I did some filing this weekend, and I wound up looking through some old files from ’97-’99. For three or four years in a row my old church sent me to a youth leadership seminar where the cream of the Church of Christ youth were gathered in order to learn to be youth leaders. I had a lot of moving experiences there, and met a lot of beutiful people who I have since lost track of.
The first year I was there I was my usual painfully shy self, although that changed before the end. By the last year I had gained enough confidence that I went determined to make it a great experience for other attendees, and I wound up getting elected as the person most representative of the event. Got to give a little speech and everything.
There was an exercise that they did every year where you wrote a little note of appreciation or encouragment to someone else in the room and gave it to them, silently. That last year I had a little pile of notes in my hands by the end of the exercise. Young men and women who had been moved, inspired, and drawn by my presence there. Either my growth from year to year, or my heartfelt involvement with the worship, or something I said or did, had effected them in a positive way. I read some of those notes yesterday. I have other, similar notes in deeper archives.
It’s always a little painful reading things like that. Remembering who I was. I had a purpose at one time. I had a fire in my heart. I knew what life was about, and at least in a vague way, my role in it. Because I had a gift. I could convey that fire to others, in my words and actions. I could look you in the eye with so much conviction and love and belief that you couldn’t help but believe as well. I could tell you with perfect certainty and heartfelt care that God wasn’t some impersonal force or absentee father, but an emotional person who wept for your pains, who cried out to be closer to you, who saw you as precious and worthy of love. I was a conduit. Some of those old notes said I shone. When I spoke the words of God, I had authority that was inborn and natural.
(To fend off the inevitable assumptions: I was never a proselytizer. I never told anyone about my faith unless they specifically asked. I’m talking about my interactions with other Christians, here.)
I can’t describe how much it hurts not to have that anymore. I feel like the shell of a person sometimes. Yes, I still have some form of belief in the divine, if only as the higher potential of humanity both individually and as a group; but it’s so vague, so impersonal. And I have no framework within which to anchor my thoughts.
The times I felt most alive, most real, most worthwhile were when I was ministering, in one form or another. I don’t have that any more. What is the point, without it? Why do I exist? I can’t exist merely to exist. I have known all my life that I was called, and I refuse to give up that irrational belief because it’s all I have.
I used to lament, long and sometimes tearfully, that I felt like the only times I was close to God was when He was speaking through me to someone else. But I would far rather have that than nothing. I get a little inspiration, a little communion, a little ecstasy from music and dancing and drumming. But where do I go with that? I’m not loving anyone but myself on the dance floor. I’m not ministering to anyone. These days when I do anything remotely spiritual with others it tends to be with pagan-types, and despite my deep need for that rooted, nature-based spirituality, I have no authority in that context. I’m just an observer, an interested outsider. I have neither the confidence, the social standing, or the conviction to do anything for anyone in that context.
And I can’t go to Church, because I know I would be disappointed.
I feel like a lamp without any oil. A Wi-Fi NIC without an access point. Like a Wizard who had great powers in his own land, but who has been exiled to a country where he is merely mortal.
And I’d join the movement
If there was one I could believe in
Yeah I’d break bread and wine
If there was a church I could receive in
– U2, “Acrobat”
Like Orko in He-Man and the Master of the Universe….?
more or less, yeah.
i’m there with ya.
I’d be interested in hearing what you reminesce about from that world.
Well how can you become a minster again? What can you do in your daily life to minister to people? What can you do without further knowledge and what can you do to gain the knowledge you feel you need?
