It's like, you know?

(ya'll remember that TV show? The girl from Dirty Dancing was in it, only she had a nose job, and no one recognized her any more. So her career suffered. Ironic!)
So I'm still alive, and have finally survived most of this insane semester. This is no mean feat. This semester has featured, for me, the following:
-numerous interruptions of my class schedule, to the point where I show up for the wrong class, at the wrong time, on the wrong days.
-Dying relatives, accompanied by predicable familial meltdowns, in the style of Tennessee Williams. (Hey, we are a traditional and a highly literate people, even in our dysfunction. Respect!)
-the annoying return of Headaches from Hell, which have been persistent since roughly August.
-These, in turn, result in the equally annoying return of Prophetic Visions! And while it has a cool title, it's not that fun. Julian of Norwich and Hildegard of Bingen may have enjoyed seeing multiple copies of things, and zooming lights, but I am not a fan. Neither are the people that I am talking to when my world splits double. Evidently, it is unnerving to have me start tilting my head from side to side in an ill-fated attempt to have your image revert to its solitary self again, while jabbering on about atonement theory. Or something.
But! On the happier side of things! The semester is almost over, which means I get a nice long break.
Also, I've spent the last week hanging out with extremely cool conference people, as part of my official part time job. (This should not be confused with my Work-study Coordinator job, or my Field placement job. Or my taking-over-the-world job.) The conference was on the intersection between catholicity and globalization. Which sounds odd, but turned out to be very interesting. I was the liaison between the Conference center at the seminary (still not done, but one day! Inshallah.) and the conference participants. We had present the IFI (Philippine Independent Church), Church of Sweden, old Catholic churches, and Episcopalians.
And it is times like these when I remember how closely life outside of high school mirrors high school. And yet doesn't at all.
Much of the ecumenical work of the church is political backstage work--who's talking to whom and why, what might upset that relationship, how can we avoid that, should we send a gift? What kind of gift? How should we phrase this bit of text so as not to offend anyone, and if we stop talking to this person, how will that affect all our other relationships, because if person A is in close communion with person B and we stop talking to person A, then person B will cut ties with us. (Like most parties I went to in middle school, someone inevitably ends up in a corner, alone and in tears.)
But! At this conference, it turns out that all that stuff (which, don't get me wrong, is important in its place) is prelude so you can actually talk to people! And the people are doing incredible things! Which, I think, is actually why we were talking to them in the first place. Not so much because we wanted to line up theologies to march in pretty rows. That's never going to happen. But the actual basis of these things is that you honestly like the churches you work with--you respect what they do, where they do it, and you want to help out as you can, in your own unique way.
Next up: two sermons. Promise!