What Now?

Lenten fail

Today was Ash Wednesday, which is really one of my favorite church services of the year. But I didn't go. Instead, I came home from school, crawled into bed, and napped for two and a half hours, having apparently hit the wall from my middle-of-the-night insomnia last night.

And I'm kind of sad about not going to church ... except that what I'm sad about is that I'm not really sad (if you see what I mean). I didn't actually have any real plans to go to church anyway. Whenever I'd see someone with ash today, I'd think, "Huh, maybe I should think about going to church tonight," but I never really did think about it. And so now Lent has come, and I haven't marked it in any way except for a vague sense of regret about not being part of a church community right now and apparently not missing it enough to do anything about it.

I have oodles and oodles of church friends on Facebook, and yesterday and today their feeds were full of posts about Shrove Tuesday and imposition of ashes and all the rest (including folks from the church that I loved so much back in Grad School City), and I felt left out, but I didn't feel motivated enough to do anything to get back in. This morning I was feeling spiritually empty and reminded myself that probably the faithful thing to do is to keep being part of a worshiping community, which of course has its own rewards anyway and perhaps brings one back to faith eventually. But then I shrugged my shoulders and thought, "eh, whatever" ... but clearly not in a "I don't miss it at all" way.

Maybe there are seasons for me and church and seasons when we're apart?

On sitting in the back row, trying not to be noticed

I mostly spent the summer not going to church, and that felt like a fine thing. Even if my beloved minister had still been at the church instead of having moved back to his old city, I might not have gone much, because things really quiet down at that church in the summer. Lots of folks go out of town (as I've mentioned before, it's very upper-class and white and country club-y, and I think many people have summer/weekend homes that they disappear to in nice weather), and in August several different churches/denominations in that town do joint worship because there are so very few folks around.

So in fact the two times I went to church this summer are probably about par for the course with what I would have done if my lovely minister had stayed put. But of course he didn't, so I'm in an exploratory mode now.

Both churches I visited were Episcopalian, which seems to be where I'm at right now. No telling what I'll be up for later on, but right now the familiar liturgy done well seems to be what I'm craving. The first parish I visited is Anglo-Catholic but not anti-woman or anti-gay (two things that "Anglo-Catholic" are sometimes code for), and it was pleasant enough but didn't wow me, and it's all Rite I all the time, which wasn't exactly what I was looking for.

The second parish I visited is a bit further away -- almost 20 minutes, which isn't much, of course, but is a little further than I'd like -- and I have to head toward Adventure City to get there, rather than away from it as my old UCC congregation and this other Episcopal parish were. I was reluctant to head into the city, because the parking and traffic are both worse, even on a Sunday morning, but then I suddenly realized that if I wanted a diverse congregation that pretty much meant going into the city instead of into the suburbs. Duh. I'm not sure why it took me so long to grasp that fact.

So this second congregation, St. Paul's (it occurs to me that there's no need to use a pseudonym for Episcopal churches because they're pretty much all named after one saint or another!), is perhaps pretty cool. I'm reluctant to get attached, but it's true that I went back there this morning and liked it even better than last time.

The weird thing is that the rector is someone I knew slightly before he was a priest. I mean, he was on the way to priesthood; in fact, the way I met him is that I was auditing a class at the local seminary where he was finishing his M.Div. But that means I know him as a fellow participant in a seminar (one in which I was far more engaged than perhaps I should have been as an auditor, but with the professor's blessing), so it's slightly strange to see him all robed up and preaching. But I liked him back then, and he actually remembered me and seemed so pleased to see him, and when I said that I'd spent a couple of years having a UCC adventure but was perhaps ready to come back to the Episcopal fold, he said that he too had had such a two-year UCC adventure, and that if I didn't want to join St. Paul's he'd love to get together with me for coffee some time and talk about which parishes might be good fits for me. I really appreciated that.

That conversation happened on my first visit. In my visit this morning, I slipped in during the morning hymn and then slipped out after Communion; apparently I was very much in a "please don't notice me" mode, all part of my plan to hang out on the periphery of a faith community for awhile without fully joining in. I don't know how well that will work, but I want to avoid my experience at many congregations in which I seem to wind up on committees before I've even gotten my breath. And I really don't want to commit anywhere right now, but I do want to enjoy the Eucharist and a good sermon.

So this guy preaches without notes, standing in front of the congregation and speaking to folks on all sides (the congregants on three sides and the choir sitting behind him). Normally I like a well-crafted sermon read well, but this guy actually does really well (the two times I've seen him, anyway) without notes -- that is, they are clearly crafted sermons that he has practiced and delivers well, all without notes. Impressive. And both times his sermon was not that intellectually sophisticated but had something to say that I really needed to hear on that morning. So I'm feeling good and will definitely go back. Indeed, this time, before slipping out during the singing, I went so far as to fill out the form so that I would get the weekly email from the parish; I'm willing to receive automated emails but don't exactly want to talk to anyone yet!

