It's Palm Sunday, the day Christians commemorate Jesus' fateful entry into Jerusalem, which set off the events of Holy Week that led to his arrest and crucifixion. After the 40 reflective days of Lent, on Palm Sunday it always feels like events in one's own life, as well as in the Passion story, have suddenly been set into motion again - and that's how the theology of Holy Week is intended. It is a journey within a journey, where the path taken by Jesus of Nazareth can sometimes encourage a closer look at one's own path through life toward its inevitable end.
I've been thinking that I've actually not written very much here about my own spiritual path and practice, although I write a lot about religion, politics, justice, human relationships, and what could generally be called "spirit." A good friend recently put the question bluntly: "You're an intelligent person - how do you do it? Stay in the church, that is." Fair enough. So I thought maybe I would take the occasion of this week to try to reflect a little more openly on my own spiritual path and how Christianity fits into that -- or doesn't.
The past six years have been a time of unprecedented transition and change in my life. If I divide that period roughly in half, the first contains the decision to write a book about Bishop Gene Robinson and the sexual politics of the Episcopal Church and Anglican Communion; the diagnosis of my mother's illness; the beginning of the Iraq war; and our decision to move to Montreal and apply for permanent residency status in Canada. The second period of time begins with my mother's death; the publication of my book; and our receipt of permanent residency (all of which happened within one month, May-June 2005); grieving and adjustment in my immediate family; leaving our rural home, friends, and garden of thirty years and changing to life in a new country, an international city based on a different language, and a much smaller urban living space. During these same five or six years I've also had a scary brush with mortality - a sudden bleeding ulcer - and gone through menopause. A lot, in anyone's book of life, but this is not a complaint - in fact I feel very fortunate. I also feel a lot older than at the beginning... and know I've changed.
At the beginning of all this, I was involved with a longstanding, very supportive, and familiar group of friends in our former community and in my church and choir, as well as friends online. I was serving the end of a three-year vestry term, and also writing about the Church, with a capital C, and in constant contact with a lot of clergy, many of whom were also good friends. Going through Holy Week together with my choir had been an annual ritual, for instance, and while I had my own opinions about the theology of what had actually happened and what it meant, I often found the week quite moving.
During my mother's illness, I was constantly worried that I wouldn't know what to do, or be able to handle things, when the time came -- but in fact I was able to do it. As I had done many times in the past, I asked for help and strength and felt I received it, or found it somewhere -- whatever. I certainly prayed for her and for all of us, but I never had illusions; where biology is concerned, I'm a realist. But despite having a pretty profound experience immediately after her death, that time also marked a significant shift in my spiritual life and my relationship with the institutional church. I became more convinced than ever that asking for guidance or opening myself to higher possibilities, without preconceived expectations, was the only kind of prayer that made sense to me, but I also felt more alone than I ever had, and that absence included the God I might have once believed in and who still seemed to be presented by the church I had known since childhood. We then became part of a different, equally supportive community at the cathedral in Montreal, where I was - for the first time in fifteen years - a parishioner rather than a choir singer, accompanied in the pews by my husband who had never been a regular church-goer at all.
The church in Canada is dying; it's an entirely different situation and feeling to be a member of a church there than in most parts of the United States. And because of that, people were talking about different things: about post-modern Christianity; about losing buildings, clergy, members; about redefining what it even means to be a community. There was no coasting along on the same old theology and comfortable words, supported by a fairly constant base of well-heeled, pledging communicants. Everyone, including the clergy, had faced doubts and a core crisis of identity, and were willing to talk about it. I found that enormously refreshing. But it was an intellectual atmosphere that had almost nothing to do with maintaining my meditation practice, let alone prayer. My book about the American church had been published; it had its own life; I let it go. I was fed up with the political fighting over the issue of homosexuality, and disgusted with the slowness, cowardice, and hypocrisy of the Anglican leadership. On the most personal level, I entered a period of dryness and disconnection in which I realized I had left behind many of my former beliefs and sense of identification with the church, perhaps for good...
