A little over a year ago I left my parish and religious community. Part of me was burned out from the hundreds and hundreds of hours I had given over to these communities over the course of a year. But there was more to it. I had the sudden realization that being part of a community meant compromising my truth, and I couldn't do it anymore. My heart wouldn't let me.
I spent almost three decades in a church that taught that women couldn't be ordained ministers. Staying in that church compromised my truth--the truth that women could rightly be ordained. So I switched churches. But even in my new church, I faced compromise on other issues. These days, I miss community. I yearn for it so much that I ache. But the pursuit of my own truth is now so fiercely and deeply rooted in me that I could never give it up to return to community. Returning to community would mean compromise, would mean putting up with half-truths and politics, and I'm no longer willing to put up with that. The desire to discover God in relationship to her sacred creation is too important a task to me to diminish it with politics. I never expected it, but my life's task has become a rather solitary one--one that thankfully involves loyal and loving companions, but one that can ultimately only be completed by me. In theology school there was warning after warning about pursuing the truth on one's own, outside the context of community. Augustine of Hippo, a fourth century African bishop, said the truth belongs to everyone. I think I side with Augustine in this case. Suppose, instead of giving into the demands of community politics, each individual contemplated her own truth? I don't mean contemplating one's own success--I mean contemplating one's relationship with all of creation, free from the influences of those in power. What if each person jumped off the bandwagon and decided to draw her own conclusions about the universe and her role in it? How would creation as a whole benefit from this freedom of thought?
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