I've got a few minutes before I have to leave to pick Angel up from clinical, and a lot of mental detritus to clear out, so I'll post a blog from church.
As mentioned yesterday, most of the people I'll be working with at Multifaith are gay males. (It is an AIDS organization after all.) Most of the people are also religious, in some sense or another, since it is also a religious organization. At the staff retreat I went on last week, we spent most of our time getting to know each other by "telling our stories"--that is, talking about the major events of our lives that have brought us to where we are. It was a really interesting way to start off a new job (though not one I'd want to repeat, say, in the warehouse), and with such a concentrated combination of gay people, religious people, and folks in recovery of various sorts, there were a lot of intriguing and emotional conversion stories.
I told the story of my conversion from Evangelical protestantism to emerging/liberal Anglicanism, but the story I didn't tell was of my conversion from homophobe to, well, homophile. It runs parallel, and I think it probably will resonate as a sort of step by step movement from what religious people generally are (and shouldn't be) to what religious people generally aren't (but should be).
The steps generally went like this in my own personal life:
1) Buy in to teaching that the Bible is God's Word, and that God's word teaches that you shouldn't be gay. God says it, I believe it, that settles it. Please leave me alone, you gross fag. Stop looking at me in the locker room. I know what you're thinking.
2) Identify being gay with "bad people" out there--outside of my social circle--who for some reason decide to do something that I think is gross--i.e., gay sex. Think they just need Jesus. Try real hard to "love the sinner, hate the sin".
3) Become convinced in college that sexual preference is probably partially genetically influenced, and certainly not a "choice" in the normal sense of the word.
4) Come to the conclusion that, hey, we're all confronted with personal weaknesses which are frequently sinful. By the accident of genetics, I like the ladies (which is of course sinful outside of legal western marriage), some like the men. Thus, genetics doesn't make doing gay things (gay sex, lisping, eating lots and lots of really chocolatey things) any less sinful--or gross in my hetero small town Ohio sensibility.
5) Stop buying in to teaching that the Bible is God's Word, since evolution happened.
6) Realize that it's questionable that the Bible even talks about Homosexuality in it's modern sense.
7) Still think gay sex is gross and unappealing, and thus leave unquestioned the assumption that God doesn't want us to do gross gay butt things.
8) Watch "Angels in America" and realize that the gays are people too.
9) Decide that I'm going to stop being a hater/homophobe and that my biases were mostly based on a gut feeling of "yuckiness" and ignorance.
10) Decide to join the Anglican/Episcopal Church formally, since it generally says that it's alright to not discriminate against gay people, if you don't want to, at least in America.
11) Move to Capitol Hill
12) Establish a social circle that is about 75% gay/lesbian.
13) Make other people mad with my suggestions that being gay should be okay, even if the Bible seems to say otherwise.
14) Get a job with Multifaith Works, thus diving even further into the subculture which I used to view as evil and gross. I'm definitely not in Camden anymore.
15) Suspect that my friends might think I'm secretly in the closet, what with my career path (priest) and super-gay social circle, and general lack of continued homophobia.
Showing posts with label spiritual autobiography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label spiritual autobiography. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Friday, May 25, 2007
Intro to the Reposting of my Spiritual Autobiography (for Mike and Others)
So, I've being transferred to a new mentoring priest, and they'll need to read up on my spiritual autobiography. As such, I have reposted the series of blogs I originally posted on MySpace, so they can be easily accessed. The easiest way to follow that thread will be to follow the "Blog Archive" for the month of May, located on the right hand side of the screen. Start by clicking on "Autobiography Chapter 1" located near the bottom of the archive, and move up through the posts, in reverse order, as you read (i.e., read "Building a Testimony" second, "Conversion and Confusion" third, and so on). The format is a bit hard to read, b/c my original paragraph spacing didn't transfer properly, but it should be all there. It's quite long, but I like to write, and I think it gives you a good feel for who I am and where I've come from.
The Blog entitled "Thank God, Another Blog" might serve as a good introduction to where I am at this stage of my discernment process, and a good preface to the spiritual autobiography. Have fun!
The Blog entitled "Thank God, Another Blog" might serve as a good introduction to where I am at this stage of my discernment process, and a good preface to the spiritual autobiography. Have fun!
Finally, a Note on the Power of the Priesthood
Finally, I'd like to conclude my discussion with a note on the power of the priesthood.
Essentially, a priest becomes a physical representation of God to people. That's a daunting task. However, it's also a uniquely empowering situation to put oneself in. When a priest blesses or proclaims forgiveness, it has an authority for some that a blessing or proclaimation of forgiveness by the average individual doesn't. The priest is a sanctioned rep. of both God and church community, so they have an authority--legitimately or otherwise--that is higher than the authority of the layperson.
The priest also possesses a higher authority in the pulpit than others--again, for good or ill, legitimately or illegitimately. (Somewhat ironically, I personally would like to use that power to help diffuse some of the priest's authority, to help church members see that we really are a community organization, and that lay people really do shape and direct the church, and really do stand on equal footing before God with the ordained. I don't fully trust centralized authority, and think that the community has to function as a check to the priest.) I believe in a progressive theology, and I believe that that theology is important to the future of the church. Ordination, to me, represents a necessary step towards helping to shape the future of the church's beliefs and practices in a way that I believe is consistent with truth, love, justice, tradition,and scripture.
Finally, and related to this, the priest possesses higher authority in church leadership. Honestly, that's one of the most exciting aspects of ordination to me--the call to take my place on church councils, and help to shape and direct the future of the church. The church, particularly the Anglican communion, is in a difficult place, but is dealing with really important moral and religious issues. Finding my voice in our ongoing debates about sexuality, war, environment, poverty, disease and global inequality is central to the reason I want to be a part of the church, and more specifically, ordained to leadership in the church. It's a chance to be involved in a truly worldwide organization with international influence.
Essentially, a priest becomes a physical representation of God to people. That's a daunting task. However, it's also a uniquely empowering situation to put oneself in. When a priest blesses or proclaims forgiveness, it has an authority for some that a blessing or proclaimation of forgiveness by the average individual doesn't. The priest is a sanctioned rep. of both God and church community, so they have an authority--legitimately or otherwise--that is higher than the authority of the layperson.
The priest also possesses a higher authority in the pulpit than others--again, for good or ill, legitimately or illegitimately. (Somewhat ironically, I personally would like to use that power to help diffuse some of the priest's authority, to help church members see that we really are a community organization, and that lay people really do shape and direct the church, and really do stand on equal footing before God with the ordained. I don't fully trust centralized authority, and think that the community has to function as a check to the priest.) I believe in a progressive theology, and I believe that that theology is important to the future of the church. Ordination, to me, represents a necessary step towards helping to shape the future of the church's beliefs and practices in a way that I believe is consistent with truth, love, justice, tradition,and scripture.
Finally, and related to this, the priest possesses higher authority in church leadership. Honestly, that's one of the most exciting aspects of ordination to me--the call to take my place on church councils, and help to shape and direct the future of the church. The church, particularly the Anglican communion, is in a difficult place, but is dealing with really important moral and religious issues. Finding my voice in our ongoing debates about sexuality, war, environment, poverty, disease and global inequality is central to the reason I want to be a part of the church, and more specifically, ordained to leadership in the church. It's a chance to be involved in a truly worldwide organization with international influence.
The Priest and the Rockstar, or, Why I don't want to be a Priest
Anyone who says that being a priest is their ideal career path should seriously examine themselves, because they might be crazy. Don't get me wrong--there is a lot that's good about the priestly lifestyle--I've talked about that somewhat in past blogs, but should also mention the cool collar and fancy robes (wink wink Charlie), a chance to help people out, good seats at the Church's holiday shows, occasional baking delivered by appreciative parishioners, etc. However, there are plenty of reasons to not want to be a priest as well, even if you do like to wear dresses and eat brownies.
For me, most of those reasons fall into the category of negative social expectations attached to the priesthood.
1. At an institutional level, there is a church culture which seems to encourage workaholism and an absence of boundaries A good priest is one who does whatever is asked of them by the bishop and their congregation. Anyone who has ever tried to please anyone else realizes that that is an impossible task. The pressure is constant, however. That's not unlike the pressure of most jobs in America though, so I won't go on about that.
2. At a congregational level though, there's another dynamic, which I've been thinking about as the "minister-as-rockstar" phenomena, which has to do with power and influence as well as social expectations. There's a common human tendency to (often subconsciously) put other individuals on a pedestal as somehow greater than the average human, and therefore place a level of trust in them which is not warranted. Worship comes naturally to us, and we tend to worship things or people we can see--like rockstars or priests. Like the rockstar, people--especially young people--often don't question priest's positions on complicated issues, regardless of how unqualified they may be in expressing them. Why, really, do we turn to musicians and religious leaders for advice on political, social, or scientific matters, and then trust what they say? Sometimes, I think, it's because these sorts of people can "sanctify" what we already believe, or at least affirm that there are others in the world who believe like us. Often, though, there can also be a sort of naive trust that we place in others, simply because we need someone to lead us.
Entering into leadership, you have to question whether you are really comfortable with having people trust you in that way. At a personal level, I know that I've given religious sanction to beliefs and behaviours that I no longer would, so who's to say that I won't find again in the future that I've been leading people down the wrong path? You have to question whether you're worthy of trust, and whether you can handle the responsibility that comes along with it. You also have to think about how you can healthily diffuse the sort of illegitimate trust that is often placed in leadership, without undermining your ability to lead.
3. Along with this power dynamic comes a sense of isolation: When you're a leader in the church, you're no longer one of the congregation in the same sense, so your relationship to people in church changes. Most church people, including myself, find that community is one of the central reasons that they are a part of the church. When you become a minister, to a large degree that's cut off. You now have a responsibility to maintain a professional and pastoral relationship which is different from the social relationships that make church satisfying. You're often placed in the difficult situation of having to devote more time to relationships that you don't enjoy than to ones that you do. Frankly, you have to put up with people that you normally wouldn't, and no longer have the freedom to choose who you spend time with. You also have to become more guarded about sharing your personal feelings with those you work most closely with, because broken relationships or side-taking can negatively impact your ability to lead, and can ultimately lead to divisions in congregations. The church has some support structures in place to help alleviate the isolation that comes with ordination, but in many cases it becomes the responsibility of the individual priest to figure out how to use those, and what is needed. Another thing to sort out if you're going to put yourself in the leadership position.