(The painting is one of many panels from Duccio's Maesta, an altarpiece at the Siena Cathedral, 1308. Thank you to A-W for putting this work under my eyes this week.)
"I became more convinced than ever that asking for guidance or opening myself to higher possibilities, without preconceived expectations, was far more fruitful than praying to an omnipotent God for specific acts, but I also felt more alone than I ever had, and that absence included the God I might have once believed in and who still seemed to be presented by the church i had known since childhood."
I just finished reading your book "Going to Heaven..." and found myself wondering as much about the writer of such a book as the subject you covered. It was engrossing and moving for me to learn so much about the process of the church in which I was confirmed (36 years ago yesterday) and how much I identified with your introduction to the book.
I have had very little to do with the church since I was 17 and was actually a part of a pilot program in my diocesse to be part of a Mission Team to research failing Parishes. I was with two Seminarians (male of course) and another woman who was getting a teaching degree from another Seminary. I remember calling on a woman who hadn't attended church in many years. My "job" was to ask her why she had stopped attending the church. She must have been younger than I am now and with much bitterness she told me that when she became divorced some years earlier, she was denied communion. I suddently felt brash and ill-equipped for the work I'd been assigned and at the same time, empathetic. She knew a good deal more about the church than I did and it did seem presumptuous of to me to be asking these questions. I think I urged her to give it a try again--things had changed...
During my young adulthood, I became involved with an Athiest who's arguments against God were mighty persuasive; but, there was always a flicker of, "But, what if the story IS true?" In the meantime, my brother became an Episcopal Priest, my sister headed the music ministry in her church and my mother migrated into a very "High" Anglico-Catholic expression of the church. (we were all raised low church). My mother was born into Episcopalianism. My father was confirmed the same day that I was. And they were both active on the Evangelism Commission for our New England Diocesse until my father died when I was 20.
Somewhere along the way, I did read the Gospels on my own and I just couldn't reconcile, the institution of the church with the words and actions of Jesus; so, I limited my participation to supporting family events which involved church.
As my mother became more immersed in her church and my brother supportive of the Election of Bishop Robinson, they became more and more polarized. And the growing pains of the Church became the battleground where our family was actually thrashing out a much deeper and more personal source of pain and anguish having nothing whatsoever to do with the church. At one point my brother's parish hired for his assistant a Lesbian living in a committed relationship. My mother's parish was joining forces with some of the African Bishops and the other American churches you wrote of in your book. I happen to agree with my brother's expression of Christianity. He did his best not to engage; but, even the restrained silences were heavy with the debate.
Reading your book simply gave me hope. I can't even be sure what that means. But it did. The way you handled all the issues and conveyed Gene's story and the process of his election, was Grace at work. I don't know how anything will be reconcilled--either in my family or in the church; but, being willing "to leave off pre-conceived expectations" is the place to begin.
Like you, I have recently emigrated. I'm living in Ireland. I know nothing of the Church of Ireland except through the eyes of my Catholic husband and our mostly Catholic friends. However, the reason that I have read your book is because I have a friend from an anonymous fellowship, who upon realizing I was American and not Catholic sensed that I might be open to reading your book. I may be the only person to whom he's confided both his "Denomination and his being gay" and I am honored that he wanted me to read this book.
Like you, I have felt more alone here than ever; and, it isn't for lack of fellowship. I'm also finding the aloneness to be Holy ground (whatever the heck that means)... Somehow, no matter where I am geographically, or internally, Holy week takes hold of me and I get swept up into the story, no matter how much I resist it or try to ignore it. I can say the same of the Nativity and Epiphany--because our little church enacted each of these stories every year of my childhood and young adulthood. Perhaps, it is the Grace of enactment that has helped me to keep cradling that baby instead of throwing him out with the bath water. And, although, I may know how the story ends, as I remain present to the re-enactment, I havn't a clue where it will take me this time. And although we are strangers, I will think of you along the road this week and imagine you among the crowd and at the foot of the cross and at the empty tomb. Peace and thank you.
Posted by: Mary Kate | March 16, 2008 at 06:45 PM