Meadville Orientation Day 3

We started the day with another excellent worship experience, including a very nice homily by David Owen-O'Quinn.  The rest of the morning was devoted to learning about community studies site logistics, teaching pastor logistics and credentialing logistics.  There was a fair amount of anxiety about seemingly conflicting information and questions about special situations.  I started to drift away a bit during some of the discussion but regained a sense of place and purpose after staring at the stained glass window at the front of the chapel and writing a short poem (posted elsewhere on this blog).

After lunch, several second-year students presented their end-of-year projects for the community studies course.  All three were outstanding and aptly illustrated the kind of perspective-shifting experiences that each of us might expect over the course of the year.  I was especially taken with Jennifer's experience volunteering at Cathedral Kitchen in Camden, New Jersey.  She quoted a passage from Father Michael Doyle who has done a lot of work in Camden, which he described as being located ". . . one hour from Philadelphia's Independence Hall and zero seconds from God."

The students then took questions from us newbies, which was helpful, if somewhat anxiety-provoking.

We ended the day with vespers, being joined by all the faculty and the second-year students, whose congregational studies orientation begins tomorrow.  I wasn't expecting the faculty to process fully-robed into the chapel in such warm weather, but process they did, accompanied by some beautiful organ music and all of us singing "Rank by Rank Again We Stand."

Lee Barker delivered a very thoughtful and inspiring sermon, entitled "I Bloody Did That"-- a line borrowed  from the poem "Cathedral Builders" by John Ormond:

They climbed on sketchy ladders towards God, 

with winch and pulley hoisted hewn rock into heaven, 
inhabited the sky with hammers, 
defied gravity, 
deified stone, 
took up God's house to meet him, 
and came down to their suppers
and small beer,
every night slept, lay with their smelly wives,
quarreled and cuffed the children,
lied, spat, sang, were happy, or unhappy,
and every day took to the ladders again,
impeded the rights of way of another summer's swallows, 
grew greyer, shakier,
became less inclined to fix a neighbour's roof of a fine evening, 
saw naves sprout arches, clerestories soar, 
cursed the loud fancy glaziers for their luck, 
somehow escaped the plague, 
got rheumatism, 
decided it was time to give it up,
to leave the spire to others, 
stood in the crowd, well back from the vestments at the consecration, 
envied the fat bishop his warm boots, 
cocked a squint eye aloft, 
and said, "I bloody did that."