Amish dreams: visions of the disaffected

 

God, I have crazy dreams. . .

 I don’t usually even remember dreams, but once in a while I have a doozie – not really a nightmare (I don’t remember those either), but one that is so bizarre it defies any explanation. It means what it means, I guess. As Bob Dylan put it in Gates of Eden:

"At dawn my lover comes to me
And tells me of her dreams
With no attempt to shovel the glimpse
Into the ditch of what each one means."

But this one - . Anyway, Bill and I were in New York (I think – at least, some teeming urban centre that I wasn’t familiar with, at all. Here we were in Gotham. The Big Apple. This Is The City.) We were standing at a sort of crossroads, a busy corner, although I had no idea where we actually were and even less idea of the names of the streets, what hotel we were staying in, etc. THEN – suddenly – I was sitting in a wagon. It was a wagon FULL of Amish people. Just chock-a-block. Not one of those smart carriages – this was a fairly primitive wagon, kind of like a covered wagon only un-covered. I didn’t quite know how I had gotten there, although I vaguely remembered climbing aboard. No kidnapping or coercion was involved.

But I was sitting next to this woman (she was on my right, maybe 30ish, very Amish in costume and demeanour, the kind of woman who already has a dozen kids) who kept talking and talking. It was Amish talk, but as usual I can’t remember much content. Pro-Amish, of course, though since I was not handcuffed, I didn’t think I was required to join the cult.

BUT. And this was the hard part. Though I had climbed aboard somewhere in the teeming downtown, I had no point of reference. I had no phone. Where was my husband? I wanted out (or “off”), but didn’t see a way. I could have, I guess, said (and I think I tried), “Stop and let me off”, but the Amish woman told me “no, we’re going up to the Lake country”. I envisioned being away to hell and gone in some isolated rural community living completely off the grid. It was a helpless feeling. I was cut off. I was part of this. . . group. Religion? I finally said, “Can you take me back to where I got on and just drop me off?” They looked at me in bafflement.

Like most of my dreams, it didn’t “end” but just sort of petered out. Of course, my mind wants to put puzzle pieces together, so I wondered if this whole thing was an allegory for the church I attended for fifteen years. THAT ended badly too, though I had been disaffected and unhappy for the last three or four. I stayed too long, and began to feel a creeping sense of “we-think” – in other words, if you start thinking OUTSIDE that box, you are no  longer welcome. This coincided with a horrible meltdown in leadership that I won’t even go into. But still I didn’t leave!

Eventually, as I regained my mental health and saw the light, my relationship with the church also petered out and I no longer wanted to attend. I was tired of the whole thing. I now see mainstream church attendance as something out of the last century. Big drafty 100-year-old buildings being used for two hours a week, doctrine and cant that is always vigorously denied, hidden agendas that create constant guilt and a sense of inadequacy, an INSISTENCE that everyone is welcome and people can interpret God any way they want . . . but if you go too far, the minister will summon you to his office for a friendly chat.

The pandemic has virtually wiped out "liberal" church congregations except in a very limited capacity. Some have gone to “hybrid worship”, which sounds to me like something out of Soylent Green or some other cinematic dystopia. I am not sorry, for so-called liberal churches are an anachronism. We didn’t really help anyone. If someone in need came to us, they were given a bus ticket and a token for the food bank, all the way across town. And that’s it. People grumbled about having to pay for those tokens and wondered why people didn’t just get a job.

Oh, but one time we tried. Having dutifully brought our canned food donations to the church, someone made the mistake of getting up at the front and saying, "We also need can openers." To a person, the congregation roared with laughter. Someone needs CAN OPENERS?

The Amish thing, well, I’ve never had too many feelings about the Amish either way, except to say that we often hear about alarming genetic diseases that have not even been heard of before. The Mennonites, Hutterites, Anabaptists and Amish have been profoundly inbred for centuries, but as young people leave in droves to live more normal lives, the gene pool is getting smaller and smaller. Marry your first cousin? Maybe you have no other choice. So you end up with a sort of horrifying Habsburg situation, with children stillborn, hopelessly deformed, or dying of untreatable medical conditions.

