I have been sleeping hours upon hours each day since term ended. Usually nine hours at night and a few more during the day. I haven't been able to sleep like this since I was a teenager/very early twenties. It's lovely but I keep wondering whether I haven't taken on an illness of some kind.
I've been very scholastically useless so far. This will change, probably tomorrow, because it has to if I want to do well and I do want to do well. I have essays for conferences to be written and a big presentation at 10.00am on the first day of term and so must crack on a little now or end up having to work on Christmas Day, which I refuse to let happen.
I have been socially very useful so far. I have been to three Christmas parties (two involving the dread 'networking' - but with think tank people, at least, so not as bad), a birthday party, afternoon al fresco mulled wine consumption, a Progress event featuring a speech given by Tessa Jowell in Westminster (my first time inside the Houses of Parliament - so exciting I could hardly keep from bouncing up and down like a small child) and a surprisingly non-awkward and contentedly uneventful night at the pub with that girl I (possibly stupidly) kissed.
That has been my life of the past week: reading the whole paper and drinking the entire pot of coffee in my pyjamas, desultory tidying up, novel consumption hour, possibly an errand but nothing too strenuous, novel consumption extended afternoon edition, bath, get dressed, sit on the uncrowded tube for an hour to get to the other side of town and reading and listening to music, four hours' good conversation and the trip home, here by night bus, there by miraculous catching of the last train. At home, the hot water bottle and some tea and back to sleep.
It's blissful, really. Such a nice contrast to the chronically recurring insomnia of mine.
Time to be more active now though. Take the work back up and add in the Christmas baking, hurray! Advent Lessons and Carols on Tuesday and I can hardly wait for midnight mass. I hope I'll get to take the night bus home in the snow and sit up top and stare out at it. Either way, it's procession time and lots of singing.
At home, no one ever wants to go to Christmas mass on Christmas Day except for me, so I think I'll go this year and indulge myself. I'm a happy person to feel that going to mass is an indulgence...that's a desire that sits easy on the conscience and is easily indulged, unlike so many of my other ones that nearly always trouble on the latter score if not the former.
So this post isn't about much but I haven't done much but drink and talk and read my way through Orlando, All Passion Spent and Madame Bovary. But I'm happy right now and that seems worth recording.
Showing posts with label Anglo-Catholic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Anglo-Catholic. Show all posts
18 December 2009
16 August 2009
Maria Assumpta Est In Coelum, Angeli Gaudent
I said goodbye to my church today. It was our patronal feast day and we started down on the street corner and carried St. Mary on her litter under the canopy back into the church. For the anthem we had Arcadelt's Ave Maria and then some of my favorite hymns, including 278 (Sing we of the joys of Mary). Our last choir director wrote a descant for it specially for our choir that is very fun to sing; lots of high notes.
During announcements, our rector made me come downstairs to be bid farewell and gave me a blessing for my studies next year, which was nice but embarrassing. On top of that, our choir director asked me to sing the prayers, which is also nice and embarrassing; I sing just fine to be a choir member but my voice isn't really strong enough for me to sing by myself, at least, not in front of people. I can never quite make it, breathwise, to the end of 'Father we pray for all who govern and hold authority in the nations of the world'. The other versicles are easier because they are shorter.
Anyhow, it is strange to be leaving Our Lady of the Holy Smokes, as it is nicknamed. I was confirmed there and have been going to church there for five and a half years - I've been there longer than the current rector, I've been a choir member longer than anyone else who is currently in the choir, longer than our current choir director and organist, longer than any of the other 'young people'. We broke ground today for the new parish hall - I'm glad I was there to see it - but I'm sorry that I won't be around to see what happens next.
When I first started going to Our Lady of the Holy Smokes, there were five people under the age of forty, an interim priest who was doing things he ought not to have been doing*, no children and a rather paltry community life. As of today, our congregation has increased from around 100 active members to 150, we have enough children of varying ages that we have child altar servers, around twenty young people, gay, straight, single and married, and the median age of the parish has dropped from 54 to 39.
All of this is nice and it has been wonderful to participate in the growth of the parish but I'm going to miss my church most because it is where I discovered the mystery that is Christianity. When my then roommate and good friend dragged me off to church with her one Sunday morning, I was entirely unprepared by my lukewarm Presbyterian upbringing for the beauty and holiness of the liturgy. I spent the entire service in anxiety; on the one hand, I was enchanted by everything that was going on, on the other hand, I didn't know what to make of the statues and procession and the singing of the Regina Caeli at the end of the service. It seemed to be a good that I was going to church but was I not then guilty of idolatry? Church attendance felt like an occasion of sin. But I couldn't keep myself away the next Sunday, nor the Sunday after that, despite my initial quandary.
Confirmation didn't make the impression on me that I had hoped for - it seems to have been one of those rituals of life that comes here too early, there too late, as Forster puts it - but I will never forget the awe of God's presence that overcame me the first time I went to Benediction, nor the solemnity of my first Holy Week (Presbyterians don't really do Holy Week, at least not in my experience).
A building does not make a church, but those four walls are especially dear to me for having housed so much revelation and love. I'm heartsore at leaving my congregation and all the friends I have therein. And the choir! Will I ever again have the chance to sing Palestrina and Arcadelt and Tallis and Clemens non Papa and de Victoria again? (I do suspect myself of making a false idol of the music sometimes, hopefully not being in choir will help me get past it although I doubt I would ever be able to make my peace with a guitar led mass).
