When I was a teenage Jesus Freak, I was surrounded by people wanting to recover their childlike innocence. There was a general consensus about lifestyle and purity of life. Drugs and excessive alcohol consumption were discouraged and even condemned, as were premarital and extramarital sex.
It isn't that we were puritans. Rather we had come into something so intensely real in our experience of God that we all wanted to joyously abandon everything and anything of our old lives that would get in the way of the beauty of that encounter. We wanted to be completely His. Politically correct and inclusive language did not matter to us, not because we were against it, but that was before that time, and really, the immediate presence of Christ in our lives trumped everything, making such nitpicking details pretty unimportant. That the Anglican Church ties themselves in knots over this triviality of inclusive and politically correct terminology is only natural because those people do not know Jesus. They know about Jesus. They do not have a relationship with him. God is always at a distance from them, where he can't complicate or interfere with their lives.
There was among us a general consensus about lifestyle and purity of life. We didn't care whether our sexuality was a gift or not. We were being called into a singular life, into holiness of life, and this certainly means leaving behind sleeping around. We were generally not in favour of homosexuality, because for us it simply implied sexual promiscuity. Now that there is some foundation to same sex marriage and now that it is better understood that same sex attraction is an inherent and therefore completely legitimate condition, this of course changes things considerably, but our call from God was not to get married to someone of whatever gender but to serve God wholly and humbly with consecrated lives. But many did end up marrying. So it was celibacy outside of marriage, and within marriage complete monogamy, be it opposite sex or same sex. Drugs and excessive alcohol consumption were discouraged and even condemned. We wanted no psychoactive substances getting in the way of the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives. God was calling us to purity, love and complete joy, for this was actually a joy-filled life we had entered into.
We were taking a strict New Testament biblical stance and position on how we were going to live. We believed that we were part of a major world movement that was like the early church of the first century reinvented and reborn. We had been visited by the same rushing mighty wind that brought flames dancing on the heads of the first disciples at Pentecost.
This was a phenomenon that sadly was subsumed and mutated into the dreadful evangelical Christian Right that has become a byword to many North American and European liberals. As I became conscious of how something so beautiful had been transformed into such vile ugliness, I left and eventually became an Anglican. It never was a real fit. I didn't care much about ritual, but in a high Anglican church I could at least have lots of time for silent prayer and contemplation, which I was greatly needing then. But after prayer meetings and simply hanging out with people who were, like me, young, informal, spontaneous and affectionate, I found Anglicans to be cold, distant and emotionally constipated. I never came into a real experience of community with those people who didn't do community, and for whom, the very idea of extending themselves to others was heresy.
It was religion. But it wasn't life. I only held on for the sense of ballast and stability which at that time I was also greatly needing. Nothing more. And there was a lot of beauty in the liturgy, but that never could become a substitute for simply walking with God.
I have come full circle now. I have no interest in returning to that kind of religious slavery and bondage that is the Anglican Church of Canada. Neither have I any idea as to where I am going from here. I don't know any people whom I can walk with, which is going to make this, for a while anyway, rather a lonely way. I am waiting to see where God leads me from here.
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