Love song to the Rogans

Last week, I got to see two people who have been saints in my life: Don and Sally Rogan. I hope they don't mind that I reveal their full names. Given that John Green already did so, as he explained that Don was the model for his character The Old Man in Looking for Alaska, I think I'm pretty safe.

I was in Ohio on business anyway, so I can't say that it was particularly good of me to see them. It was, in fact, plain old selfishness on my part, taking advantage of the opportunity to visit, and taking further advantage, as I seem to do every time I see them, of their generosity and hospitality.

I lived in Gambier, Ohio for little more than a year as the assistant rector and Episcopal chaplain at Kenyon College. The Rogans were some of the first people I met when I arrived for my interviews, as they hosted me during my stay. There were ladybugs in the bedroom and I took it as a good sign. On the other hand, the Friday I was there for my interviews, the Kenyon Carillon ringers played "Eensy Weensy Spider," which I also took for a good sign.

Perhaps those two signs were incompatible, or perhaps I was simply putting too much stock in insect/arachnid-related activity because, ladybugs or no, that was a tough tough year that has colored my ministry ever since, for good or for ill. It is the year, as I wrote earlier, that I'm still grieving, though I'm not sure that's totally accurate.

The Rogans remain without question the best thing that happened to me while I was there.

At the time, I had a retired racing greyhound named Sirocco, an ex-jock who loved to sit on the couch and tell you about his days on the track. He developed a limp that I and the vet thought was arthritis, but turned out to be bone cancer. I lived in a second floor apartment. I could have him put down immediately, or find some place for Sirocco not to have to climb stairs.

I called the Rogans. "Oh dear, oh dear," I remember Don saying when I told him what was going on. It can't have been an hour later before they called me back and invited me and my dog to stay with them in their house, for the rest of Sirocco's life. Was it one month? More? I don't remember. I just remember how completely I was welcomed, with no reluctance, no reserve.

Last week when I went to stay with them, I posted about it on Facebook. A friend, who had been a student when I was a chaplain, wrote, "If you are staying in their guest room, that is MY BED. But I will share with you." They taught all of us to share. I will forever be grateful.

Here's John Green's great Rogan tale. Well, one of them. I'm sure he has many more. I know I do.

Various and Sundry: Andrew, Advent, Aid, and Autism, among others

"I'm not barking at YOU."

Happy end of November! It's the feast of St. Andrew who, to my astonishment, I've never written about. This is especially egregious since we have a dog named Andrew who's registered name is Tollwest Quack Come and See. Did you know that according to legend, "young women should note the location of barking dogs on Saint Andrew’s Eve: their future husbands will come from that direction"? Too late now. You'll have to wait until next November 29th. I wonder if Andrew is the patron saint of single women because he was a fisher of men...

Of course the feast of St. Andrew means Advent is nigh, and I loved this collection of the 42 worst nativity sets, some of which I admit I like, and one of which I bought for my mother. It's not this one, though.

This spinach salad with warm bacon vinaigrette looks delicious, doesn't it? And it contains an actual vegetable! (And lots of bacon.)

In other food and wine news, I appreciated this post about teaching people to appreciate the pleasure in wine with flavors that sound awful: minerals, barnyard aromas. And it goes beyond that to talk about appreciating those things that challenge us -- in food, in art, in life.

[I]f we think more deeply about pleasure, we realize it isn’t always so straightforward or even comfortable. After all, why do so many of us love sad poems, disturbing horror films, or intense, subtitled psychological dramas. Why am I capable of loving Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska” or The Smith’s “Meat Is Murder” or Elliott Smith’s “From a Basement on the Hill” — while at the same time I can enjoy T. Pain, Taylor Swift, and dancing with my kids to Psy’s “Gangnam Style”?

Here's a really touching story from Bill Murray about Gilda Radner.

In obituary news, I have two impressive as hell women to bring to your attention. First is Vladka Meed, "who with her flawless Polish and Aryan good looks was able to smuggle pistols, gasoline for firebombs and even dynamite to the Jewish fighters inside the Warsaw Ghetto," who died this week at the age of 90.

