Not really on speaking terms.
I don’t go to church anymore. That’s the down-and-dirty truth of it. I don’t. And I don’t plan to go back. I don’t plan not to go back. I just don’t plan. I don’t think about it one way or the other. So that’s what it’s come to. Real Live Preacher stopped being a preacher and then stopped going to church altogether. Now I’m one of those guys who wakes up on Sunday and says, “Hmm. What do I want to do today?”
I know some of you have never been church people, so you don’t get why this is even a thing.
You don’t go to church? So what? Church is boring and they ask for money and they’re always telling you what you should and shouldn’t do. It’s icky and creepy and weird. Why would anyone be part of that?
I totally get you on this. I understand. I do. Yep.
Other people (Like my mother for example. Hi Mom! Love you. Kisses) have given their entire lives to their churches and can’t comprehend someone like me NOT being in church.
I understand that too. Sure. That was me just a few years ago. Uh huh.
I do still feel a reality beyond us. Larger. Older. Cosmic in scale. A consciousness of which we are only a part. Something so deep and ancient that I dare not name it. This reality gets me in the feels. You know how people say that now? “It gets me in the feels?” If you haven’t heard that, you should read the Internet and you’ll find people saying it. I like the sound of it and what it expresses.
I know in my feels that somehow there is a connection to a reality beyond me.
I feels it. Can you feels me? Can you feels at least a sense of me on this?
I know you do. I can feels you too. And that feels we share is connected to the larger cosmic reality somehow. I feels that too.
So I got that going for me.
But I can’t go to church. Because if I go to church I start feeling angry. I get bored. I get resentful because I’m carrying around a lot of anger about what giving thirty years of my life to the church has cost me. Then I get critical and kind of sullen. So I close my eyes and try to ignore all the churchy stuff in hopes of finding peace within myself. But then I realize the irony of what I’m doing. I got up, got dressed, drove all the way here, just to close my eyes and pretend I’m not here.
I could have not been here so easily by just, you know, not going here.
So anyway, that’s why I don’t go to church now. And I’m not going back unless I feels like it.
I’m trusting my feels now. I was never allowed to before.
Also, I am doing some other things. Some new and wonderful things to nurture my relationship to the great reality beneath, above, around, and beyond us. I kind of want to tell you about that, but I’m afraid to right now. It might not be time. I might not be ready. And I can be very blabbity blab blab about stuff where I start getting all preachy about things before I really know what the hell I’m talking about. That’s a serious problem I have. It really is.
C’mon. I was a preacher. Whaddya gonna do? I’m having to unlearn that shit.
But I want you to know that my feels and I are wide awake and plugged in right now.
And we are looking for the source.