The only churches which are flourishing now are Pentecostals, led by evangelicals who prey on the weakest and most needy. Shameless grifters, the sort that preach at us from our TVs, buy private jets with the congregation’s monetary “seeds”, and eventually get into sex scandals. I’m so tired of it all. We have two gigantic churches in our area, very recently built, which I  have heard are full every Sunday. Pentecostals. The United Church is foundering on the verge of collapse, and is even thinking of converting some of those huge drafty buildings into low-income housing (an idea that horrifies almost everyone!).  I don’t care what is happening to my former church now because it outlived its usefulness thirty years ago.

 Now I’m thinking: if that cart was pulled by horses, why didn’t I see them or at least smell them? Was it an oxcart, perhaps? DID I ever get off? The dream tapered off before I could answer any of those questions. But I would not willingly climb aboard any sort of wagon now, Amish wagon, bandwagon, wagon train with no end. Stop the horses – I want to get off.

Catholics, go home!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vs6qZd_xP1w

Oh. . . KAY. From the beginning, I've had problems with this ad campaign, and I have even more problems with it now.


Around Christmas time, the TV ad posted on YouTube (above) and a few similar ones began to run on CTV during the news hour. In fact, you might call it saturation advertising. The ad was obviously very professional, not some slap-up job recorded with Sister Mary Margaret's Smartphone.  (Blogger's note: I can't post YouTube videos any more, no doubt part of Blogger's sinister plot to suck all the joy out of this experience. Try the link above and see if it works - pray, please - or enter Catholics Come Home on YouTube.)


I guess everyone in these parts assumed Catholics Come Home was Vancouver-based, and that these ads were freshly-made and tailored for our local "market". It was a unique and even impressive form of evangelism that didn't pretend to promote Catholicism as some fun, up-to-date and hip experience where everyone claps and dances along with the hymns.


No magic squirrels, either! The E-Z Answer Squirrel on the United Church Wondercafe web site (a site so fearful and dishonest that "United" and "Church" don't even appear on it anywhere) put the kibosh on my own already-disillusioned connection to organized religion. In particular, I had grown sick of a shallow "faith" that strains to be hip while still singing 200-year-old old John Wesley hymns on Sunday morning.



It seemed to me that these Evangomercials, slick as they were, at least presented the Catholic Church as a religion, not some shallow gathering of people drawn by the fact that "anything goes" and sin does not really exist. I began to admire them for their honest portrayal of religion as religion.


Then I saw the date on this particular Evangomercial as it appears on YouTube, the same one I have seen during local TV news in the past few months.


It was made in 2008.

It was also made in the States, so it must've been sold to somebody in Canada. In other words, this ad and all the ads like it are a commodity, probably a package deal, with each ad dealing with a separate issue (loneliness, guilt, disillusionment with the Church, etc.)


2008! These Evangomercials (their word) aren't new, folks. They're so old you could blow the dust off them. Moreover, visiting Catholicscomehome.org is a pretty hair-raising experience.


The home page depicts three church doors, the kind with the pointy top, and each one bears a category: I'm Not Catholic; I'm Not Currently Attending Mass; I'm Proud to be Catholic. Each heading links to mountains of material, and when you actually begin to explore it all, the sheer weight and heft of it is overwhelming and kind of suffocating. Here is just one tiny snippet aimed at these foolish folk who still doubt the existence of God:

Twenty Arguments For The Existence Of God

More Featured Writing


The Argument from Change
The Argument from Efficient Causality
The Argument from Time and Contingency
The Argument from Degrees of Perfection
The Design Argument
The Kalam Argument
The Argument from Contingency
The Argument from the World as an Interacting Whole
The Argument from Miracles
The Argument from Consciousness
The Argument from Truth
The Argument from the Origin of the Idea of God
The Ontological Argument
The Moral Argument
The Argument from Conscience
The Argument from Desire
The Argument from Aesthetic Experience
The Argument from Religious Experience
The Common Consent Argument
Pascal's Wager

