Breaking Bread and Bones

** DISCLAIMER: I’m going to talk about religion. I don’t want to offend/alienate/whatever and I’m not interested in turning this into a religious blog, but it’s what’s on my mind…so I’m going to blog about it; just take it for what it is. **

It has been exactly 21 months, two weeks, and a day since I have had communion. The last time I broke bread was on Maundy Thursday of 2007 and there are days, like the days that I have had lately, where it feels like yesterday. I knew, wholeheartedly and with a very clear and pure intent, that when I took communion on April 2nd 2007, it would be the last time that I would take communion for a very long time. It sounds dramatic, (and as a lesbian I accept that I make situations more dramatic than they sometimes need to be) but the drama was very real for me. My whole life; every thought process, every movement that resulted from my thoughts, and every life decision that I made, was explicitly tied to how I could best serve the church and how I could be the best person FOR the church.

I knew, from a very young age, that I wanted to go into full-time ministry. When I was seven, I wanted to be a monk, but my mom told me that I couldn’t be a monk, because I was a girl and girls couldn’t be monks. (Oh, and I wasn’t Catholic.) When I was ten, I wanted to move to Africa and teach children how to read and write, but my dad told me that it was too dangerous for girls to go to Africa without a husband. (I also knew, from a very young age, that I never wanted to be married; turns out I just didn’t want to marry a man.) When I was fifteen, I wanted to convert to Judaism, learn Hebrew, and travel the world converting Jews into “Jews for Jesus”, but my youth pastor told me that women’s roles in the Jewish faith tradition were much more limiting than those in the Christian faith tradition, and that if I wanted to take on a leadership role, I would have to do it from a Christian platform.

This is what I don’t get; (I didn’t get it then and I don’t get it now) if we are to believe that God is limitless, then where did we get the idea that we should limit how people serve? When I chose to go to seminary at eighteen, I did so with the honest purpose of wanting to change that irrational and vain ideal. I did, and still very much do, believe that knowledge is the clearest, most effective, and most integrity-full (I know that’s not a word) way to foster change. My desire to create change was pure and simple… enable people to believe in the church as a tool to support them fully in their relationship with (insert your word of choice here: God, g-d, Jesus, faith, religion, doctrine, each other, scripture, spirituality, etc.), not as a place to pillage them of their dreams and solitary thoughts.

When you graduate with a religious degree and you truly invest yourself in your education, you become one of two things: incredibly strong or incredibly fake. When you spend four years writing papers about the historical reliability of the Gospel of John and you learn how to translate the New Testament for yourself (and you learn that modern day translation is iffy at best), you lose any hope of keeping your childhood faith. That is ultimately the entire point of seminary… to come out stronger on the other side. When I was sitting in the pew on that Maundy Thursday nearly two years ago, I had what people call a light bulb moment. To make a very long story short, I realized that I couldn’t do it anymore, that I couldn’t be the person to make those changes in the church. I wasn't willing to let myself become fake and I wasn't strong enough to keep going. I realized that I was going to have to break off all ties with church, scripture, sacrament, doctrine, and all of those things that come with the structure of faith if I ever wanted the possibility of a relationship with faith in the future.

When you break a bone, you have to leave it alone if you want it to mend. You put it in a cast or a sling and you don’t mess with it because it needs time to heal on its own. Have you ever noticed that bones are the only thing that we follow this kind of procedure for? Why is that? Seriously! Why? (This applies in particular to lesbians...we're not good at leaving things alone.) Well, leaving it alone is how I decided to handle my “break-up” with religion. I put all my church books in a box. I learned how to play secular songs on the piano. I took myself off all the Christian email lists. I didn’t go back for my senior year of school. And I have, completely, left religion alone so that it can heal on its own. I've been treating communion like it was a broken bone and I have the faith that things will heal...I'm just going to leave things to be and let faith repair itself.

P.S. I bought a new razor this week, cause I think that I'm finally ready to get back in the game and a girls got to be prepared, and it rocked my world…The Venus Divine…It is super amazing for those sensitive spots!