Fraught lovers.

Me and my church. We love each other, but we fight like cornered dogs.

It's only since I've been interacting with people at General Theological (the Episcopal seminary in Chelsea which I very very chose not to attend) that I've realized that partnered white men are the cream of the f***ing crop in the Episcopal Church. They cruise. They get ordained super-fast. The rest of us, we wait. We get told to be more prayerful. We are told to wait, and wait, and wait. We are the Eternal Postulants. It's hard.

I had a few brief confrontational e-mails with my bishop about this, and she came to visit last week. We had lunch, good good lunch, where she made sure I knew she had my back. The Commission on Ministry has to be handled in particular ways, but she and I have bone-deep understandings, and I love her. It helped, but it doesn't fix the ways this happens systematically throughout the national church. I am trying to stay vocal about it, especially with these white boys who will have parishes very soon, to try and show them how NOT to do this to people who will go through the discernment process in their parishes.


This Polity class at General is making me frustrated. I am now just keeping a running tally of the frightening/misogynist remarks the bishop makes during each class. (One week there was a lovely combination of using a priest killing his wife as the example of what kind of information one should not preach on and of saying, "Well, why shouldn't we bless same-sex couples? We bless dogs. And cars." Um.) I have been told that one does not lodge complaints at General. We'll see. I wish someone other than me felt like hell about it.


Preaching is awesome. And I like teaching a lot. A lot a lot a lot a lot a lot a lot. I'm starting to think that if I do doctoral work, it will be about using Foucault and Butler and Spivak to talk about the politics of interpretation, particularly in relationship to the Greek Scriptures, and the implications for Christology. I want to talk about permeable, negotiated selves, and what happens when we attempt that process transtemporally, and with someone we make particular faith claims about. Still sorting this.


I'm playing a lot of Excuse 17 these days. And Neneh Cherry. And I think it may be time to let go of my prejudices against the Raincoats.

The Trazodone is helping me sleep, but now I'm sedated most of the day, and I don't know quite what to do about that. Check-up next week.