One Saturday night.

Well, two good nights. Last night watching The Eyes of Tammy Faye, which actually made me MADDER at Jerry Falwell. I didn't know that was possible.

Then, tonight, Danielle and I watched Phat Girlz and it's my new favorite thing. (OK, there's one OJ joke that's totally unacceptable, it's true.) One perfect pork chop, two glasses of red wine, four loads of laundry, and Mo'nique. Really, really good Saturday night.

Newsy York.

I'm back. Whew.

Here's a quick rundown of all the news:
1) I am taking a leave of absence in the spring to collect myself and be with my mom. I will be doing some kind of two-day-a-week field ed placement, probably in Seattle but possibly in Yakima. I will probably be asking folks if there are places I could stay one or two nights a week in the spring, if I do end up in Seattle.

2) That's getting ahead of myself. As most of you know, this was a difficult year for each member of my family. (I am reluctant to divulge very personal emotional information on this blog. If you don't know about all this, ask and we'll talk.) Thank you for your prayers and support. I am also of course emotionally shaky because of holding the world-record for number of traumatic break-ups in 12 months. Again, thank you for the support. I feel like taking some time to feed both my mom and myself is a GREAT decision. And I've been supported. Props to my financial aid officer, the dean of the seminary, my beloved bishop Nedi, Bishop George with whom I work at 815. All have been dreams to ask for help in this shaky time. I love being able to go to my mom when she needs me. And who knows? Maybe I'll take Spanish lessons! Voice lessons! I will also be going to Alaska in the summer to relieve some dead salmon of their internal organs, hanging out all bloody on the boat with my dad, soaking up water and salt and a community of people drinking coffee and wearing Xtra Tufs.

3) That said, any love and shout-outs you would like to give me in comment or e-mail form would be so welcome right now. (I am surviving one moment of outreach and comfort to the next right now.) I just got back from my friend Emily's ordination to the priesthood at St. John the Divine, and was compiling the extraordinary list of people I will be able to invite to my ordination in a couple years, and I was crying on the sidewalk thinking about the people I've been blessed to meet in my life. Y'all better come.

4) An aside: I'm rediscovering Reasonable Doubt after a summer of The Black Album, and you know, it's just so easy to fall in love with Jay-Z all over again.

5) I am taking Luke with Joanna Dewey (!!!!!!!!! Joanna Dewey!), which is going to be a ton of work because visiting profs always forget you're taking a million classes. Because they're only teaching one class, they always give a ton of assignments. Also, I think they get nervous about impressing the institution they are visiting and make their classes really hard. Argh. But it should be good. I don't like the Gospel of Luke real well: lots of female characters but they all get silenced and a "softer, prettier, less threatening" Gospel for rich people. But I LOOOOOOVE her work on Mark, and I hope she busts something open for me.

Also, The Practices of Teaching, a pedagogy class taught by my advisor, Mary Boys. Should be interesting.

Also, Intro to Preaching and Worship. Co-taught by some seriously kick-ass women.

Also, Exegesis. Taught by my Greek Bible prof from last term, the one who helped me so much.

Also, finally and painfully, Episcopal Polity and Canon Law, at General. Taught by the bishop of Long Island, who I've heard "doesn't like to be contradicted." They give letter grades at General. Expect a punitive C+.

What I'm most excitied about is that Pedagogy, Preaching, and Exegesis are all asking me some serious questions about who I am in the world. Where am I located? Who AM I? I can only bring that person to what I do and how I do it. This is connected to:

