My Wonderings

In my last post I introduced my experience of feeling disconnected to the church. I have received many responses from others who have had similar struggles. Many of these comments came from lay persons. What I am hearing in these comments is that the feeling of alienation from Mother Church is not a condition unique to the ordained. I hope those of you, lay or ordained, church or unchurched, who have a story of disconnection or alienation will share it with me and others on this blog. I welcome you as a guest writer. Please send me an email letting me know of your interest. If you would like be published anonymously, that is fine with me. Sometimes, especially in the church, it is wise to be discreet. I only hope one would make anonymity an exception rather than the rule. After all, ‘we’re only as sick as our secrets.’ As for me, I am going to continue to share my personal experiences of alienation from my own perspective; one that I have found some understanding of it through the “setting apart” that occurs with ordination.

As I stated in “Houston, We Have A Problem,” I believe that the status quo of traditional communication does not enable deep or consistent connections. The irony, of course, is that the extraordinary way that the Episcopal Church, with her liturgies and sacraments, had sustained my connection to God, was one of the main reasons I accepted the call to ordained ministry. When my family and I left home for seminary, we became enveloped in a new but temporary community — that of the student body. But forces were in play that would inevitably alter my connectedness to a local community of faith.

Seminarians typically feel alienated from their home parishes and dioceses because they are geographically estranged for the three years they are attending divinity school. They often experience theological estrangement because they are being exposed to a level of critical thinking that shatters previously held worldviews. Most have had to sever the financial security of former careers. And as anyone who has left behind a former professional role to return to school as a student knows, all too well, one easily loses a sense of one’s own competence and “sense of adulthood.”

My diocese recognized parts of this pattern and attempted to alleviate the problem by developing programs and policies to stay connected and supportive to their “ordinands.” None of them worked. For example, we were assigned to one of the three bishops so we could have a point of contact with a “chief pastor” of the diocese. Even though I was lucky enough to be assigned to the warmest, friendliest bishop I have ever known, the late Leo Alard, I only saw him on an informal, personal basis a few times. At some point, the Commission on Ministry (a group of people who charged to evaluate and then recommend to the bishop whether a person should continue to the next stage of the ordination process) decided they needed to stay more closely connected to the candidates. So the commission assigned one of its members to be a “special buddy” to every student. There were lots of reasons this connection was ineffective. One, most didn’t take the time to develop authentic trusting relationships with their ‘protege.’ Second, the foundation of the relationship was based on evaluation and, ultimately, judgment. It was a power relationship that did not endear the seminarian to be forth-coming with much.

At another point, the Standing Committee (a totally separate group of people from the Commission on Ministry, but also charged with evaluating and making judgment on ordination) decided that they too needed to be more connected to each individual “in their care.” I was told of my new “friend” via a form letter. Needless to say, this didn’t alleviate any sense of disconnection from my standpoint as a seminarian. In fact, by this point, I started to wonder if it was better for me to feel disconnected to ‘Mother‘ and stay as far away from her dangerously clueless ways. So I became determined to stick out this time of free-falling alone, under the radar of base camp.

Finally, graduation arrived and soon to follow, the day of ordination. I was looking forward to reconnecting with my faith family of origin. I imagined a return to the hearth, reuniting to the mutuality of former relations, to the community where I could trust the connections to be strong, safe and supportive. Little did I know, that the evaluation process was not over by any stretch of the imagination. Thus the power differential with representatives of the diocese would continue to create uneasy connections. And my connections with my former faith family — well there’s no such thing as going home.

I am a cradle Episcopalian. This is a term some use in an elitist way, similar to FFV (First Families of Virginia).  It connotes a legitimacy, an authority, a  really real-nes. After serving on numerous Episcopal church staffs, there’s an additional connation to which I associate the label — a sense of stuckness, a rigidity, a conservative ecclesiology uninterested in new perspectives. And God forbid someone suggest to a cradle Episcopalian that the baptismal font be moved to another location in the church.

As a cradle Episcopalian, I was naively comfortable with my unquestioned, theological perspectives until I went away to college and met some evangelicals in Campus Crusade for Christ. They wanted to know if I was saved; if I knew Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior.  I was baffled that my membership in the Episcopal Church did not satisfy their soteriological criteria.   Apparently, I needed to recite a formulaic prayer and if I didn’t remember the exact day that I had uttered this prayer, then I could bet my bottom dollar (or worse, my eternal life) that my name was not written in The Book. It didn’t seem to be relevent that I regularly prayed to God or received the Eucharist as if I thought Jesus was my Lord and Savior. That didn’t count.