Other things: There was a huge fire in the sanctuary over 30 years ago, which left the stone walls standing but nothing else, and they rebuilt it with solar panels and a very open, spare style inside. So it's got all the loveliness of an old stone church but with a modern aesthetic inside -- quite lovely all around. And it is more diverse, ethnically and otherwise, than other congregations I've visited; apparently heading into the city really does do the trick! People are very friendly, making a point to greet me and also clearly connecting with one another. Oh, and today there was a blessing of the students' backpacks, which is the sort of thing that normally makes me impatient because it lengthens the service and isn't done well, but this was actually quite moving. And apparently I care more about straight-up Book of Common Prayer liturgy done well (as in St. Paul's) than I do about gender-inclusive language in prayers (as in the old congregation), which is a good thing to know about myself. And people wear all sorts of different clothes, so it's definitely the sort of place where one could wear blue jeans to church and not have eyebrows raised; in fact, the first Sunday I visited, the rector's partner was there wearing nice shorts, which I took as a positive sign about allowable informality. Oh, and that reminds me that the rector is gay, which definitely sets a certain inclusive tone for the congregation.

After the first visit last month, which fed me in a way I hadn't experienced in a while, I formally resigned my role in the various committees I was on in my old UCC church and declared myself officially in a "moving on, exploratory" mode. After today's visit, St. Paul's is already feeling like the church I think about when I think about going to church.

But I'm going to bide my time before I move out of the back row. (Well, actually, that's metaphorical, because they have uncomfortable old pews in the very back, and that is also where parents with young children tend to sit, so it's noisier there than I like. So what I'll actually do is try to find a back row-ish sort of place to sit that's in the more comfortable, quieter section with the modern chairs. I haven't quite figured out my spot yet.)

I don't want to commit, but it feels good to have identified a place I might consider committing to if I were in a committing mood, which I'm not.

Goodbye, preacher man

So, my beloved minister is leaving, to go back to the city where he used to live and become the minister of an urban congregation there. This was a very unexpected turn of events when he announced it earlier this spring. I cried when I got the news, and I know that I wasn't alone in that response. Other people were and still are really angry at him, feeling betrayed by his departure, but he's been there five years, so I think it's reasonable that he is taking this other opportunity, one that he clearly thinks is going to be good for himself and his family. They are urban people, and I think that this church was their experiment in suburban living, which they thought was going to be better for raising a family but which seems to have driven them pretty crazy. So going back to an inner-city church seems like a good fit for them, and I'm happy for them.

And, in a way, I'm happy for me too, because his departure gives me some freedom. Today is his last Sunday, and so the freedom begins now.

Two weeks before his big announcement this spring, I actually slipped out of church mid-service because it was making me so crazy. It was a week in which he wasn't there (in fact, it turns out he was having his big try-out at this new church that day), and I'm not a fan of any of the other ministers (one is a nice buy but I don't care for his preaching, and the others I actively dislike), and it was communion Sunday, and I really don't like the way that this congregation does communion and really all liturgy, and suddenly I had just had it. I slipped out during a hymn, went straight home, and started plotting how I was going to be able to stay at this church that was driving me so crazy.

Maybe I'd just find another church to "cheat" with on the first Sunday of every month? Did I just need to go back to the Episcopal Church for good liturgy and try my best to ignore the bishops (which is how many Episcopalians I know handle things)? Or should I go the opposite route and give the Quakers another try, even though I have no natural aptitude for sitting in silence? Or, given my lack of proper Trinitarianism, should I try another experiment with Judaism? Or was all of this too dramatic and I should just try another UCC congregation?

But, in the midst of all of those questions, what I kept coming back to is that I love this particular minister, so whatever I was thinking about adding to my church repetoire, it wasn't going to replace this particular congregation because I was unwilling not to hear him preach on Sundays. So I was thinking about just "cheating" once a month and going someplace else, or about finding a worshiping community that met sometime other than Sunday morning so that I could still hear him.

And then came the announcement that he was leaving. And after I wept, I realized that there was then nothing holding me to this community and that I was free to go where I wanted and explore as I wish.

Of course, as soon as I made that decision, I started realizing that there are people I care about in the congregation ... but honestly, not all that many. In fact, surprisingly few, considering I've been there for over two years. It's just such a big congregation, and it's also very country-clubby, very white and rich and superior, and I've never felt as though I fit in that well. There are good people there, of course, and a few might miss me a bit, but for the most part I think that any hole that my absence creates will be smoothed over almost immediately.

