Religion: The Search for a Church

I know some people think religion is a big waste of time, especially "organized religion" or "institutionalized religion". Then there are the people who don't believe in a god or goddess based religion at all-- you know, the "religion is the opiate of the masses" types. Throughout most of my life I've been an adherent to one or another type of "organized religion". I've also been an anti-organized religion religionist, thinking all churches were corrupt, self servince, and all the rest. Even at my most Leftward trajectory (somewhere along the same point of the spectrum as Professor Chomsky) and at my most radical feminist (Catherine McKinnon comes to mind) I considered myself a Christian. Maybe that meant I really wasn't truly Leftist or Feminist, because I held onto that bit of partiarchial, capitalist brainwashing, but I never lost my faith.

After having our first child, I felt the need to go back to CHURCH. Since I was raised in the Lutheran Church-- the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America to be exact. That's the very liberal-to-left leaning one for those of you unfamiliar with the political views of the leadership of the ELCA. So we did that for a while. My husband, who was raised in a completely secular household with no knowledge of his family's religion/cultural tradition eventually saw the light and joined up. He was baptized when our oldest was christened.

Being Lutheran was okay for a while. Until we started to have liturgical dancing in church, and other things with which I didn't feel comfortable. It also didn't hurt that we were becoming increasing conservative on issues (abortion, the military, national security) and the church as a whole and our pastor in particular were on the other side of many issues. So we moved to another ELCA church. We liked the pastor. His political views were unknown to us, but he left the church and it wasn't very small-child friendly. Onto another ELCA church, a rebel church, but again, Leftist politics were being preached in the church during the service by congregants, and the national church leadership was moving "Left", while we were moving "Right". We wanted something stricter, with clear boundaries and a set liturgical style, not something that changed with the current intellectual zeitgest so you ended up with people in leotards dancing around instead of singing the Great Thanksgiving before communion, or you had the Trinity (Father-Son-Holy Spirit) being replaced with feminine terms (Mother-Child-Womb) as was proposed by the Presbyterian Church.

After a very short detour to an Episcopal church, we were off to an Evangelical, non-denominational church, a very large church We liked the pastor's preaching style. We liked most of his message. It was a church where you could be pro-life and supportive of the military and whatever its current mission was without being sneered at as a stupid redeck type, a war monger, a racist, a sexist, or any and all combinations thereof. I didn't like the worship style. Singing praise and worship songs was too much like a pop concert to me, especially with the clapping. They said they weren't legalistic, and the church didn't take positions on what you and your family could listen to, read, watch, whether you observed Halloween or not, but if you did do Halloween, or read Harry Potter, watched South Park, watch out. While there was no official stricture against it, let's just say peer pressure came into play.

We have a neighbor who is a very observant and knowledgable Roman Catholic. We even agree on a lot of political issues. As a family, we've been to a few Masses-- mainly for our children's friends' First Holy Communions. I liked the Mass. My husband hated it. "It's too ritualized," he would say. "There's no interaction with God like at our church." But after a while, he too, was feeling increasingly let down, empty, alone after church services. Part of it was the constant preaching on the End Times that was occuring at our church. Part of it though, was the very pop concert like atmosphere-- the excitement, the stirring up of emotions, and the psychological ploys used during the altar calls. And yes, church isn't about ME or YOU, it's about God, but our church, despite the literal Biblical teaching, seemed to be more about ME and my acceptance by God rather than God's acceptance of ME. There seemed to be a very therapeutic ethic in our church, and from reading many Christian fora and message boards, this seemed to be the case in many similar churches.

So we were churchless for a while. We read the Bible. We prayed. We listened to Contemporary Christian Music and Christian alternative music. I began to read and research on the Roman Catholic Church. Husband was still firmly ensconced in his anti-Rome biases he had had since he was a teenager, and which had strengthened in our Evangelical church.