In this section you will find arguments of many different kinds for the existence of God. And we make to you, the reader, an initial appeal. We realize that many people, both believers and nonbelievers, doubt that God's existence can be demonstrated or even argued about. You may be one of them. You may in fact have a fairly settled view that it cannot be argued about. But no one can reasonably doubt that attention to these arguments has its place in any book on apologetics. For very many have believed that such arguments are possible, and that some of them actually work. They have also believed that an effective rational argument for God's existence is an important first step in opening the mind to the possibility of faith—in clearing some of the roadblocks and rubble that prevent people from taking the idea of divine revelation seriously. And in this they have a real point. Suppose our best and most honest reflection on the nature of things led us to see the material universe as self-sufficient and uncaused; to see its form as the result of random motions, devoid of any plan or purpose. Would you then be impressed by reading in an ancient book that there exists a God of love, or that the heavens proclaim his glory? Would you be disposed to take that message seriously? More likely you would excuse yourself from taking seriously anything claimed as a communication from the Creator. As one person put it: I cannot believe that we are children of God, because I cannot believe there is anyone to do the adopting. It is this sort of cramped and constricted horizon that the proofs presented in this chapter are trying to expand. They are attempts to confront us with the radical insufficiency of what is finite and limited, and to open minds to a level of being beyond it. If they succeed in this—and we can say from experience that some of the proofs do succeed with many people—they can be of very great value indeed. You may not feel that they are particularly valuable to you. You may be blessed with a vivid sense of God's presence; and that is something for which to be profoundly grateful. But that does not mean you have no obligation to ponder these arguments. For many have not been blessed in that way. And the proofs are designed for them—or some of them at least—to give a kind of help they really need. You may even be asked to provide help.

I will admit, I never made it to Pascal's Wager.


Much as I think these ads are professional-looking and even brave, they are the shiny surface which overlays a heavy, inflexible, centuries-old doctrine. The ads emphasize acceptance, unconditional love, and redemption of sin through Jesus: in fact, one ad portrays a flashback of a man verbally abusing a woman, with the man sitting there sweating and writhing in remorse. The answer? God, of course. But not just any God.


I can't really blame a denomination for trying to get followers back. The hemorrhage of churchgoers everywhere (except in radical fundamentalist congregations) is steady and inexorable. As far as I'm concerned, nothing can stop it. In the case of Catholicism, their unbending rules on homosexuality, abortion, celibacy of clergy, refusal to admit women as leaders, divorce, and even marital sex (only for procreation, folks!) are slowly rendering them less and less relevant. Society is leaving them behind, whether for good or ill (and believe me, there are times when I think it's for ill).

Bill Maher once presented a scathing satire of a Catholics Come Home Evangomercial in which charts and statistics appear on the screen, accompanied by a voiceover assuring parents that it was now statistically less likely that a priest would molest their children. "Come on back, folks!" Maher definitely has a point: festering scandals and horrific, inexcusable coverups are never addressed in any of this organization's material. Elsewhere in the church I have heard such rationalizations as "most priests are wonderful people" and "scandals appear in other places, too". Such cowardice and moral obfuscation masquerading as God's grace is abhorrent beyond measure.


But that's not all that bothers me here. I am sure that most Canadians believe these ads were made exclusively for Canadian television, by Canadian Catholics. But the truth is, they were produced by a vastly-different culture and are more than five years out of date, a huge span of time in a world that moves in an ever-accelerating blur. I just had to find the real source of this Evangomercial campaign, and it took some hunting. Then I found information on a seminar featuring the Rock on which Catholicscomehome.org built its Church.


