Week 2.11 - Won't you be my neighbor?

If good fences make good neighbors, I think I need a wall.

Dear Husband lived on top of a mountain most of his life, so he likes being away from other people, and I begin to understand where he's coming from.  Despite the fact that I have lived most of my life in one subdivision or another, I think I've been very fortunate that most of our neighbors have left us the hell alone.  We certainly got spoiled in Murfreesboro, when we lived next to the local NPR station director, who always said hi when he saw us, occasionally engaged in conversation (and God bless his heart, mowed the whole yard for the duplex).  I rarely saw his wife, but she was always pleasant when I did speak to her.

Fast forward to Corpus Christi.  Our neighbor was over the very next day after I moved in, which was fine.  I can understand wanting to know who has moved into your neighborhood, though it took me fifteen minutes to extricate myself from the conversation.  But over the last seven months, he has slowly started to drive me crazy, because he has stepped over the line from tactless to rude.

Example the first:  He is constantly inviting us to church with him.  This is not necessarily a bad thing, but I have expressed (as has DH) that we have a home church in town and that we are quite happy with it.  Despite this, the invitations have continued to the point of being annoying.  Yes, I understand that he likes his church a lot (which is odd, as he's in his fifties and the church is for people thirty and under--which DH and I are coming up on the edge of), but at some point, don't you have to stop?  I've tried being as polite as I can in turning him down, but I feel my patience wearing thin.  I did look in to his church--I did.  But I have no intention of rejoining an evangelical church any time soon, and honestly, it would just give him more opportunity to poke into our lives.  I've thought about inviting him to church with us every time he invites us to his, but I'm afraid he might take me up on it.  (Yes, I am a horrible person, and I'm not acting very Christ-like.  We'll get to that.)

Example the second: Any conversation with him takes at least five minutes to extricate yourself from.  I think we all know people like that.

Example the third:  I came home from work last week and he stopped me on my way into the house to inform me that he's getting a divorce.  (In seven months, I've met his wife once.)  I expressed my sorrow over the situation--it's not something you want anyone to ever have to go through--and that was my mistake, as I got the entire tale about how his wife has apparently been lying to him for the last twenty-some years.  (Again, I've met his wife once.)  He seems to have moved down to Corpus to stay for a while, while she stays on their ranch in Austin, and he's got the oldest boy with him right now. 

Example the fourth:  This is the one that has sent me on this not so short rant.  This morning, I was in the car and backing out of my driveway when he appeared out of my passenger blind spot and motioned for me to roll down the mirror.  (I am on my way to work at 7:20 in the morning.  I work at the college, which he well knows, and given traffic in this town, could have made me late, despite my early start.)  He asked if we had sold the Saturn yet, as he has a buddy who is looking for a car.  We've already promised it to the daughter of DH's boss, and I let him know that, thanking him for looking out for us.

This is when he asked, "Well, how much did you get for it?"

I beg your pardon.

I said, "We haven't made any solid deals yet, as we're waiting on the title." (Which we are, but it got processed today, so it should be here soon.)

He returned, "Well, like approximately."

I smiled as best I could for having been out of the bed fifteen minutes and said, "I really don't talk about these things."  Which is true.  The only people who get that info are a) members of my family and b) my very bestest best friend in the whole wide world (our favorite Snarky Writer), and he fits into neither of those categories!  (This is also why we paid through the nose to have HR Block do our taxes this year, rather than asking him, the only CPA we know down here to do it, because we knew good and well that as soon as he got that return, our financial information would be all over the neighborhood.)

He seemed to take the hint that I was done talking, which was good, because if he hadn't, he was in serious danger of getting his foot run over if he didn't stop leaning on my BRAND NEW CAR.  DH just sighed and shook his head when I told him about it at lunch today.  (I am really, really just hoping that he does not see DH come home tonight and go, "Hey, you all are from Kentucky, right?  How about that game?"  I don't have the money to bail my husband out of jail.)

Which brings me back to the point I had mentioned from earlier--this is all not very Christ-like of me (though in thinking about What Would Jesus Do?, I am reminded that flipping tables and chasing people about with a whip is not outside the realm of possibility).

Yesterday was Easter Sunday, and during the Easter Sunday service, as a congregation, we renew our baptismal vows, much like we do on Sundays when someone is baptized or confirmed.  The priest asks: "Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?"

