The Closet, Lore Wilbert Part II

"But Bell Hooks and others were right, that’s not healing. It’s a part of it, but it’s not finishing it. Finishing it happens when we grow brave again and begin to entrust ourselves to people again, engage ourselves to the lifetime of work that true faith is, and learn to attach healthily without putting all of our hope in people and institutions again." -Lore Wilbert

When it comes to my faith, I am "in progress." I believe that whomever is earnest in their faith and not delusional about the world is to some degree in progress, always. There is no finishing because there is no end to the river of crap you have to ford. 

I described this sense of limbo in my prior post--the sense that I am ever progressively, precariously crossing a stream of hurt and confusion--stone-by-stone, step-by-step. I once believed the church community was uneven, but that collectively, they became a solid enough foot bridge, a scaffolding, a stabilizing way to embrace God and people. 

But, institutions, leaders, and community that once felt stabilizing have become the very obstacle in my path. Instead of being the footbridge, they became rocks, then they became the very river that threatens to disconnect and divide me from from the functional visible church. I've tried, but I fail to connect back to it. The creek between us became a stream, then the stream became a river, and the currents are treacherous.

And this is where I become confused.  Maybe that's the problem at its most basic--I'm confused.  I have thought one way about Christianity as a Catholic child, yet another way as a teenager who saw the disconnect and was brave enough to call the bluff and pull my chips out. As a young adult, I pushed the chips back in, open to re-entering the conversation. I laid aside my reservations and anger, deciding to trust and learn anew, differently.  

The trusting and learning since then has been difficult at best and disastorous at worst. I've been let down by the church more than encouraged. I've wondered if part of my healing will require working through all of those let-downs.  They are not petty ones. They are not all the same, though they are all let-downs. I could and have stuffed them down, shoved them in a closet and secured the door, but they grow again. They multiply, they pile upon each other until the closet cannot neatly contain them. They begin to smell until one day you've just had it, had enough, are willing to face whatever is in there.

So what is in there?  A lot of rot and junk.

The disconnect is not primarily in the words of Christ or even the Bible where admittedly there is greater room for confusion and disagreement.  The disconnect for me is with people. People who have pledged allegance to Christ but behave in ways that are disgraceful to the Kingdom and hurtful to others in big and small ways.

The disconnect is in me being asked to commit to church institutions that have required a lot of inner work and time without reaping fruit or seeing fruit.  I see self-sustaining communities that prop each other up often in obligatory, artifical ways. I see individuals who are generally uneducated and blindly trusting, but not in wise ways.  I see a whole contingent and class of people who prey on this body of people, predators and charletains. I see earnest but out of touch leaders who continue to try, but are not of much efficacy.

Why? Why continue to invest and try to engage that? I'm not suggesting that we should not engage other people who believe and encourage each other. I'm suggesting that if as an individual, I try and try again to connect to Christians but ultimately fail, wouldn't it make sense to count the cost, step back from the process and wonder if I need to look at the effort anew?

In the end, how do we measure their work? The impact, the value. Is it in numbers? stories? functions?People's feelings? Financial contributions? new converts? the health of old converts? the degree to which the body functions healthily to sustain one another?

Why NOT go to church? A response...

I feel the hope in Amy Peterson's reasons for going to church. Some of this hope finds a place in me abstractly, but then I think about getting dressed, getting in my cold car, and facing the awkwardness of high church and many people I still struggle to connect to.  Maybe it's me.  Maybe it's just not the right fit for me.  It's not the right fit for my husband, so that gives me another reason.  

If you are curious, and for my own understanding, here are some more reasons:

*It's emotionally exhausting to try and develop relationships in an environment where people feel so focused on their "thing"--whether it be performative works or the Episcopal faith, or their own inner circle.

*I am still confused about what to do during the service. There is so much structure to an Episcopal service--the procession, the turning, the singing of complicated hymns that I don't know.  There is jumping around in the Book of Common Prayer.

The counterargument--I do find the music moving and worth medidating in, especially the evening service. There are fewer distractions there and the service is all on the bulletin which is helpful.

*I don't like trying to get to know people that seem to all have well established friends and connections. Others just seem uninterested--though who knows, they may just have different needs. I feel awkward and like I don't have much in common with others there.  The nice dress and affluence further create a barrier, as I'm much more comfortable in common clothes and with common people.

