Other People

  I was raised with the usual stuff about "other people."  Don't upset "other people."  Don't do anything "other people" might not like.  Well, we know you and what you're like, but what about "other people"?  Mightn't they get the wrong impression?  Didn't Jesus live in fear of someone, somewhere getting the wrong impression?  Our lives were lived in fear of giving the wrong impression.

  It's 1994 and I have a problem. I know that the way my church group works, we are supposed to be attending church several times a week if we want to maintain Gold Membership status.  It isn't codified, but we all know how it works.  If you come to every church thing each week (that's three on Sundays, and two during the week), this means you are Serious About God.  It means you have a right to an opinion. It means you can hold your head up and aren't hiding anything or needing to feel any shame. Once you start only coming out to maybe two services, though, your status starts to wobble.  It might be negotiable, with work, of course.  If you abstain from the right things (movies, alcohol, swearing, dancing, television, fashion) and look very business casual/cleancut, then you might still have a right to an opinion.  If you are male, you might be able to help out at church too, which is what I want.  But no one's going to let me do anything. 

  It's 1994 and I have a problem.  I believe strongly that I should attend Sunday morning (worship) service, but only if I feel in my heart a genuine 'desire' to go.  If I don't feel some divine urge to go worship God, then I don't think I should go.  I think it's like lying.  If I show up out of duty, or to humour "other people" (because they collectively take it as a personal insult on behalf of God Himself if we don't show up, if I (to use their language) "pass up a single precious opportunity to honour our Lord's dying request that we remember Him"), then I am cheating.  I know it.  I know that if I don't feel like going, and I go anyway, that this will be just fine with them.  My Plymouth Brethren Brownie Points will continue to tot up.  I can keep my accounts in the black with them so long as I made the weekly appearance, whether I mean it or not.  But I won't let myself do that.  It's cheating.  I know I don't deserve that group recognition as someone who is Serious About God.

  It's 1994 and I have a problem.  You see, increasingly, I don't want to be there.  They've had a division. Everyone of a certain type (young, alive, open-minded and hearted, wiling to listen, to bring about change) has moved on and gone elsewhere.  I'm left with the serious people. They just purposely executed a cull of the unserious, and I miss them and feel that they (we) have done something really wrong and that no one cares.  We all pretend they just died.   I'm no longer allowed to attend Youth Group activities because I "have questions" and "am confused."  I am having a huge allergic, toxic shock reaction to the place, and one which has been coming my whole life.

  Most Sundays I wake up with my alarm and sit in bed, trying to find deep within me some tiny spark of wanting to go out.  Increasingly I can't.  One time I've missed a record three Sundays in a row and have shown up before the dire "entire month without showing up" has passed.  I'm sitting in the Meeting Hall, looking uneasily around, and I pray "I'm here.  Are we cool?"

  And I don't hear a voice, but there is a thought in my head that sounds like it got put there.  The thought is "Don't even pretend this is about Me.  It's about them.  It always is. You know that."

  And I am rebuked.  I know that Sunday morning is supposed to be about Him, but it's about me and this group and my slowly losing my grip on membership within it, as I indulge myself in hanging out with unapproved Christian friends of the "asking questions and seeing the foibles of authority" type, reading nonBrethren Christian books, getting a nonChristian roommate, drinking the occasional alcoholic beverage, and going out to public entertainment like concerts and movies.  For me it isn't rebellion, it is trying to do the bible the right way. The freedom is the point of the exercise.  It's why Christ died.  But it's a point none of us are allowed to make, neither "by lip or by life."

  It is 1998 and I work most Sundays.  I go out every couple of months.  I know SO much crap about the people there and what they have done to each other and to "other people" that I can hardly look at them.  I know what they've done to people's hearts, to minds, to bodies and bank accounts.  I know about all kinds of horrible things being done, and it's not about whether I can forgive them or not. It's about them still doing the same stuff, and the system becoming a tool used to hide these things and punish discussion of them.  They know I'm not willing to play ball.  I know things and though I'm not blabbing, I know them and think they should stop.  So they call me into a room and question me.  They question me about my other Brethren friends, they question me about how I can not want to attend on Sunday. They question me about my doctrine, about my beliefs, about my occasionally drinking alcohol.  (how can I do that when younger people with less willpower than me might imitate it?)  It's all a sham.  They kick me out.  

  It is 2000 and I sometimes show up on a Sunday.  A few times a year.  I have to sit at the back with the nonmembers. I can't take communion.  I can't take any role in the goings on. I am now like a woman there, required to sit silently and let the men who are Serious About God run the show.  Unlike the women, I do not have a proxy (husband, brother, father) who brings back news.  More than one husband or son was used as a puppet for his wife or mother's views being taken to these all-male meetings. The ones I may no longer attend either.  But I show up on Sunday sometimes.  There is no pastor.  The service is collaborative.  I am not allowed in it anymore. I'm audience.  Now I can watch people worship God.  But I'm not allowed to take communion, because they say I don't care about Him.

