Phase I: Complete.

As most of you know, this summer I'm doing research on the Church of Sweden (Svenskakrykan). As of Wednesday evening, I have completed the first part of the research, which consisted of doing 7 interviews with various Church officials about the Church of Sweden.

A week from today, I made my first trek out of Stockholm to a small-ish town about 45 minutes away from Stockholm, called Uppsala. Uppsala is the "hub" (if you will) for the Church of Sweden. I met with some theologians about the consequences of accepting gay marriage into their theology. He gave me some interesting perpsectives on the subject, most of which did not even focus on the Bible. He spoke about ecumenism within the Church, and the Church's insistence on "loving the neighbor." There seemed to be less focused on strict readings of the Bible (and dare I say the Bible at all).

That Sunday I met with a former priest in the Church of Sweden, who gave me a much different, more evangelical-sounding account of the situation in the Church of Sweden. His perspectives centered around particular passages in the Bible.

On Monday I journeyed back to Uppsala, this time to meet with the ARCHBISHOP of the Church. For those of you unfamiliar with the Church of Sweden's heirarchy, he is the leader of the Church. I had built him up to be this really powerful, Wizard of Oz sort of character, only to find him of normal stature and very personable. I felt so lucky to be speaking with him, but he commented that I looked tired. He blamed it on the jet lag, and I happily took his scapegoat. In reality I haven't been sleeping as well as I'd like. Jon came up for the afternoon, so we grabbed dinner at a chinese restaurant. It's really interesting how different chinese buffets in Sweden are. Have experienced two different buffets, I can attest that they don't have General Tso's Chicken, which is a staple in American buffets.

On Tuesday, I met with Eva Brunne, the Bishop-elect of Stockholm. She is the first openly lesbian bishop, and she lives in a civil partnership with her wife. I thought she'd be really important to my study because she was an active queer in the Church, but she said her experience hasn't been that bad in the Church. Maybe her experience is different than others, or maybe I just really wanted it to be bad so I could show how much better it was getting. It could be that the Church of Sweden has been really accepting of homosexuals for some time.

After meeting with Eva, I went to the Gym and did my first real work out of the summer. It felt good to get back into the groove. I've missed having that part of my routine. I've decided to go to the core class and the yoga class. The core class wasn't really bad; I've always had pretty strong core. But the yoga class SUCKED! It was soooooo much harder than I ever expected. Holding those poses for several minutes BURNS. But I think it's gonna really help me with flexibility. Afterwards, I got this delicious salad. See above. mmm.

Then Wednesday I made my longest trek so far, all the way to Karlstad, Sweden. It was pretty hot all day, so sitting in a metal train car was not my idea of a good time, but while the train was moving, we had a pretty good breeze. Unfortunately, about five minutes from the Karlstad station, I heard this whistle blow. In the back of my mind I had this bad feeling, but I wrote it off as paranoia. About a minute later, the train stopped. My curtain was closed to keep out the sun, but from the window across from me I saw a big body of water. I hoped that this train station just had a really great view of the water, but when I looked out my own window, I saw another lake. We had stopped just minutes from Karlstad. There was a message in Swedish, but I couldn't understand it. But I managed to pick up on the general tone of the train...a hush fell across the entire car. A few minutes later, an Englishman announced that the train had hit a man (an apparent suicide). For the next three hours, we waited as the authorities did an investigation and cleaned up the remains/train. I ended up being about 3 hours late for my meeting, but luckily the Bishop I was meeting was still in his office. We had an excellent conversation with him and one of his chaplains. Afterwards, I was to tired and all I wanted to do was go home. I grabbed some dinner before heading back to Stockholm, very tired and overwhelmed.