Pendulums

The theology in which I was raised was overwhelmingly physical - divorced from the spiritual, or nearly so. God was Spirit - we were to trust Him to deal with all that, and steer clear of meddling too much with that side of the line, lest we be led astray by evil spirits.

The opposite of this, of course, is New Age religion, in which spirituality is basically all that matters, and half the point is (or seems to be) to get as far away from physical being as possible, moving towards 'pure' spirituality. (C.S. Lewis had a villain of this bent in Perelandra.) And that - or very close to it - is where I wound up in my rambling journey.

So now, having been all over the map of both realms, I find myself at some odds with the Episcopal Church doctrines, very solidly betwixt and between. (Not that the church is lukewarm. Far from it - firmly, solidly, and beautifully embracing the paradoxes of faith. But... those paradoxes necessarily mean being in the middle.) As a Baptist, I understood Baptism and Communion to be symbolic - the physical reminders of our faith, and no more. As a whatever-on-earth I was in the time after, I didn't think about Baptism or Communion, except in occasional memory. I thought about vision quests and sweat lodges (look, I said I was sorry). (I should note that I have since been made aware that this is not the case - of course - in ALL Baptist churches. But it was in mine.)

Coming back to church, my old habits quickly re-asserted - although acknowledging the Spirit, even welcoming... I have no idea what pronoun to use there really - I still thought of Baptism, at least, as a symbol of faith, and it was entirely startling to hear that it is... otherwise. Sacraments... take some getting used to, as a concept. That the action, this physical action, is not merely symbolic, but is a direct... conduit? Uh, path? Bridge? A way of opening oneself to the Spirit. Literally. Literally!

That's the part I'm still not quite... I mean, literally. When they - when we - say it, the Spirit, all those prayers - they mean something. They mean a whole lot, actually, but the big thing, the major part of it all, is that God is present. I guess it's just been a long, long time since I thought seriously enough about that. Childlike faith? Oh God, please. Please.

Anyway, today I talked for a while with our senior warden about sacraments, and priests, and what the deal is with administering sacraments, and why, if priests are not uber-humans (in the literal sense there, as 'over'), it is always/only a priest who can administer sacraments. She clarified that no one will strike down a layperson for administering a sacrament. Priests are just - sort of trained? To open themselves to the Spirit, I guess. The way I put it, after, trying to word it all, was that we trust priests to be doing that, to be able to - they were ordained, and thus we trust them to do the work of it in faith. I am making a hash of this point, and so I am going to close this specific discussion, because I think I understand this, even if I can't exactly put it into words.

It has been difficult to retrain myself to think of God. To think of God as neither a distant, modernist clockmaker, nor as... well, there's the fundamentalist too-literal Always There in the sense that if we have "Enough Faith," God will reach down and make our lives easier. It's gospel-of-wealth-ish. And that's one I run screaming from. But then you've got that paradox of if God is here, why doesn't he reach down and Fix stuff? Us? But, y' know, that I do understand. Kinda. So thinking of God as here in Spirit - in a literal sense - argh, how do I put this? Spiritually here. Here in spirit. It's really easy to start thinking of that in really lukewarm/wishy-washy terms. "Here in spirit" we say often in secular terms to translate to Really Not Here at All, but maybe thinking about us. Which is most certainly not what is meant by God being here in Spirit. The Spirit - the Holy Spirit - is a real and present... er, presence. Person. Being. Real and present. And ministering to our spirits. Which, y' know, Eucharist. And prayer. And everything.

Like I said, it's a struggle. But it's a struggle I enter with joy. I'd rather wrestle with these concepts, work towrds a greater understanding of God, and spend my whole life asking these questions (even ever unanswered) than dodge away, back to one end of the pendulum or the other.

The missing piece of this narrative is the part where part of my fleeing the church, and eventual wanderings through New Age stuff, was a rejection of all things... er, church-ish. I believed myself sundered from God, I guess. I remember thinking, very seriously, that part of the reason I would not go back to church was because I could not. I was only half-joking, if even half, when I would joke about bursting into flames if I stepped across the threshold of a church. God was Up There, and His strength was behind the Church, which had cast me out for being... whatever I was, not entirely human, I thought.

So to return to a flock, to forsake the spirits I tried to chase down for so long, and kneel to receive the Holy Spirit and believe, honestly believe, that it is no symbol, that the Spirit I believed would strike me down is in fact there to strengthen and uplift...

Like I said, it's taking some serious thought, and some getting used to. Maybe I never will be used to it, and maybe that is a good thing.