In High Gear

I had a disquieting trip on the train home tonight.

Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2008 12:47:07 -0400
From: [me]
To: [Regional Sub-Committee on Candidacy]
Subject: New Applicant

Greetings, [Committee Administrator].

I understand that contacting you is the first step in seeking fellowship as a UU minister. My name is [Spring Dew], from Lake Worth, Florida, and I’m finishing up a Bachelor of Science in Liberal Arts this fall. If you’d let me know what further information I need to provide, it’ll surely be forthcoming. Thank you.

Peace,

[me]
[address]
[phone number]

That’s step #1 - Applicant Status. I’m a little bit terrified. The more I read at uua.org, the more overwhelmed I feel, so I just now closed all those tabs and reminded myself that it doesn’t all come at once. The next thing I need to do is submit an Initial Inquiry Form, complete with photograph, but that day doesn’t have to be today. It can, in fact, happen at any time between now and graduation from theological school.

If you. . .

* feel alone in your spiritual search,
* are striving to live fully and authentically,
* want to be part of a community of open minded spiritual seekers,
* cannot find a congregation near you that quite meets your needs,
* seek support in your work for a better world,
* wish to help your children grow religious values for a lifetime in a spirit of openness and respect for others’ beliefs

. . . then you will feel at home in the Church of the Larger Fellowship.
– Church of the Larger Fellowship

Maybe that’s where I need to be. I have to confess, I have problems with the two local UU fellowships in this area. I spent a couple of years with one particular fellowship but left it behind when I moved a bit further away. Sure, I could maybe make the extra effort; it’s not significantly further away than my workplace. But my experience with the congregation left me cold in the middle. It seemed to be about two things, and two things only:

– Social action.
– Cash funding, mostly for social action.

I realize that faith without works is dead, but I hardly felt as though engaging in the practice of faith at all. I need something spiritual out of religious practice, and passing the hat for the cause du jour, by itself, ain’t it.

The other fellowship (just as far in the other direction), to be fair, I’ve only visited the once. The folks were nice. And desperate. Desperately nice. Scary desperate. They subscribed me to their emailing list, and I’ve been getting tons of stuff since. Guess what. It’s all the same flavor of stuff that the other congregation cared about.

Something that’s going to be an issue with my calling is UUA membership, and you get UUA membership by being a member of a member congregation. I let my membership with that first congregation lapse, and I did it under weird circumstances. If I have to go back, and I probably do, it’s going to be a bit uncomfortable.

My relationship with local manifestations of UUA these days is just crap, and not just because of the above, but also because I reacted in a cowardly fashion over a pledge mistake and just ran from the issue out of embarrassment, rather than try to sort it out. And I spent significant amounts of time with these people and never once hinted that I’d been called and hoped one day to fulfill that calling. Aaaaaaand I think I probably stepped on some toes when I was trying to develop their website and build a system so that they could take it over themselves and not need a webmaster.

These are going to become important when I get to the 8th and 9th steps, but they’re kind of irritating me now. I feel all unresolved and petty. Resentment and guilt. Blame and shame. That’s a familiar tune.

So I spent the train ride home pondering these things, and also feeling around some more for some indication of what I’m supposed to be doing. I know I’m worrying too much, and living in the future too much. Surely the path will be made clear once I get there.

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Oh! I didn’t know that! Or maybe I did, but forgot. General Assembly is in Ft. Lauderdale this year. Maybe I can save up enough money to go to at least one day of it.

Watched this last night and enjoyed:

From kyburg:

In response to heat they’re getting from the American Family Association, P&G is conducting a phone poll to see if people are for or against the Luke/Noah storyline on As The World Turns. Even if you don’t watch the show, please consider taking a quick moment to support boy kissing and thwart homophobic bigotry. The poll is completely automated. You don’t have to talk to anyone. And it really does take all of a second to register your opinion.

Just call 1-800-331-3774 and press #1 to continue in English (or #2 for Spanish) [ETA: apparently you may or may not get that question, so listen to the menu], then 2 to get to the ATWT poll, then press 1 to continue the storyline.

Please spread the word if you’re so inclined.

Awright! I haven’t watched a soap opera on purpose since General Hospital went all science fiction one summer, but I am totally for queer storylines anywhere I can find them.

