Good to Be at Church? It's Been a While...

[Another segment exploring my very first Artist's Way journals from 1999, listening in for what I hear today...]

Good morning all. … I am...I don’t know. Sad? Unsettled, afraid perhaps? A little lonely, I think, after such days substantially alone. I am feeling distant from myself too, let alone God. It’s Ash Wednesday and it’ll be good to be at church. And with choir friends. I’m living in fear again, more vividly and unpredictably. … I just don’t know how to do my dissertation work without it taking over my life. … The twins arriving soon will be quite a task as well. Come July, wow. 

There are lots of things that drew me into this particular entry of 1999. [edited summary below] The strongest eye-brow response, however, was the realization of Ash Wednesday 1999 and “It’ll be good to be at church. And with choir friends.” This touches some of the energies that have driven this whole project’s beginnings, so I want to spend some time here. 

I honestly can’t remember the last time I’ve said that first sentence--years, maybe? When was the last time it was good to be at church? I was in church on Ash Wednesday this past week, to sing an anthem and lead in the hymn-singing. I was asked, and I said yes. Was it good to be at church? Well, of a sort. It was worth doing, somehow. It wasn’t good as I used that word back in 1999, however.

Those words hearken me back to the days in which I still had choices to be in church...or not. They were days in which church was a safe haven for me, a community that held my life and desires for love. The choir, mostly, which became my primary social-web in these dissertation years of little classmate/grad school interactions. These were days of intellectual passions and explorations of anything that caught my heart-sense, with felt-holy invitation to something More that would make a difference. I had believable dreams of theology as a vehicle for transformation of the world. I had an all-in trust that while the church could be fragile and flawed--I wasn’t blind to that, ever--my sense of the Holy was untarnished and unbreakable. Wow do I miss those years, those words meaning that.

I did not know in 1999 that this goodness would never last, at least if I were honest and curious, which for me means true to whom I would become. My first ‘faith-fracture’ was serving as an intern at the battered-women’s shelter in Trenton, where I was broken open to see much more fully God’s utter lack of protection of vulnerable women and children. My bearing witness to this suffering, then my increasing outrage, split me down the middle. I remember the October evening I left the shelter, mostly home from the 25 minute drive back to my dorm, before I became aware I was crying. Something in me was completely disassociated from another part of me. Never before had I felt such anger...finally at God. And yet within months, I was companioned by elder-singers in the Touring Choir to name the anger, feel it whole and righteous, and eventually, to let it go into a broader living space for the Holy. Over a glass of chardonnay, at the outdoor tables in front of the Met, I was asked, “Do you think God’s not strong enough to withstand your anger?” I remembering laughing aloud. Something came back together in me, and I began to trust again...provisionally at first. Eventually, the Sacred Abundance was simply too obvious. I was back to all-in devotion. Healed fractures are stronger than the unbroken bone, so the saying goes. Scar tissue is thicker than unblemished skin. This journey then repeated itself over the years from then to about seven years ago--unbreakable trust and devotion, breaking open, then a return to a larger living space for the Holy.

Something is different in these years, and whatever it is has lasted for a much longer time. On the one hand, my current sense of the ‘larger living space for the Holy’ nearly blew my life out of the water it was in. These seven years have been stunning, enlivening, soul-opening, terrifying, demanding, utterly Holy and utterly shattering of that Holy. So it strikes me as strange, for instance, my use of the word God in this 1999 entry. I rarely use that word anymore, unless I’m holding space for someone else’s faith journey. I’m perfectly content and satisfied to be doing that holding-Work--it’s sacred, spacious, and creates more of me somehow. What we would name a ‘calling,’ in the Biz. But the Silent Treatment in me for ‘God’ remains true as well. ‘God’ is so silent today, even though theological-practice unto wisdom is loud and engaging. This basically means I don’t know of what or whom I would be speaking, were I to speak of ‘God.’ The word itself is too conflicted a symbol. The paradoxes to hold within it are too heavy for me to sustain. And trust me, I've done the research here. I've drunk this chalice to the very dregs.

