Holocaust.  this Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom HaShoah), the 27th of nisan on the hebrew calendar was chosen  by israel’s knesset because it falls between the end of passover tnd the anniversary of israel’s independence.  as we remember the Shoah, we are  reminded that the legacy of violence, intolerance, and hatred belongs to our own generation.  we are charged not only with commemorating the Shoah, but also to distill from it important historical truths and theological reflections.

as people of faith, what can we learn from this tragic chapter of our history?  how do we convey the dignity and importance of human life in an age that has seen such broad and brute annihilation?  how can we convey a message of a loving and compassionate Creator to an increasingly skeptical and desensitized society?

moreover, how do we bear witness to the suffering and tragedy of the millions who perished in the Holocaust, and give honor and recognition to those who survived pogroms, forced marches, and death camps, and went on to build new and meaningful lives?  how can we reconcile the reality of absolute evil and the goodness found in those few who risked all to shelter, rescue, and nourish those fleeing persecution and death?  how do we do more than bear witness to the suffering and tragedy in our own generation?

six million jews died: women, men, little children, old people, even infants.  along with these jews many others were killed: slavs, roma gypsies, disabled people, anyone of african descent, homosexuals, christian pastors and roman catholic priests, jehovah’s witnesses, russian prisoners of war, trade unionists, and any other individuals who, for whatever reason, were considered racially inferior or seen as degenerates.
taken from the Yom HaShoah service bulletin from the joint service of Hebrew Union College and General Theological Seminary