Squee! I think Blake’s 7 had as much influence on my budding sexuality as Wonder Woman did.

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Hey, you people know what tomorrow is, right?

(Audio is NSFW.)

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What was #1 in pop when you were born?

Cute food.

Such a good description of what depression feels like to me.

In an effort to keep up better, I’ve taken all the RSS feeds that are not blogs of people I know personally, pulled them off my f-list, and shoved them into Google Reader. Except Jonathan Coulton. Him I keep. So far, so good.

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Quite by accident, it seems to be turning into an (almost) all-Al-Anon Saturday. It started off this morning with sorting out the tracks of the 1998 AA Big Book Seminar that Joe McQ and Charlie P had done in Ft. Lauderdale. Somehow, when I imported these into iTunes, their order had gotten thrown off, so all the first tracks of each disk (well, only of discs 7 through 11 - not the first six, which were imported late last year) were grouped together, and all the second tracks together, etc. etc. Not good for continuity at all. I had to rename them all and re-list them.

I was slated to lead the 10:30 AM meeting at JFK hospital. This was a meeting I was facing with some trepidation. There was going to be a vote on changing several things, one of which had not been announced the three meetings prior, per the group’s rules. I didn’t feel down with that. It’s not my home group, but even if it were, I didn’t want to go tampering with its governance that way.

Also, through some quirk, it was going to be the third time in a row that I would be leading on a 4th Saturday, which is a Step, Tradition, and Concept Study meeting. I’d already done the bit where you photocopy and clip questions out of Paths to Recovery and pass them around for people to use as sharing points. I needed to do something different, so I took the key words and phrases from the Step, Tradition, and Concept for April and put them on separate cards:

searching
fearless
moral
inventory
autonomous
matters
affecting
another group
Al-Anon as a whole
AA as a whole
participation
key
harmony

The idea was to pass out the cards and ask people to share as they are moved. This did work pretty well, overall. And I needn’t have sweated about the vote; I just saved that part of the proceedings for the last 15 minutes of the meeting and then handed it over to the only group officer there to deal with. When the one item came up, I mentioned that it hadn’t been announced for three meetings, and could we please do a separate process on it. That went over agreeably.

Since that was my contribution, I felt obliged to stay after the meeting to attend the business meeting to participate on that item. It then came to pass that the group needed somebody to re-type the script of the meeting (opening, closing, etc.) because the manual changes over the years had made it a bit sloppy, and I wound up volunteering for this. Since I know where to copy/paste most of this stuff, this was no big deal for me. Somehow, we also wound up deciding that the group needs its own USB key to store things like that on, so that future edits would be minimal fuss. Ain’t that something?

Next stop - grocery store to get some foods, because the stop after that would be a Sponsorship Luncheon at my sponsor’s sponsor’s place. I hadn’t been to any such a thing before, but it was very nice. I brought hummus, tabbouleh, and spinach dip, with pretzels and sun chips. There were lots of nice noshables and sandwich fixins and desserts, and lots of friendly people. We did a sharing activity, and some socialization, and it was really nice. For someone like me, who has a trust issue with women, this was an especially positive experience. I felt welcome and accepted. Rare thing.

I got home and found the kids doing just fine socializing with friends and neighbors, hanging out, fishing and such. The younger needed a shoulder rest for his violin, so I took him and wlofie to the music store to get it. Once home, it didn’t take long to redo the docs for the morning meeting. Done and done! They’re on my own USB key for now, until the group gets one.

Lo and behold, it was almost 6:00 by then. There’s a brand new Al-Anon group I’d been wanting to check out, a GLBT one at Compass on Dixie up near Forest Hill, and it starts at 6:30.

It was great! There weren’t many people yet, but I expected that, being a new group and all. Once again, instant acceptance and welcome. As poly and bi, I have gotten a bit used to gay and lesbian people having almost as hard a time with me as straight folks do, but here, orientation was pretty much off the table, and when my sharing did involve references to relationships with men as well as women, I didn’t get any funny looks or people edging sideways or such.

So now I’m about to go to bed (the hour-long power outage just now made me sleepy) but I’ll listen a bit to the Big Book Seminar I started my day with. It’s funny and enlightening, and maybe I’ll have weird dreams.

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