As I was watching ABC Evening News, the final story was on the retirement of Keith Jackson – the 50+ year sports reporter with a very distinct voice and a “Woe Nellie.”
All those things that I grew up with and just kind of expected to be around are passing away. It is inevitable, I know, but the lose of those things is disconcerting. When I think about watching ‘The Wide World of Sports’ in the ’70’s, the Olympics, and especially football games, it is that voice – Keith’s voice – that I hear.
It is all changing.

Lord willing and the creek don’t rise, I should finally be ordained priest by June 3rd at the latest!

Well, I just got word that my former roommate and classmate at General Theological Seminary has begun blogging. Here is his blog:
Barefoot Priest
I have to tell ya, I am a bit surprised (in a good way) that he uses the term “father” rather than the more egalitarian “brother” (he just seems more the “brother” type to me???), and he is wearing a chasuble! A betrayal of your low-church leanings, Jason! 🙂 Unless, of course, I’m just clueless, which is more than possible.

Holy Week is over and I am so tired, worn-out, bushed. It was wonderful, but I’m paying the price right now. Try staring at data on a computer screen all day – everything is in a fog and I keep loosing track of what I am doing.
Last night, I finally was able to watch a couple episodes of “God or the Girl” on A&E. The show follows four young guys as they work through discerning whether they are called by God to be Roman Catholic priests and celibate. I remember my fellow CPE’er, Noel, who was a Roman Catholic seminarian in Chicago and from the Philippines, when he would come up and say to me, “How’s live without a wife?” Joking with him, I told him that only Roman priests had such a problem – Anglican and Orthodox priests don’t. This TV program is well done and so poignant, at least for some of us.
I saw in the four participants the struggles I have experienced over the last six or seven years in my preparation for the priesthood. One guy, Steve, is so vulnerable as he struggles through the “giving-up” of so many personal things as he discerns his call. Here is his bio, “Steve Horvath, 25, shocked his friends and family back in Virginia by leaving his job as a high-paid consultant to become a campus missionary at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. Now shaking off the comforts of the privileged life he once had (and could still return to at any time), Steve finds himself simultaneously drawn to and terrified of the level of sacrifice he must make in order to truly heed God’s call.” At 24, Steve was making eighty thousand dollars a year, etc.
In this particular episode, Steve relinquishes his hesitation and agrees to go to a mission in Guatemala to work for a short time with the poor – the real poor. His life is changed forever, and by the time he leaves he is in tears. I can see in him the process of giving up of self. It is so hard giving up all that could be in our lives for the incredible and tremendous privilege of serving the people of God, His creation, humanity.
My dean at Kent State wrote a letter of recommendation to General Theological Seminary as I was applying for admittance. He wrote something along the lines of “I believe Bob’s pursuit of the priesthood is a tremendous waste of his talent and ability, but he will do very well…” A bit blunt. I have a great deal of respect for my former boss, Dr. Terry Kuhn. I don’t know exactly what happened, but I do know that after the completion of his Ph.D. and during his first teaching position at a Roman Catholic college run by nuns, he was forever turned off to organized religion, although not to faith. He was truly a mentor of mine (and I use those words very sparingly).
There are so many different things I could have done. I was a very reluctant aspirant to Holy Orders. I started the discernment process really because a group of priests would not let me go, not because it was something I wanted to do. I am thankful, but the process has been so hard.
Lord willing, I will soon come to the end of all the preparation and will be ordained priest. It is then only the beginning. The dying to self and giving of oneself to God and His Church, to people, is the process of making oneself completely vulnerable to… what?… everything. The process of coming to the point where one willingly gives up one’s life for the work of God is arduous, but I can’t think of anything I would have rather done or anywhere I would rather be right now.
I thought a couple times this past week as I watched the people of St. Paul’s: how incredibly fortunate and privileged I am to be able to be with them, to serve them, to watch God work in their lives, and see them transformed into the very people of God. Having to work a full time job, especially as a data-analyst, in order to be able to be with these people is not what I want to do. In yesterday’s episode, as Steve was going to Guatemala he kept saying that he could go back to work, make lots of money, and give it away so that lots of other folks could go and do the hard work of caring for humanity. He was making excuses, hanging onto his previously prosperous life, in the midst of having that part of him ripped out, and facing his fears and anxieties. Steve could go back to his old life, but the place God has for him is probably not in the business world, but in the world of the Church. He has to give up self.
I don’t want to work a full-time job and then put in what is left of my time and energy for St. Paul’s, but this seems to be what God has for me now. The position at the Medical Trust is a good one, and I am thankful for God’s provision, but my most productive hours are spent not being about the cure and care of souls. I have to come to terms with the fact that this may well be, and is probably, what I am called to right now. I have to give up self.