By this time, I had eighteen years of experience as a girl, playing with other girls, and I knew that the strong and mighty of the playground could be quite tyrannical and gnostic about the rules that granted admittance to the In Crowd or relegated one to the Out Crowd of the stupid and uncool. Basically, I was being taught a theology of God-As-A-Mean-Girl. But what did I know? I was afraid I had been delusional in my snobbish sense of status or stuck in stupidity and it was possible that we cradle Episcopalians weren’t as theologically with it as my evangelical, mostly non-denominational or Baptist friends. So I wrote that prayer down and recited it very carefully, word-for-word, every dot and tittle attended to deligently. [Don't even get me started with how I learned how many water molecules a valid baptism requires! and yes, I got that checked off my Things To Do list as quick as possible.]

Years later, after spending time getting as many people off the divine hook with my handy-dandy prayer and 4 spiritual laws, I found my way back to the Episcopal Church. Imagine my surprise when I heard, right there in the middle of the liturgy of Baptism, very BillBright-ish language. Apparently, the Episcopal Church had been ‘with it’ all along. Of course, that didn’t resolve the problem that it was mostly little, tiny episcopalians of cradle-age that were being saved by these words; words being said by someone else on the behalf of another. By this time, I was comfortable trusting the authority and traditions of the Episcopal Church. But I wanted to know exactly what we believed the divine rules to be. And not just about salvation. I wanted to know the rules about what we can or cannot say about God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit; about sin, satan, sacraments, truth, confession, forgiveness; about speaking in tongues, contemplative prayer, social morality and social justice.  I didn’t want to be caught short by the next inquiring evangelical, or fundamentalist, or pentecostal.

I wanted to represent the Episcopal church well. So I started asking … and I started hearing, over and over again, “read the Book of Common Prayer.” As a recently re-re-baptized, re-re-born, re-convert, I was more than a little uncomfortable with the fingers pointing me to the Book of Common Prayer rather than the King James. But that’s who we are! Literally. My advisors were telling me to go to the prayer book because of the ancient and abiding principle, lex orandi, lex credendi, what we believe is what we pray. At first, this was not very satisfying. I wanted something strongly confessional in nature. I wanted something very black and white, very simple and very straightforward. But the Church, in her wisdom, knew better.

What the Church knew and had prepared through her liturgy, traditions and sacraments was that eventually I would need the mature solid food that is the ambiguous, paradoxical,  yes – and nature of theological truths.  The Episcopal Church (Anglicanism) was born out of the tension caused by the extremes of catholicism and the extremes of protestanism. She knew that it was wiser to wax poetic when talking of things divine and mysterious and beyond comprehension. She knew that in every sentence uttered as Truth there is also a grain of  ’not so’.  So can we say nothing or anything about something as important as God and salvation and eternal life?  How do we speak of such slippery stuff? My seminary professor, Dr. Bill Green, said, with just a tip of his tongue in cheek, that we should always ’sing’ the creeds to keep us from ever forgetting their non-prosaic nature.  Otherwise, we find ourselves in cross-hairs of the heretic police.

The Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, The Most Rev. Dr. Katharine Jefferts Schori, found herself in the cross-hairs recently when she said:

The overarching connection in all of these crises has to do with the great Western heresy – that we can be saved as individuals, that any of us alone can be in right relationship with God. It’s caricatured in some quarters by insisting that salvation depends on reciting a specific verbal formula about Jesus. That individualist focus is a form of idolatry, for it puts me and my words in the place that only God can occupy, at the center of existence, as the ground of being.

I was listening to her address live via the internet and when I heard this I thought, “Halleluiah! There is a God!”  Then I thought, “Praise the Lord, maybe there is some theology out there that I can hang my hat on.”  Then, I thought, “Hell yeah, mamma said it ‘cuz it needed to be said.” Then, I thought, “Oh shit! It is about to hit the fan.”  For this and a few other reasons, the Presiding Bishop is getting vilified by the religious right. It’s the fear of that vicious and vitrioloic attack that has kept me silent in the past. But I am so grateful for her courage to speak out and risk sharing her understanding of the truth that I feel compelled to hereby, metaphorically, stand beside her and proclaim “Amen.”

Let me assure —  real quick and right now — to anyone who is ready to quote verses from the Book of Romans at me, that I, too, appreciate the authority of the Bible.  But we have to quote the entire Bible because the entire Bible is the story of salvation, not just Paul’s Roman Road.  And that biblical story is a story about a people’s salvation, not an anthology of individual salvations strung together like a pearl necklace. It wasn’t Mr. Abraham’s salvation that mattered so much. It was the entire nation of Israel. It mattered so much that narratives about it were remembered and passed down. It mattered so much that Jesus is proclaimed savior of the world.  It mattered so much that learned people would devote a lifetime to studying it.

