Work from home -- in another country! And: clergy exchanges

This is just a section of something I'm working on that doesn't have much to do with Egeria. It's just further evidence of my bird obsession. I'm not even really into birds much outside of an artistic context, but I gravitate to them when I'm designing something. Something about the way they carve up the space is very pleasing, in a similar way to flowers. This is obviously cut paper. The real thing is about five or six feet high (why don't I know!?)and will be crisscrossed with ribbons of calligraphy. Yes, I am an Arts and Crafts fiend too.

Anyway, I had another thought about Orthodox home exchange. Well, this applies to home exchange generally, really. Increasingly, people are able to work from home and send stuff in/conference call to work. So here's the thing. What about going to another country for, say, three months, working from your 'home from home', and absorbing another culture and language in your off hours? Ordinarily you couldn't consider such a thing because the hotel bill would pretty much kill you dead, but with home exchange there is no hotel bill. If you are able to be away, and your host is able to be away, for that long, then Bob's your uncle.

Another thing is that I was listening to a wonderful series of podcasts from Ancient Faith Radio by my new e-friend Susan and her husband Fr Gabriel called Musing on Mission. It chronicles, quite literally, their mission plant (in New Mexico) pretty much from day 1. There is a lot to relate to for me in this, since that is what my husband and I did exactly six years ago this month (this being Aug 2008), but since I am ramping up this Egeria business one thing really popped out for me in one of the podcasts. Fr Gabriel mentioned the pressure and anxiety for the mission priest (I am paraphrasing) knowing that if he has to be away there is no one to keep things going, that there is a gap while people have no teaching and no services.
Well, that is one thing that Egeria can address! Clergy who need to get away can exchange with other clergy who need the same, and experience the freshness of a different parish, maybe even a radically different type of parish! It would be an opportunity for the folks in a mission to hear another voice, yet one in solidarity with their regular mission priest. It is reassuring for new converts in an isolated area to have someone come from far away and say roughly the same things their priest says -- thus showing that he is not some kook/renegade/potential cult leader, and that he really is plugged in, and they through him, into the conciliar and universal, one holy catholic and apostolic Church. This can especially be valuable where people have little or no opportunity to travel themselves.

So thinking about that leads me to another idea for the site. We can set it up so that a priest will be able to put a 'clergy exchange' symbol to indicate that you would be interested in swapping with another clergy family or individual for the chance to experience and help out another parish and walk a mile in another priest's shoes. This can even work for priests' holidays -- it solves the problem of how to find a substitute, and since the travellers need to be somewhere for Liturgy anyway (riiiiiight? we don't take holidays from God, riiiiiight?) he might as well be filling in for a brother priest. Am I making sense? Right, since I'm not sure, I'm going to sign off and get some shut eye. . .soon.

The work continues. . .

Here's how it's looking so far; at least we're on to a cool idea. The site will look like a travel journal, and when you go to a new 'page' it will look like -- a new page! Yeah, I know!

That page on the right may be recognizable to residents (past and present) of Edinburgh as a fairly strange and vaguely incompetent drawing of George IV bridge. I think I did that on my lunch break working at the Royal Museum of Scotland. On the left in the picture-- not that you can see it -- is the Elephant Cafe, where somebody or other wrote Harry Potter. I probably saw her a few times; it was during the same couple of years, and I went there for coffee all the time. It's also where I learned the cool trick of deciding who goes first in Scrabble based not on a letter drawn but on who can make the longest word to kick off the game. Not from JK, of course; just some random person --or was it!

The lettering is not great -- I know -- I just dashed it off quickly to see how the hand drawn thing would look. It will be laid out better, I promise. The gauzy, abstract background is a piece of cheesecloth I scanned, over top of a piece of a twinkly cardigan of mine. Too much information? Yeah, I thought so.

Well, I have to go and keep working on the site. It's all systems go now! We're trying to get it all up and running this fall. Watch this space!