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Temporary nuns.

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I know a lady whose friend thinks she is being called to be a nun. She is about to enter a year-long discernment process to determine if she is indeed being called. If it is anything like the Sisters of Mercy process it could take a minimum of seven years before she is able to fully be accepted as a sister.

Why? Why this long? But then again, wouldn’t it be helpful if all people went through a process to see if they were suited for their professions? I’ve lost track of the number of people I know who spent many years and many more dollars to get an education to get professionally certified; only to find out when they actually entered their chosen field they hated it. They trained to be teachers or nurses and found they couldn’t stand it in reality. When it came time to do the work they were trained for, they found that they didn’t love it.

That is a lot of time and money and energy wasted. A little discernment beforehand would have helped a lot.

Of course, deciding to be a nun isn’t the same as deciding to be a nurse or a teacher. Well, actually it is. A lot of nuns end up doing those very jobs. They are both service jobs.

But nuns don’t get paid. They don’t get to marry. They don’t get to own anything either. There is a lot more commitment to being a nun.

I’ve heard that very few young women are entering the convent these days. Perhaps the Catholic Church should rethink this whole thing.

Let people have 5 year runs. Let young women sign up to serve the poor, the homeless, the sick for five years. During that time their “pay” is room and board, just like regular nuns. During that time they are single, so they can dedicate all of their time to their mission and not a family.

After that time they can leave. It is kind of like the Peace Corps, but with church training and oversight. This would bolster the ranks of the nuns and give young women who want to help a way to do so without the lifetime commitment.

They might also have the opportunity of renewing their contract. Either way, they will have training and on the job experience that can translate into a job in the secular world.

Seems like a winning solution to the shortage of help.

Talking to myself.

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Oh my God. I still have another 3 and a half hours until supper. Then two more hours until we leave. So maybe less than 5 hours of having to be by myself.

How will I stand retirement? How will I stand my vacation coming up? At least half of that I will be alone. How will I stand being a widow, if that is to be?

I’m not really by myself, but I am. We can’t talk. There are others here, but the convent is big enough with enough areas that we can wander around and have space to ourselves. There are porches, and swings, and trees, and libraries, and snack areas that we can go to. Or we can stay in our rooms. But we can’t talk. So it feels like I’m alone.

Perhaps I don’t like being alone and silent because I’ve just not done it before. The day here is broken up with meals. We see each other then, but we still don’t talk. I write. Boy, have I written. I’ve wandered around outside. I took some pictures. I read two “elf-help” books. I did scrapbooking for the first time.

And I listened.

And God listened with me.

I’m waking up to the voice. I’m hearing the echo. Rumi says “Who is speaking with my mouth?” and it makes sense.

I’m afraid to say that the voice is me, and I am the voice. It sounds vain, petty, selfish. It sounds crazy. Yet if “I am my beloved and my beloved is mine”, it makes sense.

If we are a way for the universe to know itself, then this praying to God is self-reflective. God is within all of us. God created us, and gave us life. When we slow down the noise of our lives we hear God’s voice. It is inside us, as close as our breath, as essential as our heartbeats.

We aren’t God. But we are part of God. And God dwells within us, every one of us. God is within all things. It all came from God.

There is no division between living and not, animate and not. Everything has value. Everything has a purpose. It does not matter if it benefits humans in general or you in particular. God made it for a reason.

(Written 9-14-13, at 2 pm. Three quarters of the way through a silent retreat.)

Playing chicken with God, and being a spiritual vagabond.

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You can’t play chicken with God. Say you have a specific task that you were put on this earth to do, and you are one of the rare ones who knows what it is. To delay doing it to buy more time won’t work. God will just take it from you and give it to someone else to do. I’ve lost track of the number of times this happens in the Bible.

Even questioning God can get you in trouble, if you do it too much. Moses questioned God four times, when God called him to go to Pharaoh to get the Israelites freed from slavery. He didn’t think he was able to do it. He kept coming up with excuses and God kept coming up with workarounds for him. At the end, God sent an angel to kill him, and it was only the intervention of Moses’ wife that saved him. Kind of a crazy story. The Bible is full of them.