More than anything else that has happened so far this summer, leaving my church is the one thing that has made me feel, rather than know, that this part of my life is over, whether I want it to be or not. I'm scared, both of what might happen and what I might miss. When I was still studying ballet very seriously, it was a comfort to me that wherever I went, ballet class would always follow the same structure and that no matter what country I was in, I would be able to follow what was going on. Now, the structure of the mass gives me the same comfort. Even when I have been to mass in a country whose language I do not speak, I have been able to follow (excepting the sermon, of course) and say the prayers and creed and sanctus and so on quietly in English or in Latin. That will always be there, both in a church and in my heart, and ever my strength and shield.
Okay. My prose is getting a little out of control, so I should probably stop.
Everything here is over now.
* He was trying to switch the church from being part of the Episcopal church to being part of the Anglican Church in America - much more conservative and against the wishes of most of the congregation but not necessarily those of the vestry, two of whom were very wealthy and tried to throw their influence around that way and who scared off all of the candidates for the new rector by pretending that their viewpoint was the majority viewpoint over a two year period before the bishop intervened, dissolved the search committee, froze the vestry and more or less appointed our current rector - happily, I had no idea this was going on at the time or I wouldn't still be there - for something that almost split the congregation and did drive many people away, there was very little gossip.
During announcements, our rector made me come downstairs to be bid farewell and gave me a blessing for my studies next year, which was nice but embarrassing. On top of that, our choir director asked me to sing the prayers, which is also nice and embarrassing; I sing just fine to be a choir member but my voice isn't really strong enough for me to sing by myself, at least, not in front of people. I can never quite make it, breathwise, to the end of 'Father we pray for all who govern and hold authority in the nations of the world'. The other versicles are easier because they are shorter.
Anyhow, it is strange to be leaving Our Lady of the Holy Smokes, as it is nicknamed. I was confirmed there and have been going to church there for five and a half years - I've been there longer than the current rector, I've been a choir member longer than anyone else who is currently in the choir, longer than our current choir director and organist, longer than any of the other 'young people'. We broke ground today for the new parish hall - I'm glad I was there to see it - but I'm sorry that I won't be around to see what happens next.
When I first started going to Our Lady of the Holy Smokes, there were five people under the age of forty, an interim priest who was doing things he ought not to have been doing*, no children and a rather paltry community life. As of today, our congregation has increased from around 100 active members to 150, we have enough children of varying ages that we have child altar servers, around twenty young people, gay, straight, single and married, and the median age of the parish has dropped from 54 to 39.
All of this is nice and it has been wonderful to participate in the growth of the parish but I'm going to miss my church most because it is where I discovered the mystery that is Christianity. When my then roommate and good friend dragged me off to church with her one Sunday morning, I was entirely unprepared by my lukewarm Presbyterian upbringing for the beauty and holiness of the liturgy. I spent the entire service in anxiety; on the one hand, I was enchanted by everything that was going on, on the other hand, I didn't know what to make of the statues and procession and the singing of the Regina Caeli at the end of the service. It seemed to be a good that I was going to church but was I not then guilty of idolatry? Church attendance felt like an occasion of sin. But I couldn't keep myself away the next Sunday, nor the Sunday after that, despite my initial quandary.
Confirmation didn't make the impression on me that I had hoped for - it seems to have been one of those rituals of life that comes here too early, there too late, as Forster puts it - but I will never forget the awe of God's presence that overcame me the first time I went to Benediction, nor the solemnity of my first Holy Week (Presbyterians don't really do Holy Week, at least not in my experience).
A building does not make a church, but those four walls are especially dear to me for having housed so much revelation and love. I'm heartsore at leaving my congregation and all the friends I have therein. And the choir! Will I ever again have the chance to sing Palestrina and Arcadelt and Tallis and Clemens non Papa and de Victoria again? (I do suspect myself of making a false idol of the music sometimes, hopefully not being in choir will help me get past it although I doubt I would ever be able to make my peace with a guitar led mass).
More than anything else that has happened so far this summer, leaving my church is the one thing that has made me feel, rather than know, that this part of my life is over, whether I want it to be or not. I'm scared, both of what might happen and what I might miss. When I was still studying ballet very seriously, it was a comfort to me that wherever I went, ballet class would always follow the same structure and that no matter what country I was in, I would be able to follow what was going on. Now, the structure of the mass gives me the same comfort. Even when I have been to mass in a country whose language I do not speak, I have been able to follow (excepting the sermon, of course) and say the prayers and creed and sanctus and so on quietly in English or in Latin. That will always be there, both in a church and in my heart, and ever my strength and shield.
Okay. My prose is getting a little out of control, so I should probably stop.
Everything here is over now.
____________________________________________________________
* He was trying to switch the church from being part of the Episcopal church to being part of the Anglican Church in America - much more conservative and against the wishes of most of the congregation but not necessarily those of the vestry, two of whom were very wealthy and tried to throw their influence around that way and who scared off all of the candidates for the new rector by pretending that their viewpoint was the majority viewpoint over a two year period before the bishop intervened, dissolved the search committee, froze the vestry and more or less appointed our current rector - happily, I had no idea this was going on at the time or I wouldn't still be there - for something that almost split the congregation and did drive many people away, there was very little gossip.
