Pausing Church

I am tired by working full-time. Not tired OF it-- I enjoy my job-- but trying to get physically used to seeing my children so much less while still having the same amount of real-life work to do-- things like laundry and getting people to the dentist and the small matter of trying to get this house ready to sell-- and I feel like a certified zombie some weeks. It's worrisome enough that I've made a couple of drastic changes, and those have helped. I've all but given up Facebook again, because I just don't have time to sit and ponder status updates (either mine or those of others). I've stopped drinking those occasional glasses of wine because they were incredibly disruptive to my sleep.

Unexpectedly, I've also started to feel the Holy Spirit creeping back in again.

It's unexpected because I uninvited God from my life for a good, long time. The combined trauma of leaving postulancy for the priesthood coupled with some extreme church-related problems exahusted me to the point that I handed God over like a pair of car keys on Mardi Gras. I knew I couldn't really do much to remove myself from God's near presence, but I sure as hell removed him from mine. Or, at the very least, I uprooted the version of God I'd known and loved for so long and set it out for compost. Some of it stayed to nourish things deep on the inside, and the rest dried out and blew away. Good riddance.

I'm also very, very bad about attending church these days. I'm not going because it feels good to not go. Because untangling God from church is important work for me at the moment, and I don't have time for PowerPoint slides on what the church could have done better to have kept me there. I'm walking paths under the bright blue sky just fine on my own, which Mary Oliver would certainly agree is holy enough work. I'd rather feel comfortable with Jesus again than please whatever committee I should probably be serving on.

It's refreshing to throw things out, but admittedly, I am also making space for some things that are pretty undernourishing. Replacing the body and blood with more Netflix isn't exactly responsible soul-work. And I felt that tension and will repsond to it when I'm ready. For now, though, I'm leaving well enough alone, and maintaining my spotty church attendance.

We spend so much time and energy worried about Christian formation. For those of us who have worked within the church, or felt called to deeper service, the idea of just leaving something alone is almost anathema. There isn't room for that in current church culture. Absolutely every church season must be deftly handled, building on whatever worked last year while keeping a ready eye on whatever the current trend tells us to try this time. We make noise about saying "no," but really what we end up saying no to is our own well-being. Even Jesus shoved off in a boat and left the crowds sometimes. Why shouldn't we model that in church work?

It's a difficult balance to strike, of course, and I don't want to sound bitter. I made the choices I had to make in order to reclaim space for myself. A lot of the work that goes on in churches is absolutely necesary, and holy. But so much of it is not. And some of it is damaging, and I got hurt-- so some of this is about tending to those hurt and hurting places, which need lots of fresh air and lots of sleeping in on Sundays.

Being so tired all the time has been, in some ways, an unexpected gift. I spent so much time and effort on intentional Christian formation-- on myself, in my family, and in a series of lay jobs in the church-- that I burnt myself into an unrecognizable crisp. I burnt completely out, in fact. What has risen from the ashes has been something entirely different. An unfamiliar re-making that I'm still getting used to.

I'm not saying goodbye to anything. I'm not renouncing anything, or giving up anything. There are plenty of things I do miss about church. It's just that there are things I miss about my relationship with Christ even more, and church got in the way.