Tom Peterson – Catholics Come Home


Click here to register for this event Thursday, December 13, 2012

6:30 am – 8:30 am

Join us for our monthly breakfast. This is an opportunity to start the day with Mass, an inspirational speaker, and the opportunity to connect with other Catholic business people. You will leave inspired ad better prepared to be a Catholic leader.

Mr. Peterson has over 25 years of experience as an award-winning and record-setting national corporate advertising executive and entrepreneur. His prior marketing, advertising, and management experience includes: American Hospital Supply Corporation; Thomas Publishing Co., IDX Systems Corporation, Phoenix Medical Management, Peterson Sparks, Inc., and Peterson Advertising Corporation.


While on a Catholic retreat in 1997, Mr. Peterson had a profound reversion experience in his Catholic faith. Soon afterward, he received a vocational calling, and eventually founded Catholics Come Home, Inc. and VirtueMedia, Inc., educational not-for-profit apostolates, dedicated to promoting Catholic evangelization and the sanctity of human life.



Ohhhhh. . . kay, again. So this entire movement was founded, not by a priest or a nun or by anyone directly linked to the organization of the Church. I think Mr. Peterson saw a marketing opportunity after his "reversion" experience (and somehow, the word "reversion" doesn't carry very good associations for me). He has been at it for years, supervising these ads and, presumably, setting up a web site so thick with dogma that it's hard to get through even one article.


This is the state of religion in 2013. It's a business, and it must be run like one. The purpose of a business, as we all know, is to make money. The Church can't function without it. So here's the plan: draw them back into the fold with moving images of love, acceptance, redemption and good works, then if they have any doubts, hit them with Pascal's Wager. Meantime, all those little issues like abortion and gay rights and child sexual abuse are conveniently stashed: just get asses in seats again, and maybe this listing old dowager of a ship might not sink after all.

Why I stopped going to church

God! I have wanted to write a post about this for a long time, but every time I approached the subject, something stopped me.


Some sort of massive rock of grief.


Some sort of conviction that "someone" from my former church community would see it, become angry, feel sorry for me, try to silence me, or otherwise write me off.


For you see, after fifteen years of involvement that was often draining and frustrating, I had to leave. The immediate cause was leadership and the wrongheaded direction I felt we were travelling in; this had been going on for years and years and could not be pinned on a single individual. But as the Man used to say: if a blind person tries to lead another blind person, they're both going to stumble into a ditch.

Where do I begin? I want to start with the sense of scarcity that has become epidemic among "liberal" (i.e. not fundamentalist) churches in the past couple of decades. These churches, many of them meeting in dowdy old buildings that are outrageously expensive to maintain, are bleeding members at an alarming rate, and not replacing them. The reasons for this are either very complex, or very simple.


For a lot of people,  religion, the churchy kind of religion many of us were brought up in, now seems as dusty and antiquated as wheezy old pipe organs and hard, varnishy pews.  Most churches appear to be more interested in maintaining a pleasant space and keeping their own little private programs going than in even attempting to address the howling need among their fellow suffering humans.


So the trickle of exodus has gradually became a flood. As people peel off, not always consciously but because somehow they just don't get there on Sunday morning any more, the church's debt (which always seems to be overwhelming: isn't there a church anywhere that makes their mortgage payments?) just snowballs because there aren't enough members left to throw enough dollars into the collection plate.

What happens then is a feverish drive to make up the deficit, usually through inward-turning events like garage and bake sales mostly frequented by members. That's what passed for "outreach" in my former church. Most of the emphasis was placed on desperately trying to stay afloat. If you didn't do your part, guilt was laid on with a trowel. A few years back, you'd get a home visit from someone on the finance committee to talk over your contribution: in other words, how much you were giving, and how much you were helping the church via committees and other churchy agencies. If you weren't giving "enough" in the eyes of the church, the pressure was ever so gently applied until one day you discovered you couldn't breathe.


