Difficult Thoughts

I am a retired priest in the Episcopal Church. My wife Kelly and I moved to Ruidoso Downs, New Mexico two years ago. We were very lucky to find a house belonging to a friend and former priest, The Rev. Ann Gaddy. Retirement had been great and I keep busy by substitute teaching at Ruidoso High School. I have worked almost everyday of the school year. My wife Kelly is still employed as a County Manager for New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department.

We had a good Christmas having our youngest son Jake home. I think the best Christmas gift I had this year was getting to know him better in the few days we had together. It is true you are never too old to learn. However, we are were also much blessed prior to Christmas by having the gift of a new grandson Ben and also the news that our oldest son and his wife are expecting their first child. Talk about a lot happening but they are my preamble 'good thoughts'.

My difficult thoughts have been my inability to handle the ongoing problems within the Episcopal Church. Our national church family is being split apart by folks who simply can not get along. The liberals and conservatives simply cannot talk with one another and the solution has been that the conservatives are leaving.

I feel like a child of a divorce being left when I and many others are left by conservatives who simply state, they have to leave. I have felt battered by both sides for I am a moderate, one of those middle of the road kind of people. I basically have been told that being in the middle of the road is simply being yellow, like the yellow stripe on a highway. I have heard it said that being a moderate is no position at all, that we are simply people who are so weak for we cannot make up our minds. It is true the left and right in the Church are very convinced of their various postions and really seem not too interested in their opponent's feelings and both sides sure do not give a damn about us middle of the roaders --- except of course, to win us over to their way of thinking.

I feel the Church has been highjacked. Somehow we have inherited people who simply do not believe we can live together when we have differences. Have we not learned that after more than 600 splits that the Universal Church is not better off by the use of our 'freedom' to split the Body of Christ (The Church). I have decided I need to back off from the institutional church for a time. I need to fully retire from any kind of ministering for all I keep saying, preaching is that there is something very wrong with the Church when truths are expounded by various factions that 180 degrees off from one another -- and they are so sure! Well I am not so sure at all of many things in life and the worse thing I feel is: it is not longer okay to say you do not know know.

Well, these are my difficult thoughts for this day. I know so much less at 68 years old about all the issues. All my years as a clergy and my basic feeling is we have so battered, bent and fractured the Church of God in Christ for our own version of the truths our relationships one with another are being lost. My faith has become like a child's, very simple --- Love God, Love People and Love who you are and who you can Become. The rest has become nothing but issues to argue about and I am done arguing!