Now that I am no longer a Temp. office worker, I am slowly beginning to enter that shadowy and mysterious world of clergy and religious associations. ECRA is one such group today I attended my first meeting with them. It was odd, on one hand there was some diversity mostly Christian one Muslim: I am told there are Buddhist and Jewish members of the group as well. I simultaneously felt comfortable and out of place. these are people who are by definition serious about their faith and their religion, most present as Christian clergy and religious make their living as religious types (my co-pastor and I the exception). It is rare for me to be around people like this. The other thing that was odd for me was to be in a situation where the majority (the overwhelming majority) of people where Christians of some stripe. The world looks a little different when Christians appear to be the majority. It was oddly comfortable until I realized that I did not in my introduction self identify either as an artist or a Goth. Rather I identified in that group as pastor and prior. Now the savvy could probably pick up the clues of the other identities like I knew the Southerner who was also Episcopalian.
Outside that circle my identity as a Pastor is either something to be side stepped or is a novelty; "Oh you are a Pastor goth and artists that's very interesting tell me more." In most circles I run in outside of church I am a minority ie. both a Christian and clergy. Whether I go to a club, or a gig or an art opening or theater after party, or film crew one does not regularly run into other Christians let alone another pastor. One might run into someone religious of a different faith but even that is rare enough. This does not necessarily mean one finds atheists or agnostics either. Generally they will claim to be "spiritual" or simply nothing. Maybe dabble with a little meditation or some spiritual practice. I mean no critique in this. I mentioned this at the ECRA meeting and it sounded to me as I said it to be a critique, when I was simply attempting to speak my experience. Apart of me is actually more at home among these than the clergy and the religious. (I know all pastors say that its such a clergy thing to say). Not because I dislike clergy or am uncomfortable with them but because I have many homes, and my identity shifts ever so slightly as I move between them. I find there is often much talk about pluralism in our society but rarely do we talk about our own personal pluralism. While the extent of the diversity of my own identity(ies) may be somewhat rare it seems to me that in a pluralistic context most will find that some form of plurality exists within oneself. I think though that we still tend to homogenize oursleves or at least to put forward a homogeneous identity. This is what I did when I introduced myself at the ECRA meeting and didn't mention that I was a Goth and Artist. In that context I was overwhelmed by my own personal pluralism and felt acutely that all my possible identities don't fit nicely with being clergy and a member of a community religious association. I do not mean that I would have been any less accepted if I had revealed my pluralist personhood in its fullness only that I felt a pressure to homogenize my self presentation. In other contexts I feel freer to assert this pluralism of the self but usually some aspect of my self presentation is ignored usually the information that I am a pastor.
This experience today has made me realize just how deeply pluralism has effected me and the degree to which we talk about pluralism but rarely embrace it in ourselves even if like me my own identity is so clearly plural and not homogeneous. All the aspects of my self and how I identify don't all fit smoothly together. And in one way or another in self presentation we are expected to present a homogeneous and not heterogeneous identity. Slowly but surely I am embracing my own personal pluralism.
When I moved to Iowa, I had the interesting problem that people from the church I was going to be pastor of would be unloading my U-Haul while I was flying to Washington for two weeks.
ReplyDeleteWhat were they going to think of this pastor they didn't yet really know when they saw what he had? What were they going to think of my comic book collection? My swords? My action figures? If they looked in one of the boxes of books, what would they think of all the sci-fi I liked? I wasn't there to explain away the parts of myself that they wouldn't think were natural to a pastor.
I find it even more difficult when I am online. My blog has diverse things in it. But it is not diverse enough to capture everything, so I have three blogs. One for my sermons, one for my Supergirl project, and then my blog which has recently been mostly political, but has talked religion and popular culture and comics and movies and even goth at one point. When I look at my interests, they seem so diverse and somewhat incompatible, and yet I believe that they do come together into a whole and (mostly) healthy person.
So you raise an interesting question. I think perhaps it is that there are boxes that people want to fit us in, and we feel pluralistic when we don't fit into those boxes. But maybe it isn't as pluralistic as we fear, perhaps the boxes are false constructs.
It is interesting that you pick up on the fear, and that there is in your response a concern at least that the multiplicity is not whole or healthy.
ReplyDeleteWhile I think you are right that much of this has to do with constructs. I am not sure I would put the "false" in front of it. The assumption of homogeneity of the self may be a "false" assumption.
I note that your story is tinged with fear because when I mentioned something similar to the ECRA folks and turned our attention to that our society is more pluralistic than our inter-religious group, what it conjured up was the fear of those who are spiritual and not religious who might be what some might call "secular" and feelings of being misrepresented by this non-religious group.
I am not being coherent in this response I think I will come back to this. a little later.