Happy New Year, Mr. Johnson. It will for sure be interesting, and I hope, very peaceful and fulfilling for you.

Chris -
Sorry your year ended on such a down note, but things just have to get better after this, right?

But here is wishing you a Happy (and prosperouser) New Year and a Glorious Epiphany!

By the way, the Continuum has been here since 1977. Yes, we have had our bumps and bruises along the way, but we are still here and still very much Anglican.

We’ll leave the light on for ya!

First. Happy New Year, Johnson. I sincerely hope it’s a lot better than 2012 turned out.

Second, I get your previously-expressed reservations about ACNA. I get that. Sometimes ACNA makes me wanna pull my hair out. There are a lot of reasons for this, but there’s one line of your inner conversation here that really hits me where I live, and it’s this one:

“Because I know that I’d eventually have to do the last ten years all over again. And I’m no longer willing to fight the same fight over and over.”

Well, okay, two lines. ACNA needs to tighten up. I don’t always agree with N.T. Wright, but I actually think he’s right about ACNA: it’s a coalition held together by string. Also: united by a common enemy, in an “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” way. That’s never good, because once the enemy disappears— say, as a consequence of a combination of heresy, demographic winter, and irrelevance— then a lot of the glue dries out and things tend to fall apart. That’s just an observation from history.

But even with those caveats, I still think you should throw in with ACNA. I’m not exactly a gung-ho ACNA cheerleader, but there’s the best hope Anglicanism in America has now. If we don’t all throw in, I figure Ecclesia Anglicana as we know it might not stand much of a chance. Maybe that’s just my lack of faith talking, though.

Anyway, I don’t want to tell you what to do. I hate people who give unsolicited advice probably as much as you do.

Best wishes and blessings in 2013.

Wishing you a better ’13, CJ. Was listening to our local all-news radio station this morning (Bay Area folks will know the one) and heard about a local unemployed grad, who had been searching for a library position for a couple of years with no success. Applications in everywhere. He was just hired. He actually had two offers, one to become prison librarian in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The other to be the head librarian at the American University in Kabul. He chose Kabul.

The station thoughtfully included advice for him from a former president at the AUK, who just happens to reside in the Bay Area. This gentleman admitted that an American accepting work in Kabul needs to deal with a lot. First off, it’s helpful to ponder the fact that Kabul is the largest city in the world lacking a functioning sewer system. Secondly, he said, it’s wise to be alert each day for an attack on your life. He had a couple close calls, he mentioned casually.

I guess the moral is, we should count our blessings. Happy New Year!

May 2013 be better for us all! If it’s any consolation, Christopher, (in the “misery loves company” way) it’s been another exciting Christmastide for my family (the way it’s been for the past four years or so).

First, three days before Christmas Day, my brother had a health scare which meant he ended up in the A&E (ER) and was admitted to hospital, where he ended up spending his Christmas. Thank God, he’s home now and okay.

But last night – just to get its last kick in – when my sister and her husband were driving into town with the kids to buy them burgers’n'chips for their tea as a treat, some guy tries to pass them on the inside and ends up scraping the paint all along the side of their car and taking off the wing mirror. Again, thank God, not more serious.

Yeah. For next Christmas, I plan to dig a big hole and hide in it until Ephiphany – just in case.

Happy New Year!

CJ,
Happy new year. “The split has happened. It just doesn’t have an official name yet.As long as the Anglican right realizes it.” Rest assured, those of us on the right do realize it and we are OK with it.

trespinos,
“He was just hired. He actually had two offers, one to become prison librarian in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The other to be the head librarian at the American University in Kabul. He chose Kabul.”
Actually, as a former Michigander with property in the U.P. (deer hunting cabin) The differences between Kabul and the U.P. are population density and temperature. Two similarities are the lack of indoor plumbing and guns per capita.

2012 sucked. 2013 is already not looking much better. I hope all y’all, including our gracious host, have a better year.

The Youpers have that many more guns? Damn.

Kabul doesn’t have indoor plumbing, but neither does it have Kevin Thew Forrester and Mutual Ministry.

Anglican? What’s an Anglican? Something like the Dodo I suspect…hmmmm I just can’t recall….oh well.

God Bless you Chris – and all of you in 2013.

@midwestnorwegian: Like!

My favorite line: “Charleston was ‘Anglican’ before just about everybody else in the non-British world was. So if Charleston considers you to be ‘Angican,’ you are.”
Since I grew up going to St. Philip’s (the mother church), I agree whole-heartedly. Even though I no longer live in Charleston, most of my family does and they are just gearing up for the fight. I’m visiting later this month, so I’ll try and get an update on what lay people are thinking. Right now, the consensus seems to be that those who wish to stay with TEC are primarily professors from the College of Charleston and guilt-ridden liberals.

2012 sucked. Mama was sick most of the year and finally passed in November. Several friendships shifted around leaving me somewhat isolated (not all bad, but different). Work was a bear. Which is to say, my boss was a bear. She seems to be settling down, but you never know.