*I long to be connected to a group of believers where I can share my struggles and questions about faith and the application of this faith to our broken world.  But, I have a hard time connecting to this congregation. Many are nice, but offstandish.  Some just want to express themselves and vent. Others are so familiar with Trinity, that they barely recognize I'm there.  

*Through my interactions and sermons, I sometimes feel too pushed to the left--not by Scott White, but perhaps by Amy's stern feminist lens. I don't like feeling judged or pushed from any angle or perspective.

*I don't like finding clothes nice enough.  This is true even outside of church.

*It feels like an insiders club or an outsiders club of people who identify as "Episcopals" primarily or "members of Trinity" for years.

*There is a lack of curiosity among the members there about other people.  The curiosity they have for their spirituality or their art and accomplishments seems their focus.

That's enough for now--maybe next time I will explore why I've stopped attending the Ladie's Bible Study.

Paul, Feminism, and my Second Awakening

 This is a post processing my thoughts in general about Paul and reflecting on the Bible Project's podcast on Acts Episode 4, and Paul.

When I first confronted Christianity with seriousness as a young adult in 1993, I was in graduate school studying English and exploring feminist theory in my studies. Feminism as a concept was refreshing--it felt truthful. Although I eventually tapped out on pursuing higher levels of study and became suspicious of the academic culture of English Departments, Feminism was something that resonated with me, and inspired a form of self-reflection and reconfiguring.  I remember trying to share my discoveries with my sister Jill at the time and feeling that she just didn't get it.

So, when I began authentically pursuing God and Christianity, I was confronted with the challenge of understanding a faith that I thought I knew already afresh.  And, I was confronted with the challenge of how to reconcile this faith with my world view which was extremely tolerant and affirmative of diversity, letting people be, women being freed from societal expectations and norms of women being perceived sexually or idealistically, not as flesh and blood humans of their own right.

Because I believed in the gospel, I was confident that feminism and Christianity were harmonious. I found a feminist Christian journal and began pulling things apart to put them back together in a better way. I don't remember relating much to this journal, which was kind of dry and hyper academic, but I do remember that it first identified this idea of Paul being a problem. Paul had the most legalistic views of women. Paul came after Jesus. Paul built the community and influenced Christianity to adopt then culturally normal views of women that could change over time.

There was so much new to learn and relearn---I had read the New Testament but very little of the Old. Briggs and I began this discovery of our faith together, and I eventually gave up trying to reconcile feminist theory and the Bible, choosing to trust the basics of this new form of faith as I was learning it through my Bible reading and local church community.

I was new to Christianity--at least to the Protestant, Evangelical Christianity--the kind where you submit yourself to the truth that 1) I am a sinner 2) Jesus died for me 3) I must accept this truth and confess that He is God to be "saved" from Hell and given new life.  Growing up Catholic, we knew we needed to confess and that we sinned, but I'm not sure I understood or believed that I was inherently sinful by nature.

Fording The Stream, Lore Wilbert Part I

 Yesterday morning I was reading my email and took time to explore this substack post by Lore Wilbert. I have no knowledge of Wilbert, how I came to follow her, or what she's like as an author outside of this post, but it helped me.

It helped me because it echoed hurts in my heart and life that have festered, scabbed over, but not healed fully in the last five years. In "Out of Isolation" Wilbert mentions that we would prefer to be through things already. Definitely me. I wish I could step past the hurt, be healed fully, and embrace something healthy and new. Here's how she puts it:

"thing about doing this sort of work, though, is it comes with a near constant desire to be either out of it or through it. Everything in us aches to avoid the discomfort of whatever this is, and wants to return to the old ways of functioning in the world even though we know what we really want is a whole new way of functioning in the world."

Here's another truth of hers:

The thing about harm and healing, though, is that often both happen slowly. They’re not things we decide are happening or can dictate the time and place of their occurrence. 

They just happen. And they happen to us.

This captures what I feel.  I feel very much that I am waiting to move through this and beyond this, but I don't know how.  I feel stuck.  I feel that I have tried different ways to reconnect with the church and had limited success.

House of Mercy--too unbiblical mystic for me, though I admire their heart for people

Haywood--a place to serve but never established community there, felt like my boundaries were not respected and that I was not seen as a person.

Trinity--felt like I/we put a lot into trying high church and although I appreciate their posture, I find it difficult to connect with them.

So much dysfunction in the church--so, so, so much.  

