Skip to main content

Portrait of a Pandemic Clergy Study

Looking around the messy space in my home that is now office, study, film soundstage, editing room, meeting room, and lunch counter, I realized that it is one snapshot of ministerial life in the time of covid-19. A photographic relic.

So here's mine, (panoramic shot), messy as it is, annotated for future generations. What's yours? Not just ministers. Those who are newly working from home. Put a link in comments.


1) Bag of items from minister's study at the church, brought home once it became apparent this was going to last a while. Some additional theology books, anything edible from my cabinets. Still not cleaned out, after a month.

2) Application for Texas mail-in ballot in case the courts uphold expanded mail-in voting because of coronavirus.

3) Pile of books to put laptop computer on, so people aren't forced to look up my nose in meetings.

4) Lifeline to the church I serve - my laptop. When I bumped it last week, I suddenly realized that's it's everything. It's sanctuary, meeting rooms, all of it. Yikes.

5) Small chalice for lighting and extinguishing in online meetings, and in Sunday's worship service.

6) Photography umbrella for lighting service videos.

7) Wayne Arnason's words, taped to umbrella, that I'm ending all services with:
Take courage friends.
The way is often hard,
the path is never clear,
and the stakes are very high.
Take courage.
For deep down, there is another truth:
you are not alone.

8) One of my stoles. Brought home in case I have to do online memorial services. Praying it will never be used.

9) Bin full of theology books brought home at the start of the pandemic, with the idea that I'd have time for some deep reading. Has not yet been touched.

10) Prayer journal, filled with the names of members and others who are on my heart.

11) Candles, put in the window every night.

12) Items for "grief kits" for when people are unable to attend memorial services. Praying there will be few needs.

13) Basket full of clean face masks for any time we leave the house.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Me and My Collar

You may run into me on a Friday, in my neighborhood, so it's time I let you know what you might see. When I was doing my required unit of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE), my supervisor suggested that any of us who came from traditions where a clerical collar was an option, take one "collar week," to see how we were treated, as opposed to wearing regular professional clothes. After a couple of days, I joked to the Catholic priest, "How do you manage the power?" In regular clothes, I would walk into a patient's room, and it would take about 5 or so minutes of introductions and pleasantries before we could really get down to talking about their feelings, their fears, the deep stuff. With most people, as soon as that clerical collar walked in the room, with me attached, they began pouring out all the heavy stuff they were carrying. I was riding the bus back and forth every day, and though not quite so dramatic, the collar effect was alive there, to...

Beloved Community: The Now and Not Yet

Rev. Christine Robinson has a great little post up about the phrase "beloved community" and why it's problematic to use that to describe a church. Like her mom, I can get cranky about the whole thing, but my crankiness lies in the misuse of what is, to me, such a breathtaking and profound concept. Martin Luther King, Jr., someone whose words I study in great detail, is the one we often think of as originating the term, but he learned about it through the writings of Josiah Royce. Josiah Royce (right) with close friend William James.  Royce was a philosopher, studying Kant, Hegel. I imagine he would have enjoyed Koestler's theory of the holon , because he saw humanity as being both individuals and part of a greater "organism" that was community. As King's belief about Beloved Community would be rooted in agape , Royce's philosophy stemmed from what he called loyalty, and by that he meant, "the practically devoted love of an individual f...

Testimony to the Woman in Starbucks Who Asked About My Church

You noted my clerical collar and rainbow pin and had some questions. I told you I'm a Unitarian Universalist minister, and you wanted to know more. I screwed up, I think, with you. Because I began giving you information, little explanations that you could have just as easily found on Wikipedia. I got busy explaining "what" instead of "why."  I am a Unitarian Universalist because this religion gives me a history and a theology that I can have faith in, and part of that includes the fact that it has faith in me.  Unitarian Universalism says that I -- even on my bad days -- am worthy to be treated with respect and dignity. And it teaches me that I have both the capability and the responsibility to determine and define my own creed by which I will live. To do that, I need tools, I need encouragement, and I need relationship. And that's why I am a Unitarian Universalist in faith and in practice. That's why I go to a Unitarian Universalist church, and wo...