Welcome Back, Pigeons!!

The HILLS are alive, with the sound of PeaceBang!!

Well, WHAT FUN.
I abandoned this blog about two years ago so that I could focus on finishing my Doctor of Ministry degree. That mission is accomplished and I graduated on May 21 in a funny hat and with many beloved friends and parishioners present. Thank you for your expressions of support and congratulations throughout the process. I am now the proud owner of a big whomping dissertation called “Covenanting: Ancient Promise and New Life For the Contemporary Church” which I think deserves to be published but you know, I just don’t feel like doing the work to get it to publishers. Maybe later, after I’ve had a few beers and thrown some books down a flight of stairs to release the tension.

The Facebook and Twitter phenomena took off right after I stopped blogging here, so I have been carrying on a lively discussion over at Facebook (as PeaceBang), which I will continue to do. I love the discipline of having to condense my blatherings to a few pithy phrases, which means that I will be blogging here on a less frequent basis than I used to. As I remarked to a crowd of Unitarian Universalists earlier this week at our General Assembly workshop on ministry and social media, I am verbally manic, so this is a health practice for me. No, it really is. If not for all of you I might be in a rubber room somewhere pontificating to the walls.

So this blog will be for the lengthier blatherings. It will be for podcasts and for a nice long coffee or cocktail break, as opposed to the shots of espresso we’re all tossing back as we stand at the Facebook bar. The PeaceBang blog may occasionally even be as long as a dinner party or a retreat as we converse at luxurious lengths about issues facing the Church, the soul, the world, and “RuPaul’s Drag Race, Season 4,” or whatever tickles our fancy. I have such a ticklish fancy, as you know!

My dear friend and partner in crime, the Rev. Scott Wells, has continued to advise me and to construct this blog. I really couldn’t do this without him.

The Rev. Dr. Timothy W. Jensen

I have just learned that my dear friend, Tim Jensen (who commented here frequently as The Eclectic Cleric) died yesterday morning. Tim had been battling cancer for the past 18 months.

When we were last together in June, we got into about ten one-sided arguments (me crabbing at Tim, Tim good-naturedly tolerating my bitchiness) during a trip to Tim’s beloved Nantucket. I knew he was very sick but he was so hopeful. He moved back to the West Coast immediately following our jaunt to Nantucket to be close to family and passed away peacefully yesterday morning (the hour of worship, how appropriate) after a very rapid decline.

You can read Tim’s blog here.

His last act of friendship to me was to send Max three wonderful chewy toys in the mail.

Tim, I love you, I will miss you, God bless you.