2. "Corporate worship". Since adulthood, I've had a few religious experiences in the life-affirming, private, come-to-Jesus sense. They've taken place in different kinds of locations, but rarely in churches or "church communities". Half the time I was reading something -- usually, not the Bible. And I've been in a lot of churches, and I've found exactly one that actually worked for me (presumptuous as that may sound) in the sense that I gained something from going to it besides additional agitas, which, the objective reality of God be damned, I assure you, and He, that I do not need.
It wasn't even the "gay issue" -- though that was happily a non-issue here, because at this excellent church, the gay members worked out their feels about Leviticus and Roman with their own fear and trembling, and those of us married to the more convenient gender either left the whole issue alone, or actively fought for social justice for gay people, depending on our understanding of/investment in that issue. It never came up in church, though, or even around church, mostly because the congregants were largely a group of friends from the same college in rural Texas who were too polite to fuck up brunch. Also, about sixty percent of the time it was the gay congregants leading worship, since any breeder over twenty-four had at least one kid to wrangle around the elementary school cafeteria where we met.
It was awesome. We had bagels for communion, and when we'd been blessed, we hung around and ate the rest of the bagels. The first time I was there, on the edge of my seat, ready to bounce, I was intercepted by their leader and his boyfriend and their mutual insistence that I take a bagel before I go.
I haven't found this kind of "community of faith" anywhere else, but I miss it badly, and occasionally it is what is driving me to try to find another church (this one folded a few years ago). To be honest, though, a lot of the rest of the time, I'm looking because I feel like I should be going to church, like God wants that from me. And even though my confusion about God has often been painful and detrimental to more "worldly" indicators of my well-being, including the health of my marriage and my recovery from bulimia, I still feel like you don't get to tell God: I need some me time. I need some time to think things through.
I don't know why this is so difficult for me, why I seem uniquely unable to get with the program, whatever the program actually is. Everyone else I know seems to align their beliefs with their practice with enviable ease, the way someone other than me might eat breakfast or get dressed for a party. Most of my friends and family are either committed atheist or agnostics, noncommittal or nominal Christians or Jews whose spiritual walk is crippled more by a lack of interest than anything else, or actual Christians who I don't know well enough to talk about God with, much, or whose spiritual practice is less than accommodating to my current circumstances.
But I'm some other thing, a thing in which you can apparently believe that God is real, and yet be unable to reconcile yourself to what He wants from you. What would one call that thing? An apostate?
See, on the one hand, I know that God isn't supposed to fit around the other stuff you do. On the other hand, for me, that Sunday stuff involves volunteering at a hospital for profoundly disabled children, one of whom calls me on the phone when I don't make it (God, thankfully, does not do this), and raising my own profoundly demanding child, who spends upwards of fifty hours a week in childcare and who does not wish to spend his free mommy time having other grown ups tell him about Jesus, and seeing my husband, whose own "that noise" encompasses pretty much all organized religion, largely, I think -- though he won't say this outright, because he is also from the South -- because most of the Christians he has known kind of acted like dicks. (Quote me, fine, but don't cite him; my mother-in-law reads this blog).
If we're using know in the conventional sense of intellectual conviction, I don't know much about Jesus, up to and including whether He walked the earth or is some kind of metaphor that just really, really works for me personally. But I do know that, if Jesus is angry at me for being a mother to my son on in the few hours I get with him each week, for not launching another exhausting, quixotic campaign to get my husband to do something he doesn't want to do, for dipping into my pitiful reserves of effs-to-give for the benefit of shaken babies rather than Him, then there's some cognitive dissonance there, severe enough that belief in God may no longer be an option.
At the risk of totally failing this God -- because I absolutely don't intend to be clever or flippant here -- to swap out time with the concrete people I love for time with strangers, collectively loving Him, I am just going to need a more glaring sign than He's given thus far. Something along the lines of a burning bush, or, at the very least, a church that doesn't leave me feeling like I'm at a middle school dance -- stupid, and awkward, and wishing they had diet soda at the snack table.
Until then, I'm going to have to fall back on the seemingly reasonable conclusion that God, being omnipotent and omnipresent, can find me on the peds unit, with my family, at my job, at my school. As to the particular brand of church-speak that insists that I've let Him down if I can't get it together to leave my husband at home and drag my two year old to a church where I will either receive a blessing or provoke a full-blown anxiety attack regarding mortality/the "literal truth" of the Bible/ other people's gay lifestyles, well, fuck that fucking noise.
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