A friendship has just died. It was on life support for a few weeks, then I threatened to pull the plug. I already entered the details in Sunday's blog post. This is the Anglican woman who is one of the wardens in the church I have left. I suppose she was assigned to me to see if I might change my mind at the last minute and return to church with my little tail between my legs. No such luck. The archbishop seems to think, quite stupidly, (so sue me, Melissa Skelton!) that I could derive from that same pathetic woman the kind of pastoral support I was needing as I was trying to make sense of my place in the church, following the intense baptism of repentance and love I experienced while in Colombia and Costa Rica.
But that same warden had already advised me that she didn't have a personal devotional life, that she never prayed away from church. She also refused to know anything about my spiritual autobiography nor any other matters of my spiritual life. And I was supposed to derive from someone like that any kind of pastoral support? A woman without training, experience nor any interest at all in the things of God? An arrogant old woman who would rather end a friendship than apologize.
Even just last year, I first began to see this person's true colours. I was in a coffee shop waiting for her. In the meantime I was visiting with a homeless black man. Hoping that our church might be able to figure out some way to help connect with supports this unfortunate, and warm, kind and bright soul, when the warden arrived I introduced them, and told her about his plight. She was cold and officious, didn't even ask him how he was, and dismissively said that the church couldn't help him, and that she was in a hurry so I had better be ready now for the appointment we were going to together (she was driving me to a luncheon in the luxury and oh so spacious condo with likely two spare bedrooms where lived another one of the wardens with his wife. Lots and lots of beautifully appointed space for just two people, but here I digress.
Of course, neither was she going to invite him to the big spacious home, with likely a couple of leftover bedrooms, that she shares with her husband. I couldn't do a lot, because I live in a tiny one room apartment that can hardly hold one person, and there is nowhere for another person to sleep. And no one else in the parish were going to be considered either, many of whom live also in large spacious houses, just them and their spouse or cat or dog, no one else, on land worth often a whopping three million or more. Yes, I did say that these people are Christians. Well, they're Anglicans, anyway, so maybe I shouldn't call them Christians. Anglicans may suck bigtime at almost everything else but they tend to do hypocrisy quite spectacularly. In operatic grandeur!
So, I am not mourning the death of this friendship. Perhaps I am still scratching my head as to why I prolonged things for this long, but I always want to give others as much opportunity as possible, even if it means giving them enough rope to hang themselves.
I still have one friend from the church. He is also a warden. Our relationship is not specifically pastoral, though we do give each other all kinds of spiritual and other support. I really don't know how he can gut being there, but he does it very well, and I suspect that without him, St. Faith's Anglican parish church would be all the poorer indeed. And when my friend and I are together, it is just like attending church and meeting Christ together in our fellowship. But perhaps that is what church really is, or ought to be. Where two or three of you are gathered together in my name, there I am in their midst. The words of Jesus.
Go figure!
All for now, duckies!
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