I remain deeply concerned about the political situation in this country. It’s not abstract, “out there”. It’s a present threat of tyranny and a real triumph of the culture of death: I believe the HHS mandates are signs of dark spiritual forces at work in our culture. The devil holds great sway in this country.

Lots of health problems in the family. but on the other hand, the great-nieces and nephews are coming along to replace us old folk. That’s one joy after another.

But here’s the important thing. In a few minutes I’ll get dressed and go to Mass for what a less delicate age called the Feast of the Circumcision. With all the sadness and changes of the last year, here we still are, believers in Jesus Christ. Despite all my sins, the Holy Spirit still draws me to worship and receive the Body and Blood of Christ. I hope that doesn’t sound to pious and sweet, because it doesn’t feel like that. It feels like I’d rather lay my aching bones here in front of the heater and watch Netflicks.

So sweet and sour, hard and easy, joy and sadness, God’s best for 2013.

I should have been more clear in my comment above: “those who wish to stay with TEC are primarily professors from the College of Charleston,” meaning they’re “not from around here” as my relatives say.

2012 had its good times, stepson is over his leukemia and has moved away, stepdaughter seems to be doing just fine after door knob sized brain tumor was taken out. Mom is 98 tomorrow, living at home.

The heater in the van quit and it has been -25c. Now it is fixed it only -5c, murphy and all that.

Over to you.

Happy New Year to Johnson and Johnson (the blogger who talks to himself and gets answers not the stinking rich Band-Aid folks)

I had the same concerns about ACNA; also, like you, I still have high hopes for SC – Fort Worth too.

Considering how awful 2011 was for us, this year was an improvement. Our daughter got a job after seven months of looking, moved, found the boss was insufferable and probably crazy, and got another job which she started two days after Christmas and it’s working out. Could have been lots worse. The year before, my husband had two surgeries and nearly died on the operating table during the first. It puts things in perspective! A good New Year to all MCJ denizens!

FW Ken, my (depressing) New Year’s reading is Os Guinness’s “A Free People’s Suicide.” Consider this quotation from St. Augustine of Hippo:

Suppose we were to define what it means to be a people not in the usual way, but in a different fashion such as the following: a people is a multitudinous assemblage of rational beings united by concord regarding loved things held in common. Then, if we wished to discern the character of any given people, we would have to investigate what it loves.

When I look around my country today I see people, perhaps a majority of us, who love abominations.

As to Anglicans, yes, I think the charism has passed away from Canterbury. We now have a collegial system of bishops united in faith in which the Western churches (TEC, CofE, ACC, and so on) play little part. If ACNA fails to gather together the remnants of the believers and to keep the faith, then it will pass away, but there will be Anglicans in Africa and Asia for some time to come.

I’m unemployed as well. My job ended up in India last August. Thank God the house and car are paid for. Still, I’d like to be back at work before little Henry joins his older brothers in May…

I keep all the unemployed in my prayers. This is a strange recession/depression. For those who still have jobs or whose retirement income is fairly stable, things aren’t too awful. Groceries and gas are high, but it’s not unbearable. The unemployed aren’t out there in bread lines the way they were in the 1930s. I wonder how those years felt?

Add me to the *2012 essed* column… Tom (our “brother”) diagnosed w/incurable lymphoma; hubby having some possibly very serious health concerns (no diagnosis yet); family ramping up the passive-aggressive stuff with which they punish me for refusing to go along with their denial; oldest kitty diagnosed w/renal failure; lousy year for flowers/butterflies; politics & the gathering fallout therefrom…And I haven’t even started my own much-belated “watching” etc dr. stuff (both of us resume w/all that next week)…But, I just got done taking down and putting AWAY all the stuff that brings Family Christmas to mind– YEAH!– and seeds/flower starts catalogs will be arriving now, the Hyper-cat’s
decline remains gradual so far due to the pills & Rx
food, soon it will be Candle Mass which with its echoes of Christmas is when I quietly do my celebrating unencumbered by old baggage and secular crapola, and we could be as little as 9-10 weeks away from Snow Crocuses, mercifully timing right around Tom’s next PETscan. The good thing about having run out of time to get new ones naturalized means that there will be a wave of 70 Blue Lights (3 lavendar outer petals, 3 white inner petals) blooming in their temporary location in the Blue quadrant of the Butterfly Bed (at “the foot” of the Butterfly Bushes
Cross, and where my statue of Our Lady stands) which will be very pretty indeed. (They really do seem to glow.)……My prayers are with everyone here for a good 2013 and especially others who are under pressure and most especially you, Christopher. Love in Christ to all!

“guilt-ridden liberals.”

Is there another kind?

PIlgrim,

Liberals are otbguilt-ridden, they have nothing for which o be guilty…except for associating with we, the unenlightened!

Not guilt-ridden!

Actually Fuinseoig, I’m not sure they have indoor plumbing in the U.P. either!

@ Katherine

“the 1930s. I wonder how those years felt?”