The other is a woman named Maria Santos Gorrostieta who was found dead on November 17 at the age of 36. She "was a former mayor of the small Mexican town of Tiquicheo and became famous for her refusal to be cowed by the drug gangs battling for control of the western state of Michoacan."

A doctor and mother of three, Maria Santos Gorrostieta served as mayor from 2008 to 2011. Over that time she survived at least two assassination attempts, including one that killed her husband Jose and another that left her body peppered with bullet holes and scars.

May she rest in peace. My prayers are with her family.

You may recall that last week I posted the parody video of Radi-Aid: Africa for Norway. As a follow-up, here's a terrific interview with the people who created the project, explaining why and how they did it and what they want it to accomplish. Good stuff.

Finally, on the Confirm not Conform blog, I hope you'll check out this interview I got to do with my friend Emily LeBlanc, talking about how the church can better work with people with autism. Really helpful stuff.

Have a great weekend!

Not By Bread Alone, continued

Earlier this year, I posted about a program proposed by the mother of a friend of mine. Called Not By Bread Alone, this program provided toiletries, beauty products, nylons, and other items for women at the local food pantry.

Today I heard a follow-up story about the program. A woman came to the food pantry and was beside herself - simply ecstatic - to be able to get...a hairbrush. Because she didn't have one, not in any real sense. It had completely fallen apart. And, she told my friend's mother, if she'd had the money to buy a hairbrush, she would have bought something else.

It was also a good thing because, she said to my friend's mother, she was running out of elastics to hold her hair back. And now she didn't need to worry about that.

Just thought you should know.

Sunday Funnies, September 16 Quote of the Day

A friend of mine is a child and family therapist and posted these wise words from a 10-year-old client on Facebook.

"The thing is, about this therapy stuff....it always seems to come back to Me. I guess, I'd hoped it would be more about changing other people." 

Don't we all.

Sunday Funnies, Euro 2012 edition

 h/t Laura T-G via Facebook, who unearthed this classic in time for the Germany/Greece Euro 2012 match. Which had a slightly different outcome.

Various & Sundry, May 26 Mostly images and literary snark

Whew! It's been a busy week. I'm glad to take a moment to dump post lovingly about some of the interesting things I saw in passing this week.

I missed the solar eclipse last weekend, but someone took advantage of it rather romantically.

Please note that this is a composite photo; they weren't actually able to get this in one shot. Still cool, though.

Are you part of a book group? I'm not. But if I were, these are some of the questions I'd be asking.  For example,

3. Several people have noted key differences in structure between the modern bestselling novel and commercially successful classic literature. Who do you think these people are trying to impress? Can we all acknowledge that these people went to Brown so we can move on?

Questions like these are the reason I'm not part of a book group.

On the other hand, I have nothing but the highest admiration for Philosophy Bro who reads and summarizes philosophy texts in frat speak. Behold, one of the less profane sections of Plato's Apology. (Actually, it's not one of the less profane sections, because I couldn't find one. So, yeah, bad language, you are forewarned.)

I'm not going to disobey the gods just to avoid death; why the fuck would I take the risk into account when trying to decide whether or not to do the right thing? Were the soldiers of Troy inferior because they said, 'Death? I don't give a shit, as long as justice happens on the way.' Spoiler Alert: No. Besides, I don't know shit about what happens after death, so how can I be afraid of it? You want me to not do a thing that I know is awesome, just so some mysterious thing I know nothing about won't happen? Yeah, fuck that noise.

That is exactly how I imagine Socrates talked.

I want to know what Socrates would have to say to the frat boys who might have accidentally burned down their frat house when they engaged in the year-end frivolity of burning their textbooks. Oops.

You know who else was a smart-ass? Mark Twain, who had this to say when he learned the library allowed children to read Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn:

I am greatly troubled by what you say. I wrote Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn for adults exclusively, and it always distresses me when I find that boys and girls have been allowed access to them. The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean; I know this by my own experience, and to this day I cherish an unappeasable bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old. None can do that and ever draw a clean sweet breath again this side of the grave. Ask that young lady—she will tell you so.

