It is night and I cannot sleep. I want to write but have no idea what to say. There are a million ideas flying through my head but they careen off one-another and shatter in the process. I am thinking about hypocrisy, my own to be specific. It hangs about my neck like Coleridge’s albatross hung round that famous mariner. Somehow it is immobilizing.
Hypocrisy for some is not a problem. Many can continue to move ahead gleefully unaware of the hundred conflicting ideas being held in their heads all at once. Somehow it just wants to slam the breaks on my life. I want to teach. I miss teaching and try to find an outlet here in the e-ther but it feels like going into a great and empty lecture hall and simply droning on and on. It feels pointless.
Don’t get me wrong. I am aware of all that I have abdicated as a result of sin and frankly there is much that is freeing about light being shone on dark things. Still I feel like a prisoner in my own head incapable of unwinding the bonds I have created. Oh, many would respond with a sacharine comment about how one simply needs to “let go and let God” but frankly that does not really mean a lot these days, even to the ones who would echo that sentiment.
Something inside me tells me that all the weight on my soul is existential and therefore unreal and of no actual power but that which I allow. Nevertheless I allow it. I wonder sometimes if I have lost my calling. If I have lost my voice. It still feels as if it is there. There is not a moment that does not go by that I do not feel the deep and ever-present urge to reveal and speak and teach and cry out. But who would listen? Why would anyone listen? I have become all that offended me in the past. A person who would tell others how to live without being capable of living myself. Worse still I have become self-pitying and that sickens me to depths you cannot really comprehend.
Why is it so hard to do what others find so easy to advise? It is like trying to run in a dream…frustratingly slow. Too slow to escape the hidden doom that lays behind it all.
People have been good to me. Better than I deserve I daresay. Still I have lost some. It is hard to know what to say to someone like me now. I think I make people uncomfortable and I understand this because I make me uncomfortable. I have learned that when people don’t know what to say they tend to say nothing. Then after awhile they look down or away when you catch their glance…and eventually you are invisible in plain sight. It is a strange and otherworldly kind of existance. Honestly though if people were to ask what I needed I would not be able to answer them.
My heart aches deeply right now (and by ‘now’ I mean in this moment as I write this). It isn’t always so. I feel as though I am picking at a scab. Pulling a wound that wants to heal but for my own efforts to tear it open again and again. I am not even sure why I am telling you this except that it helps me to write, like leeching poison from the body.
I spoke of hyposcrisy at the beginning of this. I seek to enter in to the community of faith again. To partake of the body of Christ, but to do so is to make oneself utterly vulnerable. In these days I have sought to make myself invulnerable and this is my hypocrisy…that I seek Christ in the distance, standing on the edge of the crowd and feeling angry that he doesn’t see me when all the while he invites me to walk straight up to him.
I think what I struggle with the most is that I don’t feel any different now than before (some, no doubt would suggest this is a lack of repentance but they would be wrong). What I mean is that the only real difference in who I am is that my brokeness erupted to the surface for all to see. The door to my white-washed tomb was opened and the stench of my own death moved amongst the people. It will happen again…of this I have no doubt. This is not present rationalizing of a future failure, it is simply the truth. I guarantee you I will fail again and again and again. I suppose what I need to do is stop living in it, the failure that is. To stop defining myself according to it, because this is the deep whispered lie that was first told at creation. “You can never go back now” it says. “You have lost the right and will never again hear his footsteps in the garden in the cool of the day…” To this one can only say “but he came anyway. He clothed me when he could have obliterated me. He healed me when he could have left me to die and return to the dust.”
Where there is pain there is still hope.
Listen to me. I am rambling now. There is no real purpose to this post except katharsis or kenosis maybe. I do feel empty but not in a bad way. You are good listeners when it comes right down to it.
Harnessing Chaos 
You are always a teacher, even if you have lost your platform. I love your teaching. I listen! And I ache for you. My God has given me many second and third and fourth chances. It will be so for you too!
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I have followed your blog for about 4 years now. Maybe more… and I have enjoyed your writting… and your teachings. This is the first time I comment on any of your postings though. And I felt compelled to comment because I know what you are talking about. I read your confession before.
