From Minister to Atheist

From Minister to Atheist: A Story of Losing Faith

I saw this link from at least three different sources today.  Including someone who I thought shouldn’t have been shocked at the story. Here is my response:

You can't believe that a church would treat the clergy this badly? You, who have yourself been the recipient of similar if not so public abuse? You, whose own son was thrown out of more than one religious job for absurd reasons and with likely illegal process?  Every member of your family through several generations has been boxed in, closed down, and shut out of Christian ministry positions, and this story surprises you? 

In my almost three years since coming back to Christianity, I have heard dozens of similar stories: ministers living a lie to keep their job or telling their truth and losing their credibility and their livelihood. I have at least three friends on Facebook (that I can think of off the top of my head, probably more if I were to go look at my not-extensive friends list) who were thrown out of their positions of ministry with public acrimony. This woman's story is tragic but mostly for its ubiquity. No one shoots the wounded like Christians. 

I long to create a sanctuary for precisely these kind of hurting souls. I have wanted to minister to the ministers (while I was in the Christian world or to other secular ministers when I wasn’t) for as long as I have thought about "what I want to be when I grow up" but I was told explicitly and implicitly that there was no call for such a mission and if there were I was unqualified to fill it. 

But the stories are coming out now. The need is desperately real.  I ache with knowing that I could have helped so many people just like this woman over the last few decades but I myself was dismissed, boxed in, and shut out of organized religion. 

And people wonder why I cringe at calling myself a Christian, why I don't go to church, why I blister tirades at religious incivility and bigotry, and wince when they tell me I need to forgive and listen to God more. 

Yeah, I was listening to God, and my God-given reason, when the church marginalized me right out the door. But now there is the Internet ... and I have a blog!

I'm not as angry with you, dear friend, as it might seem. I am angry at intolerance and prejudice, rudeness and contempt from people who claim to follow a prince of peace who said famously, "your fidelity has saved you; go in peace.”

Perfectionism I: Pursuing Ever Greater Righteousness

Last weekend, we hosted a dinner party in honor of my daughter’s twelfth birthday.  A diva-in-training, she requested a formal, black-tie celebration.  She, of course, already owned a sparkly, be-sequined cocktail dress (yes, really, at less than twelve) but I had to outfit the rest of us. We are now all members of the little black dress brigade.  She planned a simple menu of steak, mashed potato, “mushy carrots”, and salad, which I thought was fortunate so that I wouldn’t tire myself unduly with the cooking and be unable to enjoy the party (something that happens regularly since I developed my chronic hysterical illness). I really wanted to make this party perfect for her.

I started the cooking for last night's dinner about 5 hours ahead.  My plan was that I'd cook ahead, have it all ready to reheat (aside from the steak, which my husband would be grilling), then shower and change into my little black dress and pearls.  But as I worked, making up the carrot recipe as I went along, I kept thinking of another little special touch that would "make it all just right", so that I ended up touching up the reheated foods in my undies (because even in an apron, stuff jumps right at my nice clothes) just minutes before the company arrived--despite, or maybe because of, having three helpers and a serious intention of not going too crazy.

I had to ask myself "what constitutes perfect?"  If I think of another little touch, an extra ingredient, a little twist, and don't do it, then is the result less than perfect?  I know that stems from the whole Pauline idea that if we do not do what we know is good, we have sinned. A total paraphrase and gross misapplication but is it really so far removed from the fundy Modesty codes or the Pharisees’ Purity codes and other absurdities in the name of sanctified living?

And then, when we actually served the meal, the steaks were charred on the outside, overdone on the inside from appliance faults rather than operator error; the mashed potatoes too thin and the gravy too thick (almost the same consistency) from reheating problems that were operator error (mine); we ran out of wine; and the toppings for the cheesecake only glopped instead of drizzled.  And everyone who ate thought it was absolutely the best food (well, except for my husband and me who both have these perfection issues). The guests ate it all up and asked for seconds.  

So, by what standard do we measure perfection? The eaters' enjoyment? (Excellent.) How relaxed and peaceful the cook was while she produced the food (poor, but not at all the worst, at least I didn't fall to pieces or start crying this time).   The comparison to how it would have turned out in a professionally equipped kitchen by, say, Bobby Flay? (As if...! But you know I made that judgment!)  And is the ante really, fairly, upped every time I think of some extra finesse? (Absurd, when you think about it, but isn't that what we do all the time?)

It seems ridiculous to over-analyze a dinner party this way but the prep and presentation seems an apt metaphor for the striving for perfection that we Christians do, and are taught to do.  Why is it so universal to teach the do-more-work-harder-feel-guilty model of Christian living but so rare to teach the rest-in-the-Lord-be-still-enjoy-the-simple-things model? Why do we let ourselves be consumed by the judgmental, perfection-seeking, always-something-holier-to-do, Pharisaical, conspicuous religiosity?

Original Sin vs. Imago Dei III: Selfish Babies

[comment] … any parent can tell you just how selfish and completely lacking in empathy babies are…

I completely disagree with this thought.  I found my babies to be very empathetic to each other and to my moods and they continue to be.  A lot behavior of babies and young children that is commonly regarded as rebellious or selfish, I found to be the product of inappropriate nutrition or exercise or poor parenting on my part.  My first daughter used to be a very aggressive, crabby, biting, hyperactive infant/toddler.  It would have been easy to see her as selfish or "willful", in fact, most people did think that, even I thought so, although less often than most people.  Then she was treated for her excessive allergy load, we moved out of a house with lead-based paint dust and ancient leaky plumbing (heavy metal toxicities), and 80% of those behaviors disappeared.  Later, when I began to understand how foods triggered my own tendency to temper tantrums and I began to avoid those foods for myself (evening out my own moods), even more of her “willfulness” and “disobedience” disappeared.  Then I learned about the correlation between exercise and hyperactivity and began to look for ways that she could get a huge workout. Since then, when she has sufficient nutrition and exercise, she become the sweetest, most agreeable, humorous, generous child I've ever met.  

