Time management is challenging.  For all of us.  A Google search for “time management” returns 189,000,000 other results in 0.54 seconds, the top result promising 40 skills to help manage your time.

I read some of these articles.  I’d like to find the answer to perfect time management.  I’ve always known that it’s a long shot–personality-wise I’m more inclined to busy procrastination and messy piles than being meticulously organized.  One of the people I read who talks about life and work is Penelope Trunk.  I don’t always agree with her, but she always makes me think.  And she recently had this to say about time managment,

One of the keys to my ability to work 40 hours a week and homeschool two kids is that I have great time management. Which is to say, I say no to just about everything.

(Feel free to click through to read the rest of her post, but it quickly becomes about why she’d rather read a book than talk to an author.)

And I finally understood the other reason why I’ll never be great at time management.

When my phone rings with someone who needs help, who wants my time, who needs to be heard, my day gets rearranged.  The conversation with the person next to me in the coffee shop takes precedence over my own work.  Getting someone else’s dinner comes before my own some nights. The paperwork gets pushed back.  The sermon writing gets delayed.

I was called to be a priest.  To say yes.

As a priest, it will be your task to proclaim by word and deed the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and to fashion your life in accordance with its precepts. You are to love and serve the people among whom you work, caring alike for young and old, strong and weak, rich and poor. (BCP, 531)

Sometimes it calls for creative time management.  For fitting the paperwork and the sermon writing and the other known tasks into the corners and cracks of what my days and weeks become.  (Other times it can be very boring.)

I was called to be a priest, to say yes.  And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

So the two sides cite the Bible at each other.

Holding verses like this:

Women should be silent in Churches (1 Cor 14:34, in v35 it goes on to say that it is shameful for a woman to speak in Church). Women shouldn’t teach or have authority, because Paul didn’t let that happen to him (1 Tim 2:12, and if you’re the Apostle Paul I promise not to teach you).

Against ones like this:

Jesus had female disciples, even if we are late in giving them that title: Mary, Martha, and Mary Magdalene—the first witness to the Resurrection and long recognized in the Eastern Church as the Apostle to the Apostles. Paul lauded female Church leaders Phoebe (Rom 16), Junia (Rom 16), Lydia (Acts 16). And in 1 Corinthians 11, Paul mentions women praying and prophesying with the only problem occurring if their head is uncovered, not with the women praying and prophesying.

Given that I am an Episcopal Priest, my own position is…actually not that clear. You see, I think that in the middle of the debate we lose sight of a few things. Important things, like the Bible.

The Bible matters, especially to me. I’ve spent years of my life reading it, studying it, and learning how to be better at both of these things. I spend most of my work dedicated to helping other people understand it better, or at least understand why I love it so much.

And the Bible does not present us with a simple God. Yes, God is masculine; surely, Jesus was male. But God is also a nursing mother (Isa 49:15), creation is an act of birth (Job 38:8), God is the mother of a toddler (Hosea 11:3-4), God comforts as a mother (Isa 66:13), God is a woman in labor (Isa 42:14), and God is the mother of the house of Jacob (Isa 46:3).

But where I get frustrated is when we think that the tension is only about God as masculine or feminine. Because God is also a mother hen (Mt 23:37 and Lk 13:34), a rock (Dt 32:18), a bear (Hosea 13:8), a lion (Hosea 5:14), an eagle (Dt 32:11), a refuge and a fortress (Ps 91). And of course Exodus is resplendent with God as a burning bush, a cloud, and a pillar of fire. All things that are not so human, much like God.

I take it seriously when I read that we were all created male and female in the image of a God who is masculine and feminine and so much more. So I wonder, what if the Church stopped worrying so much about being masculine or feminine, and remembered to concentrate on being Divine?

I believe, I have seen, that when we are a Divine Church, the gender of who preaches or teaches matters less, because there is space for the masculine and feminine and everything else Divine.

I believe that the products of my ministry are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, goodness, faithfulness, and self-control (Gal 5:22). Not because my ministry is more feminine than masculine or, as some have told me, that my ministry isn’t that feminine, but because I try to make sure that God is at the center of all I do. Which leaves space for the masculine, the feminine, and everything else Divine.

(My thanks to Rachel Held Evans for the sideways inspiration for this.  She asked for posts celebrating the feminine images of God, which is not quite what I did.  Rachel’s post is here and the collection of everyone’s contributions can be found in the comments here.)

I read for work. The Bible, I hope obviously; liturgies and about them; sermons, my own and others; theology; social and political commentary; current events; and anything else that will make me think, make me stretch, help me better understand people, help me better articulate a faith which is beyond words.

