Apr 23 | Freedom Reigns

Aaaaaaannnnnnd the ass unclenches.

HAHAHA so sorry, but I just thought I’d be honest.

This is first real day off I’ve had in almost seven months. Since September I’ve been busting my big buns on a zillion different projects, and now I’m free for a couple of weeks before STARTING CPE. YAY! I had a great interview and was accepted to the summer program at St. Paul’s Hospital (although they’ll send you where there’s need, so I could put in some time at other Providence Healthcare locations).

Here’s what I did this year:

VSGlee – I had the great privilege of being on the leadership team for this awesome new student-led choir that came to fruition after the school regretfully had to cut the chapel musician position. It was a lot of work but we had some really great times singing some wonderful music. The year came (somewhat) to a close with our party last Thursday, where much fun was had jamming, playing Glee! karaoke and Super Mario Brothers on Maryann’s Wii, and playing Balloon Ball, which is the nuttiest Calvinball-esque sport ever and involves rolling chairs and a whole wack of balloons. We’re still up to do Convocation, though, which should be a hoot.

Full Time Classes! – In the fall I took Sacraments/LS600, Homiletics (preaching), “Gender in Religious Literature” (to build up a bibliography for a possible ThM), and Leadership Studio (which extended into the Spring). In the spring I took Christianity in Culture (a brilliant course about Karl Barth, the Confessing Church, and the Rise of National Socialism), Prophets/HB611 (for which I just wrote a paper on Ezekiel as a metal-head, HA), and the Spirituality of Healing (for which I wrote a paper on Exorcism and Self-Harm). The work was tough – I found it very difficult to give all the classes the time I felt they deserved. Oh well – that’s what Continuing Education is for.

Work Study – This was the first year I didn’t work in the library for my work-study position. I took over a revised version of what was once called the Sacristan or Worship Assistant job. After the musician’s position was dropped, this position was revamped to include co-ordination with VSGlee. Although it didn’t explicitly say that I had to actually perform with VSGlee, I did it anyway. It made the synthesis of information much easier. My other duties included caring for linens and worship spaces, consulting with weekly worship leaders, purchasing bread, wine, and grape juice, and setting up the space for our worship each week. It was complicated at times because I’ve never been particularly good at setting my own hours, especially when I have to calculate random chunks of time spent doing minor things like folding or ironing. I made it work, though.

Field Education – Since I was doing Leadership Studio I got to be fully involved in a field education project this year! I had chosen St. Paul’s and spent the summer there, ostensibly doing TFE3, but I don’t know if it’s going to be counted at all. (CPE should take care of any inconsistencies). As September started I continued doing what I’d always been doing, which was showing up for worship on Sunday, preaching, sometimes being on-call for pastoral care emergencies, helping out Colton in the Advocacy Office (we would usually do outreach, passing out sandwiches to hungry people), and, in the springtime, conceiving of an awesome Lenten/Holy Week project called Writing the Dark Night with a friend of mine. This project came about through my attempts to create a St. Paul’s artists’ guild, or collective of artists. I started a blog and a Twitter feed and even held one meeting where I tried to structure it like a small group with a sort of urban monastic feel. That ended up really not working out. It was impossible to get people together, and indeed my studio classmates told me this kind of project might work better as something less regular or weekly – they suggested I try concrete events with clear timelines. After sitting on my butt and lamenting the problems of small groups (I’m not entirely convinced they work yet – I know some of them do but they don’t function the way they should ideally), I consulted a friend in the parish (also a seminarian) and we decided to just go ahead with our project: creation of graffiti-style Stations of the Cross which would be put up in the church, left there all through Lent and Holy Week, promoted through the websites and accompanied by explanatory sermons and Wednesday night “open houses” with harp music played by me. With the help of this brilliant artist the two of us and four other artists put together six stations and taped them to the walls of the parish. The response was dynamite – people loved them. I posted reflections on each one on our blog, and every Sunday at worship we live-tweeted questions inspired by the sermon. (I totally went on a rant about being on one’s cellphone in church to someone – this definitely came back to bite me in the butt). On Good Friday, we gathered together in the evening and, using a liturgy I had cobbled together from the reflections and the Book of Occasional Services, we actually walked these Stations of the Cross. I printed out ten bulletins because I hadn’t promoted it to the Diocese and expected only about five people. Twenty-one came to walk with us. It was a really profound experience. The project was topped off (I feel) by my friend and I reading St. John Chrysostom’s Easter homily as a dramatic dialogue together at the Easter Vigil. Finally, I hosted a retrospective two weeks later. This took a HUGE amount of work…and it was probably the coolest thing I’ve ever been a part of.

