My Stormy Love Affair with the Church

Dear Friends,
My father was a minister. My uncle is a minister. So are (big breath) my cousin and his wife, my brother and his ex-wife, my other brother's wife, my former father-in-law, my ex-husband, and now me. Two of my nieces who are in college now also plan to be ministers. You'd think going to seminary and becoming a minister would have brought me to the inside track of my family, but it hasn't worked out that way. I'll return to this in another post.

I grew up going to church. Duh. Along the way I developed a "personal relationship with Jesus" and even visited traditions different from ours in which people raised their hands while singing worship music. I loved that. There have been periods in my life in which I have prayed in tongues, held daily devotionals, even seen visions and felt God's specific answer to my prayers. When I was a teenager my brother called me a nerd-hippy-jock-Jesus-freak. Yep. That was me.

But growing up in a minister's family taught me something else, as well. There is a dark side to ministry and the church can be a very un-holy place, indeed. I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that my dad was a sincere, hard working, smart, dedicated man who loved the Lord and his church with every fiber of his being. So, how could factions rise up from within the church he was giving his life to, and accuse him of things and try to get him fired? It happened more than once. My own youth minister sat behind me in an all-church meeting once and whispered loudly to the person next to him about how ridiculous I looked in the dress I was wearing and how glad he'd be when we were forced out and moved on. I wondered why that meeting was held in the meeting room of a building the church owned, but not in the sanctuary. I soon found out. They (some small group of people within the church) wanted to be out of sacred space to spew their venom at my father.

I don't remember what anybody said to him, or what the accusations were. They certainly were not questioning his morality. He was not accused of sexual impropriety or embezzling funds or any such thing. They were upset because he had over-hauled the youth department and the group had grown from 12 to 45. So many of the new kids came from the wrong kinds of families and the kids' parents didn't come and so it was too expensive to maintain that kind of growth. The church should be for the people who tithe. That kind of thing. They were offended because new people had positions of power and the old guard had a weakening voice. Anyway, they asked for Dad's resignation and he refused to give it, citing obligations to his wife and four children. If they were going to put his family out on the street, so be it, but he would not be complicit in that. Within three months he had secured a new position elsewhere and our family moved ~ right in the middle of my senior year in high school.

I can't tell you how many times in my life I have heard people tell me that I would be a minister some day. HELL NO! I was not interested in ever being treated like that for giving my life to something. I was very active in church as a lay person (a volunteer) and basked in the recognition I got as such a talented and dedicated young single mother, giving her life to the church when she was so sick and raising those kids on her own. Good for me. So, when the time came for me to go to seminary and to serve a church as their pastor I was very resistant. I still am six years later. I don't want it. Yet, here I am.

My little church is the great blessing of my life. They are incredibly good to me. I am very well paid for doing very little. Yet, they see value in my service. I don't know why. I really don't. I've had the privilege of doing weddings and funerals, grave side services and baptisms. I preach every Sunday, lead congregational singing, and sing solos or special music regularly. But, between you and me, I do less now than I did as a volunteer at my former church. This church is just a sleeply little church of aging folks who only have energy for church and Sunday School on Sunday mornings. I have no evening or mid-week obligations. We have no choir. We have no functional committees. We have nobody griping or complaining. We just gather, worship, and go home. And they pay me very well. So, how can I leave? Why would I?

Yet, I ask myself on a regular basis if I am even a Christian any more. And, if I'm not, am I ethically obligated to resign and leave the profession? When I talked with my professor of Pastoral Care, he was sure I was called to ministry and exhibit "gifts and graces" of ministerial service. He thinks the church and society need people like me to serve those who cannot be served by traditional ministers who spew judgmental morality and alienate those who most need acceptance by a God who's son reached out to the prostitutes and lepers.

How can I abandon those who are dis-enfranchised by the church they desperately want to embrace them? I say, if I were gay/lesbian I'd say the church can go screw itself. Who cares? But that isn't my call. There are same sex couples who long for a church where they can worship the Jesus of the gospels who called the meek and lowly the inheritors of God's blessings. Do I just abandon the church, dust off my hands, and leave those lovely people shut out?

Well, I can't tell my whole story in just a few posts, but this is a brief introduction to my ambiguity about ministry; why I stay and why I want to go.
Be well my friends,
Mary

Theological thoughts

Dear Friends,
Clergy are often asked, "How can God let bad things happen to innocent people?"

Of course we are trained in how to deal with such questions. We should prepare ourselves to listen, really listen, as we ask the person what has happened in their lives to raise this question and how do they sense God present in their lives and/or absent in their lives? Folks wrestle with the big questions and they come to their ministers to talk about them. They are asking us for hope. We are the hope-bearers. Okay, well enough.

But how about this for an answer: "What an arrogant, foolish question. Look at the first two commandments and shut up." Idolatry is either the fundamental sin in the biblical texts or at least it competes for the top spot. Commandment #1: I am YHWH your God, who brought you out from slavery. You shall have no other Gods before me. #2 You shall not make an image to worship.

The people who demand their "rights" to have the Ten Commandments displayed on public property (schools, court houses, government buildings or lawns) obviously do not read them or comprehend them. They are breaking the first two commandments when they scream their demands. The Bible is very clear on the point. Many, many issues are ambiguous at best in the biblical text, but this one is consistent. God is beyond image and anybody who says, "Look, there is God" is a fool. Fundamentalist Christians are by definition blasphemous. The attitude that "I know God. He is my personal buddy. And he is so weak that he demands of me that I defend him in American courts and force others to see the image I have made of him and to afford me the right, as a member of some so-called majority, to claim for my nation my image of God." Blasphemy! Idolatry!

