We've Taken The Leap

This morning Dwight and I made a commitment that we have been wanting to make for years, but had not found the right group of people.  We joined the Hyattsville Mennonite Church, where we have been attending for several months, and it's hard to express how much joy this brings me.  We've been without a community of faith for a lot of years, and while I cannot say we've been wandering in the desert - life has been good! - we have nonetheless been wandering.  Who would have guessed that it would take a cross-country move to feel like we have arrived at our spiritual home?

The service was filled with singing and the stories of each of the seven people who joined this morning.  Speaking in front of the congregation was a little scary, but it seems like a good way to say "here I am, and thanks for including me."  What follows is what I had to say.

It’s been a long time since I’ve wanted to be a member of a church – more than 10 years, in fact.  And so I’m really happy, and a little surprised, at how much I want to be a part of this community of faith.

My family background is Mennonite Brethren.  I grew up in a small MB church in a small town in Central CA, sitting each Sunday morning, Sunday evening and Wednesday evening on pews with my sisters, parents, grandparents and great grandparents.  When I was in Junior High our small church merged with the small General Conference Mennonite church in town – a pretty unusual step – and so my ‘coming of age’ years were very influenced by the GCs.  I think of myself as a Mennonite hybrid.

Undergrad work was at Fresno Pacific, an MB school, where I studied Anabaptist History as well as child development.  Dwight and I married and joined the most progressive MB church we could find, raised our daughter there and were very active in the church.  But I was doing a lot of changing in those years.  Along the way as I mothered and wifed and moved through my career as a Montessori teacher, environmental education program director and university lecturer, my spiritual journey took me on a path I did not anticipate.

All of those little children in my school were teaching me something about a purer, more wide-eyed and open spirituality than could be contained in any one faith tradition.  The astounding beauty of the California landscape and the San Joaquin River was teaching me  something about spirituality as an organic part of my biological being.  Working with college kids who were just beginning their own path to adulthood was teaching me about the variety of ways we seek both to find our best selves and to serve others with our gifts.

In short, my faith was losing its packaging.  It had been so tidy and wrapped up.  It had been so simple – I was well trained n Biblical literacy, I can sing all the old hymns, am well schooled in the value of community and our ultimate dependence on grace.  But it was no longer enough.  What I had known to be true was no longer as true as it had once been.

And so, by the time our daughter was off to college, Dwight and I began a spiritual journey of actively looking – seeking – wandering, really.  It was kind of like trying to scratch an itch that you can’t quite locate on your body.  I felt a little lost and more than a little scared, but took comfort in these words from Wendell Berry, which I kept on the refrigerator:

"It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work                                       

and when we no longer know which way to go,
we have begun our real journey."

We left our church behind and began looking for another, spending more than a year at two of them, but couldn’t find that place of peace that tells you that you’ve come home.

Finally, we decided to stop looking.  Sundays would be spent hiking or sometimes canoeing, or breakfasting with friends or often doing what I came to call worshiping in the church of my garden.  When I just could no longer articulate what it was I was even looking for, I’d find some peace with my hands in the dirt, with the bugs and the weeds and the flowers and the vegetables.

Then we turned our lives completely inside out and upside down by deciding to leave California – the only home either of us had known – to join our daughter and her family here in DC.  This, we thought, might be a good time to make another attempt at church.  We found the Hyattsville website, were intrigued, and decided to visit.  I wanted a church community, had missed it so much, but had learned to guard my heart against disappointment.

I can’t say exactly what it was about our first visit late last August, but after the service, Dwight and I looked at each other and said . . . I think we’re home.

A few weeks later we had coffee with the pastor, Cindy.  In our conversation I told her that I am, in my deepest heart, an Anabaptist Christian.  Yet that deep heart also beats with other traditions and resonates with additional practices.  I would, at this point, I told Cindy, call myself an Anabaptist feminist- spirituality, Catholic-ritual  loving, Buddhist, earth-based pagan..

Cindy didn’t flinch.  In fact, she reacted in a way that made me feel normal.  That’s how I knew for sure that I was home.

Now we are part of a small group, I meet with WOCA (Women of a Certain Age) and participated in yesterday’s wonderful women’s retreat, and I feel like I can be myself.  For the first time since I began to step away from the prescribed and standard faith, I feel I can be myself in church.

Thankyou, Hyattsville.

This is particularly important with all the changes of the past year . . . leaving my friends, my profession, my home, my garden.

I’m still transitioning from professional educator to professional Oma (my new job is being home to care for Asaka, age 3 and Kiyoko, 6 months), I’m still developing friendships, still learning the flora and fauna of the mid-Atlantic, still learning to find my way around, still learning how to understand how it is that I have come so far away from home when before now I have never lived farther than 60 miles from where I was born.

I am amazed at God’s nurturing, patient love that has brought my spiritual path here, with you, and I am so grateful.

Our Church