This is Only a Test

General Ordination Exams for Episcopal Church seminarians began today. The GOE is made up of different types of questions and administered over several days. When I took it in January, 1994 it ranged from a full-day set of take-home essays on a single, practical topic to a series of short answer questions administered in a timed, on-site setting.

 For students in their final year of study, GOEs await upon return from Christmas break. The night before I left for that break, I filled a carry-on bag with books, intent on studying during the time off. I determinedly dragged it downstairs to the door in preparation for my departure the following morning at which time I left it sitting in the entryway in the rush to get into the taxi. It awaited me there upon my return. It would have broken the springs on the taxi driving me to the airport. No one in her right mind would have tried to move it.

I didn't discover that I had left it behind until a day or two after I arrived home. I was a bride of about two weeks the previous August when I departed Kansas City for my final year at Yale Divinity School, leaving my new husband behind. My first two days at home did not allow time for much studying. But on day three of vacation, I went looking for the carry on bag and realized that it was in New Haven. After a couple of hours of intermittent fretting I came to appreciate having the excuse not to study.

Our 1994 GOEs started on Monday morning, the New Year holiday having fallen on the previous Saturday. I was one of four students living in the house where Berkeley Divinity School at Yale is located. It's an Episcopal Church Seminary that operates in conjunction with Yale's interdenominational seminary. The house is a three-story Victorian mansion about two blocks from the main Div School campus.  Four of us lived on the third floor in what had been the servants' rooms - think Downton Abbey but without the locked door between the men and the maids.  Everyone taking the exam was required to show up at the house each morning  to collect that day's questions.  On that first Monday we were sternly admonished to return the finished product by 5:00 p.m. on pain of dreadful but unspecified sanctions.  At that point we were sent forth to our respective homes, dorm rooms and work spaces to complete that day's set of questions.  We happy few who lived in the house had but to wander down a couple of flights of stairs to pick up the questions and climb back up to the third floor to meet our destiny.

That was an advantage during the legendary winter of 1993-94.  In the northeast the snow lay on the ground from the first week of December through the end of March.  A new batch of it fell at least once a week.  On January 4 it was knee high and the temperature was in single digits.  Being able to pick up and deliver test questions with a round trip of four flights of stairs was much better than clearing off the car and driving to and from home or walking down the hill from the residence halls on campus.

The test covered four days, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday with Wednesday off.  It was snowing lightly when we woke on Friday and snow continued to fall all day long.  Outside my window I heard rasp of the snowplow every couple of hours and imagined the entryway of our house caked with the red sand that New Haven public works sprinkled over its icy streets.  At one minute 'til 5:00 I printed my answers and walked downstairs feeling glad it was over.  Classmates hung around the foyer after they had turned in their papers, comparing answers and making plans for the weekend.  We noticed that one guy was missing.

In 1994 cell phones were called car phones and few people had them.   A handful of people used email regularly, but they didn't carry it around with them.  We who lived in the house had our own land lines in our rooms and the staff had phones in their offices, but they were still on winter break.  The house itself really didn't have a phone.  There was no way for someone who was late delivering a paper to call in and explain why.  Half an hour past the deadline, our missing classmate came racing into the house, gasping for air, with his test papers in his hand.  He had parked his car on the street in front of his building and the snowplow had tossed up a berm of snow pinning it into the curb.  Snow had fallen all day and after half a dozen passes, there was a three-foot-high wall of snow between him and the test proctor.  He didn't realize what had happened until ten minutes before five when he stepped out the door.  He had run all the way from home.  The dreadful but unspecified sanctions were not invoked.  Someone drove him back to his place.

That evening the four of us who lived in the house happened all to be sitting in the common area between our respective rooms. The test was over; what was done was done.  Our last semester would begin the following Monday.   We started wondering out loud where we would all be a year from that night.  Now, nearly 19 years later, I think we're all somewhere that makes us happy and we're doing work we believe is worth doing.  Good luck and blessings, class of 2013.