By chance, our oldest daughter and I attended an Indian Orthodox Church, St. Thomas, as a school field trip. The service (I didn't know the correct terminology then) was amazing. It was truly a God-centered, worshipful experience. We didn't understand a word of the liturgy as it was done in the Indian dialect of the majority of the congregation. However, the sermon was presented in the native tongue and English-- for our benefit I'm sure. It didn't meet the forty-five minute verse by verse studies in our former church, but I found it far more edifying, uplifting, and focused on God and His word.

No one was interested in pursuing that option. The service wasn't in English, and all the bell ringing and whirly-gig tingling aside, we needed a service we could follow. That there were other, similar options didn't occur to us for several long months...

Mission Statement #1 concerning International Adoption

In his civilian life, my husband works in a large municipal social service department so I'm always hearing or seeing the various "MISSION STATEMENTS" of various local and state agencies, and private service providers. Everyone seems to have a mission statement nowadays, and I wouldn't want to be left out of the herd. I couldn't think of one good statement to encompass everything I hope to cover on the blog, so I'll have to come up with a lot of them. Being an inter-disciplinary blog (I hope none of the scary people from over at Discarded Lies visit and catch that term- they might leave comments that aren't family friendly) obviously has its drawbacks.

I'm a part of the "international adoption community". These days, you'd think that was quite an exclusive group, what with celebrities like Madonna and Angeline Jolie being part of the club. But it's really not. Anyone willing to have their home and privacy invaded by a social worker, to turn over years worth of their financial records, to have their fingerprints run by the FBI, and who can put out a substantial amount of cash can belong to the international adoption community. We've done all these things, and this resulted in one successful adoption from China. We brought our daughter home last January. WARNING: using the term "home" in relation to adoption can be a very controversial thing. I'll discuss why this is so and how I learned it in the future. For now, if you're interested in seeing my less than stellar attempt to blog about our adoption, see the link on the side- something about Mad in China.

Right now, we're smack dab in the middle of an adoption from Kazakhstan. Yes, Kazakhstan is a real place. No, I don't find Borat funny. If Mr. Cohen had cajones he'd make fun of a country that's really dangerous to ridicule, like Iran or Saudi Arabia. Some people would add the United States, but since people have been busting on us since the Revolution, it's overdone. I also don't find the commentators on VH1 funny when they ragged on Kazakhstan as a country "no one would want to adopt from" as a segue between the Madonna Malawai story and a piece about the Borat movie. But I digress...

We're smack dab in the middle of a Kazakhstan adoption. Our paperwork is currently sitting on a desk in a government office over there, waiting for someone to approve us, or send a letter back to our agency saying, "What were you people thinking sending us this? These people are crazy and we're not letting them adopt one of our kids. A great big NYET to this dossier." If we were rich (in the financial sense) we'd adopt many more children, but I think this is it. After the approval, we get invited to the country, get visas, leave the children currently a part of our family membership with friends, and go off to Kazakhstan for three to four weeks.

So I need a mission statement for the International Adoption portion of the blog. How's this for starters: "Our mission at Reserve Wife is to further the understanding and acceptance of international adoption among the members of the blogosphere, and to facilitate the dissemination of knowledge on this and related issues."

Okay, that's not very good, so we're taking suggestions in the comments.

Reserve Wife- the purpose of this blog

No, I'm not the extra wife in a polygamous marriage, though sometimes it doesn't seem like too bad of an idea to have another woman around the place. One that had a well paying job and didn't mind supporting all of us, moving us to a bigger house, etc would be good. No chance of that happening, I'm sure. I chose the name because my husband is currently serving in the Navy Reserve. No, I don't get my entire identity through him. Oh wait, maybe I do, I'll have to ask him...

Seriously, I have no idea why I came up with this name, since I won't be writing much about military-service related issues here. I'll be doing that elsewhere starting in the coming weeks. I decided to get this space to write about the things I can't write about over there-- religion, family, adoption, education, and politics. I might be able to get away with four out of the five at the other place, but I think it's better to be safe than sorry since I'll be the new guy.

So here's yet another self-important vanity blog, written by an individual who wants to run her mouth: complain, pontificate, muse, rant about things of interest to her and probably two or three people who feel compelled to read it because they're friends or relatives.