Thank you for your thoughts…
for.. as usual.. they express experiences that, for the most part, are entirely foreign to me and thus they help to remind me that the world is filled with people who see the world in vastly different ways…
In any case.. I can say that I may perhaps have a bit of an inkling of what you are talking about here… I did, as a Catholic, go on occasional retreats–where numerous bonding activities went on and it was a very spiritually oriented kind of bonding.. And in particular, during my senior year of High School, I went on a Kairos retreat–a fairly serious and intense 4 day retreat–and coming out of it, I felt very connected to a number of very spiritual individuals.. and rather more of a theistically (rather than atheistically) oriented agnostic than beforehand…
So maybe I had a glipse of a situation that was rather ubiquitous for you…
However.. for me.. these things always slipped away–and rather quickly.. the intensity of those moments always quickly paled when I noted that most of the same individuals who were loving in that particular context, quickly forgot about these views when we got back to “regular” life…
This view has always undermined any possible long-term connection with anything vaguely spiritual.. Also, perhaps because I’ve only ever rarely (if ever) felt anything that I could possibly connect to a “spiritual/transcendent” experience, my focus has tended to see this kind of behavior not as a “possible permanent state”–but rather, only as an illusion that can be a) perpetrated upon others, or b)something one engages in for various personal reasons…
Now.. I don’t mean to imply that these experience aren’t valid for others.. I claim no omniscience or infinite fonts of wisdom.. I know my experiences are merely my subjective perceptions and views…
But that is why I find description of such things very interesting.. especially for the intensity with which you obviously feel them…
Only question/observation that I have… and you, of course, have to take into account my complete and utter outsiderness in this, is:
Although it is, I’m sure, a trite kind of comparison, when I read the lament that you feel about no longer existing in the former state of being at these times.. it reminds me very much of the red pill/blue pill situation offered up in the matrix… And it reminds me a lot of the kind of feeling that motivated Cypher to want to go back and take the blue pill…
Sort of the thought-that.. even if I know that the previous life isn’t all that it claims to be (“And I can’t go to Church, because I know I would be disappointed.”), I still wish I could go back and relive it.. because it made me feel better…
I’m sure this is an unfair comparison.. for numerous reasons.. but perhaps this metaphhor from the matrix really can help here.. because, if I might take it further, my experiences have almost always been of someone who never really fit in that matrix.. and who, once they got out, look at it as something, that while perhaps seductive or comforting to a number of people, doesn’t have redeeming features for me at all… my purpose became clear to me, only once I was outside of the matrix.. then I could live a life of constant responsibility and choices…
any and all further thoughts from you are appreciated and most heartily encouraged..
Re: Thank you for your thoughts…
This view has always undermined any possible long-term connection with anything vaguely spiritual
See, I reacted in the opposite way. To me it didn’t seem at all strange that these people would go back to being short-sighted, petty, fallable people in “real life” – after all, I experienced the slide off of the high myself. I knew how transient it was. But rather than thinking of it as false or illusory because of it’s transience, I wanted to find ways to make it a more frequent component of life, so that we could find ourselves back on that mountaintop, with things back in their proper perspective, more than once a year.
The Matrix comparison is actually fairly apt. However, in that analogy I’m not Cypher. I’m one of the people who knows about the malleability of the Matrix. Morpheus, perhaps, because of my abiding Belief. For me, it’s the desire to be back in the Matrix because there I have superhuman powers, and my purpose is clear.
Interesting..
I find the metaphor that you use for the experience to be really intriguing.. For you, such experiences provide enlightening perspective upon life–i.e. it is like being on a mountaintop, from which you can gain a broader view of the world and humanity… and of course, it then makes you want to go back to get more of this perspective…
For me, such experiences always feel much more like going with a group into a cave.. The outside world is eliminated, and the only source of light is provided by the retreat leader.. who ony tends to show you what he/she wants… and what they show you might be wonderful… but even then, I always had the feeling that they weren’t showing us all of the cave.. and that the cave itself didn’t come close to explaining what the outside world was like…
I wonder what inside of the two of us makes us translate such experiences in such rather different ways…
is it something bio-chemical inside of us.. (inherent genetics etc etc) or is it due to different cultures growing up… different values??
all of the above is, most likely, the correct answer.. but I would love to have a bit more instructive guidelines…
Re: Interesting..