09 August 2009
Greetings From Our Nation's Capital
I am up in DC where it will be around 37C tomorrow (100ish F) and humid as only a city built on a drained swamp can be. What can they have been thinking? Philadelphia (the original capital) has much nicer weather, if you ask me.
So far, I have not done much but drag myself out on walks in the heat, ducked into the National Gallery for the sculpture garden, gotten gravel in my shoes and blisters marching around the National Mall and made thick clouds of smoke in the guest room where I sit and worry for most of the day. The pleasant side effect of all this worrying is that it has driven me to reading novels with a speed and concentration I thought I had lost years ago. I'm glad to find I can still read like that, with total absorption.
So far I have made it through 'Mariana' (Monica Dickens), 'Someone At a Distance' (Dorothy Whipple), 'No Fond Return of Love' (Barbara Pym), something else too light for me to name without embarrassment - snobby of me, I acknowledge - and most of 'Persuasion' (Jane Austen). Next in the pile is 'Cheerful Weather for the Wedding', which I bought on the strength of the fact that Virginia Woolf compared the author, Julia Strachey, to Katherine Mansfield.
I have been here four days.
Unfortunately, spending time with the parents has made me more muddled than less about what I ought to do with myself. They are very sweetly concerned about my health but with the result that I am more confused about what course I should follow in the immediate future. Between that and the long wait to hear about what funding I will have for next year, my anxiety, never very well moderated, is assuming operatic proportions. I wish, in my cowardice, that someone more competent could take over my life for the next few weeks, sort everything out and then hand it back over. However, I must do as E.M. Forster has recommended and face both the external and the internal situation bravely. I aim to do better than Lucy Honeychurch; I should like to do as well as Margaret Schlegel.
Tomorrow is church, which always makes me feel better. Sunday is my favorite day of the week. I do wish, though, that my mother's church's new organist would not play everything so slowly. I don't have the breath control to make whole notes (semibreves) last that long. 'Joy to the World' sounded like a dirge at Christmas midnight mass this last year and became slower and more grandiose with each verse. I was gasping by the end of it.
I never meant for this blog to become so personal but I cannot get my mind un-mired from from the Slough of Despond that has made up so much of this summer. We are past Midsummer Night now and it is a relief to think how soon it will be autumn, my favorite season, full of the smell of rotting leaves and gloomy skies.
So far, I have not done much but drag myself out on walks in the heat, ducked into the National Gallery for the sculpture garden, gotten gravel in my shoes and blisters marching around the National Mall and made thick clouds of smoke in the guest room where I sit and worry for most of the day. The pleasant side effect of all this worrying is that it has driven me to reading novels with a speed and concentration I thought I had lost years ago. I'm glad to find I can still read like that, with total absorption.
So far I have made it through 'Mariana' (Monica Dickens), 'Someone At a Distance' (Dorothy Whipple), 'No Fond Return of Love' (Barbara Pym), something else too light for me to name without embarrassment - snobby of me, I acknowledge - and most of 'Persuasion' (Jane Austen). Next in the pile is 'Cheerful Weather for the Wedding', which I bought on the strength of the fact that Virginia Woolf compared the author, Julia Strachey, to Katherine Mansfield.
I have been here four days.
Unfortunately, spending time with the parents has made me more muddled than less about what I ought to do with myself. They are very sweetly concerned about my health but with the result that I am more confused about what course I should follow in the immediate future. Between that and the long wait to hear about what funding I will have for next year, my anxiety, never very well moderated, is assuming operatic proportions. I wish, in my cowardice, that someone more competent could take over my life for the next few weeks, sort everything out and then hand it back over. However, I must do as E.M. Forster has recommended and face both the external and the internal situation bravely. I aim to do better than Lucy Honeychurch; I should like to do as well as Margaret Schlegel.
Tomorrow is church, which always makes me feel better. Sunday is my favorite day of the week. I do wish, though, that my mother's church's new organist would not play everything so slowly. I don't have the breath control to make whole notes (semibreves) last that long. 'Joy to the World' sounded like a dirge at Christmas midnight mass this last year and became slower and more grandiose with each verse. I was gasping by the end of it.
I never meant for this blog to become so personal but I cannot get my mind un-mired from from the Slough of Despond that has made up so much of this summer. We are past Midsummer Night now and it is a relief to think how soon it will be autumn, my favorite season, full of the smell of rotting leaves and gloomy skies.
31 July 2009
Don't Found a Church That Will Be Headed By Committee
Or do, perhaps. It seems still to be working for the Presbyterians.
I'm not sure if anyone who reads this has been paying attention to the state of the Anglican Church since the Episcopal Church in the US had General Convention recently but it is a sorry state of affairs. You can read about it here, our Presiding Bishop's letter is here, Rowan Williams' response is here and reflections from the Anglican communion institute are here.
