Walk Home Together

This man was also running commercials on local television in an effort to sway public opinion and I assume, the jury pool. At no time, to my knowledge, has this person accepted accountability or actually shown remorse for his crimes.

In some Protestant churches, lighting the Advent candles is an honor for a person or family who are active in the church to have a special role in the liturgy and ritual of the Advent season.

I cannot fathom that our church leadership chose that man, at that time, without being fully aware and condoning the optics and the message of that choice.

It’s my feeling that church leadership used their platform for reasons other than spreading the Gospels. Questionable reasons, at best.

As I sat in the pew that day, by heart was broken and so was my trust. But I stayed.

And this happened back in 2014. Before Trump was President, before Black Lives Matter. Before the insurrection. Before Covid and the accompanying conspiracy theories. Before the 400+ U.S. school shootings that have occurred between then and now. Before my own denomination splintered over the ecclesiastical worthiness of gay people.

And as all of those things unfolded, they were basically ignored in the pulpit by most churches. It made me wonder…why were we even there? The world got scarier and meaner and totally unrecognizable and so many churches just…said nothing. We didn’t need pithy sermons or doctrines or arrogant proclamations. The rituals and traditions I love seemed rote and empty. We needed help. We needed unity. We needed to be reminded of the divine humanity of others. I was bereft.

So I stopped going.

With a little distance, I felt relief. Away from the church, my spiritual life became richer, more honest. Less like the simple Sunday School lessons of my youth and more like personal accountability and compassion for all beings. And gratitude. Lots of that.

If God is unconditional Love and unassailable Truth, count me in. If the Jesus I learned about as a child is still Compassion and Redemption personified, I will continue to sit at His feet and learn. But I don’t hear many American church leaders saying that. I hear very thinly disguised politics. I hear theological gymnastics used to justify prejudice and misogyny and greed.

Organized traditional church isn’t for me, at least right now. It just got too polluted and I don’t trust it. The hypocrisy is just too blatant and my heart can’t take it.

But I still have a certain kind of faith. It’s personal. I’ve got faith in the humanity of other people. I feed that faith by reading and learning. I try to feed my faith by doing and connecting. I feed it by having deep conversations with people I trust about big existential things and small miraculous things

I believe in our divine connection with every other human on the planet. I believe in love and fairness and being accountable. I don’t know how I feel about the hereafter, but “we’re in and they’re out” theology has never made sense to me. It just doesn’t seem holy. But I have faith that we’ll all be ok. I guess I’ll find out one day.