Throughout all generations . . .

Twelve years ago I was in a bi-vocational phase of my work life. I served part-time in a parish as an assisting priest and worked full-time in the marketing department of a non-profit organization whose mission was to further the career development and job satisfaction of working women. In my full-time job, I interacted with many managers, executives and business owners. Prior to that time my work had been in social science research and the performing arts. I left that position for full-time ministry several years ago, but the knowledge of the business world that I developed in the marketing job has informed my work as a parish priest and contributed to my understanding of my parishioners needs and stresses.

The Internet boom of the late 20th and early 21st centuries was in full swing at the time when I was doing a lot of reading about business. One of the hot topics was managing inter-generational communication and conflict in the workplace. Members of Generation X were entering the workforce with a very different ethos and agenda than the baby-boomer managers to whom they reported. Low levels of unemployment motivated companies to reconsider policies, perks and benefits to attract workers. Executives were becoming aware that different generational cohorts valued different things.

Inter-generational issues are still a hot topic in the workplace despite a very different economic situation. Businesses in 2013 are challenged with harmonizing the values, interests and work styles of the baby boomers, Generation X and the Millenials,those born between 1981 and 2000. Generational distinctives are as real now as they were when the phrase "don't trust anyone over 30" was coined. The man who first said it, Jack Weinberg, will be 73 years old this spring.

Everyone has heard of the mythical northern-California Internet start-up where the employees all bring their dogs to work and all human interaction is mediated by text messages. Banks and professional firms swing the other way with dress codes, strict hierarchies of relationship and serious consequences for rocking the boat. The ethos of a particular business at one end of this spectrum or the other might impact the generational composition of its workforce somewhat, but the ages at which people typically enter and leave the workforce all but guarantee that most business will have employee bases in which a maximum of three generations are represented. There will be outliers at places like fast food restaurants where 16-year-olds can get a job or professional firms where the work is not physically taxing and knowledge and experience acquired over decades is highly valued. But managers of businesses really need only deal with the generational quirks of three cohorts coming together in common life and mission.

In the church, the relationships between staff and members are different and the relative status of any individual members of the community may be determined by very different criteria than in a business. What the two have in common is that they're groups of people coming together to create a common life and pursue a common mission. But six generations are represented within the membership of the church. Parishes still have members eighty-five and older from the GI generation. People born between 1930 and 1945 are frequently the backbone of a church's volunteer and financial support. Baby boomers, well into middle age now, may not support the church as fervently as their parents did, but they are still well represented. Generations x and y are the holy grail of congregational development, the mythical young families and people in their teens and 20s that every parish hopes for more of. And school age children, the offspring of those young families, born since 2000 populate our Sunday school classes and middle-school youth groups.

It isn't easy for businesses to balance the needs, interests and prerogatives of three generations of workers. It's not surprising that the church is struggling to attract and build authentic community among six generational cohorts. Obviously, not congregation has members representing the full range of age within the span of these six generations. But those that do are envied by the "graying" parishes where young people visit rarely, seldom return and whose Sunday school rooms have been empty for a decade or more.

What does it take to create and sustain a level of inter-generational community across a broad range of ages within a congregation? Do businesses offer clues that the church can learn from? How do churches that have built this kind of community do it? More in the next post.

Essay from the Basement During a Storm - Original date May 25, 2011

The sirens are blowing outside. I've gone to the basement of my workplace, St. Mary's Episcopal Church. It's a 153- year-old brick building in downtown Kansas City. We are having a wild day of storms here. One is directly overhead right now. For the last half hour the siren has wailed out its warning. We are all hypersensitive to the weather, with the deadly tornado earlier this week in Joplin.

Yesterday the weather experts warned that Kansas City could experience tornadoes today, developing from a eastward moving weather system that caused a deadly storm yesterday in Oklahoma. I watched today's weather develop from my second floor office window with a view to the south. The roof outside my office gives me a panoramic view of the city east and south. Minute-to-minute, block-by- block commentary from the new television in my office accompanied my real-world observations.

