leaving church

i have watched people leave our church over what i thought to be the most superficial of reasons. they have left over trees being removed; they have left over disagreement over the approval of a design for a chapel; they have left over the consecration as bishop of a gay man living in a committed relationship. i have watched them leave over legitimate reasons, but reasons i did not have to cleave to: they left over the lack of leadership provided by the priest; the left over the dearth of spiritual nourishment available in the church; they left over the ineffectual nature of the priest in his job. i watched one person leave because her child was not being served effectively, and with that one person, i could agree. i thought, "i'd do the same thing, if my child wanted to go elsewhere."

i find myself contemplating the same thing at this very moment. i brought my family to this church in december of 2001, and insisted that we make it our home, the people our family. my daughter was nine years old at the time, and i thought, "oh, how wonderful, she'll get to grow into adulthood in a healthy church, as a christian." the church was struggling with their youth program, but they were working on it; i had found out about a program that i thought was phenomenal called journey to adulthood, or j2a; i asked the vestry if they would consider trying it out, and they pooh-pooh'd my suggestion, saying they had already tried it and it didn't work. later i was told privately by some parishioners that the program had not been learned or run properly, thereby ensuring it's failure.

when the priest left and we called a new priest, things went downhill fast. he didn't do his job. he couldn't, perhaps did not know how to do his job, but the effect was the same: the church nearly died. the attendance dropped by two-thirds. the survival of the youth group was now secondary, as the survival of the church was foremost in everyone's minds, at least the minds of those who remained. we remained. the vestry tried to deal with the priest. the senior warden destroyed all their work by not following through with their decisions. it was two and a half years before things finally got to the point where the vestry called in the bishop. the priest was gone in a month.

it took two months, at least before i even began to see my surroundings again. i had become so hopeless, my actions merely rote repetition, that i had not even realized i had stopped looking at my surroundings, was just forcing myself to put one foot in front of the other, figurally speaking, for the show to go on. in another month i began to feel hope. it seemed like more light could get into the nave, and that worship had taken on a multi-dimensional quality again, something i'd missed sorely. and our numbers began, minutely and slowly, but surely, to increase.

now this all sounds well and good, except for one aspect. my only child, a daughter, is now almost sixteen. she has served as an acolyte since she was six, and been a good and faithful child. the former priest had a daughter the same age, and i had so hoped they would be friends, but it was not to be. my daughter knew she had best be nice to the priest's daughter, at school and at church, or she would hear about it from me. they did not get along. initially, the priest's daughter would act sort-of nice to my child at church, but then act as though my child were invisible at school, she "dissed" her. repeatedly. they very definitely were not friends. i told my daughter to be polite and stay away from her.

all this time i was picking up this child at the same time i picked up my child and taking her home two days a week, as a favor to her parents. the child would be all simpering and sweet to me, but then treat my child with disdain again at school. the dislike my daughter felt for this child only grew.

the priest's daughter is pigeon-toed, and quite clumsy. she falls a lot, and hurts herself frequently. my daughter made a remark to a friend that she thought that this child was faking her injuries in order to draw attention to herself. the friend repeated it to the priest's child, and i was called by the priest. i explained to him that my daughter would be made to apologize, and that that behavior was not condoned in our family, but that he might also want to take a look at the behavior of his own child, which has not been reported to him, in an attempt to get the girls to work it out on their own. my daughter did apologize, but it made no difference. from that point on it was not merely dissing, but outright antagonism.

when the priest left, we were told that he and his family were invited to attend another church in our town. we all rejoiced that they would be welcomed elsewhere where they could do no further damage to us. unfortunately this was not wholly correct; the ungainly daughter chose to continue to attend the youth group at our church. my daughter had tried repeatedly to make amends, both in and out of church, but the priest's daughter refused to even exchange the peace with my child, in church.

my daughter began to refuse to attend youth group, citing the presence of this child as the reason: "why does she get to stay when the rest of them have to leave?" i had no answer. the christian politically correct thing to do is to be pastoral. which means do nothing about the aberrant behavior. i pressed both the youth group leader and the interim priest to consider the matter, and the best answer i got was that if the girls could not get along, BOTH would be expelled from the youth group. i cannot begin to describe the depth and breadth of my indignation and anger.

the priest who was fired, no, allowed to resign, had offered an incredibly lame, shallow class based on the book Those Episkopals. the book is a rudimentary introduction to the episcopal church at best, and not suitable for any indepth study. he later stated that this was in fact a confirmation class, and that because his daughter had attended, she was confirmed in the spring of 2007. this was not offered to any of the other youth, nor was it explained that it was a class that was to lead to confirmation. nobody on the formation team would have considered it adequate for anything more than an enquirer's class.

