hellloooo

hello blogosphere! how are you? i've been wicked busy the past week, and that trend continues this week...i have a history paper, spiritual formation reflection, ethics midterm and hebrew quiz this week. and a 5k that i'm volunteering at on saturday. sigh. i'm exhausted already.  this past saturday was earth hour, and while we didn't have a huge crazy light turning out ceremony it was still fun to hang out in the dark and sing songs and eat dessert. boston.com (i think that's the globe) has a cool collection of some monuments and cities that went dark for earth hour. check, check, check it out! 

i'll try and write more later this week. love and hugs. r

Earth Hour 2009

hey everyone! just wanted to be sure you all knew about a fun event that's happening this saturday from 8:30-9:30pm, wherever you live. Earth Hour is an event where everyone is encouraged to unplug for an hour. there's an amazing video on the earth hour website of different cities turning lights off around the world. we're participating here at my seminary and i wanted to post the promotional sign i made using materials found in our student center, mostly in the recycling bins. 

grrr..and again i can't figure out how to make the whole picture fit. sigh. so click it and it gets bigger! like magic

and i went to boston too...

if you click on the pictures they get bigger...the second two are horizontal shots and are pretty cut off on the blog. 

couple of pics from va beach

same here. click the pictures to see the whole thing. 

this weeks sign of the apocalypse

i know i'm a little out of it, but i just checked out the NIT brackets and PENN STATE is ranked higher than UK. now, the apocalyptic signs are everwhere: 1. PSU and UK are in the same tournament 2. it's the NIT 3. PSU has a higher seed. it's time to bunker down. the end is near! 

the wheels on the bus go round and round...

hello blog! just a quick update as i will be writing more tomorrow and the next day, i'm sure. i spent the weekend at virgina beach, hanging out with the staff of the summer internship that i'll be doing. it was rainy and cold, but we had a great time. while we were there a friend from seminary called me and said that she had a family emergency and was heading up to boston on monday, could i come with her. well, having no spring break plans i said sure! so i left va beach at 10 this morning and got to boston a little after 10 tonight. i've been in the car for all but 2 of the hours i've been awake today! and i'm ready for bed... i'm here in boston for a few days, we'll leave thursday morning and we're not sure if we're heading straight back to richmond or if we'll go somewhere on the way back down south. i'll post more later, but just wanted to say hi to the blog world! i forgot my chord to get my pictures off my camera and onto the laptop. but soon! soon! there will be beachy pictures :O) hope you're all having a lovely week! 

procrastinating!

i should be reading for history or studying hebrew vocab, but instead i'm blogging. bad raquel. so we had dinner as a group tonight. our friend cooked and invited lots of people to come over and eat and take a break from midterm studying. dinner was fantastic, dessert was amazing, and we had a blast, just all sitting around and eating and talking and laughing. and since it was dinner the talk turned to food. but not any food, our campus dining hall food. now, i want to start by saying that our dining hall does a lot that is wonderful. if we have events we can use the silverware, glasses and plates- they even get them ready for us and wash them after the event; the produce is always amazing, our salad bar is always stocked with fresh fruits and veggies year round; they have coke products for which i (a diet coke addict) am forever grateful; they have fruit we can take with us; they do so many things well. but sometimes, it goes horribly wrong. and we have bad food, or just ok food, or hot pockets. yes. sometimes they put out hot pockets. and it's fine, you just make a salad or a sandwich that day, but still. so anyway tonight we were talking about our dining hall. most of the people at dinner eat there on a daily basis and so there were some complaints. and one person was apparently not happy with our complaining and started saying very loudly 'well at least you have food', and 'at least you can pay for the food', and 'there are starving people out there'. sigh. now, all of these things are correct, so what's my problem? well, some days the food is terrible. some days we all eat sandwiches because the other option is just gross. i am a firm believer that just because someone else has it worse than you, doesn't mean you have to accept something that's bad. when i was a counselor i would hear it time after time, because the client had a friend who had been beat up much worse, she felt like she shouldn't complain. this is not true! it is ok to have standards, it is possible to have standards as well as empathy for those people who don't have as much as you do. their lives are challenging in different ways than our lives, doesn't mean we need to take an oath of poverty and go live off the land. it might mean that for some people, but it probably doesn't for everyone. it's also possible to help those who are less fortunate than yourself and enjoy the things you are gifted with. 

ok. rant over. back to studying! also, if you haven't you should watch the jim gaffigan (sp?) piece on 'hot pockets'. if you go to youtube and search for 'hot pockets' its usually one of the first results :O) 

say what now?

i was reading a blog that i LOVE the other day and one of the contributers wrote the following sentence "i've never seen anything close to proof of the existence of any god in this world."  needless to say, i don't agree :O) for me it's easy. i wake up every morning and see god in the world. god is in the flowers and the trees, the sidewalks and buildings, the singing and the silence. whenever i doubt god, which happens more than you might think at seminary, all i have to do is think about visiting my friend in the hospital the morning after she gave birth. sitting there holding the hand of a 12 hour old baby, there can be no doubt in my mind about the existence of god. it's also something i try to convey in my pictures. that's why so many of them are of nature. i most easily and most consistently find god in nature. i try to capture that in my photographs. i know i don't always hit the mark, but i greatly enjoy trying. 