Last night I had spent some time considering where to go for shelter, should the weather turn bad during the workday. The church building has a basement. Most of it is barely below grade with lots of windows. All of it has thousands of pounds of bricks overhead.

The Joplin tornado was very unusual for many reasons and a lot has been written about it already. After reading those articles I know details about tornadoes, their genesis, structure and movement that I never knew before. I am no stranger to them. I've lived in a tornado-prone region for most of my life. My great grandfather, Joel Campbell Lyon, died a century ago when a tornado struck the log cabin where he lived in southern Indiana. I grew up in Hickman Mills, where a large and powerful tornado struck in May 1957. Although my family didn't move there until 1959 the tornado was a profound part of the culture of that neighborhood. When one of us meets someone else who grew up near there the first question asked is whether or not you witnessed the tornado.

When we moved to Kansas City from Des Moines, I didn't know what a tornado was. I became familiar with the routine of summer storms during my school years. A certain combination of heat and humidity, a hint from weather forecasters early in the day and the darkening sky in the afternoon or early evening prompted my mother to turn on the radio. The TV was already on, with local weather interrupting the program for brief updates. But the radio was battery operated and would keep us informed if the electric power went out. The wind grew stronger. Moms watched from the windows. Dads and some kids stood in their yards looking toward the southwest. When the rain and hail began the men stepped inside their opened garage doors and sent the kids inside. The open garages would provide ready access to the basement for neighbors running next door or across the street for shelter. Our houses were built frugally at the end of World War II and only a few of them had basements - ours didn't. When the sirens blew we headed across the street to the neighbors' basement. My mother would shout at us to put on our shoes, grab the radio and she and my father would push us out the front door and pull it shut behind them. The water table under the city of Joplin is very high. One of the reasons so many people died in the May 22 tornado is that very few homes there have shelter below ground.

I am thankful that all of our family's sojourns in the neighbors' basement ended with an all clear. The closest we came to danger was the tornado that struck Overland Park, Kansas in 1967. I heard my sister say "mom, it's a tornado" as she looked through the back door of our house. I ran out the front door and across the street without looking back. I think of friends and colleagues in the Joplin area whose lives have been changed in ways that I cannot imagine.

Today, I thought about those hasty trips to the basement as I made my way downstairs. My shoes were firmly on my feet although peep toes and kitten heels were probably not what my mother had in mind when she warned us to prepare for a possible walk over broken glass and debris. I realized that things had changed walking down two flights of stairs carrying a cell phone, laptop computer and the cordless handset of the church landline phone. As I sat on the basement floor, I exchanged a text message with my husband. My calls to him wouldn't go through - too many people trying to call. I posted a Facebook status along with a picture of the storm taken from the roof and retrieved a steady stream of comments from friends checking on each other. For all of our ability to communicate, we can't stop the wind blowing and the rain falling. Indeed, our heedlessness of the damage we cause to the enviornment likely has increased the violence of severe weather.

I see sunlight out the window. Time to gather the hardware and head upstairs. This storm is headed north and east. Others may be coming our way later today.

"A Year Goes by Like Nothing"

The title of this post is the tag line of a comic book series entitled "The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers." I have no idea whether it is still in print. Three hippie roomates and a cat shared a run down house that would make Martha Stewart run screaming into the night. It was published only once a year, hence the phrase a year goes by like nothing.

I use that phrase with this posting because it has been a year since I posted anything on this blog; a really busy year. The demands of my work and family life have consumed nearly all of my creative energy. I like my work and family, but throughout the past year, I've frequently had ideas that I thought would be nice to write about, but little energy for the writing.

I have just reached the five year anniversary with my job. My work requires creativity, executive vision, managerial diligence and good secretarial skills. In addition to everything else, I am called upon to shovel snow, push a broom and water the garden on a regular basis. I like my work. In five years I've taken what was essentially a smoldering crater and turned it into a happy, productive and growing organization that may one day be financially self-sustaining.

