:: Richard Barrett's blog ::

:: Thursday, May 08, 2003 ::

I'll go ahead and elaborate a bit more on the "spiritual journey" alluded to below. It's not the whole story, but it's some of the context, anyway.

I wasn't raised Episcopalian. I was baptized Lutheran as an infant, but that really had more to do with my Danish grandmother than with any sense of connection that my mother had to the Lutheran church. As soon as we moved to something vaguely resembling a metropolitan area (Woodinville in '84, which was as close to a real city as we'd been up to that point), she ran as far as she could in the other direction, and we wound up at Overlake Christian Church, where we both had to be baptized again (since the first time didn't count, natch). We were there probably five years or so before my mom stopped going to church to appease my atheist dad. That meant I stopped going. In high school, I started attending a small Lutheran church on my own, and it felt so much more at home for me than Overlake ever did. (At Overlake I frequently felt ostracized because I didn't believe that science was a work of the Devil intended to confuse Christians and make them less faithful.) In Bellingham, I got called to be the tenor section leader at St. Paul's Episcopal Church up there, and I'd never been to an Episcopal church. It really felt "older" in a lot of ways than the Lutheran church I had been to, but at the same time the similarities were obvious - and I really liked that "older" feeling. The more I found out about the Episcopal church, the more I really appreciated what at the time it seemed to represent - a church that kept, valued, and promoted its ties to Sacred Tradition, but at the same time didn't ask you to check your brain at the door (a la Overlake). I'd never been around women pastors/priests before, and it took a little getting used to, but it became something I appreciated very much. I was confirmed at St. Paul's on 29 June 1997 at the age of 20, with nobody in attendance - no family, no friends, nobody. My mom was vocal (and remains so, to an extent) about how she "didn't raise you to be an Episcopalian", saying that if I was raised anything, I was raised a fundamentalist Protestant. So, choosing to live out my faith for the last seven or eight years or so in the Episcopal Church, as I have, has been something that I've very much had to own, on my own. It's not something I've done for anybody else but myself and God.

When I moved back to Seattle, I attended St. Mark's Cathedral for a short time - a very short time. After three or four services, I'd had enough of the unabashed, dripping, sentimental liberalism of the Cathedral, and felt a bit disillusioned. It definitely did not feel like the Episcopal Church I had come to know at St. Paul's. When I started attending St. Margaret's in Factoria, it was a lot better, and it's been a wonderful place to be - I was married there, Megan (raised Catholic) was confirmed there, etc. - but I've really become painfully aware how unlike the rest of the Diocese (at least) St. Margaret's actually is.

And, the thing is, as I've grown and matured in my faith walk, I have to say my own views have... how does one put it... I don't know. I was going to say "become more Catholic," but that's not quite right. Perhaps simply "less Protestant". For example, I would definitely call myself somebody who agrees with the doctrine of transubstantiation. I don't know how somebody can read the Gospel of John (and I mean the *whole* Gospel, not just the usually cited verses - the whole book is rife with transubstantiation imagery) and not come away with that very specific understanding.

Maybe it would also be fair to say simply that the more church history I read, I find I relate more to the views of the historical church fathers than the church leaders of today. So, when present day Episcopalians (at least one of whom is a retired priest himself) are telling me about how they just get tired of all the theology in the Church and/or don't believe specifically in a theistic version of God and/or don't say the Creed because they don't believe that any one period of the Church has perfectly captured the essence of Christianity and to say the Creed would validate the idea that the Council of Nicea *did* perfectly capture the essence of Christianity and/or think it's psychologically unhealthy for a church to talk about a God who requires the arbitrary death of His child and/or focus on an essentially violent event (the Crucifixion) as its main image etc. etc. etc. I just get really, really, *really* tired of it. After awhile I feel like we've Enlightened and Reasoned ourselves to death, and frankly, I start feeling like I did at Overlake - that is, made to feel like my views aren't really welcome. Ironically, this time around, it's because my views are too traditional.

So, that's a piece of it. Maybe I'll write more on it a bit later.
:: Richard richardtenor@gmail.com 3:59 PM [+] ::
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What's the deal with major book dealers, online & bricks-and-mortar, and incorrectly listing books as "out of print"? I tried ordering the book Peter Warlock: A Life of Philip Heseltine by Barry Smith, published by Oxford University Press, from Borders back in January and was told it would take "ten working days" to get it. As of today they've not gotten it; all they can tell me is their distributor has the order. Amazon.com lists the book as "out of print". However, I was able to go to the website for Oxford University Press and order it with no problem, and was informed it would ship within 48 hours. This isn't the first time I've had the problem of major book dealers saying that they just can't get something or that something's out of print, and then being told by the publisher, "That's news to us."

What's going on? Is it just that American distributors are choosing to carry less and less product that doesn't come from a major American publishing house? It's really quite annoying.
:: Richard richardtenor@gmail.com 12:08 PM [+] ::
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OK, maybe I actually have some time to write now.

What's going on... I gave my lead today my specific notice that I will in fact be leaving for Indiana in August, making my last day sometime around the end of July or the beginning of August. That's after some minor heart attacks and headaches with regard to the move; last week, my admissions status still being listed as "undecided" on IU's website, I spent some time on the phone with University Admissions trying to find out what was going on. It was good that I called; my file was still sitting behind a stack of other peoples' files, and calling them put my file at the top. My status was updated to "admitted" by the next day. Yay.

Then, I got an e-mail from Michael Belnap, the man I wanted to study with at IU yesterday, saying that he'll be out the whole year of '03-'04 for performance commitments. So, now I have to find a new voice teacher - James King, maybe? I really want to study with a tenor, so Michael and I are trying to figure out a plan B. I can't not go at this stage of the game, but I need to be sure that I'm going to a teacher who is going to help me.

And we're still trying to find a place to live - there's an apartment that would be wonderful, but it's also way too expensive. So, we're continuing to work that out. We should be able to live on campus at least initially, so I'm not losing sleep over it, but we're still waiting to hear back from the University Housing office about that for sure.

We saw X-Men 2 last night. It's wonderful, and it builds really well on the foundation laid in the first film. I can't wait to see it again.

What else... we participated last week, in a somewhat small way, in Orthodox Easter; Megan's boss, who is Russian, goes to an Orthodox Easter Egg blessing every year, and invited us along. It was my first time in an Orthodox Church (St. Nicholas Cathedral on Capitol Hill in Seattle), and it was a truly revelatory experience. I was absolutely stunned by the almost immersive nature of the worship environment - the smell of incense permeating the whole of the sanctuary, icons covering just about every inch of the space - it was like two thousand years of church history coming alive for me at once. I was inspired to buy an Orthodox prayer book, and I was amazed at just how thought through everything is - in the liturgy, in the theology. It's very well thought through, right down to a detailed and genuinely illuminating two page explanation about the hand position used when making the Sign of the Cross. I'm very interested in learning more, and I'm presently reading a book called The Orthodox Church by an Orthodox bishop. We're hopefully going to go to a full service at an Orthodox church here soon - I really want to see what it's like. This kind of all speaks to an overall spiritual journey that I kind of feel like I've been being pushed towards over the last year, but I don't really feel like I can get into that right now and do it any justice.

So, current reading: The Orthodox Church by Timothy Ware, V For Vendetta by Alan Moore (actually, I've already read through this and am presently collecting a bunch of thoughts on it, since it's a work that definitely demands a response), Sandman: Brief Lives by Neil Gaiman, and I'd really like to get back to Collins' True Detective but I haven't yet.

I've also written some things as of late, but I'll get into that later.
:: Richard richardtenor@gmail.com 10:08 PM [+] ::
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