It might seem odd to write a piece about what I miss about being Christian on the heels of my first post over at Polytheist.com. It might seem odd that I am thrown into fits of nostalgia just from seeing a dude carrying a guitar walk out from a church. Occasionally I’ll pass a beautiful church and wonder when services are, as if I might go (I never do). Sometimes I miss getting lost in a beautiful liturgy, feeling elevated by the chants or singing and the incense. Sometimes I miss the order, the stilted certainty with which people live when they just know they are right.
Of course, my twenty odd years in Christianity were never comfortable. It’s an ill-fitting nostalgia that I’m feeling. I was always translating that “shared vocabulary” to fit my meaning. I was often the odd girl out in community – too feminist, too lesbian, too unbaptized, too theological, too mystical. I never seemed to know the songs. I never liked most modern Christian music or books. I never liked the complicated intertwining of culture and theology that happens all too often in American Christianity. I never felt comfortable. I found the hypermasculinity and prescribed femininity confining and, frankly, gross. I felt put off by the mall-like megachurches with coffee stands, concert-style lights and the power point presentations.
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