November 7, 2021

First frost that I noted. The late-blooming sulphur cosmos had at least a few weeks of glory.

Friday evening and Saturday devoured by Vestry meetings to rehash and organize our thoughts concerning the Parish Profile. I couldn’t detect in the others the banked fury I felt at such a staggering expenditure of time. My basic perception (and I know this to be true from my own notes in preparation for the ordeal) is that we spent ten hours arriving at a place known and sufficiently discussed before the meeting began. Our conclusions and determinations were essentially the same ten days ago, though worded differently and, by dint of wider participation, perhaps worse now. Was this to “get everyone on board”? Was this to “show the work” as they used to say in high school math classes?  Something about the process seemed to comfort people. I have my suspicions about “process.” In nature, process is necessary and majestic. In human institutions it’s nearly always a scam.  E, our facilitator, said once and implied several times that we would never do this right, never get a decent Dean, if we didn’t proceed exactly as she wanted with exactly the steps she laid before us. I assumed from the first that she’d found a commodity to sell, sold it convincingly, and our parish spent a good deal of money buying it. We bought it to avoid controversy– Oh WE didn’t do it. . . it was the PROCESS of DISCERNMENT, as though such a thing could not be itself perverse.  But it was an ordeal and, in the end, not necessary, and hurtful because it prolonged a struggle which went on much too long as it was. I don’t imagine E thinks of it as a scam. She knows she has to keep tight hold on the reins to keep out any critique of her sacred process. I was Cassandra, unheeded, feeling every grind of the slow wheel as it made its way crab-wise across the desert 

Having finally an in-person meeting was a different story, informative and invigorating. It’s better to be able to see a person. I think the terrible quarrel that led to three of them demanding my resignation and one of them attempting to resign because they didn’t receive it would not have happened had we been face-to-face. It turns out that my great and implacable enemy D is, though a bit of an adolescent, companionable and funny and possessed of a mind that did not glaze over with exhaustion near the end of things, as mine did. I liked him. That outcome would not have been foreseeable had we not met face-to-face. 

After church, this day must be spent listening to practice files for David: the Faces of Love. We perform in six days and I’ve had one rehearsal, covering maybe 1/5 of the monumental score. Were it Bach or Schubert, maybe I could sight-read. Not this. 

Sang Lauridson this AM. Made two mistakes I”ve never made in 10 years’ acquaintance with the piece. 

Planted poppies I’d forgotten I’d ordered, Sweetboi screamed at me as I worked.