Spiritual Autobiography

---,

I wanted to let you know that if you would like to read my spiritual
autobiography for discussion at our next session, that work is still a
valuable exercise for me, but I will not need it for the commission on
ministry.

The meeting yesterday was not in fact a next steps in the discernment
process meeting but a conclusion of our time together. I am in the
first stages of a breakup and since the litany, I didn't need or want
you anyway, is the same no matter what the topic, I won't bother to
expound on it at any length here. What I did find telling (but not
surprising) and will continue to ponder is the sense of relief that I
will no longer be required to attend --- or meet my deep
longings in that context.

I look forward to our next meeting,

heather lee

God is Light

Catholic Church

Snow covered stone steps, wooden doors, flickering candles. A warm hand in mine. An haven of comfort and peace.  I was 30 years old before I realized that this memory wasn’t something I’d gleaned from television. Decades before I stepped foot into a similar enough church to recognized it as the Catholic Church that my grandmother took me to. And yet, this place, this haven, is where and how I formed my first theological understanding of God. God is light. Literal light. I can reflect, now, on how easy it must have been to form this. The modern Western childhood doesn’t have a lot of space in it for darkness. Night lights, streetlights, glow in the dark worm shaped sleeping companions. God was always, always with me, just as I’d been told. I needed God to be with me all the time.

My parents were, in many ways, classic examples of their generation. My mother was a tall cool blonde who lived on the beach in Southern California, my father a sailor from South Dakota, who joined the Navy and went to Vietnam because he wanted to see the ocean. Whether or not they fell in love is their story, but they married because of my story. And from my childish perspective, it wasn’t happy, and I was grateful it didn’t last longer than it did. Through the course of their marriage, however, knowing that God was ever present, I need only find some light, and there would be peace, was a source of comfort in chaos.

Divorce and Being Saved

Their divorce landed us in the corner of Northeast California, far from the families of my mother and my father. In a place where who you were was intimately tied to who your family was, and how long they had been there. No one knew our family, and we had just arrived. We were no one. 

It was here, in this place where I knew no one, and no one knew me, that I began to know Jesus. I have no memory of my parents attending church while they were married, but after the divorce my mother began attending the church of her youth, a Baptist church. Children of divorce often feel that the divorce was their fault. Few children, I hope, learn that the marriage itself was their fault. And as I learned that this was my fault, I also learned that Jesus could take that guilt and shame, now called sin, from me.  What was difficult to reconcile was the earliest faith in God as light with this new idea of God as man. God as man truly placed God in time, and the distance in time from me to Jesus meant that God was no longer immanent. My religious community affirmed this idea that God no longer speaks and that Christians were a memorial society, coming together as mourners and believers in a time when God did speak, in faith and hope that God would again speak, although that time would not be in earthly time but heavenly time. 

Going Dark

Middle School Youth Group

This memorial community managed to sustain me through my childhood and I carried it with me when my mother moved us to Southern California to be near her parents. As before, I attended church with my grandmother and I discovered the ways that family and church weave together an understanding in the world. As I matured and left childhood behind, two particular instances happened things happened that let me know that this community was in fact of mourners, and that it did not have the capacity to deal with the issues of life. The first was being assaulted in the Sunday School room by the pastor’s son. I do in fact believe that he was a young man whose sexuality got away from him, and I know as a member of that community that we in no way ever spoke of how our sexuality might be part of God’s plan for us or how we could engage our sexual nature in the context of our Christian faith. And I know that as I tried to speak of it, I got a round of give him a break from the members of the youth group, and the adults ignored the topic as though it did not exist. As a result, I stopped going to church and moved out of my mother’s house.

Junior College Young Adults Group

I did return to my mother’s house but I did not return to church throughout high school.When I entered Junior College, the second instance happened when I became friends with a group of Christians who invited me to their young adult community at an American Baptist mega church. While this church was still a community of mourners of a time when God was present, they did seem to struggle to address the issue of how to live now, in light of that absence. As young adults are wont to do, I had several boyfriends at this time in my life and an active social life. After a particular party, I went to one of the youth ministers, in confidentiality, to discuss my social life and my Christian faith. Unlike my previous experience where nothing was said, I gained a deep empathy for Hester Prynne. Unlike Hester, it was much easier for me to leave the community and I washed my hands of the church and God, since He didn’t seem to exist anymore anyway.