4. A lot of people see the collar and think "pedophile!"
5. Ordination, like marriage, is a sacrament that sticks with you. Once you're ordained, you're ordained for life, and you have to go through a long process to get out of the commitment that comes with that. When you're ordained, you're restricted to fidelity to the church. You can't explore other options, really, and you can't function completely freely--you've committed to a specific role in your ordination rite. You place yourself at the mercy of the community and the heirarchy of the institution, so you have to answer to the community and the institution in major life decisions. That restricts your ability to do what you would like as an individual.
5. By being ordained, you're also placing strain on your family. Churches tend to have unrealistic expectations for their ministers, but they also have unrealistic, and unfair, expectations for their ministers' families. Families also have to deal with the pressures of the public commitments, frequent late night meetings, emotional demands and inevitable spiritual turmoil that comes with being a priest. You really can't decide to be ordained without deciding with your family, because it's something that will deeply affect their life as well as your own.
6. There's also a worrisome grab-bag of other issues: I prefer to sleep in on Sundays, and I'm usually not awake in the morning, I'm worried that I'm going to bore people with my sermons, I don't want to have to be a constant fundraiser, I suck at selling things, and I'll spend my life selling religion, I get restless in the same place, and my travel will be restricted, jobs are scarce in the Episcopal church, what if I get stuck with a bad bishop?, how can I possibly know how I'll stand up to years of pressure and scrutiny, a priest's skills are not generally valued in secular society, so what happens if it doesn't work out?, how can I know how this job will affect my wife, her career, etc.?, why not just find a no-stress job and enjoy a relaxed life?,etc., etc.
Despite all that, I still do want to be a priest.
For me, most of those reasons fall into the category of negative social expectations attached to the priesthood.
1. At an institutional level, there is a church culture which seems to encourage workaholism and an absence of boundaries A good priest is one who does whatever is asked of them by the bishop and their congregation. Anyone who has ever tried to please anyone else realizes that that is an impossible task. The pressure is constant, however. That's not unlike the pressure of most jobs in America though, so I won't go on about that.
2. At a congregational level though, there's another dynamic, which I've been thinking about as the "minister-as-rockstar" phenomena, which has to do with power and influence as well as social expectations. There's a common human tendency to (often subconsciously) put other individuals on a pedestal as somehow greater than the average human, and therefore place a level of trust in them which is not warranted. Worship comes naturally to us, and we tend to worship things or people we can see--like rockstars or priests. Like the rockstar, people--especially young people--often don't question priest's positions on complicated issues, regardless of how unqualified they may be in expressing them. Why, really, do we turn to musicians and religious leaders for advice on political, social, or scientific matters, and then trust what they say? Sometimes, I think, it's because these sorts of people can "sanctify" what we already believe, or at least affirm that there are others in the world who believe like us. Often, though, there can also be a sort of naive trust that we place in others, simply because we need someone to lead us.
Entering into leadership, you have to question whether you are really comfortable with having people trust you in that way. At a personal level, I know that I've given religious sanction to beliefs and behaviours that I no longer would, so who's to say that I won't find again in the future that I've been leading people down the wrong path? You have to question whether you're worthy of trust, and whether you can handle the responsibility that comes along with it. You also have to think about how you can healthily diffuse the sort of illegitimate trust that is often placed in leadership, without undermining your ability to lead.
3. Along with this power dynamic comes a sense of isolation: When you're a leader in the church, you're no longer one of the congregation in the same sense, so your relationship to people in church changes. Most church people, including myself, find that community is one of the central reasons that they are a part of the church. When you become a minister, to a large degree that's cut off. You now have a responsibility to maintain a professional and pastoral relationship which is different from the social relationships that make church satisfying. You're often placed in the difficult situation of having to devote more time to relationships that you don't enjoy than to ones that you do. Frankly, you have to put up with people that you normally wouldn't, and no longer have the freedom to choose who you spend time with. You also have to become more guarded about sharing your personal feelings with those you work most closely with, because broken relationships or side-taking can negatively impact your ability to lead, and can ultimately lead to divisions in congregations. The church has some support structures in place to help alleviate the isolation that comes with ordination, but in many cases it becomes the responsibility of the individual priest to figure out how to use those, and what is needed. Another thing to sort out if you're going to put yourself in the leadership position.
4. A lot of people see the collar and think "pedophile!"
5. Ordination, like marriage, is a sacrament that sticks with you. Once you're ordained, you're ordained for life, and you have to go through a long process to get out of the commitment that comes with that. When you're ordained, you're restricted to fidelity to the church. You can't explore other options, really, and you can't function completely freely--you've committed to a specific role in your ordination rite. You place yourself at the mercy of the community and the heirarchy of the institution, so you have to answer to the community and the institution in major life decisions. That restricts your ability to do what you would like as an individual.
5. By being ordained, you're also placing strain on your family. Churches tend to have unrealistic expectations for their ministers, but they also have unrealistic, and unfair, expectations for their ministers' families. Families also have to deal with the pressures of the public commitments, frequent late night meetings, emotional demands and inevitable spiritual turmoil that comes with being a priest. You really can't decide to be ordained without deciding with your family, because it's something that will deeply affect their life as well as your own.
6. There's also a worrisome grab-bag of other issues: I prefer to sleep in on Sundays, and I'm usually not awake in the morning, I'm worried that I'm going to bore people with my sermons, I don't want to have to be a constant fundraiser, I suck at selling things, and I'll spend my life selling religion, I get restless in the same place, and my travel will be restricted, jobs are scarce in the Episcopal church, what if I get stuck with a bad bishop?, how can I possibly know how I'll stand up to years of pressure and scrutiny, a priest's skills are not generally valued in secular society, so what happens if it doesn't work out?, how can I know how this job will affect my wife, her career, etc.?, why not just find a no-stress job and enjoy a relaxed life?,etc., etc.
Despite all that, I still do want to be a priest.
Priestliness Revisited
Why do I want to be a priest? Or, more specifically, what can I do as a priest that I can't do as the average layperson? (That, I suppose, is the question of my professional life, and also the question that I've been posed by the priest who is mentoring me through the process of discernment for ordination. Consequently, I'm told that it will also be a question that I'll be answering repeatedly over the next several months as I go through discernment.)
There are basically two types of answers that initially pop to my mind in answer to that question: practical and spiritual. The practical answer addresses the question of why the job of a priest is appealing to me--that type of answer seems relatively easy to formulate. The spiritual answer, however, seems to require me to describe some inward sense of "call" from God to the priesthood--something that transcends the physical and emotional, and stretches to the existential nether-regions of the soul. (Note to readers: the term "existential" is, in my estimation, completely useless, other than to make people think that you're deep and philosophical. It's essentially a statement of the obvious in the above sentence. Maybe I'm just dumb and don't know how to use it, but it seems to be one of several intellectual nonsense terms used to confuse readers.) I think I've been trained to think in these terms--as if the physical and the spiritual were seperate compartments of existence, and could easily be divided from one another. However, I've come to believe that it's incorrect to pretend that my practical and spiritual motivations are different from one another, just as it's incorrect to think that there's a spiritual reality separate from the physical. Being is being, reality is reality, and everything is interrelated--God and creation, physical and mental, past and present. I don't believe in disjunctions. Hence, in my estimation, the practical and the "spiritual" are interconnected to the point that we shouldn't pretend that they're different things.
Now that I'm done with that theological preface, on to the answer to the question:
When you're baptized or confirmed, you affirm that you'll serve Christ through loving your neighbor as yourself, strive for justice, "preach the good news", resist evil, persevere in faith, and other such good things. The baptismal covenant( http://www.diocal.org/blogs/mindev/cat_baptismal_covenant.php ) does sum up pretty well a lot about the type of person I'd like to be. However, it's a pretty general covenant, and really doesn't talk much about vocation or career--rightly so, as there are millions of ways in which you can live out the general calling of the Christian faith.
During the rite of ordination, however, one becomes very specific about vocation and career: you say, for instance, that you'll work as a pastor, priest, and teacher. You also say that you'll share in church councils (modern translation: join and head numerous committees), administer the sacraments, help pattern your community's life in the shape of Christ's teachings, preach, and be obedient to the Bishop and others over you in the institutional heirarchy. (You also repeat the themes of the baptismal covenant, making this rite a classic blurring of lines between the practical and the spiritual--it is essentially a job description in which you pledge to hold to a specific set of beliefs and communicate them, and commit yourself to specific spiritual practices).
At the most basic level, the reason that I want to take up the job described in the ordination rite is that I think it sounds like something I'd like to do. I've done ministry for years, and I enjoy most of the key roles: helping to pattern a community's life after Christ, ministering, preaching, providing sacraments, serving on councils, working as a teacher and priest. I don't think I'll mind the others--I'm a pretty trusting soul, so I'm only vaguely anxious about submitting to Episcopal authority. I'm interested in the big questions about God, and I like practicing and teaching the disciplines of Christian spirituality. That interest is both an accident of my personality type (a guidance-councellor issued career assesment from 9th grade listed "minister" as a possible good fit) and something I consider a spiritual aspect of "call". It's part of who I am at the deepest level, and I'll never be able to escape it.
Ordination, really, seems to be the best way--maybe the only way--that I can live out that "call". One thing I have noticed in ministerial work is that those who aren't ordained, at least in the Episcopal Church, are hampered because they can't employ the most powerful symbolic act that Christians have, because they can't administer Eucharist. (I'm not convinced that ordination should be a requirement for administering eucharist, but in my situation it is.) Once again we come back to the physical/spiritual interplay, because that is one of few experiences where Christians come to physically connect with one another and with God. To me, that experience is the most important element of the act of intentional, community based worship.
Ordination also puts me in a position where I am able to give my full-time energy to the task of ministry. It's a place where I not only am allowed to do the tasks that I enjoy, but where I have a responsibility to do them. That sometimes can make ministry less enjoyable, but it also makes it more of a central aspect of what you do. It requires you to devote your life to the tasks required, rather than just your free time--that inevitably shapes the person that you become, as well as the job that you do. That is a significant thing--you really are a priest 24 hours a day, without real time off, which isn't always true of other jobs. (I don't presently consider myself, for instance, and 24 hour customer service agent. If I'm not friendly and chipper outside of work, who gives a damn? As a priest, however, if I'm not dedicated to the church outside of office hours, plenty of people give a damn.) I'll talk about that in another post, about what scares me and turns me off about the priesthood.
