Home on a Sunday.......

We found a church home today after wandering through the offerings here in this part the Peninsula. We had gone to St. P's and the door was closed, inside cold and a few huddled in the huge space. The memories of this place wern't all bad, just conflicting as several years ago we had to bust the priest on some unpriestly behavior. He is still a priest in another church and we hope that somehow he was convicted of his strange behavior: talking of parishioner's sex life and offering to have a child with a lovely young woman. The priest was gay or whatever. We went to the Episcopal church in the town next door, two times and no one spoke to us except in the line leaving. Not who are you, how are you or why are you here. Lots of kids and lively atmosphere, but nobody spoke to us at the coffee hour. We used to go there. And then to St. A where we first went years ago when we arrived in the Bay area. The Great Litany was read, which is enough to turn off anyone just arriving to the Episcopal Lent, but despite that, we were home. The priest is someone we knew in Hawaii, and to be met with "Aloha" brought near tears. I had good memories of serving there, despite difficulties with a woman priest who was the interim, who had a problem with sarcasm, and perhaps other women at the altar. Today it was "Aloha" and all that the word meant: welcome, love, hello and we are doing the Great Litany. There were familiar faces who came up to us and gave us hugs - from remembering us of eighteen years ago. That didn't mean as much as the rest of the people coming to us in the Peace, and at the coffee hour. I have had not so much a love/hate relationship with the Episcopal church as one where my expectations of clergy and parish behavior was set to a higher standard than was perhaps realistic. It has never mattered that much to me that Bishop Robinson was gay, or that non-gays elected him, or that Bishops who did not like women clergy and gays forgot some of Christ's words and left the Anglican Communion. What mattered, all along was how people treated each other in the Episcopal church and there, we found behavior that was unfriendly, personal agendas, and politics. Imagine! Some could say that churches are the rock polishers of our society, or the social gatherings that support some spirituality, but damn, some of those rocks have held sharp edges. And there are just so many potlucks you can attend before you get fed up with pasta dishes.

Today,we didn't find any agendas, and felt at home. I had spoken to my son who is attending a Bible study group about personal spirituality, how it had to be vertical and not horizontal. That what one learned in Bible study had to resonate in a peaceful place within, not because there was consensus in the group, but that there was recognition on an individual basis. That the relationship with God was personal, not corporate. Well today, feeling at home, we felt some horizontal, corporate love, and from the Great Litany, an increase of grace, and were thankful