My theory? If God calls you to do something, it means that you have the ability to do it. God knows you better than you know yourself. God made you. The problem? Knowing that it is an actual call from God.

You are a tool. The pot cannot tell the potter how to use it. The car does not matter to the driver. If the car breaks down, the driver will just get another car. So questioning God and coming up with reasons you can’t do it won’t help you at all.

But what if you don’t know what your calling is? What if you have no idea why God put you on this Earth? Then it is good to not fight it either. Be OK with being a block in the building. Be OK with being a puzzle piece, and not seeing the big picture.

My problem, well, one of many, is that there are a lot of things that I would like to write about that I think are of significance. There are things I’ve come to understand through my prayer life that I feel would be helpful. There are insights I get from reading scripture that I think are new takes on old words. But I don’t feel that my writing is good enough, or that I have the time to dedicate to it to do it justice. I find that I only have time to write for about thirty minutes at a time, and for some reason I feel I have to create a completed post in that time.

Yes, I realize these are all excuses. I don’t have to post something every day. I’m not being paid for this. Nobody would notice if I didn’t post for a few days, so I could work on something bigger. But I know me – if I get out of the habit of posting, then I’ll take more time off, and then I won’t post at all. There is something about making a routine of it that is forcing me to write, and writing is helping me figure things out.

I’m reminded of the last meeting I had with my former priest. She said that my spiritual insights were immature. She said that she often had to bite her tongue to not say “I figured that out years ago!” The fact that she told me that erased all the tongue-biting she had done.

This is harmful, and hurtful, and not Christ-like.

This is part of why I had to leave.

Maybe my insights are simple. Maybe they are things she figured out years ago. But making fun of someone else’s spiritual journey isn’t the mark of a religious leader.

Perhaps I shared those insights with her because deep down I didn’t think she knew them. I’m not sure which ones she was talking about. Obviously at one point she thought I was onto something because she was the one who proposed that I enter the deacon discernment program.

Ugh. I’m still bitter about that whole thing. I’m trying to process this. I don’t want to be stuck here angry with it, but turning away from it is not a good idea.

There is a sense of abandonment, of being hung out to dry. There is also a sense of freedom in leaving. I feel that in a way she did me a favor by being so over-the-top in our last meeting. It provided a clean break with no turning back. I knew when I first started going back to church that the Episcopal Church was as close as I could get at the time. I’d prayed about it, and that was the reply. So I knew going into it that there was going to be an end to it. I knew I was going to leave.

I was hoping for more of a dove-tail leaving than a severing, but it wasn’t up to me.

And that too is part of the process. It is about trusting God, however I’m led. It is about following, and trying not to get in the way. It is about trying to be a worthy vessel.

I feel alone in the wilderness, yet right at home.

Watercolor shaman

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I was drawing this morning. I’m trying to get into the habit of drawing a little every morning. Watch out – I have watercolor pencils and I know how to use them.
Well, sort of. I know how they work. I’m not quite patient enough to draw real things. I make up excuses for myself, saying that the real things are there, and I can’t improve upon them. Why draw them when I could just take a picture? But I know that is a cop-out. I know that is me trying to not do the work required to learn how to translate something three-dimensional into something two-dimensional.
There is something to drawing what is there. It slows you down. You have to really look at things if you are going to draw them. Does this angle go straight up, or slightly to the right? Oh, look, there’s a crack there. I thought that spot was flawless.
Sometimes I learn things when I’m drawing. I’ve learned that figs aren’t just purple. There is a little green in the skin too. And they have really interesting spots, tiny ones. But sometimes what I learn isn’t right in front of me. I learn things while I’m drawing that have to do with how I draw, and have to do with where my head is at the time.
I’m trying a technique called “Praying in Color”. I saw this book by Sybil MacBeth at the library and have decided to incorporate its ideas into my morning routine. I like to draw, and I like to pray – and I don’t have a lot of spare time. So why not do both at the same time? I’m not sure that I do it exactly the way it is in the book. I think I have put my own spin on it. I offer this idea to you, if you are trying to find a new way to pray.
I take a piece of paper and I write today’s date and my prayer intention on the back of it, towards the bottom. Then I turn it over and start drawing. I doodle. I pick up whatever color that comes to mind, and I draw whatever shape that I’m feeling at the moment. I think that is important. I’m not trying to draw something real. Then, while I’m in that space where I’m not controlling what is happening, I get answers to my prayer intention. Quite often it isn’t what I thought it would be, and I’m surprised. It is a bit like being a shaman, but using watercolor pencils.