Ordination also functions, for better or worse, as an "in" into the community. There is a recognition of your calling and fitness bestowed in ordination, which is in a way like a college degree--it's symbolic and ethereal, but represents years of study and preparation (Asburians, insert cynical joke here). It should demonstrate that you're trustworthy and loyal, and that you won't abuse your power (unfortunately, of course, not always true), so it rightly helps you establish a place among leadership in the Church. I want to have a say in where the Church goes in the future, and ordination seems an important step towards influence.
That's enough for now. I think my next post is going to be on "the Priest as Rockstar", or why I don't want to be a priest.
There are basically two types of answers that initially pop to my mind in answer to that question: practical and spiritual. The practical answer addresses the question of why the job of a priest is appealing to me--that type of answer seems relatively easy to formulate. The spiritual answer, however, seems to require me to describe some inward sense of "call" from God to the priesthood--something that transcends the physical and emotional, and stretches to the existential nether-regions of the soul. (Note to readers: the term "existential" is, in my estimation, completely useless, other than to make people think that you're deep and philosophical. It's essentially a statement of the obvious in the above sentence. Maybe I'm just dumb and don't know how to use it, but it seems to be one of several intellectual nonsense terms used to confuse readers.) I think I've been trained to think in these terms--as if the physical and the spiritual were seperate compartments of existence, and could easily be divided from one another. However, I've come to believe that it's incorrect to pretend that my practical and spiritual motivations are different from one another, just as it's incorrect to think that there's a spiritual reality separate from the physical. Being is being, reality is reality, and everything is interrelated--God and creation, physical and mental, past and present. I don't believe in disjunctions. Hence, in my estimation, the practical and the "spiritual" are interconnected to the point that we shouldn't pretend that they're different things.
Now that I'm done with that theological preface, on to the answer to the question:
When you're baptized or confirmed, you affirm that you'll serve Christ through loving your neighbor as yourself, strive for justice, "preach the good news", resist evil, persevere in faith, and other such good things. The baptismal covenant( http://www.diocal.org/blogs/mindev/cat_baptismal_covenant.php ) does sum up pretty well a lot about the type of person I'd like to be. However, it's a pretty general covenant, and really doesn't talk much about vocation or career--rightly so, as there are millions of ways in which you can live out the general calling of the Christian faith.
During the rite of ordination, however, one becomes very specific about vocation and career: you say, for instance, that you'll work as a pastor, priest, and teacher. You also say that you'll share in church councils (modern translation: join and head numerous committees), administer the sacraments, help pattern your community's life in the shape of Christ's teachings, preach, and be obedient to the Bishop and others over you in the institutional heirarchy. (You also repeat the themes of the baptismal covenant, making this rite a classic blurring of lines between the practical and the spiritual--it is essentially a job description in which you pledge to hold to a specific set of beliefs and communicate them, and commit yourself to specific spiritual practices).
At the most basic level, the reason that I want to take up the job described in the ordination rite is that I think it sounds like something I'd like to do. I've done ministry for years, and I enjoy most of the key roles: helping to pattern a community's life after Christ, ministering, preaching, providing sacraments, serving on councils, working as a teacher and priest. I don't think I'll mind the others--I'm a pretty trusting soul, so I'm only vaguely anxious about submitting to Episcopal authority. I'm interested in the big questions about God, and I like practicing and teaching the disciplines of Christian spirituality. That interest is both an accident of my personality type (a guidance-councellor issued career assesment from 9th grade listed "minister" as a possible good fit) and something I consider a spiritual aspect of "call". It's part of who I am at the deepest level, and I'll never be able to escape it.
Ordination, really, seems to be the best way--maybe the only way--that I can live out that "call". One thing I have noticed in ministerial work is that those who aren't ordained, at least in the Episcopal Church, are hampered because they can't employ the most powerful symbolic act that Christians have, because they can't administer Eucharist. (I'm not convinced that ordination should be a requirement for administering eucharist, but in my situation it is.) Once again we come back to the physical/spiritual interplay, because that is one of few experiences where Christians come to physically connect with one another and with God. To me, that experience is the most important element of the act of intentional, community based worship.
Ordination also puts me in a position where I am able to give my full-time energy to the task of ministry. It's a place where I not only am allowed to do the tasks that I enjoy, but where I have a responsibility to do them. That sometimes can make ministry less enjoyable, but it also makes it more of a central aspect of what you do. It requires you to devote your life to the tasks required, rather than just your free time--that inevitably shapes the person that you become, as well as the job that you do. That is a significant thing--you really are a priest 24 hours a day, without real time off, which isn't always true of other jobs. (I don't presently consider myself, for instance, and 24 hour customer service agent. If I'm not friendly and chipper outside of work, who gives a damn? As a priest, however, if I'm not dedicated to the church outside of office hours, plenty of people give a damn.) I'll talk about that in another post, about what scares me and turns me off about the priesthood.
Ordination also functions, for better or worse, as an "in" into the community. There is a recognition of your calling and fitness bestowed in ordination, which is in a way like a college degree--it's symbolic and ethereal, but represents years of study and preparation (Asburians, insert cynical joke here). It should demonstrate that you're trustworthy and loyal, and that you won't abuse your power (unfortunately, of course, not always true), so it rightly helps you establish a place among leadership in the Church. I want to have a say in where the Church goes in the future, and ordination seems an important step towards influence.
That's enough for now. I think my next post is going to be on "the Priest as Rockstar", or why I don't want to be a priest.
A Theological Appendix
You—my reader—may be asking yourself, "When will all of this self-focused blabber end!?" I have spent 6 years of my life and $60K figuring out what I believe, so please don't ask me to finish without at least a short appendix on my theology as it has developed to this point.
First, the epistemology question (that is, how can we know anything at all about God?): I believe that we can speculate about God justifiably, based upon our
experiences, traditions and scriptures. We're human, and our knowledge is limited, so we can never be sure. However, that shouldn't stop us from forming the opinions which we think are best, because these are important questions. (Hope and morality depend in many ways upon what we believe about God.) My opinions are based primarily on my experiences which seem to reveal God, my understanding of scripture and the teachings of Christ, and the tradition in which I have been raised. Am I sure I'm right? No. For me, religion is as much about hoping that something is true as actually believing it. Am I happy enough with my beliefs to act out on them? Yes. I find that I can only believe things that I think will lead to beneficial actions whether they are literally true or not. Am I probably wrong on most questions of faith? Yes. God, if God exists, is indefinable, and there really aren't any precisely "right" answers which can be grasped by the human mind.
Second, the main issues:
For me, the most important theological questions are where is God, who is God, why does the world seem so screwed up, and how does faith require us to behave.
1: Where is God? I think that God is both transcendent and imminent. That is, God exists apart from the world, but also in the world. We live and move and have our being in God. That's why we experience God in nature, other persons, and our experiences. That is also why Christians talk about the presence of the Holy Spirit, Jews talk about God's Shekinah Glory, etc. That's why humanity has always developed religion. God was also present most fully in Jesus of Nazareth, who—I still affirm—was, and will be, the savior of the world.
2. Who is God? God is Love. God is the creator. God was in Christ. God is in the world in the Holy Spirit. God is the redeemer. God is the source of hope. God isn't a man or a woman.
3. Why does the world seem so screwed up? Because it is. I don't know why—I spent a third of a thesis examining why, and I have to say I don't know why. I think overly optimistic readings of the goodness of humanity or nature are nauseating, because evil is overwhelming for so many people. My best guess is that the God of love is in some way absent from the world—probably out of necessity—hence, we suffer pain and evil. I can only believe in a God who doesn't accept the world as it is though, and who will ultimately redeem it—that is, remove evil from the world. That's the beauty of the cross—the image of God suffering with his creation so that it can be redeemed.
4. How does faith require us to behave? Out of love for God, neighbor and creation, to the best of our ability. That's subjective, but so is everything else humans believe.
I believe a lot more than this, but these four questions really consume most of my mental energy.
First, the epistemology question (that is, how can we know anything at all about God?): I believe that we can speculate about God justifiably, based upon our
experiences, traditions and scriptures. We're human, and our knowledge is limited, so we can never be sure. However, that shouldn't stop us from forming the opinions which we think are best, because these are important questions. (Hope and morality depend in many ways upon what we believe about God.) My opinions are based primarily on my experiences which seem to reveal God, my understanding of scripture and the teachings of Christ, and the tradition in which I have been raised. Am I sure I'm right? No. For me, religion is as much about hoping that something is true as actually believing it. Am I happy enough with my beliefs to act out on them? Yes. I find that I can only believe things that I think will lead to beneficial actions whether they are literally true or not. Am I probably wrong on most questions of faith? Yes. God, if God exists, is indefinable, and there really aren't any precisely "right" answers which can be grasped by the human mind.
Second, the main issues:
For me, the most important theological questions are where is God, who is God, why does the world seem so screwed up, and how does faith require us to behave.
1: Where is God? I think that God is both transcendent and imminent. That is, God exists apart from the world, but also in the world. We live and move and have our being in God. That's why we experience God in nature, other persons, and our experiences. That is also why Christians talk about the presence of the Holy Spirit, Jews talk about God's Shekinah Glory, etc. That's why humanity has always developed religion. God was also present most fully in Jesus of Nazareth, who—I still affirm—was, and will be, the savior of the world.
2. Who is God? God is Love. God is the creator. God was in Christ. God is in the world in the Holy Spirit. God is the redeemer. God is the source of hope. God isn't a man or a woman.
3. Why does the world seem so screwed up? Because it is. I don't know why—I spent a third of a thesis examining why, and I have to say I don't know why. I think overly optimistic readings of the goodness of humanity or nature are nauseating, because evil is overwhelming for so many people. My best guess is that the God of love is in some way absent from the world—probably out of necessity—hence, we suffer pain and evil. I can only believe in a God who doesn't accept the world as it is though, and who will ultimately redeem it—that is, remove evil from the world. That's the beauty of the cross—the image of God suffering with his creation so that it can be redeemed.
4. How does faith require us to behave? Out of love for God, neighbor and creation, to the best of our ability. That's subjective, but so is everything else humans believe.
I believe a lot more than this, but these four questions really consume most of my mental energy.
Back in the U.S.