It's one of several profound statements in the baptismal vows, and in my irritation today with my neighbor (and the cashier at Walmart, who didn't say so much as a word to me), those words have come back to haunt me.  How do you love someone who is, at least to you, so very unlovable?  The answer, of course, is in the congregation's response to the question: "I will, with God's help."  I am, myself, often loud, abrasive, and irritating to be around.  I am often grumpy and/or cranky, occasionally mercurial, can hold a hell of a grudge, and am far too lazy for my own good (or that of anyone else's).  And yet, that's the whole message of Easter, isn't it?  That while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Sometimes, though, you just want to throw a stink bomb into his garage.  Apparently, I have a long way to go.

This has hardly been the highlight of my week, but as this post has already grown far too long...more tomorrow (that might actually recap the last week).

Living Faithfully: The All-Evangelical Rejects

A friend posted this article today: Young Evangelicals Are Getting High. It deals with the trend of young people leaving the evangelical church and finding themselves in high church traditions, such as the Catholic, Anglican/Episcopalian, and Lutheran traditions.  He was asking for the opinions of his friends, and as someone who went from an evangelical church to the Episcopal church, I found myself responding to his post. 

My response was somewhat disorganized and rambly, as Facebook comments often tend to be, but this was such a serious discussion, and my life follows this article in so many ways, that I felt my friend deserved a more put-together response.  Hence this entry sharing my own faith story--for everyone.

I grew up in a Southern Baptist church.  I was baptized there, frankly without too much of an idea as to what I was doing.  When I was about nine or ten, my family switched churches to an independent, fundamentalist Christian church in town.  At the time, the church was a very small community.  Being a kid, I didn't quite understand what any of the differences were between this evangelical church and the Baptist church I came from, but in an opinion I've held almost ever since, I decided--hey, they believed in Jesus, it must all be okay.

This church grew and grew and grew, until by the time I was in high school, church services were averaging approximately1000 people on Sunday mornings.  The church had built on a huge new sanctuary and a huge new gymnasium.  In a town of about 15,000 people, that's a lot.

While I was in high school, my parents stopped going--not because of choice, but because my mother had grown too sick.  She'd already been banned from attending church during the winter months, because that many people in close environs was asking for trouble when you have an auto-immune disorder.  My father had been a deacon at that church, and my grandfather was an elder.  And right as I started college, I began to become disillusioned with it.

Why I became disillusioned?  Well, there were a lot of reasons, and one of them was that I continually felt like an outcast.  I was a weird kid to begin with, and being homeschooled meant that I didn't have entry into the cliques that existed in the youth group and transferred into the county school system. 

The other thing was that slowly, I was starting to see things that didn't fit with my worldview.  In college, I'd begun to meet lots of new people, who had far-ranging viewpoints, far from my little town.  And what I was hearing in church--not necessarily from the pulpit--didn't fit with what I was learning.  I was attending a church that believed in a strict interpretation of Genesis, that did not allow women to teach co-ed classes past fifth grade, and in which distinct sins were seemingly worse than others.  At the same time, I also saw things happening in this church that made some of this seem hypocritical. 

So I stopped going.  This was not long after 9/11, and I can't say whether that had something to do with it or not, but certainly, there was a long nationwide soul-searching afterwards, and I remember distinctly telling my mother during a car ride that I didn't think I believed any longer in organized religion.  (Some people I knew blamed this shift in my attitude on my attendance at a secular state university.)

That didn't mean I stopped praying or stopped being a Christian.  It just meant that I stopped going to church.  And I was gifted with the discovery of Jan Karon's Mitford books.  They're a series that follows a small-town North Carolina Episcopal priest about his unique little parish.  They are heart-warming, funny, spiritual, and thought-provoking all at once.  So I decided that I would go out to the little Episcopal church in my hometown.

I was welcomed immediately.  Everyone knew everyone (and in a small town, most of them already knew me, even if the reverse was not true).  I was probably the youngest person there who wasn't in the kids' programs, but they very kindly took me under their wing.  One thing I distinctly remember was one of the members telling me that Episcopalians did their churching on three principles--Scripture, Tradition, and Reason.   This was comforting to me.  Scripture was the basis of everything, but no one was asking you to stop believing in scientific proof and evidence.  I would venture to guess that most Episcopalians agree with the theory of evolution, and it's not incompatible with the church teaching.