Now, I have infinitely more patience with the Church trying to figure out what to do with non-heterosexual people than I do with the government (Barack Obama, what is the matter with you?) but I do not have much patience for wrongheaded arguments from anyone. My problem with the arguments coming out of Canterbury is that they frame the debate about opening ordination to non-celibate queer people and giving blessing on same-sex partnerships in terms of sex. It is not about sex, it is about love. Secondly, these arguments tend to implicitly assume that queer people exist outside of the community and are somehow intruding on the Church. This is not the case. Every single queer person on earth has parents, often siblings, grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles, friends - they are not a discrete group of individuals but rooted deeply into society. To deny the full humanity of queer people affects not only any individual queer person, nor even merely those who fall into that category but also anyone who is a parent, child, relative or friend of someone who is queer.
Thirdly, to close up ranks by brandishing church tradition in the faces of those who want change and making threats of schism and rival communions is not Christian behavior. Nor, indeed, is doing so philosophically consistent with the origins of the Anglican church. To me, the great miracle of the Anglican church is that from its very beginning it managed to unite anti-monarchical Puritans with those who might have preferred to remain Catholic through having a single Book of Common Prayer. There is no clear reason, it seems to me, to think that it cannot hold us in communion now.
Blegh, such a frustrating mess. And all it will lead to is another report and then a conference and then an advisory and so on into darkness. It never will be resolved if the argument cannot be framed in proper terms because, until then, we will all be talking at cross purposes and waffling all the while. Nothing was ever solved by informal fallacies!
I'm not sure if anyone who reads this has been paying attention to the state of the Anglican Church since the Episcopal Church in the US had General Convention recently but it is a sorry state of affairs. You can read about it here, our Presiding Bishop's letter is here, Rowan Williams' response is here and reflections from the Anglican communion institute are here.
Now, I have infinitely more patience with the Church trying to figure out what to do with non-heterosexual people than I do with the government (Barack Obama, what is the matter with you?) but I do not have much patience for wrongheaded arguments from anyone. My problem with the arguments coming out of Canterbury is that they frame the debate about opening ordination to non-celibate queer people and giving blessing on same-sex partnerships in terms of sex. It is not about sex, it is about love. Secondly, these arguments tend to implicitly assume that queer people exist outside of the community and are somehow intruding on the Church. This is not the case. Every single queer person on earth has parents, often siblings, grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles, friends - they are not a discrete group of individuals but rooted deeply into society. To deny the full humanity of queer people affects not only any individual queer person, nor even merely those who fall into that category but also anyone who is a parent, child, relative or friend of someone who is queer.
Thirdly, to close up ranks by brandishing church tradition in the faces of those who want change and making threats of schism and rival communions is not Christian behavior. Nor, indeed, is doing so philosophically consistent with the origins of the Anglican church. To me, the great miracle of the Anglican church is that from its very beginning it managed to unite anti-monarchical Puritans with those who might have preferred to remain Catholic through having a single Book of Common Prayer. There is no clear reason, it seems to me, to think that it cannot hold us in communion now.
Blegh, such a frustrating mess. And all it will lead to is another report and then a conference and then an advisory and so on into darkness. It never will be resolved if the argument cannot be framed in proper terms because, until then, we will all be talking at cross purposes and waffling all the while. Nothing was ever solved by informal fallacies!
03 July 2009
Continuing to Exist
I haven't been so sure about continuing this blog but I've found that I really miss it. So here I am.
Everything is a bit at sixes and sevens here; beyond personal life drama, I am also in the process of moving. I'm off to London for grad school in the fall to study philosophy and public policy - I can't remember whether I've said that before, so please forgive me if I'm repeating myself.
Either way, I'm very excited to be headed back to a country where 23 C counts as a heatwave. Where I sit, in urban Appalachia, we are having the exact same weather with the same lack of air-conditioning and all anyone can talk about is what a cold spring and summer we've had so far. From what I've been reading in the Guardian, the same weather is causing everyone to wilt across the Atlantic.
It's a little unfair of me to make mock. I remember the first summer after I moved here: I couldn't leave the house during the day from June til late September because the heat was overwhelming. I'm still not fully re-acclimatised. It certainly wasn't any warmer than this summer during the last summer I was in London (2003) but I seem to remember spending a lot of time on the 46 bus to get to Hampstead Heath and go swimming and eating unholy amounts of ice cream and thinking that I would sweat to death before the heat broke. However, after six years of being teased over my pusillanimous response to summer heat of the American south, it's hard to resist tittering in a friendly fashion.
I'm going to go spend about six weeks with my parents before I move overseas, which means that I'm in the odd process of dissolving my household now, still more than two months before I'll be heading overseas. The hardest part was finding a new home for my cat. I was there when he was born and brought him home exactly 5 years ago tomorrow, on the fourth of July. Now I'll be dropping him off at his new home in eleven days. Happily, he's going to a friend of mine whom I know to be good to cats. Still, it makes me upset to think about.
The fun part of this is giving away all my stuff. One of my friends (there are a bunch of us going to grad school this fall, including two who are also off to England) was joking about how it had all started to feel like an early Christian community, with everyone selling or giving away all they have. We've been swapping climate appropriate clothes and there's a lot of furniture changing hands. I've been putting together surprise boxes for various friends - filling them up with things that I think the recipient would enjoy having or make good use of. It's so nice not to have to make arrangements to move the furniture. I will easily be able to get myself and my books and clothes and paintings up to my parents' in my car.