On going to a spiritual director and not an ordained minister.

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I’m always a little anxious before I go to see my spiritual director. I had to start seeing one when I was in the process to discern if I was being called to be a deacon in the Episcopal Church. That process was put on hold by the priest in charge when I came back from Cursillo a little more Pentecostal than she could handle. Then I wrote a blog post where I feel that Jesus meant for the Church to be a) not buildings but people and b) not ordained ministers, but everybody, and c) more social outreach than social club. That ticked her off a lot. So I no longer go to church, but I still go to my spiritual director. This was my choice. I get a lot from going.

There wasn’t any help on what to expect when I first went. It is kind of like going to a psychotherapist, but weirder. We talk about my relationship with God and Jesus by talking about my relationship with my husband and friends and job. I’m not sure where we are going sometimes, and I’m not sure I see the connection. But I am sure that every time I finish a session with her I want to come back the next day even though the next meeting is in a month. She manages to uncover things that I didn’t even know were hidden.

Having a spiritual director is weird coming from a faith community that has a hard time saying “I’ll pray for you.” I’m more comfortable hanging out with my Pentecostal friends than my Episcopal friends when I’m in the mood to talk about God’s interaction with my life.

This is a little weird. Supposedly I was part of a Christian church, but we would talk about God and Jesus in the abstract. We didn’t talk about God and Jesus right here, right now. They were characters in a book, not real presences in our lives. They were ideas and archetypes.

My spiritual director is part of this faith tradition, but she says things like “Invite Jesus into this situation” and “Jesus wants to be your closest friend.” She asks questions like “Where is Jesus in this moment?” This is some pretty foreign stuff. I feel like I’m doing it wrong. I feel like I should already know how to do this, how to answer these questions. I feel like I’ve been duped by priests all these years, who have kept all the good bits for themselves and left the scraps for me. I feel like I’m adult trying to learn how to ride a bicycle for the first time, when I should already know how.

I’m grateful for this time with her, and grateful to find someone who can help me. The goal in spiritual direction is “intimacy with Jesus”. This is a foreign concept to me. This isn’t something that I was ever taught in any church I’ve ever gone to. It sounds like a good idea though. It sounds like something I should already be familiar with. It sounds like the whole point of being a Christian – how can you obey God’s will if you don’t know it? How can you know it if you don’t hear it?

The funny part is that the closer I got to this idea of hearing from God, of intimacy with Jesus, the further I had to get from church. The more I talked to the priest about God talking to me, the more she thought I was crazy. The more I go to the spiritual director, the more she wants to hear about these stories and cheers me on. I’ve written about some of these stories in my “Strange but True” section.

Oh – I get it. The priests don’t want you to hear it for yourself. They want to tell you what God says. They want you to be dependent on them. They don’t want to teach you how to hear from God.

It is this kind of control that Jesus came to remove. Jesus isn’t about hoarding power. He is about giving it away. Jesus is a radical. Jesus is a revolutionary. Jesus showed us in the loaves and fishes story that God’s rules aren’t like our rules. There is so much more to how God does things than we can ever imagine. God wants us all to connect to that power and be multiplied. God wants us all to be stronger, more alive. Then God wants us to use that vitality to help others. It isn’t about paying off our mortgages sooner, as one of the “prosperity gospel” liars says. It is about using that strength and power to help people who don’t have homes at all.

Lay vs. Ordained – power play

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I once saw a photo of a lay person distributing the ashes for Ash Wednesday. Now, the lay person was Sara Miles, so there is that. She is part of an Episcopal congregation in San Francisco and she is a writer about religious matters. This congregation also distributes the sermons on podcasts, so I’ve learned that she has delivered many sermons.

Wait. A lay person, someone who isn’t ordained, distributing ashes, and delivering sermons? This is in a denomination that licenses people to be able to distribute the wine at communion. In order to distribute the wine at communion, you have to be an adult member in good standing. That translates to showing up for service weekly and paying tithes. Then the priest has to send a letter to the Bishop nominating you, and then you get a certificate signed by the Bishop to do this.

