Meditate on it

One of my intentions for this new year is to set aside time for journaling and reading. This entry is another effort to tease out my thoughts on my experiences with His Church and His church.  I continue to visit our downtown Episcopal congregation. After running from my often rote and nominal Catholic upbringing, it's not where I thought I'd find myself at 53.  But, here I am.  Because Briggs is actively angry at the visible church, he doesn't want to visit any churches right now. This is fine by me--it leaves me free to process things and worship without having to consider how he's processing things and worshipping. It's less complicated in an already complicated season of faith. He recently asked me what I liked about the Episcopal congregation I'm attending though--why I chose it from the dozens of churches I could attend. This entry focuses on my answer to him more or less. Why? First--I feel like I can go there and focus on God, bring my whole self--body,

 I just began reading Walk In Love: Episcopal Beliefs and Practices by Scott Gunn and Melody Wilson Shobe. So far, it seems a gentle, orderly approach to helping others known Christ and live out their lives in Him via the Episcopal faith. A few days ago, I read the chapter on prayer. Part of my dissonance with my Catholic upbringing revolves around the formulaic prayers that I grew up with.  It felt like too much emptiness to recite big words over and over until I knew them so well that I could say each prayer without engaging my mind or heart within it.  Is this prayer? And is the answer to this disconnection the types of freeform prayers characteristic of low church tradition?  These prayers may engage our minds more immediately but can also become empty pockets of flowery jargon without meaning. Such prayers can also center around our own perceptions and needs to the point where the prayer becomes more about the individual than God. One thing I like about the book is that they conn

 I've visited a downtown Episcopal congregation for two Sundays now.  I really couldn't tell you why I haven't returned yet to the Evangelical Lutheran congregation that I visited in early January--nothing specific pulled me away.  Perhaps it is that the other congregation feels like a "start up," and instead of feeling energized by that newness, I feel exhausted by it. They were friendly and engaging, but I'm not sure how broad their vision is and I'm not sure that I want to be "known" quickly. Coming from a Catholic background, I was concerned that I would have a form of religious PTSD when visiting a "high church." Instead, I find an unexpected peace in the familiarity of some aspects--kneeling for prayer, sharing peace with congregants.  The service is comforting in its structure. Looking around the sanctuary brings solidity, beauty, purpose. I find the details understated and quietly reassuring. There are things that I don't un

This past Sunday, I attended my first physical church service in over two years after becoming estranged from our church home in the summer of 2020.  I remember sitting in the church parking lot, looking at the building and grounds from my van, marveling that this very familiar place would necessarily now become unfamilar again. We look with closer eyes in the beginning and end of things. To clarify, I'm not a nominal Christian. All of the churches we've called home through the years matter deeply to me, which is why they became our homes in the first place and why we left each when we did. Each church marks a season and chapter in our lives and growth. I'm not a "church hopper"--way too methodical and committed for that.  But, I am a church nomad, sojourner of sorts.  If my relationship with the church was a marriage, I'd be the person who had multiple marriages with the best intentions, but each marriage ending with a painful divorce.  At some point, the div

Most of my mornings begin with Bible and coffee. This blog forces me to slow down, to nail down the text and be precise in my processing and reflections. Admittedly, I'm prejudiced: I think everyone would benefit from beginning their morning with the Word. I was born a Catholic but became a Christian at age 23--not that the two are mutually exclusive but that was my path. Two decades later, my perspective continues to mature--through reading His Word, through His Spirit, through life losses and gains, everyday relationships and the relentless pressures of experience and time. I haven't figured it all out, nor do I expect to. In this world we are given a mere handful of fragments that allude to the greater context of our lives. All the same, they are precious fragments and worthy of our most earnest inquiry. The writings you'll find here usually start with the text then wander. They are not entirely my own. Instead, they are a mix of commentaries I'm pondering, pictures

I have been away from some parts of my faith. One part I've been away from is the daily discipline of reading God's Word. After approaching Bible study with tremendous intentionality and expectation for two decades, I've become burned out. Yeah, that's a weird place to be--especially considering how many people do not read their Bibles at all. I actively began believing Jesus is God in my early 20's. After enduring a Catholic childhood with few functional examples of active faith, God felt distant if not unreal. If I am completely honest with myself, I have not released some of my hestitations in becoming a Christian--or perhaps I released them and found them again.  I'm not entirely sure. As a Catholic child, I watched a lot of people going through the motions of their faith weekly. The motions are one of the most obvious aspects of the Catholicism. How can you attend a service weekly and miss this?  There are words to say at the right time, gestures, body post

 George Herbert's poetry is lean and muscular, terse even. The sentence order is often inverted and the "thees, thous, and O's" separate me from his persona, so formal. Intense, reverant, heady, truthfilled, distant. Francis Chan is another thing. Too presumptious in asserting that he understands his reader. I'm not sure he does. I'm sure he doesn't understand parts of me and my struggle with the Church.  Some of his assertions do resonate with me: his observation that I have become resigned to the current consumer mentality of church goers--true.  I come with an oppositive perspective---want to belong to a Christian community to participate, belong, serve alongside others who are seeking God on earth, visible the invisible through our words, hands, hearts.  Sitting in a sanctuary has never been my favorite.  Each service feels packed with mostly shallow connections between church members, the "club" mentality. In the "low church" envir