A LA LA Day on L A Night

When the Presiding Bishop opened the joint session for the purpose of receiving the budget for the Triennium, she indicated that the budget would feel like death.

About the same time, I noticed my Blackberry vibrating. I had a message. The sender wrote, "My job is being eliminated, can we get together?" My heart sank. My Blackberry started vibrating again. A text message from a colleague about another friend had arrived. After the third message arrived on the now I know why they call them "Crackberries," I shut down the computer, packed up and left the joint session.

What in the name of God were they thinking when it was only minutes before the joint session that they advised staff who are in Anaheim (and who had been asked to engage with the public and put a human face on the national Church Center) that their jobs were being eliminated.

A human face was put on the budget for me as the names of the 37 staff people began to dribble out. Mind you – the budget hasn’t even been adopted.

In Pastoral Theology 101 folks in the ordination process learn the basics of human relations.

In Clinical Pastoral Education people learn a methodology of delivering news especially bad news, and human resource studies have dwelt on the day of the week, time of day and setting for telling employees that they were being let go.

Didn’t anybody think of the pastoral implications of what they were up to yesterday? Where were the chaplains? People can’t travel back home with the same sense of self worth that was packed for the trip out.

Survivor syndrome is beginning to set in for the remainder.

What a thoughtless mess.