Frantic Days

[poliphilo]

I dreamed that I'd been given three quarters of an hour to devise an entire church service. And I was having to do it while travelling to the venue. My daughter was with me and I was bouncing ideas off her. We decided on an opening hymn. One down, five to go. And then it suddenly hit me that I'd have to deliver a sermon.

My anxiety dreams almost always return me to my life as a clergyman. Frantic days. I was close to panic all the time. Stretched, stressed, stifled.

I was two weeks into the job- in the heatwave summer of 1976- and cycling home from morning prayer, when it first occured to me that I'd given my heart away. Down the hill I went with the sun on my back and the wind on my face and it was almost as if I were free- only these weren't my own clothes I was wearing but a black uniform shirt with one of those white, slave-collar things around the neck.

I pushed the thought away. But once you're wounded by the truth you stay wounded. I had ten more years of thinking other people's thoughts and speaking other people's words before I got myself into such a pickle that I had no option but to walk away.

Comments

[tx-cronopio.livejournal.com]

Thanks for posting this. Hits a nerve for me, this month. Hmmmm. Time to think...

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I'm glad it has been of use....

[halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com]

I've always wondered how one can be a member of the clergy and be his or her 'own person'. I've known a few kids whose parents were clergy. Most of them could (and a few did) teach me some lessons in lying, cheating and stealing, and two of the girls got pregnant in their mid teens.

Have you written about your time as a clergy person? Well, I mean besides asides like this?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I wrote about it and then burned the MS. I guess that achieved the desired therapeutic effect.

The only way a priest can be his/her own person is if s/he either really believes in the Church's teaching 100% or is prepared to be a maverick and make a lot of enemies.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

You knew from that summer? After only two weeks...that moment of feeling the truth must have been so hard. And then you pushed it away.

Was there ever a time, during that long ten years, when your work was fulfilling or when you felt joy in it? I hope so.

(In that same year, in October, I began working at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, at first as a mechanical draftsman. If there were ever someone misplaced in a job, that was I, and I well knew I was running a bluff--I was lousy in math, couldn't turn objects in my head--all I could do was make lovely drawing and use pretty handwriting. But I had to support two small children. Some days I would be so baffled and miserable that I would escape into the restroom and cry, I was so scared I'd be fired for incompetence.

Like you, it took me ten years to get sprung.)

I'm sorry for those ten years of pain you had.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

We're twins. But the main thing is we both got out before the machine crushed us.

Oh yes, there were good times. Plenty of them. I can remember being happy and fulfilled but, the odd thing is, I don't really remember why. And I was always anxious. It's only since I quit that I've come to realize that anxiety isn't the iron rule of the human condition.

[manfalling.livejournal.com]

yeah- write more about church days, would you? i'd be fascinated... and stories about us ;) what wicked children we were....!!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I will- in small doses. Every so often this stuff comes back. It's like an acid reflux of the soul.

But you weren't bad kids, any of you.