General Convention - 1

I was wide awake at 4 am from jet lag, so here's a new blog.

Our Superior, Br. Robert, asked me some time ago to help represent OHC at the GC in Anaheim, so here I am. The trip yesterday was fine. I took the 8:56 am Metro North train from Poughkeepsie to 125th Street and then got the M60 bus ($2.25 - a pretty good deal) to LGA. The train took 90 minutes, the bus arrived at the stop in 5, and 45 minutes later I was at the Delta terminal. The flight, to Minneapolis and then on to Orange County (SNA) boarded but then waited 50 minutes for takeoff. No problem in the plane change at MSP. I'll be here until Sunday morning, July 12.

During the flights I started Iris Murdoch's The Green Knight, which has been sitting on my shelf forever. Finally shamed into reading it. Pages and pages of dialogue which seems to be going nowhere, and then all of a sudden, a passage of narrative that just grips you and won't let you go. And Julia S. Konstantinovsky's new Evagrius Ponticus: The Making of a Gnostic. I'm three chapters in and it promises to be one of the best things going on Evagrius.

In addition to schmoozing for OHC, I am helping out with CAROA, the Conference of Anglican Religious Orders in the Americas, which will have a booth in the exhibit hall. The point of it all is to be visible, to connect with old friends and make some new ones, and basically to hold up the flag for Holy Cross and the religious/monastic life in the Episcopal Church.

I have been to several GCs before: New Orleans (1982), Anaheim (1985), Detroit (1988), Phoenix (1991), Denver (2000), and now back in Anaheim. It is huge: each diocese (110 or so, including 10 foreign dioceses) is represented by four clergy and four laity, plus alternates, as well as its bishop. There are two legislative houses, like the US Congress: The House of Bishops (the bishops) and the House of Deputies (the clergy and laity). You can do the math. A minimum of 990 people to do the business, depending on how many alternates show up and whether there's an extra bishop or two. Well over a thousand official members of the Convention. But of course that's just the beginning. Most of the national church staff is here and a lot of diocesan staff people as well. Then there are the official organizations of the Church, from the Pension Fund on down, with people from the myriads of committees and commissions, the different official ministries, and a lot of unofficial ministries. The vendors of church stuff of all kinds. The exhibition hall is always huge. And of course faithful (or at least interested) church people drop in. It is a huge event.

My friend Tony Jewiss worked in the GC office for 8 years or so, retiring in 2007, and so I got a peek inside the planning process. It is complicated work, with facilities having to be locked in years in advance, schedules to be coordinated, people's egos to be massaged, and enormous amounts of detail work.

I was the Rector of St. Michael's Episcopal Church in Anaheim from 1992 to 2001, so the first thing I did after checking into the Motel 8 on Disneyland Drive, where CAROA are staying, was to drive up to see it. There was a gathering of Native American ministries just ending, and I wasn't dressed to be recognized, so I just poked my head in here and there to see how it looked. Pretty good was the answer. St. Michael's has had hard financial times recently. It is one of the largest Hispanic congregations in the Episcopal Church, and most of those folks are poor and virtually all of them were raised in the Hispanic Roman Catholic culture where stewardship is handled quite differently. Maybe I'll write about that someday, but the bottom line is, there are a lot of dollar bills in the plate on Sunday morning, but not enough of them.

I had been back to Anaheim for a wedding at St. Michael's some years ago, so this was not the first time. But it is a strange feeling. Fortunately the first person I ran across remembered me (bless you!).

More later.