Orientation Starts Tomorrow...

I’m starting seminary. It’s a weird realization. All week, as I’ve wandered around this new college town, I keep suddenly remembering, I’m here to go to seminary. And I laugh.

Starting this blog is also a little weird, since some people have known me for a zillion years, and some of you I’ve just met, and maybe some of you I’ll never meet. So, a little back story, a few labels, and a couple caveats:

I am attending a really progressive Christian seminary in Berkeley. Me: I’m 39 years old, 18+ years sober, very queer, and mildly introverted. I have a dog named Rosemary. I just started attending church a year ago.

Relatively speaking, what I know of the Bible could just about fill up a Twinkie.

I really never expected to be attending divinity school, but over the past six years, I’ve come to two conclusions: God is persistent and God is really funny.

Six years ago, I had an experience that seemed crazy to me – essentially it was a push towards considering ministry as a career path – as I wasn’t affiliated with any religion, the idea seemed completely bizarre. Or grandiose, or like I said, nuts. But it left a powerful impression on me, and a kind of nagging longing.  I talked about it with a few friends who were ministers – one was a United Church of Christ pastor who described the “open and affirming” resolution at UCC. She also introduced me to the idea that Christ called for social justice; while this seems obvious to me now, my only experience of Christianity at the time was the “religious right,” which acted as force of oppression and intolerance towards pretty much everything that mattered to me.

My friend said: “Christ didn’t die for our sins; he died because he bucked the power structure.”  I went to her church once, and she gave an amazing meditation on this.

Still, it took me several years to make myself explore church.  (I think it’s funny that I moved to Indiana and came out as a lesbian, then moved to Seattle and came out as a Christian).

Like a lot of people, my tendency is to try and figure things out on my own, mostly so I won’t feel so self-conscious about not knowing how to do things. But somehow I understood that trying to learn about Christianity was going to require me to join a community and allow that community to see me not know. It was a scary thought. 

I started “church hopping” in early-2009.  I initially decided on the United Church of Christ because of my old friend; this decision was solidified after a conversation with another pastor in Seattle who described the UCC’s emphasis on building a "covenantal" relationship with God, versus having to adhere to a particular creed or set of rules.

 When I first started going to church, I’d look around the room and my head would start in. My head is an interesting place, and it lies. It lies all the time. It even lies to the elliptical runner when it asks for my weight. In my active addiction, my head told me that I never drank alone because the radio was on. So I knew not to listen to my head when it said things like: Look at all of these losers, of course THEY have to be here. They must have no other lives.  What my head couldn’t explain was why I cried every time I was at church. Or, conversely, why I felt so happy there – that is, when my head could stop obsessing about what people would think, or if the pastor liked me, or if I was nuts. 

I finally chose an urban church in downtown Seattle. The very patient pastor there met with me several times and listened to my confusion and encouraged me to just show up and pay attention – she also shared her experience and a few books. So, I showed up.

Every Sunday I went to church, I went to Bible study, I went to advent services, I tried different prayer exercises, I joined a service cluster, stayed for coffee hour, helped decorate for Christmas, hung around for the “re-visioning rallies” and planted bulbs in the garden.  I even baked a pie for the dessert fundraiser thing. These are not my normal activities. I felt pretty awkward all of the time. But I noticed how people acted. We have a lot of homeless people who come to services, and the other church members treat them with respect and dignity, not in that polite-but-please-don’t-touch-me kind of way. Some of the long-time members went out of their way to ask me out to lunch and get to know me outside of church – they did it for other people too.  I started reading the work of Marcus Borg, Peter Gomes, Karen Armstrong, Sara Miles and Kathleen Norris. I even bought (and started reading) a Bible.

It was not something that happened suddenly, and I still can’t quite explain it, but my life has been deeply changed through the radical welcome of this church. Somehow, becoming a part of that community and opening myself to God there brought me to a place of deep wonder.

Not only do I feel like I belong to this community, but I feel stunned with gratitude and really, love. And from that gratitude and love, I want to serve.

As I am discovering progressive Christianity, I am becoming more aware of how the perception of Christianity has been distorted by the religious right. It makes me sad and angry to think about how a religion based on radical personal and social transformation has been appropriated by a political movement that works to oppress the disadvantaged and maintain the status quo. I’ve seen way too many people who think that God doesn’t love them or believe they are going to some imagined hell because they haven’t followed the rules established by fundamentalist churches. And in my time in the Midwest, I saw so many people who walked away from fundamentalist churches feel bereft and as though there was no other path.

I think God loves everyone, period, and I think maybe people need to hear that.

So, I’ve sold most of my furniture, tossed journals and poems I’ve been carrying around since second grade, gotten rid of my car, and moved into student housing.

Orientation starts tomorrow.