Category Archives: Life

Episcopal Preaching Foundation

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PEP 2015 Group Picture

PEP 2015 Group Picture

Last week I attended “Preaching Camp’

PEP Canadians

“The Canadians” – the first from a Canadian seminary to attend PEP!

Matthew and I, along with Todd, our Dean of Theology at Huron, were honoured to be included in the Episcopal Preaching Foundation’s Preaching Excellent Program (PEP) for Seminarians. While Todd was faculty and facilitated both small group workshops and teaching, Matthew and I were grouped into different preaching groups with six or seven other Episcopal seminarians from across the United States. Within our groups we preached sermons we had previously prepared for school or church placement contexts and then workshopped them together. These sessions were interspersed with plenary sessions from the likes of renowned preacher Tom Long and smaller group sessions on practical preaching tools taught by PEP faculty.

It was an incredibly rewarding experience. Not only was the retreat centre, the Roslyn Center of the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia, a beautiful facility with heartfelt hospitality, but our fellow preachers were amazing. Huron University College is a wonderful school and I enjoy studying there, however we rarely have the opportunity to dialogue with other Anglican/Episcopal seminarians. Here, we had dozens with whom we could toss around ideas about preaching and about the future of the church, with whom we could pray and sing, and with whom we could celebrate birthdays (that’s right – I celebrated my birthday in Virginia alongside a new friend from Yale Divinity).

A great big thank you to the Episcopal Preaching Foundation for including us in PEP this year – the first of what will hopefully be many to come for Canadian seminarians!

RevGals: A Book and Belonging

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I am relatively new to the RevGals community. I found them mid-way through my first year at seminary. It went something like this:

August 2013: Move 4200 km across Canada.

September 2013: Start seminary.

October 2013: Become friends with the only other female MDiv-track in my year.

November 2013: Start following every female clergy person I can find on twitter.

And then I found them: A whole community of women who are leaders in their respective churches. Women who share with each other, care for each other, pray for each other, and laugh with each other. Clergywomen who have blazed the trail for me to come behind and benefit from their wisdom and their struggles.

So I hung around the edges. Online as in life, I am more likely to sit and watch and read rather than jump into the fray and comment the hell out of something. But then something happened that made it impossible for me to quietly watch anymore: They made a book. Or at least they started posting about making a book and were asking for people to contribute stories to it: There’s a Woman in the Pulpit: Christian Clergywomen Share Their Hard Days, Holy Moments, and the Healing Power of Humor (published on SkyLight Paths, edited by Martha Spong).

The one thing that I love almost as much as reading books is writing (obviously term papers are long finished and my brain has deluded itself into thinking this last sentence is true. Because it sure wasn’t three weeks ago…!) and when I saw the RevGals post, I knew I had to be involved.

But… I’m not ordained [yet!?!]. What do I have to offer to a collection of stories and reflections about life as a clergywoman? Then I realized that I have been in church leadership for most of my conscious life: from the lead in the Christmas pageant to leading prayers and scripture readings weekly from the time I could reach the lectern microphone from a step stool, from choir member to music director, from serving from the time I could walk and carry a candle at the same time to preaching in pulpits across Canada, from council member to warden, from student intern to leading morning prayer when the priest is away.

Maybe I do belong.

bookAfter all, that is at the heart of most of the stories contained in this book: belonging. We belong. We belong to our families, to our churches, to our communities. We belong to the group of people who call themselves clergy. And we have found a unique, quirky, and loving group of people online – and in person – to whom we also belong. These stories are a reflection of our best days and our worst days, our touching moments and our moments of laughter and tears. They are stories of the women who have gone before me to make a place for women in church leadership and they are stories for the women and men who will come after me.

I’m biased, but it is a fantastic book. I also wrote in it, so I’m even more biased. But I think you should read it. Canadian friends, you can find it here.

Thank You

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It has been a long school year and a lot has happened. I got engaged. We had some health stuff. We both had a full course load, and then some, each term. I have been working part time. And then there was the church field placement.

Twelve to fifteen hours per week. In a church. Doing stuff.

What that “stuff” was varied each week: preaching, proclaiming the word, leading parts of the liturgy, searching around for my supervisor’s reading glasses (where the heck did he leave them this week?!?), home and hospital visiting, assisting at a funeral, drinking beer at the pub while leading a bible study… the list goes on.

What did not vary each week was the love and support of that church community. St Andrew Memorial Anglican Church: Thank you.

Thank you for being a welcoming community.

Thank you for opening yourselves to me and letting me be myself amongst you.

Thank you for welcoming my partner as warmly as you welcomed me, even though he worships at another church as a part of his field placement.

Thank you for letting me learn without judgement.

Thank you for being a community where it has been okay for me to try and not be perfect.

Thank you for your encouragement, your laughter, your enthusiasm, your chocolate, and your joy.

Thank you for being a community that loves fellowship and food.

Thank you for your heart for worshipping God.

Thank you for loving me.

I have learned a lot from you, with you, and because of you. As Pastor Marty said at my last service with you, a piece of your community will come back to BC with me and will always be a part of my ministry.

The End

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Second Year is finished!

