twentieth thursday of ordinary time

when the deadline passes tomorrow and the mediation has failed for good, i will not suffer one bit. it will be no different than the solution i chose for myself.

but there are people in the church who had high hopes for the mediation, because apparently something about that protest isn't sitting comfortably on everyone.

the person with the most to lose is arguably the pastor.

if you knew the mediation had tanked on tuesday and watched the daily protests resume on wednesday and by thursday you still hadn't called the pastor to let her know what shitstorm she'd just returned to, you'd be a weasel.

if you were prepared to let the mediation fail and toss the considerable investment the church has in it be thrown away, you'd be a weasel AND you'd be fiscally irresponsible.

you're probably the sort of person who sends anonymous letters.

you're probably the sort of person who will show up to welcome back the pastor and not tell her you were going to hang her out to dry.

because by not telling her what you had done, you left her unprepared to face this, and since she's the person with the most to lose in this situation, if you were a faithful supporter or a good custodian of your congregation's resources, or a decent person, you'd have given her a heads up.

but you didn't.

you know how much money this mediation is costing, right?

you know what's at stake, right?

yeah, i thought so.

clock is ticking

today is a free day. the deadline is sometime tomorrow.

since nobody knows exactly what time tomorrow the deadline is, i'm going to suggest that anyone who has an interest in not wasting the church's investment in the mediation might could get busy on the task and make sure it gets done.

if, when i see her tomorrow, the mediator cannot tell me what happened on tuesday and why you understand it was inappropriate, there will be no more mediation and no possibility of starting it up again.

i have to go now. it's time for today's daily protest, because with the mediation dead the protest will be daily and at every church event being held anywhere, and beginning next week i will stop declining media interviews.

it's your move, and clock is burning.

same day, second verse

it was a little weird to go back on the line today with the yellow sign, just like before. same corner, same yellow sign.

WILLISTON FEDERATED CHURCH
COVERS UP
SEXUAL ASSAULT

i do not know if i was on the line for a half hour or for forty minutes or what, and i will get to that in a few lines when i tell you the sequence of it.

today there were a surprisingly high number of thumbs ups. not waves, not honks, just thumbs ups. sometimes the patterns of a day are weird. twice that i know of people took photos with smartphones, which means probably some social media exposure.

when i first got there i had gotten just far enough on my approach to start crossing the street and the clock on that side isn't working so i was making a mental note to myself to check the time on the other side and then i saw standing in the window right there joan newton o'gorman herself, honest-to-harald and i was suddenly so scared that i nearly peed myself.

it's just nerves, right? because there's totally nothing actually physically frightening about her i don't think, but the fear was there all the same.

and she smiled at me the falsest smile i have seen in a long time- like since maybe the last time that joan newton o'gorman smiled at me.

but really and truly, she'd have to be out of her honkin' head to see me with that sign and have a smile on her face that was sincere.

i'm just overly sensitive to the dishonest smile. i do not take it as a sign of offered peace. it stirs in me contempt. it does not matter to me who smiles the false smile; i simply read it as an indicator that the person making it is dishonest and therefore up to no good.

i bring it up here by way of contrast, though, because after another false smile passing me on the corner, joan newton o'gorman went home and then returned. she went into the store and came out and approached me.

this time she was not smiling. this time even though i do not know what was behind her eyes or in her heart, i had a sense that it was genuine, that whatever it was, it was true under the circumstance.

she called me by name and offered me a bottle of cold water she had clearly bought for the purpose.

"i have nothing to say to you", i said, not meeting her eye.
she asked me if she left it there, would i drink it, since it was so hot in the sun.
"if you did, you'd be littering", i said.

and she left me there.

there are some what-ifs to this story.

if it hadn't been for last night, i would have taken the water.
if it hadn't been for last night, i wouldn't have been out protesting today.
if it hadn't been for last night, the mediation would probably be wrapping up in a satisfactory manner in a couple of weeks from now.

that was an expensive thing, last night.

see you tomorrow morning on the streetcorner.

twentieth wednesday of ordinary time

after last night i have informed the mediator that i do not wish to continue the mediation. i will still keep my scheduled appointment on friday, but it will be an exit interview and not a discussion (as it was going to be) of how to proceed gracefully.

full bore daily protesting at the church properties and church events will resume today and continue until i'm too blasted old to hold up the sign.