I should also point out that I joined the Episcopal church not long after the schism within the church over the ordination of gay bishops.  There were still quite a few hurt feelings here and there about it, but one thing I saw was a church healing and forgiving one another.  There are so few churches that can survive that kind of schism, much less survive with the kind of forgiveness I saw.  The inclusivity of the church helped draw me.  The forgiveness helped keep me.

When I moved to a nearby town, I started attending an Episcopal church in that town.  The church building was fairly new--the church was a mission church, meaning that it was supported more by the diocese than under its own power.  It was very small, but I loved it.  When I moved to Tennessee, Dear Husband and I attended a large Episcopal church in town when we attended--we didn't often, because that church was rather large and sometimes difficult to acclimatize to.  There wasn't a lot of choice at the time, though.  The smaller church in Murfreesboro, when I visited, had perhaps five people, as many of them had disappeared during the schism. We have since moved to Texas and found a wonderful church. It's larger, but works very hard to ensure a community. 

As I've thought about it, contrasting the Episcopal church with the evangelical church I came from, there are some distinct differences.  The first is corporate worship.  The Episcopal church looks at worship as a community, participatory activity.  Now, many churches would insist that they, too, have a participatory worship, but what I mean by this is that everyone sings.  There is no worship team standing up in front with PowerPoint projections and microphones.  Instead (if available), there's a choir, and everyone uses the hymnal. 

I remember people in the evangelical church insisting that you had to change up the music, and the service order, to keep people from becoming complacent, but I think there's something to be said for familiarity.  When things are changing all the time, your focus is instead on the changes, rather than on the content.  It's much easier to pay attention to the words of songs that you know. 

Prayers in the Episcopal church are almost always corporate.  We speak our prayers together, affirm our faith together, and recite the Nicene Creed together, rather than sitting and listening to one person bless communion and the offering.  And it's incredibly comforting to know that everyone in an Episcopal or Anglican church are praying the same, or very similar prayers, focusing on the same texts, and using the same hymnal.  It's called the Book of Common Prayer for a reason!

There's also something to be said for the high formality of a high church.  I'm not saying that I haven't attended church in blue jeans before--I have.  But there's also something valuable about taking the time to dress up for church to take things seriously.  Worship should be taken seriously, rather than watched as a spectacle or concert. 

The Episcopal church has also, for me, been much more inclusive.  Women are welcome to serve as priests or bishops--the presiding bishop of the Episcopal church is a woman.  Those of all races are welcome, as are those of all sexual orientation.  Divorce, while something to be avoided, is not something to whisper about behind church bulletins.  I've seen the opposite at the evangelical church I attended.  I've also seen a lot more community involvement out of the Episcopal church, particularly here.  Many community outreach programs are supported by the church--fund-raising is not done for the church and for the church alone.  Even community events--like the Martin Luther King Day parade, take place at the church.

I also can't ignore this.  For a long time, I saw the evangelical church I was attending become at odds with Christ's message to love one another.  I mean this in this way: I saw a lot of political viewpoints that were not engaging in Christ's love.  For example, abortion was completely and utterly out of the question.  At the same time, a young, unmarried mother was somewhat ostracized for the error of her ways.  This is just one example among many.  I don't mean to accuse one political viewpoint of this--but this was something that I observed that I found to be problematic. 

There's also much less of the hellfire and brimstone in the Episcopal church.  The message in the Episcopal church is one of love, not punishment, and you will not, in fact, be consigned to perdition for not aligning perfectly with the church's viewpoint.  In fact, if the Episcopal church had a single motto, it would Christ's command to love one another.  

This has not been much less long-winded than the comment I left on my friend's Facebook, but I hope it helps people understand why I left the evangelical church for the high church, and why I am an ever devoted Episcopalian.

Week 12: It's Week What?

It's been a fairly uneventful week in the Stewart household, all things considered.  The usual has gone on--grading, students excelling, students being problems, sending in drop forms, reading a ridiculous amount of email, more grading, student appointments, and trying to start writing a new article.

If there's one thing I've learned about why community college professors seem (and I qualify this statement because it's not entirely true) to publish less than others, it's because the resources for scholarship are much harder to obtain.  While Del Mar has access to EBSCO--and therefore the MLA International Bibliography--getting the articles are much more difficult.  We have no access to JSTOR or to Project Muse, which makes things problematic.  I can use the library at Texas A&M Corpus Christi, but I have to go there in person to do so, which is not terribly helpful when I'm trying to work in my office.

