Longing For a Fellowship Of Faith

image courtesy of Pixabay

Last week, US Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn) introduced legislation to address the epidemic of loneliness in our country. Many on social media took to chastising the government for their own role in the issue—the closures of schools, workplaces, and places of worship for so long during the pandemic in many states absolutely increased this sense of loneliness. Even though these institutions have reopened, there’s a sense of mistrust and fracturing within many communities, as if we aren’t sure how to relate to one another anymore. In addition, many white-collar jobs are now mostly remote, for the laptop class still insists they remain home to earn their livings while the downtowns of cities turn into ghost towns and young college graduates never see a human face to face. My own son went into videogame design in 2019, back when we still went into the office, and now as he approaches his senior year, has had three different internships where he never left his apartment. He described his typical workday to me like this:

“I get up, shower, get coffee, sit at my desk in my bedroom. I sit there all day, take a lunch break, then sit there until dinner. Then after dinner, I return to the same desk to play video games.”

Or watch shows. Or FaceTime with friends. The result is the same—he works in the same seat in which he also entertains himself later and to be honest, he’s not sure what life is really about. What is the purpose of such a day? Many twenty-somethings feel this way, and I wonder if the fact that their elders, you know Gen X and older millennials, refuse to work in community with them is part of the problem. Fortunately for him, he got an in-person internship with PlayStation this summer and he texted me for the first time stating he “loves work and can’t wait to go into the office every day” and “if this is what it’s like, I can see myself doing this for a living.”

Community. Fellowship. They’re crucial.

However, this essay isn’t about the pandemic necessarily, for I believe the loneliness and longing for fellowship within western society started much sooner than the spring of 2020, and the closing of the very few things that still kept us together, like schools and the workplace, was the final nail in the coffin. We’ve been slowly drifting toward this place of ultimate individualism, a place with no accountability to others, where our work and entertainment are customized in the palm of our hands, or a screen on our desk. Everyone is distracted, unfocused, scattered. Sometimes, when I stand at the bus stop and tune into the people around me, the energy feels like a ripped and tattered shirtsleeve blowing in the wind, as if the gods weaving together our world cut the threads the bind us and left us drifting, the edges of society unraveling as we watch.

What on Earth am I Here For?

A few days after we moved into our Chicago condo last summer, while out on a walk with our dog Otis, my husband found a little pamphlet titled, “What on Earth Am I Here For?” by Rick Warren. Essentially, it is a set of excerpts from Warren’s best-selling book, The Purpose Driven Life. My husband likes to bring stuff home and since it caught his eye, he slipped it into his pocket, and it made it to my countertop. One day during morning coffee, I picked it up and began to peruse the little pamphlet.

The first line is, “It all starts with God. It’s not about you.”

I put it down. Took a sip of coffee. Pondered this idea. Do I think life is all about me? Nope. Becoming a mother taught me that important lesson. So why did this sentence trigger something inside of me? A bit of warning? A bit of fear? A bit of longing? I picked the booklet up again and reread the sentence.

“It all starts with God.”

Ah, that’s the rub. God. Do I believe it all starts with God?

In the silence of my heart I knew, yes, it does all start with God.

So I continued to read, “The purpose of your life is far greater than your own personal fulfillment, your peace of mind, or even your happiness. It’s far greater than your family, your career, or even your wildest dreams and ambitions. If you want to know why you were placed on this planet, you must begin with God. You were born by his purpose and for his purpose.”

There is deep wisdom and beauty in this statement. A simplicity. I realized the discomfort I felt wasn’t that this isn’t truth. Sure, I prefer the title Goddess over God, or even cosmic joker, but I do believe in the divine, creative force that gives birth to all we see, and takes it all away when the time has come. I see the glory of the divine in every creature, great and small. I worship, love, and commit myself to this glory in many ways. So I continued to read the pamphlet, little by little. It’s a sweet book filled with a lot of profound truth and yet reading it also brought me discomfort. It wasn’t until last night that I realized what it was that bothers me about this book, and God in general as people like Rick Warren speak of him. In the final entry of the booklet, the author suggests there are five purposes to our lives (only five???) the second of which is to be in fellowship with others who have committed their lives to Jesus Christ. Warren writes, “Your second great responsibility is to learn to love as God loves. That’s why getting connected to a local church as your spiritual family is essential. You cannot fulfill God’s second purpose for your life on your own. He made us need each other.”

God made us to need each other. Could this be true?

A Community of Faith

I was raised Catholic. Went to Catholic school K-12. Many people will say they’re sorry for me when I tell them this. We have a saying that we’re all recovering Catholics, as if our upbringing produced scars like the ones left by a good whipping. There’s a truth to this, the concept of original sin taught in most Christian communities is a hard one to swallow. It produces people who are afraid to do the work of the divine, which is paradoxical. Think about it, we’re the hands of the Earth, the gardeners and shepherds of this planet. Rather than be told we are an aspect of the divine, an extension of creative power made for the purpose of co-creating with other life on the planet, most religions teach us that we’re dirty, dark, and sinful by the very nature of our bodies. From that moment on, the purpose of the religious life and by extension the community is to save us from ourselves.

