Well, it has been a while since I have written anything here. The truth is that I have had several topics fluctuating through my attention span. Many things have happened and the ideas kept passing each other. Time to focus.
So, I turn on some Arcangelo Corelli and start typing.
This entry is a little more personal than most. It was bound to happen. I realize that there was a major event in my life and that it left a lot of people confused. I'd like to take the time to explain my exit from the Southern Baptist Convention and one of its member churches.
This is not just some tirade where I shout about transgressions and dole out accusations. This is where I share my heart about me - because the more I look at things from a distance, the more I realize that I am the one that has changed. It all began with a mysterious book I found over ten years ago and was pushed over the edge by some tumultuous events that will not be played out on AtBiG like they were elsewhere. Those who attended church with me do not need further explanation and those that didn't can read along just as well.
What happened to me is that I had to stop and look at the world around me and discern what was really going on. I had to address truth - within myself and in my surroundings. I changed many of my stances on issues. Maybe that makes me crazy. Maybe it makes me a heretic. But for right now, it makes me sane.
Having seen the Book of Eli recently I can say that there is a line from the movie that hit me like a ton of bricks. Eli is trying to defend the last known copy of the King James Bible (remember, good enough for Jesus and His disciples, good enough for me) from certain destruction. In the process he picks up a companion and explains to her "In all these years I've been carrying it and reading it every day, I got so caught up in keeping it safe that I forgot to live by what I learned from it." That was like a retroactive epiphany that threw me back to the early phases of my transition where I realized that the entirety of the Gospel is "Love God with all you have and love your neighbor as yourself"
I realized that many of my beliefs contradicted that. My neighbors might be homosexual. They may have had a pregnancy terminated. They may be atheists. They may be Muslims. They may be Democrats. They may be geologists that know how old rocks are.
What I was doing was not loving these neighbors. I was defending a book - not following it.
I realized that a church is not a building, not a location and the main goal of a church is not to struggle to keep a roof over the heads of the real church - the people that gather there. Church can happen in a bar (I've seen this myself). It can happen in a mall, around a campfire in the woods, in an Internet forum, even in catacombs - where it spent its infancy. The real church is the community of people and how they follow the book , not how they defend it. (Lower case "c" was intentional in this paragraph. I mean local church).
I learned that church can be manly and that men don't have to settle for singing 15 sappy love songs to a man in the name of worship. In fact, I learned you can have church with no music at all - witnessed it with my own eyes.
I can't see for the life of me how two men in California getting married in the eyes of a secular government can have any bearing on the sanctity of the vows my wife and I took before God. What has a bearing on the sanctity of our vows is how we treat each other and how we honor God by keeping those vows.
I met some Catholics that really love Jesus.
I don't mind if the Earth is billions or even trillions of years old. I can handle that.
I attended a church made up almost exclusively by people whose appearance, wardrobe, tattoos and body piercings made them pariahs in most churches in this area - and I saw how they lived the book instead of defending it.
And seriously, Jesus transformed Galilean water into fine wine so that drunk people could get drunker while celebrating life and the oldest of God's sacraments. I know it is hard to stomach for many but it is in our book. We have to deal with that.
All of this to say that I personally reached a point where something had to change. I could not sit quietly in the same chair I had occupied for so long. I cannot blame a bunch of people in this right now. I am owning the experience and accepting the fact that it is where the journey has taken me.
And I close with the hopes that this may have cleared some of the confusion for those that know me and that those who don't will now know me better.
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