Why?

Most people with my experience of Christianity do not keep a blog.  Most do not write songs and books and have conversations about it all, looking to arrive at conclusions about much of it.  And I'm continually asked the same thing (and anyone who knows me is asked the same thing too):

  The words "Why can't you/he just...," followed by whatever they themselves have done.  

  Why can't I just forget about Christianity and 'live my life.'  

  Because of Christ himself.  

  Why can't I just forget about my own church and go to a different one, one which won't shun me and punish any quest to try to find God in a more authentic way?

  Because it is my roots, it formed me, and my parents and many of my relatives and friends are either 'in it' in terms of being in membership and bound by the constraints of that human system, or their hearts and heads, much like my own, are trapped in that kind of thing and are trying to escape it inwardly and find God. I meet Sikhs, Muslims, orthodox Jews and Jehovah's Witnesses, and whether they stay in it, or "leave," they have head-work and heart-work to do, and work that doesn't go well if attempted in solitude. I have family members and friends who tried to "run" from what had been planted inside them.  It has never worked out well.

  Why can't I just find another church that I like?

  God has increasingly made me believe that "church" is, sadly, what we do instead of Church.  Because we refuse to assemble together with all the Christians in our vicinity, no matter how few there are.  No, we have to measure them against ourselves and decide they are very, very like the precise kind of Christians we ourselves are, or we're not letting them in the door.  My own subdivided and resubdivided Christian corner of the Christian Church always taught me that there was One Body of Christians.  And I think that was right.  They spoke very frowningly against doing anything that might be an action which suggested, more loudly than words could, that maybe there wasn't One Body.  They warned against 'denying' that there was One Body.  And I think that was right too.  So, Second Baptist Megachurch of Houston, we have a problem.

  But here's the big one:  Why can't you just shut up and go away?

  That's fair.  I am not universally enjoyed by content Plymouth Brethren people.  So why am I "troubling" people?  Is it a venomously vindictive spirit? Am I "telling it in Gath"?  (if I recall the bible story aright, what was referred to in that little axiom was already common knowledge in Gath, just like in this case.)  Something I created was once described as "a burr under the Saddle of the Church."  This all deserves due consideration.

  In the 80s, I saw bad things happening in my Christian circle.  Also, fake things.  And things that were headed in a bad direction, it turned out.  And if I pointed at them, or mentioned them, I was made to feel like I was lying, delusional and just causing trouble for no reason.  And definitely like I was certainly the only person ever who'd ever, ever thought (and felt and experienced and said and done) any of it.  I was made to feel like that fairy tale character who thought he was the only one who couldn't see the Emperor's new clothes, and was, therefore, missing something.

  Thing is, that wasn't true at all.  It wasn't just one fairy tale character anyway. It was every single person in that story who was seeing the same thing every single other person was.  Only, it took a simple-minded child to point the reality out, with no regard for his own dignity or the social consequences of his actions.  No idea what it "costs" you in human terms, to deal with what is, rather than what helps you politically.  Real cluelessness.  Maybe that child is me.  

  I suffered alone (and I did suffer...). I felt like a freak, like not-a-real-Christian, and certainly "unworthy of the calling to which we are called" and all for no reason whatsoever.  And it wasn't a tiny bit of malaise.  It was huge.  It was sanity-shattering.  Nowadays, I'm a pretty solidly sane person (I've done ten years of high school teaching without aid of any mood-altering substance, prescription or otherwise), but I wanted to be dead a lot, back when I attended Brethren meetings in my youth. Because I attended them.  Because of how tight that vise placed around my temples really was.  Because of how dwarfed and stunted my heart had always been kept.  I was being rejected for not being moldable enough.  For not being content.  For rocking the canoe I was being cast into the river from.  For being different.  And if it was just me wanting to be dead, and if it was just me being rejected for being different and made to feel like I wasn't a real Christian, I probably should shut up.

  But this isn't the case at all, either.  There are untold, uncountable human offscatterings of the movement.  Flotsam and jetsam washed up at the base of Orthanc, like Merry and Pippin.  There are uncountable numbers of us who were all alike different, and damned for so being.  It is actually starting to look like there were more people who were different than ones who were the same.

  When I was caught right in the thicket of it, I felt wholly, everlastingly alone.  Of course I still feel like that sometimes.  Too often.  But now I am starting to meet those many, many others who were alike alone, made to feel and required to think the precise same things, with much the same results.  (And some I will never meet because they are dead.)

  Our stricter Brethren cousins to the right (the Ravens, the Taylors and so on) have ex-members making forums and websites.  They have grievances.  Legal ones, in some cases.  And they get sued for talking about the truth. They get 'cease and desist' orders.  They simply don't have the kind of money and power their church elders do, to guarantee they can speak with impunity.  They talk to me on the Internet.  They are almost alike all atheists now.  And they are all, to varying degrees, victims.  One would almost think that maybe God didn't want it to end up this way, either.  But the degree to which God will allow us to screw up, and screw each other up has me terrified lately.  It's one thing to believe He simple isn't there, and that we're doing all of this.  Far less comforting to believe that He is, and is letting all of this go on.

  No number of encouraging verse shards torn from the bible and photoshopped onto pictures of sunsets, rainbows or adorably crucified kittens is ever going to reach these folks anything like how Jesus (remember him?) did when he sat down with people, or literally touched them (no hand sanitizer around) and let them talk, showed he understood what sucked and why about being them, that he saw their flaws and mistakes and was willing to still talk to them. (that was one big run-on sentence.)  But what is likely to reach them, if the happy-burbly songs, quotes and t-shirts aren't cutting it?  What can help heal what was done to their souls by those who felt they did God-service?  I'm trying to find that out.  And the modern world works like this: I write things and others skim them, and then talk or think about it all alone, or certainly without involving me in that process.

  People read stuff I write because I know a tiny bit how a leper might feel.  Because I have been purposely made to feel like one.  (Outcast and unclean!)  I have come to the conclusion that it's not me doing it.  It is being done to me.  My hideous disfigurement is that I am not a Happy Church Christian™.  It is the lack of a stoned-looking smile when someone references or links to a Christian song, quotes a verse about being happy, or takes a stand against gay marriage.  And I am not, like most pastors of my experience, like a doctor with but a single prescription bottle for every single human malady, including church abuse: a great like big bottle with the word "church" written on it, with the small 'c.'
"Get over yourself and get into that church.  Don't you love Jesus? Now where's your smile?"

  Even lepers need a place to live.  And they need to not be ignored when they talk to someone, even if he isn't Jesus.  Of course they are repugnant to perfumed, serene, affluent sensibilities.  Of course it would be easier if they went away and died.  And believe me when I say they can feel that push to "get a smile or get lost."

  This is for them.