So I've been telling all of this to the few folks who I think might actually miss me or at least notice my absence; it seems rude to just disappear without a word. On one committee I'm on, we had a great conversation several weeks ago about how we were all feeling in response to the minister's impending departure; people spoke of their anger, their sorrow, their fears for the future -- it was a really personal and honest discussion. And I told them that I didn't know what I was going to do but that I was feeling free now to start looking around and maybe going elsewhere. They were very supportive ... although I did think it was funny that all of them seemed to think I was over-thinking the entire question. Um, yeah, that's what I do.

Then, on Maundy Thursday, I wrote a lovely letter (if I do say so myself) to the minister, telling him all that he had done for me and what I thought his great attributes were and how much I hoped that his new church was going to be a great experience for him. I deliberately put this all in writing, both because it's nice for all of us to have those "keeper" texts about how great we are that we can reread later on and because I'd been realizing that other people were dumping their anger and sense of betrayal on him. I think he's had a really rough spring since making the announcement, and I didn't know if it might be useful to him to have some written proof that not everyone was mad!

Today is his last Sunday, and so perhaps I'll get to say some of this to him again in person. And then after church is the annual picnic, which is the sort of thing I normally ignore, but I think I'll go this time because I still haven't told the head of the deacons, whom I'm friendly with, that I may be leaving. (I keep saying "may be" because I really don't know what I'll decide to do.) I feel like I need to tell her in person, but there hasn't been the opportunity. She's going to be upset, partly because she likes me and partly because her job as head of deacons is to try to keep things from falling apart in the interim between ministers, and one of her fears is that people will leave.

And then tomorrow night is the last meeting of the season of another committee I'm on, and I'll tell them at that point. I'm not looking forward to that discussion, because these are the people I have most in common with at the church, but it's important to tell them, not least because I guess I have to officially resign from the committee so that someone new can take my place on it.

But the fact that these good-bye conversations feel awkward but not sad to me tells me that leaving is a fine decision to be making. Not necessarily the only right decision, but certainly not the wrong one, if you see what I mean.

I'm trying to be entirely okay with not knowing what I'm going to do next, church-wise. I think I've about made my peace with the fact that religion is always going to be a struggle for me. Jacob wrestling with the angel is now my go-to spiritual image, and I'm at least sporadically fine with that.

Conversations I had this week

• on Sunday morning, over breakfast with the soon-to-be senior deacon from church. She had been the co-chair of the ONA committee last year, the efforts of which resulted in the church's becoming officially welcoming of LGBT folks. And the church had made a few immediate changes in the wake of that decision ... and then those efforts trailed off. So she and I were getting together to decide what else we actually needed to do to fully live up to that welcoming and affirming stance we'd taken. One thing that was great is that we basically said "to hell with committees; let's just do what needs to be done," which I appreciated since I'm kind of hitting the wall with church committees. But then our conversation kept going -- we had a few minutes to kill before heading off to church -- and she asked me a couple of leading questions, and before I knew it I was sharing with her some of my complaints and criticisms of church, from my unhappiness at the church retreat a couple of years ago to my theological problems with a recent liturgical change to my honest opinion about the various ministers. It was such a therapeutic moment, to get some things off my chest to a sympathetic listener who actually has some power to do something about at least some of them. She was taking notes as we talked, and I trust her to follow up on some of these issues. Very satisfying; I actually felt much more relaxed during the church service right afterward than I have for some time in church, I think because I'd had all of those frustrations built up all this time.

• on Thursday, with three of my sophomores, about the Girl Scout cookie/ transgender brouhaha (which sounds like some sort of transgender cookie, but you know what I mean). One of my students is a Girl Scout and was taking cookie orders from a couple of her friends, and I wondered if they had heard about the controversy; they hadn't, so we talked about it a little, and they were all appalled (although I don't know that they'd be as completely welcoming if a transgender girl came to FGS -- hard to know). And then I ordered $20 worth of Girl Scout cookies from her.

• on Friday, with another group of sophomores, as we were looking at the photographs in our school art gallery's latest exhibit. The photographs are all of women and children in Afghanistan, and so this was a chance to return to some of the conversations we'd had at the beginning of the year about Khaled Hosseini's Kite Runner, which had been their summer reading. At one point, as I was standing with 5 or 6 girls in front of a photo of a girls' school, we talked about why most of the adults at the school identify as feminists and also why we hope that our students will come to hold similar commitments. It was just a few minutes, but I hope that four years of such conversations eventually have some influence on our grads.

• on Thursday, over Skype, with a class at an independent school in a nearby state. The guy who taught my AP Comp summer institute (aka English Geek Camp) two summers ago had contacted me to say that he was going to use my dangerous words assignment with his class and wondered if I'd be willing to talk with his student about it. His email totally had the "ooh, I've impressed my teacher!" thrill for me. So I Skyped with them on Thursday, which required me to get a tutorial from one of my advisees beforehand so that I knew how to use the technology. I actually don't think he did the best job setting up the assignment, so I hope that my conversation with them helped. He wrote me a thank you note this morning to say how well he thought the discussion had gone and how much he appreciated my "ability to understand the widely different perspectives of the kids and address each with individual care. They felt listened to and respected." So that's nice.

