Valentine's Day

Tomorrow is Valentine's Day. It is my favorite holiday. Why? Well, maybe because it celebrates love. Romantic love, to be sure, but it also celebrates that kind of love that is friendship. I also have a fondness for all the liitle things about Valentine's Day--the cards, the hearts, the chocolates, the red roses, the diamonds. I mean, what's not to like???

To be sure, it helps to have a sweetheart, someone to share that love with. The Valentine's Day after losing a sweetheart (whether to the carpiciousness of life or to the clutches of death) can be quite painful. I have been blessed to not have experienced that pain for many years. Maybe that is where the love of friends comes in.

Out of curiousity, I did some reading about the history of Valentine's Day, and it has quite a history. Not suprisingly, the SAINT in St Valentine's was an attempt to Christianize beloved customs that had a much older past. Nothing wrong with that, I guess, if you keep the universal theme of love in perspective. Perhaps the most charming story of Valentine's Day's origins was that once upon a time in the Roman world the powers that be decided that men made better soldiers if they were not married. Well, there was this subversive priest named Valentine who secretly married young lovers. He was inevitably found out, and thrown in jail. He befriended his jailer's daughter, and he sent her a letter signed "from your Valentine". Cool, huh? Especially since it has that whole friendship thing in there. At least, it would fit nicely with my mythology...if it was more than friendship...well...we know what happens to subversive priests who fool around with jailer's daughters. They don't live happily ever after. Who knows if the story is true, but it makes a nice story, regardless of the ending. Today, Valentine's Day has been hijacked by the same commercial interests that have hijacked Christmas, and Mother's Day, and Grandparent's Day. They didn't exactly hijack the last one, they created it, as though you couldn't honor your grandparents on their gender specific parental day. But back to Valentines--there was a time when people handmade their own. Many Sunday School classes still do. Maybe they are on to something.

One of my favorite Valentine's Days was the year that Micahel and I attended a performance of Romeo and Juliet put on by the Synetic Theatre, where everything is done in pantomine. This year, we are delaying the gratification of our theatre going desires to March 26, when we will go to see Synetic Theatre's new production of King Lear. Even if it isn't on the exact day, its our little celebration. We haven't gone to the theatre in several years. And anyway, after twenty years of marriage, what's another month?? While we're waiting we'll make do with something chocolate for dessert on the actual Valentine's Day. Maybe Michael will bring me flowers, he does things like that.

This Valentine's Day I hope you experience love, whether it's love with your sweetheart, or the love of your friends, or preferably both.

Deacons

Yesterday I attended the first Ordination to the Sacred Order of (Vocational) Deacons that has been held in the Diocese of Virginia in anybody's memory. In the Episcopal Church, there are two types of Deacons--Deacons who will, God willing, go on to be Priests, known as Transitional Deacons, and Deacons who are called to this particular ministry of serventhood, known as Vocational or Perpetual Deacons. As Bishop Shannon pointed out, this Ordination was a historic event. What will these Vocational Deacons be doing? Well, that's something that Episcopalians in the Diocese of Virginia will be puzzleing out in the weeks, months, and years to come. By definition a Vocational Deacon is a member of the clergy who does not get paid by the church, so they either hold jobs to make a living, or they have some independent means of financial suppport. Deacons go out into the world and identify where the hurts and the needs are, and then they come back into the church and get the rest of us moving to heal that which is broken. To hear Bishop Shannon tell it, they aren't our proxies. They are our conscience. But a conscience with a good bit of tact and political savvy. That's how things get done in the Episcopal Church. Definitiely that's how things get done in the Diocese of Virginia.
I attended the Ordination for two reasons. The first and most obvious one was that I was invited by one of the five Ordinands, Marty Hager. Marty did his internship with my church for the last eight months, and the Bishop has now assigned him to be with us for the next two years. Marty, like his fellow Ordinands, has proven himself to be a deeply spiritual person, highly invested in his ministry in the world (also called a "bridge ministry"), quite capable of tact and political savvy. The committee that selected these pioneer members of the first Deaconate Class of the Diocese of Virginia chose well. I wanted to support him.
But there was another reason as well. I am curious. I want to watch the Vocational Deaconate grow and develop in the Diocese of Virginia, and I was not about to miss an historic event of the magnitude of the first Ordination. The first exposure that I got to the whole concept was when I met another of the newly Ordained Deacons, Mary Beth Emerson, back in 2004 when we were both taking classes at the Servant Leadership School in Adams-Morgan. Back then, a Vocational Deaconate in this Diocese was but a topic to consider.
People have been asking me if I am discerning a call to the Vocational Deaconate. Far be it for me to have figured out totally what God wants for me, but I'm pretty sure it isn't the Vocational Deaconate. Oh sure, I love to volunteer to do stuff to fix the world's brokeness, and I am a Social Worker by profession. I am a deeply spiritual person and I am quite involved in my church. But I don't have that tact and political savvy thing down quite yet. And probably more imporantly I don't have the qualities of humility that all five of these newly Ordained Deacons appear to have. So rather than considering these questions I get about my discernment process as God's noodge, I take them as a creative opportunity to explore more deeply what my ministry as a lay person needs to be.
When the Diocese of Virginia last elected a Bishop, an opporutnity was made to interview the candidates. My questions were about the Vocational Deaconate. I liked then-Candidate Shannon's answers very well. He talked about the importance of the Vocational Deaconate and what he would like to establish if elected to our Diocese. I suspect that the presence of Vocational Deacons will reshape the way we view Transitional Deacons as well. No longer will Transitional Deacons be biding their time until their Preistly Ordination. They will be out there bringing the needs of the world to our attention--with tact and political savvy to be sure.
And so what am I expecting going forward from this historical event, this first ever twenty-first century Ordination of Vocational Deacons in the Diocese of Virginia? I am looking to be inspired. I am looking to see a church becoming more responsive to the needs of the least of God's children. I am looking to be held accountable. In short, I am looking for glimmers of the Kingdom of God in our midst.