The Bootlegger suggested I read A Hidden Wholeness : The Journey Toward an Undivided Life, by Parker Palmer. (Today I find out that Bucky has seen Palmer speak several times.)
I am halfway through the book and am not sure I can completely explain it. But the very idea of the divide life has captured my attention. It seems to give form to several of the ideas floating around in my head. It provides a way to explain what strikes me as a conflict between people of faith and their strange bedfellows (at least in part).
But mostly, it gives me a way to think about my own experiences. I remember starting grad school in Houston. We attended South Main Baptist at the time, and really liked the church. The Pastor was as good and thoughtful a preacher as I have ever heard, and the people were good. They had called women deacons well before our membership and did so without an agenda. Their outreach was focussed on social justice--feeding and clothing the poor, assisting the sick, and reaching out to the AIDS community. This church really impressed me in many ways.
Yet, the experience was also everything I had struggled with for years. I still remember staring at my Sunday school teacher in Junior High as she tried to explain why dancing was evil. It must have been the exact same face I had at a different Houston church where seemingly intelligent and well-intentioned people argued at length about women wearing pants to church. I believe I just stared at them.
South Main was everything I could ask from a large church. And yet, sunday school sucked. The nicest people taught the nicest group of young married people I ever met. And yet, the intense boredom persisted. No stupid discussions, but neither did we have meaningful ones either. When I discovered an "alternative" Sunday School, I jumped with both feet. Finally, talking about something that mattered. First, we explored the theological underpinnings of the SBC controversy. Then I moved into a class taught by a practicing psychologist. SOF joined me there and we recieved about a year's worth of free therapy. Great, meaningful stuff. Talking about relationships--how we experienced the spiritual--and more.
And yet, when that class ended, so did my church experience for a while. I have struggled to explain it to people who so thoroughly enjoy church. I think Palmer's notion of a divided life helps. I found myself thoroughly enjoying grad school. The intellectual challenge was envigorating, and I found my colleagues passionate about the things they believed in. I found a sense of community there as well. And the conflict between the Grad School Streak and Church Streak was intense. I found myself at church having to shelve my opinions. My questions seemed threatening to others. I either had to force myself on people who didn't want to talk about the same stuff, push those questions down, or decide to move in a different direction.
I chose the last. I decided that forcing my view on theology or the questions I had were disruptive and sometimes damaging to people. I had no desire to do that. But at a certain point, I found that the Grad School Streak was happier, more comfortable, and more engaged than Church Streak.
None of this is meant as a criticsm of church goers. I know many who find in their church community great meaning and support. I know that they enjoy their church experience. I don't have a problem with that. This is really about my own personal divide.
Later, I believe I experienced another divide in Grad school--between the pressures of scholarship and my desire to live a more rounded, moral, and centered life. Maybe I will write about that one in another post.
2 comments:
I wish you would write about how you handled the pressures of scholarship and living a more well-rounded, moral and (the real kicker) centered life. You have served as a good example of how to do that, imho, and I think you could write a book on how challenging that is and the discernment required.
Been out of pocket for a couple days which is usually code for "unorganized for a few days. First, is our use of anonymous pseudonyms any indication of whether or not we live divided lives?:-) Anyway, I'm glad you are enjoying the Palmer book. It was a "watershed book" for me. For whatever reason, I learned early on that church was a place where you could be honest to a point. I heard the encouragement to be open, share openly, etc.... and then saw the results when some naive newcomer actually took the advice. We quickly learned that there were plenty of taboo topics. Answers from authority figures were frequently from a perspective that assumed a certain familiarity with the acceptable norms of the church. There was a huge dose of fear, I know now, in the churches in which I was raised- fear of not getting the children saved before the teen years kicked in, fear of appearing at all soft on any sins to the extent that they weren't acceptable topics other than to affirm how awful they were, etc.... Your example of the junior high Sunday School and dancing could have been my experience exactly. I don't know about your situation, but in mine it was expected that the "discussion" would pretty much be over with the sinfulness. If I was thinking, "But I like to dance. I like the music and the way the girls move", I had been trained for years already to know that you don't voice those thoughts. Instead, I found a "safe" place to work out the meaning of it with my contemporaries away from the rigid church environment. The pronouncement of the right or wrong of a thing based on some interpretation of scripture (there's not one saying "Don't dance") was supposed to suffice. What I know now is that some of the resistance to REALLY discuss things stemmed from the teacher knowing that s/he was on thin ice biblically, a probably experientially. I found that the place that I could say anything, ask the questions I was dying to ask, etc... were with my friends outside of church or my church friends when we weren't in church. This wasn't, however, necessarily the best source of wisdom and guidance, especially from a spiritual perspective. I write all of that just to say, a divided life was a part of my training over the course of many years that continued into college and beyond. I'm not saying I'm a victim or anything. I do think that I was raised in a system that verbalized the need to be open and honest in Christian settings but did not reward this with acceptance, concern, empathy, love or other edifying behaviors that could then be followed up with advice, support, and responsibility. As an adult, I've struggled to overcome this dividedness and return to the point of feeling like one person in most all situations. This isn't to say that we don't practice some discretion- I'm not talking about being inconsiderate. I don't know if you are there yet, but Palmer explores a concept he calls "Circles of Trust" which is a place where people feel safe to let their souls show up and speak. Through this safe environment, we can get back to the wholeness that some of us have lost over the years in our divided lives. It recognizes that most real change in our beliefs and behaviors at some point have to be from self-realization, not externally imposed standards of thought and behavior.
I appreciate your perspective on the different ways we can end up dividing our lives. This isn't a division of time or commitment. It's a division of who you are. Am I living the real me wherever I am? Is my whole person there or am I squelching a good bit of it because of the environment or the rules or some fear I'm holding on to? Unfortunately for some of us, church hasn't been one of the places where we could completely show up. I, too, need to commit myself to letting other people "show up". It's not always what you want to deal with. But in the end it's what's real. A divided life can be a good coping mechanism in a dysfunctional environment, but it's not the way to a stronger sense of self and who God created us to be. Of all places you would think church would be a place where we could live undivided. For those who have a church like that it's a blessed thing. Those of us who haven't often have to look elsewhere even if it's amongst Christians.
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