Love is many things. It is never going to be safe. To love, to receive love, we make ourselves vulnerable. But there also must be ways of shoring up enough self protection in order to prevent lasting damage or trauma. Which is to say, to develop such boundaries that we can love safely without driving or keeping other people out of our lives. There is no simple formula to this and more often than not this is something that we can only learn the hard way, which is to say through difficult and trying experience.
When I was younger I was very open to people, often too open, and very vulnerable, and this kind of openness to others seems to have been returned to me in spades, especially since leaving the Anglican Church some months ago. My time among Anglicans was often painful, especially the twenty odd years I was at St. James, which is high Anglican. Everyone, but everyone remained safely armoured beneath the protective and bullet proof folds of their religion. No one wanted to come out of themselves, no one wanted to risk being open. No one really wanted to risk friendship. No one wanted to get close to anyone. You would simply attend mass, get your religious fix, then go off till next Sunday, or the next day if, like me, you were a daily attender of early morning mass. Some would stay for breakfast with the clergy. The conversations were usually very correct, superficial, dry, sometimes intellectual, and no one ever revealed anything personal about themselves. Very Anglican.
This was very painful for me, because most of my Christian formation till my mid twenties involved allowing myself to come into close relationships with those who were seeking to live in authentic community, which involved letting down our guard, shedding our personal armour and actually leaving ourselves vulnerable and open to having real relationships with one another. T
The results were mixed, but generally positive. I had some very close friends during that time. But it all eventually disintegrated and for many good reasons. Here I won't go into my reasons for being in the Anglican Church. But with the loss of my earlier Christian community, I was in need of some kind of support or ballast, no matter how grey and impersonal. There were positives, but still at the expense of living and being in a way that was really fully human, fully authentic, and fully open to others, fully open to life itself.
When I went to stay with my friend in Colombia, I knew that I was going to have to shed all that armour and baggage that I had accrued during my time with the anglicans, especially if I was to in some real and poignant way channel Christ and the Holy Sprit for my friend, while making myself open and receptive to the blessing that God was going to offer me through my new friend. I now realize that in order to become fully Christian, I would have to become fully human. In order to become fully human I would have to stop being Anglican.
So, in her passive-aggressive way, the archbishop kicked me out of the church by siccing her layer on me, and all because neither she nor my parish priest were interested in giving me any pastoral support at all while I was going through this crisis of change. This is just as well. I am now aware that they would have been incapable of helping me, since what was really occurring was God leading me out of the Anglican Church. for this reason I forgive them both for how they have hurt me, and now I can move on. I am not interested in renewing contact with them, because we are in such different universes. And that's okay. And I really do wish them both well.
Now I am moving on, in a spirit of love and forgiveness. As far as reconciliation is concerned, that can only really occur when both parties are fully willing, and each is fully prepared to accept responsibility. This seldom really happens, but that is no excuse for not continuing to love, continuing to forgive, continuing to see or at least to look for Christ in the other. But we sometimes are going to have to be willing and prepared to look through the curtain of tears and blood, because without suffering there is not going to be any love. They are inextricable.. Weeping may endure for the night, but joy comes in the morning!
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