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aaron klinefelter
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August 17, 2009
> 10:28 AM
mistakes, regrets and hankering I should have written "hankerin" - just doesn't sound right to say "hankerING." But, as with what I'm going to talk about, that's how it goes. That's how I wrote it. There are events in your life that play out in certain ways. Some you have little control over - they just happen around you and it's like you're watching a movie. Most personal life-events, though, are to some degree, bound up with our wills, our choices. They "play out" as they do partly because of how we choose to act or not act, as the case may be. We affect how the play moves and happens. OK, this is not a treatise on free will. These are just things connected to my thought process here. For the most part, I've been thinking about some of the decisions I made a couple of years ago in light of my discernment to come back into the Catholic Church. At the time this sense to "go back" came upon me, and that's what it was like, I was leading, pastoring, abbotting, a small faith community that met in our home. I was, and had been, a participant in a kind of grassroots dialogue taking place in certain sectors of the Church as a whole - in at least part of the whole "emerging church" scene. Then - well, then I sort of dropped it all like a hot potato. Not quite that drastic, but it seems a bit like that to me now. The way I handled all that, in part, I regret. At the time, I felt I needed to make a very clear break from one thing in order to pursue the other, so that's what I did. I'm not sure, in hind sight, that it really needed to happen that way. Maybe God had something in mind for me that I still don't totally understand. This is likely true for all of us to some extent I suppose. But I'm not sure that one can't still be involved in some sort of emerging type community and still be a part of another church, the Catholic Church in particular, in my case. I'm not sure one has to give up one voice in order to have another. Whatever voice I had or have is able to speak, if that's what God wants it to do, to whomever, whenever, wherever. There are certainly things in me that needed to be dealt with, and are still being dealt with by God. The one thing my spiritual director (whom I haven't seen in far too long) said to me early on in all this process, was, "maybe God is making you small, huh?" May be - and I still say to that - not fun, not at all. Is it supposed to be fun? No. I feel that, at least for a while, I became invisible, powerless and mute. This was, perhaps, necessary for a time. I think, though, that I'm starting to see myself in the mirror again, a little bit, and my voice is coming back - a little bit. I just have to listen and figure out what that means. So, I have made mistakes, I think, in how I handled some of my and my family's ecclesiastical transition. I'm sorry for that. Nothing I can do to change it now. God deals with more screwed up messes than that, I reckon. I lift all involved to His Grace and Mercy. I regret some of the ways things went down. And finally, I am beginning to have a hankerin' for something... something. Not just the monastery. That too. I have not let that die. I don't think God has let it die despite my lack of hope sometimes, my lack of faith. Maybe it's like someone who's a creative woodworker, who's an artistic carpenter, who has that gift and skill-set - if you close down your shop for a while and put your tools down, eventually the smell of saw-dust and mineral oil and stain will creep into your dreams. It won't totally go away. Then you have to discern - when do I want to go back into the shop, and what do I want to build when I get in there. Fill my mind and heart, Holy Spirit. Labels: catholic, church, emerging church, reversion 0 Comments:| permalink | e-mail me | 
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