Life As Performance Art 162

I seem to have dealt with the Anglican Church all I can, in terms of resolving the abusive treatment I suffered from clergy and others over the last twenty years when they were conspiring against me in order to silence me, given my tendency of calling them out on their crap and duplicity and trying to get me on medication on the basis of a bogus mental health diagnosis (both my doctor, and a psychiatrist later debunked what they were trying to pull off and they not only backed off, but royally shunned me afterward) The archbishop has apologized. That's nice. She also awarded me five hundred dollars, to help defray some of my dental costs. Can't complain. I was hoping for more, money and other actions, such as maybe buying my art, which they seem to admire, but people always seem to love what they don't want to pay for. Or they might try to help me find other ways to help me reintegrate. No one is biting. Anglicans seem to be very bad at pastoral care. There is not going to be any show of genuine contrition for what was done to me and Anglicans tend to be all talk, and nothing but talk. As I tried to communicate to the archbishop, the abuse that I suffered from her church impacted my mental health and my employability and was instrumental in, in fact, was the first and primary cause of, the tailspin my life went into that left me homeless and desperately poor with PTSD. She doesn't seem at all interested in acknowledging or addressing this. The mental health issues are resolved, and I have an apartment in a BC Housing building. Better than living on the street or in a shelter. I am also stably employed, but in a chronically underpaid position that promises to keep its workers near, and eventually stranded, at minimum wage, and in just over a year I will be retiring to a very poor and likely difficult old age. So, according to the Anglican archbishop for the diocese of New Westminster, that isn't the church's problem, regardless of what some of her colleagues did to wreck my life. Apparently, they owe me nothing. I am on my own. Christian Love 101, Whited Sepulchres Division. This is problematic on so many levels, especially given what particularly egregious hypocrites Anglicans are. For example, just last Sunday at my church, we were having an information forum about what we are going to do to try to fill the pews, presumably with the bums belonging to hopefully well-off white folk just like them (but of course, they would never actually say that!). When it came time for open discussion, I was raising my hand, and holding it up for quite a while, while the facilitator, who is wealthy, strove to ignore me and took a question from the priest instead, then would have persisted in further ignoring me afterward had his wife not been badgering him to let me have my say. No one is going to successfully convince me that I was not being shunned. I have to accept that, because I am not one of them, I am always going to be treated like an outsider at St. Faith's and likely by other Anglicans, as well. Anglicans are always going to other me and they are also going to continue to other anyone else who doesn't fit their genteel middle class values. But they will be nice and polite, even warm and friendly. But we are never going to be treated like true members. I am not about to leave, and for the simple reason that, as exhausting and as onerous as it can be, why should I let them get away with it? Am I perfect? Hell, no! I know my shadow. And I am quite aware of my anger and my tendency towards resentment. I don't think that they know their shadow. And I know that this shadow of hypocrisy and fear and privilege and bigotry that clings like a soiled negligee around middle class niceness, is never going to entirely go away. We can only stay conscious of it, refuse to be lulled into complacency and work towards living lives of repentance and renewal. We are nowhere near this goal, perhaps we never will be, but we have to start working towards this. If this means suffering the pain of facing the lies and lovely illusions that we base our lives on, then too bad. We have to grow, and this can only begin with our really beginning to wake up, and put paid to all our lame and precious little excuses. Happy Friday the Thirteenth, Gentle Reader!