I've experienced this also and know this to be true:

Good things happened in those years too though, we became detached from church as social security, faith as identity, and certain doctrines as right thinking. We needed isolation in order to detach from the things that hemmed us in before.

What good things happened to us?  Our faith became leaner.  We cut ties with  a lot of unhealthy ways of expressing and living out Christianity that were no longer authentic to our evolving sense of selves.  Because the process has not been tidy and more like foraging for sustenance in the dark, it's not something I lead with or like to linger on.

It prompts humility but not answers, and I'd rather have answers or at least firm stones to stand on while crossing the stream underneath my feet. Maybe that's how it feels---like being out in the middle of a sometimes rough but vibrant creek, studying the next stone. And the next.  And the next. 

The experience of fording is immediate-- forcing me to wholly enter the rigors and deep mysteries of Christian faith. It's intense; I'll say that.  But it's not easy, it's not done, and it's not comfortable.  I am arrested in process--figuring it out in real time, wondering if the next rock will be stable or if I will find myself downstream gasping.

So, yeah, to be in the middle is "not my favorite," as my son David would say.  He's great at understatement, and I can be too. I'm inherently cautious, pulled back, reserved----even without the challenge of crossing a living stream.

I feel double downed, braced, scanning. 

Where I'm at with Church

I asked some apt questions in a post last June that have been quietly waiting for me. In many senses, I could have written that post this morning--feel mostly similar about my faith journey and lived reality with the Christian church in America.

I divorced the church I knew back in 2020 during the beginning of Covid. Note--I divorced the church I knew, not The Church universal. I didn't divorce my Christian faith in Jesus or my belief in God, although there is more I don't know than I do about either. I'm still a believer as they would term it. I hold out more space and room though now for my relationship with God and others.  I assume much less than I used to, have no quick answers, pause longer and wonder more. 

I choose to reject the majority of the trappings and customs of my prior faith culture. It's as if I found an forgotten jacket in the attic that I can no longer relate to. It looks and feels uncomfortable, impractical, and not even warm.  The jacket is not my faith, and it needs to go.

Where it feels scary is that I don't want another jacket. Instead, I long to live out my faith in a warm room where I don't need one. 

This experience is not straightforward and involves a lot of questioning, rejecting, groping. I'm not looking to be a fan or a disciple of any church or man. Of God, yes. Of man, no.

It makes me feel a little better to think of John the Baptist living in the wilderness.  He also was not a fan of groups or people, although he had his followers too I suppose. But, he was unconventional, on the edge. Maybe that's where I'm missing it---John surely never found a warm cozy room for his faith, but he lived it out controversially and lost his life to it. 

Maybe my desire is altogether a wrong, misguided one.

I still remember when I was first contemplating Christianity and wrestling with all the man-made bastardizations that made me want to run the other way. My sister Kathy's advice was to focus on Jesus and not all the rest. I think that's still useful advice; it's not an answer, but a direction nonetheless.

I reject everything that does not make sense in light of the Jesus I've met in the pages of the Bible.

This is not a straightforward path either though.  Through the years and study, I've come to recognize the that Bible is a much more complex and historical book than I've been able to grasp or understand. I hold my Bible with more wonder and more context.  

Part of me feels that I've been wrestling the Bible to match my faith and wrestling my faith to match the Bible for too long. The Bible is a complex text written by hundreds of people over hundreds of years. It's not an algorithm that spits out clean cut answers and ways to follow God. It's messy too--full of narratives, histories, poems, and letters that need to be approached with wonder and a quiet openness.

Over the last year, I've spent little time in the Bible and in our Episcopal Church.  This is something I hope to explore more, as these experiences have been my most obvious straightforward expressions of my Christian faith in the past. 

It's too much this morning to tackle either of those thoughts, and I haven't answered my questions from last June either:

In what sense do I align myself with this local congregation?  In the sense that they are a touchstone, a center point, a local manifestation of His Kingdom and a place to call home.  Over time, I hope to understand pieces of this church better, to find places to serve that feel both like church and ministry.

Answer:

I align myself with this church because I respect the leadership there. They don't come to me with packaged solutions or presumption.

I align myself with their organizational posture which seeks to involve congregants in a multitude of faith expressions and communities in which to connect.

New Question--where do I feel disconnected or struggle?

Worship is foreign.  Although the bones of it are familiar from my Catholic youth, the songs are awkward, and I often feel that I am trying to follow a dance I'm no good at. Awkward.  I mostly feel awkward.