Although I enjoyed the obituary about the competitive croquet player, obit of the week goes to Evelyn Johnson, aka MamaBird, who logged more hours flying than any other woman and died at the age of 102.

The record for hours flown is held by Ed Long, who flew more than 64,000 hours surveying power lines and whose last words, before his death in 1999, were supposed to have been: “Don’t let that woman beat me.” 

She made a valiant effort to do so, despite the onset of glaucoma and a car crash in 2006 which forced doctors to amputate her leg — she complained that it was not the flying that was the problem, but “getting the prosthesis into the small planes”. Though eventually forced to give up before beating Long’s record, she continued to manage the airport until the age of 101.

That's someone to admire.

Phillip Oliver, who blogs at Dirt Therapy, has been posting lots of wonderful pictures of gardens in Asheville this week. I particularly loved the ones from Christopher Mello's garden with its "dazzling array of bottle trees and found objects including old rusty shovels and Tonka trucks (yes Tonka trucks!)."

I found another great photographer this week: a high school classmate of mine who now does wonderful digital photography, mostly close-ups of flowers, such as the one below. I encourage you to check them out and enjoy them all.

Peas, baby by Glo Photography

Have a great Memorial Day weekend!

Survey says...

Thanks to all of you who participated in the survey I posted on my 5th blogoversary, asking you what you want to see in the future. I was surprised by the results, actually.  Here's what you said:

What topics or types of posts would you like to see on The Infusion in the future?
Listed in order of preference:
1. Commentary on current affairs. 76.9%
[really?!  You want my commentary? I'm flattered...also very surprised.]

2. A three-way tie at 69.2%:

• Reviews and recommendations
• Religious reflections
• Spouting off/opinionated and often ignorant rants

[a strange combination of things.]

3. Episcopal Church politics 61.5%
[this also surprised me, but I guess it reflects the audience!]

4. A two-way tie at 53.8%

• Photos/videos/tales of cute animals, mostly my own
• Random tidbits of fabulousness

[So I guess I'm keeping the Various & Sundry feature]

5. Obituary observations 46.2%

[Not a shock that this isn't everybody's favorite, but you're probably just going to have to put up with that]

6. A two-way tie at 38.5%

• Garden updates
• Snark

[what if they're snarky garden updates?]

7. The scandalous activities of my friends and relations 23.1%

[Why do I think it was the people who aren't my friends and relations who voted for this?]

8. And the two that tied for last place at 15.4%

• Advice to the lovelorn/bewildered
• Zombies

[which is just as well, since I don't have much advice for bewildered, lovelorn zombies.]

In the comments, people kindly wrote "Anything you want" and "Write early, write often." One person had the specific request for sermons, which I shall continue to post.

I also asked if you would like me to repost old blog entries from time to time.  Over 80% of you said "sure," so I will do that from time to time when I run out of opinionated rants on current affairs.

Thank you all again for your feedback! It was so great to hear from you.

P.S. You can find the map of Kyrgyzstan here.

One of a kind Barbies

So when your sister comes to visit you and you live in the cultural center that is the San Francisco Bay Area and you want to show her the best your town has to offer, what do you do? Well, since the cupcakery that sold Chicken and Waffle cupcakes has sadly closed, you do the next best thing and take her to One of a Kind Barbies!

Here's how I learned of One of a Kind Barbies:

That's advertising money just can't buy.  Well, I guess it can, but most of the time for some reason it just doesn't.

I'd passed by this car a zillion times on the way to Elaine, the fabulous tailor (but that's another story), and it was hard to miss it, but I'd never stopped by the actual storefront before.

But then my artsy sister came a-calling and I knew I had to get in there somehow.

Despite the fact that we stopped by on a Wednesday and she's only officially open on Saturdays, the artist, Lavonne Sallee, was working in the back and opened the store for us.

And can I just say, I had no idea you could make Barbie look quite like this.

