then you’re torn from the college community and shipped off to start in a church, in a new place with new people, where everyone already knows your name. and being public isn’t just about being visible -- it’s also about the way in which you are visible. suddenly you are different. isolated. and the clothes you wear are not your own but of your church and your christ, whose gospel you’ve begun to proclaim simply by your being. you are still yourself, with all your idiosyncrasies and flaws. but you have also begun to represent something other.

christ came in weakness and vulnerability to the cross, but also in glory and power in the resurrection. christian ministers are not smothered by christ in our orders, but made more fully ourselves, more fully alive. perhaps the paradox of all these things will one day reveal for me a kind of polyphonic beauty. but right now, i hide the burdens of anxiety and depression within the folds of my new cassock, praying daily for the strength to find myself beneath its weight.

this is a new venture. i don’t know what community i fit into anymore, on tumblr or elsewhere. but I need a place to speak into the void, to breathe it in, to be myself fully and publicly in all my mess and pain