I went to New Zealand hoping, I guess, to "find myself", or at least figure out what I wanted to do with my life, and what I really believed about Christianity. I didn't leave disappointed from that perspective when we returned to the US in 2005, but it was difficult to come back home. New Zealand was a life-shaping experience, and Dunedin genuinely felt like home after two years. Spiritually, it was really the place where I became comfortable with my faith, theology, and calling, after such a significant period of uncertainty before we left. I also was a bit worried about whether or not I would find a fit in the American Episcopal Church, of which I had no prior experience, and which I had heard was generally more "high church and liberal" than the New Zealand Church.
I would be lying if I said that the transition over the last year has been easier than I had hoped: it has in fact been difficult—though not necessarily bad—for reasons that I didn't anticipate. From one angle, there have been vocational frustrations—I returned to the US convinced that I would like to pursue ordination, but have found that the process of discernment here is both longer and more complicated than the one to which I was introduced in New Zealand (made difficult, not least, by the understandable requirement that I should be confirmed prior to formally beginning the process!). Additionally, I came back ready and motivated to continue my professional work in ministry, but was unable to find a paid position during my first year in Seattle. (This of course contributed to my frustration in learning about the length of the discernment process!) Finally, my wife and I both initially found the Episcopal community in Seattle significantly less accessible for two twenty-six year olds than had been our previous community in Dunedin.
More positively though, my time in the Episcopal Church has also been a real time of challenge and growth. Toward the end of my time in New Zealand, the question of the role of the GLBT community within the church became important to me, as I gradually became convinced that homosexual behavior should not be condemned by Christians as universally sinful. (This was in fact a significant and (now) embarrassingly difficult transition for me, and one which will likely be met with considerable disapproval from some of my closest friends and family). In Seattle, I joined a church whose staff and congregation is probably as sexually diverse as any in the world, and have had the privilege of doing something which I had never done before—coming to know multiple persons who are both openly Christian and openly not straight. This has, I think, made personal my previously academic understanding of the need for an inclusive church, and has opened my eyes to the spiritual damage that has been caused by the church in its historic exclusion and condemnation of the GLBT community.
In Seattle, I have also finally become acquainted personally with the AIDS Crisis through work with the organization Multifaithworks, which provides volunteer support to victims of HIV/AIDS and their families. I certainly can't describe this as a positive experience—it has been heartbreaking, to be honest. However, I have been privileged to become friends with an extremely intelligent and interesting sufferer of AIDS, and have hence come to understand the cruel and personally devastating nature of this disease. However, because this person—our group's "carepartner"—is also inspiringly resilient and positive, I have also experienced this work as a surprising source of hope that the AIDS crisis is not insurmountable. From a pastoral perspective, this work has represented one of my first real experiences with terminal illness, and has taught me that hope and despair will inevitably be interwoven in these situations—dying is, paradoxically, primarily about living.
There have been other, less significant, happy experiences in Seattle as well. Attendance at our diocesan cathedral has deepened the appreciation of "high church" liturgical worship which I began to develop in New Zealand. Further, acquaintance with the "Emerging Church" movement here has helped me to realize that my generally uncertain feelings towards questions of faith are not that uncommon in the Church, and that there are other Episcopalians in their 20's and 30's. Additionally, I have also finally found work in ministry, beginning a half-time youth ministry position at St. Margaret's, Bellevue just recently.
My time in New Zealand seemed to me like a transition from one spiritual path—started in childhood—to another significantly different one. In Seattle, I feel like I have begun to learn what it might mean for me to move down that new path. In some ways, my experience here has been difficult, but it has generally been free of the spiritual cognitive dissonance that plagued me from the end of college through my early time abroad. I feel like I've become comfortable with my call to ministry, my generally open-minded approach to spiritual questions, and my place within the Anglican Communion. I am genuinely looking forward to the formal process of discernment for ordination, and am confident that I will, with God's help, find an appropriate place of ministry within the church.
I would be lying if I said that the transition over the last year has been easier than I had hoped: it has in fact been difficult—though not necessarily bad—for reasons that I didn't anticipate. From one angle, there have been vocational frustrations—I returned to the US convinced that I would like to pursue ordination, but have found that the process of discernment here is both longer and more complicated than the one to which I was introduced in New Zealand (made difficult, not least, by the understandable requirement that I should be confirmed prior to formally beginning the process!). Additionally, I came back ready and motivated to continue my professional work in ministry, but was unable to find a paid position during my first year in Seattle. (This of course contributed to my frustration in learning about the length of the discernment process!) Finally, my wife and I both initially found the Episcopal community in Seattle significantly less accessible for two twenty-six year olds than had been our previous community in Dunedin.
More positively though, my time in the Episcopal Church has also been a real time of challenge and growth. Toward the end of my time in New Zealand, the question of the role of the GLBT community within the church became important to me, as I gradually became convinced that homosexual behavior should not be condemned by Christians as universally sinful. (This was in fact a significant and (now) embarrassingly difficult transition for me, and one which will likely be met with considerable disapproval from some of my closest friends and family). In Seattle, I joined a church whose staff and congregation is probably as sexually diverse as any in the world, and have had the privilege of doing something which I had never done before—coming to know multiple persons who are both openly Christian and openly not straight. This has, I think, made personal my previously academic understanding of the need for an inclusive church, and has opened my eyes to the spiritual damage that has been caused by the church in its historic exclusion and condemnation of the GLBT community.
In Seattle, I have also finally become acquainted personally with the AIDS Crisis through work with the organization Multifaithworks, which provides volunteer support to victims of HIV/AIDS and their families. I certainly can't describe this as a positive experience—it has been heartbreaking, to be honest. However, I have been privileged to become friends with an extremely intelligent and interesting sufferer of AIDS, and have hence come to understand the cruel and personally devastating nature of this disease. However, because this person—our group's "carepartner"—is also inspiringly resilient and positive, I have also experienced this work as a surprising source of hope that the AIDS crisis is not insurmountable. From a pastoral perspective, this work has represented one of my first real experiences with terminal illness, and has taught me that hope and despair will inevitably be interwoven in these situations—dying is, paradoxically, primarily about living.
There have been other, less significant, happy experiences in Seattle as well. Attendance at our diocesan cathedral has deepened the appreciation of "high church" liturgical worship which I began to develop in New Zealand. Further, acquaintance with the "Emerging Church" movement here has helped me to realize that my generally uncertain feelings towards questions of faith are not that uncommon in the Church, and that there are other Episcopalians in their 20's and 30's. Additionally, I have also finally found work in ministry, beginning a half-time youth ministry position at St. Margaret's, Bellevue just recently.
My time in New Zealand seemed to me like a transition from one spiritual path—started in childhood—to another significantly different one. In Seattle, I feel like I have begun to learn what it might mean for me to move down that new path. In some ways, my experience here has been difficult, but it has generally been free of the spiritual cognitive dissonance that plagued me from the end of college through my early time abroad. I feel like I've become comfortable with my call to ministry, my generally open-minded approach to spiritual questions, and my place within the Anglican Communion. I am genuinely looking forward to the formal process of discernment for ordination, and am confident that I will, with God's help, find an appropriate place of ministry within the church.
Chasing the Collar (cont.)
My desire to become a priest has certainly not arisen from a sort of naïve, idealistic feeling that I would be a great person to provide an example for the world of the type of unconditional love, grace, and justice that Jesus preached. Neither does it stem from some sort of fundamentalist belief that I have a message of grace which will convert heathens, teetering on the brink of eternal damnation. Quite the opposite, in fact.
In my early college years, I really probably would have listed the above as genuine motivations in my desire to be a minister. However, probably owing somewhat to four years of Bible-Belt Holiness preaching and teaching at Asbury, an important aspect of my spiritual dilemma after college, and before New Zealand, was that I didn't feel that I had either the moral character or level of sincere faith required to be a minister. I wasn't a perfect example of Christian holiness and love, and I certainly didn't have a strong faith that what I believed was the absolute truth, as well as the ticket to heaven. It was primarily in New Zealand that I came to see that ministry doesn't necessarily have to involve all of that.
At one level, I began to see things differently there simply because I did more theological study, and developed a more nuanced view of what ministry is all about. Stepping from a very conservative religious environment into a relatively progressive and decidedly un-American one also played an important role in leading me to rethink the way that I'd viewed most every religious issue in the past. However, certainly the most important factor that allowed me to see ministry in a different light, and begin to re-discern a call to ordained ministry was working with and around Anglican priests in my diocesan role as Youth Ministry Educator in Dunedin.
(It might seem somewhat strange that I was actually working in ministry at a point when I wasn't sure that I was fit to, or had any desire to, but I don't think its an extremely unusual situation for those who work in ministry (or possibly any field) to be in. At any rate, when I took the job in Dunedin, I was fairly unclear about what I wanted to accomplish with it. I was, however, qualified in terms of experience, and it was an opportunity to have a real job and a real pay check. In the end, that position ended up being a good fit and an important learning experience for me.)
The Diocese of Dunedin was probably like most Anglican Dioceses in the Western world in that it was genuinely diverse theologically, and generally tolerant of people at various places in their spiritual life. Working at a Diocesan level it quickly became apparent that the Anglican Church as a whole gets by peacefully (in its best days) by being almost militantly anti-dogmatic. In order to exist as part of the same entity, Anglicans who disagree with one another are essentially forced to accept the fact that they don't have an exclusive claim to the Christian faith, and hence don't have the option of telling the unorthodox that they aren't welcome. For me, this was an important revelation, and it allowed me to take a step back in the direction of church ministry as a possible permanent career path. If ministry doesn't necessarily involve dogmatism, I realized, than even someone with as much doubt as faith could conceivably make a good priest.
The Diocese of Dunedin was also like most dioceses in the world in that it was populated by priests who were also human beings, not generally any more or less morally perfect than the rest of us. This really shouldn't have been a revelation for me, but once again, it was. New Zealand was really my first experience of working in an environment where ministers were not expected to be blameless. Similarly, it was my first experience of working with ministers who I didn't perceive as having pretensions about their own moral superiority. As such, it was my first experience of ministry as an occupation in which I didn't have to try to be something that I'm not. The pursuit of holiness, I finally came to realize, is what is required in the Christian moral life, not perfect holiness itself. Once again, this allowed me to take a significant step back towards ministry as a career possibility.