• on Friday over lunch with a few colleagues, in which we talked frankly and passionately about the ways in which we feel guilty about teaching under such great circumstances to kids who are polite, attentive, well-behaved, and mostly eager to learn; are we basically selling out by being in the business of helping the children of privilege become even more privileged? Should we all be teaching in public schools instead, but if we did so would we all burn out in a couple of years and leave teaching altogether? If we kept our lovely, cushy jobs, what could/should we be doing to help those with less privilege have the same educational opportunities that every child deserves? We didn't solve the great problems of educational inequity (no big surprise), but it was a personal and honest conversation that felt important to be having.

• And then, best of all after a busy week in which I had evening obligations on three different nights, I came home on Friday and hung out on the couch with D. and just talked and talked for a couple of hours, telling her about the various conversations above and hearing about her conversations and ideas from the week. I'm glad that, after more than 10 years together, it turns out we still have plenty to talk about.

Joyful, Joyful

Today was the commencement ceremony at school, which was an even-bigger-than-usual event because the featured speaker was the former head of school (who hired me, bless her), and because one of the parents of the grads is the president of an African nation, which necessitated much security and hustle and bustle all around.

But I wasn't there for the hustle and bustle, because I was at church instead, having been granted special dispensation to miss commencement so that I could attend the special congregational meeting in which we decided about becoming officially an Open and Affirming church (i.e., explicitly welcoming all, regardless of sexual orientation or gender expression). I've been on this committee for six months, and it's been annoying and exhausting for most of the time, so I was really looking forward to a positive vote, both to make all of the irritation worthwhile and to prove that this congregation is a good home for me.

We had no reason to expect that the vote wouldn't be positive, this church in fact being a very welcoming place ... but one never knows. It's not unheard of for someone who hasn't participated in the many, many opportunities for conversation to suddenly pop up at the formal vote and make trouble. So I couldn't entirely relax until it was over.

Despite that anxiety, I had to chuckle to myself at the way the entire service was set up. Between the bible reading (Romans 15:5-7), and the sermon (on extending to others the "YES" given to us by God), and the closing prayer (about recognizing the many ways in which we have been welcomed and extending that hand to others), you'd have had to be a complete ass to vote "no" on the measure. But of course there are complete asses in the world.

But fortunately, there were no complete asses there today! The only discussion was about the order of groups that we explicitly welcome in our statement ... so basically there was a little argument about which people have more traditionally been excluded and that we should make even more of a special effort to include now. In the end, however, we accepted the statement as presented (and as written by yours truly in conjunction with two other committee members). Yay!

But "accepted" is far too mild a word, really. There was a voice acclamation, and it was unanimous -- and energetically shouted -- in favor of the measure, with not a single person speaking or voting against it. And as soon as the moderator declared that we were now officially Open and Affirming, applause broke out ... and people just kept on clapping and clapping, with no end in sight until the minister stood up and asked us all to stand and sing "Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee," which we were happy to do. (And since the organist is gay and has been a member of the congregation for 25+ years, he was more than happy to play.) And afterward, there was much shaking of hands and congratulations right and left.

As I said afterward to my head of school, in thanking her again for permission to miss today's commencement, it was important for me to be there not just because I was a member of the committee and wanted the chance to vote in favor of the measure, but because it was important to me personally not just to hear the vote but to witness the great joy with which the vote was cast. This was no dutiful adopting of a PC platform but rather a heartfelt statement of welcome -- lovely!

When I joined the church in September, I did so only because I knew that this Open and Affirming process was about to begin, and I did so as well with the caveat that the process had better be successful or I was leaving. I've metaphorically kept my bags packed and standing by the door all this time and have been fairly defensive (maybe even occasionally hostile) this whole time.

But now, I think, I can unpack my bags, and that feels very good indeed.

Plus -- bonus! -- the minister is friends with the editor of Poetry magazine, who was in town for a wedding at the church that afternoon. As the minister (hmm, he needs a pseudonym) said, he exploits this friendship every chance he gets, so he'd invited his poet friend to run a pre-worship conversation about George Herbert's "The Pulley," a poem that I didn't know but now really love. I talked too much during the discussion, I'm afraid, but other folks weren't saying much, and I was having an adrenaline spike and had stuff to say, and all the way around it was a wonderful morning!

Of course, once I came home and ate lunch, I promptly fell into a deep and overly long sleep. It was sort of a psychological Maslow's hierarchy of needs thing after the excitement and adrenaline of the morning. And now I've stayed up too late, and I have 42 comments to write tomorrow (something that independent school teachers do in addition to providing grades for the students; it's a narrative assessment of the student's work) ... but who cares? What a triumphant and joyful Sunday! 