I am leaving my “secular” job and now entering into the Triduum of Easter. Tonight, Maundy Thursday services begin the three days of Jesus’ Passion leading to Easter Sunday.
I have been thinking a lot lately of the appeal of High Church liturgy (whether Anglo-Catholic or simply High Church) for many people, particularly younger people, coming out of American-Evangelical/Pentecostal/Charismatic churches. There are an increasing number of young people from these backgrounds migrating to St. Paul’s and our “non-fussy Rite I Anglo-Catholic” church. I really only have to look as far as myself to see this phenomena in action. (Okay, okay, so I’m young in spirit if not so young in fact – age is an attitude of the mind and dependent on perspective – right!?)
I thought the other day, at the Renewal of Vows for the Diocese of Long Island, as Prof. Jim Farwell (my former liturgy professor) was talking about the Triduum liturgies, that it seems that a connection between Pentecostalism (or at least “experiential” forms of Evangelical Christianity) and Anglo-Catholicism is that both are truly experiential. In different ways, of course, by they still share this common aspect.
I don’t know. There is something out there right outside my reach to explain these ambiguous thoughts going through my mind. I’ve been thinking, too, of doing some surveys and asking non-cradle Episcopalians (and particularly the non-High Church) what attracts them to this kind of liturgy/service. A book, perhaps.
So, off to Maundy Thursday and the continuing and deepening discovery of the slow yet persistent work the Seasons of the Church and their liturgies, the Word, and the Sacraments have on the formation of one’s Christian self.

I should write a book – “The Making of a Current-Day Anglo-Catholic.”
One of the many reasons I moved away from the Evangelical/Pentecostal side of the Church and into a more liturgical/sacramental side (into The Episcopal Church) begins with what I foresaw in the later 1980’s as the co-opting of Evangelicalism by the American cultural phenomena of hyper-individualism. “It’s all about ME!” “Me and Jesus!” While lip-service is given to the communal nature of the Body of Christ, the reality is that the individual, even in the midst of a mega-church crowd, is focused on his/her self and concerned with what s/he “gets out of the service.” The consumeristic nature of modern American-Evangelical churches, the willingness to engage in schism, a worship service that is basically entertainment oriented (despite the denial of such an orientation).
This infection of American hyper-individualism in the Church will only lead to further overall ecclesial chaos and separation into ever smaller groups of narrowly focused and like-minded individuals, who will be willing to separate even more once they find yet another point of disagreement.
An essence of the “catholic” nature of the Church, this side of it anyway, is that we are bound to Christians past, present, and future, and that we as individuals and even as congregations or denominations are not isolated, are not self-sufficient, are not separate from the Great Cloud of Witnesses all around us. We, also, are not free to do whatever we want – we bring ourselves into the discipline of submission to continual-community within Tradition. This aspect of the Church universal, its “catholic” nature, is what draws me to Catholicism, particularly the Anglo-Catholic expression of it.
I am not on a path leading to the Church of Rome. I do not believe that in the Vatican is the final authority. This may smack of the same “individualism” that I am moving away from. But, I think in the various pendulum swings we go through the ecclesial structures of the Church of Rome long ago swung too far into the denial of the individual. Too much authority rests in the hands of too few men, and that authority is absolute if exercised.
In Anglicanism, in Anglo-Catholicism in particular, there is more of a balance between individualism and authoritarianism (is that the right word?), at least as I’ve experienced it thus far. There is the emphasis on the universal nature of the Church and our connection and responsibility to one another, but not to the point of demanding absolute conformity or obedience. I do know that in the current Church of Rome that there is no longer the draconian authoritarianism of times past.
So, I am in the process of becoming more “catholic.” I am being formed into an Anglo-Catholic. It is a very different way of approaching the faith, God, the Church, and one another than I experienced growing up within American-Evangelicalism. It also has some great implications concerning the controversies Anglicanism is wallowing in right now. It isn’t “all about me.” It isn’t even “all about us” as in just this part of the Anglican Communion – The Episcopal Church. There has to be balance, though, and an acknowledgement that some parts of the Church will begin the move toward right change before other parts are ready for such change.