During the last year my organization has done nearly $500,000 worth of renovation work. The day to day grind of having construction under foot, scheduling around it and dealing with the surprises it uncovers has been a real challenge, but it has been worthwhile. One of the things it has taught me is that the milestones in an organization like this one are most clearly visible when you look back on them. Miracles come about incrementally. When you're looking at the individual increments you have no idea that it's going to be something amazing once all of the increments have been realized.

I'm more patient than I was a year ago. I'm a lot more patient than I was five years ago.

Catching Up

I realize it's been a while since I've posted anything, but I didn't realize it had been since July. Usually summer is a slow time for me at work. This year it was anything but slow. Building renovations that didn't go as planned (what do you expect with a 120-year-old building) and special events going on made it impossible for me even to take all four weeks of my allotted vacation. I intended to take the last week of it between Christmas and New Year's Day, but a Christmas Eve blizzard put an end to that hope. We had more than two weeks of constant below freezing temperatures and several inches of snow on the ground (and the roof, which is what really kept me awake at night) for the entire time. It's melting now.

I did take a trip to Iowa at the end of August. It rained, which kept me off the tennis court, but allowed for some unplanned sightseeing at places I had never visited before or hadn't seen in a long time. A few pictures accompany this posting.

Last fall was equally crazy with fund raising, continuing work on the building and special events. I haven't had much of a break for more than a year and it's starting to wear on me - so much so that the day off scheduled for Monday - Martin Luther King Day has taken on an air of anticipation usually reserved for something with a bit more "once in a lifetime" character. Oh well - it's a worthy occasion to celebrate and I'll take my leisure when I can get it.

Moon Landing Anniversary

The reminiscences about the July 1969 moon landing started a couple of weeks ago. It got me thinking about that summer and my experience of those events. I was exactly a month shy of my 15th birthday on the day of the moon landing. There's a picture of me from that summer that I remember. It's a polaroid taken by my aunt in the back yard of her house. It's one of a tiny handful of pictures of me that I actually liked at the time it was taken. I thought it made me look good. I still do, but my camera-shyness pervades the frame. She's looking for the picture and if it's found, I'll post it.

We took it for a specific purpose. I was visiting my cousin in the town of Winterset, Iowa, to which I introduced you in a previous post. There was a film crew in town that summer making a movie called "Cold Turkey." It didn't get released until 1971, but they shot it that summer. I was thinking about showing up at a casting call for extras. I can't remember why I decided not to do it, but one of the requirements was a photo.

I asked my mom what she recalled about watching the moon landing, because I remember being in Winterset watching the television in the living room of my cousin's home. Well, what I really remember is the television being on, all of us being in the living room, but with the kids less eagerly engaged than our elders thought we ought to be. I remember my mom being mad at us for not paying enough attention to the telecast of the momentous events. Of course, for the kids, it was another space mission. We had already been watching them take off for eight years.

She remembers it differently. She thought we had watched coverage of the Apollo 11 mission on TV in Winterset, but that we had left to drive home to Kansas City on the afternoon of July 20. She recalls getting home just in time to see the landing on TV.

I've wondered what the counterpart to the moon landing is for my nieces and nephew whose ages range between 18 and 25. Maybe it's the Internet, but I think I'm looking for an event that can be marked at a particular point in time. Maybe they know.

My recall of that summer is of specific incidents and moments in time. I don't really remember the order in which things happened. Most of the memories have something to do with watching the movie get made. Many of the small towns in Iowa have an event they call "Crazy Days." There is often a parade, an ice cream social and sidewalk sales by the downtown merchants. Winterset still does it, I think.

The 1969 Crazy Days in Winterset had a parade with a costume contest. My cousin and I entered with an homage to the film. "Cold Turkey" is about a town whose entire population quits smoking at the same time. Our costumes were a cigarette and a match. I was the match. My hair was redder them and I teased and sprayed it into a point to look like the flame on a match. Then I constructed a tube made from posterboard and painted it tan. I climbed inside the tube in my swimsuit and I was dressed. My cousin used a posterboard to create a cigarette with a brown filter closest to her head and a red edge at the bottom to make it look like it was burning. She had to cut an eyehole in the posterboard to see out. She cut handholds in the sides of her costume. I'm not sure how I kept mine in place.

