Sarx

ETWEEN THE POST On my grandmother (above) and January 1999, a number of things happened. My roomies asked me to move out – and I moved in with Rick, a friend I knew from St Gregory’s Church. At the same time, I was wrestling with what church means, what Christianity means. I’d made a big deal about leaving Church ten years earlier to become a pagan. Part of my blog was a daily meditation on the Sabian Symbols and I was, at best, not very friendly to Christian thought. In the wrestling (and in the comments I received from readers) I made discernment choices.

Part of my experience as a Pagan in San Francisco was the total lack of community. You can do pagan by yourself so you don’t need to sit still when someone does something you don’t like: go next door, go to your own basement. I came from “back east” where traditions pagan “Denominations” were very important forms of Identity. So doing it “by myself” was awkward at best and frustrating most of the time. Going back to church was a way to get community back in my life, and a sense of accountability too.

Donald once told me that what makes us a Christian community was gathering in Jesus’ name to do the things he commanded us to do. And, week after week, gathering to sing and dance as Jesus leads, breaking bread and feeding each other, makes us Christian. After a while, my daily meditations on astrology gave way to a daily meditation on the lectionary which went out on a mailing list – 30 or 40 subscribers at its max. I can trace there the evolution of my own sense of radical gospel – of Christarchy, of AnarChristos, etc, of inclusion and exclusion… it’s all there. You can, ironically, see the evolution of my Eastern Orthodoxy there too. My friend Damon was on my vocational discernment committee and he says that, reading these daily meditations, he used to wonder, “Why are you not Orthodox?”.

There’s no “Greatest hit” entry from this period, just a note about what was going on. I think it’s interesting that I feel many of the same energies now, present and active in my life: the desire for community, the urge to “go it alone” coupled with the strong desire not to be alone. I blogged it last time. Don’t want to this time.