Pardon me, I had a bit of a tirade there. Back to my point. Why does God allow bad things to happen? Well, first, it is a rather narrow understanding of God to assume that God is or has a consciousness that allows bad things. But, beyond that, how can we know hope if we know not despair? How can we know love if we know not grief? How can we know ecstasy if we know not abandonment? Is it fair that a child is born with a deformed heart and dies in a few minutes? No. Not at all. But fair is a value of the narcissistic. Pre-schoolers want "fair." The death of that child makes the life of all healthy children that much more valuable.

Is that justification for a moral God to condemn the one child to pain and early death? Of course not. But as we see and experience pain, loss, fear, degradation, and despair, so we are capable of experiencing love, peace, happiness, and hope. And so I am thankful for the horror I have seen, for it allows me on this day to rise to a new hope. And for the record, no I do not believe that any deity causes horror in our lives. God weeps with us when our child dies in our arms. I would not worship any conception of a loving transcendence that does not.

God/dess of resurrection, thank you for the hope that rises out of despair, the life that rises out of death. Accept my gratitude for making me finite, weak, and human. What a gracious creator you are.
Happy Thanksgiving,
Mary

Welcome

Dear Friends,
I am starting a new blog today because I want to create a new life for myself and I need to write it as I go. Life happens in imagination. For example, recently someone said to me, "wow, it must be nice to have four or five guys interested in you," or something like that. Hmm. It should be nice, shouldn't it? But it isn't. Not for me. Not in my imagination.

In my imagination it is a burden and a disappointment. I don't know what to do with these men. I'm quite sure I'm messing with all of them in ways I shouldn't, yet I mean no harm. I'm just lonely and reaching out however I can, making it up as I go along.

I want to keep a positive tone to this blog. I am hoping that the title will remind me every day that I am creating my own life in my imagination and what I imagine is being reflected back to me in all my interactions throughout the day.

So, I begin with a data dump ~ not positive at all. But I want to take a good look at what I have been thinking up for myself so I can evaluate it and make intentional changes. This life is really precious and I have so much to give. It would be a real shame to skip the work necessary to move into the great love of my life and bring fulfillment to myself and another. Remaining broken in my relationships is a poor choice. I want to make a better one.

What has been going through my mind is this:

1. I'm lonely. There is no one on this earth who understands me or really cares. Okay, I know that is not true, or not more true for me than for others. Let me try again. I have designed a life that is so fractured that nobody can know me the way I want to be known. Anyway, I'm lonely and I feel it every day. This I must face, experience, learn from, and move beyond. Loneliness is not to be feared or to be conquered, but neither is it to be wallowed in day after day after day. Time to find a positive direction.

2. I don't know how to have a relationship with a man. I don't know how to meet men responsibly. I don't know how to set good boundaries in the first emails and phone calls. I don't know how to carry myself on a first date. I don't know how to date several men at once and just leave it at dating. I don't know if I want to learn how to do that, but I do know what I am doing now is not working for me.

3. I have chosen a career path that has been the great blessing of my life and also my un-doing. There is no way I can do what I need to do with this blog without naming that career, so I'll tell you: Christian ministry. There it is. I wrote it and my stomach churned. I have such an attraction and such a revulsion to ministry that I cannot stay away and cannot get comfortable. This is a deep source of my loneliness. Oh goddess goodness graciousness, how I would love to be in relationship with a man who can understand, really understand my complicated feelings about this issue and still love me. I expect to write a good deal about my experiences in seminary, with my church, and my struggle to accept or reject my chosen path.

4. I'm sick. I've been on full time Social Security Disability for eleven years because I have narcolepsy. I don't think I'll write much about this, but it is a factor in everything else in my life. Briefly, it is a neurological condition that primarily functions as a sleep disorder. I do not have any stage 4 sleep (deep sleep). Nobody knows why or what to do about it. Therefore, I am almost always tired, sometimes profoundly exhausted. I have the kind of narcolepsy that is complicated by cataplexy. That means I experience random paralysis. The way I understand it, some portion of my body, or my whole body, just decides it is asleep. So, my leg can go out from under me. Or I can get double vision. Or I can just collapse. Or my speech might slur. On and on. I suppose the possible manifestations are nearly infinite. My most common experiences with narcolepsy are persistent fatigue, with episodes of paralysis in one or both legs, some slurred speech or difficulty forming words verbally, or whole body collapse. The whole body collapse is not total and is not completely sudden, though it happens rapidly. So! The good news is I still have my driver's license. If an episode comes on while I am driving, I have to go immediately to a safe place and rest, but I do have control of the car long enough to do that. If it gets worse as I age I could lose my license. Enough said about that.

Finally, I chose the name "Mary Poppins" for my pseudonym for this blog because I want to remember to go fly a kite and to jump into chalk drawings and ride carousels in my life. I have a tendency to take myself too seriously. I need to lighten up.

I'd like to leave this blog open, but already in this post I have given enough information about myself to be recognizable to people who know me. I mean, how many single woman pastors do you know who are in seminary and have narcolepsy? But, how can I write what I need to write if those factors are not openly discussed? So, let's try this. I'll leave it open for a while because I really think the chances are quite small that someone I know will happen upon this blog. If you do know me, please extend me the courtesy of telling me you've been here and understand that I'd prefer you keep my anonymity. Everyone else, welcome. Please leave a comment, and let's see if we can make a little community. Okay?

Imagine a good life!
Mary