Midlife Meditation

Freshly baptized, I begin my journey into doubt. "I want to believe." Those words sum up most of my adult life. It's an odd credo, indicative as it is of the lack  of a creed, but there really are no other words to describe my spiritual journey. I began wrestling with unbelief when I was in middle school. I idolized my father, the small-town minister, and even though my pubescent sensibilities wished there was more adventure in his sermons, I loved hearing him preach. The old church in Emmett, Idaho, was a safe, comforting place to me. Outside its walls, though, I was suffering the worst years of my childhood: merciless bullying; constant reminders that, as a non-Mormon, I was an outsider; and worst of all, the knowledge that, as much as I admired my father, most of the town looked down on him. Why, my young mind wondered, would God allow such storm and stress to fall on our family? Despite these growing doubts, I took confirmation classes from Dad, never t...

Catherine of Siena drinks the blood of Christ. This is going to get theological, philosophical, and gross. Much of my young adult intellect was wrapped around the two sacraments recognized by the United Methodist Church. A sacrament, in the traditional Methodist lingo I grew up with, is "an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace." More concretely, it's a ritual that gives believers a tangible experience of the ineffable. Methodists recognize baptism and communion as sacraments. In baptism, the believer is symbolically drowned so that he or she can be resurrected to new life as a Christian. In communion, the believer eats a small bit of bread and drinks a sip of wine so that he or she can be sustained by the symbolic body and blood of Jesus Christ. Although I grew up in Methodist parsonages, my parents were always Baptists at heart, and held off having any of us baptized until puberty, at which point my father found an immersion baptistry ...

It took me ten years to earn the right to wear this stuff. Four and a half years later, I hung it up for good. But you already knew that. I've written about it many times, and it's never far from the surface when I'm talking about my roots.   I've taken these items out of storage twice since I left ministry in 2000. Both times were for weddings. I didn't know either of the couples well, but I spent time with them making sure their services were as personalized as I could make them. I could probably have made a nice side income out of performing weddings and funerals for the unchurched (an unattractive but PC word clergy use to describe persons with no religious affiliation), as many in my situation--ordained but without a pulpit--have done. I do know my way around liturgy, and I can come up with thoughtful, significant rites at the drop of a hat. I just don't care to.   And here's why: I'm not an essential part of those ceremonies. Don't g...