Could be different experiences as well. I never did well with authoritarian group leaders. In the cases of the succesful experiences I’ve had they were more facilitators than leaders. Of course, that could be matter of perspective. But the experiences I’m talking about were definitely more interpersonal than mass-group.
Mountaintops are not always revealing (like when the ground is hidden by clouds); and caves sometimes reveal the hidden roots of things. I think it’s more accurate to say that these emotionally-charged experiences offer a different perspective, rather than an all-encompassing OR a narrow one. A perspective that is, in my opinion, too rare in our lives. Why? To put it to the William James pragmatism test, because it’s a perspective which tends to encourage people being nicer to each other.
…the nail on the head…
I think you may have just nailed the root of our differences here…
1. I agree with you that life experiences are at the root of our different perspectives here…
2. Just as much as I “disagree” with you that such experiences tend to encourage people being nicer to each other…
For exactly the reason that in my life experiences, all things “spiritual” have tended to increase the incidence of pain that people around me (including myself) have felt…
So.. for me=analyzed within the framework of my life experiences, this kind of perspective, fails the William James pragmatism test…
so.. what acts as a tool for love and healing for you.. has acted as a tool for oppression and deception for me…
What does this tell me…
that you should believe and that I shouldn’t.. 🙂
Re: …the nail on the head…
WRONG! It means you should repent and believe what I believe!!! 😉
…am I bringing back any memories?
heehee..
it was more along the lines of
“Go say some hail mary’s and think about what you have done”…
but the same kind of sentiment.. 😉
to continue the matrix metaphor for a second…
Does it disturb you, perchance, that the truth that Morpheus was sure that he would find turned out to be false? i.e. that if he found “The One,” the war would end…
or rather.. perhaps that his interpretation of “truth” turned out to be wrong in its details–even if The One did put an end to the war itself??
I only ask, because I found Morpheus’s character to be at his best right at the moment when Neo told him what the Architect said.. that “The One” is not the messiah who just ends the war and frees humanity–but is “The One” who ends the war by destroying everything previously..
okay.. must get to work now..
Re: to continue the matrix metaphor for a second…
Belief doesn’t have to be right to be effective.
A dangerous point of view, I know. But we have pragmatic heuristics to fall back on – “by their fruits you shall know them”.
Morpheus had a belief that was contagious. It may not have been perfectly correct, but without it nothing would have transpired the way it did. His faith, however flawed, was essential.
I am more interested in the power of belief itself than in the particulars of it’s creed. Unfortunately, I find that the particulars sometimes contribute to it’s power.
It sounds to me like you’re now in the same position you were at the beginning of the Christian retreat days, and all you need to do is acquire the confidence (or knowledge, skill, wisdom…) to return to a giving position.
Of course, I could be missing something important, but it’s very easy for a high point to overshadow what it took to get there, and that may be happening to you.
How strange that I should have been brought independently into contact, just last week, with the exact same topic that you are describing here.
I have a beautiful, beautiful chapter that I would like you to read. I know that it helped me so much when I was feeling so empty – empty because I feel like I have so little to give the people that I see wanting and lacking all around me.
Contact me and I will give you the link.
Give link! Give link! I could use some uplifting/purpose-giving too.
http://www.whiteestate.org/books/da/da39.html
I believe particularly pages 369-371 were important.
Since I don’t really know you that well, I’m curious– what changed? What shook your faith and made you leave the Christian church?
Is it that ministering to yourself, as it were, is unsatisfying in and of itself or is it that it is not enough? Is spirituality, for you, rooted in connection with others? What does it mean to you to “minister” to others? (I am trying to make sure I understand what you’re saying, getting a context– my concept of ministering to others may not be what you’re talking about.)
Do you need a specific framework/language for your spirituality in order to feel fulfilled? In other words, do you need to be able to say “I’m Christian” or “I’m Pagan” or what have you and to have the attendant rituals/literature/belief structure/hierarchy through which to focus and hone your spirituality?
