Dear XXX,
First, please forgive the less-than-personal feel of this
word-processed reply. My handwriting is reputedly (and admittedly) deplorable,
even to those used to my crabbed scrawl. I really enjoyed getting a handwritten
letter for a change. During my church tenure, handwritten notes were generally
a red flag. But it was SUCH a pleasure to read what is essentially an epistle, the
only aim of which is deepening and broadening relationship between fellow
travellers.
Quite without meaning to, I seemed to develop an M.O. as I
read it—circling parts that jumped out at me that I felt I wanted particularly
to respond to or reflect on. Inevitably, that will say more about where I’m at
than some forlorn pretence of ‘objectivity’. Some were things I could relate
to, others were an ingrained pastoral-care reflex, a deformation
professionelle from years of teaching and Ministry and now chaplaincy.
Anyway, I’ll plunge into some of these circled bits in order over the next few
days, and see where my reflections take me. May they be ‘dulce et
utile’—pleasing and useful.
First, though, I want to reiterate that you’re one of the best XXXX I’ve seen on three continents. Measured, strategic,
persistent, inclusive, knowledgeable, analytical, deeply moral and
heartfelt—the conclusions to which you led even the most ideologically
resistant in my church were inescapable. That said, you are allowed to stop, to
have boundaries that are no one’s business but your own, and which require zero
justification from a free, self-directed adult. That UU 1st
principle of the ‘inherent worth and dignity of every person’ applies even to
the politically non-engaged. You’re no good to anyone if you’re broken, least
of all to yourself. Your energies have been outward-directed for a long time.
Give yourself a break. If you don’t, who will?
“I contain multitudes” Walt Whitman said. I don’t know about
you, but as a fellow neurotic, I have always had this voice in my head as long
as I can remember who tells me I’m not good enough, that I’m a fraud, that I will
struggle to deserve comfort or happiness. You experience this as the
gaslighting imposter syndrome. Only quite recently, I have become better at
telling myself that this voice inside me has never done anything in life
other than be mean to me. One of us is sad and sick and useless, and it ain’t
me. Becoming best friends with yourself, as you say, is telling that voice
regularly to go XXXX himself, whenever it pops up. That is absolutely required
to be able to grab your oxygen mask, don it with a clear conscience, breathe
deeply, and enjoy the benefits of not suffocating. Our self-flagellation serves
no one.
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| Talk about unproductive... |
Leaving things you’ve built behind, and letting attachment to them go. Yeah, that’s a tough one! It’s hard because it puts us in mind of our mortality and the ultimate, cosmic futility of individual human endeavour. The power-brokers at XXXXXXX are probably claiming what they liked of my work as their own, and burying what they didn’t. C’est la vie. Though I can’t any longer influence what they do, the clean, sharp break still seems the wisest course, not merely because doing so was a centuries-old protocol of free churches, but because it embodies and fulfills the self-effacement inherent in true service. The Ministry of the church is what matters, the particular Minister does not. Facing what I knew to be the end of an important and intentional identity felt like the most grown-up thing I’d ever done, and I hope I face my final oblivion with half such certainty.
When I begin to kick myself about it, I remind myself of the
way I respond to those who belabour me about the importance of the person
of Christ. If the ideas/values/principles he’s meant to have espoused were inherently
good in themselves, then his historicity (the particulars of the magical birth,
miracles, and resurrection) need never have happened, nor require my belief that they did. When I think of exemplary self-sacrifice at all (talk about a
sharp, clean break!), I imagine his death to be the ultimate faith that the
ideas will live in some form after him. The alternative to self-effacement is the
personality cult, a species of idolatry, a flat denial of the transience of all
material forms.
Unitarian churches, having a few central principles but no single
text or narrative, necessarily tend toward personality cults, especially if
Ministers don’t know when to leave, when enough of you is enough. This was
happening in the latter stages at XXXXXXX Never trust anyone that puts you on a pedestal, no
matter how flattering, because the pedestal itself always belongs to those who
put you on it. Had I stayed, my contract would not have run out until 2023, and
I’m not sure a graceful, emotionally intelligent exit could have been managed
by then. Maybe this is the case in all intentional communities, XXXincluded.
It’s not false humility if you genuinely humble yourself to a greater good. This means sacrifice, and thus suffering, but also offers a
way through suffering to equanimity. While it would be false to say I’ve
achieved that state, I’m further along than I was a few months ago, so maybe it’s
a process that will continue. I did some good things there, and one of the
things that truly became my Ministry was the leaving of it. It was a hard thing
to do well, given the ample ‘friendly fire’ and the enormity of the task, so I am
allowed to be proud of all that and find something new that’s worth doing.
To venture into new lives, you have to leave old ones,
knowing you can’t go back, not really. You can visit, but it’s never the same
because the observer (you) will have changed (this is the Heisenberg principle
at work in our own personal histories). Doing the kind of work you’ve done is a
young man’s game, best done in the vigour of one’s flowering season. But flower
is meant to become fruit, and fruit is meant to ripen. If that’s where you are headed
now, that’s only natural: the bright promise of the spring becoming the hard
realities of the harvest—what you’re damn well left with, what the scope of it really
is, what you might usefully do with it for those who come after in the time
remaining to you. Time to pick the fruit before it falls--and it must fall, if
we don’t pick it.
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| How nature says "pick the fruit" |
The Tolkien quote reminded me of Voltaire’s Candide, the eponymous character having finally settled down at the end of his wide-ranging, bizarre adventures to a quiet, domestic life. His teacher, Dr. Pangloss, still insists that since everything has worked out in the end, we still live in the best of all possible worlds. “Yes,” Candide says, “but we must still tend our garden.” The scope of his stewardship has shrunk, but it’s manageable, and needs his agency to yield what it can. He drinks the wine of the country, praises the God of all things, and lets the world be the world. There’s nowt wrong with that.
That we resist this, well, maturing, is a way of
clinging to youth, and as much as I love Tolkien too, he wrote in, and never really
left, the sheltered workshop of a school. Now that I’m back in an academic
environment, I can see that even for the adults there’s something infantilizing
about that culture. Plus he was writing the Rings as the British Empire was
summoning up all its will and resources to conquer the great existential threat
of its day, and the Judeo-Christian trope of glorious sacrifice was understandably
at the heart of his work and that of many other of his peers (like C. S. Lewis).
It always reminds me of their debt to William Blake and the promise that a new
Jerusalem was at hand if only we took up our bow of burning gold, its arrows of
desire, and mounted our chariot of fire. All that heat and light in the sacrificial
fire of youth (no culture ever used the elderly for burnt offerings!). But
fire is a temporal phenomenon. Stories that deal with what happens after
this fire expends itself, as it must, don’t make exciting reading or viewing.
After the forward thrust of one story expends itself, it is
always possible to begin a new one—having the learned the lessons of the old, and
taken a break long enough to answer the question: “Well, what now?” I have complete
faith that however you answer that, it will be well, and all manner of things
for you shall be well.
Obviously this all comes through a tired old man’s filter,
whose next story can only be how to face age, and then the only end of age. Naturally,
it says more truth about where I’m at than where you are, but I hope these
reflections are of use.
Thanks for prompting this epistolary. It’s done me a power
of good to reflect deeply on issues that are alive in you. I hope we can
continue. Say, do you mind if I blog this, if I keep your name and the
organisation’s name out of it? Maybe others will find it useful too. No problem
if not.
Yours in faith,
Rob