I can actually pinpoint the moment that I realized that I would like to pursue ordination to the priesthood, and ironically enough, it was in the midst of the worst conflict that I experienced when working in Dunedin. I won't go into details, but it was essentially a somewhat childish, and relatively public, conflict between church leaders about issues that really could have been worked out in a mature and private manner. I don't know what this says about me, but seeing leaders openly squabble caused something to click, and I realized that ordained ministry is not too lofty a job for me to handle. Over approximately three years, I had come full circle back to the point where I felt that my earlier impression of a call to ministry was legitimate, and had found my milieu, in the Anglican Communion.
In my early college years, I really probably would have listed the above as genuine motivations in my desire to be a minister. However, probably owing somewhat to four years of Bible-Belt Holiness preaching and teaching at Asbury, an important aspect of my spiritual dilemma after college, and before New Zealand, was that I didn't feel that I had either the moral character or level of sincere faith required to be a minister. I wasn't a perfect example of Christian holiness and love, and I certainly didn't have a strong faith that what I believed was the absolute truth, as well as the ticket to heaven. It was primarily in New Zealand that I came to see that ministry doesn't necessarily have to involve all of that.
At one level, I began to see things differently there simply because I did more theological study, and developed a more nuanced view of what ministry is all about. Stepping from a very conservative religious environment into a relatively progressive and decidedly un-American one also played an important role in leading me to rethink the way that I'd viewed most every religious issue in the past. However, certainly the most important factor that allowed me to see ministry in a different light, and begin to re-discern a call to ordained ministry was working with and around Anglican priests in my diocesan role as Youth Ministry Educator in Dunedin.
(It might seem somewhat strange that I was actually working in ministry at a point when I wasn't sure that I was fit to, or had any desire to, but I don't think its an extremely unusual situation for those who work in ministry (or possibly any field) to be in. At any rate, when I took the job in Dunedin, I was fairly unclear about what I wanted to accomplish with it. I was, however, qualified in terms of experience, and it was an opportunity to have a real job and a real pay check. In the end, that position ended up being a good fit and an important learning experience for me.)
The Diocese of Dunedin was probably like most Anglican Dioceses in the Western world in that it was genuinely diverse theologically, and generally tolerant of people at various places in their spiritual life. Working at a Diocesan level it quickly became apparent that the Anglican Church as a whole gets by peacefully (in its best days) by being almost militantly anti-dogmatic. In order to exist as part of the same entity, Anglicans who disagree with one another are essentially forced to accept the fact that they don't have an exclusive claim to the Christian faith, and hence don't have the option of telling the unorthodox that they aren't welcome. For me, this was an important revelation, and it allowed me to take a step back in the direction of church ministry as a possible permanent career path. If ministry doesn't necessarily involve dogmatism, I realized, than even someone with as much doubt as faith could conceivably make a good priest.
The Diocese of Dunedin was also like most dioceses in the world in that it was populated by priests who were also human beings, not generally any more or less morally perfect than the rest of us. This really shouldn't have been a revelation for me, but once again, it was. New Zealand was really my first experience of working in an environment where ministers were not expected to be blameless. Similarly, it was my first experience of working with ministers who I didn't perceive as having pretensions about their own moral superiority. As such, it was my first experience of ministry as an occupation in which I didn't have to try to be something that I'm not. The pursuit of holiness, I finally came to realize, is what is required in the Christian moral life, not perfect holiness itself. Once again, this allowed me to take a significant step back towards ministry as a career possibility.
I can actually pinpoint the moment that I realized that I would like to pursue ordination to the priesthood, and ironically enough, it was in the midst of the worst conflict that I experienced when working in Dunedin. I won't go into details, but it was essentially a somewhat childish, and relatively public, conflict between church leaders about issues that really could have been worked out in a mature and private manner. I don't know what this says about me, but seeing leaders openly squabble caused something to click, and I realized that ordained ministry is not too lofty a job for me to handle. Over approximately three years, I had come full circle back to the point where I felt that my earlier impression of a call to ministry was legitimate, and had found my milieu, in the Anglican Communion.
Chasing the Collar
(Maybe you have picked up on this in my writing style, but I am finding these blogs increasingly difficult to write. I think that's primarily because they are venturing into the territory of my present--and hence unreflected upon--experience, but these last few topics have also required me to elaborate on motives which are often subconscious, and therefore not open to easy, step-by-step explanation. Explaining my decision to pursue the priesthood is probably the most difficult of the topics which I have addressed thus far, but here goes...)
If I were you, I would think that the next logical issue to address after why Tim is an Anglican would be why Tim would like to be an Anglican priest. As such, before I continue with the story, I'll take some time to address this question, which I am of course sure that you are presently asking (though probably only in the unspoken sort of way in which you ask questions of people posting blogs on the internet).
I have read that when one is writing application essays, etc., for the process of discernment for the Episcopal priesthood, it is a good idea to mention things such as how important it is for you to deliver the Eucharist (communion) to people, and how it would be impossible for you to live without preaching on Sundays. Those are, of course, some of the central public tasks of a priest, so it makes good sense that a person who wants to be a priest should be attracted to such activities. However, it would be a bit dishonest of me to suggest that it is simply the performance of either of those tasks that has attracted me to the priesthood. (I'm not against the Eucharist or homiletics, but, after all, theres been a healthy move within the Church towards the recognition of the ministry of laypeople, and I could certainly find a church where I could preach without being ordained, just as I could probably find somewhere that would allow me to bear the chalice for folks on Sunday morning.)
The Eucharist and the sermon have something to do with it, but they dont define it. To me, a priest is one who is committed to being a means of grace within a particular parish community. That is, they are ones who allow a truly Christ-originated unconditional love and forgiveness to flow through them to the community, as well as being ones who serve as a mouthpiece for a truly Christ-originated commitment to justice. Those characteristics are often communicated most directly in the sermon and Eucharist, but for me they are better seen as qualities of a persons being than tasks to be performed. I want to be a priest because I want to accept the responsibility to be the type of person who allows Christian love and justice to characterize their life.
Certainly one can do that without being a member of the clergy--the vows of a priest in many ways echo and grow out of the same vows that you take when you are baptized. However, I think that ordination carries with it certain advantages for someone like me. Not least, it allows you to make the pursuit of the goal of Christian love your lifes work: your paid vocation as well as your vocation based upon the vows you take at baptism and confirmation. It also represents recognition by the community of a personal responsibility for leadership in this area. It allows you to have a recognized voice within the Church, and it charges you with the responsibility to help the Church move in the direction that Christian love calls it. Practically, it also of course provides one with a recognized and traditional platform as a person through whom Gods grace flows, through (again) the sermon and administration of the Eucharist, but also through leadership within local, national, and international church structures, as well as in situations of spiritual counsel.
I am aware that these past paragraphs may make my readers of a non-Christian persuasion think that I am full of idealistic, slightly crazy, hyper-religious codswallop. Without denying the possibility that you're correct in that assessment, there is more that I would like to say. This is the point at which we should feel our way back into the story of my religious development.
If I were you, I would think that the next logical issue to address after why Tim is an Anglican would be why Tim would like to be an Anglican priest. As such, before I continue with the story, I'll take some time to address this question, which I am of course sure that you are presently asking (though probably only in the unspoken sort of way in which you ask questions of people posting blogs on the internet).
I have read that when one is writing application essays, etc., for the process of discernment for the Episcopal priesthood, it is a good idea to mention things such as how important it is for you to deliver the Eucharist (communion) to people, and how it would be impossible for you to live without preaching on Sundays. Those are, of course, some of the central public tasks of a priest, so it makes good sense that a person who wants to be a priest should be attracted to such activities. However, it would be a bit dishonest of me to suggest that it is simply the performance of either of those tasks that has attracted me to the priesthood. (I'm not against the Eucharist or homiletics, but, after all, theres been a healthy move within the Church towards the recognition of the ministry of laypeople, and I could certainly find a church where I could preach without being ordained, just as I could probably find somewhere that would allow me to bear the chalice for folks on Sunday morning.)
The Eucharist and the sermon have something to do with it, but they dont define it. To me, a priest is one who is committed to being a means of grace within a particular parish community. That is, they are ones who allow a truly Christ-originated unconditional love and forgiveness to flow through them to the community, as well as being ones who serve as a mouthpiece for a truly Christ-originated commitment to justice. Those characteristics are often communicated most directly in the sermon and Eucharist, but for me they are better seen as qualities of a persons being than tasks to be performed. I want to be a priest because I want to accept the responsibility to be the type of person who allows Christian love and justice to characterize their life.
Certainly one can do that without being a member of the clergy--the vows of a priest in many ways echo and grow out of the same vows that you take when you are baptized. However, I think that ordination carries with it certain advantages for someone like me. Not least, it allows you to make the pursuit of the goal of Christian love your lifes work: your paid vocation as well as your vocation based upon the vows you take at baptism and confirmation. It also represents recognition by the community of a personal responsibility for leadership in this area. It allows you to have a recognized voice within the Church, and it charges you with the responsibility to help the Church move in the direction that Christian love calls it. Practically, it also of course provides one with a recognized and traditional platform as a person through whom Gods grace flows, through (again) the sermon and administration of the Eucharist, but also through leadership within local, national, and international church structures, as well as in situations of spiritual counsel.
I am aware that these past paragraphs may make my readers of a non-Christian persuasion think that I am full of idealistic, slightly crazy, hyper-religious codswallop. Without denying the possibility that you're correct in that assessment, there is more that I would like to say. This is the point at which we should feel our way back into the story of my religious development.
Becoming an Anglican
Okay, so, on to significant spiritual shifts in New Zealand.
I suppose that the first thing I should discuss is the shift in the outward form of the faith that I practice--that is, my change from an evangelical protestant faith to a mainline Anglican faith. People are frequently asking why I decided to become an Anglican/Episcopalian, and a large part of the answer lies in my experience of the Anglican Communion in New Zealand.
As I mentioned in a previous entry, since college I'd had the idea in the back of my mind that I might like to consider whether the Anglican Church might be a good fit for me spiritually. In the year I spent feeling mostly disengaged from the institutional church, I had begun to investigate that idea in my normal protracted manner, by finding information in books and on the internet which would help me to make an educated decision. Our trip to New Zealand was a chance to finally take the plunge, and actually visit an Anglican Church.
