Many, many clergy do not have a notion of how to take care of themselves—to indulge themselves in any way—and that is, really, the purpose of the conference. But for me? Well, there’s the thing about spending two or three days a year pretending like you’re a little more upper class than you are—I guess my old 60s informing rears its little ugly head. Quick, throw it another crab and lobster fritter… And my West Virginia mountain sensibility doesn’t mind style and class, it just doesn’t like the idea that you can take a bunch of ministers and pass them off as the Astors on the Titanic. It’s the reason I could never, ever get married (or blessed or not-blessed) in an Edwardian-style morning coat. To me that would be pretending that getting married somehow made me, for a day, upper crust and English. To me, the One Unforgivable Sin Against the Spirit may well be Anglophilia.

But, really—this unease with opulence in this form is what one sister calls, as she rolls her eyes, a luxury problem. The kind of problem anyone can afford to have. The kind of problem, ultimately, that isn’t a problem. The kind of problem that we all should be so lucky to have.

…Mind you—it wasn’t the first time during the day that people had looked at me a bit askance. Earlier in the day we had meditated on the idea that we are the Lord’s beloved in whom he is well pleased. We shut our eyes for a full five minutes and thought about it. That, perhaps, was the best time at the conference. Just asking a huge room full of clergy and the Loves of Their Lives to shut up for five minutes is, to my mind, about the equivalent of moving the mountain to Mohammed. All I could think about were my toes.

Katharine asked us to talk to the people around us about what we had thought about. There were four others sitting near us, two other couples. No one spoke. And I thought, “Well, it won’t take me long.” And so I said, “I thought about my toes.” And four heads strained the necks underneath them into a head-moved-back-now position.

“Your toes?”

And what does that have to do with some battle weary US Episcopalians who hang out at a blog actually getting around to building a school in Central Tanganyika?
They may just be tired enough of the arguments and the words and the meetings and the fighting and the threats and the pronouncements to step back from all that for a bit and build a school.
If you want to understand what a guy named Harry is going on about you can read the rest here.

Update: The collaborative website is up -  Sail in the Wilderness