This place might just be the Barbie Diorama Capital of the World. Barbie got eaten by dinosaurs, blinged beyond belief, turned into a centaur, re-cast as Kathy Bates' character in Misery, and shish-kebobbed.  And if you've ever thought to yourself, "Gee willikers, why won't someone just give Barbie nipples already," well, you're in the right place.

My personal favorite was Barbie's Last Sleepover:

Description: "The lead Barbie is dressed in a white velvet robe as she holds out her arms to welcome her 12 followers. Some are White, some Black, some Asian and some Latin. Each of the 12 is dressed uniquely in a velvet robe with a matching scarf around their hair. Maybe they just took a shower and are eating before the sleep over. I made the bread of Polymer Clay and the glasses of wine out of ear ring findings. They set on benches around a long table covered with an amber velvet cloth." Price: $800.

We must have spent the better part of an hour looking at Barbie in all her various guises.  It was...I'm not sure what it was, but it certainly wasn't the usual.  Because I take my sister only to the best places in town.

I didn't spend the $800 it would take to own Barbie's Last Sleepover for myself, but I got several cards with this image on it.  If you're very nice, maybe I'll send you one for Easter. 

Not By Bread Alone

The mother of a friend of mine is on the board of a food pantry in upstate New York.  She was approached by a local organization that offers grants to organizations--but with a catch: the grant had to go to a program specifically to support women.  Now, how do you do that with a food pantry?

My friend's mother had a brilliant idea: why not provide food pantry participants with nylons, skin care products, and the basic things women need to go to job interviews and present professionally?  And why not call it Not By Bread Alone?

I think that's simply fantastic!  One of the things I love about it is that it conveys (I hope it conveys) to the patrons of the food pantry that they are not seen as people just looking for a handout.  It says (I hope it says), "We don't think you're lazy."  When the food pantry provides for some of the things people need for work or for a job interview, it acknowledges some of the issues they might face beyond food.

But there's more to it than the pragmatic job-related issues.  There's also something about aesthetics that I find worth noting.  I vaguely remember a story Dorothy Day relates that, thanks to the wonder of Google and the Dorothy Day Library on the Web, I can quote accurately.

Another family moving in with us, on one of our Catholic Worker farms, felt that the beautifying which had made the farmhouse and its surroundings a charming spot was not consistent with a profession of poverty. They broke up the rustic benches and fence, built by one of the men from the Bowery who had stayed with us, and used them for firewood. The garden surrounding the statue of the Blessed Virgin, where we used to say the rosary, was trampled down and made into a woodyard filled with chips and scraps left from the axe which chopped the family wood. It was the same with the house: the curtains were taken down, the floor remained bare, there were no pictures--the place became a scene of stark poverty, and a visiting bishop was appalled at the "poverty." It had looked quite comfortable before, and one did not think of the crowded bedrooms or the outhouse down the hill, or the outdoor cistern and well where water had to be pumped and put on the wood stove in the kitchen to heat. Not all these hardships were evident.

Dorothy Day goes on to say in that same passage, "But the poor, it seems, have no right to beauty, to order. Poverty must be squalor, filth, ugliness, to be esteemed as poverty."

One thing I like about this project is that it does not insist that the poor must look properly poor in order to be worthy of aid.  That it is all right for people to want to look good and feel good, to dress well and impress people by how they present themselves.  That you can wear nylons and have beauty products, they are not things only for those who have "gotten their life together".  My pleasure in Not By Bread Alone is that it says, "Yes, you do have a right to beauty--your own first of all."

This is not about vanity; this is not about fashion.  This is about giving people the message, "You are a person of substance and worth in this world. We believe in you.  Go out and show them who you are."

I hope this project goes like gangbusters.

Update: I wrote a follow-up on the program here.

Sunday Funnies, January 8

Did The Media Treat Bachmann Unfairly Because She's An Insane Woman?

thanks to Scott Gunn of Seven Whole Days fame for the heads up.

