Thursday, June 15, 2006

You Are Not Alone! Yeah!

So I met a friend the other day, a kindred spirit. I can relate to the Indigo Girls in their age old song Virginia Woolf. In the 1200 Curfews album the intro to the song talks about making a friend, a connection through time, through the pages of a book. I met my new friend, Lauren F. Winner through the pages of her "memoir", girl meets GOD. Of course she has no idea who I am, but in some ways she knows a little bit of me, because I find that I am a bit like her. I haven't finished the memoir, and I'm certainly not Jewish, but in so many ways I have felt and experienced what she expresses about church and worship and my own humanity. I folded down a page to quote from, so let's see what it says.

"So I church-hopped, sometimes visiting as many as three churches on a single Sunday. I manufactured good reasons never to return to any of them, but the real reason was probably that it was easier to stay anonymous and aloof than to do the hard, intimate work of actually becoming part of a church.
By the time I return to All Angels', two things have changed. They have called a rector, whom I take to immediately, a sharp and careful man from India named Milind Sojwal; and the very anonymity that made church-hopping appealing has begun to wear me down. I am tired of looking for a church, tired of having my spiritual community be just a patched-together group of Christian friends scattered across the four corners of the earth, folks I can call at any hour but never pray with face to face or eat cheese straws with during coffee hour. I am tired of not being expected anywhere on Sunday morning. I so need a church that it takes just the gentlest push to fall, as though exhausted onto the downiest of feather beds, into All Angels'. "
Now, Adele, if you are reading this, Yes...I'm finally reading the book you let me borrow before the hurricane! Thank you for thinking of me. You know me even better than I suspected. I can't wait to read more. The honesty with which she shares her experiences in church services, in interactions with Christians and/or just ordinary people is refreshing. You Know I've thought those same things before, but kept them to myself.





Well, nap time must be over cause I hear my daughter meowing like a kitten! Gotta go.

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