A Crossroads

"Jodie, how many times have I told you.  I don't want to go to church."  These were the words of my Mother the last time she left the family home.  We were taking her to the hospital, but in her confusion she reached for the one place I was always trying to force her towards. It was Boxing Day.  Alongside her dementia she had a severe kidney infection.  My Dad, had called, late on Christmas Day to say that he couldn't care for my Mom anymore.  In the next week, we would discover that Dad needed a quadruple bypass.

That January the health of my parents ebbed and flowed.  I thought at times that I would lose them both.  By the end of January my Mom was gone and my Dad was recovering, ever so tentatively, from his surgery.  

It was at my Mother's bedside, in those critical weeks, that I would first hear the adult version of my call to the ministry.  

When I was a young girl I heard God's call, but I also heard the voice of the minister at my summer camp telling me that God would not call a women.

This calling at my Mother's bedside was different. More a statement of identity than of aspiration.  I was a mediator, a priest.  This was not a job to pursue, this was  a way of being--an orientation that I couldn't escape.

The first 20 years of my life.... I worked so hard to balance commitments that felt at times impossible to reconcile.  My parents--who I loved so deeply--who wanted nothing to do with the church AND my own deep, crazy and passionate love of Jesus.  

Both my parents are gone now.  

Another cold and dark January brings me to another crossroads--a juncture where I feel an excruciating heartbrokenness regarding the church.

The church was always a place of solace and safety for me.  

And yet, at times, I also felt like the church, which would glibly say that my parents were eternally damned, demanded that I abandon and forsake my deepest loves.

What the church offered instead was its claim to righteousness and justice.

And at the time, I was willing to surrender everything for a taste of this other world of God's reign within this world.

............ 

My Dad was never lauded as some holy man.   He made many mistakes in his life.  Yet, for ten years he gently, conscientiously, carefully cared for my Mother.  Comforting her fearful nights, filling her days with pleasant diversions, defending her when people belittled her  --noting that "she was the smartest woman he had ever known and she would be treated with respect." 

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The church has demanded much from me-- using the words of Jesus.  Asking me to abandon kith and kin.

AND

I love the church, but not more than vulnerable love.

I love the church,  but not more than the truth

I love the church, but not more than the severe and tireless love of self sacrifice and courage.

And so I sit at this crossroads: 

Knowing that the truth lies somewhere betwixt and between 

more, perhaps,  in the Gospel preached by my parent's broken faithful love than in the glib promises of a church that refuses to lay down its own life and its own reputation.

And I am bereft.