The 30 Hour Famine icon, from their website.

Last weekend,  we had the Thirty Hour Famine at the Cathedral.  That is a youth event, where the youth learn about world hunger while fasting for thirty hours.  The fast is a fast from foods, but we could drink some broth and fruit juice.  It also involved doing some service projects.  We started fasting at 1 in the afternoon on Friday.  The kids arrived at the Cathedral around 7 in the evening.  We did some games and activities, learning about hunger, interspersed with games to goof off and relax.  The next morning, we did some more games and worked on two service projects for the Cathedral, cleaning up the Sunday School supply room and working on a banner.

We also watched The Rescue of Joseph Kony’s Child Soldiers, which is a movie about child soldiers in Uganda.  After watching the movie, some of the group went down to a rally in support of the child soldiers, held at Lewis and Clark High School.  We all went to the 5:30 service Saturday evening, and then we had dinner around 7, breaking our fast.  After dinner, we all packed up and went home.

The event was pretty good for raising awareness of world hunger.  There were a lot of stories and pictures of people suffering from hunger throughout the world, which do make the issue of world hunger more real and vivid.  That is a good way to present information to people, so they can understand it and connect to it.

However, some of the information was not presented as well.  There were a lot of numbers about world hunger, without a lot of context.  For instance, they had the statistic, 862 million people are chronically hungry, which on it’s own is just a number.  It’s so big, it’s hard to have a real gut feeling for it.  It’s a lot of hungry people, but how many, really?  It would be better to put this number in perspective by, for instance, saying the population of the Earth is about 6.8 billion people, so that means about one in eight people is chronically hungry.  One in eight is the sort of number that a person can imagine.

I am not sure whether the use of fasting to make the issue of world hunger more real was helpful.  Fasting, even if you do get broth and fruit juice, is hard because it makes you tired and cranky, which does make it harder to focus and learn.  Which is good for teaching you that it is hard to learn when you’re hungry, but bad for teaching you facts about world hunger.  Also, some youth chose not to come to the event because they did not want to have to go hungry.  To that extent, the famine was counterproductive.

At the same time, it does make you really feel what being hungry is like, which hopefully makes you care more about people that are hungry.  To that extent, it is useful.
On the whole, the event deals with an important issue, and some of the way the information is presented is good, but some of it could be presented better.

The Holliston Town Hall, where they were married, though it was not so decked out in Fourth of July decor at the time. Image from the Holliston Town website.

Last weekend, I was in Boston with all my friends from college because our friends Jeffrey and Julia were getting married.  The wedding was in the style of the Quakers, which means it was part of a Meeting for Worship.  If you don’t know, the way Quakers meet for worship is they all sit together in silence for a while, and if somebody is moved to speak, he does.  There is no liturgy or anything, just people sitting together.  I worshiped with the Quakers for a summer, and all the meetings I have been to were at Pendle Hill.  They were about half an hour or an hour long, and usually only one or two people would get up to speak.  (Sometimes Quakers have programmed meetings; they work differently, but I have never been to one so I don’t know what they are like).

Anyway, the way the wedding worked is, we all sat there quietly for about twenty or thirty minutes, and then Jeff and Julia got up, exchanged their vows, and exchanged rings.  After that, people began to get up and say things: about marriage, about the two of them, about growing up.  We hard stories about Jeff’s childhood, about Julia’s sister thinking Julia was crazy to get married already, and about seeing the relationship between the two of them.

This way of getting married was rather different from any wedding I had ever been to (I’ve been to a few: some of my aunts’ and uncles’ weddings, and the wedding of one of my mom’s friends; all were quite some time ago).  There was no minister, no flower girls, no readings, and no real pomp of any sort.  It was all pretty simple and low-key.  Well, that is in character for Jeff and Julia.  It was very different from anything Episcopalian, most obviously because there was no liturgy, just people getting up and speaking as they were moved.  It was different, but I think it was quite beautiful, hearing what everybody had to say to them.  Some if it might have seemed a bit inane, but it was all heartfelt.  It was particularly moving hearing my friends getting up and saying the things I felt but did not have the words for.

The tree swing we swung on.

For me and many of my friends, Jeff and Julia are the first of our friends to get married, so for us the wedding was not only a sign that the two of them were growing up, but also a sign that we were.  I remember when, the fall of our senior year, Jeff first asked us whether he ought to accept Julia’s proposal of marriage.  One or two of my friends and I ran off to the nearest tree swing to swing on it.  We were, we felt, not old enough for our friends to start getting married.  As time passed, though, it became more and more obvious that the two of them should get married, and if that meant we would all have to grow up a little, maybe that was not so bad after all.