The idea of not being here for next year's farm tour or this year's apple season and not being at Our Lady of the Holy Smokes for Easter (no more church choir!) is disturbing. However, whatever melancholia this premature nostalgia brings on is easily dispelled when I remember all things in London I like to do - there are so very many. I'll be back in the same town as some of my friends whom I haven't seen in six years and there will be tops of buses from which to stare out of the windows again and the Tate Modern and lunchtime concerts in the City churches and Primrose Hill and I won't have to drive everywhere. Walking will be easier, too, what with London being on an alluvial plane while I currently live in the mountains. You can't just go out and walk for a couple of hours here as you can there, and I miss it.
It's going to be nice to leave the ranks of America's uninsured too: due to state budget cuts, the mental health clinic I go to is now open only three days a week and they're about to dump patients like me, who aren't in a state of acute mental illness. I'm glad I won't have to figure out how to find appropriate care here next year.
I'm going to stop here for now with two requests:
1) There's no way for me to pretend that wretched things have happened in my personal life and that I am quite unhappy over the state of things. The world hasn't ended, however, and no one has died and I haven't lost my mind, so it will all be okay in the end. I just can't talk about it, so, though I know any enquiries would be friendly ones, please don't ask me about it.
2) I need to find a church in London: C of E, high, pref. Anglo-Catholic, and friendly to women and gay people. If you know of one (or of a way to try and find one - the diocese of London website is distinctly unhelpful), please tell me.
It's nice to be back.
Everything is a bit at sixes and sevens here; beyond personal life drama, I am also in the process of moving. I'm off to London for grad school in the fall to study philosophy and public policy - I can't remember whether I've said that before, so please forgive me if I'm repeating myself.
Either way, I'm very excited to be headed back to a country where 23 C counts as a heatwave. Where I sit, in urban Appalachia, we are having the exact same weather with the same lack of air-conditioning and all anyone can talk about is what a cold spring and summer we've had so far. From what I've been reading in the Guardian, the same weather is causing everyone to wilt across the Atlantic.
It's a little unfair of me to make mock. I remember the first summer after I moved here: I couldn't leave the house during the day from June til late September because the heat was overwhelming. I'm still not fully re-acclimatised. It certainly wasn't any warmer than this summer during the last summer I was in London (2003) but I seem to remember spending a lot of time on the 46 bus to get to Hampstead Heath and go swimming and eating unholy amounts of ice cream and thinking that I would sweat to death before the heat broke. However, after six years of being teased over my pusillanimous response to summer heat of the American south, it's hard to resist tittering in a friendly fashion.
I'm going to go spend about six weeks with my parents before I move overseas, which means that I'm in the odd process of dissolving my household now, still more than two months before I'll be heading overseas. The hardest part was finding a new home for my cat. I was there when he was born and brought him home exactly 5 years ago tomorrow, on the fourth of July. Now I'll be dropping him off at his new home in eleven days. Happily, he's going to a friend of mine whom I know to be good to cats. Still, it makes me upset to think about.
The fun part of this is giving away all my stuff. One of my friends (there are a bunch of us going to grad school this fall, including two who are also off to England) was joking about how it had all started to feel like an early Christian community, with everyone selling or giving away all they have. We've been swapping climate appropriate clothes and there's a lot of furniture changing hands. I've been putting together surprise boxes for various friends - filling them up with things that I think the recipient would enjoy having or make good use of. It's so nice not to have to make arrangements to move the furniture. I will easily be able to get myself and my books and clothes and paintings up to my parents' in my car.
The idea of not being here for next year's farm tour or this year's apple season and not being at Our Lady of the Holy Smokes for Easter (no more church choir!) is disturbing. However, whatever melancholia this premature nostalgia brings on is easily dispelled when I remember all things in London I like to do - there are so very many. I'll be back in the same town as some of my friends whom I haven't seen in six years and there will be tops of buses from which to stare out of the windows again and the Tate Modern and lunchtime concerts in the City churches and Primrose Hill and I won't have to drive everywhere. Walking will be easier, too, what with London being on an alluvial plane while I currently live in the mountains. You can't just go out and walk for a couple of hours here as you can there, and I miss it.
It's going to be nice to leave the ranks of America's uninsured too: due to state budget cuts, the mental health clinic I go to is now open only three days a week and they're about to dump patients like me, who aren't in a state of acute mental illness. I'm glad I won't have to figure out how to find appropriate care here next year.
I'm going to stop here for now with two requests:
1) There's no way for me to pretend that wretched things have happened in my personal life and that I am quite unhappy over the state of things. The world hasn't ended, however, and no one has died and I haven't lost my mind, so it will all be okay in the end. I just can't talk about it, so, though I know any enquiries would be friendly ones, please don't ask me about it.
2) I need to find a church in London: C of E, high, pref. Anglo-Catholic, and friendly to women and gay people. If you know of one (or of a way to try and find one - the diocese of London website is distinctly unhelpful), please tell me.
It's nice to be back.
08 April 2009
Nonsense
Well. Here I still am.
It's been a funny old week: I am unendingly behind on my schoolwork and happy because I'm dating a very sweet girl and very anxious that I won't be able to graduate because I am subconsciously convinced that I have screwed something up irremediably without realizing it. I am on the verge, I believe, of having an offer of a place at one of the MA programs I applied to and it snowed quite a bit yesterday but did not kill the flowers, thank God. I have a tension headache and yet keep finding myself singing because I'm happy.
