My mom the deacon

The fall semester is almost over, and not a moment too soon. My students have their final tomorrow morning, and I have a Swedish final on Friday. This has been the hardest I've worked since coming to Berkeley, and I don't like it one bit. (Roger once told me I was "a slacker at heart," and I have to agree with him.) One consequence of having all this work -- and the consequence of particular interest to my blog's readers -- has been my piss-poor job of keeping up on my blog. I just noticed that my last post was nearly a month ago. Now, I don't want to be one of those people whose every post is a tale of woe about how I don't have time to post to my blog. This lengthy preamble serves to introduce that I've gotten a bit of a backlog of things I've been meaning to write about, which I'm going to try to dole out over the couple weeks before we leave for Christmas. The first thing I want to write about is our two trips to Vegas this fall.

A few weeks ago, we did the annual trip to Vegas for Thanksgiving. I always like seeing people's expressions when I tell them that's where I'm going for the holiday. The look I get is usually an odd mix of excitement ("I'm happy for you because you're going to the Entertainment Capital of the World!") and confusion ("Who goes to Las Vegas for a family holiday?"). I love seeing my mom, and she knows her way around Thanksgiving dinner, but neither Anne nor I are particularly crazy about Las Vegas.

But I digress .... What I really want to write about was our first trip to Vegas this fall, back in mid-October. After years of studying and preparation, my mom was ordained as a deacon in her church, and we flew down for the ceremony. I was really happy for her because it's something she's been working hard at for a long time -- taking classes in the evening and enduring interviews and examinations from clergy members for the past six to eight years. It was like she spent that time going to seminary in night school.

Just to clarify in case you, like me, are kind of fuzzy on the role of a deacon. The deacon, at least in the Episcopal church, is a parallel position to the priest. While the priest is the spiritual leader and runs the church side of the things, the deacon's duties have more to do with outreach and the social justice side of the church's ministry. Also, deacons don't tend to be paid by the church, so my mom is going to keep her day job.

A lot of my family came to town, and there were about 80-100 people there all told. Anne's mom even flew down from Brewster. The ordination itself was a full church service, and the coolest part was that the bishop of Nevada presided over it. For those of you who don't follow episcopal news, she is now the presiding bishop of the entire Episcopal Church USA, so it's pretty cool that she chose to make my mom's ordination her last act as bishop of Nevada.

The ceremony was really nice; Anne and I even got to participate by carrying the bread and wine down the aisle before the communion. This was the first time I'd been in a church for a while, so I was happy that all my years of going to church as a kid helped me wing my way through the service. How would it look to the bishop if the deacon-to-be's son bumbled the wine handoff or stood and sang when he should have been kneeling and praying?

The next day, Sunday, we went to the church on our way to our flight. Although we had to leave before the sermon so Jack could drive us to the airport, we did get to see my mom in the full outfit reading the gospel for the whole church. Although church is all about the spiritual experience, I don't think it's telling stories out of school (church?) that my mom's somber appearance barely concealed a wide grin.

So although I'm no fan of The Vegas, I was more than happy to make a special trip (and to go to church twice in the same weekend) for my mom's ordination. Things seem to be going well for her in her new role -- she's already been roped into the search committee for the new bishop. It seems that institutions are all the same in that respect.