The Mosher Pit

Clergy and lay delegates at the annual council, faced with a slashed budget for Shrine Mont camp scholarship budgets, were strident in their call to have the funding restored.

But of course, when you restore something in one line, you must cut it somewhere else, right?

So it was put to the council: how many of you would be willing to give $100 now, to restore this funding?

Hands around the room shot up. Tellers went around to do a count, and instead got checks and cash donations, on the spot. The estimated return to the program was $19,000.

Bishop Lee, noting this unusual development, said, “Can you imagine Congress doing this?”

Discussion that followed underscored the importance of taking this back to your congregations.

GIVE!

Posted in Diocese of Virginia by: Helen
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I’m at the press table, although if any of you are here you’re not likely to be reading this since you’re at Eucharist.

But I will probably be here tomorrow, too, so please find me!!

Posted in Diocese of Virginia, Episcopal Church by: Helen
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Wah. I am starting to sound like a one-note flute sometimes, I guess, when I defend the fringes. But there is one place I’m hard and fast on when it comes to tradition, and that’s church music.

I love hymns and anthems, and I really should be in the choir, but EfM takes precedence right now and I’ve been too peripatetic in the past. I have a good chunk of the 1940 hymnal memorized because most of my churchness was before 1982. When your mom is the choir director, it becomes second nature.

But I find myself just… totally, BLEAH over so-called praise music. I love gospel music, stained-glass bluegrass, orchestral music, international songs of faith, spirituals, secular-music-brought-over, and, most of all, traditional hymns from the 18th and 19th century.

But I went to a church service not too long ago with a creative liturgy, adapted from the one we all know and love, and really enjoyed it. Except for the praise music.

Just wanted to let all my traditionalist friends-in-faith know that I’m not completely outside the box.

Posted in Episcopal Church, Music by: Helen
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OK, if I’ve managed to figure out one thing, it’s that I want my ministry to be in the world and vaguely evangelistic, because I don’t really like that word but don’t have a better one for it. And it occurred to me, that …

If I was new to the church, and walked in one Sunday, bewildered, new, questioning, the last thing I’d want to hear about the @#$%ing schism. Same goes with our focus on what we blog on.

Are we so preoccupied with ourselves, with how this and that is wrong or right, that we’re forgetting that our ministries aren’t just about ourselves and if we’re directing all our spiritual energy toward fighting each other, aren’t we just killing the spiritual energy of those hungry for a meaningful spiritual experience? How can we transform lives if we can’t put ourselves beyond this dissent which, for lack of better language for it, Satan has sown among us?

ARGH! I tie myself in knots. Focusing excessively on the drama in New Orleans is physically painful for me, as is every time Stand Firm tries to demonize me. I’m one of your best ambassadors in the world, because i can talk about authentic faith to disenchanted agnostics between 25 and 45. I can influence them to open their hearts and minds to something bigger than themselves. But NO. I’m cast out from the “orthodox” and seen as some kind of enemy by a population of the church that is so ironically preoccupied with how we’ve lost our way.

It’s bewildering, I tell you. Bewildering.

Posted in Episcopal Church by: Helen
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… more likely to be astute admirers of English Literature, particularly of the Austen-Woolf corridor?

I’m starting to feel typecast in my own novel. Well, at least I don’t have a collar and a crush on the local police chief.

Posted in Episcopal Church by: Helen
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Now some round these parts might think to be all splittin’ hairs over this and that in the anglican communion, but really, nothing gets Episcopalians up in a row more than standing firm about their parking spaces.

Posted in Episcopal Church by: Helen
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(I wrote this on Friday after the first day of annual council.)

Me and faith is a funny mix.

It occurred to me today that the chain of events that culminated in my break with faith had to do with mysteries of childhood being shattered. Two things happened between 1980 and 1983 that really messed with the stable universe that my parents tried to provide me. It’s hard to talk about them publicly, because I love my parents. It’s a very hard line to draw when you are a compulsive writer and honesty has an edge that’s painful to share.

But what I can share is that both my mother and my father lost their respective jobs during that time. My father spent a few dark years as a traveling salesman (when he was a psychologist by trade), and my mother was let go from her post as organist of the church I grew up in.

Though I didn’t understand it at the time, there was a dot.dot.dot that kind of trailed off after I was confirmed in 1982. I won’t go into the details, but I went from being the star of the christmas pageant and first in my class at everything to being a lost child who didn’t always do well in school and really could care less about church.

And today I saw the kind of kid I could have been, running around at Council being a young leader. It was kind of a shock, because in seeing that reflection of another Helen, I became her.

It was a beautiful thing. And yet it makes me sad. I am–fortunately–in a position to restore that balance to my life, but the more I find that my troubled relationship with my parents was what _caused_ my break from faith for 15 years, the more that anger comes back. I thought I had wrestled through all that during counseling–both the therapist kind and the pastoral kind, but I see now that forgiving my parents for what transpired between them and me during my teens and twenties is only part of the problem.

I also need to forgive them for what transpired between me and God.

Posted in Diocese of Virginia, Episcopal Church, Life, Memories, Religion by: Helen
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So it turns out that Charlotte Hays, co-author of Being Dead Is No Excuse, is a fourth cousin of mine. (My mom is very obsessive about genealogy, and that side of the family is very well documented.)

It also turns out that she is planning to visit Richmond next weekend. She lives in my neck of the woods.

It also turns out that I am going to the 211th Annual Council of the Diocese of Virginia next weekend, also in Richmond.

Mom called me tonight to enquire whether I might be interested in saving her some train fare.

Faint!!!!

Posted in Diocese of Virginia, Episcopal Church, Family, Random, Writing by: Helen
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Related to the previous post and sent along by one of my EDoVa friends, we have:

The Blog of Daniel.

Posted in Episcopal Church, Link of the Day, TV by: Helen
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CNN.com - Two NBC affiliates dump ‘Daniel’ - Jan 5, 2006

NBC affiliates in Arkansas and Indiana are turning the page on upcoming series “The Book of Daniel,” which has been drawing criticism for its portrayal of Christianity.

The series depicts an Episcopalian minister, played by Aidan Quinn, struggling with an addiction to Vicodin, among other problems in his diocese. Jesus is actually a character on the series, depicted in imagined conversations with the minister.

Last month, the conservative American Family Assn. began calling on affiliates and advertisers to bail out of “Daniel.” Many stations have been flooded with e-mails and calls from viewers objecting to the series.

You would think they could object to something objectionable, such as reality TV.

Posted in Episcopal Church, TV by: Helen
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