Something's Missing

Ever since I was so unceremoniously let go from my job of the past twenty years, I've been periodically checking on my grief process. I mean, I learned in that new George Clooney movie that loss of a job can have the same effect as the loss of a family member. I believe it. George has never lied to me. I also read somewhere that people who lose a job go through the same stages of grief as when they experience that same death.

Since my ouster, I have been stuck at the really pissed off stage of grief. Since the place I was fired from is a peripheral business of my church, I've stopped going there, too, and I think I'm mourning that as well. Its not that I stopped believing in God when I lost my job, I just can't figure out how people who profess to want to do good things in the world can reconcile treating someone (me!) so meanly. I figure that its not the religious experience I'm after to sit there on Sunday morning staring daggers at the backs of peoples' heads.

But I love Jesus and I believe in God. I'm just having a little trouble with organized religion. Really, God is love and perfection and all good things. People, fallible, errant, sometimes really mean people run churches. In general I love people, I really do, but some of them are just big, fat poopyheads. Its not just my former church, a friend has a friend who was married for three decades to a terrible man.

She hung in until her kids were grown then gave him the heave ho. She was a devout member of her church and the priest knew her history but he gave her a ration of crap anyway for not trying hard enough to make it work. If she tried any harder, she'd have imploded. Then he could have presided at her funeral.

Then last week I heard Pat Robertson talking on TV about the Christmas crotch bomber, who by all accounts, was singing like a bird in custody. Pat Robertson said he thought the medical people should deny pain meds to the bomber. Now, I don't think that idiot should be coddled in any way but doesn't denying pain medicine smack of vengeance? And isn't Pat Robertson a man of the cloth?

In any case, I really hope that some day I'll find another church I can trust. I always feel calm in church and I like the spirituality of it. Its just that I don't think anything good can come of me grumbling under my breath during the opening prayer, or adding editorial comments ( "Yeah, right", Sure they did!" "Uh-huh") to the sermon. Maybe I can find one run by nice people. Or dogs. I trust dogs.