So yes: my emotional life makes no sense at all right now.
It's Holy Week, too. Lots of church, which I like, with lots of music that I like. Time to get the house cleaned out on Good Friday, which is really a Jewish custom for Passover but which I have adopted because I like it. Really, what good is the church calendar if it can't occasionally tell you when to plant things and clean your house?
This is a fairly nonsensical post, which only makes sense given the circumstances, and really I just wanted to say 'hello, I am alive', anyway.
Hello. I am alive.
It's been a funny old week: I am unendingly behind on my schoolwork and happy because I'm dating a very sweet girl and very anxious that I won't be able to graduate because I am subconsciously convinced that I have screwed something up irremediably without realizing it. I am on the verge, I believe, of having an offer of a place at one of the MA programs I applied to and it snowed quite a bit yesterday but did not kill the flowers, thank God. I have a tension headache and yet keep finding myself singing because I'm happy.
So yes: my emotional life makes no sense at all right now.
It's Holy Week, too. Lots of church, which I like, with lots of music that I like. Time to get the house cleaned out on Good Friday, which is really a Jewish custom for Passover but which I have adopted because I like it. Really, what good is the church calendar if it can't occasionally tell you when to plant things and clean your house?
This is a fairly nonsensical post, which only makes sense given the circumstances, and really I just wanted to say 'hello, I am alive', anyway.
Hello. I am alive.
31 January 2009
De Delicte
Well, I should have given in at 9.00 when I was yawning and gone to bed. Now I'm up too late and as I was trying to fall asleep I became very aware of my upstairs neighbors enjoying themselves in their bedroom, which is directly above mine. So, feeling a bit uncomfortable at how well I was beginning to know them, I decided to come out to the living room and make a new post instead.
I'm going to delve into the realm of the self-indulgent, so bear with me if you like or go investigate the blogs of my followers: they're worth looking at. (My followers - saying that makes me feel as though I were some sort of sage or prophet when I am actually someone sitting next to her cat in her badly mended pajamas tapping away on a laptop in the middle of the night.)
After splitting up with the girlfriend in July, I have now come to the end of the obligatory six month celibacy. It is own-made obligatory but I began to impose it years ago because it seemed fair neither to myself nor to others for me to engage in any kind of dating so soon after. It never seems to really be six months, though. That is, it is always at least six months but once it turned into four years and usually it ends up being ten months or more.
At this point I feel like I have gone far into a relationship too often and that it would be better to lay off, perhaps altogether. I'm tired of the normal pattern and if espousal of some permutation were not the mutually desired end of the relationship, I can't quite see the point. Espousal is my own neologism to avoid both the weakness of the terms 'partnership' and 'commitment ceremony' (ugh) and yet avoid offending the sensibilities of those who would object to calling it marriage. Those objectors come from both sides, by the way. Those who take a conservative view of the idea of marriage may not realize it but there are many gay people who are also against marriage for gay people. So I have happily settled on espousal as my term of choice, which can also eliminate the "who is the bride, can I call her my wife, or is she really my husband or what" related confusion by tossing those terms out and replacing them with spouse.
And so I ramble. I did have something like a point. Ah yes, espousing. For me it is a question of it being one of the Sacraments of the Church and that is that as far as I am concerned. If I'm going to be committed to someone, then I would like the church to have a hand in it, just as I go to confession and would want to receive the Last Rites.
This makes it very hard for me to find anyone to date. The heavy handed way in which the Church has dealt with homosexuality has driven most of us screaming away. I myself was a conscientious objector to church attendance until Gene Robinson was made a bishop. Now I delight in going and doing the flowers and singing in the choir and leading the rosary and working with the social justice committee and the prison mission. But most church-going gay people are some sort of very wishy-washy protestant: Unitarians and non-denominational semi-Christians. Dear me, that's very judgmental. At the same time, if Buddhist meditation comprises part of your Sunday service...well...I'm glad people are going to Sunday services but without most of the Sacraments and the Eucharist, I do feel that they are missing out. I wish they hadn't, some of them, been made to feel that they deserved to miss out.
My point, to drag myself back to it, is that it is hard to find a church-going young woman who shares my proclivities and is also not on the far side of protestantism; harder still to find someone who isn't Low Church. I want to be espoused/married but it is so difficult to find anyone who is willing even to consider it, especially if it involves church.
I think that I would rather not be in a relationship at all if religion will create constant tension and half of the relationship has a principled stand against espousal/marriage for gay people or against church marriage in general. Of course, technically I can't be married in the Church (or the civil state for that matter) but only have a blessing. That is enough, though, for now.
And there I went on another klonopin induced ramble around but not to my point. My point is that I would like to fall in love but it seems impossible. I would like to embrace celibacy but I fear that I do not have the strength nor the temperament. Having been in love (still quietly pining after seven years) I understand how wonderful it can be: there is no substitute for requited love.
Now, with the bipolar disorder, I also feel at times unworthy of love, that I am damaged goods. It is a lot to ask of someone, yet I know from my own experience of looking after people whom I love that there is no resentment if the love is true. Ubi caritas.