Somebody once told me that “the punishment is in the sin”… and I can see how that continues to torment you. And I can see how difficult it must be for you -a man of the cloth- to have fallen into temptation and now feeling how you can go about preaching about morals and all of that.
I think having sinned qualifies you even more to preach and to teach about the consequences of sin. Kind of like a drug addict or an alcoholic, after being ridden by that evil for so long… and then coming out clean… and maintaining him or herself clean. To me, and I’m sure to many others, that person is worthy of teaching… and we would listen even more, knowing the person teaches from the heart, because he/she has experienced first hand the sin and the punishment.
I t hink you are not being a hypocrite. I know you have repented. We are all humans. We all sin. Only God doesn’t sin. A sin is a sin. No sin is bigger or better, or harder or softer than others. Yours was having fallen into “that kind” of temptation. Others fall into “other kinds of temptation”. We all sin… every day!
But you are even better than most of us. You confessed it publicly. Most people don’t. And you are beating yourself that much?
Maybe the hypocrites are us… because we point the finger at you, but we fail to point the finger at ourselves.
I hope the Lord in all of his wisdom, eventually will help you understand and free you of that guilt.
But I or others who may reply to your posting can’t tell you to “let go and move forward”. That will come from inside of you in due time.
Be patiente.
God bless!
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Thanks for sharing Pete. I read you post earlier and was so touched by your struggle. It is so true in the christian life that we are our own worst enemies at times. These words of Christ came to mind.
John 8
1Jesus went unto the mount of Olives.
2And early in the morning he came again into the temple, and all the people came unto him; and he sat down, and taught them.
3And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery; and when they had set her in the midst,
4They say unto him, Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act.
5Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou?
6This they said, tempting him, that they might have to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not.
7So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.
8And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground.
9And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: and Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst.
10When Jesus had lifted up himself, and saw none but the woman, he said unto her, Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man condemned thee?
11She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her, Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.
I wonder if Christ really expected the woman to obey. “Go, and sin no more.” There in lies the hypocrisy with which the teacher struggles. There in lies the truth all men must face. Hallelujah what a Savior!
“Honestly though if people were to ask what I needed I would not be able to answer them.” When you can answer you will teach. Hallelujah what a Savior!
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Hi, Peter. During the past couple of weeks, I have struggled to define my best response to you and within your isolation. In the ideal: Sin isolates but when it is recognized, confessed and forgiven, it is ‘atoned’ or covered. Fellowship is restored. All that we see is the covering, the blood of the covenant staining the Ark. So that ‘ideally’ there is no isolation and there should be no feelings of isolation within a fellowship with the Ark at its center.
The fellowship that you and I share is unbroken. However, other relationships are broken and the role that you once played in those relationships has been taken away from you. Of course, you are feeling isolated. You have fins for swimming but no water to swim in. The gills you used for getting oxygen out of water, don’t work on dry land. You can’t move like you used to move … you feel the slow decay from within. You are grieving a death. It is your own death and the death of relationships that defined you and to which you had adapted yourself.
I have told you before that I think all of this has been overblown by the committee and the church. In the letter you read in front of the church you confessed to what I would have called an ‘indiscretion’ which somehow was transformed into ‘moral and ethical failure in the form of sexual misconduct’ by the Regina committee. You submitted to this transformed description of your act. And the church submitted to the description. A indiscreet ‘kiss’ has become ‘sexual misconduct.’ All of this was completely unnecessary, in my view.
You once asked me the question: ‘why were you so honest?’ when I ‘confessed’ to the Pastor of Morden Alliance Church that I did believe that if a person does not accept Christ as his personal savior he would be going to hell. You watched this confession on my part isolate me from the church. It barred me from ever acting as a teacher and made me suspect in every attempt to ‘teach’ by way of participation in a small group format. I eventually found the whole situation so intolerable that I became associated with another small group in another church where I could talk about my skepticism without upsetting the apple cart of doctrine that bound the group together.
I now have found myself asking the same question that you asked me a number of years ago: Why were you so honest? The precariously balanced apples of the Morden Alliance fellowship are not able to withstand the type of honesty that you attempted to bring to the fellowship: The honest apple becomes a bad apple that must be removed in order to keep the other apples safe.
