I am free now. Free in a way I never would have previous imagined, but had always longed for. This hasn't developed as an easy freedom. It seemed to really begin with the death of my mother, when I began to get liberated from my family. But being set free from one's family is always going to be a Pyrrhic victory. We need our families, and they are going to need us, no matter how much we also complicate and encumber each other's lives. The support and connectedness is such that family bonds have always been lauded and upheld as sacrosanct, and above being questioned. Even when families turn toxic. Even when they turn dangerous, deadly and even lethal to their most vulnerable member. And leaving a toxic family is never going to be an amputation that can easily be born or lived with. This is because too much of your own self is going to perish with this kind of primal severing. Unless you are prepared to be somehow reborn and remade. And even then it is not going to be easy.
My life is no longer encumbered with relatives. No one has to spend Christmas or Thanksgiving dinners pretending to like each other just because we happen to come from the same gene pool (not chlorinated, unfortunately). I will never have to endure the silent, and not so silent judgment of a sibling or of parents or uncles who have always held me in contempt. Christmas, and often Thanksgiving, might still be unspeakably lonely seasons for me, but I still have to find a way to get over this, because no one is going to call me again to summon me to their table. And friends, even the closest of friends, usually do not make a valid substitute for lost family. My mother's death was followed by rejection and desertion by my father and brother, and all my cousins, aunts and uncles. The trauma was hard to live down. Even though I can celebrate being free now from people with whom I have nothing in common with outside of blood, I will also still always have to live with their rejection of me. But now I am free.
I am free now from church. The Anglican Church, anyway. They have failed me in every way, and I am better without them. Will I continue without church? I don't know. I rather like this time of not being connected anywhere. I still have friends from the church, but I am in no hurry to integrate again. I have actually a nice diversity of friends, and I am also confident that I will be meeting new people as friends in the future. Is that the same as family? No. As community? Not really. Will I be moving toward a lonely and desolate old age? Could be, but not inevitable. In the supermarket today I did run into an old acquaintance from one of the Anglican parish churches that I suffered in. She was friendly and mentioned how well I am looking. I couldn't help it. She had been a particularly problematic person for me while in that church. I simply retorted that if I am looking well, it is because I am no longer an Anglican. Perhaps rather a cruel thing to say but she has caused me a lot of grief, so she had it coming.
I am soon free from my work. In nine months, I retire, and will likely be retaining one contract, but otherwise...I could even quit right now the other two sites where I am working, since I do not really like being there, and one supervisor I have always found a bit problematic. It's wait and see. We are in a pandemic and this makes everything kind of weird right now. I am feeling semi-free, but it is still better to wait for now.
I am in contact with many good friends, some old, some new. I want to go on nurturing and cherishing these friendships. I also want to go on celebrating this new sense of freedom. I still wish I could find some people to pray with, whom we could mutually support and empower in the Spirit. We will have to see, Gentle Reader. In the meantime, there is the present moment to receive, embrace and celebrate for the divine gift that God has ordained that each present moment should be. Later...Who only knows?
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