Via Negativa

I went to my church's lovely Maundy Thursday service last night -- the minister, a fabulous preacher, always preaches on the "broken God" on Maundy Thursday in a way that I find deeply honest and moving, and then there's a beautiful Tenebrae ending to the service -- and yet I'm finding myself not caught up in the Passion story this year. Maybe it's because I've spent the last week immersed in the Exodus story -- I had my AP Comp students read it, and then we read several texts that use Exodus as a powerful metaphor, including Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I've Been to the Mountaintop" final speech -- and so that's pushing out the Passion story for me, although certainly the timing and meaning of Passover and Holy Week are such that one really should be immersed in the former when preparing for the latter.

But the lack of engagement is probably more because I'm just really not feeling the love lately -- a spiritual emptiness that is not distressing me particularly, just leaving me relatively unmoved by worship. So I was glad this week to be reminded of poet-priest R. S. Thomas's beautiful 1972 poem "Via Negativa":

Why no! I never thought other than
That God is that great absence
In our lives, the empty silence
Within, the place where we go
Seeking, not in hope to
Arrive or find. He keeps the interstices
In our knowledge, the darkness
Between stars. His are the echoes
We follow, the footprints he has just
Left. We put our hands in
His side hoping to find
It warm. We look at people
And places as though he had looked
At them, too; but miss the reflection.

I figure that remaining aware of the emptiness is its own kind of spiritual faithfulness and maybe even discipline.

On a brighter, less Via Negative note, D. pointed me this morning toward a charming story about a letter about God that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, recently wrote to a six-year-old girl (in response to her father's forwarding a letter that the little girl had written). Totally worth a read:

... [People] discovered me when they looked round at the world and thought it was really beautiful or really mysterious and wondered where it came from. They discovered me when they were very very quiet on their own and felt a sort of peace and love they hadn’t expected.

Then they invented ideas about me -- some of them sensible and some of them not very sensible. From time to time I sent them some hints -- specially in the life of Jesus -- to help them get closer to what I’m really like. ...

So I'll go to church this weekend and live with that "great absence in our lives" and maybe feel "a sort of peace and love." I could do much worse.

On Returning to My Protestant Roots

I miss incense. I didn't think I would, since it often gave me a headache, but apparently I still miss it when it's gone.

I miss kneeling before a priest to receive communion, which is funny when you think about it since I resent clerics' assumptions of authority.

I miss bishops' laying on of hands, which doesn't make any sense since I never believed in a literal apostolic succession anyway. Go figure.

I miss the bibliolatry of turning to face a raised book, even though that very worship of bound pages almost drove me from the place the first time I entered.

I miss the up-and-down, up-and-down of standing and kneeling repeatedly, although the fact of the matter is that I often got unpleasantly light-headed when I did so. (It's a low blood pressure thing.)

I miss wine. Grape juice is fine and all, but it's just not the same.

I miss mystery.

I have something in the place of all I miss, don't get me wrong. But it's a cold intellectual comfort, one that almost, but not quite, makes up for the smoky warm haze of what I miss.

 

(This is the first poem I've written in about 25 years; it's the one I wrote at the writers' retreat I went to back in February. I've revised it a couple of times, but I have no illusions that I'm a poet. I've pretty much accepted that I'm a non-fiction writer of the non-personal-writing type, and I'm fine with that -- no real ego invested here, and no plans to work toward becoming an actual poet. But I kind of like this poem nonetheless.)

"all the light of sacred story"

I was not into Ash Wednesday today, I had given little thought to Lent, and it was only grudgingly that I went off to church this evening. But then it was actually a very nice service -- lovely music, darkened church, and imposition of ashes, which is one of my favorite liturgical moments of the year. I for some reason couldn't concentrate on the homily, but I'd happened to have dinner with a couple of friend/colleagues this evening, and one was recovering from surgery, and the other told stories about his heart attack a few years ago, and they talked about that sense of potential death becoming very real, so I had plenty to contemplate during the service.

I confessed to my dinner-mates this evening that I hadn't had any ideas for Lenten discipline, but then that changed during the service. The first hymn of the evening, "In the Cross of Christ I Glory" (written by John Bowring in 1825), includes the line "all the light of sacred story," and that led me to the following thoughts on how I might live a holy Lent this year:

• I actually got to church a full five minutes before the service began ... and wow, it's amazing how much more worship-ful I'm able to feel when I'm not running in during the opening hymn, which has become my pathetic habit recently. So my first Lenten discipline is going to be getting to church at least five minutes early on Sunday mornings, so that I'm in a right mental space to hear the "sacred story." (Yeah, I know that this is not the most rigorous Lenten discipline ever, but hey, it's a start!)

