Me: Hi! My name is Megan!
You: Hi Megan! Who are you exactly, and why the blog? I have many questions for a made-up straw person!
Me: I am an ordained Episcopal priest, formerly working as a college chaplain in the Diocese of Arizona. I then moved to be the Assistant Rector of St. Paul’s, in Kansas City, Missouri. Now, I am the rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church, in Ithaca, NY. (And this blog has now been running for over five years. It is practically attending kindergarten and reading.)
You: So you live in New York?
Me: Yes, but the state, and not the large city.
You: So you’re a coastal elite then, like I’ve been warned about on the news?
Me: Uh, not quite. I live in a smallish, college town in upstate New York, filled with waterfalls, bookstores, and places to recycle. I work at an awesome church there, and it’s pretty great. Also, I knit, collect shoes, and sometimes protest things. I also try to convince my cat not to attempt global domination.
You: That sounds like fun.
Me: It is! Any other questions while I have you here, O Imaginary Straw-Figure?
You: Yes, why do you make so many relentless jokes about everything? Shouldn’t you be more serious as a clergy-type person?
Me: Well, maybe. But there is a lot of really horrible stuff in the world already. Humor is my way of coping, of sorting the important stuff from the adiaphora (unimportant stuff). Also, let us not forget that God made the Leviathan for the sport of it. Probably because God thought it would be really funny. And in a society where, largely, people have been trained to be unemotional, or emotional only on a very surface level, convincing them to laugh first often gets them to feel safe enough to venture into the harder emotional territory.
You: Wow. That got deep.
Me: Yup. Sometimes that’ll happen.
Red Shoes, Funny Shirt 
love it!
Ann Dearman from Eastern Shore Chapel.
Love the reply on the serious stuff. I get some criticism from New England family friends about “shouldn’t I be more serious” about the religion stuff. I can’t bear to bit my tongue in front of my own mother in my mother’s house…. we have to let our hair down some place!
please visit North Carolina! I would love to meet you in person–and share laughing for a change!
It’s not just North Carolina. Try East Texas for a bit
Also DioDC and its Maryland suburbs…
Love this post. A few years ago I got to teach world religions to one of Mr. Girard’s granddaughters. Imagine a grown woman going all fangirl and swooning at the feet of a ten year old, who didn’t quite understand my admiration for her grandpa.
Nice to meet another priest who refuses to take her vocation too seriously!
Megan, love your entries this year (my first with Lent Madness). Your level of communication has surpassed even your EFM days. Emily Fitzgerald
megan, please contact StStephen’s Episcopal in Newport News,VA at ststephens372@verizon.net…we need your address. Thanx
Thanks for sharing that, Megan. I thinik sometimes we have to remember to not take ourselves too seriously!
All of the above is why we miss you so much in AZ now that you are in that square state with cor…oops! Sorry, shouldn’t have gone there!
I wore red shoes with my cassock and surplice in seminary. I won’t name the seminary, but it was then abbreviated CDSP. And I got a thirty minute lecture about my red bowling shoes being inappropriate from the sacristan. I may not have responded in clergy appropriate syntax.
But my grammar was good. And my shoes matched my Book of Common Prayer perfectly.
Good to read you, Megan.
sigh… I don’t even know where to begin. I haven’t come out publicly with what I’d like to share with you, but lets just say I “got the call” and I’ve a long long way to go until I get to where I need to be. I couldn’t believe there are episcopal blogging women priests, and a friend that I shared my news with found “Dirty Sexy Ministry” and through a twitter follow I found you, right here in my homeland of wordpress. I’ve been wandering around trying to figure it all out, and now that I have, I’m trying to make the connections I know will only help my journey from here. I hope you’ll check out my blog, and if you want to reach out to me my email is lauramomma27@yahoo.com, because I’m not going public anytime soon. I also all of this makes sense, heh heh.
Megan, have you thought of working on my side of the pond? We can have lady bishops now, unbelievable though it is. Why it took a generation to get there I don’t know. Much as I love the Church of England some of its more arcane mysteries still pass my understanding!
On the days when I receive a bill for going to the doctor, I do wonder about hopping the pond! 🙂
Thanking God for you, Riot Rev, and for all clergy who know that laughter is the way into our souls.
Dear Megan, Just came across your name on the Collect for today in Lent Madness and have checked out your blog, which is great by the way. Sounds like you are having a great time with kids, adults, etc.. Hello from Epiphany. Judi Frerichs
Also found you through Lent Madness. Love your work. Blessings. Dan Lester, LEM, LEV, Usher, Reader, general dogs body at Grace Episcopal, St. George, UT.
I appreciated your essay/blog. [I guess my use of the word essay tags me as a geezer.] your argument shines the path past doctrine to the original right praise of Orthodoxy. Thanks.
I thoroughly enjoyed your article on foot washing. My first encounter with foot washing was at a Cursillo in the early 80s. This was a co-ed weekend and was multi-cultural. In the early 80s in S. FL the races usually didn’t mix. The team washed the feet of the candidates and I washed the feet of a very large African-American man. When I looked up into his face and hugged him there were tears running down his cheeks. Fortunately, today our churches are mixed and the parish where I worship, though small, has people from 26 different countries. All brothers and sisters in our blessed Lord.
God bless you all.