9 – Hope, Part 2
About a year ago, I wrote a letter titled "Hope". It was about finding faith again, about wanting a spiritual community, about falling in love with it all again. The morning after I wrote that letter, I stepped into an Episcopal church on the first Sunday of Advent. The church was small and earnest, proudly uncool—no skinny jeans or pop culture references. I loved it immediately. It felt like the group of Christians who identify as "miscellaneous" (AKA me) belonged there.
I thought I was going to happily remain there for the rest of my years in grad school. Unfortunately, that did not become the case. Several weeks ago I left this church, and this Advent we are once again church-less and searching. It's a long story, one that involves some very painful choices, but where I was loved and supported at every step of the way. As far as church endings go, mine was likely far less painful than many others.
No one tells you how to leave a church. If you were serving in ministry, how do you back out? Do you meet with your pastor? Do you just stop coming, and let people reach out to ask? How much of the "why" do you choose to disclose, and how much to you keep to yourself? How do you discern the difference between a church with a bruise or a church with a rotten core? When we left, I accepted that I would likely lose all the friends I met through the congregation. Do you try to stay in touch? What if one of your friends is married to one of the reasons why you left?
I wish I had the energy to be angry. Everyone is so angry about toxic church leaders killing congregations, and they should be, I'm glad someone is. But I'm just tired. I have so much love and energy to give to a community, and I'm tired of searching for one that's worthy of it. I feel impatient to get to the end of this process.
"Hope requires accountability," I wrote last year. "If we believe we can be better, then the expectation arises that we must do something to make that happen. Hope can be a liability in a society with powerful people that want to perceive themselves as victims of their circumstances rather than active change agents in bringing goodness and justice to our world. Hope inspires action." This is even truer now than I realized when I first wrote those words. The action that hope inspires me to is often clear to me immediately, but in this season my inner vision feels clouded. The clarity and direction that comes so naturally to me feels suddenly missing, like a phantom finger I can't touch.
This year Sarah Bessey wrote that the Carmelite nuns replaced the 4 themes of Advent (hope, peace, joy, and love) with 4 verbs: waiting, accepting, journeying, and birthing. I laughed when I read these, because to replace hope with waiting in this season feels so on-the-nose that I would never ever write this into a fictional essay; it would be redundant. But this is life, not fiction, and redundancies are often signs of emphasis, if you're paying attention. And I'm paying attention. I am very, very bad at waiting, but I am paying attention. If waiting is my action, so be it. I'll keep these palms open to receive whatever is coming to me for as long as it takes.