Guest post: on Vaclav Havel

My friend Molly D. sent me this email this morning. I asked for her permission to post it here:


I was really sorry to learn today that Vaclav Havel has died.  Back in 1989, I was working on Captiol Hill when he was named President of the newly-free Czech Republic and came to address a Joint Session of Congress. I was working on a number of things at the time, and had the TV on in the background as he began. Within a few minutes, however, I had put everything down and focused completely on what he had to say. And when it was over, my boss returned from the floor of the House, deeply moved, and asked if I'd heard the speech. We talked about its message and, at my suggestion, he bought full page ads in the nine newspapers of our congressional district and reprinted the speech. We both felt that, at such an astonishing time in history, Havel provided a grounding in what mattered most.

What follows is the key section of that speech, and what strikes me now is A) that he's still right, B) the entire Congress needs to hear this speech again and C) how refreshing it is to read a speech with complex ideas rather than the simplistic drivel that passes for thought these days.

Molly

-----------------------------------------------

Ladies and gentlemen, I've only been president for two months, and I haven't attended any schools for presidents. My only school was life itself. Therefore, I don't want to burden you any longer with my political thoughts, but instead I will move on to an area that is more familiar to me, to what I would call the philosophical aspect of those changes that still concern everyone, although they are taking place in our corner of the world.


As long as people are people, democracy in the full sense of the word will always be no more than an ideal; one may approach it as one would a horizon, in ways that may be better or worse, but it can never be fully attained. In this sense you are also merely approaching democracy. You have thousands of problems of all kinds, as other countries do. But you have one great advantage: You have been approaching democracy uninterruptedly for more than 200 years, and your journey toward that horizon has never been disrupted by a totalitarian system. Czechs and Slovaks, despite their humanistic traditions that go back to the first millennium, have approached democracy for a mere twenty years, between the two world wars, and now for three and a half months since the 17th of November of last year.

The advantage that you have over us is obvious at once.

The Communist type of totalitarian system has left both our nations, Czechs and Slovaks as it has all the nations of the Soviet Union, and the other countries the Soviet Union subjugated in its time a legacy of countless dead, an infinite spectrum of human suffering, profound economic decline, and above all enormous human humiliation. It has brought us horrors that fortunately you have not known.

At the same time, however unintentionally, of course it has given us something positive: a special capacity to look, from time to time, somewhat further than someone who has not undergone this bitter experience. A person who cannot move and live a normal life because he is pinned under a boulder has more time to think about his hopes than someone who is not trapped in this way.

What I am trying to say is this: We must all learn many things from you, from how to educate our offspring, how to elect our representatives, all the way to how to organize our economic life so that it will lead to prosperity and not poverty. But it doesn't have to be merely assistance from the well-educated, the powerful and the wealthy to someone who has nothing to offer in return.

We too can offer something to you: our experience and the knowledge that has come from it.
This is a subject for books, many of which have already been written and many of which have yet to be written. I shall therefore limit myself to a single idea.

The specific experience I'm talking about has given me one great certainty: Consciousness precedes Being, and not the other way around, as Marxists claim.

For this reason, the salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human humbleness and in human responsibility.

Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better in the sphere of our Being as humans, and the catastrophe toward which this world is headed, whether it be ecological, social, demographic or a general breakdown of civilization, will be unavoidable. If we are no longer threatened by world war or by the danger that the absurd mountains of accumulated nuclear weapons might blow up the world, this does not mean that we have definitively won. We are in fact far from definite victory.

We are still a long way from that "family of man;" in fact, we seem to be receding from the ideal rather than drawing closer to it. Interests of all kinds: personal, selfish, state, national, group and, if you like, company interests still considerably outweigh genuinely common and global interests. We are still under the sway of the destructive and thoroughly vain belief that man is the pinnacle of creation, and not just a part of it, and that therefore everything is permitted. There are still many who say they are concerned not for themselves but for the cause, while they are demonstrably out for themselves and not for the cause at all. We are still destroying the planet that was entrusted to us, and its environment. We still close our eyes to the growing social, ethnic and cultural conflicts in the world. From time to time we say that the anonymous megamachinery we have created for ourselves no longer serves us but rather has enslaved us, yet we still fail to do anything about it.

