Next Step on the Journey

For a while now, I have been walking away from my "church." As I described it to a friend of mine, it is as though I finally made the decision to go through with the divorce. I want to be clear that I don't so much mean my local church, but rather the wider idea of church as embodied by processes, doctrine, polity, and organization. But maybe divorce is the wrong metaphor. It may be instead that I am differentiating from my family of origin, and that is a good thing.

It means I can be less reactive. It means I can be separate and together at the same time. It means I don't have to conform to pressures to stay together at all costs, but can instead take personal responsibility for my own place within the family, without being drawn into its drama and trauma. It also means I can let parts of my family self-destruct without feeling the need to rush in and rescue.

It also means I can stay in love and in healthy relationship with my church while continuing to walk away from it. Esther Perel describes it this way in her TEDSalon talk The Secret to Desire in a Long-term Relationship: 

Our need for connection, our need for separateness, or our need for security and adventure, or our need for togetherness and for autonomy, and if you think about the little kid who sits on your lap and who is cozily nested here and very secure and comfortable, and at some point all of us need to go out into the world to discover and to explore. That's the beginning of desire, that exploratory needs curiosity, discovery. And then at some point they turn around and they look at you, and if you tell them, "Hey kiddo, the world's a great place. Go for it. There's so much fun out there," then they can turn away and they can experience connection and separateness at the same time. They can go off in their imagination, off in their body, off in their playfulness, all the while knowing that there's somebody when they come back.

I love that image she creates. I am being drawn, led, pushed, prodded out into the world to find new ways of sharing faith, expressing the sacred and discovering the nature of the Christ living, breathing, pulsing, moving through the alleys and sidewalks of the world. I want to go, but I still look back to see if it is going to be OK.

What I don't know is whether my church is in that place where it can say "Hey kiddo, the world's a great place. Go for it. There's so much fun out there."

I think my church may be less secure than that. It wants me to pack its china and silverware. However, its concern for their safety if I simply put them in a backpack means it went out and bought a new set of suitcases for me. It is worried that I may forget the lessons it taught me. It is afraid that the world might actually chew me up and spit me out. It kind of wants to hover or come along for the trip.

All of those things add up to a funny pressure to stay within the bounds of the home. To continue to put my time, effort, gifts, witness, and service into supporting, sustaining, and caretaking the family. To get a job in town rather than heading off for a stint with the Peace Corps.

But Christ is calling me. Christ is telling me that my gifts are needed somewhere else; that the family can take care of itself for a while; even that the family can suffer through its own stuff for a bit. And I don't need to worry, because I am more than just a part of a family, I am an individual self with a unique life whose particularities, often overlooked by the first family, have myriad opportunities to flourish among the lives of others-people who might not automatically fit in to the family mold; people of whom the clan might not really approve; people, like me, who might actually kind of hate china and silverware.

So this feels like a faith thing to me, and a trust thing, because the growing distance between me and the United Methodist Church isn't really hate, dislike, or even disapproval. It feels so much more like leaving home for college; or deciding that my purpose as a child is to live my own life, not to serve the needs of my elders. It doesn't seem like I want to discard my name or deny my heritage, but instead like a drive to go, do, discover and explore how to be the best United Methodist I can be.

So wish me luck. Tell me "Go for it." Because I am leaving. I am heading out. I am starting a new journey. And my church will either be there when I come back, or it wont.