6) Surviving CPE. Some very good learning. But also massive frustration. One of the big pieces of learning was that I bring this person, this skeptical, hopeful, questioning, engaged person to the people I pastor. I can't bring someone else, someone less messy, someone more conservative theologically. I can't be tidy. I can't fit a little box. And this messy person I am can take care of people. Showing people that I am broken too, but that I keep looking for the places God and Hope poke their collective nose around the darkest corners, helps. Sighs of relief. I don't have to be a monolith. I am learning that SO intensely right now. Who I am as a prophet, who I am as a teacher, who I am as a pastor, are all who I am right now. A part of me is thinking, "Well, goodness. I'm only 27. I have to know who I am NOW? You're kidding, right?" But I do know a lot about myself, about my primary commitments, about myself and God. I know I need to be always holding the big picture and the teeny picture together. I know I want to break systems and cycles of injustice as much as I want to hold one little baby and baptise it with tears streaming down my cheeks. I know I see God all over the place: my lack of a Sunday School education enables me to not compartmentalize God-ness. God's in hip-hop, God's in the bookstore, God's in Spike Lee movies, God's in Gloria Steinum, God's in Prokoviev, God's in the turtles, God's in the sidewalk and in the cracks. God loves sushi and God loves me and God is skin and God is the magical math that explains how airplanes fly.

7) Bishop Katherine preached at Union's convocation. That was awesome.

8) Ghostface Killah's Fishscale was so hyped when it came out I just couldn't listen to it. I am now. I am cautiously pretty hot for it.

Also, this is a really interesting article about the responsibility white people have to hip hop. I'm going to post, but I'm still thinking on it. Racialicious is a great blog anyway.

9) I really need to do homework. Really. Much love. I'll be posting here again soon. Once I'm caught up at work I will also be posting back at the work blog too. I'm also going to be offering up a little political round-up, stuff I think is pertinent to media, race, representation, and gender.

Other blog.

I thought you might like to know that the Bishop of my office, Bp. George Packard, is now on the blogging bandwagon, and has asked me to blog for him. I am one of two contributors to a blog for diocesan chaplains, and you can find it here.

I work at a really great place.

Le Rire de la Medusa

Can I just say how glad I am to be back in grad school? The last time I had this much fun with my brain was when I was dating that tragically unsorted boy and we went to queer theory reading group, and I got to start thinking about discursive creation of bodies, about norms materializing human beings, and about how series of acts create (not develop out of) naturalization. Super, super fun, and now I get to interpret that theologically.

I am starting to do thinking and talking around how to organize the gender conversation at Union. I am starting to reread Butler and bits of the French feminists. They are HILARIOUS. Not always useful, but completely, adorably insane. (How can you not love someone who wrote a book called "The Speculum of the Other Woman"?) I mean, there's an awful lack of any whisper of postmodernity on this campus (OMG, it's SO overwhelmed with "good" white "liberal" "mainline" Protestants chugging away at this doomed and glib and facile modernist happy "progress"-centric project. Ack!). So I feel like I'm starting from scratch. But who loves a challenge? Me!


The revolution is pending. Union is stuck in a place where it's not even willing to cede the aims of the second wave. And the second wave was racist and classist and all kinds of problematic, but Union isn't even there yet. It's slightly horrifying. But one of my profs has promised me space, and I just heard about someone's thesis about Paul's queering of gender dynamics in the early Jesus movement. It's a start.

Religious illiteracy.

We've begun our academic journeying into Islam this week in my Religions and the City class, and today we had a prof from Harvard Divinity come speak with us. Dr. Ali Asani spoke with us about the insanity that comes from a nation of religiously illiterate people (like, um, Americans). We're so spooked about religion and schools that we refuse to teach people good methodologies around thinking about religions, and histories of religions (which are, actually, only histories of loci of interpretation). As a result, we get a nation of bumper stickers about hunting Osama, a nation of people who wrongly equate Islam with the "Middle East" ("middle" according to whom, exactly?), an entire city on Puget Sound that will not stop telling me, "But Christianity says that women are less than men and that abortion is wrong and gay people are going to hell." I mean, goodness. You would never tell me that "Art" or "Literature" says that "gay people are going to hell," right? I mean, some writers says that and they are wrong, but don't hold the whole damn field accountable for it, K? You don't stop reading books just because some books are bad. People who are religiously illiterate eventually resort to caricature and humiliation, and when in power, acts of dehumanization.