In other words, we still don't know how to put morality ahead of politics, science and economics. We are still incapable of understanding that the only genuine backbone of all our actions if they are to be moral is responsibility. Responsibility to something higher than my family, my country, my firm, my success. Responsibility to the order of Being, where all our actions are indelibly recorded and where, and only where, they will be properly judged.

The interpreter or mediator between us and this higher authority is what is traditionally referred to as human conscience.

If I subordinate my political behaviour to this imperative, I can't go far wrong. If on the contrary I were not guided by this voice, not even ten presidential schools with 2,000 of the best political scientists in the world could help me.

This is why I ultimately decided after resisting for a long time to accept the burden of political responsibility. I'm not the first nor will I be the last intellectual to do this. On the contrary, my feeling is that there will be more and more of them all the time. If the hope of the world lies in human consciousness, then it is obvious that intellectuals cannot go on forever avoiding their share of responsibility for the world and hiding their distastes for politics under an alleged need to be independent.

It is easy to have independence in your programme and then leave others to carry out that programme. If everyone thought that way, soon no one would be independent.

I think that Americans should understand this way of thinking. Wasn't it the best minds of your country, people you could call intellectuals, who wrote your famous Declaration of Independence, your Bill of Rights and your Constitution and who above all took upon themselves the practical responsibility for putting them into practice? The worker from Branik in Prague, whom your president referred to in his State of the Union message this year, is far from being the only person in Czechoslovakia, let alone in the world, to be inspired by those great documents. They inspire us all. They inspire us despite the fact that they are over 200 years old. They inspire us to be citizens.

When Thomas Jefferson wrote that "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the Consent of the Governed," it was a simple and important act of the human spirit.

What gave meaning to that act, however, was the fact that the author backed it up with his life. It was not just his words, it was his deeds as well.

I will end where I began. History has accelerated. I believe that once again, it will be the human spirit that will notice this acceleration, give it a name, and transform those words into deeds.

Barefoot and laughing

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about Kirstin who was going into hospice. Yesterday, we were informed that she has died.

Her blog was called Barefoot and Laughing which seems like a perfect epitaph for Kirstin. Ann Fontaine at the Episcopal Cafe sums things up well, saying, "In the end she lost the battle with cancer but she never lost herself."

Rest in peace, friend. Laugh in glory.

Curb Appeal on a block I know

Friends of mine recently had their house re-done by the good folks at Sex Curb Appeal: The Block and very kindly invited me to the wrap party. Let's start with this, shall we?

Sally H., the ridiculously handsome John Gidding, and me, looking goofy

I will not subject you to the huge number of photos I took. Let's just say I didn't see a bad angle on the man.  At one point, I was talking to my friend Heather, who is the homeowner, and said, "He's even better looking in person." She said, "You realize I'm still miked, don't you?" So I leaned over and said loudly, "He's even better looking in person." Probably why he's leaning away from me in the photo as he mutters to Sally through his teeth, "Save me..."

Aside from gazing at John Gidding the wrap party, which was a blast, it was great watching the process day by day as Heather posted the work in progress. I won't go through them all, but I would like to share the before:

and after:

Fantastic! And couldn't have happened to nicer people.

BTW, if you're in the SF Bay Area and want to have one of these makeovers, you can apply for one!

Prayers for blogging friends

I have a couple of blogger friends much in my thoughts and prayers these days and wanted to pass their news on to you.

It's Margaret, who comments here regularly and blogs at Leave It Lay Where Jesus Flang It (isn't that an awesome name?), is on sabbatical in Guatemala. She's been posting about her experiences at Camino Segura, an organization that works with the children who live and work in the dump in Guatemala City. What she writes about her first-hand experience there is...I'm not sure what. Revelatory? Chilling? If it has this much impact second-hand, I can only guess how it's affecting Margaret, being there in person.

Meanwhile, Kirstin over at Barefoot and Laughing has kept us all informed about her ongoing fight against cancer. It seems only a few weeks ago when we first heard about the lesion behind one ear, but she's far, far from that place now. Yesterday, she wrote

I’ve been fighting for three years. That’s enough. Just saying, “I want hospice,” gives me so much peace. I don’t need to fight to the bitter end. I don’t need to be a warrior anymore. I can let go as my body wants to, into as much comfort as possible.