I read for fun (and sanity). Fiction—most often science fiction, but also mysteries, horror (it has be really good), and whatever else I find and enjoy. Poetry because I fall in love with a well-turned phrase. Memoirs because I love learning about how others experience their lives.

I read.

Right now, in this season of my life, a season with more than a little grief, a time when it is challenging to remain optimistic, I’m reading for a new reason. I’m reading for hope. I’ve survived tough times before. Often enough that I sometimes thing that between all of the fingerprints, hand impressions, and nail troughs I have made trying to hang on to faith, hope, and love, I should have gotten better at it. More dextrous. More able to secret away the right-sized portion to sustain me.

Instead I’m bookmarking my way through hope. Literally bookmarking my way through Jurgen Moltman’s Theology of Hope. Underlining passages and scribbling notes on my bookmark. I am a thorough reader.

As I work to pastor and serve my congregation through change, trying to bring to our times together the right combination of my very real grief and the eternal reassurance that nothing is lost in God, I need someone else to remind me of those things.

I need the voice of Moltmann, a German theologian, alive but only real to me through words on the pages in front of me. I need him to remind me that God, while keeping us firmly in the present, calls us into a hope and a future that leave all Christians disquieted. I need to be reminded, in the midst of my now, that “hope casts [me] upon the future that is not yet.” (pg 26)

Because hope is hard. It is hard, in the face of the loss and grief which are so common in this world, to continue to stand on the eternal reassurance of God’s promises. It is hard, after the kind of long day which leaves one feeling empty to rise the next morning ready to praise and serve.

And it is harder yet to continue to believe that these things are necessary, that they are the actions of faith. That they are hopeful. But they are. And even though I know this, I still need Moltmann’s word to remind me that, “Faith and love are timeless acts which remove us out of time, because they make us wholly ‘present’.” (pg 30)

The joy of a book is that it will be wholly present to you just as you need it be. So no one minds as I make my way through Theology of Hope far more slowly than I usually read, savoring the words, sustaining myself on the reminders that hope is not only worth holding onto, but still being held out for me to grab. Right now, Moltmann and his Theology of Hope is saving me.

This post is one of many for Provoketive’s synchroblog on Hope.  Please go read my fellow writer’s reflections, stories, and hopes here.

Moving out has been a slow trickle. More like fading away. Every time I’m there I take a tote bag of books away with me, carting them out of the office and building. Carefully selected to be the books that will be missed least from the shelves, the ones I will least likely mind having buried in the back of their temporary shelving in my apartment. I take my time selecting them, always making me the last to leave, solitary in my little ritual of grief.

Because there will be no new priest after me. No one will rearrange the furniture again. No books will replace mine on the shelves. I need not debate whether to leave my lovely rug for my successor, wondering if they will want it. St John’s is closing, the parish dissolving. The gamble we took together, the mostly impossible task I described in one of my first sermons, has proven beyond us.

You can ask why. I do. I even have answers. There are the double handful of answers I give on even days about the changing demographics of small towns; about being Episcopalian in a conservative town; statistics about mainline Churches; the ability of any congregation to change; and my worry about being young, female, and liberal. Then there are the answers I give on odd days while looking between my hands and my reflection in a mirror, knowing that it wasn’t enough and wondering what might have been, if only…

In between I know that these answers, any and all of them, don’t matter. I mean, they matter to academics and perhaps to the priest in the next town over hoping their church is is where St John’s was ten years ago. But not to me, not to the faithful remnant who will attend the secularization of our Church’s building with the Bishop and I.

Answers are only a layer of our grief.

Our grief as we celebrated our last Christmas together as a parish. Our grief as we recognize that we will not celebrate Easter together. Our grief as we all remember funerals, baptisms, and weddings, and holy conversation held in this space. As we begin to make decisions about where the stuff of our parish should go. One or two items relating to the history of the 100+ year old parish to the town museum. One or two items crafted by family members to their descendants who are parishioners. One or two will come home with me, as memorials and for my continued use. And the rest, hopefully, to other Churches, where they will continue to be used to the glory of God. In the midst of all this grief, we gather to celebrate Eucharist and count out our last few services together, in much the same way as family gathered around a deathbed keeps track of the breaths, full of grief and the knowledge that the end is coming.

In preaching, I often ask people to look at the Biblical text differently (sometimes quite differently), I make jokes, I ask questions, I tell stories, I make comparisons, I talk about money (Jesus did!).  Sometimes this all works and people seem to think.  Sometimes I worry about who I just offended.

My preaching professor in seminary would tell us that, “when you have a dog of a sermon, walk it proud.”  Which works, but better in person.  Delivery can cover many shortcomings.