It is the theological doctrine of salvation is called soteriology. It is big. It is complex. It is a doctrine that has developed for centuries and continues to develop. St. Paul was not the first soteriological theologian. He inherited some good material from Isaiah. Athanasius, Augustine, and Anselm did some pretty impressive thinking on the subject before Luther nailed his salvific thesis. And with all due respect to my friends of the reformed tradition, the subject of salvation was not closed on the Wittenberg door. Barth, Bultmann, Gutierrez, Kung and Moltmann are just a few worthy examples of the exemplary thinkers on the matter. And not one of them ever concluded that the Answer was as simple and as easy as swearing an oath-like-prayer. Nor did any of them imply that this was an individual, personal or private matter. There certainly is an element of  individual choice and free will that is relevent but it isn’t the only thing that is part of this subject. The entire created order is part of the subject.  Faith certainly is a critical element, but so is grace. Works may not be the sole criteria, but they are certainly a part. And part of the work we are called to do is to think and to think as well as we can, so that at the end of our days, we might hear the One who created us thoughtful folk say, “Well done, my good and faithful servant.” In the meantime, go “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.” And I mean that in the poetic, lyrical, sing-y way that also includes me, and others, those who have gone before us, and those who have yet to come, working, collaborating together, God’s earthly think tank.

Many people have been wondering with me about the purpose of Twitter. The Rev. Chuck Culpepper, of MS, likened it to the CB Radio of the Millenium; just a platform that allows many people to broadcast to many people. And it is that; but so much more. Back in the “BreakerBreakerGoodBuddy” days of old, one had to find a channel that was both static-free and one that your friends or others of value to you were also utilizing. With Twitter, static distraction is eliminated. Because of the search function, the number of available Twitter “channels” is equivalent to the total possible permutations of keys on the keyboard (letter/number/symbol.) Plus, there is no limit imposed by physical distance to a signal tower. Take a moment to wrap your brain around the implications! From anywhere in the world, anybody with internet access and a computer or smart phone can come together and have a conversation in real time. The only thing missing in Twitter (and I’m sure that will soon be resolved) is translating languages to your preference.

Those of us following the Episcopal Church General Convention 2009 created a “channel” entitled #ecgc. The acronym was for Episcopal Church General Convention. The # symbol is called a hashtag in twitter and it is used to indicate that this particular permutation of keystrokes is a deliberate combination formed for a specific group to track a conversation. We immediately realized that there were a few other streams of conversation about the convention being made so we formed a hub to gather all these streams together. Thus, the “Twub” was created at www.twubs.com/ecgc. This was a godsend for me; I didn’t have to remember to use my hashtag when I sent a message because it automatically added it for me. I could see the thumbprints of the pictures, videos and webpages that were linked with people’s messages without having to open the link at all. This made it easy to filter what I wanted to explore further. I could see a cool visual of our developing internet community through a grid of the faces/image associated with each Twitter account.

You may be wondering about the tweeps (people) who were part of this gathering. There were clergy and lay, conservative and liberal, young (20s) and not-so-old (60s), gay and straight, lovers of TEC and haters of TEC, attendees of convention and at-home folk like me. It was (go-figure) a gathering made up of folk much like the church! On the first day, we had a slam of porn spam that would have turned a blue-haired white. But that was quickly resolved by the Twub company who were probably more horrified and shocked than us Episcopalians! And we did have a “troll” try to impersonate “815″ but he or she was quickly exposed and we all campaigned to have that account terminated. If anything, that troll only accomplished bonding our group of disparate Anglicans together during a very contentious week.

And I know (from the many tweets of others) that I am speaking for many people when I say that there have been a lot of transformative moments in our little byte of the Twitterverse. Personally, I had an extraordinary exchange with a fellow priest from the diocese of TX who is a conservative greatly fearing the direction this convention is taking. We shared our stories, albeit in little 140 character chapters at at time. And in our exchange, I was healed a little bit more from some old wounds.