The Virginia Theological Seminary campus was really beautiful. Image taken from the Virginia Theological Seminary website.

From Friday February 20th to Sunday February 22nd, there was a conference for interns in the Episcopal Church Service Corps at Virginia Theological Seminary, in the DC suburbs.  The conference was an opportunity for interns and their directors to meet together.  As part of my internship, I went to this conference, and so did my director, Bryan.  I do not know what the program for the directors involved, except for when they were with us.  The program for the interns involved chapel Friday night, extensive Bible study on Saturday, with a focus on call stories, a driving tour of DC, and church Sunday morning, which was at Trinity Episcopal Church in Northwest DC, the church with which the DC internship program is associated.

Bryan and I arrived a bit late on Friday, because it took longer to get from the airport to the seminary than anticipated, so we missed chapel on Friday night, but we were there for the rest of the program.  Also, I had the chance to see my mother some, which was nice.  I grew up in the DC area and my parents still live there, though my father was away that weekend.  My mother, in fact, drove Bryan and I to the airport Sunday afternoon, which was very convenient for us.

The conference provided an opportunity to meet other interns in the Episcopal Church, which I thought was pretty exciting because there aren’t any others here in Spokane.  It was good both to meet people in different programs, in order to see how ours here in Spokane is similar to and different from the others, and also just to meet other young people that are excited about serving in an Episcopalian context.

The program we interns experienced provided many subjects for further thought.  Our Bible study of various call stories provided a lot of material for my own thoughts about my sense of call and vocation.  Towards the end of the Bible study we talked some about the challenges of being an intern, particularly those posed by family members and friends who do not understand what interning with the church is about and why it is something in which we are engaged.

It would have been even better if the conference had provided more structured ways to process the issues it brought up, perhaps in small-group discussions or something.  It would have been particularly helpful to have had some sort of structured way to discuss how the call stories we studied related to our own senses of call.  It would also have been helpful to discuss in small groups the challenges of interning, especially if the emphasis were not just on what the challenges are, but also on how to deal with them.

One of the aims of this conference was to build connections between the interns, and having small-group discussions would have helped with that aim, too, because it would have built in program time geared toward interacting with other interns.  As it was, the program relied mostly on large-group time, alternating with completely unstructured time, neither of which provides much structural support for getting to know the interns from other programs that one does not already know.

TECers, team members, and adults pose for a photo on Sunday morning.

From Friday January 16 to Sunday January 28, the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist hosted its third Teens Encounter Christ (TEC), which is a retreat lead by youth for youth.  There were about 40 youth in attendance, approximately equally divided between TECers (youth who had not attended a TEC before) and team members (youth who had attended a previous TEC and were now helping lead this TEC).

The youth sit to listen to a talk.

The program for TEC involved ten talks, most given by the youth leaders, whose topics spanned from “Who am I?” to turning from sin to “Being an Apostle.”  The youth discussed the talks afterward, in five small groups, each lead by some of the team members.  The youth also ate together in these groups for most of the meals.

The program also involved several worship experiences, which brought the youth from the Ash Wednesday and Good Friday experience, through the Easter mystery, and into Pentecost.  Friday night ended with an Ash Wednesday/Good Friday service, which involved a writing and burning of sins, an imposition of ashes, and a form of the stations of the cross.  Saturday morning began with an Easter Vigil, and Sunday celebrated Pentecost.

The youth gather around, listening to the singer Marshall play before one of the talks.

On Saturday afternoon the Rev. Bert Marshall, a pastor in the United Church of Christ, recited the entire Gospel of Mark, which he had memorized.  He did not follow a particular translation, but rather recited it in his own words.  He recited with a certain amount of drama, in the form of oral story, which kept it interesting.  It was pretty cool, although some of the kids got bored and we were all really tired.  We had been up past one in the morning the night before, in order to get through all the talks and everything.  One of the funniest parts of the presentation of the gospel was how it ended.  The end of the Gospel of Mark is so abrupt, the women see Jesus is risen and they don’t tell anyone, and that’s it.  So he recited up through that, and then he left, and we all just sat there.  Well, then he came back and he told us, you know, that really is the end.  He then took questions.  The event was open to the public, and the questions mostly ended up being for their benefit, because those of us doing TEC had to go do other things.  The TECers had to go shower and have some free time, and we adults and team members had to get the Agape Dinner set up.