• I'm going to return to the habit of saying Compline at night, something I did for years and years in grad school and haven't done regularly since. I almost started crying during the Confession of Sin tonight, not because I was feeling particularly sinful or penitent but because the language was essentially that of the Book of Common Prayer, and I've been realizing in the past couple of weeks how very much I miss the language of the Episcopalian liturgy. So I think I'll adopt this repetition of "sacred story" during Lent.

• Furthermore, I'm going to stop work by 9:00 at night and go to bed, and after I say Compline, I'm going to read in bed for a little bit. This isn't about "sacred story" but rather about holding sacred my "story-time," as it were. This falls more into self-care than spiritual discipline, I guess, but it's also about humility, about recognizing that I'm not so darned important that I need to stay up and get even more work done because somehow the fate of everything rests on what I get accomplished in the next hour.

• Finally, I was thinking about that poem that I wrote at the writers' retreat a couple of weeks ago, a poem that I titled "On Returning to My Protestant Roots." (The title is the best part of the poem, I think.) And then in church last Sunday, I was watching about a particular worshipper who was engaged in a behavior I found both amusing and also nicely metaphorical, and I thought at the time, "You know, there's a nice short prose piece to be written about this." So my last Lenten discipline is going to be to engage in some "sacred story" myself; I'd like to write something creative at least once per week, and I anticipate taking as my prompt something spiritual or church-related, although I'm not going to obsess about this part of it.

So, to quote George Herbert, "Welcome deare feast of Lent."

"Oh, and what's-her-name"

This weekend, from Friday evening through mid-day Sunday, was my new congregation's first-ever church retreat.

By mid-day Saturday, I'd reached my limit and headed home.

The problem mostly lies with me. I had signed up to go, thinking that this would be a great way to get to know folks at my church. It's a big church, and there are all sorts of folks I know by sight but not by name, and there are any number of folks who know doubt recognize me but don't remember my name. So when this retreat came up, I thought, "Hey, what a great way to get to know some people!" But of course what I wasn't bearing in mind is that it's perhaps not a particularly good way for ME to get to know folks. I'm so terrible at coffee hour and mixer sort of chit-chat that I avoid these things, and when I have to do them they simply exhaust me. So why I thought I could plunge myself into 42 hours of this and be happy is beyond me, a stunning moment of lack of self-knowledge.

Of course, the answer is that I didn't think about it. I had been on one church retreat, years ago, and had a great time, but what I didn't really think about until it was too late is that that particular retreat was specifically for the 20s/30s group, and it was held after I'd been an active member of that group for a year -- no wonder I had fun at it! But it was about deepening relationships that already existed, not forming new ones.

And that same emphasis was clearly at play in this retreat, but I didn't realize that in time. So almost all of the folks who went on the retreat (really only about 15% of the congregation's population) were people who had been members for years and years. And I hope they're having a lovely time in deepening their relationships, which clearly is what many of them were looking forward to. But the retreat was not at all set up for new folks to build relationships in the first place, and perhaps I should have anticipated that. And maybe all of the other new folks had enough sense not to say they'd go away for an entire weekend, two hours from home, with people they didn't really know.

All of this was brought home to me in the following pair of incidents:

• I drove up to the retreat site on Friday night with an FGS colleague, we'll call him Jay, who has been a member of this church for well over 20 years. (Jay's wife was coming late to the retreat, so they're driving back home together.) The drive up was actually one of the best parts of the weekend, because by the end we were a little punch-drunk with fatigue, and when I missed a turn and we had to do a country-style U-turn, which involved a dirt road through the woods, the whole weekend seemed like a huge, funny adventure. And when the GPS guided us down a road that was, it turned out, blocked off by a huge cement barrier, we started laughing so hard that we were gasping for breath. As we were recovering enough to start thinking about what to do next, we realized a car had pulled up behind us. Fearing that they wanted to enter the driveway we were blocking, I turned around and headed back the other way, only to discover that the other car contained two of the congregation's ministers! (They're both part-time ministers associated with the parish, one of them temporarily as a sabbatical replacement.) They had similarly been led astray by their GPS, and so the two cars set off together, led by the other driver who actually knew the area fairly well. When we arrived a few minutes later at the retreat center site, both of the ministers reintroduced themselves to me, and we had some laughs about "we once were lost but now are found" as we headed into the evening worship service that was half-over by that point. It was actually a great way to start the weekend -- nothing as bonding as getting lost together! -- but then in the coffee hour sort of gathering after the worship service, I couldn't quite bring myself to crash any conversations, and I wanted to be careful not to cling to Jay, so I headed back to my room, thinking I'd gather my socializing energies over night and start fresh in the morning.

