The reoccurring theme that I often hear expressed by those who have exited high control religion in its various manifestations, is that upon exiting they are often left with a sense of sadness and loss of community. This is something that I have experienced as well.
Being conditioned to only see community through the lens of a church experience, it is difficult to find it elsewhere in any meaningful way. Even when we look for it diligently. Certainly, we are made for community. The intimacy of being fully known and loved is central to the heart of what it means to be human. But I want to suggest that what we miss from our former church experiences wasn’t intimacy but a pseudo-intimacy that was based on fear. The fear of rejection either by God or those who represented God to us, and the desire to maintain a sense of order and security within ourselves. This is why upon leaving, many of us are plagued with a kind of grief that feels like loneliness, rejection, and loss. This natural way of feeling is then often exacerbated and exploited by the churches we leave when they cut us off in some way. This practice known as “shunning” is designed to make those of us who leave feel guilty and alone. We then crave the rewards we once received in the church we attended regularly.
Why do we crave attention from those who are the most reluctant to give it? I suppose there is something consistent about the human experience that we always most want what we are least likely to have. I thought about this today in context while reflecting on the gifts given to me by my formative religious experiences. It is s a mixed bag. As it is with all our experiences. They are knives with sharp edges on both sides, blades that simultaneously serve as instruments of healing and hurt. Wielded as a scalpel it serves to carefully separate us from the cancerous tumor that will choke our life, but wielded as a sling blade it eviscerates our soul. People can cut as deep as experience.
There were so many moments when as a young man I relished being alone. But with age something in me has changed, as if someone flipped the switch of extroversion in my heart, it is a light that now serves to illuminate just how alone I can be. How alone all of us can be. Certainly, I don’t think I’ll ever be the life of a party, but I would like to be of interest at a small gathering. My primal religious experiences were steeped in hyperbole, dramatic pursuits of spiritual ecstasies. We mimicked the motions of drowning men in depths of oceans of God’s spirit. We flopped, and splashed, frolicked, and choked on the saltiness of our own emotions, when we were merely splashing water on each other’s faces from the tepid trickle of a rusty facet. We were playing hide and seek with a God who had long ago left the building if he had ever been there at all. Perhaps we were hiding from ourselves and from each other? This is why our pursuits always eluded our grasp. This is why they still do. Empty hands and hearts always reaching for what they cannot hold.
I’m certain that real community exists, although I have yet to find it. I choose to believe in intimacy even though it is plagued by fears of rejection and pain. Sometimes I feel like the father and the son in Cormac McCarthy’s classic book “The Road” as they attempt to survive in a post-apocalyptic dystopia. Everyday I take steps towards something new, and promising, only to discover it evades my reach. Nostalgia is a trick designed to convince us that things used to be better, when better is just a matter of perspective. Things were better because we were young and innocent, but things weren’t better for those responsible for our wellbeing. These are the well-worn ruts that remind us of a home that likely never existed. As the father reveals to his son in “The Road,” “Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that. You forget some things, don’t you? Yes. You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.”
Community that is based in high control religion is all about transaction. Giving to receive, earning your place through sacrifice, obedience, and loyalty. But genuine community I suspect, can’t be earned. It surprises us. It ambushes us.
I want to live in the place Leslie Jaminson describes beautifully in “Splinters,” “Living toward joy that was less about earning, and more about ambush. A joy you might call grace.”
May we all find this place.
Scot Loyd 