And I podcast my sermons.  (More surprisingly, people listen!)  Which means that anyone could stumble or search for me and get me at, not only my not-best, but sometimes my worst in quite awhile.  (When exactly is my rock bottom worst will be a question for my non-existent biographers or quite existent siblings.)

This bothers me.  Not for the sake of my ego.  Okay, not just for the sake of my ego.  My job in preaching, my role, is to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  I regularly pray that I have the right sermon, a germane point for the people sitting in the pews or on the other side of the speakers.  I hope that they leave with something to ponder, some new way of seeing God.  But the point of all of that, the purpose of my time and effort, is to point to Jesus Christ, who changes lives.

And when I have not done my best, when my life or my job have unavoidably spilled over into the time I set aside for a sermon, when I am worn out, when the sermon, despite hours of work, has just not settled into a coherent form, I pray harder.  That God is still greater than my failings.  That whatever it is I have to say on Sunday morning will have meaning for someone.  That next week will be better.

But, regardless of what next week winds up being like, there will be more weeks, in all varieties of good and busy.  And most every week, I’ll be there preaching and trying.

For the past three months, I’ve had the joyous privilege of teaching theology to future deacons.  (We’ll just side-step the whole Episcopal ordination process bit.)  Altogether I had a lot of fun and they seemed to also.

Of course, there is always more to discuss than we had time to, so one of the things I left them with was a reading list.

The process for compiling this was pretty simple.  I looked at my bookshelves and my RSS reader and asked, “What should people at least experience?”  A few caveats: it is by no means exclusive, or complete.

Further Reading List

In fact, we discussed names that could be added to it: Jim Wallis, Phyllis Tickle.  And for those who had not had their religious funny bones appropriately tickled: Lamb by Christopher Moore and Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett.

So, what authors or books did I miss?

Thanksgiving.  Or, as I often think of it, the secular holiday I approve of.

I approve of the chance to focus on giving thanks.  I approve of being encouraged, as a country, as one of the richest countries in the world, to take a day (or, as my Twitter and Facebook friends are, more)  and consider all that we have which is beloved and good.  This is no easy task, as the things that we are, and should be, thankful for can easily get overlooked in the busy-ness of life.

Yet, as a priest and an individual, I always approach this season with more than a little hesitation.  While there is a rightness to being asked to consider all that we have, as a country and as individuals, there is danger in how this conversation happens.

There are things in our lives, all of our lives, that we may not and should not be thankful for.  Issues of money, health, family, work, and other things that are struggles, burdens, and torturous.  It may seem like we are doing better at hearing this truth, right now in the midst of Occupy Wall Street and with the recent New York Times article on the ‘Near Poor.’  I’m not so sure.

We may be on the cusp of beginning a societal conversation about some of the economic issues that create persistent inequalities for our neighbors and ourselves.  Or we may not.  We don’t know yet.

But a societal conversation is not the same as learning to speak the truth of the broken, weak, and sometimes just destroyed parts of our own lives.  There are truths about debt, about illness, about personal and family secrets that are hard to share, hard to expose to close family and beloved friends, much less the world.

This Thanksgiving, let us give thanks.  Let us give deep and genuine thanks for all of the beloved and good aspects of our lives.  Let us rejoice and celebrate wholeheartedly.  May that only be the beginning of a conversation about the reality of our lives.

Catholic and Protestant. Via Media.  The Middle Way.  The Episcopal Church.

We are Protestant inso much as Protestant means “not Roman Catholic.” However, Protestant also, and as it is more often used, means “any Western Christian who is not an adherent of a Catholic, Anglican or Eastern Church.” Because we and the Eastern Church did not separate from the Roman Catholic Church under Protest.  (Neither did we leave simply because of Henry VIII’s divorce–the history is slightly more complex.  But that’s another post.)

I am not Roman Catholic.  I do not acknowledge the supreme authority of the Pope (even if only when speaking ex cathedra); I do not agree with many of the other teachings of the Roman Magisterium, although I love their work on social justice.  I am not Protestant.  I do believe in the Apostolic Succession; I do believe in the authority of Bishops and the tradition of the Church held in tension with Scripture, rather than the supremacy of either.

It’s not simple.  As an Episcopal Church we are constantly trying to figure out what it means to be the via media anew in each generation.  On specific topics like how we read the Bible, understand our tradition, homosexuality, marriage (two topics that are separate and related), the family, the institution of the church, politics, and many more.

We don’t always get it right.  And we don’t always know what to do when that happens.

I think that it is a struggle worth continuing.  That there are truths born between the authority of the Magisterium and the solas of many Reformed traditions.