Tag: church

March to May, Pt 1

May 11, 2022 2 Comments

Places and Patterns

Here I was again, wanting to run away. At first I thought it was the impending dog’s mouth of summer.

It wasn’t. Okay, maybe that’s part of it. The prolonged, belligerent heat of South Texas is so alienating to me. But I am a grown ass woman with an air conditioner so I like to think I can get beyond the wool coat drenched in chicken broth climate.

But sure as the Earth’s orbit, March to May never feels right, and some part of me comes roaring forward looking for a way out. Something about place. Something about belonging.

Place and belonging have always mattered to me, but for some reason I have not, up to now, taken them into consideration when spring after spring my spirit came unmoored and wandered the map like a ghost looking for a haunt. In fact I barely noticed the regularity as spring after spring I grew fitful and anxious. Spring after spring home became hurt and I ached to be somewhere else, anywhere else. Just not here.

Perennial longings and predictable complaints crop up every year. It seems worth figuring out, here in the air conditioning. Indulgent, I know, and I’ll try to at least make it entertaining. But, also, you know, this is my blog, no one’s paying me for it. So if you’re annoyed, at least you’re not out a monthly subscription fee. I do hope observing self-inquiry helps get readers thinking about their own journeys, I mean the social media pros would tell me to end with a question. Here it is: Do YOU have a time of year that’s particularly hard for you?

Still, if it’s not helpful, or you find this kind of introspection obnoxious…feel free to click away. Because I’m devoting most of my independent writing this month (newsletters and blog posts) to that mysterious pattern.

Pattern: a series of things repeated.

My repeated spring things are restlessness, grievance, and anxiety.

Repetition is time, staking a claim. Time has claimed the spring for me, and it makes home feel all wrong. And there’s a part of me keeping that time, rolling out the discordant emotions right on schedule. Restless because life feels too long. Grieving the ways it is too short. And anxiously trying to keep moving so this place does not become permanent.

Mapping backward, asking this timekeeper, “what happened? Why do you ruin every spring?” I followed a series of stepping-stones in the form of memories where the feelings didn’t match the reality.

Here’s what I found first:

I found the entire process of pitching my book in March 2021 and wrestling with rejection letters through April, getting the contract signed in May, and as I crossed the threshold of this monumental life goal, like the thing I’d been dreaming would make me really, truly, finally happy…immediately feeling anxious it would somehow vanish.

I found the pandemic arriving on March 13, 2020, and my irrational response to scramble quickly to work harder as the world slowed to an eerie halt. I signed a contract in May for more rigorous and regular work than I’d had in two years.

I found April 2018, when I made my first successful pitch as a national freelance writer with very little confidence this career would continue.

I found becoming a mother on March 28, 2014, and being all at once overwhelmed with love and ashamed of how I grieved the loss of my autonomy, and the complication of my identity.

I found voluntary work trips when I should have stayed home. I found crippling grief after months of really productive therapy. I found close calls on bad decisions and lots and lots of empty bottles.

And then I found the first answer that might also be an explanation. A break big enough to set a soul to wander. It might not be the origin of everything, but it certainly originated something.

Ten years ago this spring, my home places stopped being home places. In March 2012 I was called into the church office where I worked to kick off my slow and reluctant divestment of religious burdens. I mean, they thought they were firing me, but the Spirit was waiting in the wings with some business to commence. And as thankful as I am for the spiritual freedom, the pain of cutting loose was real. I lost most of the things that made home feel like home: my job, my community, my religious tradition.

They told me I would stay on until May, so as not to signal a premature exit. Bi-weekly check ins to make sure I was sticking to the story, lying to the people around me about whose decisions were whose. And in the middle of that uncertainty, there was a pregnancy. And on the last day of May 2012, that pregnancy ended, spontaneously, on the same day my job ended. On the day I drove away from the community that felt like home, the tradition I’d been born into.

But I didn’t drive far. We briefly considered a move, but we stayed. I didn’t find a new home or a happier place. Emotionally maybe, or figuratively. I changed my patterns a little and my routes a little more. I got a new job, and then another and another. We added babies and a new house.

But if place matters, if belonging matters, I went nowhere. And for ten years I have been trying to redeem this place for myself, to belong here again. I don’t know if “here” is San Antonio, Texas, or Christianity, but I’m still here in all of them, but still not home in any of them. I tried to replicate what I had with necessary modifications (like being Anglican instead of Presbyterian), or to build something new on those same foundations (like being a journalist who writes about Texas). I have been a booster and an advocate, gotten as close as I can to the beating heart of this truly warm and wonderful city. I have been trying to find home among the familiar, but every spring the dissonance, the restlessness reminds me that I haven’t found it yet.

Is Church Worth Crying Over?

April 6, 2022 No Comments

A lot of churches are struggling right now. In addition to the people leaving for reasons unrelated, the pandemic got many of us out of the rhythm of weekly attendance. But what’s more, when we fell out of the rhythm, we realized that we felt something else. We felt relieved.