To my way of thinking, you need a new fellowship centered around the same blood, stained Ark but able to look at the stain and recognize what it means in terms of dealing with honesty.
You are scarred and scared, understandably. I can understand why you have ‘sought to make [yourself] invulnerable’ but I would paraphrase your interpretation by saying that you are seeking Christ in a group that is not at a point where they are able to translate his message of forgiveness in terms of their relationship with you. You are standing at a distance, standing on the edge of [that] crowd and feeling angry that [they] don’t see [you] when all the while [Christ] invites [you] to walk straight up to him.
When I was agonizing as you are agonizing in my relationship with Morden Alliance, I bristled under the ‘honesty’ of a prominent leader who said ‘I will be praying against you’ when he understood that I did not believe that people will be going to hell because they have not accepted Christ as their personal savior. I felt so terribly isolated by this statement but as I directed those feelings of isolation toward Christ in prayer, I felt (eventually) coming back at me the response: ‘I am the Head of the Church not this person who is praying against you.’ I cannot describe the relief I felt when that truth sunk into my own heart.
I realized what I would say that you realized when you say:
“Something inside me tells me that all the weight on my soul is existential and therefore unreal and of no actual power but that which I allow. Nevertheless I allow it. I wonder sometimes if I have lost my calling. If I have lost my voice. It still feels as if it is there.”
I would say that you have allowed members of Christ’s body to define your status in the body of Christ in a way that Christ would not. And, I would venture to opine that it is going to take some time for you to move through the dark tunnel and into the light of a new fellowship with the body where ‘God is light and in him there is no darkness’ and when we ‘confess our sin he is faithful and just to forgive us our sin and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.’
My prayer is that you will find all of this helpful …
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Re-reading my post, I must correct a significant error: I said ‘I did believe that if a person does not accept Christ as his personal savior he would be going to hell’ but it should read ‘I did not believe …’
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John…as always you challenge me in ways no one else does (or has). You honesty speaks deeply to me. I often wish my mind was not always spinning and thinking and re-thinking the things it does. I seek balance and only ever seem to find the extremes.
I appreciate your intentional friendship and could learn a lot from it.
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btw thanks for your response. I have been struggling, as I said, with how to best respond to this part of your pilgrimage. It is difficult for me to see you suffering like this. Of course, I want to remove the cause of the pain as if I were to remove a sliver from your finger but this is so much deeper. The agony is deep within your soul. I can look into my own soul and try to identify as I did in my earlier email of today but I have had to guard against blending my own experience with yours so that I am unable to see what you are up against clearly.
Something I did want to add regarding MAC is that at some point there has to be the strength of forgiveness for those that have reacted poorly. On the one hand, those who are constantly told that they are accepted in the beloved should be able to transfer that to a relatively simple problem like the one that you presented to them. But, on the other hand, what you have confessed has become like a sliver of pain in the MAC body and they will need to go through a period of grieving. As you stand on the outside of that crowd, the anger you feel at being excluded has to be ‘watched’ and let be as it is while another part of you thinks about why they are unable to be the healing body that they were called to be. For my part, I had to find another body in which to process my own skepticism before I could see the anger for MAC subside. I was able to distance myself because I found a small group where I could admit my skepticism and be taken seriously. Further, the small group is made up of others who are honest about their own skepticism. Together we try to understand one another’s journeys as well as challenge one another. Because I have this small group, I don’t feel the same agony that I felt when I was trying to blend in with the crowd at MAC. I can stand on the outside where you are standing and see things more objectively. However, it still bugs me (aka makes me angry) that there is not a modicum level of understanding of the doctrine of the atonement in terms of how to deal with someone’s honesty since the doctrine is constantly applied in a general way over the pulpit. If God ‘enjoys his people’ why can’t his people ‘enjoy’ someone whose inner conflicts erupts in a moment of indiscretion?
Anyway, I am looking forward to our next coffee chat …
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On often wishing that your mind was not always spinning and thinking and re-thinking the things it does: I have found the perspective of Ekhart Tolle helpful when he says ‘become a watcher.’ In terms that you and I are more familiar with from Romans 7 (as viewed from the Greek Tragic Dramatist’s perspective i.e. Medea): See the lower self (the body) following its own law.
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