it's midterm week here at school so probably not much posting in the next few days. i have a history final that is sure to kick my butt. i will be in the library if you need me! i'll probably blog friday after it's over. 

happy wednesday! 

think i'll float on down, to richmond town

my mom and dad came to visit this weekend, here are just a few pictures. the monument is the robert e lee monument, the other thing is down at the river, and then the library. just so you can contrast that to the snowy library from a week prior :O) more on fbook. as always. happy monday!

it snowed!

we got about 9 inches of snow this past sunday night/monday morning. it was super fun, we had a huge snowball fight, played snow football, built snowpeople. and now it's slowly warming up to weekend highs in the upper 70's. it's great!

why i said 'coochi snorcher' in a chapel. and why i'd do it again.

in the past month i've had to become comfortable with the following things: saying 'coochi snorcher', acting out the memory of a rape, talking about masturbating in front of a woman, listening to fellow students moan, curse and yell. i've had to do all of this in front of my seminary president, inside the oldest chapel on our campus, which dates back almost 200 years.  so why did i do this? i told the story 'the little coochi snorcher that could' in our seminary production of 'the vagina monologues'. yes. you read that correctly. our seminary put on 'the vagina monologues'. if you don't know much about the monologues, you can read about them here. their wiki page has a good round up of criticism and controversy as well as a basic description.

so why did we do the monologues? and why in a chapel? the performance was part of 'gender justice week' here at union-psce. we spent the week with different activities; conversations about the difference in pastoral care with men and women, community break featuring a local DV center, planned parenthood, and a local health clinic, the showing of a video that supported sexual assault survivors, the selling of luminaries in honor of survivors of DV or SA, and the performance of 'the vagina monologues'. the cast was made up of students, faculty, staff, alumni, and even the wife of a student. we spent time practicing our monologues and when the time came to put our one night only performance on, we were all pretty excited and terrified, or as i said that night 'i'm scared and i can't wait'.  so why in a chapel? well. we are a seminary and the largest spaces we have available to us are both chapels. the only other option would have been to hold the performance in the dining hall, or move it off campus. we held it in the larger of the two chapels, which also happens to be the older of the two chapels. we moved all the chapel like stuff off the little stage area and the only thing that was left out was the baptismal font, and that's because the spotlight monologue, about a girl with fistula, was called 'baptized'.  

i hadn't heard much controversy surrounding our performance of the VM's, i'm not sure if people weren't talking about it or if they just weren't talking about it to those of us in the show. but after the monologues were over, hellooooo controversy. now let me set the stage the night of the show. some of us started up in the balcony, so we're sitting up there watching the people come in...'oh my gosh, there's a dean, oh my gosh there's another dean, oh my gosh there's my (insert class here) prof, OH MY GOSH THERE'S THE PRESIDENT OF OUR SEMINARY'. yes. our seminary president came to the vagina monologues. and it looked like he was having a pretty good time. so we did our performance, went home, passed out from exhaustion, and woke up and got on facebook (we are in grad school) and that is when the controversy began. there were lots of people who thought we did a great thing, and a few who really felt like we had not done a great thing, indeed that we had done something very, very wrong in having the VM's in the chapel. bless their hearts. there was one persons note that garnered, at last count, 60 comments. lots of this persons friends jumped on and were bashing us for doing this performance, and quoting scripture saying that since homosexuality was in the VM's and not in a way that was clearly defined as wrong that it shouldn't have even been on the seminary campus. others basically said they disagreed with some of the content so it shouldn't have been there, some said, and this part really pissed me off, that no one took into consideration how this performance would reflect on their ability to get a job, bless his heart. 

so why do i think it was an appropriate time and place? firstly, and this is no small thing, this was the space that would allow us to sell the most tickets. the money we raised went to the fistula foundation (you can read about it in the link above) and the more money we raised, the more girls we could help. secondly, we were not going to have it in the dining hall. thirdly, we asked, and received permission to have it there. yes it is a chapel, but it's also just a space with a lot of seats. when i came for my weekend to inquire we had a concert in this chapel. it was much less controversial, but still, that's not worship. someone pointed out at some point we use the chapel for weddings, not worship,when i worked with high school kids they played sardines, met in small groups, played 'capture the cookie', sang songs, watched slideshows, had discussions about sex; all of which i'd argue are important in the life of the church, but not worship. also, as others pointed out, god is bigger than the chapel. if we had performed this in the dining hall god would have been there. god is with us through the good times, the bad times, the heartbreaking times. it's absurd to think god is confined to one space. by allowing us to use the chapel our administration was saying that these issues, women's issues, are important to them. ending violence against women is important to them. that there is a place in the church for you if you've been abused, if you've been raped, if you're gay, if you're  a sex worker, if you're a british woman on a blue mat with a hand mirror. there's a song i used to sing in my youth group. 'they will know we are christians by our love'. allowing this performance to go on, in the chapel, on the seminary campus, supported by the president, various deans, various professors, loads of students, and many others shows our love for the survivors in our midst, and lets them know that the church is a place for them.