A Comment from the Sr. Warden

            

Our guide through the discernment process, Fr. Tim Sexton, has suggested that it will be helpful to give the congregation a touch of what the Appreciative Inquiry is like, so I'd like to share what I said when the vestry did its introduction to the process.

            

The question we were asked to consider, with a partner, was a time or event which had been meaningful to us as individuals at St. Thomas. Since the big ceremonies of my life (marriage, babies' baptisms) were mostly at my home church in Tucson, I was surprised to find that two big events for me were memorials, those of Bill White and Martin Fuller. At Martin's service, I read the New Testament lesson from Romans 8; it is  the familiar:

I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, or depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

As in last Sunday's lesson, St. Paul can make a great list, and this is a stupendous list, covering so much of the human condition. But I was teaching Advanced Placement English Language at the time, and we were learning about rhetorical devices. I wondered, in my Trivial Pursuit mind, how this sounded in Greek. So after the service, I asked Warren Smith to help me find out. He too identified this device as "polysyndeton," just meaning repetition of conjunctions. But he found a copy in Greek to show me, and I stored the knowledge for future use. I ended up copying and pasting the two versions, Greek and English, side by side and showing them to my students. It was a fun lesson for them, which helped etch the principle in their memories; I used it a number of times. It always brought back the loving kindness of the St. Thomas family, the warmth of our good-byes, the power of ceremony, and the comfort of a place where there are no stupid questions! The passage also reminded me of why we read lessons over and over and they always seem fresh. This refreshed and refreshing memory is at least part of what is achieved with Appreciative Inquiry.

-E.C. Senior Warden