There are a lot of control issues in the Episcopal Church. I suspect the same is true in a lot of churches.

Note this is just for the wine. Regular, un-ordained people can’t distribute the bread unless there is something pretty severe going on like the priest has hurt his back. And they certainly can’t bless it. You have to go to seminary to learn that trick.

Jesus didn’t go to seminary, and neither did his disciples. And they weren’t ordained either.

There is definitely a hierarchy of “us and them:. The lay people are told that they are ministers too, but they certainly aren’t seen as equal, and they certainly aren’t encouraged or taught how to deepen their ministry.

So this lady, doing priest things, really woke me up. I first thought how dare she? I then thought, I wonder if the Bishop knows? Then I thought why not? Then I was jealous.

It reminded me of all the micro-managing that my old priest did. And that my old manager did. And it makes me wonder why I keep getting myself into situations with controlling supervisors.

And it makes me think that the worst kind of controlling person is one who acts like they aren’t controlling you at all.

We’ve been bamboozled. We’ve been deceived. We’ve voluntarily given over the care and feeding of our souls to people we thought we could trust. Even if the priest / pastor / minister is a decent human being and not secretly embroiled in a scandal involving money or sex, we are still being led astray.

Consider a teacher. You’ll only learn what the teacher wants to show you. You won’t learn anything about what you are interested in. The teacher won’t be able to answer all your questions and if you ask a lot of questions (as I did) you’ll get some surly reactions from said teacher.

People in authority don’t like it when you ask questions. It undermines their authority. It reveals what they don’t know. It proves they are fallible. It unmasks the guy behind the curtain. You may learn it is all smoke and mirrors.

Don’t give them your power. Don’t entrust the care and feeding of your soul to another person. Question everything and everyone, and if they resist your questions, get as far away as you can. Worse, if they say they welcome your questions but distract you and don’t answer them or show you how to answer them for yourself, run.

I was lulled into a sense of complacency with the church I was in. It was pretty progressive. Big on women’s rights, gay rights, equality for all. Open to other faith traditions. But there is still that division of lay versus ordained. There is still the training that ordained people get that lay people don’t.

The priest can’t be everywhere. Remember the idea of don’t put all your eggs into one basket? Don’t put all of your ministry into the hands of one person.

What would it be like if Jesus had fed only his disciples with that bread and fish?

He didn’t. He gave thanks for it, and broke it, and it was distributed and fed thousands. This is what we are to do with everything. This isn’t just about food, or money, or power. Nothing is for keeping or hoarding. If we build up for ourselves treasures on earth, we are missing the point.

White is white – on blind obedience to the Church, and going it alone.

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Some of you will remember that I was in the deacon discernment process for the Episcopal Church. This means that I believe (and the priest believed) that I was being called by God to serve “the least of these” – the poor, the homeless – those who have no one to serve them. Some of you have been reading along since April of this year, when I stopped going to church. The part that is interesting to me is that only a handful of people have even seemed to notice I’m gone.

I’ve recently written to the team that was involved in the process. It took me this long to get over my anger at and sense of betrayal by the priest. I didn’t want to write an angry letter. There are/were (what tense do I use?) nine people on that team, all trying to “listen” with me to see if it was a call from God. None of them have written back. I then sent a copy of the letter to the Bishop. Nothing, again. I feel like I’m standing at the front of an auditorium and the microphone isn’t on so nobody can hear me. Or maybe they are ignoring me, hoping I’ll go away. But the weirdest part is that more people from a church that prides itself on being welcoming and friendly hasn’t contacted me.

I was very active in this church. I was there every week. I was the leader of the team of lectors and chalice bearers. I was also an acolyte. I served up front as part of the worship team nearly every week. It is a small church. I’m hard to miss.

To be a deacon in the Episcopal Church is a big crazy process. It takes years. It takes homework and meetings. You have to submit your transcripts. You have to submit your baptism and confirmation records. You have to submit to a physical and psychological exam. Basically, you have to submit. They want to make sure that you are hearing from God, sure, but they also want to make sure they can control you. They want to make sure that the Church is safe by not signing off on a wacko, sure, but they also want to find out if the priest or the Bishop tell you to do something, you’ll do it.