I'm praying for immense comfort.

Finally, I learned yesterday that the Anglican Scotist, a blogger I never met personally but greatly admired, died suddenly a couple of days ago from a brain aneurism. He was just my age, 42. Services will be held tomorrow.

My prayers are with all of these folks and their loved ones. May they find abundant blessings and peace forevermore.

Pass the milk

A unionized public worker, a member of the Tea Party, and a CEO are sitting at a table. In the middle of the table, there is a plate with a dozen cookies on it. The CEO reaches across and takes 11 cookies, looks at the Tea Partier and says, "Watch out for that union guy; he wants a piece of your cookie."

h/t Gawain

Job search update

Having finally decided what kind of job I'm looking for (a marketing position with an emphasis on social media), I'm deep in the networking phase of the job search.

The whole asking for help thing has been hard. As I call people I haven't spoken to in years, I keep thinking, "I'm just using them." But it finally occurred to me that if someone called me up and said they were looking for work, could I help, that I would be happy to do it. I wouldn't feel used; I would feel useful.

The only rule I have for myself is that I only call people for help if I would be comfortable offering them help in return. It's amazing how few people that eliminates from my inquiries.

I'll keep you posted.

The only thing on my mind today...

...is that I killed a dog last night while I was driving home from dinner with my parents.

I'm glad a friend of mine was with me who made me stay in the car while she checked whether the dog was dead or injured, and who assured me there was nothing I could have done.

He was a little chihuahua, black and tan, no tags, no collar. Neighbors came out to see what was going on, but no one knew whose he was, just that he had been running in the street all day.

His eyes were open, he had a wound on his head, he wasn't moving. We had boxes in the car from stuff of mine my mom had cleaned out of the attic. We took off a lid and put his body on it and carried him to the car. We put him in the hatchback. I petted him. He was still warm. I felt no heartbeat.

Still we weren't sure. My friend asked one of the neighbors, a woman, to borrow a spoon so we could check for breathing. Another neighbor, a man, said, "Oh, he's dead." My friend asked then if he knew where the chihuahua lived. "We just moved in today," he said. "Welcome to the neighborhood," my friend said, wryly.

The woman arrived with the spoon and I held it to the chihuahua's nose. Nothing. We put a towel that happened to be in the car over his body. My friend drove.

Poor little guy. I hope he didn't suffer. I hope he's happy now, and at peace. I hope I treat my own dogs and cats with care. If there's more I could have done, I pray that God will forgive me for not doing it.

On the way home, we found a place for him to rest with dignity, I think. At any rate, that is my hope and my prayer. May he rest in peace and rise in glory. St. Laika, pray for us. And God have mercy upon us.

Job search update: Informational Interview insights

As you might have guessed, the past couple of days have been busy. Something had to go and that something was blogging.

While I have a moment, I wanted to update you on the job search thing. Although I don't know how much closer I am to finding out what I want to do, I have at least been having fascinating conversations with some really interesting people as I do informational interviews.

Here's how that works: I'm talking to a friend and explain in the course of conversation that I'm thinking about such-and-such a field; and that person says, "Oh, I know just the person you should talk to!" It's amazing.

I was having dinner with Lorin and her husband a couple of weeks ago and told them I was thinking about doing work with hospice. And Lorin's husband, Chris, said, "Oh, I know just the person you should talk to!" So the next week, I met Chuck Cole who is a consultant for skilled nursing facilities ("sniffs" I learned they are called).

Chris had been very coy when he introduced us via email and so when Chuck asked me what my story was, I told him I was an Episcopal priest looking to make a career change, possibly into non-profit administration. Chuck just laughed and said, "Well, that changes the direction of our conversation."

Turns out, Chuck had been a Baptist minister. He had been working at a church in Modesto that grew by leaps and bounds in the 1970's when he was outed to his congregation and forced to leave. He moved to San Francisco in 1977 and got involved with the MCC. Then the AIDS crisis hit--what was then called GRID.

