A late post after getting up at 4 a.m. and driving from the farm to Panama City to prepare for and attend a hearing at nine. I just couldn't make myself leave Wyldswood yesterday, lingering into the evening talking to P on the phone and admiring a beautiful sunset over the pond.
I had contemplated going to church, but the recollection of the expression on the face of the priest at St. Andrews when I showed up there, he being the guy who succeeded me in the pulpit at Chipley, led me to decide I'd make things easier on both of us and stay at Wyldswood to clear brush and shoot water moccasins. Mortal combat with poisonous snakes was a more comfortable experience for me than awkward church time.
As if on queue as I thought about whether to darken the doors of a house of worship, an old friend of mine posted on Facebook that he'd lost his job as a priest up north somewhere, and was coming home to the South with an obvious heaviness of heart shared by his whole family. He and I were ordained together, navigated the whole discernment thing together. He was the sort of kind, thoughtful, erudite priest you'd want in your parish, and totally committed to his call. No wonder they showed him the door. The church eats its young.
Another friend sent me the essay at the bottom of this post, written by a priest who'd decided he'd had it up to here with all the boozy hypocrisy, and was doing just fine, thank you very much, happily on the outside looking in. He does seem a little bitter, however.
I was there once, but not anymore. Life's both too good and too short. I wish all those folks the best, and miss it less and less every day. To quote John Prine, I'll just keep trying to find Jesus on my own.
Yesterday was Father's Day, and of course the silence from my three was deafening. Three or four years now without so much as a card or a call on this fake holiday. Except this year Issac called me from halfway around the planet in Greece, his own personal laughing place. I'll have to go there with P someday, and let him be our well-versed tour guide. He and Olivia also sent me a wonderful illustrated history of flight, which I've already pawed at a little when I should've been getting ready for my next appointment. The thought is appreciated--our blended family is sort of a coalition of the willing these days. Happiness is the best rebuke to being rebuked.
Mid-afternoon, after the snake killing, I drove over to the Perry Country Club in the blazing heat to play a little golf. My favorite bartender Nicki was there, and soon I had a Tito's and Diet Coke for hydration on a day boasting a heat index of 108. The usual crew was on the patio, about to marshal the will to venture into the furnace and tee off for a quick nine holes. There was my droll friend Mike the physical therapist, his son Christopher the perpetually jolly chiropractor, and Audie the retired Sheriff's deputy now happily in love in his 70s. I usually play alone, and there certainly wouldn't have been any problem with that given the empty golf course, but instead invited myself along.
I played badly, as usual, but had a nice time and refused to let the internal dialogue creep in and wreck my already wobbly game. It was just a bunch of friends riding around in golf carts, sweating profusely, and engaging in the self-deprecating humor that makes the game bearable.
And the three of them held off on offering advice until we were back out on that porch with a cocktail, correctly figuring that tinkering with my stance or my swing would have been counterproductive. Here I was on a Sunday, surrounded by good friends who'd accepted me into their tight-knit little community because I must be okay if Peg thinks I'm okay, and they all love her. I get the same treatment from Helen the octogenerian bartender at the Elks, and Dot who regales about her wonderful but deceased husband Roscoe. The same pretty much everywhere in town.
And for that, I am very grateful.
By Charles LaFond on Jun 19, 2022 10:22 am
This is the last reference, in non-fiction, referring to the church, for the remainder of my life. (Short of a need to defend myself. perhaps) Today I am bathing in the awareness of how much my life has been healed by the planet on which it walks, lives, breathes, and has its brief being. As a fundraiser of almost 40 years, nothing is more central a reality than that giving, philanthropy of time or money, emerges from two chemistries: gratitude and emotional intelligence. If one or the other has been broken by life, then generosity is constipated.
My youth was deeply damaged by parents whose freedom to raise a child was not licensed. It was not their skill set. They, themselves had been badly raised and so how could they raise me well?
And so I joined the church because it felt familiar. I fit in. The abandonment, manipulation, lies, abuse, posturing, and pomposity all felt normal to me. I went from one alcoholic family to another. How could I not?
And I, so sick, chose the sickest places for ministry. A monastery of emotionally truncated men escaping reality. A diocese in which the Canon To the Ordinary maintained an affair for four years with as senior warden. Where a bishop was having sex in public parks. Another place in which the head priest and bishop were sociopaths and the church was what we call a “clergy-killer.” I was living in a Trollope novel.
So I left official church ministry after 5 years of preparation and 20 of hard work. Half my life on earth. Or was expelled. Or vomited out. Hard to tell really. But regardless, the cosmic release into the hope of healing began when I walked out. Striding, Head high. Having done my best. And, of course, I knew too much for the church not to try to hunt me down. I was too good at making a new life to be harmed any more. How do we seek revenge? We live a great and good life!
Two years of silence in New Mexico then three on this beautiful island combined with the loving care of a good therapist, two loving dogs, and a dozen friends healed me. I was restored to the life “God”, or whatever you call that co-regulating co-creating energy of the cosmos, had meant for me.
Now, this is my chapel. I sit in my back yard on this small island in the Salish Sea, forest-bathed under new baptismal waters. No people interpret spirituality at me. No dogma. No ritual except the ones my heart longs for. No pomp and yet plenty of circumstance. I let the green-life throb around me and I let the celestial beings call for my healing. “Heal! Heal! Heal! says the hymns they sing so softly. Then I let the island clay pass through my fingers on the potter’s wheel, making shapes in the air.
Tonight new friends join me. Nothing religious. But so much FUN! A roast beef with vegetables, Yorkshire Pudding and Trifle eaten in stages while we watch a Downton Abbey double feature sipping gin. The irony of watching Downton Abby family while the church family goes through the same changes is not lost on me. My bishops were all Countess Violet. And most clergy were a version of Thomas Barrow, the sad, broken footman.
Dogs, good food, friends, a mission to raise money for people who suffer, a forest, an island, some distance from abuse. I can feel myself recovering. Sure I wish I had not entered the church. But I have compassion on the me that did. How could I have not!?! And now it is time never to write about or speak about the church again. Never. It is time to seek an act of new revenge – a happy life. Lead where it will and cost what it may.
Today as I cook in the kitchen and make plates in the pottery studio and sit in my tiny forest I am profoundly grateful that forces I refuse to describe or explain, spin me between unseen fingers into this new vessel – this content man – this new person.
Behold, I am imperfect. But behold, I am being made new, just in time. Not an elegant altar vase. Just a mug. Enough. And soon, decomposition. A brief life. And what will remain? mugs. Bowls, plates, funeral urns. Thousands of pieces of pottery in kitchens and landfills. For ten thousand years. And some love infused in the lives around me. More than enough in billions of years on this green and blue spinning marble. More than the average Pooh Bear.
(Author’s note: Soon, look out for written and video blogs and vlogs on “Spirituality Set Free.” And perhaps a new Trollopian novel…After all, fiction is how we tell the truth.)
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