Sacrifice
“The important thing is this: to be ready at any moment to sacrifice what you are for what you could become.” -- Charles Dubois
The last time I set foot in a church on a Sunday was more than two months ago. I remember writing, not even a year ago, that I found spiritual sustenance and community in church. Church had been for me, for the past 6 years, a central part of my spiritual life and experience. Before going to seminary, I was an active member of a UU congregation. Once in seminary, I found a great spiritual community that I felt really at home in. I liked Sundays in church, I liked getting to know people, becoming someone who was considered a leader.
But the last time I set foot in that church on a Sunday was more than two months ago. What has changed? What is different now, than when it felt natural to wake up on a Sunday morning, get up, and walk to church, when now it feels natural to hang out with my partner, then get up and go sit in meditation for a while? Why is it that I have no desire whatsoever right now to engage in what was, for me, so natural, so much of a habit?
In exploring this in more depth, I need to start a long time ago. My relationship with that spiritual tradition called Christianity was broken, and I needed the institution called Christianity to heal it. I was raised a Presbyterian. I never really understand what that means in a denominational sense, not in the sense I understand denominational institutions now. But I know that we went to a Presbyterian church, and I was confirmed at 14. I wanted to be confirmed – it wasn't something that was pressed upon me, unlike what's true for many people. And, two years later, I really wanted to join the fundamentalist church I joined in Valley Stream. It was a Nazarene church, in the “Holiness Tradition.” I jumped in with both feet. It filled both psychological and spiritual needs for me. But, in the end, it couldn't hold me. It couldn't hold a woman who wanted to transcend the limitations of the prescribed female role, it couldn't hold theological concepts that were outside the bounds of biblical reality, and it couldn't hold my increasingly obvious queer identity.
And, in the end, my relationship with the spiritual tradition of Christianity, one which had spiritually fed me for years, ended abruptly and jaggedly. As I wrote about once, I “tossed the baby out with the bathwater.” But that jagged end needed healing. I needed to find, understand, and re-incorporate the part of the Christianity that fed me.
And that is what the last few years have been, really, among other things. It wasn't just about healing the relationship, this relationship between me and the theological and religious tradition of my birth and early development. It had to do with healing my relationship with God.
In my personal cosmology, God was (and I can use the past tense, now) embodied and held within that framework – within that spiritual and religious tradition known as Christianity. I'd kept God there, and so when I left it, I left God behind. I was a Buddhist, and then a Unitarian Universalist, slowly but surely approaching God in the only ways I knew how, without actually embracing God, or feeling like I could touch God in any way.
Re-encountering Christianity, and with it, the Abrahamic tradition – the tradition that birthed the tradition of my own birth, is what allowed me, finally to touch God again, and feel God's touch again, even though God had been with me for all of that time. And I can free God from my own constraints and structures that I'd placed Her in – the constraints and structures of Christianity.
I came back to Christianity, or a particular brand of it, and became a Christian again. I wanted to embrace all of it – I wanted to be completely within its structures – completely find myself in it and a part of it. I tried really hard. I even tried to become clergy within that structure. But in the end, I couldn't do that, because Christianity can't hold all of who I am. It holds my queer sexuality uneasily, and my feminism with equivocation. It can't hold my deep understanding of the Divine Feminine. It can't hold my paradoxical perspective on Jesus. It doesn't embrace my deep regard for contemplative practice. I had every hope that it would be enough for me, but it isn't.
Sacrifice is a word with immense significance. Many Christians think of Jesus as giving the ultimate sacrifice for those who would believe, and save them from eternal damnation. One of the most significant stories in all Abrahamic traditions is the story of the potential sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham. Sacrifice is giving something up, something cherished and loved, something of value, something of significance. I realize that I must sacrifice my desire to sit within Christianity, or any religious tradition – I must sacrifice that impulse, that drive, to find myself at home within some given structure or institution. I must sacrifice a comfort and familiarity of a known, an understood. I must sacrifice this all, in order to really be able to fully embrace the God I know. God is so much bigger than one faith tradition. I can leave this faith structure behind, and in leaving it, take God with me. I must finally, fully and completely embrace what Meister Eckhart said many years ago: "God does not ask anything else from you except that you let yourself go and let God be God in you."