At the Agape Dinner.

The Agape Dinner was the dinner on Saturday night.  It was a formal sit-down dinner that was a surprise for the TECers.  All the youth, both team members and TECers got served by us adults.  After the dinner, the TECers were led on a trust walk which led them to the crypt.  While they were on the walk, we set up the big community room in the crypt for a dance, with music, cool lights, and a fog machine.  We also set up the smaller youth room as a quiet room with board games, for people who didn’t want to dance.

Decorating bags for wheat.

After the dance, we all went back upstairs to the cathedral and the TECers were given their wheat.  In TEC, wheat is a term that means a sign of God’s love.  All the team members made wheat for all the TECers.  For instance, one made cookies for everyone, and another made little bags with Hershey’s kisses and a poem.  The most important wheat is a letter each TECer receives from his parents, about how much they love him. Our youth director, Michelle, tells the parents to write the letter.  Since I knew my parents did not know about this, I was not expecting to get any wheat letters.  I was, therefore, quite surprised to get letters from the people I work with, like my priest and the people at the diocesan office.  It was quite unexpected. I suppose that’s the point.

TEC was pretty different from anything I’d ever seen.  In the church I grew up in, we did not do much in the way of youth retreats.  I think the closest I had ever experienced was a lock-in at my church in sixth grade, but the only part I really remember about that was playing hide-and-go-seek in the sanctuary.  TEC was a lot more religious.  It was a good experience, but also really intense.  It was difficult because Michelle was trying to give me some of the TEC experience while I was simultaneously doing the adult helper thing.  That combination meant seeing most of the talks and getting the wheat letters, but also having to do adult things, which generally meant getting things ready for the next event.  It was alright having to do that except that it ended up meaning that, unlike the TECers, I didn’t really have any time to process anything that happened.  On the whole, though, TEC was a very good experience and one I was glad to have helped with.

Shepherds and sheep in the pageant

I was in my first ever Christmas pageant a couple weeks ago, as part of the Cathedral’s pageant.  I was a shepherd.

It was about the first Christmas pageant I can remember even remember seeing, and certainly the first one I had ever been a part of.  I grew up Unitarian Universalist, and I suppose the Christmas pageant is not something UUs do that much.  In any event, as far as I can remember, we never had a Christmas pageant in my church when I was a kid.  The Episcopal church I was going to in college had a pageant, but it was always close enough to Christmas that it was after our semester was over and we’d gone home for the holidays.

One of the three kings comes

So there I was, grown up and an intern and everything, and I suddenly had to learn all these mysteries about exactly who all the people in the Christmas pageant are, and what shepherds wear, and whether they can wear their shoes or not.  Being a shepherd is fortunately not difficult.  I am not exactly sure what happened before we got on the scene, but by the time we arrived, Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus were already there in Bethlehem.  We came in and sat at some distance until the angels came.  Once they came and stood behind the scene, we followed them to the holy family.  We then waited while the three kings came with their gifts, concluding the pageant.

Crosswalk asked us to bake pie for about 80 people, so we baked six pumpkin pies and six apple pies.  Because it had snowed the night before and the roads continued to be rather treacherous, we had not been sure that any of the youth would be able to come.  As it turned out, we had about six kids when we started baking the pies, around one in the afternoon, and another six or so trickled in over the course of the afternoon.

It took us about three hours to make the pies and clean up.  Michelle and Pia showed a couple of the kids how to make pie dough and I helped some others prepare the apples for the apple pies.  By about four in the afternoon, we had finished cleaning up and all the pies were either baking in the oven or were done.  We then had our present exchange.  Everybody brought a present and everyone had a turn to either open a present or steal a present someone else had opened.  I brought a card game and ended up with a set of really cool magnetic rocks.

After the present exchange, we had an early dinner, so the kids could leave before the roads all froze, and the kids trickled back home.  After we finished cleaning up, we went to the wholesale grocery store to buy eggnog and whipped cream, which we took to Crosswalk along with the pies.

Guests and volunteers at dinner

On Christmas Eve, Holy Trinity had another dinner for its neighbors, with a Christmas party.  We served dinner to a small army of volunteers and to somewhere between 45 and 65 of our neighbors.  There were so many people walking around and coming and going that it was hard to keep an accurate count of them!  We had our Christmas Eve service at 4 that afternoon, and as soon as the church service was over, around 5:15, we started welcoming people into the parish hall.  We had dinner around 6.  For dinner, we served ham, yams, peas and mushrooms, jello salad, and rolls and for dessert we had chocolate and vanilla cake with candy canes.

