Mysterious

I live alone.  There's actually a song about that.  And something I do sometimes when it's Friday, and the work week is over (and I need to buy groceries and don't feel like it) is I come home and order a pizza delivered.  I've been doing this, sometimes a couple of times monthly, for a couple of years.

   The pizza has pretty much always been delivered by one or the other of two guys: 
   The first is a twenty-something guy who plays drums in a thrash metal band around here, who I first met when a kid at my high school wanted help recording their band.  They were brash, surly teens.  When this guy delivers my pizza now, though, he is warm and friendly and matured by comparison.  Realizes we have a lot in common.  No reason to be all "You're a teacher.  I by, contrast, am a fully formed human being" about things anymore.  Adult life yawns challengingly open in front of him, with no grownups blocking his path to it anymore.

   The other guy who delivers pizza is a guy in his late 50s.  Bald.  Dour.  White moustache.  Quiet, but with gravitas and character.  Exactly the sort of guy you wonder "Why are you delivering pizza?"  Doesn't have to talk much at all for you to know he has enough personality in there to address a room full of people, or nail and quiet scene in a movie.  A couple of times he's brought the wireless bank machine thingie, and the Savings account button has fallen off.  Then he's used the temple on his glasses to poke it for me.  He did that a couple of times, and then the  next time I used my own glasses to do it.
   I mentioned this to the young guy one time.  "I would never bring that machine" the young guy said, smilingly.  Pride in his job.

   Like I said, I've been ordering pizza on Fridays once or twice a month for a couple of years.  Have had only brief chats with whichever guy brought it.  I'm "the music guy, with the instruments" they catch a glimpse of through the door when they deliver the pizza.  They get asked "You know where this pizza is going?" and they say "Yeah.  Music-guy."

Now, this week I've been getting more than my usual dose of dealing with people who still go to my old church, or who left/stayed/got kicked out/removed themselves from it, and now meet at one you couldn't tell from the other one if I paid you to try to go do so.

   I've been trying to reconnect to people like this, and with a certain amount of success.  Of course we seem to trip over ourselves and falter and fumble around on our way to reconnecting.  Things like this blog are continually brought up as examples of things that are a/the problem with me connecting to Christians.  As things that supposedly make me impossible to deal with.  Needless, meaningless affronts to decency.  I feel like I'm repeatedly being asked to justify why I'm "not nice" on here.  Why I'm (it is felt) screechingly, over the top, crazy offensive, profane, heavy-handed, indecent and upsetting on a very deep, pointed level.

  The idea that I mean well is acknowledged.  Even the idea that maybe, despite my excesses and indulgences, I might be sometimes helping "some people."  Not people for whom church works pretty well, of course. You know.  The other people.  The 60-80% of Christians who aren't really terribly involved in a church most of the time.

   But let me tell you this: I never feel more left out in the cold than when someone who is claiming to be fairly happy in their church, most of the time anyway, repeatedly demands I explain why I'm different. Why I'm not nice (on here), why I'm not deep into a church, and so on.  When people suddenly pretty much go "Hey!  I think I just saw you loving Jesus and caring about the Church and about Christians, there, for a moment! You DO care!  I didn't know that!  Why can't you show that first? There's no way to tell!"

  I've felt terribly alienated and freakish this week.  Phrases like "extreme attention seeking behavior"  and the notion that when Brethren people argue with me, they are made to feel "like some kind of pawn in a sick game" do not make me feel nice about myself.  Wording like " rip up, push, criticize and analyze" and "mean streak" weigh heavily on a psyche as tender as mine.  Like the apostle, my blogs are powerful, but my bodily presence contemptible.  I'm willing to go through that soul-abrading stuff though, as Brethren people are claiming that it's nigh impossible to have talks with me without it feeling like that for them too.  And they're telling me that.  Along with demands to know why I seem to need people to admit the negative stuff they think of me.  Why can't I just "leave" that?  Why do I need them to admit how they judge me?  When they are only judging me in their Brethren hearts, and not their real ones.  I understand that, don't I?  They don't really resent me.  They actually kind of like me.  Not in their Brethren hearts, of course.  In their real ones.  And they wouldn't, in theory, actually ostracize me.  Not in their real lives.  Just in their Brethren ones.  Don't I understand?

   Most of all, the fact that I do not do things by Brethren standards anymore, having been freed from said standards and constraints by Jesus Christ in the 1990s, and so can now be seen to be comparatively at liberty?  Seems to put a barrier between us.  Why can't I act decent and nice and proper?  You know... Christian?  Do I think Jesus or Paul or Peter would have said a harsh word like I tend to do on occasion?  Exactly how much do I get off on continually upsetting Christians?  Why are personality and colour important?  Can't I dispense with those and be a glass of warm spit/milk?
  That's what it feels like at this end, anyway.  And I'm not getting it from only one (or two) Brethren people this week.

   So I did my week, enjoyed talking to some Brethren Christians online and in person a bit, but also, on some level, found that it really took it out of me to look at myself the way they see me.  More than I remember it does.

So I ordered a pizza.  And, the older guy came with it this time.  He brought a machine with all of its buttons.  For some reason, we connected more than usual and slid over into a Real Conversation.  I'd have invited him in, but he's working.  We spoke with me holding the door open,  and my cat sneaking timidly out into the hall.  Standing there, holding the door open, reminded me of things it is not lawful for men to utter.