Discernment Group – This has not taken up nearly as much time as any of the other things, but it was something that raised my mental work a bit. For those not in the know, a discernment group is one of the first concrete steps toward ordination in this Diocese of the Anglican Church. It’s a very long process! It starts with a group of folks from your parish (preferably a mix of lay and ordained) having meetings with you for six to eight months. At the end of their time, they can give you a green, yellow, or red light to proceed. If you get a green light, you move on to what are called Examining Chaplains. You meet with them a few times and they assign you a mentor for the rest of the process. If they give you ANOTHER green light, you move onto ACPO, or the Advisory Committee on Postulants for Ordination. It’s usually a retreat held at Sorrento Centre on the shores of the gorgeous Shuswap Lake. There, people from different dioceses in the region seeking ordination meet and are grilled further, heh. If you make it through the grilling, they start to call you a “postulant,” and although this doesn’t mean unequivocally that you’ll be ordained, it does mean that the Diocese is seriously considering you. This is traditionally when most people are to start seminary. My process is a bit jumbled because I started with the intention of becoming a vocational deacon, and deacons have an entirely different process. However, no-one minds that my process has been different. During seminary, you stay in contact with your Bishop through sending him “Ember Day Letters” and meet with Examining Chaplains a few more times. If all goes well, by the time you graduate, you will have been assigned a place to go to work and eventually become an “ordinand.” Then you get to be ordained – first as a transitional deacon, and then as an honest-to-God priest. So after all that – I’m only at the discernment group part! I’ve got a long way to go…but when I met with my Bishop he told me that if all went according to plan and there was a place for me to work, I could be ordained by June 2014. I threw up in my mouth a little when he said that! Anyway, I should know if I’m moving onto the first round of Examining Chaplains by September at the latest, well in time to potentially make ACPO 2014.

Part-time Job! – A lot of people don’t know this, but throughout this whole time I was also working at my super-part-time harp teaching job! I work at Celtic Traditions Celtic Music School two afternoons a week. The hours obviously change depending on how many students I have, and I think it was actually a gift from God that this year was much quieter than years previous, with only about five or six students (there have been years where I’ve had ten). It did mean that I didn’t have much spending cash in my pocket, but somehow God still helped me pull through (with a lot of help from my amazing husband). It’s nowhere near as exhausting as the other endeavours, but it still represents a chunk of time and effort to arrange pieces and such. My students are great, but the job is really just a way for me to make money. Teaching harp is not a passion of mine. (Thankfully, teaching theology IS).

So that was my year, and I wasn’t joking about the seven months thing. There was literally never a day when something didn’t need to get done. I would have afternoons or evenings off, and that was about it. I became a bit of a hermit for a while – I’m an introvert and all that interaction (especially in the super disclosing environment of VST) exhausted me. Today I plan to do some laundry, maybe go out for a walk (or maybe not!) and make some jewerly, which is my latest creative hobby. I picked up some notions at Michael’s on Sunday because I knew that I would finally have time. I’ve got a big bucket of buttons (I love making jewelry out of buttons) and some beautiful beads.

It’s going to be a good day.

-Clarity

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