Philosophy 101

I know that all humans have a deep seated need to apply organizing principles to their existence, to find meaning in their lives and that many people do so via religion. I, however, was done with that, and when I transferred out of junior college, contemplating becoming a lawyer, I became a philosophy major purely because they scored well on the entrance exams. I fell in love with philosophy. Here, I found a way to apply meaning to existence and God did not need to be present in any way, except as a figurehead for some organizing principle of the universe. It certainly didn’t need a bearded, robed figure, and I found that I could let that go, along with that community of mourners who did not live in the real world. Philosophy was in fact so challenging to my understanding of the world that I dropped out of school before completing my education and moved to Portland with my finance.

Twilight

Getting Married

Shannon and I married in Laurelhurst Park in the summer of 1995. We are still married and he is still my best friend. One thing we share is a fascination for systems, particularly human systems. Many late nights were spent in our early years in pubs with friends, creating meaning for the systems that we found ourselves in and locating ourselves in them. I had no need for that dead God in this world we were creating.

Having Children, Making Friends

Much to the dismay of my doctor, our approach to children was rather indeterminate. Endemetriosis runs in my family, my mother had a full hysterectomy when I was 18 and I had been diagnosed with Pelvic Inflammatory Disease. The possibility of pregnancy seemed slim but we determined not to engage in prenatal warfare in order to have children. Two and a half years later, our daughter was born, at home. At that time, I met the first of what became the village it takes to raise children. This community, the core of whom are women, fulfilled every dream I might ever have had for what a community could be. It was as unlike as I can imagine from the community of mourners that I had found in the Christian community, for here there were no details of life that could not be shared, digested, incorporated. Without knowing it at the time, I was learning about incarnation, what it means for all aspects of living to be impregnated with the squirrelly chaos of life itself. 

College

When my son was an infant, I returned to college. I discovered that the mucking about in creation had left me less enthusiastic about the heady abstract contemplation of the meaning of life. I knew, now, that the meaning of life was found in it’s creation, it’s preservation and it’s laundry. Ordinary things, and the surprising connections between them, were the place where we lived and the place where we found the meaning. And so I graduated from Portland State University in 2001, with a B.S. in philosophy, and it felt as useful as the irony it invokes. 

Sunrise

St. Francis

It came as a surprise to me, about a year later, having moved to to San Jose, CA for a career advancing opportunity for my husband, when he told me he wanted to go back to church. I suspect that the only reason I agreed was that I was far from that community that had given my life structure and happiness. We agreed to try several different denominations, and there were many to chose from in our neighborhood. Our first foray was to St. Francis Episcopal Church, a block from our house, with the distinguishing feature of a 10 am service with childcare. I did not know it at the time, but we arrived on the first or second Sunday of Lent. All I knew was that the service spoke to something deep and barely remembered in my heart. We sat in the back, near the door, as do most families with small children, and I remember nothing about that service except for a feeling that even now defies description. As we left the service, we were invited to the parish hall. There was a huge cognitive disconnect between that solemn service and the cacophony of coffee hour. A woman walked up to me and asked me if this was my first time in an Episcopal church. I said yes, and that I was having a hard time reconciling the tone of the service with the exuberance of the coffee hour. She suggested I keep coming back until Easter before I made up my mind. And I did. I cried every Sunday until Easter, when I walked up and took Communion for the first time in that parish, and I cried many Sundays after. I had finally found a place that reconciled that God of Light with Jesus on the Cross. I did not find it at the table, as so many others seem to, I found it in the corporate confession, which began a long journey for me of unraveling corporate sins from personal sins; sins I had done and sins done to me. 

In the fall, I began attending the 8am service, Rite I, and helping in the nursery during the 10 am service. The following Lent, I participated in a program that explored Holy Week and created symbols for use during Holy Week. At the Vigil, my daughter was baptized in a font that I had helped create. The second Easter was more miraculous than the first had been. And the next day, my husband lost his job.

St. Paul’s and the Call

The first thing we discovered when my husband lost his job was that unemployment would not even pay our rent. So in the spring of 2003, we packed everything into storage and moved in with Shannon’s mother in Bakersfield, CA. I went back to work, via a temporary agency, for Lucich Farms, a table grape grower in Delano, CA, and began to discover just what a sheltered life I had lived as a young white woman. I also discovered that it was no longer possible for me to return to the Baptist church, I had grown out of that theology, so we went searching for an Episcopal church. The first one we attended, the sermon was on sex, and with my own experience of churches and their attitudes on sex, that was not going to work for me. The second one we attended had locked doors and I was later surprised to learn that is was not in fact a closed parish. The third parish we attended was St. Paul’s. 