• I started Saturday morning with a three-mile walk around the lake with a whole group of folks, but the conversation beforehand was awkward -- folks who knew each other talked, and I stood there looking out of place -- and then we wound up straggling into a bunch of twosomes and threesomes, so I did the entire walk talking with Jay, despite my best intentions not to monopolize him. (But he actually sought me out, so I'm not fretting about that.) At breakfast there was the socially awkward chit-chat, but I was really making an effort to be outgoing, and everyone else was clearly making a social effort as well. But I was pretty much socially exhausted by the time breakfast ended at 9:30! After that was the morning worship service, which was led by the minister who is at the congregation as a sabbatical replacement but who has long-standing ties to the church and whose husband has been a member there for years and years. Let's call her Linda. She stood up and made a few opening comments, chiefly retelling the story of getting misled into the concrete barrier by the GPS last night, but just as she was getting really frustrated, there was the other car that contained none other than Jay, and wasn't that just such an apt metaphor! Ha ha ha, what an amusing story! As folks were laughing, Jay called out, "and WN!" And Linda said, "Oh, right, and ... I'm sorry, what was her name? Oh, WN, yes, is she here?" I waved my hand, but she was quickly glancing over the gathered group and didn't see and just went on with what she was saying. I can't tell you the last time I felt so completely erased. I hate to make too much of an off-hand anecdote, but this has now become for me the central metaphor for the entire weekend, which was clearly all about relationships among long-time members without even recognizing the existence of new members. I certainly don't blame her for not remembering my name -- that would make me the vilest of hypocrites, since I can never remember anyone's name! -- but, honestly, she could have (a) asked Jay beforehand what my name was, or (b) told the story without naming names, or (c) just not told the story. But for her to tell the story as though Jay were alone in the car and I didn't even exist -- well, it hurt. I sat there during the worship service (which was itself pretty bad -- clearly the retreat leaders took the attitude that I hate, which is that retreat worship is somehow more fun if it's sloppily done) feeling completely invisible in the midst of a crowd, which is one of the lonelier feelings.

And then, after worship, there was small group conversation; mine was led by a 79-year-old man, a long-retired FGS teacher who referred to me as "the kid from FGS," which amused me mightily and reminded me that I'm not unknown to everyone, but he was a terrible conversation-leader, and the hour stretched on and on painfully. And since my bed the night before had been terrible and my room absolutely frigid, I'd slept almost not at all -- actually sitting up at one point in the night and wondering, "should I just pack up and drive home right now so that I can get some sleep?" -- and I was having terrible back pain, which just made the whole thing worse. After the small groups, we had an hour of free time, and after hanging about for a few minutes to see if anyone invited me to do anything, I struck out on my own and did the three-mile lake walk again by myself to have some quiet time to think.

When I found myself crying over the "Oh, and what's her name" incident, I decided that I just wasn't up for another 24 hours of all of this, on top of another night in that awful bed, and that I would head home after lunch. I had gone into the weekend promising myself that I was allowed to leave if I wasn't enjoying myself, so I invoked that promise! Before lunch, I stripped my bed and packed all of my stuff so that I could just throw it into the car the minute lunch was over.

Of course, once I'd done all of that, lunch was actually pretty pleasant. Another woman was futzing around a little in the cabin, and I waited for her so that we could walk over to lunch together, and then she made a point of sitting with me to eat, and the lunch table was a slightly more relaxed version of the breakfast table in terms of getting-to-know-you conversation, so then I felt a little guilty about leaving. After all, people clearly were making an effort to include the new person in conversation, so why was I being so curmudgeonly and difficult and princess-y? But the thought of my packed-up belongings and already-stripped bed helped me maintain my resolve, and so after lunch I told a couple of people from my small group that I hadn't been feeling well all day -- not a lie, really, since I'd had such a bad night -- and had decided to head home. They looked skeptical but sympathetic and said they would make my apologies to the rest of the small group. And then I got the heck out of Dodge.

It was a much longer trip home than it had been coming up with Jay, but at least there were beautiful fall colors everywhere, and I knew I was on my way home. (Sadly, there was no D waiting for me at home, since she's out of town on business for a whole week.) When I got home, I immediately took two ibuprofin, put on my pajamas, crawled into my very comfortable bed, and napped for two hours, and I'm feeling much better now.

I'm glad I left when I did, and I'm glad I stayed through lunch, because I left knowing that the folks in the congregation weren't mean and ignoring me; it's just that it was a weekend clearly geared toward people who'd known each other for a couple of decades. And honestly, even if it hadn't been, I should know myself well enough by now to know that the best way for me to get to know folks is by working with them on something -- talking in a group about a book, or setting up for the homeless shelter, or in general trying to achieve some common end. If the encounter is just social, I freeze up. I've put my name in for the Adult Education Committee, a term that starts in January, and I think that will probably be a much better way for me to get to know folks.