Do you feel that you need a certain amount of standing in a group in order to minister to others, ie that you need to be invested with some authority from without, from a group/body/person whose wisdom you trust to say, “yes, you are chosen, you are ready to lead”? Or that you need, as it were, a congregation that empowers you by collectively trusting you to tend to them before you feel you can effectively minister to others?
Do you still *love* god, however you conceive of divinity? What do you believe?
(I am happy to talk at great length about these things…I am just trying to get as much insight as I can on your state of mind so that what I say can be useful…)
Pt. 1
First of all, thank you so much for taking the time to respond at length. Part of why I posted that second plea for comments was that I felt that there was an important response still out there waiting to be written, and I think your comments confirm that feeling.
I came to a point where I realized that my reasons for believing in the particular myth that I subscribed to were largely arbitrary. I never had any real falling-out with Christianity; I just realized I couldn’t rationally say that it was any more believable than any other myth.
It’s not enough.
In it’s most powerful form, yes. It’s like an electrical circuit – it doesn’t matter how high the voltage is that I’m touching; if I’m not completing the circuit it’s not going to do much more than make my hair stand on end (ever see a Van de Graff Generator demonstrated?). I get a lot out of dancing (among other things), and some of it is of purely personal value. But I feel the need to share my inspiration in order to bring it to fruition.
That’s hard to say. I never really nailed the definition down in the old days, either. Looking back, though… I used to counsel people, informally. I was one of those guys who attracted people who were hurting, and I would talk to them. One thing that stands out in my memory is the occasions that I would pray with someone, or with a group. Those were times when I really felt the “spirit”, as it were, move in me. The words would just come naturally and passionately and I would cry out to heaven on behalf of myself and those I was with… and perhaps I was just fooling myself but I really believe was able to express what needed to be expressed.
There were other forms. I’m a naturally affectionate person, if a rather repressed one, and I think hugs can be a form of ministration. I used to play guitar and/or sing in worship groups occasionally, which was the only time I felt like I was doing any good in a worship service. And my old church used to love to have me do scripture readings, but that’s probably of dubious ministerial value. They would always complement me on it though, so I guess some people got something out of it.
This shouldn’t be seen as an exhaustive list though. I never really felt that I had fully explored the avenues of ministry that might exist. And I haven’t even addressed charitable work.
Pt. 2
Christianity gave me a very specific and detailed, and moreover emotional and personal, mythology in which to anchor what I said and did. It gave me the ability to say very specific things about God’s care for the individuals I worked with, and to back them up with references which they also bought into. It wasn’t just “a vague impersonal divnity cares for you in a generic way”; it was “God loves you so much it keeps him up at night worrying, as it says right here…“. Christianity gave me the ability to personalize deity in a way I just don’t see very often outside of it; something that was particularly important when dealing with people who felt alone and unloved.
That overall point of view is not incompatible with my present beliefs – after all, it can be seen as the Self’s desire to love and care for the tormented Ego. But I lack the power of the myth.
Both of those things are important to me, yes. Partly because I am always questioning myself. I know that I am young and inexperienced; I know that in the realm of the spiritual there is the potential to do great harm. Partly because I recognize in myself the germ of a cult leader. I have the emotionally wounded person’s knack for drawing other wounded, vulnerable souls to himself. I have the carefully tended hubris of believing that I have a gift, nay, a callig for channeling the divine. I lack the ambition to be a big-time nutcase; but I fear that I have the capability to lead the impressionable down spiritual blind alleys, or to mistake my own neediness for the desires of God.
Yes, absolutely.
All I can say with certainty at this point is that I believe in divinity as the highest potentials of human experience and action. The divine either is, or is seen in, humanity at it’s very best, both individually and as a group. It is the transformative ecstasy of worship. It is charity that is not merely moral but joyous. It is what we see in each other’s eyes when we are at our very best. And it is also the still small voice inside, the caretaker within which nurtures our own souls.