Today, I am wearing my clerical collar to work. Frankly, it has more to do with undone laundry rather than any particular ecclesial responsibility I have today.
I was walking from Penn. station to the Medical Trust and came near one of the hundreds of people passing out hand-bills for this or that restaurant or bodega. He was a Latin-American Indian, as are most. All the implications of strange cultures and languages and customs come to bear on anyone who is a foreigner (this was made all the more apparent to me when I lived in Europe).
He was standing back against the wall of a building and not handing out many hand-bills as I approached. He saw me, or perhaps he saw a white clerical collar on this person who was approaching, and came forward to give me a hand-bill. It was obvious that he approached this collared person and not all the other people passing by him. How could I not take it, even though I knew I was not going to go to this particular restaurant-bodega? I thanked him and went on my way.
People notice. People have impressions of those in white collars, whether good or bad impressions. What are we all, we who call ourselves Christians and more particularly those who have entered Holy Orders, doing in our everyday lives that add to the sense of honor and trust of those who wear such collars so that the people feel safe coming to us, as this young guy did with me – this person in white clerical collar – in the midst of hundreds of other Mid-town people? What are we doing that may cause people to avoid us, to revile us, to mistrust us?
This is the responsibility of the clergy – to be holy even as Christ was/is holy despite the fact that we will fail more often than not. We who are the representatives of Christ on earth have this high-calling to put aside ourselves and take upon ourselves the Cross, so that when people see someone in a clerical collar they know that they are safe and free to approach us, even in confession, even in a plea for help, even in passing out a hand-bill when one is shy or afraid. This is what it means to be one who points to God.

From the vestiges of Home-Group (St. Paul’s Carroll St., Brooklyn)
Spy on Doug Burr in iTunes!
New stuff to obsess over…
Still obsessing over…
Sufjan Stevens
Eastmountainsouth
Bird York

For whatever reason, today is a day of discontent. Not that anything is particularly bad; I just don’t feel like looking up people and correcting wrong information.
Tired. Bored. Just tired. And so it goes…

I watch the tides come in and go out as I am riding the train into the city and back home again. Between Newark and New York City, there are large stretches of marshland, rivers, and water-ways. The marshes are all brown and tan this time of year and when the sun is setting or rising, they are golden. It seems strange to see these marshes full of reeds and other water-plants in such urban settings – bridges, trestles, tracks, some abandoned factories, stranded boats sitting cockeyed on the banks of rivers. Yet, here are wetlands and in the spring the green pushes up and it is quite striking.
In the summer months when the wind blows, these stretches of land remind me of wheat fields in the plain states that cover acres and as the wind blows waves move across the landscape. It is like that.
In the wetlands – the marshes – as the tide comes in new “rivers” or “creeks” appear where water runs in to fill the marsh and again when the water drains away as the tide goes out. Nature moves in her own rhythm – coming and going, change, death and life. Creation.