Hearing my upstairs neighbors put me in mind of what seems unlikely to be a part of my life. How happy many people are to be able to choose a husband or wife and have social and sacerdotal approbation or to make a free choice to forgo it. How happy am I, too, to live now when though I might be damaged goods, something can be done to help repair and though I might face many obstacles to finding a spouse/wife, I'm at least no longer an outlaw.
To my Catholic readers who have stuck it out this far, thank you. Same to the atheists and agnostics among you.
I'm going to delve into the realm of the self-indulgent, so bear with me if you like or go investigate the blogs of my followers: they're worth looking at. (My followers - saying that makes me feel as though I were some sort of sage or prophet when I am actually someone sitting next to her cat in her badly mended pajamas tapping away on a laptop in the middle of the night.)
After splitting up with the girlfriend in July, I have now come to the end of the obligatory six month celibacy. It is own-made obligatory but I began to impose it years ago because it seemed fair neither to myself nor to others for me to engage in any kind of dating so soon after. It never seems to really be six months, though. That is, it is always at least six months but once it turned into four years and usually it ends up being ten months or more.
At this point I feel like I have gone far into a relationship too often and that it would be better to lay off, perhaps altogether. I'm tired of the normal pattern and if espousal of some permutation were not the mutually desired end of the relationship, I can't quite see the point. Espousal is my own neologism to avoid both the weakness of the terms 'partnership' and 'commitment ceremony' (ugh) and yet avoid offending the sensibilities of those who would object to calling it marriage. Those objectors come from both sides, by the way. Those who take a conservative view of the idea of marriage may not realize it but there are many gay people who are also against marriage for gay people. So I have happily settled on espousal as my term of choice, which can also eliminate the "who is the bride, can I call her my wife, or is she really my husband or what" related confusion by tossing those terms out and replacing them with spouse.
And so I ramble. I did have something like a point. Ah yes, espousing. For me it is a question of it being one of the Sacraments of the Church and that is that as far as I am concerned. If I'm going to be committed to someone, then I would like the church to have a hand in it, just as I go to confession and would want to receive the Last Rites.
This makes it very hard for me to find anyone to date. The heavy handed way in which the Church has dealt with homosexuality has driven most of us screaming away. I myself was a conscientious objector to church attendance until Gene Robinson was made a bishop. Now I delight in going and doing the flowers and singing in the choir and leading the rosary and working with the social justice committee and the prison mission. But most church-going gay people are some sort of very wishy-washy protestant: Unitarians and non-denominational semi-Christians. Dear me, that's very judgmental. At the same time, if Buddhist meditation comprises part of your Sunday service...well...I'm glad people are going to Sunday services but without most of the Sacraments and the Eucharist, I do feel that they are missing out. I wish they hadn't, some of them, been made to feel that they deserved to miss out.
My point, to drag myself back to it, is that it is hard to find a church-going young woman who shares my proclivities and is also not on the far side of protestantism; harder still to find someone who isn't Low Church. I want to be espoused/married but it is so difficult to find anyone who is willing even to consider it, especially if it involves church.
I think that I would rather not be in a relationship at all if religion will create constant tension and half of the relationship has a principled stand against espousal/marriage for gay people or against church marriage in general. Of course, technically I can't be married in the Church (or the civil state for that matter) but only have a blessing. That is enough, though, for now.
And there I went on another klonopin induced ramble around but not to my point. My point is that I would like to fall in love but it seems impossible. I would like to embrace celibacy but I fear that I do not have the strength nor the temperament. Having been in love (still quietly pining after seven years) I understand how wonderful it can be: there is no substitute for requited love.Now, with the bipolar disorder, I also feel at times unworthy of love, that I am damaged goods. It is a lot to ask of someone, yet I know from my own experience of looking after people whom I love that there is no resentment if the love is true. Ubi caritas.
Hearing my upstairs neighbors put me in mind of what seems unlikely to be a part of my life. How happy many people are to be able to choose a husband or wife and have social and sacerdotal approbation or to make a free choice to forgo it. How happy am I, too, to live now when though I might be damaged goods, something can be done to help repair and though I might face many obstacles to finding a spouse/wife, I'm at least no longer an outlaw.
To my Catholic readers who have stuck it out this far, thank you. Same to the atheists and agnostics among you.
11 January 2009
And Where I'll Land, Nobody Knows
As anyone who is reading this will have noticed, I'm still finding my feet. I don't seem to have decided what exactly this blog is about. At the moment I'm just writing about whatever takes my fancy, so please be patient with me and feel free to let me know what you think in the comments.
I had originally intended to stick to the philosophy end of things but that can get to be a bit much, especially as I have a somewhat pretentious writing style when I'm trying not to be too academic. I also have just a tidge of the stage fright. Apart from some university publications, hardly anyone apart from my professors reads anything I write and what I do write for them is full of statements such as "logical invalidity of the exclusive disjunction in biological sex dimorphism" and "Weber's criterion of exclusive right to military force as constitutive of government is neither necessary or sufficient." That sort of thing gets unbelievably boring very quickly.
So then I started thinking about what I enjoy in other people's blogs. I don't follow so very many of them with regularity. One is nearly exclusively images, one is mostly news and facts, another is advice and information and the last is personal narrative. (You can have a look at them on the blog roll.) They're such a mix that I couldn't find much of a common thread except that two of them are about the Church and two are about bipolar disorder, both of which are of such abiding interest to me that anything I wrote would inevitably touch upon them both.
