People ask me, "so what ARE you?" Meaning, "what kind of church do you belong to?' And I find that when they ask me that, often they have an agenda. Not everybody-- some are just making conversation. I usually say, "Methodist," because it's easier to just say that then give them more information than they're really asking for. It's partly true, it's the last church "address" I had. Last year, however, I was at a hospice conference and sat in on a workshop for hospice chaplains. The leader of the workshop asked us to go around and give our names and our church tradition, if any. I'm not sure what made me be so honest with a group of strangers, but when it came to me, I said, "I'm Peggy, and I guess I'm in exile."
I think I surprised myself more than anyone else when that came out of my mouth. But no one jumped up and threw a Bible at me. Instead, oddly enough, a few grunted with understanding, some even chuckled. No one asked me, "what does THAT mean?"
When I was a pastor, I of course would not be so understanding of someone like me. I truly believed that you had to be a part of a church community to be spiritually healthy. Of course, it was my job, as assigned by the Church, to get as many live bodies in the pews as possible-- preferably bodies with money. Now, having been in enough churches--and clergy gatherings-- to know that there is a lot of UNhealthy church communities that actually do more damage than good, well, I'm more open to the idea that sometimes and for some people, it's actuallly healthier NOT to belong.
Granted, it is a self-imposed exile. I did nothing to get myself kicked out or excommunicated anywhere. I follow Jesus, I love God, I try to live a Christian life, but I do not go to church. I find my spiritual community among some very special spiritual friends, both near and far. I feel more spiritually whole than I have in years. I have not renounced anything but church membership.
I get deeply disturbed at the current atmosphere of organized (??) Christianity. Especially with how it is being used as a tool to get votes or paint a demonic picture of opponents. It all reminds me of an experience that had a huge impact on the rest of my life.
I grew up as a pastor's kid in the United Methodist Church, and I was the non-traditional P.K. in that I actually liked church and didn't go off and party my brains out to prove that I was just as cool as anyone else. I was very involved in choir, worship, Sunday School, bell choir, youth group, you name it, I was there. I went to summer church camp. I was a model teenager! But I also had a deep spirituality and faith. This made me a nerd in high school, of course, and when I anticipated college I wanted to find a place where I didn't have to defend my non-partying ways. I was also very naive. I thought there were basically two kinds of Christians: Protestant and Catholic. I thought Protestants were all pretty much alike. I had very little experience otherwise. Yikes.
So when I filled something out at school saying that I was interested in going to a Christian college, I got a lot of mail. I got mail from Messiah College, which was the closest one that looked interesting, about 2 1/2 hours from home, in Central Pennsylvania. We visited Messiah College. I heard about how students would pray for each other, there was chapel worship, professors with a Christian commitment. Cool. I looked no further! It sounded like summer camp every day for four years!
By that time, I'd sensed a deep call to pastoral ministry, and that was the direction I started heading in. I majored in Psychology, basically because I didn't know what else to major in, and my father thought that'd be good. Fine. I was very excited.
Messiah College is located about 10 miles south of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in a beautiful setting among the mountains. The campus was pretty, with lots of places to walk and enjoy the scenery among many trees. A creek ran through campus, too, shaded by trees and crossed by a covered bridge straight out of a storybook. I met my roommate right away, and she categorized herself as a "non-denominational Pentecostal." Huh. That was different. She was very sweet and beautiful. That first day, after the parents departed, and we were thrown into orientation, we wandered among the other students and there was the usual questions: "Where are you from? What's your major?" And here, at a Christian college, was added: "What kind of church do you go to?"
I heard later that there were many United Methodists there, but I'm thinking they were in the closet. Or in another dorm altogether. I didn't meet them-- at least knowingly. I wonder if they were undercover. Me, I was proud of my tradition, I said, "I'm from New Jersey, majoring in Psychology, I'm United Methodist and I'm going to be a pastor!"
That very first day, I met a young woman, we'll call her Beth, whose eyes narrowed, her forehead wrinkled, she crossed her arms and said to me, "First of all, United Methodists are all going to hell, and second of all, God doesn't call women into ministry, and it's precisely because they believe He does that United Methodists are GOING to hell. THAT," she said indignantly, "and because they are even considering ordaining homosexuals!!"