i will still get what i want out of it and after last night i no longer care if the church can get anything decent out of it, nor do i care about their leviathan timetables.

if - and this is a big IF- someone from the church wants to explain to the mediator what happened and why it was totally inappropriate before the scheduled meeting, i will be willing to entertain offers of what concessions might be made just to get me back to the table.

otherwise we are done and you are all on your own.

business as usual, from now until i'm too old. considering that i am not yet 50 and in good shape, by the time i stop holding the signs on that corner, people will be serving on the official board of the williston federated church who haven't even been born yet.

twentieth sunday in ordinary time

standing on the corner with the sign is physically draining, even if you haven't spent the day previous doing a twelve hour adventure race.

at about twenty minutes to nine, a woman came up and introduced herself. she asked if she might lay hands on me and pray, to which i consented because there was a time in my life when i had such a vibrant and joyful faith that the first thoughts i had in the morning were prayers and the last thought before i went to bed at night were prayer and  a great deal of the in between were prayers, too.

i miss that feeling.

but then she talked with me a bit and she offered to take me to her church, a church that will not blame victims or throw people out.

i'm not so sure about that. before it happened to me, i would have bet my life that the williston federated church would not have done any such a thing, either.

i told her that for all of the foreseeable future, i have work to do here, on this street corner.

she asked God to bless me again and gave me a hug and she went on her way.

at about ten to nine, a man driving by stopped his car and said "i never liked that church anyway!" and he waved and went on.

a couple of people raised their coffee cups to me as they passed.

at about a quarter to ten, a woman stopped and offered to take me to her church, right NOW. "i'm going now, she said. you can hop in."

i thanked her and i said that while i still have work to do on this streetcorner, i have an obligation to stay.

i do not know when this work will be finished. i expect it will take a long time, maybe years.

but i am steadfast and i am strong.

and this is the right thing to do.

i'll see you out on the corner.

nineteenth sunday of ordinary time

it was a nice day for a protest, cool and fair. there were the usual waves and thumbs up.

the scary moment was where a car proceeding through the intersection southbound after stopping was very nearly t-boned by a driver with out-of state plates going WAY TOO FAST who completely failed to stop at the stop sign even though it has a flashing light on it.

but mostly i was thinking: some days i don;t really feel like taking the single most painful episode of my life and putting it out on the streetcorner. sometimes i do not feel like being in touch with that.

but it is important work, and i am in it for the long haul. i will do it, if necessary, until i am simply too old to stand with the sign.

today at the end of my time on the corner a young man came and asked if he could take my picture. and he asked about my story. and he asked if i would mind if he posted it to facebook.

by all means, do.

while it is a personal thing, i am trying to communicate something about a problem not just of the church community of the williston federated church, but a cultural norm in which the victim of an assault is blamed for the consequences of the assault.

"if you had only kept quiet about it", they tell us, "it would have been fine".

"we were ok with it until you started to talk about it", they tell us.

let me be blunt about it: when it happens to your son or your daughter or to you, the problem will begin at the point of the assault, with the bad behavior of the perpetrator and not at the point at which you or your child speak up, or even at the point where they fall apart under the strain of trying to keep it quiet.

the problem is very firmly the act of the assault and secondarily the attempt to keep it all nice and quiet, because people would be uncomfortable.

i was also thinking today about how it will feel at the end of october when the protest will be a year old, and i was thinking about how cold it will feel come thanksgiving and how lonely it will feel standing outside the church on christmas eve.

i was thinking how it will feel to be standing outside while the pastor gives that "welcome home, everybody is welcome" sermon that she aways gives on christmas. i was thinking how it will feel to look at the candle light and the expressions of goodwill and hope from out in the darkness, on the street.

seasons turn. years pass. i am not yet fifty years old. there are a lot of years in me yet.

i'll see you on the streetcorner.

off course

heh. that's a funny title if you know where i was today.

i had some other work i needed to do today, and let's face it: if you're going to mount a protest over multiple years, sometimes you're going to have to miss a sunday or two.

but there will be next week.

and next month.

thanksgiving, christmas, and easter.

and thanksgiving, christmas, and easter.

until i'm too blasted old.

it's funny, because when i started walking the line in november, i thought a lot about how that would go in the cold of winter, if i could stand it.

and now i have walked the line through the cold of winter and through the hottest part of the summer.

seasons turn.

years pass.

i'll be eighty before i even know it, and i'll wonder where all the time went.

see you on the corner.