  I'm not going for God at all.  I'm just checking things out.  Seeing if there will ever be any forgiveness for me.  I don't see a real point in showing up (which nearly kills me) only to not be allowed to take the communion when I get there anyway.  I have asked them to readmit me and they have smiled like sharks and informed me that they don't understand me.  How can they feel right about taking communion with someone they don't understand? 

 I tell them that they have created a situation in which, as they are shunning me and not reaching out to me, forbidding me to attend any form of social function, and never phoning or otherwise checking up on me to see if I am alright, they have guaranteed they will know me less and less.  I point out that me showing up on Sunday, sitting at the back, and then leaving if there is any food or social stuff going on, isn't going to help them know me either.  They acknowledge my logic, but stick to their guns.
  But I show up sometimes.  Everyone either pretends I'm not there or smiles brittle smiles and tells me they're SO glad that I've come back to the Lord.  Many of them shake my hand to greet me, in direct disobedience to the traditional withholding of the "right hand of fellowship" to people like me.  There aren't many there anymore.  Maybe a third of how many there were when I was going to school.

  And in the intervening time, I've been thinking.  I've been reading and talking to other people, Christian and not so.   I feel like my head is full of thoughts and if I so much as allow my brain to think (just once) in that room, it will blow the roof off.  It's a room filled with people carefully not thinking any number of things.  The deal is that everyone help everyone else not think.  Group unthink.  Just saying the wrong thing will cause thought. I feel like the whole place is packed from wall to wall with towering houses of cards.  Simply my walking around or breathing can knock some bit of it over, resulting in a wail of confused anguish going up.  Don't I know how it works?

  An old lady comes up to me, shakes my hand and says "There are SO many places we could choose to be on Sunday morning... it's it nice to know that we are here, that we are where THE LORD is in the midst, and not just at a human church group created by men?"

  This is a shibboleth.  It's a test.  A password is being sought.  The password is "Yes.  You are right.  It is lovely.  So much better than being anywhere else.  Good to know we're in the Only Right Place."

  And I fail it.  I say what pops into my head.  Before I have time to think, I look at her in the eyes rather speculatively, pause for a moment and then say, as if I'm looking at a particularly unusual specimen of giraffe,  "It's really important to you, isn't it, that this be the only right place for Christians to be..."

  She gives a stinkface and mumbles something and moves on.  Shibboleth failed.  My heart scented and found reeking of "them."  It's the "Us or Them?" test, and I haven't changed. I am still Them. And they don't understand me, so they're not admitting me. I am not ever going to be part of "us."

  And I know that they're wrong. I know that they are worse things than wrong. I know they are silly, closed-minded, afraid, uninformed, in denial, any number of things.  And yet, I can't feel good about not doing what they want.  I was raised to that and I have never beaten it.  I can't even pretend my church attendance is about  God yet. It's about them.  It always is.  And any church I go to, I can find a new them to make it about.

  It's 2002 and I'm at my grandmother's wake.  People who've been shunning me for five years come up, shake my hand, and show genuine regret that my troubled, dark, paranoid grandmother has died.  I feel their concern.  I decide that maybe it's worth another chance.  They're not monsters, right?  I phone one of the guys who kicked me out and leave a message on his phone asking if they will reconsider my case, if there is any way I will ever be allowed to worship God and take communion there again.  A couple of days later, when I am standing beside my grandmother's casket in the the cemetery, waiting for the funeral service to begin, he walks up to me and says they aren't going to meet with me. He walks away, leaving me looking at the casket in the rain.

  I phone him later and he says the feeling of them is that I am not broken enough in spirit, that I haven't shown enough remorse for writing the parody of their gospel pamphlet ten years prior.  I tell him that it's been ten years.  I tell him in ten years, even loses like dead grandmothers will heal.  I tell him he knows very well I felt remorse for what I had done, back when they first confronted me about it, claiming my mocking the church pamphlet was "a grave dishonouring of the name of our Lord."

  He agrees. He says he knows.  He says "I'm just saying what I was told to say.  They are a hard lot, collecting a debt in full, even unto the last mite."

 There is a they which isn't him nor me, and they don't like me, and not a single one of them will admit to being they. They is bigger than any one of them.  Each one is just doing the will of them. And them?  Is still not God.  But to me, I still feel horrible about myself if they're upset with me, if they shun me and mark me a wicked person to send loose into the world so that Satan may have his way with me, to use their verses.  God and me? We're fine, mostly.  The only real things I wrestle with are why I don't get to have a full-time teaching job, a girlfriend and a place to go Sunday morning where they accept me. I've tried other places. I've been trained.  They don't fit.  And they've never met anyone like me either.