But my writing focus over the last week has instead been on National Novel Writing Month.  NaNoWriMo is now on its ninth day, and in those nine days, I've so far written 11,319 words.  That means in the last week, I've effectively written twenty percent of my novel.  Considering that I started working on it over two years ago, that's quite bit for just the last week.  I've also managed to outline the rest of it, so I know exactly where the rest of it is going.  If I sit down and really work at it, I think I could probably have it knocked out by the end of the week.

This may also be in part because DH is going to have to start working on Saturdays for the foreseeable future. Not the Saturday after Thanksgiving, thank goodness, but probably otherwise through the end of the year.  That's both good, because of the overtime, but bad because that's less time I get to spend with him during the week.  But if there is one excellent thing about working at the same place as your husband, it's that you get to see him during the day at times.  We get to have lunch together on Mondays and Wednesdays, which is very nice.  Next semester when I don't have a mid-day class at lunch time, we should be able to eat lunch together every day.

The landlord came this week and replaced our disposal, as it was leaking quite badly, and installed a gutter on the back of the house in hopes that it will stop the water seeping into the garage when it rains.  We'll get to see if that works later this week, I think, as we're expecting another cold front to come through the Coastal Bend on Tuesday.  But the cold front should bring highs of 50s to 60s, so it will finally start to feel, perhaps, like fall.  I don't know that we'll ever get to heavy coat weather, but I'll take hoodie weather.

All Saint's Day was a beautiful service last week at church with two baptisms at the 10:30 service.  In the meantime, our Sunday School class has been continuing our journey through the Book of Common Prayer.  Our priest has been doing a great job leading us through the BCP, and it's amazing how almost all of Episcopal theology can be found inside it.

What may be the most important thing that I've found has been about the difference between sickness and illness, and healing and cure.  When you've faced chronic illness, either yourself or with a family member, it's difficult to deal with the spiritual nature of it.  One thing that's always made me angry has been the idea that we must not have sufficient faith for my mother to be cured of her lupus (or for that matter, any of us with any other illness).  What I've understood in the last few weeks, both in Sunday School and by reading Father Westerhoff's book, is that I'm not wrong.

Whenever the Garth Brooks' song "Unanswered Prayers" came on the radio, Mom always stopped after it to remind us that there are no unanswered prayers--sometimes the answer is just no.  After twenty some years, it's become quite clear to me that our prayers for the cure of my mother has been "No."  I don't know why.  But that has been the answer.  It's not that I doubt God's power to cure my mother, but after twenty years of praying, I'm pretty sure that's His answer.

So I've stopped praying for a cure to my mother's lupus.  Instead, I've started praying for healing.  Father Westerhoff explains that illness is something in the body or mind going wrong.  Sickness is the attitude we have towards it.  A cure is the fix for the illness.  Healing is the cure for sickness.  And if there's one thing that's stuck with me from Father Westerhoff's book, it's this - "Disease is not a 'cross to bear'" (118). Furthermore, he says, "No one suffers from a disease as God's punishment for sin" (117).

It's comforting to hear and read that.  When you learn this, you get to let go of so much.  Healing is instead acceptance of God's will and learning to walk more closely with Him and in his ways, no matter what illness we have.  And that includes when you have a mental illness which can so closely connect with sickness that it's difficult to disentangle them.

So it's been an enlightening week as I've been thinking about that.  Today we talked about living a holy death, and the takeaway was that we die the way we live.  My great-grandfather Elza lived a peaceful life in God's will, and from what my mother has told me, his passing was also peaceful.

I won't say that Sunday school didn't bring up a lot of feelings this morning either.  I may have shed a few tears, and Father Philip was very kind and came and checked on me, both after Sunday school and after service this morning to make sure that I was okay.

I continue to be amazed at how wonderful Corpus Christi is being for us. "Body of Christ" indeed!  Our lives have been enriched by work and by church, and we continue to find ourselves drawn into a community of wonderful people.

It may not be Kentucky, but I think it'll do.

Week 11: *yaaaaaaaawn*

 Dear Husband and I went to the Texas State Aquarium today and had a wonderful time.  The aquarium is really neat, and being right by the gulf, had a lot of sea creatures that you can actually come across in the area.  I have some decent pictures of the dolphins, but this one of one of the sea turtles came out the very best.  I was so pleased with it!