My aunt/foster mother(b.1922)used to tell my brother and me stories “about when you were little!” as we dubbed them. We learned fascinating snippets such as how to make a doll out of a clump of long grass. The root-ball was the head, the grass-clump was the rest of the “baby”.

In her sixties, a doctor told her that he could tell by her chest-bones that she didn’t get enough protein to eat when she was a child.

“Poverty” means something else now.

And I have a new problem for 2013 . My newest great granddaughter is to be baptized in a couple of weeks in the UCC, and I don’t know that I can overcome my disgust with that church to attend.

Wishing our host and all his guests a happy, peaceful and prosperous New Year. I don’t feel very good about 2012, but it was mostly due to physical and financial concerns. Viewed with an honest eye, there were still many things that I, personally, should be thankful for. One of those things is a place to visit with folks who have not drunk the Kuhlaid of the Zeitgeist.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, we didn’t have indoor plumbing until I was fifteen, and look how I turned out!

Er…

What’s the matter with Missouri? A teacher elected to the state legislature is refused unpaid leave — because he’s a Republican. Long-term leaves for teachers working for the state teacher’s union are fine; a Republican legislator, no way.

Katherine -
She should bring an immediate law suit and take it as far as she can. That is discrimination based on political party.

Of course, the question does arise: Why is she still involved in the public education system? Surely there are better things to do with her ability?

Well here is a bunch who decided Anglicanism was going to hell in a handcart way back in the 30′s. Refused to join up with Duncan and associates re those elephants in the room. Seem to have church plants in both English speaking “mission Fields” in North America. I land up for a breath of sanity every once in a while. Very refreshing. http://www.independentanglicanchurch.ca/

Sexist! It’s a man.

I hope that 2013 is a year full of kept promises for you. I pray that you find work soon that is both well paying and personally satisfying. I hope your personal life is richly blessed with good friends.

I have really enjoyed being part of the MCJ family and would very much miss this home away from home.

Ed The Roman.

Kabul does not have Deer Season.

My prayers are with all those who have struggled this past year and who face challenges in the next.

I also worry about the state of this nation and am alarmed by the number of people who just don’t seem to get the continuing attack on our personal liberties, religious and otherwise. I am tempted at times to stock up and stockade in. I think my income level keeps that at a wistful thinking level.

I suffer from Depression very deep at times and it is tempting to slip into despair. I don’t because I always hear the admonishment “To despair is to sin against the Holy Ghost.” Which cause me to A. wish that voice was more forthcoming with tidbits such as “Go ahead the jewelery store won’t miss one little diamond.” and B. that my Hope is not centered in envisioning what plans my fellow man has for this world but in the person of Jesus Christ.

This does not erase the reality of struggle for myself or others and it does not excuse me from trying to ease that struggle for myself or others. It does mean I remember what all of this is really about. It’s about Salvation. Don’t know if I can explain it well. It’s as if we are in a story and every page that is turned is leading to an ending where I know that everything that ever mattered will be brought to light. That light will illuminate how I have lived out the Salvation promise. It will be the cruelest and kindest light of all.

So I try and often fail to remember it is the fate of my soul that life in this world is truly all about. All else will pass away. God remains. I will remain. I pray to remain out of damnation. I pray the same for you all too.

Maxine – GO! Pray as the child is being baptized that God’s will will reign in that child’s life, the family’s life, etc.

Looking forward to a better year than last, but thankful not like 10 years ago in many ways.

Challenges are ahead of all of us in the future of Anglicanism – but not as bad as some have had it.

May God bless all of us with prosperity and peace in the days ahead. I give thanks for His blessings, but even more so, His character and how much He loves each one of all of us.

LAKRLAND
Thank you. I would welcome any more advice from my Anglican friends here.

Maxine, praying for the child would always be good. If she is “baptized” in names other than the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, then she won’t actually be baptized. Other than praying, I suppose letting her know as she grows what your own faith is might help. I was influenced by by grandparents whom I greatly respected and loved.

Paula Loughlin,
“I suffer from Depression very deep at times and it is tempting to slip into despair.”
Perhaps this will help.
http://sanjoaquinsoundings.blogspot.com/2010/06/christians-and-depression.html

Dale, Thank you very much that was an excellent read.

Maxine – Katherine has given you great advice. Be involved in the child’s life and the family’s. And pray! No matter where you are – even in an unfaithful church or country, God hears those prayers.

Maxine, since you asked for advice, here’s mine: what Katherine said. I think being there is valid not only to be a prayerful part of the child’s life, but also to see if a valid baptism actually occurs.

Happy New Year.

This should cheer you up. As far as I know it is not parody.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0S2WlvNTU8

Classic, Paula! I’ve been baptized!

Well, if God has called her, that settles it. Someone let the pope know, ok?

Thanks, Friends, for the advise. I guess I should quit preying for a big snowstorm that day! (so I don’t have to decide)

Chris, don’t worry. At some point, Ed, Fuinseoig, Dale, WTF, Wannabe, and I will get together and toast you.

That may be some serious airfare.