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Heaven on earth, we need it now...This season of peace, joy and good will is starting to grate on me, slowly decaying my sense of sugar-coated inevitability. As I was cutting up fruit for Christmas lunch on the morning of the 25th, I was watching SKY News which was screening a lengthy report on the continuing work Medecine Sans Frontiers is doing in Southern Sudan, a region wracked by starvation and insidious religious violence. As infant children cried out in hunger, my sharp stainless steel knife sliced through mangoes and rockmelons, while a little girl was being treated for serious injuries sustained after being knocked down by a car, while the sick and starving walk for hours and days in suffocating heat I wash my sticky fingers and wipe the bench down, scraping watermelon seeds into my hand and throwing them into the bin.
Sitting in Church next to my mother later that morning, I asked myself where He is in all of this, is there really any balance in such horrifying contradictions? Is it fair that while I cut up fruit others starve? There is this seed of hope inside me, this instinctive knowledge that he is food for the hungry, that the currents of his love run strong and pure around the weak but I find it so hard to overcome my anger, my thinly veiled bitterness at the self-centred tilt of churchianity, the inability to comprehend that he has asked us to be his hands and his heart.
We sit in our pews or plush chairs saying the Old Testament points to Jesus, the New Testament points to Jesus then proceed to ignore him completely, preferring to listen to that which does not challenge us directly, sculpting his words into a more acceptable form. Where is our covenant with the poor? Why do we let them wallow in such squalid conditions, feebly explaining away our inaction, forgetting what John Donne said about none of us being an island. We only diminish our own souls when we let another needlessly slip from life.
Days like this I am reminded of just what a brittle and fragile clay pot I am. When the thorn in my side embeds itself deeper, sends down strong roots into my soul, when I don't even have the words to describe the pain of withdrawal, of my weakness and utter need for it and my inability to let it go. Where is the mortar that makes these fragments whole, Where is the light that shines out of all of this?(Days like this, I don't know what to do with myselfAll day - and all nightI wander the halls along the walls and under my breathI say to myself 'I need fuel - to take flight')
This post is inspired in part by Heather's post on going back to REAL church for the first time in a long time, and partly by the visit this weekend of one of my close friends from the CILB, with whom I shared this experience.
A month ago I went to Sydney to attend a friend's exhibition and spend a frenetic weekend catching up with friends and former flatmates. On the Sunday evening I ended up going to church with three of my good friends from my CILB. The only catch was, we were not going to our 'regular' church, but to another building, another denomination a few suburbs away - they were finding their current church experience was progressively stagnating, and I have to admit, having them say that made me feel a whole lot less crazy about what I went through last year.
Though I have an inkling I was just not made to function to my fullest potential within the institution, the service we attended filled me with hope at the fact that there are churches out there whose hearts are truly seeking God and community in a real way. Worship was stripped of its adornments and was so real, more so than anything I had experienced in a long time, teaching was solid and spirit-filled, and afterwards we were welcomed by people who were truly interested in what was said and what we had to say. Nobody seemed to be going through the motions, and we almost skipped back to the car!
Later on I remembered the last supper, how Jesus had gathered his friends together for what was, essentially, a meal: the breaking of bread and drinking of wine, how he had said do this in remembrance of me. So as we sat eating KFC and watched traffic fly past us, laughing and reflecting and sharing, I remembered him and thanked him for this crazy, diverse, honest group of girls, glad that he has let them be my church.