Santa was here

After dinner, Santa came in (well, really Dennis, who is one of our volunteers, dressed in a Santa suit) and the kids put on a Christmas pageant, which was narrated by our vicar, Paul.  The pageant was pretty low key: the kids were in costume, but there was no rehearsal or anything.  They just followed (or not) the promptings of the narrator, which included instructions like “the shepherds went past the coffee pitchers and down to Bethlehem.”

Mary and Joseph in the Pageant

The audience thought these instructions were pretty funny, so it worked well.  At the end of the pageant, Santa gave presents, including gift bags, lunch boxes, and art sets, out to all the kids.  We also had gift bags for the adults, which we gave out after the kids got their presents, along with donated clothing and shoes.

To prepare for the dinner and the party, we wrapped presents on the Saturday before.  Our kitchen leader, Mahli, spent days baking all the cakes ahead of time and then freezing them.  On the Tuesday before the dinner, we got together and prepared the jello salad and frosted and cut the cakes.  We also counted out the tableware and went over the schedule for the flow of the evening.  All this planning ahead meant we had much less prep work to do on the day of the dinner, which made the evening go more smoothly.  This was a good idea because it made it easier to feed as many people as we had, and still have time for the volunteers to attend the church service.

My whole family are math and science people, and in good familial tradition, I was an engineering major in college. That lasted until the spring of my Junior year, at which point, I realized that I was much happier in my religion classes than in my engineering ones. I became a religion major, with a minor in engineering.

I was brought up in the Unitarian Universalist (UU) church. I’d gone to church regularly growing up, but stopped going so regularly when I got to college. When my grandpa became quite ill the fall of my Junior year, my friend told me I needed more religion in my life, so she brought me to the Episcopal-Lutheran campus ministry group. That was my first real introduction to the Episcopal church. I liked the group so much that I kept going even after my grandpa recovered, and the spring of my Senior year, I got confirmed as an Episcopalian.

In my job here, I work part time at the Diocesan Office, part time at the Cathedral, and part time at Holy Trinity. At Holy Trinity, we’ve got a program where we invite our neighbors in for a free dinner twice a month, and I help with that, mostly by working in the kitchen and by delivering fliers advertising the dinner to various social-service agencies in the area. At the Cathedral, I work with the youth. At the Diocesan Office, I do pretty much whatever anyone tells me to do, which has involved helping prepare for convention and presently involves some work with the website.

I like cheese sandwiches. They’re what I usually eat for lunch. They’re tasty, they’re cheep, they’re quick to make, and they pack well. I like grilled cheese sandwiches, too, but they take a little bit more work to make and they don’t pack quite as well.

This is my bike.

Actually I have several favorite parts of my job, but one of them is delivering fliers for Holy Trinity’s dinner ministry.  We have a list of 19 social-service agencies to take fliers to, and I do most of the deliveries.  I don’t have a car, so I ride my bike to all those places.  Most of the agencies we take fliers to are in the neighborhood, so riding my bike works well.

Two weeks ago, I delivered fliers for the first time to Holmes Elementary, which is the local elementary school.  These fliers were advertising the dinner we had last Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving.  I went into the office, because I didn’t know where else to go, and they told me to talk to the counselor.  She was so glad we were having this dinner and that I had fliers advertising it because she really worries that some of the kids won’t have anything to eat for the holidays otherwise.  The councilor’s reaction is why I like delivering fliers.

A few weeks before that, I delivered fliers Our Place Ministries, which is an agency run by several of the churches in the neighborhood.  They provide a food bank and a free laundromat and several other services.  Every time I go there, the place is absolute chaos: there are all these people wanting this or that, waiting to be helped, filling out forms, and so forth.  The chaos is okay, you just wait until someone has time to deal with you.  Anyway, the day in question, I was there waiting, and eventually someone asked me why I was there, so I explained about this dinner we’re having and how I had fliers advertising it.  The lady helping me said to the room at large, “Fliers for a free dinner!  Who wants one?” and just about everyone got excited and said they did.  Their reaction is why I like delivering fliers.

I really like riding my bike, and I like that I can do it for my job.  That’s why I like delivering fliers.