My son lives with his dad. He’s at that age where he goes away for two weeks and comes back two inches taller. It’s disconcerting for me, but moreso for friends who haven’t seen him in a year or two. To them, he’s a foot taller. He’s rapidly approaching six feet tall, even though just a year and change ago, he’s clearly three inches shorter than I am–I’m 5′7, and a half. I always fight for that last half inch. It makes a fraction of a difference on my body mass index (BMI), which is what seems to have grown exponentially for me in the past couple of years. My son grows UP! I grow stout.
I’m going somewhere with this, though. I left the church around 1985. I’ve identified several factors in why I left the church–some of them were social; I was a teenager that had been removed from the church of my childhood and taken to one where there weren’t any kids my age; I also perceived a classist and competitive streak among the yuppies in the choir that struck me as cliquish and shallow. Granted, that’s how I perceived the world in those days. But there was something more sinister undermining my faith—my increasingly tense relationship with my parents, my inability to reconcile the notion of God with my exponentially expanding world view, the incredible amount of *judgment* I felt radiating from more conservative Christian friends of mine. I got so angry about the notion of predestination when I was 17 I tried to make a point by injuring myself; there is still a scar on the back of my left hand from that moment of rage.
When I came back to church 15 years later, a lot had changed. I had changed, for one, to be sure. But more importantly, the church had changed. I was 5 years old when the first women were ordained as priests, and when I left, I had never known a woman priest in my diocese of Southern Virginia.
But when I came back more than 15 years later, women priests were at every single parish I visited (just about), the suffragan Bishop of Southern Virginia was a woman, and a few years after that, a woman was elected presiding bishop.
This has all happened in my mother’s lifetime. My mother became a church organist specifically because she couldn’t be a priest. Indeed, the first women to be ordained were done so irregularly; now it’s the norm, and some people left the church because of it; some parishes established that while it was accepted in the church it wasn’t right for them, and so on.
When I came back to the church after all that time, it was as if seeing a newborn grown into a teenager overnight. Gays and lesbians were priests! Women were bishops! Gene Robinson had just been elected, as I recall. Other changes had taken place, too. The altar had been pulled out. The Gospel was being read from the center of the nave. There was a funny new crossing of oneself for the Gospel I had never seen before. And, as I went to different churches, I saw different practices: this one has an open table; this one doesn’t say “The Word of the Lord” after a scripture reading (although we still say Thanks be to God.) This one still reads the Gospel from the pulpit; this one dances throughout the service. This one has organ music, this one has banjo music, this one has djembes and why is everyone wearing Birkenstocks?
That’s not the point, though. The point is that these changes don’t happen overnight. One little thing might, but the whole process forward is a slow march. That whole thing about faith being like a mustard seed? So is progress. I give you my tomato plant of 2005, that appeared to die in August but reflowered in September and gave me an autumn harvest I cannot forget. That story is here.
But for those who are foundering, remember. You may feel like the rosebush cropped, but does it not grow back stronger? You cannot see the grass growing, but it is. You cannot see my son growing, but he is. You cannot see the moon moving, but it is. And right now, you may not be able to see the church growing. But it is.
Posted in About Me by: Helen
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