I have received a fair amount of flack and dismay from people in the years since for having attended the parish of Mark Lawrence, now the bishop of South Carolina. But it was in that parish, at that time, that I learned what it meant to be an Anglican with a global and trans-generational perspective. It was there that I discovered the beauty of an Anglo Catholic service and integrity in a tradition that remains in conversation and takes the long view of God’s unfolding manifestation. And it was in that place, in the summer of 2003, in the midst of the NPR coverage of the General Convention, that the still small voice of God thwacked me upside the head.  

I spoke with my long ago philosophy advisor, for it turned out he was an Episcopalian, about the deeply interconnections I could feel between all things, and how it seemed to me that it was God who was that connectivity. He recommended that I continue thinking about these things. I spoke with Fr. Lawrence, and he affirmed my calling and told me that it would be very difficult to explore that within the Diocese of San Joaquin. In any case, the blossoming of my spirit was very unsettling to me, and I concluded that what was really happening was a longing for my friends-made-family in Portland. I told my husband that I wanted to go home and soon after, we did.

St. David’s

I rather hoped, upon returning to Portland, that we might put this church nonsense behind us. I was fully prepared to be spiritual but not religious, but as it turns out, I needed both. We tried a few churches and when Lent came upon us, we found St. David of Wales completely on accident. That first Sunday, we encountered the supply priest, Fr. Bullock, whom we had met at St. Francis in San Jose. His encouragement and a sense of perseverance in hope that I felt there, led us to stay.

Quite early in our tenure, I let Fr. John Nesbitt, the rector, know that I had a calling experience in Bakersfield but that I was ambivalent about pursuing it. In large measure, I had no idea what it meant or why I would want to do anything about it. For one thing, I was completely terrified to turn around at the chancel steps, or look up if I found myself in parishes that did not have a side exit from the altar rail. In spite the clear presence of a voice saying to me, turn around, I knew that I had nothing to offer that could be done from up there. 

On simple truth about a small parish is that it is in many ways a needs must parish. In a small enough parish, there simply aren’t any of the 80% of passive participants, because there are only enough people to get the many jobs of a Eucharistic service done. I began as an acolyte, alternating with the only other acolyte. After a discussion during coffee hour one day, the editor of the monthly newsletter asked me to write articles for The Contact. The vestry paid my tuition to attend the Metro East School for Lay Preachers and I began preaching twice a month. We started a Wednesday night supper and bible study that eventually incorporated Evening Prayer. Over and over again, I was gifted with opportunities to find my voice, to give voice to my new found conversations with God. Over and over again, I found that people are hungry for The Word made flesh, for a way to see how Jesus can be present in and through their own lives. Over and over again, Jesus redeemed the experiences of my life and made them fodder for the conversations that people needed to have in their own lives. And in time, I believed that I might, in fact, be called to guide people on that path in the ordained ministry. 

Seminary

I went to seminary “out of order.” People always ask me about this. Ordained people tell me that it will “ruin my chances” and lay people assume that it makes me a priest. There are a lot of strange ideas about what seminary is and does in the church. God needed me to go to seminary right when I did. Because I needed to go to the desert in order to step closer to God. Seminary did what I needed and wanted it to do - broke open all my preconceived notions of God, left me vulnerable, and made me look deeply inside myself to find the roots of my own brokenness so that all things can be redeemed. And I could never have done that if I had been trying to find the right answer for a committee or commission or professor or bishop. Because there aren’t any right answers in my relationship with God, there are only mine. And the best thing that I will ever be able to do for anyone else seeking God is to be grounded in my own experience of the truth. 

Turning into the Light

These are some of those experiences. Coming to believe that God has my back, even and especially when it feels like those who ought to, don’t. Discovering that I have a Social Anxiety Disorder, and experiencing the truth that I learned those patterns over time and that with time, I can unlearn them. Integrating traumatic events in my history, allowing redemption to happen in my whole life, not just the pretty parts. Developing a sense of being, that grace is not only available but actually present in who I am, irrespective of what I am doing, and that I do not have to purchase grace with works, particularly those that fall under the label, social justice. 

For so long I have known the light of God in my life. I have known that light as contrast to the shadows in which I dwelt. Right at this moment, I am turning into the light. I know my shadows are still with me, will always be a condition of my humanity, but they are part of me that can rest behind me, as shadows do, as I face the light. God loves me, just the way I am. This is grace, and through grace, I can know this for truth, and can trust that truth enough to share it with everyone I meet. 