When I hear people talk about selfishness, sin, the rebellion of children, I hear an implication that this is somehow the child's fault (a sin nature to be overcome, "whip the devil out of him", “break her will”, etc) that puts the fault on the child rather than on the whole system of influences that contribute to a collection of behaviors that we call a child's character.  From my own experience, the shame of being sinful did not lead me to feel grateful for anything to do with God—after all, God made me, right?  But God made me defective? And the only means of becoming better was prayer and trying harder?  How exactly was God supposed to fix me in any way that turned me into someone more acceptable to the Powers That Were in my world?

I think there IS a huge aspect of personal responsibility that children need to learn: how to manage the influences to which they are susceptible.  I consider the biggest ongoing lesson of my daughter’s childhood to be helping her to recognize how to manage and prevent moods and behaviors that are not community-building.  The largest part of this lesson is teaching her to regulate her protein:carb ratio, getting a hard enough physical workout for her needs.  Without management of these things, she is so volatile that she "can't stop herself" from violence or temper tantrums.  With appropriate management, the anger, tantrums, and tendency to violence disappear. 

I see this learning to manage as hugely different than owning sinfulness and repenting.  Regulation of the chemical processes of the body (the vehicle of modification of selfishness that works for her) is not at all what I think is meant by church teachings on eradicating our sinful nature, even though the resulting obedient, joyful, peacemaking child is the same.  Thus for me it begged the question what is "sin" and the "sin nature" if it could be managed by diet and exercise much better than shame, punishment, prayers asking God to make me behave better.

[comment] …that does not make babies "bad" that's simply their natural state. We need to make the choice to be unnatural/supernatural, to accept the grace God offers to overcome our natural tendency toward sin.

Although I hope this writer is not meaning this "need to make the choice to be unnatural/supernatural, to accept the grace God offers" the way I heard it...ugh, I absolutely recoiled just reading it.  We, out of all God's creations, need to become unlike our created nature in order to become acceptable to God? We are born "sinful" in our nature (although no other natural creation of God is "sinful") and have to act entirely against nature, which is God's masterpiece, in order to be what God wants us to be?

No other created thing, no matter how corrupted by human intervention, is considered "sinful":  for example, wildlife that has been genetically damaged by pollution--is this a fair analogy to the Adam in the Garden version of Original Sin?  The bird that can't fly didn't choose to be genetically flawed anymore than we choose to be born as "Adam's seed" but we don't call the bird "in sin" or expect that somehow it is not acceptable to God.  Why are people considered as less worthy right from birth than birds?

Freedom, Responsibility, and Omnipotence

Would God (or your god) be worth worshiping, in your view, if he was not all powerful?

Is it more important to you that God be just and good (by any definition you care to name) than that he be powerful, or do you feel that the two are uncontradicted in your god? If so, why?

Another great question posed by Otter at the Riparian Church , to which I replied thusly:

I think it is quite clearly obvious to anyone with eyes to look at the human condition that God does not interfere with us individually to save us from our individual or collective stupidity or maliciousness. Whether that is because he cannot or will not is a bit irrelevant to me since either way the responsibility then lies with me and with mankind collectively to repair, mediate, and prevent the effects of my individual and our collective maliciousness and idiocy.

If I have to choose, I guess I believe that God is not omnipotent but it is kinda like asking a tree that grows underneath a sidewalk to sprout up on the other side why it did not grow up through the sidewalk that I poured. Is that because it could not break through the concrete (there are reasonable albeit superficial arguments both ways) or because it was never its purpose to break down artificial barriers; its purpose is to grow and it grew in the most efficient and superlative manner possible in the situation I created.

Humans pride ourselves on our ability to choose our destiny or at least to have it chosen for us by parents or social constraints (and I recognize that we are rapidly trying to abdicate this free will in the increasingly narrow, proscribed lives possible in any kind of religious fundamentalism). We like to know that we can choose our job, our home, our spouse. Especially Americans, i think, like to think we are independent of a destiny thrust upon us. No one is going to tell ME what to do! Least of all some old-fashioned deity.

Yet we get all whiny and cast blame anywhere and everywhere including that old-fashioned deity when the consequences of those free-will actions (individual or collective) affect us personally. Or if we are a bit more altruistic, when they affect the innocent bystander who had no part in the causative action. We want the free-will to choose our own actions but we want not to accept the responsibility we then bear in foreseeing or at least mediating the consequences of our individual actions. Even less do we want to think and act with collective responsibility--only if it is in our "national self-interest".

Perhaps that is the impetus behind the increasingly rabid fundamentalism developing in every religion, denomination, and global region. At some, perhaps unconscious, level we recognize that we've kinda f****d it all up in our post-Reformation, post-Enlightenment, increasingly post-industrial world and now we run crying back to some all-powerful parental figure to clean up our mess, even if it means accepting restriction on our ability to continue independent creative development.

Please feel free to comment either here or over at Otter's.