A Typical Week?

It’s been a quiet week in the suburbs of Atlanta…

On Tuesday evening I began attending a monthly book group that meets at the monastery where I work. In the past this group has read such gems as The Cloud of Unknowing or Passion for Creation (Matthew Fox’s translation of the sermons of Meister Eckhart);  I’m joining them as they began reading Teilhard de Chardin’s The Divine Milieu. Discussion was lively and the monk who leads the group is a veritable fountain of theological and contemplative insight.

Then on Wednesday my family and I drove to Macon, where we participated in the ordination service of a dear friend of ours who was being ordained as an Episcopal Priest. At the reception afterwards we kept busy hugging old friends (the Episcopal Church is sufficiently small enough that, even after being away for almost a decade, I still feel like I know tons of people whenever I go to a service). Spent a while clucking nervously with one woman about the politics of the Episcopal Church’s recent convention, where among other things the church elected its first woman presiding bishop (yeay!) but also wrote a very tepid response to the worldwide Anglican Church’s objections to its consecration of a gay bishop.

And then last night we had dinner with two friends from the Pagan community: she’s a Canaanite reconstructionist with a particular devotion to Lilith; he’s a druid with a bit of an Irish twinkle in his eyes. It was a lively conversation that ranged from the challenges of deconstructing male privilege when raising a son to lamenting Atlanta’s paucity of decent reconstructionist Pagan groups to dishing up our actually-quite-similar reasons for being uncomfortable with Mythic Journeys (which I have taken to calling the "Yuppie Wicca" convention).

And also during this week, I submitted a mini-proposal to an editor who’s looking for an angels project (something I started and then aborted for a different editor last year), and at long last finished my mysticism proposal which I submitted to my agent, who is in turn shopping it around to eight publishers. Fingers crossed.