Some have told me they feel happy not to have to put on a holy show when they have not felt close to God in years.

Others feel relieved not to have to avoid the harmful and offensive things said casually by people who have found church to be a safe place to air their racist, sexist laundry.

A few feel relieved to not fear being found out for a lifestyle the church condemns.

My own relief was related to severe social anxiety, particularly around people judging my kids. Nevertheless, two years in, I’m missing community. It’s important to be together, and I need to see myself in the context of the family of God. But after two years off, and eight years of struggle before that, I’ve got some suspicions.

Suspicion #1: I don’t think calling yourself a church makes you any more likely to operate as the body of Christ than a PTA or a Country Club.

Church as we know it is not inevitable. It’s not the only way to do this, and it looks radically different than it has in the past. But we seem so married to the WAY we do things, assuming the format was ordained, and seem to be on the hunt for the corrupting influence. I’m reading and hearing a lot of hand-wringing over the church’s fumbles and stumbles, and how they have contributed to the present anemia. Blame the Trump era. Blame the 1980s. Blame the culture. Blame social media. Blame CRT. Blame women. Blame millennials. Blame sex scandals.

A lot of folks are saying we need different leaders, more humble leaders. The problem, they assess, is with the type of person attracted to the pulpit and celebrated there. We’re picking arrogant, rough people to do holy work.

But what if the work of church-the-institution makes humility nearly impossible. What if it makes holiness obsolete, because it is inherently embedded in a hierarchical power structure that will either corrupt or devour you? Have we created a power center instead of a body?

If we start there, then, yeah, I agree we should take a look at who feels called to this work.

Suspicion #2: Power-hungry pastors are inevitable in the current model

Could it be that this “calling” so many feel is actually the call of the One Ring? Is it possible that the desire to tell others how to live, how to worship, how they may access God is a desire we should be more careful with? Should we be more suspicious of those who desire to speak for God?

I’m open to being wrong here, but I spent 10 years surrounded by people who were “called to ministry” (myself included) and I didn’t see a lot of people delighting in the lowly things. Like real service to messy folks. I saw a lot of aspiring executives, creatives, and moguls. A lot of folks who didn’t know how to be in a relationship where they didn’t have some kind of authority.

I also saw a lot of people delighting in the “me and my bros against the world” vibe so many seminaries cultivate. So few admitting that authority over how people related to God counted as real power. These fools believed they were the margins when they were, like the elves or dwarves, keepers of rings themselves.

Here’s the thing: I heard the call of the One Ring in my own dark nights, and I saw its glint in the hungry eyes around me.

Years later, after I left, I got the affirmation I was after. Not from ministry, but from other places.

I heard the thunderous applause.

I saw the audience numbers, in the form of clicks and views.

Oh this, I realized, this is all I was after all along.

My soul is tarnished, friends, just like everyone who desires a public platform or a position of leadership. It’s a desire for power, and if I indulge it, if I stop trying to appeal to people and start trying to exercise authority over them…you should run. I have no authority. Don’t let me pretend I do. Only your spirit can determine what is true or right or lovely in my words.

And I’ve seen the so-called discernment processes governing “calling” in the churches we know. Governed by men who do not admit their own biases. Continuously elevating men who agree with them, who smoke cigars with them, who look like them. I’ve seen the training process, the boot camp teaching the “called” to fight off bad ideas instead of how to divest oneself of power as regularly and constantly as possible.

Power doesn’t just tempt you to abuse it. It doesn’t just become a problem when you steal, harass or berate. Those are end-stage symptoms. Power has to be accounted for in every interaction. It’s not something you use or don’t use. It’s always working, and you have to adjust accordingly.

Suspicion 3: We will be churchless for a while

The last church we attended did not survive the pandemic. Its last day was March 6. So my habitual return to the place I first and last met God is now a bigger question mark than ever. Do we find a new church? Do we keep holding onto the glimpses and glimmers in spite of the broken record of power and corruption? Or do we get serious about building something new.

Where would we even begin?

Jesus’s whole thing was this “upside down kingdom”… this impossible scenario where whoever desires to save their life must lose it. We have no idea how to do that, friends. The early church was making it up as they went, and things only went further off the rails after that. Cathedrals. Popes. Wars. Empires.

I want there to be a “church.” I want us to gather together, to support and love each other, to place ourselves in the context of belonging. Together we can support those in need. We can be the light that beckons weary travelers. I know there are places and communities and networks who do this. People have told me how they find it in recovery groups, specific churches like House for All Saints and Sinners, or religious networks like Evolving Faith. I know there are ways to intentionally gather, but the hard work seems to be figuring out how to separate leadership and power.

There’s no radical model around me. I’m not within a stone’s throw of some new kind of institution. So the best I can hope for is to either find God embodied between just two or more, or, if I ever return to the institution, to find one where the corrosive effect of power is taken seriously, not as something to which certain personalities or governance structures are just immune. But for today, just being real, I’m not sure I have the energy to look.