Like most things in my life, the internet aided in this, because before Angel and I left for Dunedin, I was able to find a parish on the web (St. Matthew's) which looked like it might be a good fit for us. It seemed like a relatively youthful church in an old, attractive, very English, building, and it obviously had a vibrant congregation with a lot of mission involvement. When I told Angel that I'd found a church that I thought we should attend when we arrived in NZ, her initial reaction was, I think, "Oh, that's nice". Then she said something along the lines of, "Oh, it's Anglican. Aren't they pretty boring, like Catholics?" (Angel, being raised Catholic, was of course only suggesting this in the most positive of ways). I generally take a long time to make decisions, but I also think that I usually make the right ones. Here this was definitely true, because both St. Matthew's and the Anglican Church proved to be an excellent fit for both Angel and I, whatever the general level of boringness present across the denomination.
In arriving in New Zealand, our first goal was to quickly find a place to live, and within two business days we had accomplished that: we found an expensive little two bedroom apartment at the top of a steep hill, with holes in the hideous carpet, wallpaper that clashed offensively with the rest of the decor, and no heating. There was almost nothing good about it, but it was (unbeknownst to us at the time) located about five blocks from St. Matt's.
Thus, the first Sunday we were there, we stumbled down the frost-covered hill to the church, which, we found, also didn't have much in the way of heating. However, it was populated by a great group of people. As an example of their friendliness, in a way I suppose we were initially bribed into staying around because one of the members offered to allow us usage of their automobile while they were away for the week. (This was amazingly hospitable, but also horrifying. It isn't exactly comfortable learning to drive on the opposite side of the road, in a country whose driving laws you don't know, in the car of a person who you have just met. No crashes, but we did manage to kill the battery twice.) We would have come back anyway, because St. Matt's immediately seemed like a comfortable place to be. Probably in part that was because it was/is generally an evangelical Church, similar in style to what we were both used to. However, for me at least, St. Matt's NZ Evangelical Anglicanism represented a significant enough departure from what I was used to that I could there begin an involvement with the institutional Church that would be different from the involvement I had had in the past.
Within six months, I was employed by the Anglican Church (in part to help support my university study habit) as a diocesan youth worker, and by the end of the 20ish months that I worked for the diocese, I was convinced that the Anglican Communion was a Church that I could worship within. There is a lot that could be said as to why I came to that conclusion, but some primary draws included: 1) The theological breadth of Anglicanism 2) Its rich tradition 3) Its general, historically established attitude of tolerance and inclusion 4) It's commitment to social justice and 5) Its international character. I experienced Anglicanism as a movement that was bigger than me, which was able to unite people across time and geography based upon a commitment to Christian principles of love and hope. I also saw that it was generally an anti-dogmatic church, which would allow me (and whoever) room to believe what I actually believe about God without too much anxiety.It was primarily that experience of Anglicanism that led me to pursue confirmation when Angel and I returned to the US, and I see my experience of the Church there as a standard to be lived up to in my involvement with the ECUSA.
I suppose that the first thing I should discuss is the shift in the outward form of the faith that I practice--that is, my change from an evangelical protestant faith to a mainline Anglican faith. People are frequently asking why I decided to become an Anglican/Episcopalian, and a large part of the answer lies in my experience of the Anglican Communion in New Zealand.
As I mentioned in a previous entry, since college I'd had the idea in the back of my mind that I might like to consider whether the Anglican Church might be a good fit for me spiritually. In the year I spent feeling mostly disengaged from the institutional church, I had begun to investigate that idea in my normal protracted manner, by finding information in books and on the internet which would help me to make an educated decision. Our trip to New Zealand was a chance to finally take the plunge, and actually visit an Anglican Church.
Like most things in my life, the internet aided in this, because before Angel and I left for Dunedin, I was able to find a parish on the web (St. Matthew's) which looked like it might be a good fit for us. It seemed like a relatively youthful church in an old, attractive, very English, building, and it obviously had a vibrant congregation with a lot of mission involvement. When I told Angel that I'd found a church that I thought we should attend when we arrived in NZ, her initial reaction was, I think, "Oh, that's nice". Then she said something along the lines of, "Oh, it's Anglican. Aren't they pretty boring, like Catholics?" (Angel, being raised Catholic, was of course only suggesting this in the most positive of ways). I generally take a long time to make decisions, but I also think that I usually make the right ones. Here this was definitely true, because both St. Matthew's and the Anglican Church proved to be an excellent fit for both Angel and I, whatever the general level of boringness present across the denomination.
In arriving in New Zealand, our first goal was to quickly find a place to live, and within two business days we had accomplished that: we found an expensive little two bedroom apartment at the top of a steep hill, with holes in the hideous carpet, wallpaper that clashed offensively with the rest of the decor, and no heating. There was almost nothing good about it, but it was (unbeknownst to us at the time) located about five blocks from St. Matt's.
Thus, the first Sunday we were there, we stumbled down the frost-covered hill to the church, which, we found, also didn't have much in the way of heating. However, it was populated by a great group of people. As an example of their friendliness, in a way I suppose we were initially bribed into staying around because one of the members offered to allow us usage of their automobile while they were away for the week. (This was amazingly hospitable, but also horrifying. It isn't exactly comfortable learning to drive on the opposite side of the road, in a country whose driving laws you don't know, in the car of a person who you have just met. No crashes, but we did manage to kill the battery twice.) We would have come back anyway, because St. Matt's immediately seemed like a comfortable place to be. Probably in part that was because it was/is generally an evangelical Church, similar in style to what we were both used to. However, for me at least, St. Matt's NZ Evangelical Anglicanism represented a significant enough departure from what I was used to that I could there begin an involvement with the institutional Church that would be different from the involvement I had had in the past.
Within six months, I was employed by the Anglican Church (in part to help support my university study habit) as a diocesan youth worker, and by the end of the 20ish months that I worked for the diocese, I was convinced that the Anglican Communion was a Church that I could worship within. There is a lot that could be said as to why I came to that conclusion, but some primary draws included: 1) The theological breadth of Anglicanism 2) Its rich tradition 3) Its general, historically established attitude of tolerance and inclusion 4) It's commitment to social justice and 5) Its international character. I experienced Anglicanism as a movement that was bigger than me, which was able to unite people across time and geography based upon a commitment to Christian principles of love and hope. I also saw that it was generally an anti-dogmatic church, which would allow me (and whoever) room to believe what I actually believe about God without too much anxiety.It was primarily that experience of Anglicanism that led me to pursue confirmation when Angel and I returned to the US, and I see my experience of the Church there as a standard to be lived up to in my involvement with the ECUSA.
Pilgrimmage to the Shire
Although I didnt initially see it as such, our trip to New Zealand represented a genuine pilgrimage for me (if I'm properly understanding a pilgrimage to be a trip you undertake which allows you to get yourself sorted out spiritually). With all I was going through after college, I didn't feel that I was in any place to immediately continue my path into youth ministry, and wasn't entirely sure where to go. I had a degree designed to prepare me for the ministry, but I didn't feel comfortable practicing the only model of ministry I knew. New Zealand provided me with more time to consider my future and my faith, because I was traveling as a student, and enrolled in a Master's program in Theology at the University of Otago, in Dunedin, at the bottom of the South Island.
At the point we arrived in New Zealand, I had essentially had about a year off from any significant involvement in either church or Christian organizations. However, maybe because we were in such a different place, I was finally comfortable enough to begin to feel my way back in. Obviously, enrolling oneself for a Christian theology degree necessitates some consideration of spiritual things, but perhaps more significantly we also quickly found a church and began to get involved. In Dunedin, I recognized several things about the institutional church almost immediately, which I don't think that I had considered before. Firstly, religious organizations provide a sort of multinational community unlike any other organization that I have been a part of, and secondly, the Christian church is an amazingly diverse entity, and it cannot be fully characterized by any one locality's expression of it. Both of those understandings were initially very important for me: as a stranger in a strange land, I needed the community that church provided, and in experiencing a church which wasn't very much like the one at home, I realized that there was room for me to comfortably exist as a part of the institution.
In traveling, I think I also quickly began to adopt a new attitude towards faith in general, and more specifically my own. That is, that religious faith is not necessarily something objective which one can either have or not have; it is really a feature of the process of one's life, which you often have little control over, and which is extremely difficult to quantify. Prior to NZ, I had questioned whether I had lost faith by rejecting many of the essentials of the faith of my youth, but I soon came to realize that "losing faith" is not so simple a thing as rejecting a few generally ridiculous doctrines.
Just making the trip to NZ then marked a significant turning point for me in terms of faith and my commitment to the Christian Church. However, the course of my time there also directed my thinking in the trajectory in which it is still headed (time will tell whether I think that's a good thing or not). There are several stories I should tell in relation to that, but for brevity's sake, I'll do that in the next blog.
At the point we arrived in New Zealand, I had essentially had about a year off from any significant involvement in either church or Christian organizations. However, maybe because we were in such a different place, I was finally comfortable enough to begin to feel my way back in. Obviously, enrolling oneself for a Christian theology degree necessitates some consideration of spiritual things, but perhaps more significantly we also quickly found a church and began to get involved. In Dunedin, I recognized several things about the institutional church almost immediately, which I don't think that I had considered before. Firstly, religious organizations provide a sort of multinational community unlike any other organization that I have been a part of, and secondly, the Christian church is an amazingly diverse entity, and it cannot be fully characterized by any one locality's expression of it. Both of those understandings were initially very important for me: as a stranger in a strange land, I needed the community that church provided, and in experiencing a church which wasn't very much like the one at home, I realized that there was room for me to comfortably exist as a part of the institution.
In traveling, I think I also quickly began to adopt a new attitude towards faith in general, and more specifically my own. That is, that religious faith is not necessarily something objective which one can either have or not have; it is really a feature of the process of one's life, which you often have little control over, and which is extremely difficult to quantify. Prior to NZ, I had questioned whether I had lost faith by rejecting many of the essentials of the faith of my youth, but I soon came to realize that "losing faith" is not so simple a thing as rejecting a few generally ridiculous doctrines.
Just making the trip to NZ then marked a significant turning point for me in terms of faith and my commitment to the Christian Church. However, the course of my time there also directed my thinking in the trajectory in which it is still headed (time will tell whether I think that's a good thing or not). There are several stories I should tell in relation to that, but for brevity's sake, I'll do that in the next blog.
What are you, some kind of liberal?
