A Visit With The Bishop

Today I saw the Anglican bishop for this diocese.  I have been approaching this meeting with some trepidation, not knowing whether this would be for closure or for something to open.  I think that it's going to be both.

She did not wave a magic wand.  There is really not a lot she can do to change things in this hugely flawed and wounded denomination that she very faithfully serves.  Simply the bishop with her assistant present has given me her blessing.  I am officially unchurched or perhaps de-churched?  Now will I be searching my forehead whenever I look in the bathroom mirror for the beginnings of horns budding out of my head?  I don't think so.

As a flawed and wounded place the church is also a wounding place.  Only the strong survive.  There is no possibility of community unless you are what they are looking for.  High school.  I'm done.  Am I ever coming back?  God alone knows.  Will I choose another church?  Ditto.  Now it is time to make my home in the dessert with the wild beasts sleeping near my cave.  Now is the time to dig deep in the parched earth until I strike water and this dessert becomes fecund again.

There is nothing left to be done except to live each day, and to manifest around me the community that I desire.  This might even be easier than it seems.  If I try to be careful not to plan it, nor to create an outcome, if I trust God each day to do it, and if I simply do my little part each day, no matter how insignificant or purposeless it might seem, then could this be the future that I will end up helping to create?  There must be others out there besides me who have this longing, who feel this helplessness and who want to faithfully dig into the hard desiccated clay.  I will watch for these people.  Perhaps we stand already next to each other and we need just to look.

Metaphor aside, I feel as though a tremendous weight has been lifted.  Okay, Gentle Reader, I drift here from metaphor to simile.  Forgive me, please.  I had a nap, more of a deep rest following dinner, as though resting following a tremendous labour.  Now I wait for the new day and then I will begin my labour again, working and building as God instructs me.  I have no idea what to look or wait for, only that I am to look and wait.