Sounds like not-a-me-problem

February 7, 2022 4 Comments

When I was younger, in my certainty-loving, ultra-controlled churches, there was a right way to hurt and a wrong way. Comfort and compassion were for those who had done no wrong, who had been brave, who had managed to save a few people on their way out of the burning building. Comfort and compassion waited to see how you would handle your grief.

Asking questions or pointing out flaws, especially of those in authority, turned into a me-problem. My tone. My disrespect. My ingratitude.

Prophets are told their anxiety disqualifies them. Anxiety is the thing that tells you something is off, friends. Of course prophets have anxiety. Maybe not chronically, but also, maybe chronically.

Helpers are told to withhold grace. They must choose between quenching the spirit and obeying authority while everybody waits for the hurting person to say the magic words.

I believe we can do better, but we have to get rid of some things first. We have to get rid of certainty and hierarchy. We have to welcome back the prophets, and embrace mystery and belonging.

Tolerance of question-askers and mess-makers is not the goal. Those are the prophets, the new day welcomers. They are essential. They should be celebrated.

Something New and Good : Requiem

April 16, 2013 No Comments

My sister and her husband were living in my grandparents’ old house. The alarm, which had not been turned on for literally over a decade suddenly went off for no apparent reason. It was loud (which upsets my sister), and it was relentless. My brother in law tried turning it off, dismantling it, and disconnecting it, and still it screamed.

Suddenly he turned, and there was my sister, who had been outside calling relatives to try to figure out the alarm code. She was holding heavy duty scissors and wearing her game-over face. With no pause for discussion, she took a handful of the freshly exposed wires and cut straight through them. The alarm stopped. She handed the severed hardware to her husband and walked away. The alarm is turned off in a permanent way.

That’s what happened to me and God-talk.

Once upon a time, my faith was easy for me to talk about. I loved going to conferences on topics like “the church” or “the Church” or “this thing called church.” I could worship pretty freely in most settings (I say most because of my weird squeamishness in charismatic services). Nothing got me jazzed like a good theological debate or the inside jokes that only Bible students can access. I wanted to live my life in the semantic fray of those who would decide what is most important to Jesus, and what’s really wrong with the world.

And then came a concentrated series of misunderstandings, hurt feelings, and disappointments that made corporate worship and spiritual intimacy almost unbearable. The language of these misunderstandings was the language of my faith. The words that hurt my feelings cut straight to my identity, because they were words of my faith. The disappointments knocked the wind out of me all the more because they were delivered in the same language I had used to pin my hopes to the church.

The words that had been my life now sound like death to me.

The music, the memes, the tropes, and the catchphrases of Christianity feel like itchy wool on the blistering summer of my heart. So it has been with a fair amount of desperation that I’ve been hunting for sounds that don’t make me cringe or want to hide. Right now, that means going to the symphony.

Last weekend the San Antonio Symphony, San Antonio Mastersingers, Trinity University choir, and UTSA choir performed Verdi’s Requiem, and they did so with a grandeur I had never seen from this group of hard-working and humble musicians. Trumpets in the mezzanine. Bass drums. Super-titles. My lungs were vibrating behind my ribs from the sound waves, and my soul shook somewhere deep my guts.

In the wake of the explosions at the Boston Marathon, the shootings at Sandy Hook, and Kermit Gosnell’s house of horrors, and the millions of lesser injustices we witness every day, we should all appreciate the need for songs of grief and cries for mercy. The concert was universal and personal in a way we often forget that we need. Not to compare my grief with the victims of tragedy, but simply to point out that death has many faces, and no paltry words or chords can match it.

Verdi was not a man of public faith, but he used the requiem format – a sung funerary mass from the Catholic church – to honor deceased friends and a common political ambition of a unified Italy. He was skeptical of the church, and yet the power of a private devotion wasn’t lost on him. His distrust did not run so deep that he would abandon the vocabulary of faith. Instead he made it beautiful by composing one of the finest pieces of music to carry it past the ears and into the soul, past the cynical guards who kept the words themselves at bay.

I can relate.

As I listened, four soloists and three choirs delivered the haunting words of the Kyrie, Agnus Dei, Sanctus, Lacrimosa, Lux Aeterna, and the rest until finally the Libera Me, which literally means Deliver Me. The words were displayed on supertitles, but I didn’t need them to know that this terrifying and haunting beauty was at once the death mass for who I thought I would be, and a reminder of why I’m still tangled up in this tattered and sweat soaked faith of mine.

I’m not who I was. Not headed in the same direction, not in the company I used to keep. And the gulf grows greater every day.

It’s difficult to worship. It’s difficult to talk about my faith, or to hear others talk about the faith we share. But it is not difficult to hear beautiful music. Music that makes me want to join when it sings, “May eternal light shine upon them, O Lord, with Thy saints forever, for Thou art good.”