The beauty in the losing is a loss finally of self-consciousness. There's a gorgeous moment that can happen in all kinds of places. It can happen with people, it can happen with nature, and it can happen with my eyes shut anywhere I am.
When I talk about losing myself, which I did, it's losing my idea of who I was and my idea of what I was supposed to be doing and the idea of what my value was to God. I lost all of that at least.
I think a toxic message in a lot of Christianity has been that the self has to be annihilated in order for God to be found. I think that has been a toxic message.
If God is about putting God ahead of myself then I've just quit being religious, because that's what got me into such deep trouble.
I'll do my best to always put God and neighbor ahead of ego, but I want to find myself, and if finding myself means losing my ego self, I'll go there.
Humanity can be pretty stinky.
To be fully human is perhaps why I'm Christian, because I see in the life of Jesus a way of being fully human.
To get God on your side is a great way to feel powerful.
I can't help but note that God is being useful to a lot of people trying to do harm to one another.
It's difficult for me to ignore how many conflicts locally and worldwide have religion tagged to them.
I don't miss the ministry, because I'm completely engaged in it. In terms of parish ministry, I miss the intimacy with a group of people.
I miss the hot spots. I miss the hospital calls. I miss the nursing homes. I miss the really intimate human contact with other people, which I did nothing to earn.
I'm leaving out some of the hugely successful megachurches, of which I have very little experience.
The value for me being in a mainline tradition is history and memory, which is not just Christian tradition but denominational tradition, and characters, you know, with real distinct flavors of ways to be Christian.
I'm in a mainline church, I'm very aware, especially as I move through community churches and new-start churches that are making real efforts not to associate themselves with traditional denominations - very often they have no history. They have no institutional memory.
Church can be extremely boring. It can be very meaningful, it can be character forming, but can be have very little fizz in it.
To be in the mainline is to have a history and not simply to be an amalgam, a community church of who knows what that came from who knows where.
You probably can't get much closer to God than serving a congregation 24/7. At the same time, there's a different kind of closeness in this present life I have in which I have much more freedom to come and go and to engage some of the silence and stillness and solitude that I was missing before.
The tradition piece is so embedded in me I don't know that I can see it any more, but the community piece is one I've been in danger of losing.
That's enough, and I have a ministry as a neighbor as well. A ministry as a friend and a ministry as an aunt and a godmother, and family is very much in the circle of my vocation.
I decided I got to say whether I was Christian or not, and so I've relaxed enormously since then. I'm the one who gets to say that, and not someone else.
I'm a follower of the Christ path, and that opens a huge discussion about what we even mean by words like "Christian."
For a long time I listened to other people to decide whether I was still Christian or not, and I would sort of vet myself by the traditional formulae.
I began to get notes from people saying they were sorry to hear I'd left ministry. And for a while, I halfway believed they were right, that I'd left.
I've got a hold of something that won't move. It's a willingness to keep walking into the next day, open to whatever may turn out to be true that day.
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