Another blazing hot day and I walked up to the library. Mary B from the local evangelical church came up and spoke with me, asked why I didn’t go to church there any longer. As I answered her, I was soft-spoken ( it was a library) but the anger inside me surprised both of us.
While I was away from South Africa I realised how much I had struggled with the local English-speaking church, the only English-speaking church in my village. Small towns revolve around faith communities and I have always been able to move in traditional faith communities because there is no other place available to worship the Divine or share understandings of the commonality of faith and hope, or care for one onother at liminal moments of birth, death, bereavement, loss, doubt, war.
This little church is problematic. Elderly white congregants cowed by a fundamentalist preacher who fought with and drove away many church members before he was forced to resign in a very ugly deadlock with another senior elder who happens to own the church, insists on paying for everything. Doctrinal rigidity and ignorance. Racism. Gossip and control. And sexism, more than in many churches these days.
When I came back to the village, I was told what had been going on, the smothered conflict and backstabbing and fear, and old story, a pattern going back more than two decades, and I simply decided to give church a miss. An Anglican congregation is being established and I thought I might go along there. My own faith, as I have mentioned before is a wait-and-see place and I have a very strong alternative and Otherly element, but so have many mystical churchwomen who find a way to stay in Christian communities without feeling compromised. Protesting in place, one could say, prophetic and powerful and opening up older traditions to more compassion and outreach, more radical ways of reading and living the Bible.
Anyhow I told Mary B why I had left and at first she was very flustered and distressed. But as I had spoken with her my anger had begun to ebb because she was hearing me, she knew exactly what I was saying and although she disagreed with me on certain points there was a dialogue going on.
We talked about our individual experiences and our concern for many of the lonely elderly or mentally ill women in the village ostracised or overlooked by the church, the difficulties of integrating a church in post-apartheid South Africa.
And for the first time we became friends in a deeper and more truthful way. She wants me to talk to Sid, who has just become the new minister. I am happy to do so, have known him for many years.
As I walked back home under the blue spill of jacaranda blossom, I realised that I have distanced myself from the vilage because I have felt angry with many of my neighbours, sometimes for good reasons, but also becuse I did not want to come back here. I wanted to stay overseas. And so I cut off from village and community life except from a few friends.
It also came to me very clearly how badly I need AA meetings. If I had been sitting with others, fellow alcoholics, each week, much of this would have come out sooner. Why do alcoholics bottle up so much? The great imponderable. But there are no meetings and I have to find other places to talk, other groups where I feel safe.
Let me see if I can post this.
Posted by louisey 
Posted by louisey 