My final year of college was a major turning point in my life for a variety of reasons, but spiritually it marked the beginning of a major transition away from the faith that I had been raised with. I was still at Asbury, but I began to dissociate myself from it in a lot of ways. I moved out of the dorms into an apartment, I took the minimum number of classes required to graduate, and I cut out most of my previously significant involvement in the spiritual life of the place. Significantly, I also stopped the program of daily prayer and scriptural study that I'd been practicing regularly since high school. I didn't at the time recognize what I was going through as a loss of faith, or anything akin to it. I just realized that the track I'd been on wasn't working for me anymore, and I wanted to move in a different direction. I began to see what direction that would be, and I did a senior presentation on Anglican Spirituality because I was interested in the broad and tolerant nature of the Episcopal Church.
Before I made any commitments though, I think I needed a solid break with the past, and the summer after graduation provided a convenient time. Angel (the girl I had dated all through college) and I got married, and moved to Louisville where she had attended college. Neither of us wanted to leave the Church totally, and we drifted for a year between a couple different churches. However, we avoided any involvement beyond attendance on Sundays.
We also made plans to travel. We originally hoped to join the Peace Corps and spend a few years in West Africa. However, those plans dissolved after a year of planning, for multiple reasons, mostly related to disorganization on the Peace Corps' part. Instead, we decided to head back "Down Under", this time to New Zealand.
Before I made any commitments though, I think I needed a solid break with the past, and the summer after graduation provided a convenient time. Angel (the girl I had dated all through college) and I got married, and moved to Louisville where she had attended college. Neither of us wanted to leave the Church totally, and we drifted for a year between a couple different churches. However, we avoided any involvement beyond attendance on Sundays.
We also made plans to travel. We originally hoped to join the Peace Corps and spend a few years in West Africa. However, those plans dissolved after a year of planning, for multiple reasons, mostly related to disorganization on the Peace Corps' part. Instead, we decided to head back "Down Under", this time to New Zealand.
Animal House
My first three years of college, spiritually, represent a pretty logical outgrowth of my last two years of high school. I went to a conservative Christian college (Asbury, in Wilmore, KY), decided to major in Biblical Studies and Theology, and planned on becoming a youth worker in the Church of God, or possibly some other conservative Wesleyan denomination.
I embraced the Asbury way of life thoroughly, which was a lifestyle of rigorous spiritual discipline: daily scripture readings, prayer, community service, regular church worship, abstinence from sex, drugs, alcohol, staying up too late, etc. In a lot of ways, there was some significant element of utopianism involved in that period of my life, because I believed strongly in the need to build a sort of alternative Christian subculture, which Asbury seemed to be committed to. (Strangely enough, I think that sort of countercultural impulse was the same thing that earlier had attracted me--and currently attracts me, albeit less so--to the punk and alternative music scenes). There was also definitely a real element of spiritual quest there. I've always believed in the need to pursue truth, and I thought that I'd found it in the sort of straightforward faith that I was learning. Thus, I tried to live out that faith as fully as possible. Mine really wasn't the average American university life, though it probably wasn't too dissimilar from most small Christian college experiences.
By the end of my third year of college, however, several significant developments had begun to make me seriously question many elements of the faith I'd grown up with. Towards the end of sophomore year, my two closest friends both lost parents, relatively unexpectedly, and I experienced a lot of empathetic pain on their behalf. Both of them, I think, developed problems with God as a result, though in different ways. For the first time, I was also forced to deal seriously with the real challenge that pain and suffering pose to Christian belief in a loving God. I had also been in contact with a good friend who was/is more scientifically astute than I am, and during this period he finally convinced me that the creationism that I was being taught in church, and even at college, was, for lack of a more apt expression, bullshit. As a result, I could no longer accept my basic belief that Christian scripture was "revealed by God", in a fairly easy to understand way.
Also raising questions for my faith was the girl who I had been dating since late in my high school career. She'd been raised as a nominal Catholic, and though she converted to an evangelical faith, she never accepted many of its central tenets as easily or fully as I did. She spent a semester studying in Australia at the end of our junior year, and her eyes were, in a lot of ways, opened to the truth present in other religions and cultures. I also spent a month visiting her and traveling the Australian east coast, and our experiences there went a long way towards loosening up the tightness of my faith. I learned to see that my own faith was wrapped up in my midwestern-American culture, and that many elements of it genuinely didn't work in a larger world.
I embraced the Asbury way of life thoroughly, which was a lifestyle of rigorous spiritual discipline: daily scripture readings, prayer, community service, regular church worship, abstinence from sex, drugs, alcohol, staying up too late, etc. In a lot of ways, there was some significant element of utopianism involved in that period of my life, because I believed strongly in the need to build a sort of alternative Christian subculture, which Asbury seemed to be committed to. (Strangely enough, I think that sort of countercultural impulse was the same thing that earlier had attracted me--and currently attracts me, albeit less so--to the punk and alternative music scenes). There was also definitely a real element of spiritual quest there. I've always believed in the need to pursue truth, and I thought that I'd found it in the sort of straightforward faith that I was learning. Thus, I tried to live out that faith as fully as possible. Mine really wasn't the average American university life, though it probably wasn't too dissimilar from most small Christian college experiences.
By the end of my third year of college, however, several significant developments had begun to make me seriously question many elements of the faith I'd grown up with. Towards the end of sophomore year, my two closest friends both lost parents, relatively unexpectedly, and I experienced a lot of empathetic pain on their behalf. Both of them, I think, developed problems with God as a result, though in different ways. For the first time, I was also forced to deal seriously with the real challenge that pain and suffering pose to Christian belief in a loving God. I had also been in contact with a good friend who was/is more scientifically astute than I am, and during this period he finally convinced me that the creationism that I was being taught in church, and even at college, was, for lack of a more apt expression, bullshit. As a result, I could no longer accept my basic belief that Christian scripture was "revealed by God", in a fairly easy to understand way.
Also raising questions for my faith was the girl who I had been dating since late in my high school career. She'd been raised as a nominal Catholic, and though she converted to an evangelical faith, she never accepted many of its central tenets as easily or fully as I did. She spent a semester studying in Australia at the end of our junior year, and her eyes were, in a lot of ways, opened to the truth present in other religions and cultures. I also spent a month visiting her and traveling the Australian east coast, and our experiences there went a long way towards loosening up the tightness of my faith. I learned to see that my own faith was wrapped up in my midwestern-American culture, and that many elements of it genuinely didn't work in a larger world.
Conversion and Confusion
When I was 17, I had what was still probably the most important single experience in my religious life, which ultimately led me to take faith seriously, and then to investigate a feeling of calling to ministry.
Looking back, the whole situation seems a bit silly, and in fact hard for me to define verbally. Essentially, I felt that God spoke to me, whatever that means, at a Christian music festival that I attended in Kentucky. My youth group was listening to a youth speaker, whose name I don't remember, and one of my closest friends was moved by the message to pray for repentance because he was sleeping with his girlfriend. For whatever reason, I was also extremely moved, and felt a real need to take my faith seriously. At the time, it felt like a message from God. Now I'm not sure that it was; I'm not even sure that I believe that genuine messages from God occur in such a direct way.
In any case, however, the experience deeply affected me. My response was to dive fully into the evangelical faith that my church taught. My initial decision was to stop listening to "secular" music, and stop watching television. Neither or those decisions lasted more than a week. However, I also decided to take my personal faith more seriously, and to begin trying to convince my non-Christian friends of their need for an evangelical faith. The personal side of things probably worked out the best. I started a daily regimen of prayer, journaling, and scriptural study that I kept up until my last year of college. I also committed to avoid alcohol, drugs, and premarital sex, and to be committed to attending church and youth group on a regular weekly basis. In some ways I'm still shaped by the pattern of spiritual practice that I set then, because questions of personal discipline and morality are still central to my faith.
My path from there was relatively set. The experience at the youth festival had felt like a call to ministry, though it took me a year and a half to equate that with a call to ordained ministry. I stepped in to a significant leadership role in my youth group, and planned to attend Asbury College, a Christian school in rural Kentucky, near the point of my "divine revelation". My initial idea was to study journalism, but those plans quickly changed in a decision to pursue ordained ministry in the Church of God.
Before moving on to my experiences at Asbury though, I should mention a significant event that occurred in the interim. After I graduated from high school, I went with my youth group on a short-term mission trip to Lima, Peru, which primarily involved painting at a school for the deaf, organizing a Bible school for children who didn't understand the English that we were speaking, and touring the city to experience firsthand the reality of third-world poverty. I might question the validity of much of what was taught by the church of my upbringing, but I have never questioned that I learned an important reality about God in my experiences in Lima, and I would later be attracted to Latin American liberation theology (which in many ways achieved prominence in a university in Lima, as taught by the theologian Gustavo Gutierrez) because of its teaching of God's preferential concern for people like those who I met in the shantytowns that comprise most of that city.
Looking back, the whole situation seems a bit silly, and in fact hard for me to define verbally. Essentially, I felt that God spoke to me, whatever that means, at a Christian music festival that I attended in Kentucky. My youth group was listening to a youth speaker, whose name I don't remember, and one of my closest friends was moved by the message to pray for repentance because he was sleeping with his girlfriend. For whatever reason, I was also extremely moved, and felt a real need to take my faith seriously. At the time, it felt like a message from God. Now I'm not sure that it was; I'm not even sure that I believe that genuine messages from God occur in such a direct way.
In any case, however, the experience deeply affected me. My response was to dive fully into the evangelical faith that my church taught. My initial decision was to stop listening to "secular" music, and stop watching television. Neither or those decisions lasted more than a week. However, I also decided to take my personal faith more seriously, and to begin trying to convince my non-Christian friends of their need for an evangelical faith. The personal side of things probably worked out the best. I started a daily regimen of prayer, journaling, and scriptural study that I kept up until my last year of college. I also committed to avoid alcohol, drugs, and premarital sex, and to be committed to attending church and youth group on a regular weekly basis. In some ways I'm still shaped by the pattern of spiritual practice that I set then, because questions of personal discipline and morality are still central to my faith.
My path from there was relatively set. The experience at the youth festival had felt like a call to ministry, though it took me a year and a half to equate that with a call to ordained ministry. I stepped in to a significant leadership role in my youth group, and planned to attend Asbury College, a Christian school in rural Kentucky, near the point of my "divine revelation". My initial idea was to study journalism, but those plans quickly changed in a decision to pursue ordained ministry in the Church of God.