  It transpires that he was raised in a messed up family situation around here, was an alcoholic by his teens, and found Jesus in a Brethren (yes) local group.  The group pointed him in the general direction of Jesus, and then he needed to almost immediately move on from them to try to find God more fully, in a far safer spiritual environment where he'd be allowed to grow, and not get smooshed.  Because they were ridiculous, apparently.  Very, very harmful to him.  He said it was like he needed to meet God, and their message about God and to go find Him was pretty much "perfect" at that point in his alcoholic, teenaged life.  He needed Brethren people to tell him what they claimed to believe was wise, about God.  To speak their teaching with him in the room.  Not to actually be around him, though.  Because then, the toxin started to work and he had to flee.  To find God really, he said.  Find out about that love and liberty.  Except for real.  From people who might be able to do it, not just have meetings and talk about the importance and "glory" of it.  From people who were free.  From people who did love.  From people with actual understanding.  From people who weren't trying to own it or claim it, or worst of all, defend it from other Christians.

   And so he went to bible school. Got degrees. Was deeply disillusioned by the reality he felt he saw there in the church industry.  That it was all about power and control.  "Politics," he said.  But he became a preacher and pastor.  Did a lot of street preaching.  Was a pastor in a church for over a decade, he said.

   He said his gifts were prophetic, in terms of being about common sense, external view, trouble-shooting and attitude mirroring.  You know?  Someone who could give an opinion, but who hadn't unthinkingly bought the story and drank the Koolaid, someone who wouldn't unthinkingly excuse everything and live in "let's pretend" and try to make people stop referring to too many of the wrong kind of real things.  And sometimes, some churches need to hire or appoint someone to keep both eyes open.  And increasingly, that was his job.  They needed him to deal with trouble.  Because it was almost all they could do to even admit there was trouble.  Then back to the happy.

   He said the more he told the truth, the more he got kicked out of groups and ostracized.  Especially if his official job was to deal with church problems.  His training is in counselling and human interactions.  Mediating.  He said he's been knocked around pretty harshly in his church experience.  His voice wobbled a bit.  It was stubborn.  Beaten down but not beaten.  He said the more he helped or trouble-shot, the more he found what happens when churches split.  He said when he would be asked to go "mend" a church that was going to split, he often had to report "I'm wasting my time.  There's nothing of Christ to work with here that I can lay hold on.  They are determined to split and won't talk about anything but power. There is literally nothing to do."  Made the higher ups angry.

   He says people think it's a 50-50 thing when a church splits, but it's always 20% go one way, 20% the other, and the rest mostly "go into the closet."  Stop feeling worthy to (and also stop wanting to) be connected with and involved in church life ever again.  Often they are scared and angry.  And the church groups call them bitter or say they weren't ever really sincere Christians, and let them go.

   He said this community around here is absolutely packed with people who have been very, very hurt by their experience of church.  Of it being driven by politics, power and control.  Said the community is full of closeted Christians with stories to tell, no one they want to tell them to, and no one who would listen.
  He told of one occasion when he reported over the phone that the church he had been sent to "mend" in Buffalo, New York was unsaveable.  It insisted upon splitting, as churches do.  He phoned and reported that he was wasting his time.  They said to try harder.  He said no. He said he was wasting his time and was going to stop wasting it.  Because wasting time is bad.  Sometimes God's not working.  Sometimes there's no point hoping.  This church went on to split, he said (the catalyst for it splitting, anyway, was) over whether the hymnals HAD to always be red to symbolize the blood of Christ, or not.  It was literally a red vs. blue thing.

   He said his childhood was very messed up.  He said he was a drunk then, but hasn't had a problem with that for twenty years and can't imagine having one ever again.  Said Jesus saves from stuff like that.  And that we're not special.  None of us.  He said it's about love, and any church which trades in control and power wielded by using guilt and shame?  Doesn't know about Jesus, no matter how correct its doctrine is, on lifeless paper.  He said when I'm dealing with people who don't know about love and freedom, it's improper to keep taking them at their word and calling them "Christians" like I've seen any sign of the real deal.  "You got to change your terminology," he said. "Refer to them only as 'people.'  That's all you know they are."
   "I can't seem to stop making satire" I said.
   "The Church badly needs satire" he immediately said.  "It has no clear picture of itself. Doesn't know when it's ridiculous. It needs it."

   He'd stayed longer than he should have, given that it was "rush night" at the pizza place, so he had to go.  We resolved to talk again.  I told him we'd been "trying out" churches for fun lately, and he said to try (for fun) the one he'd gone to twice, and that no one had been willing to talk to him at. The one that had been warned that he was an ex-pastor.
  And of course it was the first nonBrethren church I ever attended.  The one whose pastor I repeatedly affront. The one who says I "push people too hard and break them and they run away" from me.  The one who tried to help me and fix my attitude by listening to my problems with church (he's got training) but then got mad and resented me for having the problems I have with church.
   Perfect.  We both laughed, Howard the ex-pastor/pizza deliveryman and I.

   I can't tell you how magical it was to talk to this guy.  He asked if I knew what the origin of the word "religion" was?  Of course I did.  Ligature.  A tie or bond.  A fetter.  Something which confines one and takes away freedom.  Makes one a prisoner.  He nodded.
   We were two ships in the night, finishing all of each other's sentences, nodding and saying "Yup.  You're not imagining it.  It really is like this.  It really is this hard.  It really is this lonely.  For some of us, anyway.  Some of the time.  God bless you."  Do you know what it means when someone says "God bless you" to me, and I believe he means it?  There was no pity in it at all.
   And the young guy in the thrash band who delivers the pizza also?  Of course, it turns out that he was strictly raised by strict Christians and still has the guilty heebie jeebies if the other guy teases him about his "devil music."  Which he does, on occasion.  Just to watch him look uncomfortable.

   I just ordered a pizza.  But I got all that.