The odd part is that you have to go through all this for an unpaid position. You are expected to keep your day job. You have to do more at church and in the community, but you don’t get paid for it. They have this whole multi-year process to shape you into a deacon. The process is arduous.

But it turns out that they don’t really have a framework to teach you how to follow God when the Church isn’t. That’s the scary part. There’s a group in the Catholic Church that embodies this blind faith in the Church. The Jesuits say that if they see that something is white, and the Pope says it is black, they are to say it is black.

I’m not about that kind of obedience. I understand it, somewhat. We humans are fallible. I entered into this process because I know of my weakness. I’m bipolar. So I wanted training and oversight. I wanted to make sure that if I thought I was seeing white, it was indeed white. It is my greatest hope that I not deceive or mislead anybody. I think it is really important to make sure it is God’s voice I’m hearing and not my own imagining.

I left church because I could see white and everybody else was doing black. The more I read of the Gospels, the more I realized that what we, collectively as a Church, are doing, is wrong. It isn’t about building church buildings or having ordained ministers. It is about building up the Body of Christ – by teaching every person who is called to be a Christian how to be a loving servant of God and how to hear the voice of God. Everybody. Not the elect, not ordained people – everybody.

I think everybody needs to go to Cursillo and be woken up to the Holy Spirit. I think the homework assignments for the deacon process are very helpful for helping people “hear” their calling. I think small groups where people “listen” to each other and keep each other accountable are useful. I think reading books by progressive Christian authors about their struggle to integrate the ways of God with the ways of the world are helpful. I think we all need to work on our faith rather than take it for granted.

Perhaps this is what they are afraid of. Perhaps this is why they haven’t contacted me. I represent a total upheaval of the way things have always been done. No more church buildings. No more vestry. No more priests. Church isn’t a social club but a way of life – and that life is service. Perhaps this frightens them.

It is like the early Christians, who knew in their hearts that what they were doing was right, was in fulfillment of all the promises that they as Jews had been told. They knew that Jesus was the Messiah. But everybody else railed against them. How dare you upset the way we’ve always done things? How dare you tell us that we are doing it wrong?

I get that. People are like that.

But white is white, and black is black, and the blinders are off now.

Getting hit by lightning. Or not.

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While walking to my car on the way to work this morning, I noticed that the sky was very dark and heavy with storm clouds. The air was sticky with humidity. I had the distinct impression that a storm could happen at any moment, and that there could be lightning. Just ahead to my right, about four feet away I looked at the driveway. I had an impression that there was a lot of energy there, like lightning could strike. It felt then as if there was a strike, right there, too close for comfort.

This is hard to explain. It is as if I saw a lightning strike with my mind’s eye. I didn’t see the lightning, either real or imagined. I felt that it was simply there, beyond my normal perception.

What would I do if there was a lightning strike that close to me? Probably freak out. I seem to remember that you are supposed to drop to the ground but don’t drop flat. Just crouch down, so you aren’t tall anymore. Lightning looks for tall things. Lightning tries to bridge the gap and make a connection.

I stopped for a moment. Was I predicting a hit? Nothing happened. I kept going and went on to my car.

I was reminded at the time of the tale of Balaam’s donkey. It tried to warn him of danger ahead.

I’m reminded now of the tale of Moses and the burning bush.

A lot of crazy-sounding things happened in the Bible, to otherwise everyday people. But somehow we downplay such experiences today if a person says they are having a similar experience. We tend to think that the person is making it up, or needs to be locked up.

A little later on at work, I had the distinct impression that there was a man sitting in the chair just ahead of the area where I was working. It was approximately the same position from me when I was at home and I felt the lightning strike.

Weird. Is it a ghost? TheHoly Spirit? Again, I paused. Anybody there? What would I do if it was a manifestation of God, a messenger? Not a lot of training around for that.

Yet we are of a faith that tells us that God is seeking us. That God wants to connect with us.

God is that lightning bolt, wanting to make that connection.