Another of the manifestations of religious illiteracy is the equation of religion with devotional practice. We are socialized to think about religion as churches, festivals, people praying, etc. We are taught to think of religions as individual practice, instead of a complex interweaving of economics, politics, culture, gender, text, art, literature, etc. Which, of course, they are. Yet another manifestation is the use of religion as the EXCLUSIVE lens used to explain the actions of an individual or a community. ("Well, s/he was a suicide bomber/was an abstinence "educator"/supports the State of Israel BECAUSE s/he is Muslim/Christian/Jewish." Not because they're poor or scared or living under colonial rule or entire family was killed in a genocide or their human rights are being compromised on a daily basis or or or...) This is reductionist, and it's wrong. It's particularly salient in light of the dangers faced by American Muslims in contemporary America. People are now talking about "the Muslim problem" in the same way they used to talk about "the Jewish problem."


In other news, next Thursday I am going to be in an ankle-length skirt and a headscarf at a mosque in the east 90's for the afternoon. I will then catch a cab back to school, throw on my red dress, and proceed to play a sex worker in the Union production of the Vagina Monologues. So multiculti!





And, for just a moment, I would like to formally thank you readers. This blog contains a lot of blather, and it's rather poorly written. I don't edit. I just go. I promise I do hand in real essays that are elegantly and concisely written. I just want to pour some of this out sometimes. Thanks, loves!

FIVE HUNDRED AND FIFTY DOLLARS.

This is what my books are costing this semester. Jiminy Crickets.


Can somebody call them and tell them I only make $150/week?


I have a feeling that I'm going to have to provide artifical respiration to my bank account this semester. Between doing my CPE in Seattle (paying rent in two places, here and there, and paying Swedish) and buying plane tickets, I'm going to be eating a lot of cereal and tuna fish. Well, I already eat a lot of cereal and tuna fish, but you get the point.

And, interestingly, the front page article in Episcopal Life this month was about how much debt seminarians accumulate in the process of attempting to follow a call to ordained ministry. Which I felt great about, right? Until the part about how the people trying to relieve that debt are only willing to do it if the seminarian is going to an Episcopal seminary. Apparently those of us who are trying to prepare for the ecumenical future of the church at truly excellent seminaries are not worthy of being supported financially. Puh-leeze. This is the 21st century. The studies tell us that no one is choosing a church family on the basis of denomination anymore. And, as a friend of mine at an Anglican seminary told me, "I feel like I'm being taught how to be a really good Anglican but not necessarily how to be a really good Christian." I am at Union because the academics are stellar, and because I need to learn how to make good church. I am learning how to be a good Christian and not isolate myself in an Anglican enclave. I need to learn how to speak God, not just Canterbury-ian.

And all of these things are making me more intensely Episcopalian than I've ever been: I defend and speak up for my beloved, beloved tradition all the time. So I'm not losing identity: I'm gaining it. But apparently that's not exactly worthy of support. Yeesh.

I forgot to tell you.

That last night I went with Andrew from work to St. Mary the Virgin in Times Square for the 6:00 Eucharist celebrating the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple.


WOW.

There was so much incense choking the air that by the end of the 2-hour service I could barely see the altar. And it was sung! For those of you who remember my Christianities and the City course last semester, you'll recall I went one morning to a Methodist service where we sang 14 hymns in their entirety and I was about ready to bolt, screaming. Sung services are really alienating to people who don't sing. It actually felt strange to take the Eucharist because I didn't feel like I was part of the community's life and affirmation in the service! I couldn't sing it, and I felt awkward consuming something I didn't help make.

But it was quite an experience, and there was a schmancy wine-and-pate, WASP-centric recetion afterward where everyone was very nice. And it is certainly a show. I don't think I've ever - even when I was attending Catholic Mass - been to a service where the priest has his or her back to the congregation (I almost said audience). It was astonishing! But overall it was beautiful. I am going to bring my mom when she comes.


My friend Andrew was somewhat worried about me, I think, because he knows I am much less of an Anglican-ist, a traditionalist, than he is (even though I'm more of a traditionalist than most of the people I know at St. Mark's). I think he thought I would be in a tizzy about how traditional it was. And, I mean, I don't use the language they use, but they are preserving a cultural legacy, they are making something beautiful, they are preserving a part of my narrative, and for that I am truly thankful. It works for a lot of people, and I'm all about what works.