This is a letter I wrote to myself, to process my feelings and my sense of grief and loss after choosing to stop attending a church that I respect and, honestly, that I like. I just couldn’t keep going. This was not sent, because I couldn’t see how to make sure it would be received positively; it’d be very easy to take this as scathing criticism, and that’s not what it is. I am publishing it just in case anyone else wonders if they feel the same things – and to suggest that they shouldn’t have to.
Pastor, I wanted to reach out, sort of, to just clear the air in my own mind.
If you haven’t guessed, and you have, we’re no longer attending the church. It’s fine; there’re some residual mild scars on our part (the reason we left, because we don’t do things without cause), but there’s no bitterness, and we haven’t run down you, or the church, or the Church as a whole. We just felt like we were failed in some important ways, and I wanted to write you about why.
And yes, I know, you’re unlikely to read this. I wrote this to myself, so I could work through all of it and just process it. If you do read this, rest assured, I expect it to be for information’s sake only. It really is a record of myself for myself, and if you read this I hope it might be useful to you or others somehow, and if you are reading this, I mean it for your benefit and mine.
Did you know my mother had died, or when? Why, or why not?
I get it, if you didn’t: I don’t talk to people easily or well. She died in the summer, I found out Friday morning, and played for the worship team that Sunday.
My relationship with my mother was interesting; she was a real human being, with everything that implies, faults and flaws and wonders and achievements, all together. She was able to hold immense faith in one hand and offer you betrayal and suspicion in the other, and I say that not to impugn her memory but to recognize who she was and why our relationship was fraught.
And I grieve oddly: not only am I an introvert, but I’ve seen a lot of death for most of my life. I grew up in a high risk situation, in an age of much more primitive medicine. I’ve experienced enough of the mortal coil that a passing doesn’t bother me much. It can’t. I’ve seen too much of it.
But with my mother, it’s not just the ending of her life: it’s the ending without real resolution. There can be no peace made with the dead; all peace is from stasis, and that’s where my mother and I were left. She was dead. I was not. We had not come to a point where we were satisfied, and she suffered from dementia that prevented most such clarification; I suppose there was the possibility that she’d come into her own mind and we could come to an understanding, but her passing ended that.
Such is life. Yet I am also human, and this was my mother, and I grieved in my own way… isolated, alone, in the middle of the church.
I remember. I remember “How are you doing, man?” – and the pro forma response was, and is, “Fine,” because that’s the Man Code. I was not fine. I was trying to figure out how to rebalance my world, isolated, alone, in the middle of the church. My wife had suggested I not go, but I had made a commitment, and I take commitments seriously, so we went. (Plus, what else was I going to do?)
Did you know she’d died? Did anyone? Who was I supposed to have connected to at the church such that someone, anyone, would have known? You? The worship pastor? Anyone? If not the two of you – the two people with whom I personally had the strongest connections in the church – then who? When?
Was I supposed to go to you and bare my soul? How? Because I understand that I am not necessarily like most people; most people would hear “my mother passed away” and think of the grief as a simple loss. One loves and honors one’s parents, so that’s simple enough, stiff upper lip, we’re sorry for your loss, and that’s that.
I get that. Yet that is not me. That is not my loss.
And there’s the problem, right there: I don’t think anyone at our church ever invested in us, in my family. There was some investment: I do not mean to deny everything, because I can’t in any honest way. Yet it felt like there was a sort of quid pro quo involved: if we extended effort to a specific degree, we might eventually expect a return investment to a similar degree; as we plugged in, so would we be plugged in and eventually the clique would see us as more than interlopers, as more than names and faces.
The thing is: we don’t have it to give. I hold myself apart because the maelstrom of my inner and outer lives is not your effin’ problem… but it’s an effin’ church. The Body has to concern itself with the hand, even though the hand is not the Body. And I make no demands – like I said, there is no demand here, no intended recrimination – but there were failures: we failed to signify who we were, and we were failed in that people took that as how it was, that’s fine, even in moments when I feel like it should have been obvious that it was not good enough to be fine.
You’ve asked me for insight in various ways; I appreciate that, even while I find it amusing. (Who am I to have insight? Is it worth it?) Yet when asked, I offered; you asked about deep emotions, and for the love of God and out of my own depths, I answered in my own way. And it was worth it, I hope.
And I was tentative in other ways, I know, but I still tried, to respect what people could bear while respecting myself and the people who could bear more. I know I am not simple, and I know others are, and I cannot disrespect that, and I do not disrespect that. But I tried.
And yet, if you asked me if I felt seen or known at the church, I’d say no. I do not have any idea how anyone there would have described me, were they asked, even you. I’d be a name, probably a face – I know my face is pretty memorable. Some might be able to describe something of my faith. But if anyone asked what I did, or what my hopes were, or what my fears were, or what my struggles were, or when I lost my job… who would have known? Who would have cared?
Being perfectly frank, I think the caring ended at the Man Code: pro forma, we go around the room, we ask, we move on as we hope nobody really digs in the dirt of their own lives for others to see. That’s how I felt.
Why? Why was I asking the various Toms, Dicks, and Harrys about the concerns they had in their lives, but … that was the end of the exchange? I know it feels like I’m being selfish for me to say “What about us? We cared for others, what about us, us? US?” But the fact remains: a well that is never supplied runs dry.
And we ran dry.
I don’t have any answers, because I don’t have a question. I only see data, and patterns. And this was a pattern that cost my family, it cost us in time and endurance and forbearance for little slights, surely unintended but easily avoided with any understanding – and that understanding was lacking.
And there was no reason for it to be lacking. We were doing the best that we could to establish every connection we were able to make, and it was not enough. That’s not on you or the church – it’s a holistic problem, and we’re part of it… yet were I to look purely analytically, I’d say that something was missed that shouldn’t have been.
I don’t blame you, or anyone else there – in fact, I have no desire or even ability to point fingers. We all carry our own heavy burdens, and my family is not your specific concern, or anyone else’s. But I’d say that if there was a problem to observe at a systemic level, it’s this: we should have been someone’s burden, even as little as we were able to invest in creating those connections.
Maybe not yours – but someone’s. And we weren’t, and it was painfully clear, and that was untenable for us: attendance in a vacuum did more to weaken our walk than it did to encourage us, and that’s not a situation that I could put my family through.