The last assignments and exams have been turned in and I have concluded my time at my placement church. This is the first time I’ve turned on my computer in 4 days and it feels great.

More writing to come in the next few days and weeks, but for now, I’m enjoying some reading of fiction to give my brain a break!

Multitude

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I was honoured to be invited to contribute to a Lenten reflection booklet curated by a friend and fellow postulant in the Diocese of British Columbia. My reflection was for today and is based on the Hebrew Bible lectionary reading for the day, Genesis 17:3-9.

 

Your name shall be Abraham for I have made you the ancestor of a multitude of nations. 

Suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God.

I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all the tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands.

Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, before Abraham was, I am.”

Before he even reproduced, God had made Abraham the father of a multitude of nations. It still seemed impossible – there was not even one child, let alone a multitude of nations.

And before Abraham was even conceived of, Jesus is.

In the beginning was the Word…

Time and space. What is time to God? A thousand years is like a day to God, we are told. Yesterday is last year, tomorrow is 2019. Or 2130. Or 1875.

God was, God is, God will be.

That multitude of nations? God knew them then. God knows them now. God sees and knows those that will be. Each and every one.

Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again:

And yesterday, today, and tomorrow we all join together; with Abraham, with the angels who heralded Christ’s birth, and with the multitude from every nation envisioned by John, praising God.

Spring (?!)

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1982333_10153966181325311_1595311846_nSigns of spring are all around.

New life emerges as snow slowly melts and creates puddles of dirty slush on roads and sidewalks. But birds are singing, warmth is seeping into the world.

I have traded my warmest jacket and boots for lighter ones and colourful ones. Because these are the days when colour is also coming back into the world.

New things are afoot. I have been working with our theological students council to make things new and try new ways of working together that will, hopefully, make us more effective as a council. I have a new job – a short, part-time contract with the mental health organization I’ve been working with for a couple of years on a relief basis.

And so, in this changing and warming environment, we continue the lenten journey towards Easter when, once again, we celebrate life made new.

Snow Squalls

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This is why living in southwestern Ontario is a little bit crazy in the winter.

The snow was blowing wildly across the road, creating drifts well into the roadside lane and blinding us from time to time. Probably not the best day to be on the road, but great for taking pictures. (We made it to our destination safely!)

This was February. Here is to hoping that March will be a little nicer to me than February was on the cold and snow department!

Publication!

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I did some writing last summer, though not for school.

One piece that I wrote over the summer is getting published in a book this spring! Its a short essay I wrote that is, essentially, a theological reflection on the work I used to do in emergency shelters in BC. It will be published in the book There’s a Woman in the Pulpit: Christian Clergywomen Share Their Hard Days, Holy Moments, and the Healing Power of Humor which is set to come out mid April (though the amazon page says mid-May).

The book has come out of a community of women who’s wisdom I have appreciated, the Rev Gal Blog Pals. I’m looking forward to hopefully meeting some of them as we get closer to publication. I’m also really looking forward to reading everyone’s essays in the book!

You can see more about it on the Publisher’s page (Skylight Paths Publishing), or on Amazon.

I’ll keep you posted as more information becomes available about its publication date and so on.

That Finger

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IMG_0503 IMG_0504  IMG_0518

So I broke my broke my finger just before Christmas.

Despite its beautiful colouring, I really didn’t think that it was broken for a week. However when it only got worse, not better, I decided to go and get it checked out. Lo and behold, it was broken.

*Sigh*

It spent two weeks in a giant fibreglass cast over Christmas (good thing it was mild this year – the cast wouldn’t fit into the sleeve of any of my warm jackets!) before migrating to a removable splint (hello full showers – so much nicer!).

Going through my photos I found these three lovely views of the finger. Take note, some of the crook in the finger was already there from an injury in elementary school.

Lovely, eh?

The finger is pretty much all better now. I had a few visits with the therapists in the Hand Clinic here in London and range of motion is back. I can type with both hands again (yay!) and do all of the other things that two handed people do quite comfortably. Its amazing how much one uses the pinky for!

Month in Review

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I’m still here!

It has been a slow start to writing in 2015, mostly because I broke my hand just before Christmas and am only a few days back into having two hands available for typing. It is a wonderful feeling to have all ten fingers working[mostly] properly again! It was a freak finger jam of the finger I dislocated as a kid and I spent the second half of December in a bright blue cast from finger-tip nearly to elbow, then the last two and a half weeks in a removable splint. Thursday I was set free to “take it easy” which, obviously, I have been doing…

The last month in review:

IMG_1827We had a lovely Christmas week at Matthew’s family’s home outside of Ottawa, then down to Montreal for a few days with some of both sides of my family before heading to Sarnia for New Year’s Eve with that fantastic gang.

School has begun again, rather uneventfully. Some good courses this term, with a nice balance of practical and academic. I remain in placement at St Andrew Memorial Church and have been refining learning goals for a new term of new learning.

Matthew and I continue to plan our wedding – we’ve met with one caterer and will meet another next week. The date (October), venue, and priest to do the ceremony have all been settled. Fitting for two priests-to-be, the things we have been deliberating on most have included liturgy and who will read what for the service!