The picture below is from the beach right outside the aquarium and is of me in front of the U.S.S. Lexington, a floating museum.  We didn't go there today, but that's on our list of things to do before much longer.

It was a nice day to go.  It's been about 72 degrees with a nice breeze off Corpus Christi Bay.  It's apparently 37 degrees in DH's hometown, and there was a nasty storm with ice and sleet last night.  It's been a bit weird for it to be November 1st and not need at least a hoodie. Instead, I was wearing my Men of Marvel dress from Her Universe.  It will actually be warmer at the beginning of next week before going back into the 70s on Wednesday.

This is, apparently, considered cold for Corpus Christi.

I've been having weird dreams the last couple of nights--dreaming about my Mamaw Hardiman.  It's been several years since she died, so I don't know why it's come up now in the last few days.  But I miss her dearly.

This week were student conferences with my 1301 and 1302 classes.  Over the last week, I've had almost 100 students in my office.  Some of them I told to keep up the good work, some I told just to keep on keeping on, and some I scolded.

That's all to be expected, naturally.  But then there were some who came into my office, and talked to me about what was going on in their lives.  I gave out bookmarks to the retention office, post-it notes with the number for the counseling office, tissues, platitudes, and hugs.  Then they left my office, and I needed the tissue for myself.  So many of my students are working so hard to overcome so much, and there's not much I can do to help but to sit there and be a listening ear and a shoulder to cry on.

At the same time, I've also seen these students succeeding--and doing so fabulously, overcoming all of these things that they're dealing with.  They're so determined to make a better life, and I am so thrilled to help them do that.

We've been studying prayer in our Sunday School class, and I think one of the most powerful things I can do right now is to pray for my students.  The older I get, the more prayer becomes important to me, and the more I recognize the power of prayer.  It's not so much because I believe that God will do everything I ask of Him--I recognize that I can pray for something and sometimes the answer will be "No."  But while I can worry over my students, I have to learn to let it go, so all I can do is turn it over to God.  And that takes practice and patience and prayer.  So I'm learning.

Today starts National Novel Writing Month.  Whether I get a full 50,000 words written over the month of November, I have no idea, but to be fair, I'm kind of cheating in that I only want to finish my novel this month, and I've just finished chapter 15.  My word count on the novel can be found at the bottom of the page.  I'm starting with 35,362 words.  I'm aiming for about 60,000 words with this novel, and then it's on to the second in the series.  Several of my friends are working on novels this month.  There's also a Corpus Christi group of people doing NaNoWriMo, and they're going to have "write-ins" at the Half Price Books this month, and I'm thinking of joining them.

In other news, I've been doing a pretty good job on the academic writing front this week.  I've got a complete draft of my Tennyson paper, and I have some colleagues, current and former, who have agreed to read it before I submit it to a journal.  I'm looking forward to their feedback, and I hope that I have something publishable.  Still, I want to get some feedback before I send it off.  In the meantime, I have an idea for a new paper I want to write, so that's the next goal.  After all, as soon as you're done writing one thing, it's time to start another.

DH is taking a nap on the couch right now.  He's been working overtime in the registrar's office--which looks like it will continue for the foreseeable future.  He says he's never bored while he's working!  He seems to be enjoying it, and they seem to be happy to have him there--naturally.  And it's wonderful to have him on campus with me--we get to eat lunch together on Mondays and Wednesdays, and we get to drive in together almost every day.  I'm in my office a lot more, so I'm getting more work done, so we can both come home and leave work at work.

One thing that's been interesting is that this weekend is Dia de los Muertos.  I'm still learning about the holiday, but it goes from Halloween on Oct. 31st, through All Saint's Day on Nov. 1st, and ends on All Soul's Day on Nov. 2nd.  We'll be celebrating All Saint's Day tomorrow at church, and I'm looking forward to it, as I've never been to an All Saint's Mass at a 'high' church.

This week has me finishing Hamlet with my 1302 classes, working on advertising with my 1301 classes, and reading Poe in my American Lit class.  (We did "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Young Goodman Brown" on Thursday in anticipation of Halloween.)

In the meantime, DH and I will be missing the snow from home and the fire we know his mom and dad are building--and hope that our weather calms down a bit, if only for the sake of the garage.