One Year

Bishop Michael,

It has been one year. One year since I sat down at the half way point of my discernment committee with a list of things I'd just found out where considered part of the process but that were not in the contract and that no one had done. It's been one year since the woman who called me a narcissist, told me that in my place she would be resentful, that my preaching made her feel attacked, and after a sermon on baptismal ecclesiology told me the church doesn't work that way, sat in that meeting. One year since she told them to not bother giving me false hope. One year since the committee offered to form a therapy group for me presumable because they did not care to have heard about the ways I had been healed by Jesus, only the ways in which I was broken. One year. One year since I received no note of consolation or care from you. One year since I received a pithily worded email from the diocese, one that could have come from the 99 cent section of Hallmark. One year since the event that summed up 9 months of experience into a PTSD diagnosis, 3 months of crisis therapy, and anti-depressants.

Today, I'm resting in the irony that the place that saved me became the place that broke me. And that I am healing in a place that I spent so much of my life trying to get away from.

I will never stop answering God's call to me-I will never stop being a priest of God, even if I will never be a priest in a church. I can't, because it is who I am, not what I am doing. I never confused those two things. But I will no longer believe that the work God called me to, the work I have been equipped to do, is compatible with being a Pharisee. I cannot place the church first, I never could. And all I could wish is that someone in the last 9 years had been clear about that. But I am also wise enough to know, now, that the immune system doesn't know why it works, it simply does it's job. 

It has been one year, and that year is over, and now I am done. I am not writing this for you. I am writing this for me because one year is long enough to protect what needs protecting and long enough that it isn't about the people who begged me to write you about the situation (since I asked for a meeting and was rebuffed), and it isn't about the people who felt that in rejecting me, the church was also rejecting them. One year is long enough that my sour grapes have turned to good compost and I know that I have soundly defeated the lesson that the world has tried to teach me for forty years. I am not a toady. I cannot keep my face straight. I cannot lie about God. I cannot tell people what they want to hear - I can only tell them what I hear, and when I let Her, the Spirit will use that to tell people what they need to hear. And it turns out, the oppressed do need comfort and the powerful do need to be brought low, but people hear that in my words not because they are my words, but because I let the Spirit use them. 

Today marks one year. Today, I let go of everyone else's truth and speak the truths that I see, and again I will let the Spirit speak through me. It is all I can do.

Dear Heather:

Thank you for your e-mail today. In this letter you say you do not write it for me but you did write it to me so I am responding.

I am sorry you felt no consolation or care from me and I am sorry you were rebuffed. It seems from your e-mail that you are wanting me to hear something of what the last year has meant for you and to let me know where you are in your journey with God at this time. I thank you for the opportunity to hear you and for your willingness to communicate with me.

I do apologize to you for not reaching out more a year ago, I suspect it would have been better to have talked together at that time.

Blessings,

+Michael

Job and Jesus were brothers

I've been, as you might imagine, understanding Job a lot better these days. And I'm wondering how he managed to go back to church, or whatever it was called back in the day. I mean, if it was all just go to the altar, I can still do that, but I'm just not sure about dealing with the people.

I've lost a lot of patience with people in authority - and truth to tell, I didn't have a whole lot to begin with. And while that it be an invitation to work on that, I am working on it. I'm not feeding the pettiness of most authority anymore.

I totally get why the only place Jesus lost his shit was at church. I appreciate even more the irony that the church is what protects the message, sometimes despite it's best efforts. But I'm still not feeling the urge to get back into the politics that is church. I can't get beyond the notion that if it's not actively striving to be better than the secular world, I can actually do more for God, to alleviate suffering, and enact justice outside the building, and even outside the community, than I can in it. And more importantly, I can have more integrity in my relationship with the Almighty. I know Episcopalians aren't fond of the image, but the church isn't going to be writing me a letter of recommendation for St. Peter - I'm on my own with that.

The most humbling thing anyone ever said to me was that I was Jesus walking. And every day, since the day I was told that, I have tried to live into it. Interestingly, I find that Jesus is a lot less gentle than we give him credit for. I find in my actual experience that the bible is merely a tight outline of life lived, and it often leaves off the parts I really need. Of course, then I reread something like Job and go, oh yeah, here it is, I just didn't have the experience to understand it before.