I also started thinking about what I had been looking for in a blog. I have struggled with illness and school and identity ever since I was diagnosed almost two years ago. I spent hours last winter hunting for whatever information I could find on bipolar disorder; I particularly wished I could find something, anything about managing school in combination with bipolar disorder. I never could find anything. Just last month I found 'The Secret Life of a Manic Depressive,' which has been wonderful to read. There is a distinct paucity of information and narrative about women and bipolar disorder. Women and PTSD, women and depression (the regular kind) are all over the place. I by no means wish to belittle those illnesses; I just really want something that bears directly on the illness I have. Men's narratives of bipolar disorder are helpful but they do have a different experience of it in some ways.
At this point I'm leaning towards school and bipolar and self-identity and bipolar. Church and philosophy will be in too: they are always with me. Same for health insurance, politics and social justice. But it's good to have a focus, isn't it?
I had originally intended to stick to the philosophy end of things but that can get to be a bit much, especially as I have a somewhat pretentious writing style when I'm trying not to be too academic. I also have just a tidge of the stage fright. Apart from some university publications, hardly anyone apart from my professors reads anything I write and what I do write for them is full of statements such as "logical invalidity of the exclusive disjunction in biological sex dimorphism" and "Weber's criterion of exclusive right to military force as constitutive of government is neither necessary or sufficient." That sort of thing gets unbelievably boring very quickly.
So then I started thinking about what I enjoy in other people's blogs. I don't follow so very many of them with regularity. One is nearly exclusively images, one is mostly news and facts, another is advice and information and the last is personal narrative. (You can have a look at them on the blog roll.) They're such a mix that I couldn't find much of a common thread except that two of them are about the Church and two are about bipolar disorder, both of which are of such abiding interest to me that anything I wrote would inevitably touch upon them both.
I also started thinking about what I had been looking for in a blog. I have struggled with illness and school and identity ever since I was diagnosed almost two years ago. I spent hours last winter hunting for whatever information I could find on bipolar disorder; I particularly wished I could find something, anything about managing school in combination with bipolar disorder. I never could find anything. Just last month I found 'The Secret Life of a Manic Depressive,' which has been wonderful to read. There is a distinct paucity of information and narrative about women and bipolar disorder. Women and PTSD, women and depression (the regular kind) are all over the place. I by no means wish to belittle those illnesses; I just really want something that bears directly on the illness I have. Men's narratives of bipolar disorder are helpful but they do have a different experience of it in some ways.
At this point I'm leaning towards school and bipolar and self-identity and bipolar. Church and philosophy will be in too: they are always with me. Same for health insurance, politics and social justice. But it's good to have a focus, isn't it?
03 January 2009
Greetings
Salutations.
So: New Year, new stuff to do. I don’t know if anyone will ever look at this, but keeping a blog seems like a good way to get myself into the habit of writing and corralling my thoughts.
Let me introduce myself.
I’m studying Philosophy and Classics (Greek and Latin.)
I’m an Anglo-Catholic (a very particular and frequently odd type of Episcopalian.)
I’m applying to grad school.
I’m about to start learning Spanish for my church’s Social Justice committee.
I read voraciously.
I am officially a madwoman.
There are, of course, other rather salient facts about me but it seems pushy to just list them. They’re not in the set of personal qualities that one lists when introducing oneself. They’ll come up in due course.
I want, provided anyone ever reads this, for this blog to be discursive. I am not so interesting that anything written about only myself and my thoughts could hold anyone’s attention over a sustained period of time. I hope that all of you will leave your thoughts and queries on philosophy and religion and literature and so on in the comments. I also hope that you’ll take a moment to introduce yourselves in the comments for this entry, even if you’re reading this long after it was first posted. I’ll still see them and it would be nice if everyone knew where to look. Of course, if you prefer to lurk or be anonymous that’s okay too.
That’ll do for an introduction, I think. I’m going to try to keep this regularly updated, hopefully every Monday and Thursday. We’ll see.
So: New Year, new stuff to do. I don’t know if anyone will ever look at this, but keeping a blog seems like a good way to get myself into the habit of writing and corralling my thoughts.
Let me introduce myself.
I’m studying Philosophy and Classics (Greek and Latin.)
I’m an Anglo-Catholic (a very particular and frequently odd type of Episcopalian.)
I’m applying to grad school.
I’m about to start learning Spanish for my church’s Social Justice committee.
I read voraciously.
I am officially a madwoman.
There are, of course, other rather salient facts about me but it seems pushy to just list them. They’re not in the set of personal qualities that one lists when introducing oneself. They’ll come up in due course.
I want, provided anyone ever reads this, for this blog to be discursive. I am not so interesting that anything written about only myself and my thoughts could hold anyone’s attention over a sustained period of time. I hope that all of you will leave your thoughts and queries on philosophy and religion and literature and so on in the comments. I also hope that you’ll take a moment to introduce yourselves in the comments for this entry, even if you’re reading this long after it was first posted. I’ll still see them and it would be nice if everyone knew where to look. Of course, if you prefer to lurk or be anonymous that’s okay too.
That’ll do for an introduction, I think. I’m going to try to keep this regularly updated, hopefully every Monday and Thursday. We’ll see.
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