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
No comments:
Post a Comment