So in the end, I'm feeling grumpy about Linda, which really doesn't matter much because she'll be off to another parish in a couple of months, and I'm still feeling like the congregation I've joined is a fine place, but I'm recognizing that it will take awhile before I feel fully a part of things. And I'm okay with not rushing that process and with maybe just showing up on Sunday mornings for awhile and not having friends in the congregation. But it's also okay that I took care of myself and came home when I did. So now I'll spend Sunday grading papers -- not fun, but I'll feel much better about the week ahead if I do it -- and not going to church, of which I've had enough for the moment.

Wrestling with God

Big decision: I'm formally joining my new church next month.

Not a decision I've made lightly, I should say. I have to stand up in front of the congregation and say that I believe in God, in Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Spirit and renounce evil.

Okay, I'm down with renouncing evil -- no problem.

But the rest of it -- the basic Trinitarian theology -- I felt I could only assent to with big asterisks and footnotes. D. helped me so much last night, through a series of questions, in getting to the point of clarifying what those asterisks are.* I've been calling myself an "optimistic agnostic" for awhile, and I've wrestled with the Trinity for years. One of the things that I love about this church is its explicit language of welcoming doubts and doubters, but as one of those doubters, could I assent to the statements required for joining the church? Tonight I met with the awesome, fabulous minister and talked with him about those asterisks, and at the end of it I said that I would in fact join the church. Here's what I told him, in response to D's questions to me:

• Do I believe that God was involved in the creation of the world, and that this creation is a good thing? Oh, sure, I can say "yes" to that. Here's what I told my fabulous minister just tonight: I've been wrestling theologically for years, regularly angry and upset and wound up about religion and churches and justice and injustice and the meaning of the world and all the rest of it, and one doesn't wrestle alone. So I'm willing to call my wrestling partner "God" and go on from there, and indeed I'm in the tradition of Jacob wrestling with the angel here.

• Do I believe that, if I want to know something about God, I can look to Jesus? Yep, I can definitely say "yes" to that. Now, as to divinity and humanity and incarnation and resurrection and all the rest of it, I don't know what to think; but, yes, I can say that looking at Jesus tells us something about God. As I confessed to my minister tonight, I'm a low Christologist and am pretty sure that I don't think about Jesus the way most Christian churches would want me to; but I also don't think about him as a Jewish synagogue would want me to, which is one of the reasons that I investigated but didn't pursue Judaism a couple of years ago.

• Do I believe that God is still working in the world in some way? Sure -- maybe not in the way that a lot of Christians think God is working in the world (for example, intercessory prayer makes no sense to me ethically), but yeah, I think God is working in the world, including through people.

So apparently I'm a functionalist rather than orthodox Trinitarian, a modalist -- and yeah, modalism is a big ol' heresy, but hey, I"ll claim it. And I said tonight that I knew modalism wasn't orthodoxy, but that Trinitarian language is in fact culturally if maybe not intellectually appropriate for me, and that I'm willing to use it as long as I can be clear that I'm really kind of a Unitarian who believes that God is creator, redeemer, and sustainer.

During this whole spiel, my minister kept trying to get a word in edgewise, but I had to get through the entire speech before I'd allow for any open space in the conversation. When I did finally stop talking, he said that he really appreciated the integrity with which I was approaching this decision. And he reminded me that the language of the membership questions was deliberately wide open, that the UCC is not a creedal church and that no one is asked to assent to a series of propositions. All that we're asked is whether we believe in God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, but we're not told what specific things we should believe about each. He said that I clearly had thoughtful responses to the questions I would be asked and that he wanted to make sure that I could feel that I was answering the questions honestly; there was, he assured me, no need for asterisks, that I was in fact answering the questions fully on my own terms, which is what they asked everyone to do. And he said that he wasn't really a Trinitarian when he was ordained, that it's something he's been wrestling with for years now.

So, at the end of all of that (and there was more to the conversation, of course), I said that I would indeed join the church in a couple of weeks. And he was clearly so delighted and kept saying what an extraordinary contribution I was making to the church community by my presence, that he was so glad I was taking this step. It was all very welcoming.

And since this particular conversation happened (by appointment) after the end of a 90-minute theology small group discussion (no meltdown this time, but still much agitation), a conversation in which people tossed off comments about both "Leda and the Swan" and Data on "Star Trek: The Next Generation," I'm feeling pretty good about claiming this community as my people.

Coming to this decision to join has been fairly tiring and emotional and intensive at times -- not least because it says in a public way that I'm not an Episcopalian anymore, which I don't take lightly -- but I feel good about the decision and what it signifies. Not that I think this step is the end of the journey or that I'm done wrestling with God -- unlikely! -- but it feels good to claim a community to support me in that wrestling.

* Speaking of asterisks: Since some readers of this blog know D in real life, let me be clear that my theological assertions are not D's! She helped me think through my own ideas, but my comments are no reflection on her beliefs. (Annoyingly, some people have not always understood that the two of us actually have independent minds -- most irritating.)