Grief, Longing and Anger

At a local performance of Handel's Messiah, I meet KL by chance; she recommends Keeping Faith: A Skeptic's Journey.  So I check the book out of the library, and what do I read in the opening pages?  Johnson's emotional response to church:

Here among believers, seated at the foot of the bloody Christ for longer than any time since the Lenten vigils of my childhood, I was stunned by the anger that simmered up from some repressed place.  I was possessed by anger - the pit in the gut, the quickening pulse; I recognized the signs.  I was angry at the institution of the church, any church; angry at myself for letting it get to me... angry at being so alone in my anger... (4).

It turns out that Johnson is not alone; he soon discovers that others attending this Christian-Buddhist conference feel angry too.  Johnson writes:


...the cause might be more accurately described as longing, with anger the result of its frustration (5).

Frustrated longing, leading to rage at the church?  Yeah, I totally get that. 

Epiphany - after weeks of fuming, I have discovered I'm not just grieving over the results of the election, the dismal moral character of our next POTUS, or even how most Evangelicals voted.  My anger is the result of feeling alone, of not finding an anam-cara among the people of God.


Many who belong to my church call it "home."  They refer to our local congregation as their "church family," and say that they feel loved.

I feel like a visitor from another planet.

Somehow, we've let each other down - badly - and I don't even know how, or why.


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Johnson, Fenton. Keeping Faith: A Skeptic's Journey. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. Print.