claudine_c

This is an update on my ongoing vocation question to help members of my various (sometimes overlapping) social circles to keep up with where I am; I think I need help keeping up with myself too!

[This is also an attempt at getting back into blogging or online journaling, and I've got a new place for that, at Dreamwidth, which is built on a fork of the Livejournal code. My Dreamwidth posts should be cross-posted to Livejournal though.]

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In organising my Livejournal tags in preparation for linux.conf.au, I see that my linux.conf.au tag has one entry from 2007, in which I confess to not being a (Linux) geek. LCA 2007 was my first, and so far my only full LCA. That particular identity crisis affected me so much that in 2008 I planned to avoid all of LCA (in Melbourne! organised by friends!) and only went to the Linuxchix miniconf because day passes were introduced.

I already have two entries for LCA2009, listing my upcoming miniconference presentations. How did this change come about?

For one thing, LCA does seem to have a more diverse programme now than it did two years ago, with more user-level presentations as well as the traditional focus on kernel and hardware hacking. I think, though, that the way I look at myself has also changed significantly. In January 2007 I was trying to complete a degree that I no longer cared about; I did not feel confident about continuing my career in public health; and while I had begun some private conversations about vocations within the church, these were still at a very tentative stage. I didn't feel that I belonged anywhere, or that I had any professional or vocational direction. I might have initially hoped that LCA would provide some direction, but I only came away feeling that full-time work in IT was not my direction.

My sense of personal direction is certainly not clearer now; in fact, it is a lot more messy, and that mess is both rewarding and frustrating. Part of my development has meant moving to a new job that involves more creative and challenging explorations in the uses of computers in historical research. I am much more of an active geek now than I was two years ago, but back then I couldn't have imagined he shape my work would take; I hadn't had much exposure to the digital humanities at that stage.

I am a geek; but the issue of defining myself as geek or not-geek no longer matters to me. My horizons are wider, and involvement in the free software community can be rewarding without causing any existential angst.

Tomorrow I'm going to an Anglican Benedictine Abbey in Camperdown, western Victoria for three days. Then on Friday I will be grilled by have a few nice chats with a panel of people who will decide whether to recommend me for training for ordination. I think I am as ready as I'll ever be. Time has passed quickly -- when I started inquiring into this process about 18 months ago, I wouldn't have thought that I'd be ready to face the panel so soon.

The following Monday I leave for a Student Christian Movement conference in the Blue Mountains, followed by a few days in Sydney. I'll be taking my laptop and some work that I need to catch up on, but I don't expect to have internet access during the conference, so I will probably be mostly offline until 10 July.

To take my mind off the interviews, I was given 70 undergraduate essays on the history of psychiatry to mark last week, and still have five left to mark this evening. This is my first attempt at marking, and it's been an eye-opener; hopefully I won't be so anxious about my own writing, now that I see that a tutor can only give about 30 minutes' attention to each essay!

Yesterday evening I went to my first Year of discernment session, the first session for a new cohort. About twenty people attended, with a broad age range but a slight imbalance in favour of men. There will be about one session a month for the next twelve months, and apart from this introductory one they will be taken with another group of people who are six months ahead of us.

This session introduced perspectives on discernment. Two established priests spoke; one focused on trying to learn about oneself through prayer, counsel and Bible study, while the other introduced the basic principles behind the Spiritual exercises of Ignatius of Loyola. Over the coming year we'll be hearing about various aspects of ministry in the Anglican church.

I've had moments of terror since I realised that I was starting this process. (I can't pin down a specific time when I made the decision to take the possibility of ordination seriously. Various people slowly extracted the decision from me over a period of about half a year.) The discernment process is meant to help me decide: yes, I should be considered for ordination; or no, I should look at other opportunities. I don't know what those other opportunities might be. If, one year from now, I don't have a better sense of my future direction, I'm afraid I'll feel more lost and useless than I did a year ago.

But we were told that this is not a question of success or failure. We make a decision. (I hate making decisions!) If our choice is God's will, He will guide us further along that path. If it is not God's will, He will guide us along a different path. We have to trust that we'll eventually end up where we're supposed to be.

[I haven't been writing much lately, and it's not for lack of interesting things happening. I think it's fear of this semi-permanent recording of the discernment process as it happens. It might come back to bite me later; but it probably won't. Here is another fear that I need to confront.]