Off to Baltimore again this year for Thanksgiving. I could sense that my mother really wanted me to come home this year. All the concerns surrounding my grandmother and the problems concerning my uncle, my mother’s brother, do nothing but add to her frustration and worry. She wanted to come to New York – she would have loved to have seen the balloons being inflated or even gone the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. That is not happening, and this is my last year here. They will be at my grandmother’s for Thanksgiving.
Maybe I should have gone, but part of me just can’t. Selfish? Maybe so. I will have an incredible Thanksgiving meal. I will be in a place that is so relaxing. I will be with people I am comfortable enough with, although…
Another Thanksgiving. What am I honestly thankful for? Am I far too removed from real life to stop, even for a moment, to think and be thankful?

I have a great view of the children’s garden a few stories below my bedroom window. The toddlers and kids up to around three or so are out there playing, and I heard one crying, only half paying attention.
I looked out my window and saw one of the kids just hugging another one and patting her on the back. She did this for a good bit of time, releasing and hugging again. After it ended, the hugee wiped her eyes and they went back to playing.
Kids are amazing things!

I have a more reputable source for the mean and origin of the surname, “Griffith.” I heard from another Griffith years ago that the name was Welsh and stood for “red headed tribal chieftain.” Thatç—´ a lot of description for one little word.
So, according to The Family Chronicle, here is the definition:
Griffith is British-Welsh and comes from the middle Welsh “Gruffund;” “und” means lord. The name is taken from or based upon the first name of the ancestor’s father, which makes it patronymic.
And, according to The Sweetest Sound from PBS, it is number 358 out of a possible 55,000 of the most popular surnames in the USA. Go figure.

Ashton coaches the Princeton Equestrian team. Today, they were high point team and one of the women was high point rider. They won by the highest point spread in the school’s history. Ashton has been coaching them for less than a semester, but boy have they improved.
He also qualified for regional competition, on his way to nationals once again!
(There have been problems with this weblog since my website host company has some screw-up once again. I have spent all afternoon rebuilding this stupid thing, which means I have done nothing with my liturgy paper which is due tomorrow.)

I am tired. I’m tired of a year through which we had to deal with aftermath of Bishop Robinson’s consecration. I’m tired of a year through which we had to deal with a presidential election. I’m tired of month period where the Windsor Report was issued, and a president was elected.
I am tired of all the lies and fear mongering perpetuated by the anti-gay establishment in both the Church and the State.
I am tired of living in a society where few have really learned anything about loving one’s neighbor as one loves one’s self. Don’t you think it is about time we start honestly doing what we are called to do as Christians?

Walter Bauman, a systematic theologian and retired professor of Trinity Lutheran Seminary in Columbus, Ohio, taught a Systematic Theology course I took a few years ago, commented on the role the East German Lutheran Church during the Communist period. He said that the East German Lutherans did not campaign against the godless communists in power, but decided that they would hold their communist leaders’ feet to the fire and demand they actually do what their propaganda promised. The Lutherans held their public leaders accountable to the egalitarian and socialist ideals they said they believed in, they fought against public graft, corruption, and enrichment of leaders at the expense of the people, and they demanded that their leaders actually abide by the grand claims of the socialist and communist system.
If that is what the majority of people who voted for “moral values” want, then that is what we should hold them accountable for. If that is the language and schema they want to use, then so be it.
We should demand that they explain that they mean by “moral values,” then demand that they prove their assertions using good exegetical and hermeneutical methods of Biblical interpretation, historical and cultural understandings that apply to those Scriptures, and not let them get away with the misuse and misinterpretation of Scripture. We should also be vigilant in demanding that they live up to their own rhetoric, and sadly make sure their failures are widely known. Of course, because we strongly believe in the merciful grace of God, which they claim also, by pointing out their failures we are fighting the sin of hypocrisy and we are actually helping them be free from that which enslaves them and helping them come to the freeing realization of God’s grace, mercy, justice, and peace.

Honestly, what are we looking for as Americans? Honestly, what are Evangelical Christians looking for? Honestly, what are liberal Christians looking for? What do we all want?
“Many of us who call ourselves Christian long to be what we call ourselves, but we cannot see how to do it, granted our culture’s basic assumptions about what it means to be a human being. If we assume with our culture that the goal of human life is individual self-development, how does this goal leave space for love that might thwart that development? How does the need for assertiveness in a world that despises the weak fit with the Christ who ‘did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant” (Phil. 2:6-7)? How does an ethos of productivity fit with the image of the cross? We suspect that our culture’s assumptions about human life may be wrong but it is hard to see what alternatives we have.”
Roberta Bondi, To Love as God Loves

I keep hearing the refrain – “we have to find the terrorists and kill them…” Both presidential candidates keep saying that.
Oh Lord, where are the peacemakers?
Where are those who do not rely on the depleted weapons of this world?

When I was growing up in the Pentecostal/Evangelical side of God’s church, I heard all the time how liberals did nothing but: “…to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.” (2 Timothy 4:3)
I moved into Anglicanism because I recognized that a good many Evangelicals, especially with the politicalization of Evangelicalism in the U.S., who where doing the very same thing. The ability to engage with people with different opinions of Scriptural interpretation was becoming less and less possible. Now, everyone must believe the party-line without question else we are giving in to the cultural zeitgeist, forgoing any real concern for Scripture, or simply denying God all together.
Now, I am witnessing this same attitude engulfing Anglican-Evangelicalism. No one can read a history of Anglicanism and not recognize that there has always been an allowance for different Scriptural interpretations on all manner of things, along with different expressions of piety and worship style. It didnÂ’t always make people gleeful, but it allowed for staying-together. There have always been people who have said we can no longer abide by such an attitude. Puritans, Quakers, Presbyterians, and Methodists are only a few examples of groups of people who said Anglicanism was apostate in their time because the whole Church did not come over and agree with their particular understanding of things. Read all the controversies that were surrounding the Church during the Tractarian period during the 1800Â’s.
Now, so many religious conservatives or traditionalists or Evangelicals refuse to read about or honestly consider different views of Scriptural interpretation over many issues, especially homosexuality in this time. If it does not agree with pre-determined opinions or prescribed interpretational systems, then it is completely discounted, outright.
I am sad to see within Anglican-Evangelicalism that we have accepted the worst attitudes and methods of many American-Evangelicals. Fifteen years ago while working as a campus pastor with the Assemblies of God, we were heretics to most other Evangelical campus ministries because we were Arminian or worse yet because we were Pentecostal/Charismatic. Now, I am a heretic to many because I consider and listen to those who say our traditional Scriptural understanding concerning homosexuals and homosexual relationships have been incorrect – and think their exegesis is more reasonable, even after reading Gagnon, even not wanting to find loopholes, etc.
It is my humble opinion that 2 Timothy 4:3 can be applied to a good many people on both sides of the issue, and it is to these people that the Windsor Report is a failure, and it is to these people that the Windsor Report presents a call back to the Anglicanism of history and to listen, consider, and respect those with whom we differ.

This is a very personal post. The Lambeth Commission issues its findings day-after-tomorrow, at 7:00 am Eastern Time. I have no idea what the report will suggest, but angst and worry are ever present. Not so much the kind that ties my stomach into knots, because I have learned that one hour of that kind of worry does not add anything to my life and wellbeing. All I can do is place my trust in my Lord and go forward, nevertheless, my gut still says that during the final moments I will not be ordained – and it speaks a bit louder now.
Of course, I am up writing this on a Saturday morning at 4:00 am, listening to the people going home after a night in the clubs (the seminary is surrounded by a few very large dance clubs and on Saturday and Sunday mornings around this time, the streets become very loud). Revilers are heading home. They will spend all night in clubs, but the Church no longer presents to them – anything. Anyway, here I am at 4:00 am writing about my angst before the report is issued.
I have been reluctant about this whole priest thing from the beginning. I was very up front with my Discernment Committee, my Vestry, my bishops, the Commission on Ministry, the Standing Committee, the Canon to the Ordinary, my psychological evaluator, and everyone I knew, that I really had no desire to be a priest. I began the discernment process because several priests in my diocese kept after me to consider seminary and the priesthood.
I knew very well that ordination was not something I desired while working in the Assemblies of God. Everyone told me I should be ordained. After all, I was doing pastoral work. I was burned by one church organization, and I had no desire for a repeat performance.
As I talked with close friends about all this, they agreed and affirmed my being a priest, being a pastor, doing that kind of work. After all, I lit up and become very passionate when I talked about my faith, God, the Church, and all the ramifications of such things. A few cautioned me, wondering whether I might be running away from life, or something else. They were generally lapsed Roman Catholics who saw too much of that kind of thing in their own priests. My former boss, Dean/V.P for Undergraduate Studies at Kent State where I worked for 9 years before seminary, of whom I have the greatest respect, wrote a fine recommendation for me, but said he thought it a great waste of my talents and abilities to go into the priesthood or church work.
One day at Kent while I was talking to a vivacious graduate student, I suddenly realized that my interest in her, at a base level, was not her academic education or even the realization of her goals (in good Student Development fashion), but it was her soul. It was a sudden and unexpected realization. One Sunday morning while the priests were getting the elements ready on the altar, as the choir sang, sitting in a pew watching, thinking, feeling the warmth of the sunlight streaming through the large, clear windows, I was struck by the feeling and the thought – “I can do that!”
The priestly conspiracy to get me off to seminary reached its apex when the bishop offered me a job at the diocesan office as a means to discerning whether church work and/or the priesthood might be the direction my life should go. It was a very good job, but I turned it down because after much prayer and discernment I felt it just wasnÂ’t the right time. Finally, I relented and agreed to go through the yearlong discernment process. I figured that if it is supposed to be about discernment, then it could only help me decide whether there might be something to all this encouragement.
I passed with flying colors and everyone, everyone, said that the Church really needs someone like me right now. After a year of discernment, prayer, and the prodding of lots of people, it seemed that I would be off to seminary, but it just did not feel right. I told my bishop I needed to wait another year, and he graciously consented – “Just let me know when you are ready and I will declare you a Postulant. I want you to write me Ember Day letters this coming year so I know what you are thinking.”
The process, from beginning to seminary, took four years. In the end, I went to seminary because I felt here was where God wanted me, not just because everyone kept saying I should. I am a reluctant Candidate for Holy Orders!
Then, the day before classes began, I met someone. The previous three years were very difficult, as were other periods in my life. I know what being single is like. I know what loneliness is, even though I had strong friendships, loved the people I worked with, etc. There is a fundamental difference in very close and good friends and someone with whom one can love and be loved. I have not been given the gift of singleness, even as Paul encourages us to live without encumbrances in singleness.
So, I was excited to start seminary, to be in New York, to begin this new chapter of my life. The last thing on my mind was getting into a relationship, despite what I just wrote above. Yet, this person appeared. We have been dating for two years now. Our relationship isnÂ’t as he would like it to be – I just donÂ’t have a lot of time. I told him from the beginning that I am here for a purpose and that he must understand that God always will be a first priority for me as a priest. I still don’t know whether he knows what he has gotten himself into, but I am so blessed.
Now, after six years of discernment, education, trial and tribulation, great joy, and Gene Robinson, it is quite difficult for gay people in relationships to find a “Cure,” a priestly position. What do I do if there is an agreement among the bishops of the Anglican Communion to stop all together, or hold off on ordaining gay people who are in relationships?
In eight months, I am to be ordained a transitional deacon, Lord willing. Many say that the Lord certainly is not willing. That is their opinion, but I stand before my God and am accountable to God alone.
What do I do, though, if such a recommendation, and then decision, comes down? What would happen if the Church told all aspirants that they could no longer have sexual relations with their wives or husbands? It wouldnÂ’t fly. Do I ask my partner to live in a relationship without sexual relations? That is a mighty tall request.
I may be confronted with making a profoundly unfair, unjust, and in my opinion unfounded, decision of ending a relationship, entering back into a loneliness that will only be compounded because of a profession known for loneliness, because the majority considers my relationship a profound sin and abomination. Or, do I forgo my ordination to the priesthood, my calling, for the sake of a relationship?
Despite what anti-gay forces propagate as GodÂ’s will, I do not find in Scripture GodÂ’s forbidding of same-sex relationships that are mutual, adult, loving, and monogamous. Scripture says nothing of such relationships. Our culture and society, throughout history, have certainly condemned such relationships, until more recently as attitudes change. Most in the Church cannot handle such change right now. It will, of course, in the same way that it changed with society to support inter-racial marriage, equality for minorities and woman, etc.
What do I do until that time? What do I do if they say, “ordination or relationship, you cannot have both!” I know my only recourse is my Father in Heavan.