In the Old Testament, people usually threw themselves down to the ground when a messenger from God appeared before them. Whether in fear or in humility, who knows? But whatever the reason, they made themselves smaller. Perhaps they didn’t want to be hit.

But I’m standing. I’m standing before God, saying here I am. Use me. Send me. I don’t know where I’m going or what I’m doing, but I know that you are in control. It doesn’t make sense. But here I am.

I remember that every time I’ve needed a tool, a supply, it has been when I was unprepared. I was a good Girl Scout. I’ve got a first aid kit. I have phone numbers of community services. But every time that something big has happened, I happen to not have my kit or my phone.

So every time I pray, and God provides what is needed.

Perhaps that is what God is reminding me of.

I’m debating taking some classes. I’m thinking some classes about how to perform life-event ceremonies would be helpful. You know, weddings, funerals, the like. People need ceremonies and rituals to mark changes, to say “this has happened”. It is like how the Israelites were forever putting stones on top of each other in the desert to indicate that something amazing happened there. They’d mark that spot so when they came back to it they would remember. Ceremonies are like that, but for time. They mark not a place, but a transition from one time to another. Marriage, birth, graduation, a death – we have ceremonies for these things. I’ve looked online and the classes are long and expensive. It might not work out with my work schedule.

Maybe God is saying stop worrying about this. You don’t need a certificate to do this. Remember every time you needed to have something with you, it wasn’t there? Relax, and pray. Just like with the disciples, the Holy Spirit will give you the words.

But maybe God is telling me something like Noah. Build an ark. Get prepared.

So now I’m waiting for the third instance. I’m waiting for another sign. When I have them all together I’ll have enough data to go on. Maybe. That is what I’m telling myself. Sometimes the path for following God isn’t clear. It is like stepping from one pool of light, to one small stone, to another pool of light that just appeared right then when you stepped on that stone. Sometimes you just stand there and no light appears, and you just go forward anyway.

Meanwhile, this all sounds crazy. But I don’t feel crazy, and both times I was I knew it. And I get solace from the fact that there are a lot of crazy-sounding stories in the Bible.

Just look at Elijah and Isaiah and Daniel and Jonah. Look at Abraham and Jacob. Crazy stories. You’d have to be crazy to think that God is talking to you, right? Yet we have a book that is full of these stories. We have a faith built on these stories.

You’d have to be crazy to think that God isn’t talking to you.

“Do you trust me?”

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Sometimes, when I’m praying, Jesus says “Do you trust me?”

I say, I’d like to, but not really. I’ve committed myself twice. And now I’m talking to myself.

Or at least, that is how our society would label this. Lilly Tomlin said that if you are talking to God, you are praying. But if God is talking to you, you are crazy.

I’m afraid. I’m terrified of going too far and losing control. I’m afraid of going over the edge. I’m afraid of having to go into the hospital again. The last time was 12 years ago. Who wouldn’t want a nice break from work? But the bills don’t pay themselves. And mental hospitals aren’t that awesome. The last one I was in one of the workers tried to molest me. This is especially evil since I was on sleeping pills.

So when that little voice in my head says “do you trust me?” and I think it is Jesus, I don’t know. So not answering that question really is answering it. It is saying no. No I don’t really trust. Because I’ve been over the edge before, and I don’t like where I landed.

So why is it that all the churches I’ve been in (mainline Protestant, mostly Episcopal) don’t teach people how to hear from God, and how to know what is the voice of God and what is the voice inside your head? Isn’t that the point of church? The stories in the Bible are full of people who talked with God. They knew God was talking to them.

God asked them to do some crazy things. Take everything you have and pack it up and move to some place far away. Take your child and sacrifice him on an altar to Me as a test of your loyalty. Or, you are going to give birth to the Messiah.

You know, stuff like that. Crazy stuff.

Yet our entire faith is based on people listening to a voice in their heads telling them to do crazy stuff.

Our culture says that if you are saying that God is talking to you, you are crazy. Even my former priest (Episcopal) said that she thought I’d fail the psych exam for the deacon discernment process I was in.

Meanwhile, I’m properly oriented to day and time. I get to work on time, I get the bills paid. I have friends. What is “crazy” but simply not adapted well? I’m starting to think she is crazy for thinking that serving God is all about trying to raise money by getting more people in the church. I think that serving God is all about waking up the ones who are there to hear the voice of God.