This attitude of scarcity just breeds more scarcity, not to mention a "help, help, we're drowning" mentality that is probably not the best thing for attracting new members. Asking people to get on-board the Titanic isn't very effective. The minute someone new comes in the door, the hands are out, and the lasso is thrown: come, teach Sunday school,  join this or that committee, join the choir! Get involved (but in our way, not yours: fit yourself into a pre-existing slot.)  And whatever you do, for God's sake, don't leave.


I wonder when my feeling of spiritual awe died. It happened gradually, and at first it took the form of feeling extremely alone. I was not able to voice any of my grief to anyone, or I would be ostracized, patronized or pitied, as in, "well, you know, she can't help it, dear." If I felt transported by a service, it was almost by accident, as everyone was scurrying around making the service happen, busy-busy-busy, and even busier afterwards at coffee time when the talk ran along the most trivial lines.

 









I didn't stay fifteen years for nothing, however, and I am sure there was a time when it all meant something to me, but I'll tell you this - I was never able to truly be myself. I had to be a carefully-edited version of myself, and weigh carefully everything I was going to say before I said it. This was so I wouldn't upset the applecart and be ever so slowly, ever so subtly, ever so ruthlessly edged out.


If I got carried away and cried during a service, I couldn't help it because I was evidently "suffering from depression" (poor soul!). The thing to do was remain in the middle of the middle, a kind of blandness marked by hoary old hymns from the 19th century and sermons that were generally very conventional and uninspired.  Don't upset the applecart, remember. Don't lose control.

Several years ago we had a meltdown over leadership, a very bad one (and forgive me if you've read this here before: apparently I still need to write about it),  but NOT ONE PERSON acknowledged at any time that we had created the experience ourselves by choosing that person out of all the other available candidates. He did not fall from the sky, but you would not know it from the victim mentality that prevailed in our church over the next several years, the sense we'd been "wronged" (by, in the words of the Council Chair, "a nasty, evil little man").


If you blow on a church and it falls over, doesn't that mean the structure is just a little rotten? Like is attracted to like, and (as the psychologists say) we tend to recreate the experiences that are most familiar to us. Such as dysfunction, poor communication and the oppression and abuse of the weakest members. But if anyone had suggested that these things were going on BEFORE our meltdown, the congregation would have been aghast.

And, needless to say, the messenger would have been shot.

The problem was "solved" when the nasty, evil little man was ousted by the larger church. Then came the long period of "healing", in which we replayed the awful scenarios over and over and over again, after which we told ourselves it was all over and stuck big glossy smiles on our faces.


For me, it was all gone, just all of it, whatever I had absorbed of the gospel message, of holiness, of compassion at the deepest level. I began to see things I could and would not see before. While a few other churches in our district were making a brave attempt at programs for the homeless (and by the way, they first had to overcome the common perception that no homeless people existed in our community), our church steered needy people to a social agency whose office was so far away you'd have to bus for half an hour to get there, probably to be treated patronizingly. I think we provided them with a bus ticket.


So much for "I was hungry, and you fed me; naked, and you clothed me. . . " But what does church have to do with any of that?

And how's this for muddying the waters? While that "nasty, evil little man" was in charge, he was horrified that we turned away people in need and insisted we keep some non-perishable food in the church to be given to people who were hungry. Everyone thought he was crazy: that's just not the way we do things!

I still long for a sense of community and spiritual belonging, but I see that when I had it, or thought I had it, the personal cost was astronomical. Financially, I gave more than I could really afford (because I couldn't live with the guilt if I didn't), and saw my contribution thrown into a giant abyss where it promptly disappeared, leading to cries for "more, more, more". Every annual meeting was the same. How I hated and dreaded them: it was a dirge of "not enough, not enough," and desperate ploys to make up a hopeless deficit. We seemed to sink a little bit lower every year.