In my own life, I grew up Catholic and spent a great deal of my youth trying desperately to be a devout practitioner. I always had a deep connection to spirituality but Catholicism left me unsatisfied and unhappy. I spent a couple of years after that feeling pretty lost before I ultimately turned back to the Paganism I had started to explore in my teens. But my Paganism has always been of a very personal, constantly evolving sort, never firmly rooted in one group or tradition and very difficult to articulate in words. And I have often felt a strong pull to work with others in a spiritual context and have grappled for years with questions of leadership and ego and connection and the “right” to do this kind of work, so I definitely have some sympathy with where you’re at. This is my context for my thoughts on your situation, FWIW.
What I see in what you’ve written (and I’m jotting this now before I get your reaction to my questions above because it may be that the “pure” response is helpful) comes down mainly to two things.
First, to me it is key that you said I went determined to make it a great experience for other attendees. It sounds as though there was a very personal element to your connection to God– that is, while you felt that you were closest to God when he spoke to *others* through you, perhaps the reason for that is that he *was* speaking to you– through them. That your spiritual experience was grounded in a very tangible way in experiencing the joy or hope or comfort you brought to others. I don’t mean to belittle it at all– quite the opposite. I have always believed in the immanence of the divine and that it infuses every aspect of reality, and I believe that the act of making namaskar— that is, seeing/welcoming/recognizing the divine in other beings, particularly human beings– is one of the finest ways we have of directly experiencing/honoring the divine because it acts on many different levels of reality at once. Spiritual traditions from time immemorial recognize this, be it the act of namaskar or the Sufi tradition of recognizing the Beloved in a mortal friend or teacher, or Christ’s teaching “Whatsoever you do to the least of My people, that you do unto Me”. So it sounds to me as though it is fairly essential for you to connect with other people and to *help* them, to *give* to them, in order for you to truly experience your spirituality.
Second, though, I note that you describe an experience of removal or isolation even at the height of your period of deep faith. (Whether that had anything to do with what changed for you, I don’t know.) It sounds as though you were running on empty– like a gifted couples counselor helping others find love while remaining lonely and unwillingly single in your personal life. Right now you don’t seem to find satisfaction in those practices– dancing, drumming– that feed your spirituality on a very individual level without connection to others, and it sounds like you feel those things aren’t as valuable because they’re too selfish. (I could be wrong– this is just my read on what you’ve written, devoid of further context.) But my experience has been that those who minister most effectively require deep personal reserves to draw on in order not to burn out; that they need to make room for their own spiritual needs in order to have conviction/love/peace/enthusiasm/etc to share with others.
This isn’t necessarily mutually exclusive with my first observation, if in fact working with others is what fulfills your spiritual needs and what is missing is recognition or acceptance of what *you* get out of it.
It sounds like you still feel like you have something to share with the world; that the fire is not so much gone as ungrounded.
It also sounds as though you feel you need a certain amount of permission to do what you feel called to do– not even so much from the people you would help as from some authoritative person or body– and that the lack of it is frustrating you, turning your energy in on itself and depressing you.
Pt II
I tend to take a somewhat entrepreneurial attitude towards spirituality, myself; so keeping that in mind here are some thoughts. One is that you sound like you need a spiritual community but, at least right now, a fairly loosely-defined or interfaith one where you can jive with the basic principles without having to argue strict dogma. Didn’t your wife have a yearning recently to have some kind of spiritual home as well? Maybe that’s something you can explore together or even start– do you have someplace where you could start a periodic open spiritual circle?
My second thought is what if you took your desire from your Church of Christ days to make those retreats a good experience for others and applied it more generally– set out to make *life* a good experience for others? There are ways of ministering to others that don’t require teaching a specific dogma. What are the things in life that you care deeply about and want to share? You don’t necessarily need the framework of a church for these things (although it is possible you may ultimately find one) or the approval of an authority figure. There are many people in the world who are lonely or lost or hurting or in some need of connection with others spiritually; it is still possible to help or inspire them outside of a church.
