types of churches
Recently I've been thinking a little about my spiritual life and how it has become really directionless of late. In high school and college I did everything I could to push the path of my life off the comfortable, easy route, and into a service profession, forgoing opportunities to make a lot of money to instead pursue avenues that would lead me to work that requires me to work with people and make their world a little better on a daily basis. To facilitate this, I had a spiritual orientation that drew on familiar symbols to continuously remind me to think about how my actions would affect the world.
Now that I am finally beginning that life in a difficult, demanding job that offers few material rewards and does allow that engagement on a daily basis, I find the spirituality of change to be debilitating. I continuously ask more of myself, unsatisfied with the small benchmarks that I am in fact making, because the difference between where I want to be and where I am is so great, and there is no lack of reminders of the great gulf between the real and the ideal.
I realized today that a lot of this is due to my upbringing at MCC, whose ministry is basically devoted to shaking people out of their routines. The spirituality of the suburbs is one in which people need to constantly remind themselves that there is work to be done in the wider world, since they don't encounter this truth on a daily basis unless they force it on themselves. I developed a mindset that constantly criticized my own way of life, because while growing up on the green and in the enclave of college hardships were so few and far between that I needed to expose myself to other ones and thorougly ponder their ramifications just to stay grounded.
It seems that I have in fact outgrown the church that I grew up with. Maybe the constant self-flagellation about just how far we need to go to bring the Kingdom of God to this earth isn't necessary, since I am confronted with such obstacles on a daily basis, both in the world and in myself. I need a new outlook on my place in the world: one where I keep the high ideals and lofty goals in place, but learn to live with the shortcomings, since it is now time to actually tackle them instead of just think about them from a safe, insulated little world.
The kind of scary thing is whenever I start to think about this stuff it sounds a lot like somebody saying to a headstrong college student "well, yeah, of course all that stuff sounds good in your dorm room, but wait until you get to the real world, and you'll see what's really possible and what's not." I always swore to myself that I wouldn't be jaded and changed by age and experience. But I suppose everyone has to grow up eventually. People become more conservative as they get older, and not everyone is as strong as they think they are. If they were maybe the world would already be a better place.
Or, maybe that's just what I thought people were saying when they were really saying what I'm saying now, which I think is a little more subtle: accepting problems in ourselves and in the world isn't the same as not caring about them or saying that they are okay, or even the same as not working to fix them. I guess we'll just see what happens.
Now that I am finally beginning that life in a difficult, demanding job that offers few material rewards and does allow that engagement on a daily basis, I find the spirituality of change to be debilitating. I continuously ask more of myself, unsatisfied with the small benchmarks that I am in fact making, because the difference between where I want to be and where I am is so great, and there is no lack of reminders of the great gulf between the real and the ideal.
I realized today that a lot of this is due to my upbringing at MCC, whose ministry is basically devoted to shaking people out of their routines. The spirituality of the suburbs is one in which people need to constantly remind themselves that there is work to be done in the wider world, since they don't encounter this truth on a daily basis unless they force it on themselves. I developed a mindset that constantly criticized my own way of life, because while growing up on the green and in the enclave of college hardships were so few and far between that I needed to expose myself to other ones and thorougly ponder their ramifications just to stay grounded.
It seems that I have in fact outgrown the church that I grew up with. Maybe the constant self-flagellation about just how far we need to go to bring the Kingdom of God to this earth isn't necessary, since I am confronted with such obstacles on a daily basis, both in the world and in myself. I need a new outlook on my place in the world: one where I keep the high ideals and lofty goals in place, but learn to live with the shortcomings, since it is now time to actually tackle them instead of just think about them from a safe, insulated little world.
The kind of scary thing is whenever I start to think about this stuff it sounds a lot like somebody saying to a headstrong college student "well, yeah, of course all that stuff sounds good in your dorm room, but wait until you get to the real world, and you'll see what's really possible and what's not." I always swore to myself that I wouldn't be jaded and changed by age and experience. But I suppose everyone has to grow up eventually. People become more conservative as they get older, and not everyone is as strong as they think they are. If they were maybe the world would already be a better place.
Or, maybe that's just what I thought people were saying when they were really saying what I'm saying now, which I think is a little more subtle: accepting problems in ourselves and in the world isn't the same as not caring about them or saying that they are okay, or even the same as not working to fix them. I guess we'll just see what happens.