On the one hand, I think I’m weary of being duped, again and again, with any sense of the Holy that will only need to be broken open again. What’s the old adage, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me”? I don’t know what the count would be, but it doesn’t feel or look good for me, “Fool me 70 times 7? and shame on whom then?” I’m weary of trusting and then being duped again. This weariness lives alongside an overwhelming sense of the Holy, sometimes coming out as Rage, other times as the Silent Treatment. And the grammar there is intentional--is the referent of the predicate nominative the weariness or the Holy? I don’t know. I can’t tell if it’s the Rage that’s Holy, or the Rage erupts from a wound to be healed to re-welcome the Holy back into my spirit-spaces as intimate, as Friend.

Some part of me feels sorry for this younger me, even as I also envy her too. She has no idea the terrifying days of utter abandonment that are coming, or how horrified she’ll be to realize her family’s not the Cosby Show anymore, and the world creates so much more suffering than she could ever imagine. [To be fair, with an impish smile, my family’s not the actual reality of Bill Cosby in those days either, but still...]. I was emotionally and spiritually abandoned by my parents/family, my husband, my church, my colleagues--for growing beyond what they could consider (I see now). When I refused to carry her pain for her anymore, my birth-mother said plain to my face, “Well, you’re dead to me then.” My father stood by, unspeaking, when she said plain to my husband (in my absence), “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if you divorced her...she’s grown so strange…” Part of me knows I have forgiven my family for these fragile-flaws when my path demanded more than they could give, but I will never forget them either. There are days when I envy that young self, who still believed her father and uncles were larger than life, her mother might be her best friend, and her theological work would change the world. 

But then I’m returned to a bit more realism, with the grief chasers I often refuse to swallow. The whole enterprise of ecclesiastical Christianity can smell rotten so many days of the week, from where I sit in academic isolation and attempted-loving pandemic support of a congregational pastor.

If I am not intentional about seeing the good, most of what I see is the political pettiness of folks, swamped in fear and reactivities of our day, and my husband’s inability to work enough hours to match his own obsessive sense of duty and obligation to ease their pain. The whole structure is set-up for all of us to look outside ourselves for what only the inner work each of us has to do can offer. They would rather believe he can ease their pain as religious services tendered for tithe. He would rather believe he can do that for them. Tending to his own pain is excruciating and too hard, most days. He thrives on duty and obligation, sugar and carbs to sweeten the deal. Of course, with intention and tenacity, I can see the shared journeying, the hopes shared in community, the good-intentions and good-hearts of people really doing the best they can do. But I so easily slip into judging the people who participate in such a community whose pace of transformation is achingly too slow for me. Particularly when my own pain or rage has been nicked by something. I’ll flame-throw the room with my rage, if in measured speech and surgical precision. None of this offers a pretty road for a seminary professor to be on, for herself, or her own loved calling of teaching/learning along others on the journey. Pointing out the hypocrisy of the church is like shooting fish in a barrel--it can be a good liberal party game, but it’s not that difficult or challenging. Even when it’s obviously true. None of us should stay there, in my view, including me.

So what is challenging, engaging, is staying with the tensions that won’t let me go anyway. Sitting with the feelings of being duped, for instance. It’s clearly an ego-oriented word, for one. Feelings of “should have known better” or “incompetence” come to the surface here. Why should I have known better? And I know I was not, am not, incompetent. Wildly successful, by most worldly terms. The natural-energetic counterpart to any act of trust must then be having that trust broken, in some way, intended or not. You do your best to be wise about it, of course. We try to discern who we will trust in our inner worlds, and we try to minimize the conscious damage as best we can. But trust means you will be disappointed. These words are the yin/yang of the whole of what is. Just as faith dances with doubt in order to breathe into life, trust always dances with betrayal. My grounded heart-sense of mind knows this… 

Or staying with the sense of envy then. Probably cliche to even go here, but I believe this is a generational thing for me, at the start. My older me yearns for the younger days back when… When intellectual passion could be met with books; when romance & sex seemed the end to all things loving; when the world looked and felt a little less daunting than it does right now… Back when… Then I wake myself up and shake my head. I am mis-remembering then how very challenging it was for me to find the resources that would nourish me, how I was really struggling while doing the very best I could do too. It wasn’t easier back then, it just feels like it from here. And I kicked ass to get here. I'm not only pleased about that, I'm damn proud (to teasingly quote my Grandmother, who thought 'proud' was a bad word). The younger me sits up, takes notice, and calls me out on it. Do what I did, ya weary lout! Get back in it if you want to live!!

