thoughts from services

I like the current pastor at my church, even if as a commuting part-timer he can't always be there.

I know some people are a bit challenged by him because he does tend to be more "political" than some have been in the past, and he does seem to spend a lot of thought on how being a Christian should affect how you act (and what you spend your money on, for example). I'm sometimes a bit challenged but I don't have a problem with that.

(I was more challenged - in the bad sense - by a past one who seemed to have a bit of the....what was the old heresy, Manicheanism? Where you believed that only spirit was good and the created world was bad because human sin was so big that it managed to corrupt everything else? - in his outlook)

Anyway, two things struck me. He quoted another pastor's homily/prayer, about how we really aren't co-saviors of the world (and yes, that's true) but that we can still say "a small yes" to God and I really liked that. Because one thing I feel strongly is that I'm just one woman, I'm busy and scared and I can't usually do big things....but I can do small things, including saying that "small yes" - in how I live my life, in how I treat people, in maybe resisting participating in some of the cruelties around me. I can't figuratively march on Birmingham, but maybe I can hand a cup of water to someone who is...

And all too often, it seems, at least in faith matters, we hear that all-or-nothing thinking: that if you're not out there fighting injustice hard every day of your life, you're essentially collaborating with those perpetrating the injustices and that makes me tired because it seems to lack an appreciation of how some people live - or how some people just ARE. I could never get up in someone's face and scream at them about how they're wrong, though I maybe could go and find the person they wronged and comfort them...

The other thing was in his table invitation. He remarked something about "welcoming those who were dismissed from other tables, so that they may be fed" and while I understand that he was making a statement that applied to other people (the poor, who literally may need to be fed, and also LGBT people who are not welcomed in some faith places but are in the Disciples), I admit I was struck by it and had a sudden mental image of me, at 12, in the school lunchroom, being told by more "popular" and cliquish kids "No, you can't sit with us. Go somewhere else" and while I had my sack lunch in my hand (so I'd be physically fed), that rejection....well, I was left emotionally hungry.

(And yes, I know one of the current school-fights is "should kids be forced to let anyone sit with them at the lunch table" and while it's nice to be able to sit with your friends and all, there needs to be some balance, and there need to be people watching out so some kids don't wind up as small sad Flying Dutchmen trying to find a table that they can eat at)

And that's why I like the congregation I'm in. And why I like some other "church people" (The woman at AAUW I was talking about is a Presbyterian minister): they don't look at me and see the kid who was (as some of my classmates said) "ugly and your mother dresses you funny," they see me, and they see me as a child of God, and most of them welcome me and you know, that's such a HUGE thing.

And I wonder now as an adult, where most people I encounter seem to like me and many of them seem to be deeply fond of me: what changed? Did I become more tolerable as I grew up? Did other people grow up and lose all the insecurities and silliness that made them reject other kids for inscrutable reasons? Or is being in the milieu I am in now so different from the strange, money-and-status-obsessed bedroom community in which I grew up, and the frankly Lord of the Flies sort of junior high I attended?

It's a mystery to me, but I'm glad that whatever changed, did.