the furor over this action caused the priest's wife to offer a confirmation class for the youth that fall. half the time she did not show for the classes, and they were rescheduled time and again. the formation director wound up having to finish the class after the priest was, er, allowed to resign. to this date none of the youth have been confirmed, it should have been done in the spring of this year; it is now september, almost october.

so i brought my family to this church to make it our home, the people our family; the church has not met the needs of my child, in any way, shape, or form, aside from communion each week. it has been a site of continued abuse from the priest's daughter, and remains such even though the priest was "allowed to resign". now my daughter may be expelled from the youth group, if she does not agree to continue to accept disdain and dismissal from the former priest's daughter. this does not seem fair to me.

okay, life is not fair. but it seems ludicrous that this should even be considered. but we have to be pastoral to the child. while we are doing that, who is being pastoral to my child? who is caring for my family, every member of which has served above and beyond any reasonable expectation in this church. yet the slacker former priest's mean daughter will determine the future of my daughter's attendance. ever wonder why people leave the church?

substitute teacher

tomorrow is the orientation for substitute teacher's for the public schools here in my town. i'm told that, because i have a degree, i will be called every day, from 6:00 a.m. to midnight. that will thrill my husband, who sleeps during the day...i can't believe how demoralized i feel, how stupid and what a failure. i went back to school and got the degree, now i'm going to work for $60. a day. i got the "real" job after college, and failed miserably (enough said on that topic in previous posts, no point flogging the dead horse further).

last year at this time i firmly believed that i would be in seminary right now, into the three year program that would turn me into a priest. then we decided that it would be better to let our daughter finish high school in her hometown before leaving for seminary. good decision, don't regret it. it's just that while you can't hardly get a job without a degree, you can't get a job worth having without a master's.

i have plans, am going to take a couple of tests to see if i can become a k-12 teacher, maybe get a job in january, assuming i pass the tests...but the tests cost hundreds of dollars, i need to do hundreds of hours of study, and there are no guarantees about any of it.

god's will is what i keep asking to know. i want to want what god wants me to want. urrgggghh... i thought god wanted me to be a social worker, it all sounded so good, so right, somehow. i had no idea what the work entailed, and that it would whip me like a cruel man whips a beast. i did learn much, about the poor, about the welfare provided by the government, and about myself. but i failed, i could not keep doing the work.

what if teaching is as wrong for me as social work was? maybe it's not social work, per se, but governmentalized social work. maybe dealing with uncertainty is what i'm to live with for the moment. aside from suffering and death, little is certain for humankind.

christ said the poor would always be with us. i realize this is slightly out of context, he was stressing the importance of the apostles really trying to understand what he was saying, as he wouldn't be around in that particular incarnation much longer. but it was a statement, "the poor will always be with you."

this means that, while we are admonished to do what we can for the least among us, there will always be those people with us who need our care. what does this mean for the folks trying to end world poverty? what does it mean for me, preparing meals to serve at one of the local soup kitchens? (and what are they called now, surely not "soup kitchens"...)

the changes in the church are causing financial difficulty for the church. everyone is searching for a way to be faithful and to also be relevant to 21st century people. seminaries are struggling, allowing faculties to drop in number, mostly through retirement without replacement. how can what i want to be more than anything in the world become something irrelevant? what am i supposed to do? tell me, precious lord, i'm listening...

getting better

i wasn't sure how long the surreal not-sure-who-i-was episode was going to last. the long walk at the lake was quite therapeutic, but i'm still scratching the bug bites. i went to the gym today, during the day, when all the mommies and retirees were there. i felt somewhat like an interloper, but i pretended that i was supposed to be there, i do pay, after all, to use the facility, and i enjoyed myself. the mommies weren't very friendly but the retirees were quite kind.

am going over to my mother's tomorrow to decipher some correspondence she has received from the Social Security Administration. i find it wryly humorous that i am better equipped to help her now with government-ese. guess it's a good thing.

but that brings up something totally unrelated to dhs; or, maybe not...my mother used to be so sharp. she was really smart. she could figure out how to find out anything, and get people to give her information they weren't supposed to share. she doesn't even know what her social security gross income is; she has difficulty differentiating from gross and net, and i know she used to know the difference.