Is this an excuse? Is it too much to carve out time to attend the Celtic service which is easiest to follow and avoids all the pomp and circumstance of the main service?

I have time to devote to learn it. To serve. I just don't want to end up "putting time in" to "put time in." But all relationships require time and investment. No short cuts with God or people.

So maybe if I don't feel at home in the service, I find ways to connect on the edges. Ladies Bible Study was one such commitment. It feels inconvienient and sometimes awkward too, but it's also helpful and a way to connect.

I could join a knitting group. I could start a book club. I can be a Christian on the edges. More questions than answers...

June 2024

 In May we joined a local Episcopal congregation officially. It was the next logical and emotional step, and I'm glad we joined. After four years of wandering, it's good to settle.

Settle in both ways?  Maybe.  If I'm honest, I've given up on finding any body of Christians that I can truly connect with in all ways. I find groups of Christians--and unspecific social groups in general--a lot of work. It takes a long time to know a church, a pastor, a person.  So, I am content to join and slowly get to know this congregation and its people, but I am in no rush.

Last post I mentioned that I dislike the term "deconstruction" or the thought that the last five years have been about deconstructing my faith. What verb would I use instead? Assessing. Examining. Sorting. Kneading. I'm not sure still. Whatever it is, it's an active and passive process--a lot of sorting, sifting, wondering, letting things rest, picking them up again, trying new approaches, asking new and old questions in familiar and different ways. It's involved picking up some of what I learned as a Catholic, rejecting some of what I learned as a Southern Baptist. It's a broader pasture I've entered where there is less certainty, but more room for beauty and wonder. It feels roomy, a place where I can catch my breath and just begin to seek God again anew.

It's less about what the church is doing, although I identify as part of my local church. In some sense, if there is a sense in which I've taken apart my faith and put it back together again, the taking apart has involved placing aside all the crazy that I encountered as a "nondenominational" but essentially Southern Baptist Christian.  I literally spent decades trying to connect with and live my faith through this culture. It's been a heavy load and journey--I'm thankful to set it down.

I'm cautious about picking up any new loads....feel pretty against any man-made or directed loads that I don't understand on a literal or metaphysical level. I'd rather experience my faith one day at a time, mostly apart from the waves and wind of cultural expectations and interpretations whether Southern Baptist or dyed in the wool Episcopal.

In what sense do I align myself with this local congregation?  In the sense that they are a touchstone, a center point, a local manifestation of His Kingdom and a place to call home.  Over time, I hope to understand pieces of this church better, to find places to serve that feel both like church and ministry.

Why I Dislike "Deconstruction"

Well, I think part of my dislike for this term goes back to my English Master's program at Clemson.  Back in the early 1990's, "Deconstructionism" and "Postmodern" literary analysis was all the rage.  Honestly, I'm confident I didn't understand it then, and still don't understand it now.  The difference is that I now know enough not to be overly impressed with anyone who waves that flag--it's just another category and word that can mean many things to many people and nothing at all.

As a Christian, I notice the term gaining ground in edgy circles in the last decade. It became fashionable to "deconstruct" one's childhood or adult faith.  If I think of it that way, I certainly had a season of deconstructing my childhood Catholic inheritance, then deconstructed my Pentecostal season.  Somehow in the effort to be "nondenominational" and place an emphasis on the authority and relevance of Biblical scripture and worship, I ended up in the Baptist camp, which is now a dirty word. Not that I disagree.  But all the same, words and still just words and many different noxious or benign things lurk under each.

And how is deconstructing different than growing up?  As we grow into maturity, which is certainly a prime Biblical value.  The apostle Paul is echoing in my mind here, and what a lovely translation:

"This work must continue until we are all joined together in what we believe and in what we know about the Son of God. Our goal is to become like a full-grown man—to look just like Christ and have all his perfection." Ephesians 4:13-ERV

I guess I feel like deconstruction is a slippery term. Are you saying that you are denouncing parts of your faith?  Are you denoucing belief in Christ?  In the authority of scriptures? What exactly are you deconstructing?  

An even more important question is "What are you building or REbuilding?" What do you struggle with and why? What have you come to peace with and take me through your journey and story.  That I can relate to.

But deconstruction, that feels a little pompous and too easy--like one of those toddler boys who ambles along knocking down another child's block tower, often solely for the pleasure of watching the tower fall.

I'm more interested in what you are building.