You said in one comment here that you wanted to bring spiritual experiences more into daily life. I would say that a good way to do that is to look at the mundane in a spiritual way. Any thing, any act can be understood as something amazing, something infused with the divine. A morning shower can be a ritual cleansing. Contemplating something as simple as a pencil can bring about an awe-inspiring sense of connection to the countless people involved in its creation and journey to your hands. Why should ministering to someone at a retreat be an act less spiritual than, say, teaching your stepchild about photosynthesis or taking care of your wife when she’s sick? No, the spiritual connection to mundane life isn’t “automatic”; it takes some effort and attention to be mindful of divinity in the midst of daily life. But I also believe that it’s not intrinsically divorced from it either, and I would argue that our culture imposes a somewhat artificial and extreme divide of material/spiritual that leaves many people feeling empty and adrift when they are outside of specially-designated spiritual places or times. For those of us who feel a strong spiritual pull in the world, it does take some conscious effort to overcome that separation and experience the whole world in a spiritual way. But once that happens, it becomes easier to reconcile it over time, to feel at once grounded in the mundane world and exalted in the spiritual world and to feel that those things are not independent of each other or hostile to each other.
I don’t know if any of this is helpful to you or if I am getting my thoughts across as clearly as I want to. It’s a subject that I both love talking about and have difficulty putting into words that capture what I really feel. Anyway…I am happy to talk with you more about any of this if it’s helping you or stimulating ideas.
Re: Pt II
Yes, yes, yes, very much yes.
Interesting that you should pick up on this. In fact, this sense characterized my faith, even at it’s strongest points. My Christian faith was more a state of wanting desperately for it all to be true than that of quiet confidence. I believed, yes; but I believed out of need rather than out of some experience that had proved it’s reality to me.
And moreover, as a spiritual person I was a dry watercourse. Occasionally rains would come and water would rush through and on it’s way to someone else – and I would be left, cracked and dry as ever. This is exemplified by the closest thing I ever had to a “miraculous” experience, i.e. one that I couldn’t explain rationally. I was at a sort of Christian therapy retreat. I was in a worship service. I wasn’t really into it. My mind was wandering. Next to me was my friend homa, a woman closer to my parents’ age who I had a lot of love and respect for. Someone came out with some “word” from God, as they are called, for her, and she started crying. Feeling that it was the friendly thing to do, I laid a hand on her shoulder. All at once I was sobbing, utterly overcome with emotion. I felt God’s love for her, so powerful and consuming it defied the human frame to contain it. And I felt that I was irrelevent to it, I had merely stepped into the flow. A bystander caught and swept away by the rush.
This has been the story of my life, spiritually speaking. It has not been wholly unrewarding. I have, indeed, found myself speaking “inspired” words to someone and realized that they are just as applicable to me, and that I should listen to myself and learn something. And it’s a wonderful feeling when the emotion and the words well up from within. But at the same time, the whole time I felt like I was, as you say, running on empty.
Absolutely. I’ve been making a special study of it; that’s why I’m reading Care of the Soul, by Thomas Moore, and have a whole slew of similar books on my list. I have some hope that a more ubiquitous spirituality could abate that “running on empty” feeling. But while I feel that the spiritualization of everyday life is, on the one hand, essential for for my long-term health, I also see it as having limits. I can invest my actions and even my interactions with soul, but that is something different from the emotionally charged interactions I think of when I think of ministering. Recognizing the divine in everyday life is important; being the divine is a whole different level. If that makes any sense. My soul cries out to be used for my seeming purpose, as a link between God and man. Put in those terms it seems so conceited, but dammit, those were the only times I truly felt alive.
