Loosed Canon

        This past Wednesday, St. David’s held The Open Table, its monthly service that especially welcomes Austin’s LGBTQ+ community and their friends into a space of worship, reflection and affirmation. We started the service in January, and this community has since grown into one that is at once constant, yet ever changing.  We meet once a month, and our homilists are regularly lay people who bring their own personal insight of LGBTQ+ life into the sacred space.  For those who regularly attend (about half of the group are not St. David’s parishioners), it seems to have become an important part of their spiritual practice.  It is a stop on their ongoing journey that perhaps gives them the spiritual sustenance and strength to go back out into the world, to give thanks, to grieve, to connect, to be wholly seen, to be sad, angry, fearful, joyful or renewed. I’ve had folks ask me why such a service needed to exist when St. David’s is ...

           The 79 th General Convention of The Episcopal Church wrapped up last Friday here in Austin.  For those not familiar with The Episcopal Church (TEC), this convention is a triennial gathering for the governance of our church.  However, it is so much more than that, as I came to learn.  GC79 was my first convention and I am still riding a high from the experience. My friend, the Rev. Albert Kennington, put it so wonderfully to me just days before GC79 started - “General Convention is a massive gathering of passionate, opinionated, determined, (and some co-dependent) people -- hundreds of them - some days, thousands of them -- loving, arguing, praying, preening, legislating, protesting, worshiping, marketing, eating (lots) and drinking (lots) and acting like they/we think they/we are people of God.”             And, oh what a two weeks it was! ...