so, how much of a role has stress played in the deterioration of her mind? granted, she has abused alcohol and prescription drugs for almost as many years as i've been alive, the role of which should not be underestimated, but she has also lived an extraordinarily emotionally stressful life. she has never understood boundaries; she frequently went beyond where hers should have been to the extreme discomfort of my father, and they fought about her behavior often. actually, he would just get angry and quit talking, and she would scream, drink, and throw things. then he died in a plane crash. then she went over the edge for an extended period.

she wound up working as a private investigator for my grandfather, we all did. she became an excellent investigator; nobody ever said she was stupid, just dysfunctional. and she worked on some major cases, one of them one of the most important cases in the history of this country. but the stress was too great, and she wound up a basket case by 1997, when i started doing a lot of work for her. by 2000 i was doing almost all the field work and writing the reports, and she billed the attorneys and took half the income.

so, long story still impossibly long, she never dealt, psychologically, with the reason my father nearly left her several times, before he died, and she never dealt with his death; she has repeated the same impossibly stupid mistakes over and over, and now has almost no quality of life; she is trapped, as a mere 70-year-old, in the body of an 85-year-old, and not a well one, at that.

i don't want to wind up like that. i don't want to be all alone, because i've always insisted that people come to me and never gone to them; i don't want to be isolated because i've never been involved in any sort of community; i don't want to be trapped in a space all by myself because i've made people around me so miserable for so many years that nobody wants to be around me. i want my daughter to not mind talking to me occasionally. i don't want her to dread talking to me on the phone, and even more the sporadic guilt-driven visits.

my mother gave herself up to her work. she renounced family and friends and community to be available for her work at any hour of any day. she would take a phone call at 9:00 p.m., with guests sitting at the dining table, from an attorney, even if he or she just wanted to shoot the breeze; she would talk for hours, completely ignoring the people there to visit her. i have lived in the same town as my mother for many, many years; i have lived in this house for 12 years; i can count the number of times my mother has been inside my house on the fingers of one hand.

dhs wanted everything i had. it wanted my muscle, bone, flesh and sinew; my brain and my heart and my soul. i tried to give it what it needed, what it demanded, but there wasn't enough left for me, for my own life. i felt i was being consumed by a voracious beast that had no knowledge of or interest in the damage it inflicted with its demands. as long as i was in the belly of the beast, i could *mostly* function; i say mostly because, towards the end, that even became an almost impossible chore for me; but when i left the beast, when it was finally sated for the day, or the week, and i was disgorged and allowed to crawl home, i found it increasingly more difficult to willingly return. it was painful, mentally and, eventually, physically. the last day i tried i found i could not push myself further; i had lost my flail; i could not drive myself another step. i knew i had to see a doctor, not so much to heal the physical as to verify the existence of the problem. i am so thankful for my doctor. he helped me acknowledge what i knew in my subconscious but did not want to face. he helped me admit i could not do the job any longer. and he helped me find a way out.

thank God.

my box of stuff

one of my friends from work was kind enough to bring my box of personal stuff to me yesterday evening. she said my boss groused about the amount of stuff, "if i'd known how much she had, i might not have been so quick to offer to box it up."

it was mostly pictures and snacks, along with office supplies i had personally brought to work (the state does not furnish brightly colored post-it notes or decent staplers), but there were also some certificates of appreciation, you know, the "you did a good thing!" kind-of certificates. somebody had recognized me for having a positive attitude (that had to be several months old), and my daughter had written me a letter in rainbow hues telling me what a good mom she thinks i am and how sorry she is work is so hard.

there were prayers, asking god for the ability to endure the suffering i was going through and help make it meaningful:
"God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, Courage
to change the things which should be changed,and the Wisdom to distinguish the one from
the other. Living one day at a time, Enjoying one moment at a time, Accepting hardship as a
pathway to peace, Taking, as Jesus did, This sinful world as it is, Not as I would have it,
Trusting that You will make all things right, If I surrender to Your will, So that I may be
reasonably happy in this life, And supremely happy with You forever in the next."