I was part of that elite group of kids who were set apart to do God’s work. We attended conferences together and had special meetings where we were groomed to be the next generation of pastors. I won awards and had a lot of recognition for my Christian walk. Then our denomination forced my dad to resign and my whole world came crashing down on me. The false world that had been created for me along with all my hopes, dreams, aspirations were void. My best friends stopped talking to me. I hate those people now. They all married within the group after a stint at Bible College and are now in ministry and have about 4.5 kids apiece. They make me sick. I have learned so much about who God really is by withdrawing from that which “they” told me He was. I found a church I can tolerate even though I don’t sign their “say no to same sex marriage” petitions. I have relationships within the church which is more important for me to feel connected. It also gives me a chance to stretch their thinking a bit even if they never venture as far out as I am. I miss the way I would worship God. I’m not sure I will ever have that brokenness back. I’m not sure I want to, or if I’d allow myself to ever again. Perhaps I don’t need to feel that way because I am no longer broken but am stronger in my faith, whatever that may be. I have faith that God is somehow helping me navigate through life. I see Him in the intangible and I see other people being changed by what I believe to be His presence speaking through me. I am now ministering to my family, speaking into their lives, and raising a daughter who is secure in herself and a great thinker. Jesus made the most of every conversation and every life that desired communication with him. He offered people validity and gave them a purpose. I try to do that in my own way. I don’t think we are meant to join a movement, especially those of us who dare question the church and pretty much any grouping of people and their idea system. It is a lonely walk, but there is nowhere else I’d rather be. I have hopes that one day I will complete some kind of level of spiritual actualization and will feel something again for longer than a moment. Then maybe I’ll be able to more precisely define who God is and what my purpose is in life. But maybe the closer I get to that the more blurry it really is meant to be because I’m living it. That feeling I used to have- the overwhelming sense of God’s presence inside of me isn’t gone it just envelopes more of me and my life now. Like a fog it kind of dissipates so I don’t realize it is there most of the time. Love used to be this defineable thing for me along with rules of what marriage was supossed to be. Now my love for my husband is so broad it includes much more and I am able to breathe, question, test boundaries for myself and him, and we can take greater risks because we are secure in our foundation. Fear no longer holds us back from discovery. Marriage is a reflection of Christ’s love for us and in that we are given freedom. I never understood that before because I was so fearful of not being perfect/Christ-like/self sacrificing and without blame. The people I thought were that way were probably the most sick people I knew. Love shouldn’t force us to hide from each other, especially when forgiveness is so much a part of our belief system. And forgiveness can only be obtained when we try a path, see it isn’t helping us become better people and turn back to try again. Or of course failing miserably and receiving the opportunity for a re-do. One thing I never thought I was allowed to be as a Christian was successful and happy. I don’t have to sacrifice anything to be generous. I don’t have to live in poverty for the sake of Christ’s people. I guess that is my life lesson at this time. That and how to cultivate lasting and true relationships. Anyhow, this rag tag group of “xnetgoth turned livejournal/what the hell am I now” helps me tremendously. If we aren’t helping each other answer questions or experimenting with other paths life has to offer at least we are curing that sense of being lost I am sure would have overpowered me eventually.
Forgive me for posting this without reading most of the posted comments.
Well, where do you honestly feel more at home? Clearly you crave some sort of spirituality, which is understandable. However, if you feel more at home as a Christian, and if you connect with that faith, perhaps you shouldn’t let your disillusionment with the Church or with any one church hold you back from it. If you feel the need to connect with the love of the Divine on that level and in that manifestation, then do so. You will find a home, even if the home isn’t a church.
You don’t have to fit a mold others make. Make a mold that fits you.
Also, you said that you had no authority and were just an observer in pagan situations. I could probably refer you to some good organizations that offer ordination and opportunities to enter priesthood within the pagan community – I was in training to be a priestess myself and now that I’ve gotten away from my classes I feel like I’m wandering terribly. I have a mission, but I don’t have a path. Yanno?
Just keep looking.
Sylphstorm