Maybe that is what she is afraid of. Maybe she’s never heard from God. I find it interesting that I’m not the only person who feels this way.

I’d like to propose that it is crazy that when a minister finds out that a parishioner has a desire to help people and wants training and oversight, she then thinks that the person is called to ordination. Isn’t the desire to help people normal? Isn’t it part of what everybody in church is supposed to feel? And the training – that is to make the person better able to help. Isn’t that the point of church?

Or is the point of church to be a social club? My old church had a few social outreach ministries – Second Harvest and Room in the Inn. Both are very good things, the very things that church is supposed to do. I know that the first one met with a lot of resistance when it was proposed. Meanwhile, the normal activities, the stuff that takes up the majority of the time there, are book clubs (not all are religious), ice cream socials, outings to hockey and baseball games, and karaoke night with frozen margaritas.

I feel it is crazy for people who say they want to join together to serve God to be distracted with these kinds of activities. You can have fun and serve God at the same time. Instead of hanging out at a game, why not hang out at a widow’s house and help her with house repairs? Why not volunteer to teach an immigrant how to read and write?

And make sure that you don’t make a requirement of membership in the church for getting help from the church.

I asked for oversight because I’m bipolar. I want to make sure that what I’m hearing is the voice of God and not the voice of Betsy. But the more resistance I got from the priest, and the more I started looking around at the activities in the church, I didn’t feel like I was going to be lead anywhere there.

Now, I knew even from the beginning that I was going to not be a member of this church forever. I prayed beforehand, upon returning to church, as to if the Episcopal church was the right one for me, and God said that it was the closest there was to what I needed right now. So I knew it wasn’t forever. I knew it was going to end, I just didn’t know how or when.

When the priest attacked me for my blog post called “My Problem with Church”, that was it. April 17th, and I’ve never been back.

This is hard, and strange. I’ve identified as a church-going person for many years. I’ve been a confirmed Episcopalian since the late 1980s. Gone. There is a sense of freedom, and of fear. I’ve been asked by some members to come back to lead the way for others, to wake them up. How can I, when I’m silenced by the priest?

And more importantly, I don’t want to lead, or teach. I want to be fed. I want to learn.

So yes, really, I do trust Jesus. I trust that I’m being led in the right direction. I don’t know where I’m going, and I don’t know how I’m going to get there, but I’m in good company for that feeling. I know that if I was going to stay in that church I’d be even further from God’s path.

Stained glass windows, part two

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I’m totally opposed to stained glass windows in church. I object to the idea and to the cost.

Having stained glass windows keeps the church members focused inward, not outward. Their view is of pretty pictures, not of the world they are called to. We are called to love and serve the Lord by loving our neighbors. How can we think of loving and serving them if we can’t even see them?

The windows are expensive. Maybe the church as a whole raised the money to put the window in. Maybe a parishioner donated the money in honor of someone who died. It doesn’t really matter how the money was raised – 8 t0 20 thousand dollars was just spent on a window – when there are needy people who need help. Jesus told us to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and house the homeless. He told us not to build up treasures for ourselves on this earth. Do you see the contradiction here?

The windows are most beautiful to those people who are inside the building. The people who are inside already get the message. It is the people outside who need it. And what is that message? That God loves us, and needs us, and wants us. God made us, every one of us, and we are loved beyond measure. It is the duty of people in the church to share that message to every person. These stories of love and healing and redemption are stories that everybody needs to hear.

I propose that each one of us needs to become a stained glass window. We need to let God into our lives and our hearts and let the light of God shine through us. We need to be the way that people see God. We need to carry the stories of love and healing and redemption with us by living them out. We need to bring them to life. They need to not be stories so much as reminders. They need to be touchstones to let us know we are on the right path. They aren’t stories that happened back then – the stories are happening right now. There are still people like Abraham and David and Moses and Jonah. There are still people like Sarah and Leah and Miriam and Mary.

God still calls us.

I propose that the purpose of church is to wake people up to this idea, and to teach people how to be servants of God. I propose that a church that is all about the building rather than the people has got it backwards.