  I take a new tack.  That church in Ottawa is never going to let me in.  In fact, they seem to be gearing up for another big split. There is hardly anyone even still going out to the little group where I attended when I was growing up.  I start showing up there on Sundays.  I have to sit at the back.  I come four weeks straight.  At first everyone says they're glad to see me.  Once I've been out once or twice, they start ignoring me again.  Gavin's sister comes up to ask who I am.  I am someone who knows her brother, and we are both working part-time for the same school board.  Knowing who I am, she nods and never speaks to me again.

  After I've been coming out this long, I ask an older guy if I could talk to him about maybe worshipping there, or about them putting in a good word for me in the Ottawa church that kicked me out?  He's not having any of that. He's going to direct me to the guy who used to teach me Sunday School. I start to try to ask that guy, when the two of us are the last two left in the room, and he shouts at me and kicks me physically out of the church I grew up attending. 

 "You know that's not how it works!" he shouts.  "I don't know what you did, and I don't WANT to know!" he continues. 

 The fact that what I did was write a parody of a gospel paper ten years previous, and the fact that no one in Ottawa will return my phone calls or letters is news he doesn't want to hear, and he kicks me out.  My dad is unhappy about the new division they're having over wanting to do another cull, to kick another crop of undesirables out. This makes my father one of the undesirable troublemakers too.  He's out also.  After part of a year in which if he doesn't attend church, he's not even able to recognize that he is even a Christian, he and someone who was part of kicking me out of the Ottawa church form a new church.  But it's not a new one, they tell themselves. They weren't kicked out.  They are the original.  The "old" one departed from the truth, and is not a wrong, new one.  They are the OG (original gathering.)

  It's 2010 and I'm at Ahren's church. There are hands in the air, electric guitars and almost no people.  My sister has been "triggered" by this experience and has run out in tears.  The whole thing makes me want to sneer nastily.  I've been trained to do that.  At one point in his bite-sized 35 minute sermon, Ahren sings a line of "Jesus Loves Me."  It gives me a cold, empty feeling, conjuring Sunday School and Mr. Wood pinching our ten year old knees if we didn't give him eye contact as he stammered his way through obscure old testament prophecy.  Afterward, everyone is saying how awesome it was, and how great it is to be them, and how no other church is so groundbreaking, free, honest, open and new.  They say "You know what I like most about us?  We're so divERSE!"  (there are no people there who aren't white. Pretty much everyone is between 30 and 50 too.  All middle class. All with kids.  All dressed business casual.)  And it all feels the same to me. Ahren's sister says to his wife and me "Didn't that just give you chills when Ahren sang Jesus Loves Me?  Brought me right back to those days!"

  "Me too," I said.  "But not good chills. Brethren flashback chills."

  Ahren's sister grabs my arm carefully, as if there is a snake in my shirtpocket.  "You're got to get HEALING for that!" she cries.

  "This is healing," I say.  "Scars are MADE of healing."

  She walks away and never really has anything much to say to me again.

  It's 2012 and I'm driving in my car.  I realize something for the thousandth time.  I can't feel good about myself and what I'm doing if anyone (them) have a problem with anything at all about me.  I judge my success and get my comfort not based on what God (the source of all, and ultimate standard as to what is excellent and worthwhile) wants, but based on if any idiot at all has any critical, mean-spirited crap to toss my way, or not.  That, my friends, is spiritual immaturity.
  The bible says to obey our earthly masters, but work for God.  As a teacher, this gives me permission to do what I think is good, what I think helps, what I think works, and work around the bureaucratic, mechanistic, unthinking them of the system so long as I'm not outright disobeying it.  I realize all seasoned teachers are doing this.   NONE of them believe in the system once they've worked for it for five or ten years.  But I realize that I never feel okay unless they are happy. And they're never happy. They don't pay attention, and if they do, they don't understand, and they try to tidy things up without understanding that people are involved.  People I'm teaching day in and day out. The kids and I?  We're us.  They are a machine. A money-making, vote-swaying, propaganda-spewing self-promoting machine.  It doesn't know us.

  And I realize that one of my central personal lacks is that God (excellence/worth) needs me to say things people won't like, and do things that work, things that no one else has thought of, or doesn't see the need for.  Yet if anyone judges or criticizes or disrespects me, I am a wreck.  A fighting, hissing, spitting wreck.  Leaving social wreckage in all directions in a society and an environment where all significant violence done by adults is social.

  There's no way I'm going to be able to do what I need to do in life if I can't get over worrying about what theoretical "other people" think, what "they" think.  I need to really deal with people one at a time and pry them out of their them identity and make them look me in the eye and see that I'm a person and look at them and know that they are too.  If I can't make them us, and join with them in leaving them out of the discussion, we won't be able to get anywhere.