I’m in Paradigm Distress

Since I was a young woman, newly ordained to the ministry of the United Church of Christ, I have consistently had some level of paradigm distress within the context of my love-hate relationship with the Church. The photograph here shows me with my ministry partner, Rev. Dale Rominger, the creator of this website, The Back Road Café. I was not alone in my distress in 1985 when this photo was taken and I shared it with Dale, my friend and colleague. And, I continue to share my distress with many colleagues who have been “laboring in the field of the Lord” these many years.

According to a recent Gallup poll 47 percent of people polled about the honesty and ethics of various professions gave clergy high marks for moral standards. That’s a 20% decline in as many years and I understand why. The secular population does not care about the difference between a Protestant clergy person and a Catholic priest. If Catholic priests abuse power and victimize children in their care then cultural confidence in all clergy declines. The “collateral damage” for the Church Universal from this lineage of predation has not yet been calculated. Ultimately, I suspect history will record it as one of many death knells for organized Christianity as we have known it.

This kind of betrayal strikes deeply into the soul and quietly we leave home. With the unfolding revelation since the early 2000’s of Catholic priestly abuse and the organized cover-up we have all become emotionally incested victims of the Church. For over 10 years we have been watching and waiting for “Dad” to receive consequences that have not yet happened.

In addition, the healing reach of the Church has been severely diminished as our congregations thin out and our missions shrink and disappear. There are many reasons for this and we can’t blame it all on Catholic sexual repression and their dysfunctional hierarchy. We Protestants have plenty of our own issues.

Yet, it breaks my heart that people trust nurses more than they trust clergy. Not because I need to burnish the sheen of my professional role but because our culture has been betrayed by so many of our institutions. We Americans are the victims of corporations, the banking industry, politicians and the political arena, to name only a few. Recently the U.S. Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, commented about the ethical lapses in the three major branches of our armed forces. Really? Now, we can’t trust our Generals and soldiers who are second tier heroes just beneath our national athletes who dose and dope themselves into pyrrhic glory.

What about the deep cultural response? Well, zombi shows are the rage in our national entertainment scene and it makes sense. Zombies are dead and they feed on the flesh and blood of the living. Our corporations drool with greed and stalk us with dead eyes and our priests rape our innocent children. Greed, avarice and lust have burst the boundaries I learned to expect growing up in the 50’s. Ethics are so mid-century, no wonder today’s youth tattoo their flesh with their beliefs and watch revolting zombie drama on TV. I hope those shows help them survive the blood sucking credit card companies and the flesh eating corporations.

There’s no denying that our institutions are failing us and I’m in paradigm distress about the bigger picture. It is not just the Church that is staggering before my eyes. Some spiritual teachers call it “free fall” when our paradigms dissolve and we live without holding. St. John of the Cross called it Dark Night of the Soul and I think our entire culture is in a spiritually dark place.

And yet, I do not despair because coming out of the dark night experience brings with it spiritual advancement. An individual soul is never in the same evolutionary place at the end of a dark night as they were when they entered it. Surely, the same is true for the American culture and humanity at large. The evolutionary cosmic screw is turning and I’m going to do my part to make sure we don’t get screwed!

WHAT? Historically, Wisdom Schools pop up when people are looking around for what they can trust and these islands of consciousness are all over the place hidden in plain sight. I’ve become a part of a Christian Wisdom School and I’m committed to ever-greater consciousness. And so I quilt and knit, every stitch a prayer. I walk, every step a prayer. I meditate, every breath a prayer. I cook dinner for my husband, a sacrament of grace and I’d chop wood and haul water if we had a forest and a well. My humble contributions to consciousness.

I look out of these old eyes now without fear or dread, not because I’m a church-lady devoted to the culture of niceness and happy endings, but because I see the Church expiring into the living flame of love which is the light-filled hearts of the people around me. One by one we are internalizing the authority we formerly projected onto the Church and other worthy institutions. Now that they are failing us our evolutionary task is to internalize the authority we let them carry in the past. As profound authority is established within an individual it gazes deeply into the heart of the indwelling Beloved and knows unequivocally, that we ARE the Divine.

 We are in a sacred process of taking responsibility for our lives, for our divinity, for those around us, for the earth …and I think we are finally really beginning to get it… that damn…the bleeding edge of divine revelation can only happen right here and right now through this sacred life of mine.

VOI LA…EVOLUTION! But oh, not until the hundredth monkey gets it.

Copyright © 2014 Gayle Madison