Reinhold Neibuhr's original language is so much more graceful than the modernized version, and before this job i had been unaware of the rest of the prayer, i'd just know the first bit everyone knows. the difficulty with this prayer for me at this point is that i was unable to withstand the suffering, the hardship. i couldn't bear the pain any longer, not to be overly-dramatic.

it was like trying to hold my hand in a flame, the burning finally drove my mind to the point where i could not bear it any longer. insofar as i was unable to remain at the job, the suffering did ultimately become a pathway to peace, though, because i left, i ran away from the hardship, not able to bear the burden any longer.

but the burning analogy isn't sufficient to describe the type and level of suffering i felt. it was more like having a wound that was always with me. sometimes the pain would subside (on the weekend), but then the pain would flare up again upon returning to work, each monday a little more intensely, like the wound was tearing just a little more each week. i dreamt about the horrors awaiting me at work, the inability to complete the work, the constant increase in volume of the work, and the abstractly horrible nature of the work, namely that it's focus wasn't really to help people, as i'd been led to believe, but, instead, to process paperwork.

now, for someone who has experienced true horror, like that of war or murder or intense abuse, this sounds trite. unfortunately, my past experience is exactly what set me up for a fall. both my supervisor and my doctor described what i was experiencing as ptsd. i'm embarrassed to mention that, as i've been in no war, no people-dying, bombs exploding war, anyway, and i've not seen anyone murdered, at least not first-hand. but i did a little research into ptsd and found, amongst the things that did not apply, one little snippet that offered insight into why i was in this place. i found the following quote in wikipedia:

"Predictor models have consistently found that childhood trauma, chronic adversity, and
familial stressors increase risk for PTSD as well as risk for biological markers of risk for
PTSD after a traumatic event in adulthood [24][25][26][27]. This effect of childhood
trauma, which is not well understood, may be a marker for both traumatic experiences and
attachment problems [28][29]. Proximity to, duration of, and severity of the trauma also
make an impact; and interpersonal traumas cause more problems than impersonal ones."

in other places i've explored the childhood traumas, the chronic adversity, and the familial stressors in greater detail, i'd rather not revisit them at this point, but this dry little paragraph offered me some insight into why this job caused me such tremendous pain, such that i could not bear to return.

it wasn't the clients...i've dealt with marginalized people for over twenty years, that was the best part of the job. it was the pressure to do something essentially undoable. it would be different in a different office, one that wasn't internally combusting, but i'm not sure i could bring myself to be in that spot again, just in case things got worse...

gotta go, hear stomachs rumbling in the bedrooms...in the space of time where i am unemployed, i am chief cook and bottle washer, as is appropriate. there is so much ease in the simple tasks, each one doable and satisfying in completion. hmmmm...my stomach is rumbling, too...

Buying In

i feel like i'm in the twilight zone. i'm not sure who i am or what i'm supposed to be doing, thinking, feeling...our work defines us so thoroughly that without the job i bought into lock, stock, and barrel i feel worthless.

i intend to take the time now, before i start another job, to clean my house, organize my closet, trim my trees...i had gotten so wrapped up in the job that everything else took a subordinate position in my life.

to have so thoroughly invested myself in a job i ultimately failed at is hard to deal with. i want to "do" something, but i know that doing is not what would be best right now. the best thing i can do is to try to process and understand what part of me made the job undoable (i know the part of the job that made it undoable, but i also have some responsibility in the demise of this path).

think i'll go out to the lake and walk around for awhile...

time flies when you're in hell

i had no idea how disconnected i had become from my life until i quit my job...i haven't really been present for the few activities i've actually been, well, present for...work was everything, which might not be a bad thing, if the work was meaningful, potentially doable, satisfying, or in any way possessing of value. but when you dream about determining someone's eligibility for foodstamps and the 37 messages you have on your voicemail, and the 350 cases you are responsible for, then you think about the time you spend off the clock trying to catch up, because by doing your job you are falling behind on your job, it makes a girl crazy.

i'm not an avid social networker; i made myself a facebook page so i could see what my daughter and all the young people i know were talking about, and became intrigued by its implications for creating greater awareness of activities i plan and/or participate in; i fell in love with the word games, and looked forward to playing at least for a few minutes each day (yes, i'm a dork, i like word games); i quit my job yesterday, and finally drug myself into my home office to see how many hundreds of emails i had received and actually had the energy to log onto facebook. i had made a note on july 30th that i was "going to my happy place"; i was so frustrated and angry and bitter at that point that i was unsure how much longer i could make it at dhs; yet it hardly seems any time has passed since then, and now it is september 4th. wow.

department of human sacrifice

just quit my job as a social worker...didn't realize i didn't get to do social work as a social worker...became a cog in the machine, completely devoid of personhood, devalued in every way, absolutely replaceable...

always assumed that the workers who failed merely didn't have superior organizational skills...never realized that the performance expected was absolutely unattainable...mentally, how do you deal with knowing you can never do the job you are expected to do, further, charged with doing? i couldn't reconcile the impossibility of striving to do something essentially undoable...melted down...