We didn't practice walking in the costumes. When we arrived at the staging area for the parade, we put them on and got in line and the march itself turned out to be a test of endurance. The bottom edges of the posterboard tubes raked the backs of my ankles as we walked. For some reason we had decided we would have to walk barefooted. It was really hot that day and our feet were miserable on the pavement. The costumes forced us to take tiny, quick steps instead of regular strides. My cousin nearly broke her neck trotting to keep up and with limited visibility.

The parade route took us around the square of Winterset - a leisurely walk of maybe 10 minutes duration under ordinary circumstances. When it was all over, our feet were fried and I had a noticeable sunburn on my face and shoulders. The scars from the scrapes on the backs of my legs took more than a year afterward to go away. A week later we were notifed that we had won second prize in the costume contest. I remember reading it in the local newspaper. The prize was money - maybe $5 for each of us.

The town of Winterset is deeply woven into my memories of summer. I remember a lot about how I felt at the time of those visits. It's interesting to me that a town where I spent, at the most, a few weeks out of every year is so evocative of time and place - like a song or a scent. Those summers created a memory that holds together 40 or more years later. I have visited Winterset the last two summers for vacation and it has changed remarkably little in that time. I spend a lot of time on those visits walking and bicycling around the town. The familiarity I used to have with it comes back after a little while, but it still looks different at least partly because my cousin and sister aren't there with me.

Midsummer

I don't remember liking summer all that much in the past. Maybe I liked it when I was a little kid, but I have very few clear memories of it. I'm someone who has never had much tolerance for sun exposure and those fun outdoor activities involving the water involved serious sunburn for me. I grew up at a time when there was no such thing as sunscreen. When I was in my teens I remember summer as a time of feeling stressed about looking fat in a swimsuit and my mom fussing at me not to stay out in the sun too long.

But one happy memory of summer has to do with the time I spent in two small towns in Iowa called Winterset and Indianola. I had family living there including a cousin close to my age. My sister and I would spend weeks at a time in one or the other of those two towns every summer. We had the run of the town on bicycles. It was a fascinating change for me to go from the suburbs of a good size city - Kansas City, to a town of fewer than 5,000 residents.

I've gone back to Winterset for vacation the last three years. My present job tends to be stressful and omnipresent and being able to go away on vacation has become very important to me. The town hasn't changed too much in appearance since I spent my summers there. It has a few more houses and maybe a few more people and some businesses whose products and services didn't even exist when I was a kid, but really, it's about the same.

If you ever read The Bridges of Madison County, Winterset is the town where that story takes place. It's also the birthplace of John Wayne. The small victorian cottage where he was born has been restored and it's a national historic site. The town has some beautifully preserved/ restored victorian residential architecture, a nice swimming pool and a downtown square that is mostly occupied. There are still a couple of stores there that were in business when I was a kid. The city government and business community have been smart about promoting the town as a tourist spot for readers of the novel and John Wayne fans.

Walking or cycling around Winterset or being at my aunt and uncle's home in Indianola are some of the most evocative experiences of my adult life. When I'm there I remember with crystal clarity what I felt like the summer of my eighteenth birthday - just out of high school, waiting for life to start happening. I remember the music that played on the radio when my cousin and sister and I sat out on the deck late at night talking and watching cars go by on the highway. We waited every night for my cousin's boyfriend to ride his motorcycle out highway 92 past her house listening to Alice Cooper sing "School's Out" and Derek and the Dominoes playing "Layla." I was not a carefree child or adolescent, so I won't tell you that those summers were idyllic, but the memory of them stays with me.

I made my reservation yesterday for a week-long stay in Winterset later this summer. I'll post some pictures and write more about it when I get there.