This Year's Montreal Conference

In my seventeenth year, I went to Montreal Bible Conference as usual.  And I was feeling the pressure.  I didn't have a girlfriend, and that wasn't okay.  I'd graduated high school, I looked okay, I liked girls, there were girls there from my own narrow culture, and I was supposed to "get" one (and then not fool around with her).

   The girls weren't into being set up with Brethren guys, though, so they opted out of the thing.  They stood around in tightly protective little all-girl clumps, hair stiff with spray, sublimal makeup hinted at in most cases, and modest skirts or dresses which hinted their figures might be nice also, without really displaying anything.  No cleavage.  No bare arms, collarbones or shoulders.  No knees visible.  But altogether delicious nonetheless, to teenage boys such as we were.

   We were like pandas in a zoo, all of us.  My uncle went around remarking on our lack of coupling, but it did nothing.  Then his wife suggested a "nice" (read: not unBrethren/not a whore) girl I might like, and she looked okay, and so we exchanged addresses and resolved to write.  We did for a bit. It didn't last.  I wasn't Brethren enough, even then.  My thoughts and feelings weren't quiet.  I begged and pleaded with God to make me, and resolved to myself to become, "normal" (Brethren usual) but it never, ever happened.  Instead I remained who I am today.  You know.  Me.

  But when I was eighteen, a guy introduced himself to me at Ottawa Conference the next spring, right when it was obvious to me that this girl had driven seven hours to attend a conference in the very city I was living, with the express intention of being in a different room from me the whole time.  And so I befriended this young guy, and he asked me about her, and not long after, he was dating her.  They did that for a bit.  It didn't last either.  Not like my friendship with the guy and his family has.

   

   And then last year.  Around my birthday.  One whimsical comment about how I wouldn't ever be allowed to attend a bible conference again, being excommunicated and all, and someone brave and quite extraordinary decided I should be allowed to go, and 'oversaw' things somewhat.  Like a guardian angel.  Looking out for he who is treated as dead.  (A few someones were involved, actually.)

   And I went.  It was utterly terrifying to go, but in the end it went more than just okay.  No doubt my blogged description of how it all seemed to me, decades on, was deeply insulting to some.  I don't feel good about that at all, but I felt quite impelled to do so anyway.  As one of my moore obscure (as opposed to wildly successful) songs asks rhetorically "How do you move in a wasp tent?  How do you move in a bee teepee?  How do you move in a wasp tent?  Caaaaaaaaarefully."

   Thing is, in the end my going made it uncomfortable for the people I grew up with (the ones who remain in the culture, I mean, who personally kicked me out of it for being who God made me and for doing what I believe He wants me to do, and who are currently still shutting me out in every way, as a policy).  In fact, I imagine it made them feel intruded upon and stabbed in the back.
  All that I can live with.  I don't feel good about it, but I can live with it.  Sometimes I want to be Banquo's ghost from Macbeth (the ghost come to the table of Macbeth to confront those who stabbed him and left him in a ditch), and I want to come see everyone when they're at table, and moan and go "woooooooo" at them a bit.  Especially in October.  But that wasn't the extent of the uproar.  My actions caused more problems for those special people who reached out to me than I even understand today.

   I would never have gone.  Never.  Not if I knew what it would mean to the endless delicate balance/tapdance/house of cards/juggling act the best of those Brethren people are damned to spend the rest of their Brethren lives doing, so long as they submit to that teetering human system with any degree of devotion.  Never.  Far better to have lain on the futon and watched Fellowship of the Ring.  Far better.  It was not worth nearly 700 mostly anonymous people viewing the blog entry.  Not worth it at all.

    For me the whole thing was also rather like getting into a diving suit and going down and seeing what is left of the sunken Titanic (how have the pious fallen).   I guess I was doing it just for the novelty, and to be seen by those who need me to be gone.  Feeling like Rip Van Winkle or a zombie of some kind.  Seeing them keeping on keeping on, like nothing's happened.  Needing all of us thousands who were edited out of existence to never infringe/impinge upon, or be relevant to the core 'reality' there.  They need us to help them forget.  By going away and being very, very quiet.
   It's a very, very delicate thing.  Because the bible says, not that we ought to be one/united.  No, it says we are.

   There are always wonderful people who may belong to a given human system, but who are exceptions to any generalization one could make or pervasive attitude seen in said system.  The apostle who leaned on Jesus at the last supper calls them "overcomers."  I know people make them feel like absolute shit sometimes.  Like nobodies.  Like people who are "too much love and not enough light."  But John knew what to call them.  Overcomers.
   Somehow they can be different.  I saw it in everyone who was able to smile at me with their eyes.  It might have been even more widespread than just those warm, open people, too.  Because all these people who were supposedly set free from the power of sin by the death of Jesus aren't at all at liberty to love as their hearts direct them.  They are under bondage.  No sudden moves.  Don't think or feel anything inexplicable, and if you do, for goodness sake don't share that around much.  Don't broadcast that.  It might get on everyone.

   No loving deed goes unpunished, seems to me.  Bucking the human system when it's being its most inhuman is a betrayal that is never forgiven.  Because that's when it needs you most.
  No mercy.  Not in circles which seldom make any attempt to even give lip service to scriptures about forgiveness, mercy, lovingkindness, grace or longsufferingness.  I guess to them that's all "love" stuff.  Not as important as the "light" stuff.  (love stuff = love.  light stuff = correctness.)  I guess you can 'get free' of any concern about practically living out any scripture about love if it can somehow be demonstrated that you are focused upon a "light" concern instead of doing that.  More important stuff.  Policy.  Politics.  Traditions we have a hundred-year-old tradition of not calling that.  Because correction is god to many and connection be damned.  It all purports to be obedience to the one "half" of Jesus' legacy.  As if that were even possible.  Christ is not divided.  If you think you have half, you've got nothing.

Needless to say, I will not be going to Montreal Conference this year.  I connected with some amazing people there a year ago.  But they live on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall that is my birth culture's alternative to 'outreach' and their traditional approach to the Oneness of the Body of Christ and to Christian community. This is how they demonstrate that they understood the bible when it told them we were all one.  The Church.  But there are overcomers.  I was fortunate enough to meet some.
   These overcomers were mostly "corrected" for having connected with me.  Were warned they could end up just like me if they "weren't careful."  I will not go out to church events and make people have to choose between supporting the system by giving me the cold shoulder, or bucking it by smiling and waving.
   I'm supposed to be dead, remember?  Spiritually, anyway.  Alone and without God in this world.  If I weren't, they might be obligated to restore such a one as I to the land of the living.  And they're not up to doing that.  Because apart from the overcomers, they are nothing but a valley of dry bones themselves.

  Connecting to me cost many of those overcomers.  Made it next to impossible to get by in that system.  I can't imagine it was worth it for them.  And I feel horrible for them.  Deeply.  Because being noticeably, acceptably Brethren really matters to them.  Maintaining connection to that tiny correct-obsessed fraction of the Christian community is vital to them.  They'll sacrifice almost anything for it.  Themselves, certainly.  Me, clearly.  It's something they take terribly seriously.  Much of them is built upon it.  They think God wants them to do most of it, and who knows?

   All I know is being Banquo's ghost from Macbeth isn't easy sometimes either.  But at least I can drift where I please and terrify children.  And walk through walls that to me, aren't even there.  Boo.  Woooooooo.  Happy Halloween.