Maybe a better question here is What does a full life require to be full...or what does it invite in fullness? What does refusing to trust look like, and can that life even be full? What is the life I really want?

Some words caught my attention this past week, or perhaps it was February 16th itself. When the snows are all gone and the ice has melted, you look down into the bottom of a well and witness a paradox: bright blue sky reflected on black water.

The secret of heaven is that I hide heaven in lowly sunken places where no one thinks to look.

Religion has never defiled Me. Technology does not annoy Me. … But the workings of deep, slow, and certain things...these I observe carefully and respond to adroitly. Their prayers are always heard.

There is no body, no leaf or bough or branch, no fallen sparrow or butterfly that passes unnoticed by Me. But all are embraced by Me, and reclaimed by Me, as a Loving Mother who forever knits the tissues of dying and decaying things into the bodies of living, breathing beings. I have been doing this forever. And so you must decide who you will trust. ...

Religion has never defiled Me…? Really? I remember gasping aloud, in denial and disbelief. This 'speaking' comes to a 'circle of friends' group called Way of the Rose, devoted to Our Lady, every 16th of the month. It's new every month, but a monthly oracular-feeling speaking is posted on the group Facebook page. Our Lady Speaks... Even allowing the stretches into mystery there, How can Our Lady say that?!? How is it that religion does not defile Her every week, even every day, in our world? And never? That’s a long time, with seemingly ample evidence to the contrary. Right? Has She not been present in Christian liturgy in my seminary today, for instance?!? She might as well be on the Moon... (smiling...giggling now...). Yes, the MOON.

I probably would have just let the words wash over me, but for the final sentence here: And so you must decide who you will trust… Notice now that the words are who you will trust, not whether?… Bob Dylan has a song that feels structured like this too. You’re Gonna Serve Somebody… It’s not like you can choose to serve, or not… It’s a question of whom...or what…

What am I trusting...? More than Her...? Can I trust Her? Do I trust Her, even provisionally?

I founder a bit here, not quite knowing how to proceed, or what else needs saying, except that's all I've got for now. No answer that feels honest. This is already longer than will be good for my small group tonight, but so much of it has been necessary. Maybe I’ll just lower the bar a bit, from my beginning. It’ll be good to be at church, I said, which meant one thing in 1999, though probably couldn’t mean the same thing to me in 2021. Not only am I different, the church is changing too, if at a slower pace.

How is it good today to be at church? (Again, note not if or could it be, but how?) I love to sing, and for that singing to be a valued contribution in my husband’s congregation today. It feels genuinely me, particularly as I change all the masculine pronouns that I feasibly can, and it allows me to be seen in something genuinely me as well as being supportive in Brian’s work. He can become vulnerable to congregational gossip and the pettiness of the disaffected if ‘his wife’ does not attend ‘their church.’ It is good to be finding my way to deeper transparency, which feels more honest to me, in these words, which often arise as I am sitting in a pew. It is good to see friends and colleagues of Brian, some of whom I even traveled to Israel with last February. In those small ways--which are not small from whence I come--I will say today, “It will be good to be at church."

* * * * * *

[Other things that caught my attention from my journal entry: I smile to realize I was already attuned to my ‘inner committee’ of voices, Good morning all. Julia Cameron’s work invites that awakening and a sense of how to honor each voice, if not be governed by the defeating ones for very long. “The twins arriving soon…” also caught my heart-strings, for a couple reasons. One, to be brought back to that time when my sister was pregnant with the twins, a variety of emotional currents there. But mostly, to feel the image colliding within me of Brian coming into my life within months, though I was not clear about any of that at the time of this writing. [Brian first met my sister after her Caesarean section surgery, when she was quite high on the drugs necessary. We’ve smiled about that over the years--not an ideal setting for first meetings, but in another sense, it may have been for the best. They are so very different, with little patience for one another. Or B has little patience for her, perhaps. Regardless...]. There’s something anticipatory and wondrous that rises in me, sitting with my 1999 lonely self, who is about to meet her life-partner (again, for the first time).]