Disclaimer: I am not on my usual computer and for some reason my family’s computer browser only lets me see half the text i’m typing. I apologize for any blatant spelling or grammar mistakes.

So this morning my rector gave me the opportunity to speak to the 8am and 10am services. I like to fly by the seat of mypants (although when I used that term during my speech no one seemed too humored…) so I really just touched on the ideas that came to mind first as being the most powerful lessons learned from GC. Let’s all keep in mind that the 8 am service had about 7 people in attendance total, needless to say I didn’t serve up the hottest speech in town. I asked them to select what aspects of GC they’d like to hear about, and got to describe to them the whole process of following the bottle bill from start to finish (which was so cool since the HOD adopted iton the last day, and I happened to be around to witness the vote and everything!).

When it came to the 10 am service, there were a lot more familiar faces and the floodgates opened! All my GC memories came together with this happy whooshh! and all its highlights and themes, lessons and missteps, composted after a day of R&R, filtered through my seive-like mind and here’s what trickled out:

Umbuntu (Joseph and Anson must be cringing… we all agree it was overused) and it’s “I in you and you in I” got me thinking about identity and definition. The church was, and is every 3 years, staring at itself in the mirror. Except, being detached from our respective organic communities, the national church was a body of loosely connected individuals seeking to find themselves in one another.  Most of the time when I sought to put that mirror to myself, or see what others see in themselves, I always came up with an abstraction whose likeness reminded me of home, of someone frm my parish, from someone who has helped raise me, and in this circular way, of myself. The identity crisis of the national church is the identity crisis of every parish.

It’s the crisis of people (as individuals and/or as communities)seeking to define themselves based on decisions made for the right reasons. Have I come to be what I am because I have made decisions for the right reasons? Did the national church repeal B033 for the right reasons? Do we define ourselves to others for the right reasons?

From my brain droppings delivered at 10am service, the pulp of my GC experience strained out my itty bitty revelation, if you will. My parish, my home community, the very thing that defines for me what being Episcopalian means (and, even after GC, still does), that is what I contributed to the national Ubuntu, what I was able to give to the national identity. My parish, with its commitment to local poverty alleviation, to caring for its own families in time of economic and medical crisis, for being so committed to inclusive love, that’s what I see in MY mirror. It’s a gift from my parish that we share an Ubuntu relationship where those values have become my values. So as I had my GC experience with YAP, I was able to bring my parish to the national level through my Ubuntu relationship with the national church, through the awesome peace and justice work EPF does, through giving away my “novel” voice and opinion in exchange for meaningful change.

I hope I was able to bring my best face to the national church as it looked itself in the mirror to define what its become and will continue to progress towards. Also, if the Episcopal Church wants to be a part of me, its already so through my parish. GC has given me hope to extend my own inclusive love, and make the national image of the church a part of what I see in myself.

I hope I never again have to make Ubuntu metaphors. Seriously.