It's so patronizing.

This is why I eventually left the faith. I never believed in original sin. I recall arguing about it at age nine with my mother. I didn’t want to teach that to my children. I also didn’t want to be a part of a community that preaches day in and day out about sin. As I became an adult, I longed for a community of faith that celebrated the glory of God, the power of the Mother, our partnership with nature and our ancestors, and all things seen and unseen, as our prayers spoke.

The problem is, I never found this community. I never found a place where I could be free to love with the heart of God without some sort of condition. In the Catholic church, the condition was that anyone who didn’t believe in Jesus Christ had no hope of salvation. Also, women weren’t worthy of priestly status. Even so, I remained in the church until 2008, when the Catholic Bishops stated that anyone who voted for Barack Obama couldn’t receive the Eucharist, given the pro-choice stance of the Democratic party.

There are other reasons I don’t fit into the Christian community. For example, I’m a confessed green witch who believes in the wisdom of nature, and to believe you can receive wisdom from anything other than the Bible or the Church is also a sin. The thing is, the words I heard when praying the Rosary or singing under the boughs of the tree I once knew as Big Doug made way more sense than anything I’ve heard coming at me from the TV or the news. Moreover the tree’s wisdom was familiar, like one of the more inspired homilies I’ve been blessed to witness in my life as a Catholic. The teachings I receive from nature are real, even if they aren’t received in a church.

I’ve tried other spiritually minded communities and found the same dogmatic approach eventually reveals itself. Take yoga, for example. I’ll start a new studio and it’s only a matter of time before I’m told I can’t drink coffee, or wine, or eat meat. Again, there is a right way to give glory to God and a wrong way, and I’m not a quiet, tea-drinking Zenlike beauty with long flowing legs, I’m a red-faced, loud Slav with big thighs, a bull in a china shop kinda gal who needs a steak in regular intervals.

I also found this dogmatic tendency in the Anthroposophical movement. At first, I was overjoyed with the resonance of the philosophy, it rang so true, but with time the rules followed; I was told that I wasn’t reverent enough, or perhaps I decided to do something on a day that wasn’t astrologically auspicious. Food restrictions were involved and a disdain for non-believers made it feel cultish at times. Someone once said that if I crossed my legs, my prayers wouldn’t be heard, nor would I be able to receive any wisdom. To be fair, I’m not sure if that was an Anthroposophical belief or just his, but he was an elder in the community and people listened to him.

I could go on and on, but in the end the dogma always gets in the way, and I fade away from the community. Yet, I still long for fellowship. I loved going to Church as a kid. We dressed up in nice clothes and I got to see everyone on Sunday and catch up with what was happening in our little town. We had bake sales, carnivals, festivals, and celebrations. The Church would change decorations with the seasons and the liturgical calendar provided a framework for the year. We had Mother Mary with candles at her feet and a communion of saints so robust, I think there’s a saint to celebrate every day of the year. The dogma might contain the toxic teaching of original sin, but the community filled all of us with love and connection. Imperfect people finding purpose in an imperfect world.

What Replaces the Temple?

I was listening to an interview with GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and something he said hit me hard—that there’s a void within our collective soul, especially in our younger generation. Many of our social ills, from addiction to crime to self-harm, stem from this void. No one feels anything anymore and if we can address this void, we can fill our souls with purpose. He mentioned that a lack of religious community was a key reason for the void. We gave up communal worship and our family religious traditions but had nothing to replace it with except science and politics. These are not enough to light the fire of the human spirit. Besides, neither science nor politics should be religious, nor should they be a dogma we cling to. Rather, these topics are always changing as new information is received. Religion, on the other hand, provides a purpose, a reason for living, and that reason is unchanging—our purpose is to give glory to the divine by whatever name you choose to call this ultimate mystery. It is a humbling endeavor, the religious life, one that throws us into the center of both beauty and chaos, life and death. Worship of the divine should include singing and prayers, chants and incense, myths and stories to inspire, the sharing of food and drink, and the celebration of milestones such as birth, marriage, and death. A community of faith is a place where everyone knows your name. When this is gone, where do we go for fellowship? Schools? Work? What if you’re a new college graduate working in a white-collar job from the desk in your home? The bar?

Where do we find fellowship where we celebrate the glory of the divine rather than pontificate about the sins of man? Where we celebrate our need to be together? To raise our children together? To co-create with nature? To truly become the hands of the Earth? Where does the communion of humanity gather together where we love each other without judgment?

I long for such a fellowship. I agree with Rick Warren that I can’t do this part alone. I don’t want to.

Do you?