Before moving on to my experiences at Asbury though, I should mention a significant event that occurred in the interim. After I graduated from high school, I went with my youth group on a short-term mission trip to Lima, Peru, which primarily involved painting at a school for the deaf, organizing a Bible school for children who didn't understand the English that we were speaking, and touring the city to experience firsthand the reality of third-world poverty. I might question the validity of much of what was taught by the church of my upbringing, but I have never questioned that I learned an important reality about God in my experiences in Lima, and I would later be attracted to Latin American liberation theology (which in many ways achieved prominence in a university in Lima, as taught by the theologian Gustavo Gutierrez) because of its teaching of God's preferential concern for people like those who I met in the shantytowns that comprise most of that city.
Building a Testimony
If I were writing this five years ago, I would have led you to believe that the next 2-3 year stage of my life was a time of spiritual rebellion. Now, I'm not sure why. (My theory is that it has something to do with the Evangelical tendency to emphasize the need to have a powerful "testimony" so that you can tell people how much your life has changed since you got "saved". My friends and I would joke about doing bad things in order to "build a testimony" for the future, and I think that mentality worked itself into a skewed perception of my own past).
To be honest, I've never had a genuinely rebellious stage, spiritually or otherwise. I personally dislike conflict, so any rebellion or revolution I'm likely to be involved in would be peaceful. In any case though, during my first two to three years of high school, I did feel generally ambivalent towards religion and Christianity. I was primarily interested in girls, music, and figuring out who I wanted to be--not that those things are unrelated to faith. Looking back, this was the time when I picked up a bent towards the countercultural, mainly through music, but this tendency eventually contributed to my attraction to Christian faith.
I was certainly absorbing something of the evangelical faith that my church was teaching, and a lot of my social life centered on youth group, but I wasn't totally sold on Christianity yet. I was interested in trying things out that my church would have prohibited. However, that desire didn't lead to anything more than a few months of skipped church services, some cursing, a couple puffs of tobacco, and punk rock concert or two (all done primarily with friends from youth group, I should say). At the time it felt like rebellion, but the fact that I lived in a town of 2,000 shielded me from any real involvement in illicit sex, drugs, or rock 'n roll.
Ironically enough, at this point in life, I am more comfortable with the person I was during this "rebellious" stage than with the hyper-religious person that I became over the next 4 years or so.
To be honest, I've never had a genuinely rebellious stage, spiritually or otherwise. I personally dislike conflict, so any rebellion or revolution I'm likely to be involved in would be peaceful. In any case though, during my first two to three years of high school, I did feel generally ambivalent towards religion and Christianity. I was primarily interested in girls, music, and figuring out who I wanted to be--not that those things are unrelated to faith. Looking back, this was the time when I picked up a bent towards the countercultural, mainly through music, but this tendency eventually contributed to my attraction to Christian faith.
I was certainly absorbing something of the evangelical faith that my church was teaching, and a lot of my social life centered on youth group, but I wasn't totally sold on Christianity yet. I was interested in trying things out that my church would have prohibited. However, that desire didn't lead to anything more than a few months of skipped church services, some cursing, a couple puffs of tobacco, and punk rock concert or two (all done primarily with friends from youth group, I should say). At the time it felt like rebellion, but the fact that I lived in a town of 2,000 shielded me from any real involvement in illicit sex, drugs, or rock 'n roll.
Ironically enough, at this point in life, I am more comfortable with the person I was during this "rebellious" stage than with the hyper-religious person that I became over the next 4 years or so.
Autobiography Chapter 1: Me and God are like THIS!
There are a significant number of hoops to jump through when one hopes to become an Episcopal priest. I'm somewhere near the beginning of the process, and the next requirement for me is to write a "spiritual autobiography"--basically a personal history that, I think, explains why (the hell!) I am a Christian, an Episcopalian, and an aspiring sporter of that creepy collar. I have decided that I'm going to write that autobiography the way that I like to do everything--nerdofabulusly, on the internet, in a series of blog posts. Once again, I'm creeping towards taking blogs seriously with this, which is something I have hoped to avoid. However, I can't stand the thought of writing this just for myself and one priest, and possibly some of you have curiosities about my spirituality. Thus, I shall kill two birds with one stone. I am warning you that these posts will almost definitely be long, boring, and embarrassingly personal. Hopefully they won't be too unbearably saccharine. Here goes...
In the field of spiritual development, there are at least two things of which I am relatively confident: 1) that there is something innate in us that leads us to religion, or at least a concern with the supernatural, and 2) we are socialized into our religious beliefs, whether intentionally or not. As such, when discussing my own spiritual development, I should begin at the beginning, and talk a bit about my background and religious upbringing.
I was raised in a rural southwestern-Ohio town called Camden by what, I suppose, were at least relatively devout parents, as a member of the non-denominational Wesleyan Evangelical movement designated "The Church of God, Anderson, Indiana". Distinguishing characteristics of the COGAI were/are the unwillingness to admit denominational status, despite denominational structure and doctrine, and an unwillingness to adopt a formal system of membership despite keeping track of weekly church roles, and developing qualifications for voting in church elections. Incidentally, I was never formally a member of any Christian denomination until April 2006, when I was confirmed as an Episcopalian, despite having attended church regularly my entire life, and having left the COGAI in about 2000. (Although, I was of course a devoted "not" member of a "not" denomination for a few years.)
In my life prior to high school, I genuinely don't remember having a terribly large number of experiences which I would label as "spiritual" or "religious", though I do remember church quite well. I attended Sunday school weekly, as well as vacation Bible School in the summers, and when I reached the seventh grade I began participating in youth group. My youth leader asked if I would like to get baptized when I was 12, and I said yes, under the vague impression that it was something that God wanted me to do. My primary memories of that event are of being nervous about falling when I stepped into the baptismal, and of being disappointed to find afterwards that baptism did not stop me from sinning. I also remember feeling somewhat relieved, because I was pretty sure that now, if I were to die, I probably wouldn't go to Hell. I didn't have a well developed notion of who or what God is during that period, and religion was mostly about learning to do what is "right", and keeping some distant God from being angry with me.
Looking back, I did have some key experiences that were formative during that period however. I remember latching onto Christianity and the Bible strongly in the Sixth grade, when my social scene was shaken by a move from elementary to middle school. A good friend and I formed a sort of miniature religious clique, and both started to read the Bible and pray seriously. In Junior high, I also went on two mission trips with my youth group, to a Native American reservation at Gordon, Nebraska, and to Appalachia, in Neon, Kentucky. Those trips helped to cement my place within my home church, and mark the beginning of the development of my present understanding of the social responsibility of the Church among the poor.
I can also recall at least two incidents that seemed at the time to be experiences of God's presence. One was lying in a Nebraska field, looking at the stars, and contemplating the immensity of the universe, probably for the first time. The other also occurred at night, but this time in my house in Ohio, sleeping on a mattress on the floor while my room was being remodeled. I had a dream about being murdered, and woke up with the sort of genuine but irrational fear that nightmares often produce. I prayed that God would protect me, and remember feeling a real peace, and sense of some sort of divine presence and love. I don't know how much credence that this event carries as an authentic experience of God, however, because in my dream the person attempting to murder me was Mr. Belvedere.
In the field of spiritual development, there are at least two things of which I am relatively confident: 1) that there is something innate in us that leads us to religion, or at least a concern with the supernatural, and 2) we are socialized into our religious beliefs, whether intentionally or not. As such, when discussing my own spiritual development, I should begin at the beginning, and talk a bit about my background and religious upbringing.
I was raised in a rural southwestern-Ohio town called Camden by what, I suppose, were at least relatively devout parents, as a member of the non-denominational Wesleyan Evangelical movement designated "The Church of God, Anderson, Indiana". Distinguishing characteristics of the COGAI were/are the unwillingness to admit denominational status, despite denominational structure and doctrine, and an unwillingness to adopt a formal system of membership despite keeping track of weekly church roles, and developing qualifications for voting in church elections. Incidentally, I was never formally a member of any Christian denomination until April 2006, when I was confirmed as an Episcopalian, despite having attended church regularly my entire life, and having left the COGAI in about 2000. (Although, I was of course a devoted "not" member of a "not" denomination for a few years.)
In my life prior to high school, I genuinely don't remember having a terribly large number of experiences which I would label as "spiritual" or "religious", though I do remember church quite well. I attended Sunday school weekly, as well as vacation Bible School in the summers, and when I reached the seventh grade I began participating in youth group. My youth leader asked if I would like to get baptized when I was 12, and I said yes, under the vague impression that it was something that God wanted me to do. My primary memories of that event are of being nervous about falling when I stepped into the baptismal, and of being disappointed to find afterwards that baptism did not stop me from sinning. I also remember feeling somewhat relieved, because I was pretty sure that now, if I were to die, I probably wouldn't go to Hell. I didn't have a well developed notion of who or what God is during that period, and religion was mostly about learning to do what is "right", and keeping some distant God from being angry with me.
Looking back, I did have some key experiences that were formative during that period however. I remember latching onto Christianity and the Bible strongly in the Sixth grade, when my social scene was shaken by a move from elementary to middle school. A good friend and I formed a sort of miniature religious clique, and both started to read the Bible and pray seriously. In Junior high, I also went on two mission trips with my youth group, to a Native American reservation at Gordon, Nebraska, and to Appalachia, in Neon, Kentucky. Those trips helped to cement my place within my home church, and mark the beginning of the development of my present understanding of the social responsibility of the Church among the poor.
I can also recall at least two incidents that seemed at the time to be experiences of God's presence. One was lying in a Nebraska field, looking at the stars, and contemplating the immensity of the universe, probably for the first time. The other also occurred at night, but this time in my house in Ohio, sleeping on a mattress on the floor while my room was being remodeled. I had a dream about being murdered, and woke up with the sort of genuine but irrational fear that nightmares often produce. I prayed that God would protect me, and remember feeling a real peace, and sense of some sort of divine presence and love. I don't know how much credence that this event carries as an authentic experience of God, however, because in my dream the person attempting to murder me was Mr. Belvedere.
Sunday, May 13, 2007
The Solution to my problems
I've found the solution to my problems, and I think I'll be able to get out of paying property taxes on our apartment. http://www.openordination.org.
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