Skip to main content

Just Another Sucker

Yesterday, my old friend John M-B came up to visit me. We spent the day at the beach, talking about life. John's a UCC minister turned therapist; in addition to being a newbie Quaker, I'm a therapist turned teacher. We always have tons to talk about. So it wasn't until the trip back that I got to talking about recent spiritual developments in my own life, including joining Ministry and Worship, and my feeling of just how much I have to learn before I'll be able to talk about all this and make sense.

John laughed at me (one of the things I love about him most). Then he said, "You know what your problem is? You've always been a sucker for God."

I love that. I really love it when somebody finds a way to say something that's really true--and says it in a way that cuts truth down to size.

Yep. I'm just another sucker. I'm not sure what "God" means, but I do think that I am indeed a sucker for it... And John has known me long enough to laugh with me about it.

And, lest I forget, the last meeting of M&W was much less frightening. I was a lot more comfortable asking dumb questions--and it doesn't matter if they aren't dumb questions, because you never know that until after you ask them anyway--and M has agreed to be an offical answerer of dumb questions for me. Which helps a lot. Plus, we laughed a lot. (I don't know if I can trust spirituality without laughter; hence my delight with John's turn of phrase...)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Fame

(Note: there were so many thought provoking comments in response to this post that it generated a second-round of ideas. You can read the follow-up post here .) I have a confession to make. I want to be famous. Well, sort of. I don't want to be famous, famous, and ride around in a limousine and have to hire security and that sort of thing. I just want to write a book, have it published by somebody other than my mother, and bought and read by somebody other than my mother, and maybe even sign a couple of autographs along the way. Mom can have one autographed, too, if she wants. It has to be a spiritual book. A really moving and truthful book, that makes people want to look deep inside themselves, and then they come up to me and say something like, "It was all because of that book you wrote! It changed my life!" And I would say, no, no, really, you did all that, you and God/the gods --I'm a little fuzzy on whether the life-changing book is for Pagans or for Quake

Peter on Grief and Communities

Well, that was unexpected. For the last year, ever since my mom's health took a sharp downturn, I've been my dad's ride to Florence Congregational Church on Sundays. That community has been important for my dad and the weekly outing with me was something he always looked forward to and enjoyed, so I didn't mind taking him there. It meant giving up attending my own Quaker meeting for the duration, but I had already been questioning whether silent waiting worship was working for me. I was ready for a sabbatical. A month ago, my dad was Section-Twelved into a geriatric psych hospital when his dementia started to make him emotionally volatile. I had been visiting him every day at his assisted living facility which was right on my way home from work, but the hospital was almost an hour away. I didn't see him at all for three weeks, and when I did visit him there, it actually took me a couple of seconds to recognize him. He was slumped forward in a wheel chair, lo

There is a Spirit Which I Feel

I was always a "rational use of force" gal. For most of my life I believed that the use of force--by which I meant human beings taking up arms and going off to war to try to kill one another--was a regrettable necessity. Sometimes I liked to imagine that Paganism held an alternative to that, particularly back in the day when I believed in that mythical past era of the peaceful, goddess-worshipping matriarchal societies . (I really liked that version of history, and was sorry when I stopped believing in it as factual.) But that way of seeing reality changed for me, in the time between one footfall and the next, on a sunny fall morning: September 11, 2001. I was already running late for work that day when the phone rang; my friend Abby was calling, to give me the news that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center in New York. So? I thought to myself, picturing a small private aircraft. Abby tried to convey some of what she was hearing--terrorists, fire--but the mag