But a hopeless deficit does not fall from the sky either. WE create it out of an entrenched mentality of chronic scarcity. If people stop coming, that situation doesn't land on us from the moon. They stop coming because they're bored, feel that the service is irrelevant, and need the time to catch up on sleep after an exhausting week of working long hours and looking after the kids.

Most conventional churches had their heyday during the Betty Crocker era, when men worked and women stayed home with the children and everyone dressed up in their finest on Sunday morning. It doesn't exactly work that way any more: not if your husband is a violent alcoholic or has just walked out on you, or you've just been laid off from your factory job and have nowhere to turn. It also doesn't work if all you can get is a Sunday morning shift. (I can't count the number of times I picked up subtle disapproval of people who worked on Sundays.) But most churches I know of "don't have the resources" for a service at any other time of the week.

This tells me everything about their priorities, not to mention their inflexibility and (perhaps unconscious) need to keep things the way they are.
For after all, "we've always done it this way" (and we've done just fine, thank you very much).


I sometimes go on church web sites, if they have them, and see a confused mess, with most of the links not even working. One had no email address. One had been "under construction" for three or four years. It was common to see the most recent events listed under 2008 or 2009.


It screams "out of touch". It screams "irrelevant". It screams "we don't know how to change, in fact we don't want to, so let's just hold tight and see if they come back".

There is very little acknowledgement or even awareness of the profound social turmoil that has thrown the care of needy people back on the church's resources. For the most part, government funding is no longer there. But it appals me to see how many churches protest that they have to put themselves first, to keep their little operation going from all those desperately-begged-for donations before they think about those people "out there", those poor souls (whom they'd rather not have in the sanctuary because they're messy and unkempt and drop cigarette butts on the driveway).


There's nothing wrong with being a little old lady. I'm all for it, as that's the direction I am moving in with frightening speed. But increasingly, churches are dominated by very traditional older women from the Betty Crocker era as older men die out and fewer and fewer young people join. A few years ago I went to an ordination ceremony with a couple of dozen candidates, and all of them were women between the ages of 45 and 60.  No men, and no new blood either. Maybe a 60-year-old woman can be a spiritual firebrand, but why not a 25-year-old man? Where are they,  and why are none of them even faintly interested?

But lest I come across as age-ist, let me tell you a story.  One of our most dynamic members, a great-grandmother who gave tirelessly of her time and energy for years, was asked to leave. She and her husband were presented with a report, a long list of grievances neatly typed-up, which listed all their transgressions over the years. They strayed from the Sunday School curriculum, probably making it interesting for the kids for the first time ever. He (a retired minister) preached a sermon that was a little hard to follow, and it upset people. I don't know what else they did except restore the church library from nothing and build professional-level sets for every pageant we ever put on (and this on their own dime, because everyone else screamed that they had no money).

They were coloring outside the lines, obviously, and even though every progressive thinker we ever heard of was begging people to do just that before the church sank, they were asked to leave. The minister apparently didn't want to get his hands dirty with this task (though, to be sure, that report had to be his doing). He had one of his henchmen do it for him. These two were my favorite people in my church. They were told to toe the line or get out, and the choice was clear.


I'm sorry, but I can't be part of this. It's not going anywhere. It's just not. I am tired of being squeezed for money I can't afford to give. I'm tired of editing myself, of biting my tongue. Of being so careful all the time, never saying what I really think. 

I was never much of a joiner anyway, so all those years of participation were kind of surprising. I'm not going to go out and run after another disappointing experience of listening to those howls of scarcity. I wonder if anyone in these increasingly-empty places has ever heard the story about the loaves and fishes. In my former church, people would be running around screaming, "We're running out of loaves, and look at those fishes!  Quick, pass the collection plate again!"


What would Jesus say? I'd say it would make him sick.

(A post-script. Re-reading this, which is never a good idea, I realize it  resembles a post from quite a long time ago called Why I Left the United Church. I hope this piece gets into some other issues, things I may have left out. The fact that I still need to write about it is significant in itself. Roots that deep are not pulled up without pain.)

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm