What once was magical

I've been looking for the YouTube vid of this ad for over a year: it was on last year, and I was delighted to see it again. There's just something about the jingly, festive music (which is, by the way, written by Frederick Delius: Three Small Tone Poems, with this movement usually called Sleigh Ride, sometimes Winter Night: I looked it up!). The cookies and ornaments coming to life (and the snowman!) are enchanting, though, surprisingly to me, some people find them creepy.

I have trouble with Christmas, specifically what the culture has done with it. It's shark-infested waters now, one massive greed-driven buy-a-thon, and often not much else. We are really trying to pare it down, in part because Bill is retiring in the spring and we won't have much money, and it's going to happen in stages. We want to buy gifts ONLY for the grandchildren, with perhaps the adults getting a charitable donation in their name (which is something I would love to "get" - imagine giving someone the opportunity to give for Christmas!). Even with the grandkids, we want to start paying for things they can do, activities like horseback riding and crafts, rather than "stuff" that they will soon get tired of, leaving their parents to try to Craigslist it so there's room to turn around.

I remember, and this gave me a chill, someone going on the radio, an expert on traditions, and the interviewer said, "So! How did this Christmas thing get started?" At the time I was quite a devout Christian, and my jaw dropped. No longer do we celebrate "Christ" - mas, unless we're fanatics of some sort, those nuts who go to church on Christmas Eve. No one seems to remember that - traditionally, at least - a baby was born of Mary in Bethlehem, and THAT is how it all got started: the gift-giving originates with the Magi from the East (Magi being the root word for "magic").

When I was a kid, everyone seemed to have what we called a "manger scene", and we had one imported from Europe that was the talk of the neighborhood: the figures were 8 or 9 inches tall, the manger was backlit, and the camel so scrumptious I craved it to play with. Yes, there was and is lots of phony/superficial Christianity (I call it "Christian-ism"), in which church is mainly a gabfest and an opportunity for frantic baking and other jolly fundraisers so the church can have a brand new plush carpet. People stand around and eat things loaded with fat and sugar and starch and yak about their new car or whatever. Talking about your faith is awkward and seldom done. It's somehow an embarrassment. Church for the most part has become an old pair of shoes, or perhaps tattered slippers we can slip our feet into with total comfort because we know exactly what to expect.

I miss the feeling of wonder, I mean the wonder beyond cookies coming to life: the sense of holiness, which now makes me feel like a schmuck who didn't know how to do it right. I used to shed tears while taking communion, and I know that people gossiped about me and called me names that weren't very flattering (because I overheard it more than once, though they pretended they weren't doing it). At the same time, we were encouraged to "feel" the service, to have some sort of numinous experience.

People washed up on shore, usually people in the midst of personal crisis, and they almost always disappeared as soon as the crisis was averted. For them, the church was a safe, comforting womb. For me, it slowly became a tomb, a dry hole where I could no longer seek the living water that was too far below surface to access.

I needed water from the rock, but somehow or other I was considered a bit of a nut case to actually pursue it. I didn't want to make brownies or Nanaimo bars or serve on committies, which was the "proper" was to contribute to "worship" (a term I now associate with a kind of idolatry, throwing yourself on the ground and begging for mercy - and believe me, no one did THAT in that place). The few times I did try to serve on "teams" (which was the new, hip name for committees), I was pretty much told what to believe.

Anyway. . . I started with Christmas, didn't I? And I ended up here. I didn't decide one day, "gee, I think I will walk away from everything meaningful in my life after 15 years". It was more like, "I think I've had enough." There was no one, not ONE person I could talk to about this, as it just made me look like a traitor. I scrambled around with it for several years, alone and despairing, and one day (I didn't even realize it at the time!), I walked.

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

Death of a church

It's not always sad when something dies: in fact, doesn't everyone, doesn't everything die in its own time?  But the death of a once-vital community is sometimes pretty sad to watch.


When I stumbled on this video while looking for something else, I felt a jolt from the past: this was Park Street United Church in Chatham, Ontario, the church I attended from birth to age 16. It's typical of the sort of edifice you saw back then, a huge brick building in traditional style, with stained glass windows, a gigantic pipe organ, varnishy-smelling pews, dusty red carpet, and cavernous echoing acoustics.

Well, maybe not. As a kid I don't remember that echo. That's because the sanctuary would be full most Sundays. I have heard that at one point this church had something like 1000 members and adherents. It also attracted a firebrand, one of the most controversial ministers in Canadian history, a man who was eventually defrocked and even jailed for his pains.



I've written about him before: Rev. Russell Horsburgh, self-nicknamed "The Rev". He burned into the skin of my consciousness like a brand, so much so that I felt compelled to weave him into the narrative of my second novel, Mallory. This was the early '60s, and the Rev hit the ground running, implementing so many controversial social programs that many people wondered just what the hell they had signed on for.

I won't go into the whole story here, though I will provide a link to two excellent articles written about him, telling me things that my six-to-ten-year-old self never knew. But I did know some things: that people were buzzing and whispering, that the air was crackling with suspicion and accusations of teenagers drinking and even having sex in the church basement. Those who supported Horsburgh - and believe me, I know from subsequent experience that ANY mininster, no matter how corrupt, will split a congregation and siphon off a band of supporters - claimed it was a witch hunt. There were stories on national TV, newspaper articles, even a book (or two). 




I will quote (below) a postscript I wrote to the original articles, including some personal memories of Horsburgh, whom I remember as an abrasive, belligerent man. As he was increasingly opposed, he became paranoid and sometimes frightening. It was possible to see him as a martyr, but I personally don't doubt those rumors about the young people's group because I saw things going on that dumbfounded me. I  just didn't understand how all this could be happening in the church I was baptized in.


Postscript. Though the Gilberts have a right to their opinion based on what they were able to piece together about Horsburgh, the fact remains that they were not there when it happened. Public opinion eventually swung back in Horsburgh's favor, but my own view is that it swung too far.

I was ten years old when Horsburgh was removed from Park Street United Church. I remember a belligerent, browbeating figure literally pounding the pulpit as he harangued his astonished congregation about their unforgiveable rigidity and ignorance.

I remember three very drunken teenage boys hanging around outside the church late one evening, guffawing and slurring, "Hey, where's the Rev?"

I remember my father's best friend saying, "he's a psychopath," though at the time I didn't know what that meant.

I remember my mother, the least-gossipy person I knew, whispering to someone, "You know, they found empty liquor bottles in the church basement. And worse."

I remember a church bulletin that had an entire page bizarrely x-ed out. When my older brother held it up to the light, he saw that it contained a fulminating rant aimed directly at the ignorant fools of Park Street United, ending with a famous quote: “You ungrateful people should be ashamed of yourselves. . . . I am sorry I ever freed you from the tyrants and the papists. You ungrateful beasts, you are not worthy of the treasure of the gospel. If you don’t improve, I will stop preaching rather than cast pearls before swine.”

It was signed:

Martin Luther
Russell Horsburgh

The meltdown of a church is agonizing. I've been through it in recent years. I don't think things are ever the same after that, though everyone claims to have experienced rebirth and resurrection. When I watched the video I posted today, I began to see why Park Street United eventually closed its doors. Shot by a professional company, the video is an exercise in awkwardness. It's like the funeral of a very old, very unpleasant man who didn't have too many friends. There are half-empty pews everywhere, and a good many more that are completely vacant. It's as if those members who survived felt obligated to come. The sanctuary echoes eerily, and the service itself is dreary and interminable, without one single spark of passion, enthusiasm or joy.

In this video I see the United Church's demise played out in all its tattered glory. A few years ago the church hired a PR person and set up a web site called Wondercafe (no mention of church anywhere!), which strains so hard to be hip that it's embarrassing. This includes bobblehead Christs and the E-Z Answer Squirrel, which randomly gives yes or no answers to deep spiritual questions.

The fact that the United Church is burying its old identity under this squirm-inducing nonsense reveals a shocking truth: they're even afraid to say who they are! Afraid to align themselves with wheezy pipe organs and elderly congregants who attend because that's what they've always done.

Where is the passion? The only passion I have experienced in a church came from a man who in retrospect seems to have been half-crazy. He was brought down for his pains, and maybe he had to be. But when the church goes on and on and on about revitalization and finally paying off its debts, I see a sinking ship, and people trying to bail it out with a thimble.

Unfortunately (for me), the only churches I see with any real spirit are fundamentalist. The music is rollicking, the messages proclaimed like great good news. And I can't be any part of it. They don't need me because they're burgeoning already: a great many people seem to want to be told what to believe.

Meantime, we're left with E-Z answers and a strained attempt to appear "relevant". But watch this video, and you'll see it all laid bare, the demise of an institution that is slowly but surely heading towards oblivion.

http://www.cktimes.ca/archives/column/11/9271.html

http://www.cktimes.ca/archives/column/11/9302.html

http://www.wondercafe.ca/webisodes/ez-answer-squirrel

Margaret's Links:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1896300693/qid%3D1064537730/sr%3D11-1/ref%3Dsr_11_1/103-6792065-9634225

http://www.amazon.com/Mallory-Margaret-Gunning/dp/0888013116/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1319992815&sr=1-1

Rev. Russell Horsburgh: what I didn't know

 

The Controversy over Reverend Russell Horsburgh Continues After Almost Half a Century

The following article by Jim and Lisa Gilbert (part one of two) outlines in vivid detail the strange, turbulent, ultimately self-destructive reign of a United Church minister in a sleepy Ontario town. It was the early `60s, and I dutifully went to Sunday School at Park Street United every week, but in between the services there were whisperings that something terrible was happening with the minister. Though I barely understood what was going on, the episode, and my family`s subsequent flight to a rigidly fundamentalist Baptist church, left indelible scars on me. Years later when my church in Coquitlam hired a fraud who had to be dismissed  from the pulpit, anguish bubbled up from those buried memories, made worse by confusing, fragmentary information and the poisonous fear that comes from not knowing. A few years ago I tried to google Horsburgh and came up with exactly nothing, so these two articles from 2008 were a revelation to me. I reproduce them here out of gratitude that someone finally made an attempt to make some sense of "the Horsburgh affair". They filled in many informational gaps, while at the same time leaving out a lot of emotional context that could only be experienced by someone who was there. Though I do not agree with all of their conclusions, I am grateful to Jim and Lisa Gilbert for clearing out some of the cobwebs from a dark, scary, and extremely traumatic episode from my childhood.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

I felt that I might bump into him around the very next corner. His larger-than-life presence drifted in and out of my possibly overactive mind. Whispered teenage voices seemed to be almost audible amidst the quiet of the once former church. There were muffled giggles, whimpers, hushed outrage and hearty laughs that seemingly emanated from everywhere and yet nowhere. I wandered around the former Park Street United Church trying to visualize a man I had only seen once or twice and a scandal that I, as well as most of Chatham Kent, had largely forgotten.

There's a strange mixture of the holy and the profane that seems to permeate the many rooms of the slightly forlorn former church today. Although it has been almost fifty years since the silver-tongued voice of Reverend Russell Horsburgh mesmerized, mocked and motivated those seated amidst the deep, dark pews and the sacred, stained glass windows, his presence still lurks like a forlorn and forgotten spirit that longs to speak but cannot or....dares not.

The former church was so quiet that I suppose I could have imagined many things and the mere closing of the eyes conjured up a hundred visions and revisions. Sitting in the former sanctuary of the silent structure in 2008, it is possible to imagine a time, some forty eight years ago (1960), when Park Street United Church in Chatham, Ontario was described as a "preacher's church" and the most controversial minister ever to step inside its doors was about to make his appearance.

With its population of over a thousand parishioners Park Street was considered to be the second most powerful church in the London Conference and placement there as a minister was considered to be a "plum job" leading to a promising and powerful future.

When Reverend Russell Horsburgh took over the reins of pastor at Park Street in 1960, President John F. Kennedy was still alive, the Beatles were playing for a few pounds in Liverpool and the distant growing din of a new generation willfully embracing sex, drugs and rock and roll had yet to reach the sensitive ears of those church-going, God fearing, conservative residents of Chatham, Ontario.

If there were whispers of change in the air, they were ignored. Those things happened in Detroit or Toronto but not in the safe, innocent and quiet backwaters of Southwestern Ontario. That, however, was to all change the day Reverend Horsburgh stood up in the pulpit and began, in grand oratorical fashion, to outline his vision of the church's future.

"The Rev", as he soon came to be known by the young and those that admired him, looked at things in Chatham's Park Street Church that never were and instead of simply asking "why", he dared to ask "why not?".

Described by those that knew him, or thought that they knew him, as being impetuous, impulsive, caring, rebellious, creative, maddening, charismatic, contradictory and a hundred other things the new minister wasted little time in "opening up" the church. Park Street United Church was, under his guidance, destined to be open seven days a week. He longed to take the church out into the streets and bring those in the streets into his church.

Between 1960 and 1964 he, amid many other things, launched a teen drop-in center, organized youth basketball nights, set up teenage counseling sessions, arranged group therapy sessions, put a pool table in the church hall, and held regular teen dances on Saturday night.

He also, during those first four years, organized a series of Sunday night lectures where he invited, among many others, a rabbi, a Catholic priest, Lester B. Pearson (whose father had been a former minister at Park Street), Virgil Fox ( the famous church organist) and Marian Anderson (the renowned black opera singer) to speak to anyone who chose to attend. The attendance at these presentations was overwhelming. The church, each Sunday night, was "standing room only" as all residents of Chatham and Kent County, no matter what religion they espoused, were invited to have a glimpse at an exciting outside world that had rarely, in the past, come knocking.

Those concerts were followed up by a series of "sex lectures" that ran from October 20th, 1963 to December 8th, 1963 entitled "The Modern Crisis In Sex Morality". While the world mourned and anguished over the assassination of a progressive young leader who seemed immortal, the charismatic "Rev" was intent on bringing the voice of reason and logic to teenagers, as well as troubled adults, who were woefully ignorant. Ignorant about sexual matters as well as about a world that seemed to be moving much too quickly and losing its innocence on many fronts.

The lectures dealt with such innocuous topics, by to-day's standards at any rate, as "going steady", "petting", "lifting sex out of the gutter" and "date bait" but in the 1960s these topics were perceived, by some in the church, as opening the church doors to sex, drugs, rock and roll and, I suppose, Satan himself.

Thoughts turned to whispers, whispers turned to murmurs and murmurs turned to open dissension out in the pews among some of the conservative members of the congregation. They whispered of a minister who listened to no one, who was an ego maniac, who was much too friendly and way too permissive with their children, who allowed too many strangers (some of them black) into their church and was, like the 1960s in general, moving way too fast.

There were others of course in the church (and well beyond the church doors) who considered Reverend Russell Horsburgh to be a saint who embodied the essence of Christianity and who was attempting to save not only the youth of the church but the very church itself.

The scene was set for one of the most controversial events (up to that time) to occur within Canadian church history. It was to occupy the media across Canada and North America. It was to bring the former City of Chatham much unwanted attention, inspire three books, a play, a record album, destroy a man and create a local controversy so powerful and so divisive that I had to think long and hard about bringing it to light once again.

However, after almost half a century and so many other much more horrendous scandals and crimes allegedly committed by the clergy, I felt that it was time to revisit Reverend Russell Horsburgh and attempt to put the incident into a balanced, objective and modern perspective. I wanted to explain both sides of the issue and try to see the good, the bad and the ugly in this really sad story that hints, in many ways, at an almost Shakespearean tragedy.

Next week......I shall try.

---

Jim and Lisa Gilbert are local, national and international award winning educators and historians.

Bitter fruit: why I left the United Church

Those last two spirituals, stumbled upon while trying to find something else, so pierced the core of me that I wondered if I could write about the central dilemma of my life (at long last!). After many years of intense involvement with the United Church of Canada, and after varying degrees of satisfaction/frustration, I "walked". There were many reasons why I walked, chief among them (I thought) my dire disillusionment with leadership. Yes, I know ministers have a tough row to hoe, but I also think churches have a way of drawing to them ministers who reflect both their strengths and their most dire, unacknowledged weaknesses.

In some cases, they even draw evil. What does this mean, and, more to the point, why doesn't anyone recognize/admit it? What sort of spiritual blinders keep the so-called faithful from seeing even the most glaring kind of light?

From needing the church as a way to belong, contribute, and express my feelings about God and Jesus, I ended up feeling like I was in a box. Not just any box but a shoebox that I was supposed to squash myself into. Suddenly - or maybe it was not-so-suddenly - all I could feel was limitation, lack of oxygen, and bitter alienation. I cannot even tell you how lonely this was. I became deeply disaffected, and there was no one in the church - not one person - I could talk to about it. I knew it would be misinterpreted. Or, worse, perhaps it would be interpreted correctly.

I had something happen to me that I really can't describe, and for some reason - maybe very obvious reasons - I link it to Hurricane Katrina back in 2005. I obsessively watched those stranded souls - marooned in a stinking hell we can't even imagine - as they cried out for help, help, help. I watched old people die and be covered with whatever was available, maybe a plastic tarp. I saw hungry, dehydrated babies, glassy-eyed like in those ads for Save the Children.

The ordeal went on forever. I began to wonder if there could be a benevolence in the universe that "loved" everyone, that "cared". The Christian model of God was supposed to be an omnipotent deity, remember, one that was capable of changing everything. Like the poet in The Hound of Heaven, he swung the earth a trinket at his wrist, and we were expected to dangle from it like insignficant little charms.

So what does worship mean? It seems to me it means a kind of surrender, a submission to what is perceived to be a power greater than ourselves. It's a bowing down, at least of our heads - or a kneeling - or outright prostration. Lowering yourself. Worship doesn't mean love, it's something else, something quite else, and it began to scare me.

(This just popped into my head as a sidebar: a First Nations preacher talking about being forced to adopt the white man's style of worship. "They told us to close our eyes and bow our heads in prayer. And when we opened our eyes, our land was gone.")

Though the church claimed to allow me all kinds of freedom of interpretation, increasingly I found that freedom ebbing away. It was subtle at first, but soon I began to feel we had to shape our lives, not around our own apprehension/comprehension of the deity, but around the church's. I saw this as a very conventional and limited model, no renegade cries of hallelujah, no embarrassing professions of salvation. If you were saved, and United Church people don't talk about being saved very much (or a personal Saviour or even the Devil), then keep quiet about it or you might bother people.  And if you're committed, you have to Serve, which means doing thus and so. You can't just fill a pew. Go and bake something, for heaven's sake, or sit on a committee and pick on fine points until the cows come home, solving nothing.

Though we were expected to keep our faith journey pretty much in a one-block area, I saw no such restrictions on clergy, who sometimes had agendas that were not so hidden.  In the 15 years I attended, we went through some doozies: one minister decided, without permission from the congregation, to allow CBC television cameras into the sanctuary on Sunday morning to further a "cause" that would raise his spiritual profile, improve his media image, and lift up his wife as a heroine and role model for oppressed women everywhere.

It made me sick. But nobody said anything. Not anyone. Stepford Syndrome had already set in, a dry rot worse than I could have imagined.

It was not ever thus: early on in my involvement, I tried to share some things that went to my core, leading worship services, doing Biblical readings and poetry and even dance and drama set to classical music. People were polite, but I see now that it didn't really fly. The starchiness inherent in churches (I mean "liberal" churches) eventually communicated to me a lack of openness to anything new or different. Being a little tired of their perception of me as a creative flake who really couldn't help it (and whom, by the way, they generously tolerated as a kind of social work),  I gave up and stopped doing it.

Recently I went with a friend to visit Christchurch Cathedral in Vancouver, a magnificent edifice in the old style, full of stained glass featuring Biblical figures that could not have been inspired by human beings. I used to come here to pray, hadn't been in it for years, but this time it was a whole 'nother place. It was the smell that hit me: that old-varnish, dusty-hymn-book smell. The echoing emptiness of the place. The huge pipe organ. I felt my throat constricted as by a collar and leash. I could no longer bend my knee and worship: as my friend meditated with her eyes closed, I kept looking at my watch and wondering when I could get the hell out of there.

There were and are many other aspects to my discontent. A few years ago the United Church set up a trendy website called Wondercafe (hey, make sure you don't mention church or God or Christianity or anything spiritual, but set it up as a sort of Sunday Starbuck's). I see this as a fairly desperate attempt to overcome the largely accurate public perception of the church as outmoded and dull. But they went too far, having some sort of squirrel-figure that gave answers to moral questions, and even offering bobblehead Jesus figures for sale. (No, I am not kidding: kind of like that buddy Christ in Dogma).

It sickened me, but everyone else seemed to either ignore it (what did this have to do with them?) or display a mild acceptance, even enthusiasm. I couldn't figure it out. The church was hiding behind something, I didn't know what. But whatever it was trying to do, and I guess it thought it had to do something, it didn't update the essential dustiness and boredom of liberal Christianity.

Same old hymns, for the thousandth time. A seating plan that isn't even made manifest until you try to sit in the "wrong" place. (After I "walked", I made three more attempts to find a church home. Twice, when I went to sit down, an elderly person said, "No, my family sits there." One old lady even put her hands on the pew beside her. Get your ass out of here!) Superficial friendliness exists, all sorts of it. But what lives underneath it, if anything? I remember a few people washing up on shore over the years who were in some sort of personal crisis, but they immediately left when that crisis was resolved.

There was all sorts of other stuff going on in my church (which I came to privately call Dysfunction Junction),  including hiring a minister so corrupt he had to be fired, and unceremoniously running another minister out of town after nine years of service (and surely we could have sat down with her and gone over our grievances? Apparently not. Nobody said anything until it was too late.) Underneath the friendliness and the Sunday starch, I saw cruelty, all the more awful for being subverted, pushed down and denied. If you raise even one objection, unless you have an immediate and total solution, the messenger will be shot. Problem solved.

When I left, no one called me, but perhaps it was just as well. After fifteen years of somehow trying to fit in, I got tired of the lockstep and had to abandon the whole thing. During our big meltdown over leadership, in which the entire congregation was embroiled in a kind of civil war, not one person seemed willing to take responsibility for hiring a minister who turned out to be a complete fiasco. He was a con artist and a manipulator, but why didn't anyone see that? (If they had, would anyone else have listened?)

I think in large part, we saw him as desirable because he was a black South African who constantly referred to his "pals" Nelson Mandela and Bishop Tutu. At last we had an opportunity to transform our bland pseudoliberalism into something far more exciting. We'd have the most politically correct leader in the whole Lower Mainland! Such power, such cachet, even if only second-hand. This would blow those sad little churches with gay ministers out of the water.  No one was willing to entertain even the possibility that hiring him was a way to increase our prestige in the community, not to mention raise our profile as an "inclusive" congregation who even accepted black folk, so long as they had the right connections.


It all went bad because he wasn't who he said he was. I don't think he was exactly evil, but I often heard that word bandied about. (The Council Chair once fumed, "He's a nasty, evil little man.") Without a doubt he was a shallow con artist with a smooth exterior, and we fell for him hook, line and sinker.  Unfortunately he flipped the race issue  and turned it to his advantage, calling his dismissal an appalling example of racism. The church was left in a tailspin from which it never recovered, in spite of our insistence that we had "healed" and moved on.

But if a church could be so blind as to hire a man like that, how can it make clear-headed judgements about its multitude of unsolved problems, systemic problems that go right back to the founding of the church?



The mess my church created was a big part of my disillusionment, but I was also astonished and shattered to find I no longer believed in God. Not the God of dusty hymn books and pipe organs, anyway. There was no "big guy in the sky" calling the shots. If there is anything, it is an indwelling love, not always within our comprehension, and a dizzyingly complex Creation that quite literally came out of nothing.

So am I Christian or not? Probably not, but the only real Christians I know seldom or never set foot in a church. They live and embody it, and don't even talk about faith or worship because they don't have to. They have the quiet gift of making others around them feel comfortable and OK with who they are. If there's a task needs doing, they show up and do it. They don't say things like "if there's anything I can do, just call me" to a person struggling with devastating bereavement. They call them and say, "How are you?", then listen for the response. No unsolicited advice, no psychobabbling, no social work. And above all: no staying away.

Do we really need Christ any more? I'm not sure, because my personal relationship with Jesus has gradually devolved from a dazzling connection with a personal saviour (eventually fizzling out from the cold water the church threw on it - no embarrassing displays of love, please!) to blankness and complete bewilderment. We turn Jesus this way and that, make him whatever we want or need him to be. Many Biblical scholars are now coming to the conclusion that he didn't exist at all.

I tried the Unitarians for a while. Nice people, mostly elderly, and far more welcoming than United Church folk. But the "sermons" I heard were talks about people's hobbies, photography and music and the like. No mention of God or prayer or anything spiritual at all. I almost felt like I was at a Kiwanis Club meeting, or maybe Toastmaster's. 

The other two United Churches I tried nearly suffocated me with boredom. I kept looking at my watch. I didn't feel comfortable trying to butt into the little conversational knots of two and three in the hall downstairs as people ate fat-and-sugar-laced baked goods washed down with tepid tea.

I guess I don't belong anywhere now (in spite of my constant references to "my" church), which is sad. It hurts me more than I can say. Recently I was shocked but not surprised when two of my dearest friends, a married couple who gave tirelessly to the church for years and years, were asked to leave. So I have given up the frantic (or whatever it was) search for "sanctuary". If church happens again in my life, it will have to come about through a natural turn of events.

So what do I miss most? I guess it would be the singing, and when I hear spirituals like the two I posted, something in me just aches for it. I wonder sometimes if some mysterious force has hit me like a stroke of lightning and smashed my spiritual life all to hell. I can't pray any more, not like I used to, because I just don't see what difference it makes.

If there is an ultimate power, someone who is in charge of everything, how in the world can we convince him to do what we want? (Do this, God. Do that. Why would we pray at all unless we wanted to change things? Can't we trust that God is doing OK on his own?) And if a thousand different people pray for a thousand different (probably conflicting) things, and none of it comes true, do we go on praying, in hopes that we just somehow didn't do it right? If ONE prayer is "answered", say, wiping out the infidels in the Western hemisphere, does that mean that those people are more beloved of God than the rest of us?

While it may be true that disillusionment is just proof that you harboured illusions, spiritual disaffection - if that's what it's called - is particularly devastating because it strikes at the heart of matters of life, death, and ultimate reality. We expect better of our friends when we're down, or lost, or full of tears. We don't need pats on the hand, Bible verses prescribed like medicine, or more pans of brownies. If the so-called people of God can be this shallow, this dogmatic and self-deluded, how indifferent are the people who walk outside the margins? The pulp so bitter, how shall taste the rind?