Archive - Jan 2016
January 15th
Discernment Committee Reflections 1/15/16
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 01/15/2016 - 17:44I arrived at church a few minutes early to find my priest and a member of the discernment committee talking about the events of the day. It seemed to us that the death of Alan Rickman was of greater import to members of the parish than the latest pronouncement out of Canterbury. For me, of even more significance was this next step on my spiritual journey, my first discernment committee meeting.
For my friends who are not Episcopalians, a discernment committee is part of the process of becoming an ordained priest. You need your priest to support your calling and you need your local community to support it. All of this comes after many meetings with my priest, as well as meeting with the bishop and members of the commission on ministry to get the go ahead to even have a discernment committee.
It seems like in the old days, people would tell the Bishop about the career path they hoped to follow, starting as an assistant rector, becoming a rector, and over time moving to larger churches. The discernment committee would then either be a rubber stamp, or a veto of this desire.
If you got all the proper approvals, you would then go to seminary for three years and then start your career as a priest, where there would always be jobs available.
Things have changed. In my letter to the bishop, I said I didn’t know what God was calling me to, but simply that I was called to some sort of ministry beyond what I am currently doing in my day to day life. People have told me that in the old days, that would have ended the process for me right then and there, but things have changed.
So, for the next couple of months, every other week, I will gather with a small group of people, some from my church, others from beyond the church, to pray, study scripture, and talk about God’s calling to each of us, especially as it relates to what God might have in store for me. It won’t be a simple rubber stamp or a veto. It will be work for all of us. They will then pass their thoughts on to the bishop and the commission on ministry and I will move on to the next step, whatever it might be.
The discussions will be confidential, so we can all speak as freely as openly as possible, so unless someone gives me specific permission to talk about something they have said, I expect to be sharing my experiences of the meetings, what they feel like and meant to me, but not much else.
I am hoping that the meetings will be a blessing to me and to members of the discernment committee. Likewise, I hope that my reflections on this online will be a blessing to a wider audience and that I might gain additional insights from my friends online.
I realize that the process I am going through may be different than the process in other dioceses and I hope that my writing about this will help both The Episcopal Church in Connecticut and other diocese think more about how discernment and formation processes can be improved to better meet the needs of the 21st century church.
So, what was it like last night? I came from a relatively poor family with a relatively strict father. In elementary school, my classmates made fun of the clothes my mother bought me from thrift shops, and the food we ate was simple, either home grown, inexpensive, or day old. In spite of doing well academically, it often felt like I could never please anyone, not my father, not my classmates. I was never good enough. Other than the care I felt from my mother, I rarely felt particularly loved.
And here I am, exploring becoming a priest. Why? Because I finally came to believe that God really does love me, not just as some sort of nice concept that we talk about in Sunday School, “God loves you”, but a deep full love greater than we can understand, a love beyond our deserving, made accessible through the cross. In experiencing that love, I came to believe that I must go show that love to whomever God leads me to.
As I think about this, as I try to write about it, I get verklempt , a feeling I felt several times last night. I felt God’s love for me coming through the words of the members of the discernment committee as we talked. I felt God’s love for me, and all of us, in the words of the opening collect and in the discussion of parts of the liturgy that have been said by others God loves just as much for centuries.
Yet one does not have to be ordained to share God’s love. So, is God calling me to ordination? If so, why? Does it have something to do with celebrating the sacraments? With living a sacramental life? With outward and visible signs of inward and invisible grace?
And who is God leading me to serve? What sort of service is God asking of me?
These are the things I hope to discern, with the help of the members of the discernment committee as well as the help of people reading and commenting on my words online.
January 14th
On Expecting the Unexpected
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 01/14/2016 - 15:26From Statement from Primates 2016
It is our unanimous desire to walk together. However given the seriousness of these matters [The Episcopal Church’s change in their Canon on marriage] we formally acknowledge this distance by requiring that for a period of three years The Episcopal Church no longer represent us on ecumenical and interfaith bodies, should not be appointed or elected to an internal standing committee and that while participating in the internal bodies of the Anglican Communion, they will not take part in decision making on any issues pertaining to doctrine or polity.
This was not a statement I expected to be reading today, of all days. This evening, I will have my first meeting with my discernment committee, a group organized in the Episcopal parish I attend, to explore what God is calling me to, and particularly, if this might be a called to ordained ministry within The Episcopal Church.
A few months ago, I met with the Bishop of The Episcopal Church in Connecticut and members of the Commission on Ministry about my calling and my desire for discernment. One of the questions I had been asked ahead of time was how do I “anticipate, as an ordained leader, helping the Episcopal Church in Connecticut be more faithful to God’s Mission”., and I wrote my response, “On Expecting the Unexpected”.
Friends told me that this would not be well received, but it was the honest truth, and I felt it was more important to speak this truth than to come up with some acceptable statement that didn’t truly express what I was experiencing.
I was asked about this during my interview, what is it like to expect the unexpected? How have I done this in the past? I spoke about taking jobs that did not exist five years earlier, and my priest mentioned, that with all the changes going on in the church today, the job of priest in The Episcopal Church is likely, in many ways, to be something very different from traditional views of priesthood. What does it mean to be a bi-vocational priest? What role does the internet play? This later question is one that I’m especially interested in. As I mentioned in a recent blog post, I feel more closely tied to online communities of interest than I do to geographic communities, even though churches remain strongly focused on geography. The discussions around the announcement out of Canterbury accentuates this.
What will we talk about during my discernment committee? How does the announcement out of Canterbury fit in? What will the response of The Episcopal Church in Connecticut be, or of The Episcopal Church as a whole be? How do I, personally, react to this announcement, as I seek discernment?
As a communications professional, I like to return to the mission statement. I’m not sure if there is an official mission statement for the church, but I like the phrase about restoring ““all people to unity with God and each other in Christ”. I don’t see the announcement out of Canterbury doing this, and I want my words, as much as possible, to point in this direction.
I’ve re-read what I wrote for my meeting with the Bishop, and it seems like, perhaps, it fits not only for my own discernment process, but also for my thinking about how we react to the announcement out of Canterbury.
On Expecting the Unexpected
For pretty much all of my adult life, I’ve tried to convince myself that those gentle tuggings at my heart of God’s Love was not something I needed to attend to, that I could do what God wanted of me as a lay person. Yet God called to me, unexpectedly, at a poetry conference at Yale Divinity School. During a guided meditation, after I was overwhelmed by a sense of God’s presence and loving kindness, we were instructed to reflect on how God has the same love we were experiencing for everyone. The moment of bliss changed to a moment of epiphany. This is what I’m here for, to share God’s love where it is too rarely felt. Everything I have been doing so far has just been a prelude to this.
When I ran for State Representative, I ran knowing that it was unlikely that I would get elected. Yet it gave me an opportunity to encourage people to think about how they could show God’s Love and justice in the legislative process. As a social media manager for a Federally Qualified Health Center, my job is to show God’s Love and healing to underserved patients and in online communities.
With this epiphany comes a challenge. For I have not loved God with my whole heart. How can I better share God’s love where it is too rarely felt? I no longer believe I am doing as much as I can, or as much as God wants me to. I have left undone those things which I ought to have done and one of those things is to pursue ordination to the priesthood.
Why the priesthood, what sort of ministry does God have in mind for me? I keep asking God that question. I ask myself. I ask my friends. I am not sure, but I expected it to be unexpected, joyful, yet tempered with awareness of the suffering in this world. Sharing God’s Love where it is too rarely felt includes visible signs of God’ grace in unlikely places. It is making God’s grace visible to the homeless people that hang around on the street outside my office. It is proclaiming God’s Love in online communities, and challenging others to do the same. It is calling out in the post-modern twenty-first century wilderness, “Make straight the way of the Lord.”
This captures much of my current thoughts about how I “anticipate, as an ordained leader, helping the Episcopal Church in Connecticut be more faithful to God’s Mission”: by proclaiming the Gospel in unlikely places, in the post-modern twenty-first century wilderness.
God’s Love and God’s peace passes all human understanding, so, it seems to me, does God’s plan for my life, for all our lives. So one of the most important parts of God’s plan for me, I believe, is the unanticipated, the unanticipatable, here and now. It is one of the most exciting aspects of what I believe God’s plan for me is, as well as one of the most frightening.
I believe that God is calling me to proclaim the peace and Love that passes all understanding in unlikely and unexpected ways and places. I believe God is calling me to do this, in my current life as a lay person, in the future as an ordained leader, and especially, publicly, in community, through this process as I yield myself to a closer alignment of God’s desire for me and my desire for myself.
As I reimagine God’s desire for me, as I think about Jesus coming to start a movement and not just an institution, to borrow from Presiding Bishop Elect Curry, I hope to help those around me, both within the Episcopal Church in Connecticut and beyond in restoring “all people to unity with God and each other in Christ”.
The Digital Church
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 01/14/2016 - 07:40In a recent online discussion, someone mentioned to me the idea that Christianity goes through a five hundred year trend of re-evaluation and remodeling. I was asked if I thought we might be at one of those once in every five-hundred year events. I’ve often wondered how close we are to another American Great Awakening. The Great Awakenings happen much more frequently.
It is interesting that this has come up in an online discussion, something that didn’t exist during the reformation or the early Great Awakenings. Many of my media oriented friends often talk about the Gutenberg Press as bringing about great changes in terms of education, politics, and religion. Is the Internet bringing about a similar change?
Much of my political involvement has been focused around online activities. The communities I belong to are often around common interests shared online and not around common geography. Yet our church structure is still seems to be primarily oriented around common geography. At the same time, people are looking at how to get Christianity out of the church building and more into the community. How does this relate to the church community being online?
The stuff we post online is much more permanent and searchable that the comments we make face to face or write in letters. If you know where to look, you can find stuff I posted online back in 1982. Recently, a friend died of cancer. I had met him through an online group back in the 90s, and people in the group are still connected online. They are sharing memories and pointing to photos that were shared back in the 90s.
In two different online religious groups, people have asked that personal information either not be shared, or shared with the smallest amount of personal information necessary.
Now I get some of the desire for privacy. When I started considering more deeply what God is calling me to last spring, I was hesitant to talk publicly about it. Part of it was that it seemed God was calling me to a much more intimate relationship, and we are often restrained in talking about intimacy, especially when there is uncertainty about the relationship and vulnerability. Yet at the same time, as we become more sure of the relationship, we proclaim it boldly. I think of my friends posting life events on Facebook, a new relationship, the engagement ring, the marriage, the birth of a child. As I write this, I think of the song we sang in youth group years ago, “I’ll shout it from the mountain top, I want the world to know, the Lord of Love has come to me, I want to pass it on.”
I think of some of the meditations I’ve been reading recently, about our experience of God’s Incarnation, God’s love, God’s presence, happens in the simple parts of life, like appreciating the sunrise on the daily commute, or the kind words of a coworker at the office. How do we experience the presence of God online?
Likewise, I get the idea of telling one’s own story, and not someone else’s story. Yet when we think of our self as part of a community, part of the body of Christ, the line between my story and our story blurs.
When I get into discussions about acceptable behavior online, I often go back to Mark Prensky’s article Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. He was writing in the context of education, but I like to think of it more broadly. In the context of this post, I have to wonder what a church of Digital Natives looks like.
Are the people who are more hesitant to share online digital immigrants? Are they the older folks regularly attending churches as opposed to the millennials who have by and large abandoned church? What might a church of the twenty first century, organized around online interests instead of geographical proximity look like?
I’m also interested in how all of this relates to addressing stigmas, confessing sin, and several other topics. I hope to be exploring some of these ideas in more detail over the coming months.
January 13th
Waiting...
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 01/13/2016 - 21:52I have several writing ideas in the works, but none of them are quite ready to be posted. I don’t feel I can even talk about some of them yet. Instead, I’m at a place of waiting. Tomorrow, I will know more, and perhaps the day after tomorrow, even more. I’ll get to bed early this evening. Perhaps not as early tomorrow evening, and at some point, I’ll be better rested, more thought out, and able to write more.
January 12th
Checkpoint 1/12/16
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 01/12/2016 - 21:37So, here we are, not quite two weeks into the New Year; a good time to take a moment and see how all those resolutions and goals are going. I’m still managing to do okay with mine. I’ve been getting up earlier, usually around five, but sometimes a little later, and try to spend the first hour of my day in various devotions and meditations. I’ve gotten the Digg Reader set up nicely to let me know when there are new posts on various blogs, and I’ve subscribed to others via email.
I’m also using Digg to track other blogs, mostly from a long time ago. I’m not keeping up with all the blogs as much as I would like, but I’m doing okay.
I’ve been using Workflowy to try and keep track of what I’m doing, and what I want to get done. Over the past two weeks, I’ve changed the way I’m using it a little, but it is going well. My social media activity isn’t as much as I’m shooting for, but Workflowy is keeping me focused on it.
This evening, I closed down a bunch of tab, and saved information about them in Workflowy. Here are some of my thoughts about how they tie together. During my morning mediations, I read Choices we make in telling personal news of a private nature. Our public Vs. Private lives. It is something I struggle with as an online writer, how public can I appropriately be? As a comment, I wrote,
I really appreciate your thoughts about the public and the private. I am thinking a lot about this right now as I explore becoming a priest. God called me privately, as I sat in a public gathering. I am seeking to balance bearing witness and letting my light shine with the needs of those around me for their privacy.
In Water Daily, Kate wrote
"We may not be turning water into wine, but we can transform the ordinary into the sacred just by bringing Jesus along with us and letting his Spirit kick things up a notch. You never know what might happen."
Another post pointed me to Dorotheus of Gaza whom I hope to spend more time reading about.
Three articles concerning the gathering of Anglican church leaders caught my attention
- Church split over gays not a disaster, says Welby: Archbishop makes comments ahead of meeting of senior bishops to attempt to secure a compromise
- Primates’ Dilemma from a Pittsburgh Girl’s Perspective
- Anglican summit: Traditionalists' anger over Justin Welby’s federal plan
Meanwhile, I’m looking at MOOC MOOC: INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN, CLEARING CONFUSION BETWEEN SOCIAL EMOTIONAL LEARNING AND SOCIAL COMMUNICATION DEVELOPMENT and reading Slow Church, which I’ll discuss online.
We’ll see how much time I’ll have to explore some of these. I will miss the State of the Union speech tonight. After a long day at work, I’m too tired for that. I also hope to get a new poem that has been brewing in my head written down soon, but that, too, will have to wait.