I witnessed folk ask for forgiveness when emotions got the best of them. I witnessed the previously uncomforted assure the previously comfortable that there would always be a warm welcome offered. I witnessed our group self-regulate by calling someone out when their tone became snarky. The group self-corrected when inaccurate information was given. The group collaborated when someone requested information that was not accessible to them. Our group self-organized with some folk volunteering to give play-by-play commentary for those without access to the GC HUB live feed. We even had internet DJs tweet dedicated song links to us. Some of our group were wondering if we could continue an online network of Episcopalians when convention concluded. To that I say: “That’s What I’m Talking About!!” Sign up at Episcopalians.pbworks.com to stay informed of our growing network.

And Warren, thanks for believing! Kurt and Joyce, thanks for making it happen. And to all my new friends: gideony, WhatOneCanDo, Kvoets, ktkimble, CarlosRAlvarado, scottagunn, JosephPMatthews, Liturgy, swancommarachel, gaytheologian, AuntScilly, bgclick, franklogue, davidrpeet, putmeinabox, GRobit625, loribythesea, FredinAtlanta, chaplain_mdiv10, mooregardening, Floridagordon, ktkimble, rrchapman, johnleesandiego, JeffreyShy, vagabondfaith, and a bunch more … thanks for being Church for me this week.

Our understandings of vocation as individual and corporate response to and expression of relationship with the living God move beyond a matter of compulsive obedience to superior order or an acquiescence to preordained determinism. As in any creative partnership, communication is central to the relationship, and it is vital to vocation and discernment. Commitment to mutuality in relationship entails commitment to a conversational imperative, a free, open disclosure of self to the other, without which intimacy cannot be sustained.

When I was growing up, children who tried to have a conversation with adults were often accused of back talk. Children had conversations with other children; those of equal status. Necessarily, if it was considered rude to talk back to adults, it would have been blasphemous to talk back to God in conversation. When I came of age to have a mature relationship with God, I was heavily influenced by evangelical and fundamental movements that emphasized prayer as what one did to try to understand God’s will for one’s life; for understanding the preordained determinism. My vocational call, then, was interpreted under these filters. I didn’t approach the discernment as a conversation, as a place where my will was valid, respected or relevant. Little wonder, I came to resent God and my vocation when the circumstances surrounding both became painful and difficult.

This conversational imperative is in lively evidence in the stories and lives of Moses and the prophets, of Jesus and Paul. In theirs and countless stories related in the scriptures, in Hebrew midrash and Christian patristic writing, in the witnesses of saints, in sermons and songs ancient and modern we experience this lively, living conversation among partners intimately caught up in and bound to committed relationship. . . .

God and I have been in a lively, living conversation for a while now. Ironically, it would be fair to describe my tone and attitude in this conversation as back talk, even insolent. But I suppose that is a necessary corrective to my earlier compulsive obedience. During this time away from the church, there was never much doubt in my mind that my faith was alive and well; even though, to many, it appeared lost or dead. My spiritual friends who were well versed in the stormy faith journeys of the patriarchs and saints were less concerned for my spiritual welfare.

Jesus was at pains to insist that he neither wanted nor had followers, but friends. “I have called you friends,” he explains to his disciples, “because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father” (John 15:15). Those who sought to learn from him would not copy his attitudes and behaviors, but would undertake the more difficult business of plumbing their own depths, exploring and embracing their own selves, and shouldering full responsibility for their very being. Or, as he famously expressed it, they would take up their own cross—a cross that was distinct from his.

This was the paragraph that made me stop and pause. As I read it, I had an “ah-hah” moment. Is that what these last five years have been about? Is this a plausible meaning for the aridity I have experienced in the sanctuary lately and finding connectedness and understanding only on the therapeutic couch? Is this why finding sobriety through Alcoholics Anonymous felt wrong for me in spite of the profound respect I have for the program? Is this why I needed to find sobriety solely based on my own will and responsibility for my behavior — to declare that I have power over choosing alcohol or not? Is my greatest spiritual struggle not in knowing God’s embrace but in coming to embrace myself?

This learning process, this discipleship, is dynamic and subject to constant variation, consistent with any relationship between and among living beings. . . . The process of daily, constant learning about self and one’s world is a demanding discipleship and the central activity of discernment. Understood this way, we see that any so-called discipleship that obscures or escapes such learning is not worthy of the name; it is just evasion, denial, busyness, and distraction, and ultimately, destructive dishonesty. True discipleship not only dirties the hands, it breaks the heart, opens the mind, and stretches the nerves, as all good learning does. Yet, paradoxically, it is this very dangerous conversation that constitutes the core of discipleship and the intimate heart of relationship with God.

From Transforming Vocation by Sam Portaro, a volume in the series Transformations: The Episcopal Church of the 21st Century, edited by James Lemler. Copyright © 2008. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org