General Ordination Exams

Posted on September 15, 2011 by Rosalind C Hughes

It’s that time of year when a certain subset of Episcopalian seminarians begins to feel the first tinglings of exam nerves. I know, because I got a message last night from an online friend asking what I learned from taking the GOEs this past January, and what tips I might like to share.

So, on the off-chance that it’s useful to anyone else, and with the disclaimer that I am no expert, just another humble body who went through the mill and came out the other side, here are my honest advisements for any of you facing GOEs this winter. Feel free to share your own tips in the comments section below.

  • I spent last fall not believing the people who told me that as long as I had worked at – and enjoyed! – seminary, all would be well. Turned out, they were right!
  • Go to the www.episcopalgbec.org website and look around. You can get previous exams, see what the examiners advise for prep (no cramming!), and how they grade. For the exams, they asked us to use Firefox, so if you don’t have it, download it and get used to it. In the next month or two you’ll get your log-in and be able to get used to candidate areas of the site. Familiarity breeds comfort.
  • Consider using a previous year’s questions (available on the gbec site) to do a practice run. Get a friendly teacher to read and comment, or swap essays with a friend. Know how much you can expect of yourself in three-and-a-half hours. It’s enough.
  • Make sure your technology is sound. If you plan to get a new laptop, don’t leave it til Christmas, or you’ll still be frustrated by the new keyboard etc in January. Try very hard not to have to borrow a computer, or if you do, make sure you know it well. Similarly, rather than treat yourself to a new annotated Bible/BCP/Hymnal, if you have one you already know and trust, use it.
  • Get to know the supervisor for your group. S/he is your go-to for any questions, technical glitches, or talk-downs during the exams. 
  • CLEAR your calendar! For the whole week! Including the off day! Use that as real sabbath time. It’s tiring. Take care of yourself. If you have a choice of where to take the exams, think carefully about what you most need not only to be able to concentrate, but also to relax between sessions.  
  • Have a buddy, preferably one whose talents and trip-ups are different from your own, so that you can calm each other down rather than stoking each other’s anxieties. Have lunch together or unwind at the end of a day of exams, but don’t get caught up in examining the minutiae of your answers.   
  • Keep in mind the purpose of the exams. They’re “diagnostics,” part of the educational process, designed to make you a better priest, not to trip you up. Think pastorally, then; practice your priestcraft and pastoral skills in your answers. The toughest question I had to answer was about a teen suicide: it took my breath and broke my heart, and I spent the first five or ten minutes just praying for the teenagers I know in my life. I believe that it was that prayer and those personal and pastoral concerns as much as any acquired “knowledge” that made my answer sound.
  • So, pray before you start, even if it’s just “God help me!” When you hit the send button, let it go.

Blessings on your studies and on your ministries! And good luck!

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Resident Aliens

Posted on September 12, 2011 by Rosalind C Hughes

The second of an occasional series of posts on the experience of immigration and the journey toward naturalization

The first time we passed through US Immigration, and we were directed into the line for Aliens, the children were all under ten, and they thought it was funny and cool.

It’s a technical term, I know; an immigration status. It says nothing about our personhood, our qualities or qualifications as human beings, our dignity or value.

Still, that’s the thing about language. I know that the term is not meant to be loaded, but it hits the one termed “alien” like a sock with a rock at the bottom. Unless she’s under ten.

I’m not complaining. We came as guests to this place and have been treated with consistent courtesy by immigration officials, with cute curiosity by strangers; we have been generously embraced by our new friends.  And now, I have received an invitation to get my fingerprints taken and my biometrics captured so that my application for citizenship can be processed.

Don’t forget, the invitation stresses, to bring your Alien Registration Card.

“And you are to love those who are aliens, for you yourselves were aliens in Egypt.” Deuteronomy 10: 19

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Spiritual vs. religious?

Posted on September 8, 2011 by Rosalind C Hughes

During the past week, I have been following a back-and-forth on my facebook newsfeed and twitter timeline discussing the religious response to the “spiritual but not religious” label, and a thoughtful and thought-provoking invitation to engage with both labels and their baggage (please find links to the essay by Lillian Daniels and response from Kurt Wiesner, who also prompted the conversation I’ve been following, below).*

I found myself drawn into the debate when I wondered, “Is this a false dichotomy?” Asked to explain myself, I posted this on facebook:

I suppose I mean that my religion(/ous practice) is a vehicle for my spirituality. In prayer, worship, service, I make explicit my recognition of (gratitude to, dependence upon) God; the religious traditions and communities in which I’ve been raised help articulate that spirituality. In my life, they’re interdependent. Big-time!

Needless to say, perhaps I’ve been lucky!

Then I remembered this story, which I wrote up five years ago in an update to my spiritual autobiography commissioned by my Vocations Committee when I was applying for Postulancy (and if any of those terms needs a glossary, let me know! That could be my next blog entry!), which I think illustrates that interplay in my own spiritual but still religious life:

During the last week of our travels, staying at my father’s home, I missed the one church service for the combined villages of the area that Sunday. I found out when I walked down to the church to check the time of the service, which we had thought to be in the evening. I was upset to discover our mistake, but surprised to find the church doors still open; they are usually kept locked when no one is there. I went in and sat in the pew where, just a year ago, I had sat for my mother’s funeral. I decided to read and pray through the service by myself, and when I reached the Communion prayers, I was warmly comforted. I knew myself at that moment to be in communion with those people who had sat there this morning at Communion, a year ago at the funeral, fifteen years ago at our wedding; with my friends at home who, five time zones away, would be in their own churches just now; with, in short, the communion of saints. It was an extraordinary and most wonderful feeling. Afterwards, I walked back up the hill to my father’s house, and shared the Peace with my children.

 

* Lillian Daniels’ essay: http://www.ucc.org/feed-your-spirit/daily-devotional/spiritual-but-not-religious.html#.Tl6ZHN_2428.facebook

Kurt Wiesner’s reflection: http://www.episcopalcafe.com/lead/people/encountering_the_spiritual_but.html#more

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Remembering

Posted on September 5, 2011 by Rosalind C Hughes

It was something after three o’clock in the afternoon. The school bell rang and the doors disgorged a horde of children. My son’s friend’s mother wasn’t there; we waited together under the blue sky sun of early September. She arrived breathless, sweating out her excuses: “I couldn’t tear myself away from the t.v.” Then, “They’ve attacked New York.”

Bewildered, we looked together into the empty sky.

We redistributed the children, and went our separate ways. At home, I turned on the t.v. and recognized her dilemma; the images too horrible to miss, to turn away from, to turn off. Images, not only from New York but other, familiar places that we had never visited, never seen. Even as we hated what we saw, we watched over and over in an effort to absorb news that fell too heavily to be soaked up all at once, which ran off and lay in puddles around us, even three thousand miles away.

A couple of weeks later, I was at a writers’ retreat. My news-watching friend’s husband was also there. We wrestled with lectionary sections and wrangled them into presentations fit for youth audiences, for Sunday Schools, for all-age sermons. In the between times, at lunch, at dinner, in the evening, we talked about the news.

We talked about our fear. So far away, we were afraid, not so much of our enemies, as of ourselves.

We talked about our fear of revenge, of the frightening, seductive magnetism of vengeance, of the sleepless anger which ran like an unbroken surge of electric current through the corridors of power.

We were afraid of our own religion, of its embrace of apocalypse and its proven tendency to crusade.

We were afraid of our fear. We were afraid of becoming a people to be afraid of.

In the midst of terror, of despair, and of untold grief, the angels of the Lord tell us time and again, “Do not be afraid.”

They are words not of comfort only, but of commandment, calling us to be steadfast in love and commitment to the ways of the God who steadfastly loves.

Psalm 116

I love the Lord, because he has heard the voice of my supplication, because he has inclined his ear to me whenever I called upon him.

The cords of death entangled me; the grip of the grave took hold of me; I came to grief and sorrow.

Then I called upon the Name of the Lord: “O Lord, I pray you, save my life.”

Gracious is the Lord and righteous; our God is full of compassion.

The Lord watches over the innocent; I was brought very low, and he helped me.

Turn again to your rest, O my soul, for the Lord has treated you well.

For you have rescued my life from death, my eyes from tears, and my feet from stumbling.

I will walk in the presence of the Lord in the land of the living.

I believed, even when I said, “I have been brought very low.” In my distress I said, “No one can be trusted.”

How shall I repay the Lord for all the good things he has done for me?

I will lift up the cup of salvation and call upon the Name of the Lord.

I will fulfill my vows to the Lord in the presence of all his people.

Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his servants.

O Lord, I am your servant; I am your servant and the child of your handmaid; you have freed me from my bonds.

I will offer you the sacrifice of thanksgiving and call upon the Name of the Lord.

I will fulfill my vows to the Lord in the presence of all his people,

In the courts of the Lord’s house, in the midst of you, O Jerusalem.

Hallelujah!

(From the Book of Common Prayer, 1979)

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L’esprit d’escalier

Posted on September 3, 2011 by Rosalind C Hughes

 

Despite the trials,

 

I should have said, “I love you;”

 

“Goodbye” is hopeless.

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Seek the good of the city

Posted on August 31, 2011 by Rosalind C Hughes

Yesterday, I sent in my application to become a US citizen, so this seemed like a good time to begin a new occasional series of reflections about the whole being-an-immigrant thing.

When our children learned about immigration and immigrants in elementary school, the focus was on refugees, political or economic; or pilgrims, seeking the promised land of milk and honey. Neither really seemed to fit. In a flight of fancy, I could make a case for a figurative Exile scenario, with global corporations as the colonial powers who whisked talent away to their central cities to further their own power and profit. But we’re not exiles. We could have walked away, stayed put, stayed home; and we’ve been well received, accepted, taken care of as we’ve transitioned from one world to another; and we have always been free to go back.

But when I was recently on vacation in my country of origin, and my father asked me, “Do you feel like this is home, or are you a visitor?” I had to respond that although I could find my way around and blend in where I wanted to, I no longer had a home there.

Instead, my home is here, west of Cleveland, Ohio, where my children have grown up and go to school, where we have friends and neighbours upon whom we can call and who call on us when we need a friend or a neighbour. My community of faith is here, those people whose faith and faithfulness keep me grounded and rooted in love.

Recently, I was ordained a deacon in Christ’s one, holy, apostolic church – which sounds big, and is bigger than our imaginations – but the specific and immediate context of that ordination, of the call to service, gospel proclamation, prayer and love, was the Episcopal Church in the USA, and even more particularly its expression in the Diocese of Ohio. I am bound to the people here by a promise of service and love, and by their prayers.

And I am grateful, so grateful, to have ended up among them.

But how can I serve them if I will not make my home with them?

The prophet sent the word of God to the people:

“Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce.  … Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you …, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” (Jeremiah 29: 5, 7)

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Portents

Posted on August 25, 2011 by Rosalind C Hughes

This week has been a bit, well, portenty; omenfull, as it were. If I were of a nervous disposition, I might be getting a little bit jumpy.

It started on Tuesday, with the purchase of not one but two temporary drivers’ packets for not one but two teenagers. “God bless you,” vouchsafed the lady behind the counter in a hushed voice; by her tone, she might as well have been crossing herself.

Sure enough, as I took the younger one out for his first ever go behind the wheel, the earth was shaken from the east coast to downtown Cleveland.

The next day, we saw the destruction of cars and buildings from Germany to New York, rubble and broken glass laying abandoned in the street, and yellow caution tape. We’d been expecting it: after all, we had gone on purpose to see the set of the Avengers movie, which had been turning Cleveland into far-away places then blowing it up for a couple of weeks; but still, portenty, right?

Last night, we went out for an end-of-summer last family dinner together before school began today. But last night, strong storms blew in and did bad things in north east Ohio, and school (at least for my three) didn’t happen. The younger one didn’t start High School after all. The eldest failed to launch herself headlong into her final year.

This morning’s Daily Office Psalm was 18, verses 1-20. Here are some samplings:

“The cords of hell entangled me, and the snares of death were set for me. I called upon the Lord in my distress, and cried out to my God for help.

He heard my voice from his heavenly dwelling …

The earth reeled and rocked; …

He parted the heavens and came down with a storm cloud under his feet …

He wrapped darkness about him … From the brightness of his presence through the clouds burst hailstones and coals of fire …

He loosed his arrows and scattered them; he hurled thunderbolts and routed them …

He brought me into an open place; he rescued me because he delighted in me.”

For some, last night’s storms were a reprieve, a chance to catch up on things left undone at the end of the summer, a breathing space. But I hesitate to claim them as a rescue, because for others, the events of this week, and the threat of more storms to come, will have been a nightmare; they will have felt like anything but rescue.

Portents are in the eye of the beholder. But the Beholder delights in me, and in you, and will bring each of us into the open places where we can see clearly the love that God has for us, and share it with those for whom the rumblings of the earth and the heavens brings disaster.

Lord Christ, who bid the storm cease and the waves be still when your friends were in peril and in terror; bring your peace to bear on those who are in fear or in danger today because of natural forces or because of conflict and war. Let us who know your blessings share them with those who are in need of reassurance, comfort and relief, that your name may be blessed in all the earth, and all of God’s children know your love and peace. Amen.

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Hospitality – 2: guest vs host

Posted on August 19, 2011 by Rosalind C Hughes

This week, I read in the blog of a friend, who’s spending his sabbatical in the Holy Land during the holy month of Ramadan, the following nugget:

 An-Najah is a half-mile walk past Rafidia, so after church I had a nice walk up the hill. Along the way, I was hailed from across the street by one of the older members of Good Shepherd. He gestured for me to come over and visit, an invitation that one simply cannot decline in this culture. He insisted on serving me the most wonderful, homemade rosemary juice. Though I was technically breaking my fast, I feel sure that accepting hospitality is a duty equal to fasting in Allah’s eyes!*

 His words pricked my conscience. One of the reasons that our recent family trip “home” was so successful was that, for once, we were the hosts rather than the guests for the greater part of our visit. We rented a holiday cottage and welcomed family and friends to visit us there, where we had arranged for ample beds and living space, instead of accepting the close embrace of spare rooms which were never designed for spare families of five. We set the menus, the bedtimes, the activities (despite polite consultations). We offered generous accommodations, provisions, assistance – but on our own terms.

Being hospitable to guests is easy, and fun, even when it involves activities which I normally prefer to avoid, such as dusting and vacuuming. Accepting hospitality takes a lot more humility, consideration, self-effacement and grace.

I am chastened by my friend’s (unwitting) conviction of my recent sidestepping of the honoured and honourable duty of a guest.

*http://www.stpeterslakewood.org/news/keiths-sabbatical-blog/sabbatical-blog-post-14/

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Hospitality – 1: the short form

Posted on August 17, 2011 by Rosalind C Hughes

Recently, I’ve been travelling. I’ve experienced hospitality both as a guest and as a host, and as the visitor to unfamiliar church communities’ weekly services.

Arriving early to one such service, I found the place quiet and meditative.  A note in the bulletin, in fact, encouraged people to get their greetings out of the way before entering the sanctuary, so as not to spoil the silence within. Most of them obeyed. It was easy to be a visitor in such a space, and I was grateful for the opportunity as a stranger to worship in company and receive Communion.

After the service, the rector greeted me. “Are you just visiting?” he asked. Yes, I was.

It may have been my imagination, but was his nodding, goodbye sigh one of relief? “Oh, I don’t need to cultivate an acquaintance, then, on to the next thing on my list.” He was not unfriendly, but neither was he curious, or warm.

It’s certainly a pragmatic approach. It wasn’t inappropriate, and it’s not one that is any less welcoming than other places I’ve been. It was just, well, kind of funny to see him mentally checking the box and moving on. It’s the sort of thing that makes me wonder what shows on my own face when a new face approaches.

Or, indeed, an old one!

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Do you forgive me?

Posted on August 11, 2011 by Rosalind C Hughes

In the movie, Fiddler on the Roof, there is a duet between Tevye and Golde in which Tevye asks his wife of 25 years, “Do you love me?” After all that time together, Golde is surprised by the question: what does it even mean? But Tevye persists. Eventually, Golde summarizes her feelings about his wondering:

For twenty-five years I’ve lived with him,

fought with him, starved with him.

Twenty-five years my bed is his –

If that’s not love, what is?”

In other words, I’ve lived as though I loved him. Therefore, I love him. That’s how it works. Actions speak louder than words.

One of the complicated side-effects of love, especially within families, is the necessity for forgiveness. I’ve been wondering whether Golde’s formula can be applied here, too.

“For twenty-five years I’ve lived as though

this never happened, that never was;

for twenty-five years I’ve held my tongue.

If I’ve not forgiven, who has?”

There are times when this has been a helpful approach. There are times when I remain unconvinced. Love might involve living as though we love; living as though we have forgiven; living with a plausible denial of the inconvenient truths of the difficult sides of relationships (does it really, Golde?). But forgiveness: doesn’t that take a little more work? A little more honesty and candour? True reconciliation can’t paper over the cracks. Only once the depth of the chasm is recognized can a bridge be built, or a staircase down to the base of the valley. We might never find our way back up. But without trying, we will never know.

This morning, in episcopal cafe, Bill Carroll offers the insight that while “reconciliation is a two way street[,] forgiveness, by contrast can be unilateral.”* This helps with the problems left over by the above: how can we forgive the dead? Or those whose memory is irretrievable? Or those who are otherwise lost to us?

Golde’s approach may be prosaic rather than poetic, pragmatic rather than romantic, but it has legs. Twenty-five years.

Do you forgive me?

*http://www.episcopalcafe.com/thesoul/personal_reflections/resentment_forgiveness_and_rec.html

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