Still Skunky After All These Days

Skunk smell? It totally sticks around. My HSH took a bite out of an apple he brought to work from home today, and it was utterly skunkified, and he was appropriately repulsed. Ick.

And Nora, she is still very skunky. Very. Skunky.

Let's not talk about it.

Instead, I will alienate half my readers* by talking church again.

*And to those readers - I am not That Person. I am not even remotely interested in saving your soul. I don't care how you live your life. It's your life. I have ZERO interest in converting, evangelizing or witnessing. The fact that I am writing about my own search for the perfectly liberal Episcopal congregation is in no way a judgment on the way you are living, your spiritual life or any comment whatsoever on you and yours. I grew up an agnostic in the Bible Belt. I wouldn't do that to you.

So we attended a service on Sunday at the church in O-town (not Orlando, btw), which is where I work and about a 40-minute drive from our house.

We arrived early and deposited the girls in child care. Is it a sin to be so grateful not to have a toddler crawling on you during the Confession?

I had hoped the priest's sermon would cement his political position. Maybe something on the importance of welcoming everyone to the table to keep the feast. Maybe something on Family Values and the way that everyone but upper-middle-class, white, heterosexual males are eroding the core values of the church, country and world.

Alas, he did not make my decisions quite so easy.

I learned that he is conducting a series of classes based on a Church thinker who is conservative, yet not as conservative as many others. I learned that he and his wife and his daughter are very sweet people.

I learned that it is very nice to sit through a service without saying "Shhh, we whisper in church. Don't stand on that. Put the books back. No, we don't rip the pages out. No, we don't color in the books...."

It's not a huge church. It's not even as big as our own Village Church. But there seem to be parishioners who still have most of their own teeth and are not yet eligible for government sponsored health care insurance.

HSH and I were sitting in the back pew waiting for the service to start when a family walked in with a child around 10.

"Why is that person so small?" HSH asked.

"And his skin is weirdly smooth."

"And his hair, it's not white or silver! What is that about?"

Comments

[Jane from P'cola]

I recently decided that Sunday mornings are one of the biggest challenges in my life these days. Between a talkative & inquisitive 3 year old (I'm sure you don't know what I'm talking about...) and my own HSH who is generally part of the altar party with his seminarian self, I'm lucky if I spend a moment being reverent!

You keep making me want to go back to NY - as a kid we spent summer vacations upstate in a tiny camp on the shores of Lake Ontario, driving into the metropolis of Mexico for laundry, ice cream & pizza! I think you're in a different part, but close enough! We used to love how each township had it's own "fireman's field days" on a different weekend - it was like a mini fair every week!