Before he was a minister, Chuck had been an RN. With his medical background and connections to the gay community, he was named part of Mayor Dianne Feinstein's task force on AIDS. And as a result of that, he helped establish what we now know as the hospice program in the United States. Not that he was getting paid much for that; he was doing consulting work for AT&T and other companies during the day and doing this work at night. I can't imagine how exhausting that must have been--physically and emotionally. He told me that by 1995, he had held durable power of attorney for something like 80 people and had been the executor of over 60 estates. I cannot imagine.

But these programs became the model for hospice programs throughout the United States. During the 80's, Medicaid came and looked at what they were doing and included it in their coverage; you don't get much more mainstream than that. Of course, it's very mainstream (and well-regulated) status means there is not much of a future in hospice administration as a career. That's all right. It's as good to know what not to pursue as to have new leads to follow.

A few thoughts about this: first of all, I had no idea how much we owed the gay community for the quality of our life and death in contemporary America. It had never occurred to me that hospice came from somewhere. I didn't know that it was in great measure instigated by the AIDS crisis.

Secondly, I was so encouraged by this meeting. I was reminded of the book of Esther, being put in place "for just such a time as this." Or perhaps more appropriately Joseph. Because how would you have guessed, after being kicked out of your church and finding yourself unemployed in San Francisco, that you would be just the right person to help at just the right time. It cannot have felt like that.

Plain and simple, this interview gave me hope that, though I don't know what I will be doing in a year's time, what I have done and who I am will have prepared me for the next thing. Does that make sense? I hope that I too will be able to look back in future years and see that I was just the right person in the right place at the right time to do what God has put me here to do. Whatever that might be.

Thank you, Chuck, for your encouragement. I hope I got the gist of your tale right. It meant a great deal to me to talk to you.

Onward!

Some rules for understanding religion

Thank you to my friend Gawain DeLeeuw for allowing me to repost this here. He wrote this on his blog, The Divine Latitude.

Talking about religion is hard, in part because most people are ill-equipped to discuss it with precision and accuracy. Religion, after all, raises people’s emotional temperature to a point where it is difficult to understand what the real points of conflict or misunderstanding are.

Here are some of my presuppositions when thinking about religion.

1. Religious traditions have as much diversity within them as they do between them: Quakers and Roman Catholics; fundamentalists and Episcopalians; Sufis and Sunnis; reconstructionists and Hasids; Zen and Vajrayana.
2. Most religions are not single traditions, but multiple traditions. For example: works vs. faith by justification; law vs. grace; institutional authority vs personal conscience.
3. Traditions mingle and change according to context: Buddhapalians, for example; the protestant influence on all religions in the US. New age thought on Christianity.
4. Holy texts are unrelated to popular piety: Some Muslims drink; some hindus eat beef; Christians have premarital sex.
5. Religious conflict is often ossified political conflict. The conflict in Northern Ireland has much to do with the birth of the English empire; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict began as a conflict about land.
6. Religious practice is more like a language than a moral calculus.
7. Religions are not the same; nor are they completely different. Traditions include rituals, myth-making, moral teaching, and organizational systems.
8. Religious traditions steal from one another.
9. Few people know all the rules.
10. Few follow all the rules.
11. We misunderstand other people’s traditions.
12. We often misunderstand our own.
13. We like the positive parts of our faith traditions.
14. We ignore the bad parts of our faith traditions.
15. Hypocrisy is the universal faith tradition.
16. It’s still about sex, money and death. (Or more poetically, survival in the desert).

Monster Tomato Watch: the Day of Reckoning

I reckon that's a mighty big tomato, right there.

Check out that ugly bottom. Why do they get that?

I had dinner last night with Chris and Lorin and took Mr. Tomatohead to them since Lorin had been through the whole growth process with me. And if I had had dinner with you, I would have brought it to you!

More tomatoes to come, but none of them quite like the monster, there. I won't be quite so obsessive from here on out.