Third in the How Do Bishops Become Bishops? Series*
Okay – the promised play-by-play of the process of getting a new bishop is somewhat delayed. I’m not as adept as wading through canon law and other interesting things are happening in the interim. So – soon on the play-by-play. And for now?
I’ve received word that my nomination was received and I am now a Proposed Candidate. Now I have an application that I need to fill out and submit in the next thirty or so days. There are a handful of essays, each a page long. I need to polish my resume, which was expected. I need to update that crazy online database church-version of a resume, which though useful is a bit of a chore to wade through. I need to select my three references – one clergy person, one layperson in good standing in the church, and one other person not related to me, and not the person who nominated me.
Oh, and I have to tell my bishop.
(Yes, you can take it for granted that he is not reading my blog, nor is any of his staff monitoring it. Mayhap they ought, but ours is a small and understaffed diocese, so it’s not clear to me exactly who would get to do that and in exactly what free time they might do it in.)
In this way, the process is very like any other job hunt. There’s an application, a series of interviews. They’ll be doing a background check (okay, more than one). And then toward the end, if I make the final cut, about a thousand people will vote on me and the rest who made said cut. Okay, it stops being like any other job hunt at that point, if not sometime before.
And so I find myself in an interesting place. I love what I’m currently doing and I feel I could keep doing it for quite some time. And yet there is this other thing that other people tell me I could do, and that I myself have the gentle, familiar tuggings toward. And if taken from a completely non-deist statistical standpoint, I haven’t got a hope in hell. (Oh wait, I was being non-deist. Clearly I suck at that.) But I don’t really look at it that way. The way I’m currently embracing is, to quote Eckhart Tolle (who was quoting someone else I don’t recall), ‘I don’t much mind what happens.’
Except for this nausea.
EDIT: I prayed. …and I feel pretty calm now. :) Time for the celebratory cup of tea.
*This series is meant as an instructional commentary on how Bishops become Bishops in the Episcopal Church. The intended audience of this blogpost is not Episcopalians. This blogpost is not meant to be a form lobbying for me to become bishop.