What??
The more I mingled, the more I heard much of the same thing, in less smack-you-over-the-head terms, mind you, but still the same message. I'd never been told I was going to hell! And I'd NEVER been told that my whole denomination was going to hell! (And Beth, you'd be "happy" to know that 29 years later, the United Methodist Church still can't decide what to do with homosexuals!!!) I was shell-shocked. I moved into my dorm room, and went to dorm floor meetings, and it seemed that everyone on my floor was "Independent Pentecostal," which I didn't know anything about. But they waved their arms a lot and said, "Praise God!" every other word, and my roommate prayed in tongues, which, I may add, scared the hell out of me if there was any in me! I went to a Spiritual Leadership class that first semester, and the professor--who was a woman--decided to do a role play of a church, and "appointed" me pastor. We never got to actually do the role play, because upon my "appointment" a group of guys in the class started a heated debate against the possibility of women being pastors. It took me completely off guard, I honestly didn't know there was a controversy. I honestly did not know that there were people who believed that God wouldn't call women as pastors, and that they had biblical references. They pointed to a place in the Bible that said that women were supposed to basically keep their mouths shut in church. I shrunk down into my seat.
And decided then and there that I must have gotten God's message wrong. Or maybe God simplyy got the wrong number. Whatever the problem, I decided to focus on becoming a psychologist instead. Apparently women weren't allowed to mess with people's spiritual lives but they were trusted with people's psyches.
I also tried to fit in. I was not a fighter then. I wanted to be liked. I wanted, to fit in. I didn't drop out or transfer because I thought if I left I'd get stuck living at home with my parents and commuting, like my father had wanted me to in the first place. When I had a bad day and came back to my room and put on a Lynyrd Skynyrd album, my roommate walked in like she'd seen the devil himself. "What now?" I wanted to know. "That's druggie music," she said. In fact, it turned out, all secular music was devil music. Holy shit. I mean, excrement. I put my "secular" albums away. In a fit of desperation, I even broke the Lynyrd Skynyrd album over my knee in front of my roommate. (It's ok, it's all on my ipod now) I asked other people. Yep, secular music was "of the devil." Beth, the person I met that first day, followed me everywhere. She worked hard to be in my circle of friends. Apparently God was calling her to "save" me from the United Methodist church.
I tried. I tried getting up at 6 to do "devotions." Couldn't do it. I was never a morning person. So I felt guilty. I began to feel like they were right about God. I felt like such a disappointment. I didn't know my Bible as well as the rest of them who grew up in Bible quiz competitions that were as popular in their lives as football games were in mine. Another roommate another year read a book by Leo Buscaglia that I was inspired by. She underlined the thing and threw it across the room, yelling about him being a "secular humanist" because he was so positive about human beings. She was "disgusted" by him. (Good thing she didn't know he's gay!) She damned every book I found inspiring. I had given it to her as a gift because it meant so much to me. Her big dilemma in her current love relationship was that she believed in Predestination and her boyfriend believed in Free Will. How would they raise their children without confusing them? She would have to pray about it. I felt like I was in the Twilight Zone and I was the woman with the normal face while everyone else had alien faces and they thought I was the ugly one! I learned shame. I learned there that God was always looking out for what we did wrong and the devil was hiding behind every tree waiting to trip us up. And I learned that I was just wrong.
I dated a guy from North Carolina who was the only guy I dated for more than a few months. We started talking about marriage and attended the on-campus Engagement Seminar. But then he got increasingly nervous about.... well, how I made him feel. Poor guy was turned on by kissing me. So his solution was to stop kissing me! I'm not sure why I went along with this except I just felt that bad about myself that I figured no one else would date me. I took him to my brother's wedding, and my boyfriend was upset to the point of fighting with me because there was dancing at the wedding. And there was wine. How could he marry a girl whose family danced and drank wine? When he told me this, I took another glass and went out on the dance floor with my neices and danced my fool head off. Finally I had the sense to break up with him.
