Isn't that just preachy?

The minister's on vacation, so our two pastoral assistants and the other certified speaker guy- that would be me- got to divide up his three Sundays off, leading the entire service and giving a personal-reflection sermon on the very broad theme of "Voices of Faith."

Today was mine.

There were the usual snafus. I'd asked the minister if it would be okay if Cameron did a solo during the service, and he said it was fine. Nobody told the music directors, though, and so somebody else already had been lined up to do two (very good, as it turned out) solos during the hour.  The liturgist I'd asked to help out (who I did the same for last Sunday) didn't show up until about two minutes before the service started, so I'd already sprung the job on the other one with no notice, but she was very gracious about doing it. (The other one did find time, once she got in the pews, to bitch Eleanor out for reading in church after the service had started. It was Joshilyn Jackson's latest book, who is as close to God as I can think of, and it was a passage about Vacation Bible School she was reading at that moment, for crysake:)  My remote microphone was gorked, I messed up the order of service at least twice, and we got at least one complaint about the bulletin cover.

But other than that, Sister Mary Lincoln, the play was fine:)

The message, largely, was based on things I've read on friends' blogs in recent weeks- about the recent controversy about harassment at Readercon and the organization's official (and eventually revised) response to it.  I felt a need to speak on the importance of forgiveness, but these recent events finally made clear to me that forgiveness is not merely the flip side of apology.  What I didn't "get" about the whole Readercon reaction was why the guy's attempt at apology was so angrily refused.

In time, though, and largely through the help of another online friend's experience, I came to understand:

( Edited a bit to omit some prior references and such... )

It was important for me to expound on this message to others because of how hard it's been for me to understand and accept it myself. On at least three occasions I can think of over the past several years, I've had someone remove me from their online life (or some meaningful part of it) because of something I said, or otherwise referenced, in the things I've written here. In each of those cases, I made an immediate and what I believed was a genuine effort to apologize. (There were other incidents where the same things happened, I apologized just as quickly, it was accepted and our friendships were restored, maybe even improved, as a result of resolving the misunderstanding.)  Until these recent events, I always felt sad, and a little frustrated, that I'd been unable to reconcile with these other people, and that my efforts to apologize weren't even acknowledged, much less accepted.

But that's part of this. Like the quote above put it, "you do not get to choose how you apologize.”  It's far better to accept what happened as a consequence of my own words or actions, and focus on the friendships I can continue, and any that I can restore by reaching out to those who may have hurt me, rather than hounding those I've wronged into further corners of discomfort by anything I've ever said or done.

If that was you, ever, I am sorry. But I won't go out of my way to dwell on it anymore unless you tell me you want me to.