episcopal

September 7, 2023 Uncategorized

Freeing Myself {Part 2: Belonging}

Trust in the slow work of God… Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be. Give Our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.
-Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Some people are soothed by the certainty that they hold the one irrefutable true interpretation of Scripture, the “right” answers everyone else outside their group is missing. Seeing the world in black-and-white, in tidy boxes to be checked off and answers given to them bring them comfort. I used to be one of them.

But as the world around me became greyer, I was no longer satisfied by packaged ideas handed to me without the ability to ask “Why?” The unraveling began decades ago when I fell in love with the cultures not my own and my Muslim friends taught me about faith. I discovered a vibrant, diverse global church outside the walls of my denomination. I found communities encountering and serving God in ways the faith of my youth would say were out of bounds. God was at work in bigger and more varied ways than I’d ever been told.

Then came my engagement with contemplation and some around me pushed back against what Catholics had to teach me. As a woman, I had never been comfortable with my denomination’s view of what women could and could not do, but I thought it was the sacrifice I had to make to fit into the community that introduced me to Jesus. Finally, after 2016, I was even more unsettled with the white evangelical church and the choices its leaders were making, especially regarding women and people of color. I stayed despite great distress—until it was too damaging to my own soul to stay.

I entered an Episcopal church through the doorway of a centering prayer group. After practicing Lectio Divina (a method of meditating on a Scripture passage) together and sitting for twenty minutes in silent prayer, we discussed what we heard God say in those moments. I had found a kindred group.

“You’re Baptist?” they asked when I told them a little about myself. “Well, kind of,” I said, unsure what to call myself anymore. “I have been a member of a Baptist church since I was a teen, but during my years in college and living in South Asia and the Middle East, I have attended Episcopal, non-denominational, Coptic Orthodox, and Assemblies of God churches. I have learned from Trappist monks and Jesuits and attended house churches and international churches in Muslim and Hindu communities. I’m kind of a denominational mutt, I guess.” They laughed and said they welcomed my perspective and were glad I was there.

A few weeks later my family attended an Advent service at that same church. With rapt attention, I hung on every word of the woman priest. When I kneeled at the communion rail and she placed the bread in my hand, it was a coming home meal. For my husband and children, it wasn’t home. We decided to try to walk separate spiritual paths and see if we could make it work.

Over the next few months, I moved timidly from the back row into coffee hours and Wednesday dinners. I wasn’t sure what people would make of my complicated history or my family now divided between two churches....

CONTINUE READING AT THE MUDROOM

September 6, 2023 Uncategorized

Freeing Myself {Part 1: Awakening}

“For my entire life, it seemed that people had been shouting at me—telling me what to believe and how to act…’There is a new voice,’ Mary Oliver wrote of the journey of awakening, ‘which you slowly recognize as your own.’ Until my mid-thirties, I did not know that voice. But once I listened, it grew more insistent. A calling, a beckoning, and urging toward love. And, as Oliver said, I ‘determined to do the only thing’ I could do: Save my own life. I did not know what would happen. But I was ready to leave the old voices behind. I stared at the cage’s open door, and I knew it was time to walk out into the world. I trusted that Jesus would be on the way.”
– Diana Butler Bass, Freeing Jesus

It feels as if I am embarking on a new journey and yet my entire life has been leading to this bend in the road. So, is it really new? I am simply following the voice that beckons me on toward love.

For a long time, all I could see were the losses on this journey. All in the span of a few years—my family left all we’d ever known to move to work with a non-profit in Bangladesh. Then, we lost our dream of living long-term in South Asia when we moved back to the U.S. The family I knew was forever changed by serious illness and death. I walked away from the church that was home for two decades.

The losses I felt weren’t unique. So many were struggling with faith and church in the wake of so many shifts in society and the church, all over people awakening to what they’d been missing. Then, Covid stole so much from us all. The aches of the world gnawed away at our souls, our societies, and the faith of many.

Even as I heard a voice calling me forward and I tiptoed toward what I couldn’t see, I could not stop looking at all that was slipping through my fingers.

It was only a crawl at first—that day I stepped into the Episcopal church. Wounded, I looked for a place to heal when I found a Centering Prayer group that met at a nearby parish. I nudged open the heavy red, wooden door and stepped inside, begging God to meet me there. I believed with all that was in me I could still find God inside the church. I loved her and wouldn’t let go of that hope.

My exploration into contemplation had saved my faith, and I prayed it would help me find my way forward. Amidst deep anxiety and depression—it was silence, stillness, and contemplative prayer that allowed me to find Jesus anew and discover my own belovedness....