At Messiah College we were not allowed to dance... anywhere. They had spies from the faculty go to the local dance bars and look for Messiah students. We weren't allowed to have boys in our room, of course, except during Open Dorm evenings, and then we had to make sure that our feet were on the floor. Obviously alcohol and tobacco weren't allowed on campus. However, I did start hearing that a large group of the student body would go together and rent a hotel room for a night and have sex, all in the same room. When I took Chemistry in summer school at a local college in New Jersey, a student there told me, "oh yeah, Messiah students are the wildest partiers!" Hm... really.
A friend of mine who was a United Methodist pastor had advised me against going to Messiah because he was afraid I'd be too sheltered there. During my first semester, a male friend of mine told me he was gay, and because he "knew" that he was an abomination in the sight of God, he was going to kill himself. He had the date and method all planned out and he wasn't going to tell me. That whole semester I was a nervous wreck, my grades were awful, I never knew if I would see him again or hear about his death. I tried to talk him out of it. I was a sheltered kid from New Jersey, but I didn't think he was an abomination in God's eyes, I didn't believe in that kind of God. I didn't tell him he had to change. After awhile, he messed with my head, manipulated me, played mind games with me, and downright scared me. He found some Pentecostals who were able to "exorcise the demon of homosexuality out of him," and he never spoke to me again. He was angry at me for NOT trying to change him.
My second semester a married friend of mine confessed that he and his wife were having problems, that he really didn't love her, and, in fact, he loved me. He was actually very handsome, I enjoyed talking to him, and he was the one person on campus who didn't try to "save" me. He was my friend. I knew I had a huge crush on him, and the fact that he was "in love" with me was very disturbing, to say the least! Nothing ever happened. I tried to counsel him, and by the end of the semester he "went back" to his wife. We remained friends and never talked about it again. We pretended we never had those conversations. That same semester, my roommate had gotten involved with a mentally ill boy, who started demonstraing psychotic behavior. During Finals Week, he showed up at her father's house with a machete, and we stayed by the phone to make sure they were ok. He ended up in a psychiatric ward. I stayed up for 48 hours trying to study. My grades that first year were horrible.
The rest of the story could fill many pages, and perhaps I'll write more about those episodes in another installment. Those years at Messiah taught me about a God who hated me, who was always trying to catch me in a "sin," and who expected me to mess up or cause others to mess up precisely because I was a woman. I learned about a God who hated women, like we were some necessary evil to make children. It was the men who were righteous. I was put down for just being a Methodist! How much worse, I began to wonder in the later years, must it be for someone who is not middle class, not white, not Christian, not heterosexual, etc? Being Methodist was important to me, but it wasn't my body, my being, my skin, my personhood. It was something I could change if I wanted to, although they made me not to even consider changing! Beth became a Resident Assistant who loved to sneak around and try to catch people breaking the rules. When I bought a cigar to use as a prop in a class presentation, she threatened to write me up for having tobacco in my apartment. Fortunately, my professor laughed at the threat. She also threatened to write me up for having Creme de Menthe liquor in the icing for my browies at a gathering.
I left Messiah College and didn't want to see another Christian for a long time. Obviously I ended up realizing that God had indeed called me to ordained ministry and followed that call. I don't stay in touch with anyone from Messiah-- well, except one person. One professor who was kind to me and never judged me-- a professor, in fact, who helped me discover that I did have a brain after all. Because of my experience at Messiah, I have a very low tolerance for self-righteous behavior and anyone who thinks they're better than anyone. I have NO tolerance for anyone who thinks that they have the right to judge anyone worthy of hell. I have an allergic reaction to anyone who sees anything but LOVE as the central call of Jesus Christ.
So exile's ok. There's a lot of us out here, many of us even spiritually connected. My call is to offer the grace of God to whomever I meet, specifically now in hospice. However, I hope that I fulfill that call in my personal relationships as well as in my work. I believe that call comes from God, and maybe I can look back on my time at Messiah as having prepared me to be more merciful and compassionate to those who have been "cast out" for one reason or another.
I feel much closer to God, too.
