To All Friends of St. James and All Sinners,

Every congregation in America has to have this talk. It’s uncomfortable, you won’t really want to read it, and some of you will skip it outright. However, it is fundamentally important to the light and life of this church. For instance, if you want the ability to create and paint in our church, you have to be willing to be okay with giving us enough money to keep the lights on while you do it.

A church is only as good as its budget allows. Right now we are running on a shoestring with two volunteers, but we believe that the mission is bigger than us. We are not advocating wealth for ourselves or for our church… just enough for it to breathe, so that if we want to expand the homeless ministry from being able to serve 50 people to 500, we have enough to do it without wiping our capital account down to zero.

At this point, we need everything from a building to meet to a choir director to hymnals to Bibles to other religious texts that we need in order to study said Bibles in the first place. It is a fledgling dream aching for resources to fight spiritual emptiness in all its forms… that in order to heal, one must be available to take in light…. impossible when you are wandering around in darkness hoping there’s gotta be a switch somewhere…….

I invite you to be a part of the solution. You know as well as I that people may not be aching for God, but they’re definitely aching for something. Give us the ability to realize our dreams, not for ourselves, but for the legacy we want to create.

Not only do James and I want to have money to respond on the fly to need, we would also like to create an endowment to keep the church running in times of economic distress.

But first things first.

I need a living wage to be able to devote myself to making this dream possible. If you are able to help with that, please do. It is my hope that by reading and responding to this worship experience here on Facebook, we will gather enough money to bring it to you live. Music and art entwined with praising God in all God’s forms with glorious music all around and gardens for meditation so that if God to you is being alone, you can have your communion, too. At present, my bills are ridiculously cheap and I would like to keep it that way. If this worked out to be a $14/hr job, I would be ridiculously happy. I want to work under Francis’ model of living humbly and giving money to the less fortunate, because I have already been blessed so many times over that it’s time others had a chance.

Needing money is not out of desperation. It is about creating a church that will live for much longer than I will, because there will never be a chance in hell that people stop being anxious and introspective because their pain tortures them. I cannot help the people who aren’t willing to help themselves, only because emotional healing requires a certain openness to take hold. As a non-credentialed minister, I will not be involved in counseling, but I will be involved in creating the materials that help you examine your own grief… not because I am so super-awesome. I am one of the most broken people I know. Since I let the brokenness be known, though, light has been flooding into my body faster than I can really take it in.

I want to be a message of hope to people who think intelligent Christianity is dead. I want to prove that the risen Christ has relevance in our world as part of the lens we use to see current problems (to paraphrase Marcus Borg).

Aren’t you curious to see what happens when you step out on your own ledge and say, “I’m a part of something greater than myself?”

I promise. It feels excellent.

Pax,
Leslie

In doing so much research on verbal abuse, I know that my reaction to getting well is right on target. I have managed to piss off nearly everyone I know because I don’t act in ways predictable to who I used to be, so they think I’ve gone bonkers while at the same time, I feel like this is the first time I’ve ever made sense. What has been ridiculous is thinking for the last 24 years that I was destined to be a normal person with a normal life who could make it through in the rank and file when my personality indicators in both the Meyers-Briggs and the Keirsey Temperament Sorter have been Idealist/Visionary. I am not telling you that I am a visionary. I will let every personality test I’ve ever taken speak for me. The people in my category type are, for example, Jesus. Martin Luther King, Jr., Oprah.

Oprah.

Now there’s a reason for my obsession with her career. I was trying to figure out how growing up in BFE prepared her for the life she has now, and I realized that it hadn’t. Unless I miss my guess, the vision came to her in a dream, snapping into action as opposed to a great buildup. Dana compares me to the 50th Anniversary Special of Doctor Who, that my software has been running the algorithms for St. James since I was born.

She’s indisputably right.

I have a palsy in my brain from being oxygen deprived as a child. It did not delay me mentally, but my coordination is off to a tremendous degree and I have monocular vision so that I always look like I’m staring at two places at once. I also started talking when I was six months old, but I did not walk until I was almost two.

That’s the foundation of my personality, those months being able to think without being able to move. I couldn’t do anything but soak up information and start the tape running. Because I am ADD, I start tapes all the time and they just let me know when they’re done. I can’t feel that they’re going all the time, necessarily, but what I know is that I ruminate on things until they’re done and then once that happens, I am unstoppable.

Amen.

• We are a symbolically apostolic church. As Peter is the Rock for the Catholics, so James will be our bishop.
• There is one God of the catholic church indivisible, and that is the Creator, Redeemer, and Advocate. God has many names, brings many names… and all are welcome at St. James and All Sinners.
• We believe that Christ is resurrected in ourselves- that the gifts we bring all flow from the idea that from desperation comes prosperity.
• We believe that all sinners are worthy of redemption, and no sin is too great to receive the blessings that the Spirit will endow if asked.
• We believe that all people are sinners, that there is no way to avoid making mistakes, and that the way to healing and wholeness is redemption with the self, letting go of shame and guilt.
• We believe that God has an intrinsic value to our lives, whether the traditional versions of faith apply or not. We believe that God can be found in all aspects of the human condition.
• We believe that God is every side of every story since the beginning of time, and that society’s reflection on the divine is more important than the divine itself.
• We believe in inclusive language and furthering an interfaith dialogue for the community at large.
• We believe that Christianity is and should be a group endeavor, and that to practice the faith requires dedication to both the church and the relationship its congregation has with it.
• Justice and witness is an integral part of the doctrine, because there are so many places to bring witness to this. People are aching for relief from the struggle that life has to offer, We believe that the way to heal it is by putting aside the self and healing others who, in turn, feed individual growth and development.
• We believe that a prayer life is essential to the work of every believer, whether that prayer is to the Christian God or not. We believe that the exclusion of anyone is counterproductive to our mission, and do not require any formal set of beliefs to join or participate in the life of the church or its activities.
• We believe in the use of all the senses to understand faith. From touching the bread and the chalice to flipping pages in the hymnal, faith is a sensory experience.
• We believe that expression is the heart of learning one’s own connection to the divine, and to that end will support and encourage all types of ways to worship- traditional and not.
• We believe in communion as an expression of divinity. Communion takes many forms… on Sundays at the communion rail, and throughout the week as we minister to the people around us.
• We believe that the ordained ministers are the visionaries, but that ministers exist in all forms and should conduct their own ministries as they see fit… whether that is as a volunteer, a donor to a cause, or a hobby that allows for interpersonal interaction.
• We believe that we are Christ to the world, and will spend all of our time deciding what that means. For some, there is no belief in Christ, but the teachings of goodness, mercy, charity, and love are translatable to other cultures and systems of belief. We are a Christian church, open to all ideas and the manifestation of different types of the divine is a celebration.

My idea for all three church structures (Houston, Austin, and DC) is based on a Russian doll. That way, the idea starts at about 2700 sq. feet, but has room to grow and a vision for the future. All three structures are, at full capacity, three acres including the parking lot, which is essential to ensure that parking is always free and readily available.

Again, God is not the big picture. God is in the details. What would be more frustrating than trying to go to church, getting there, and missing it because you can’t find a parking space? I am slowly taking an inventory of 27 years of church issues and trying to fix them before I even start implementing a grounds plan.

What I am finding is that you can’t be the founding pastor of a church without having a clear vision- when the vision fails, the people perish. I don’t remember who said it (Fosdick, maybe?), but it was a mantra growing up, and having seen its results, I know it works. We came to St. Mark’s and Christ Church at a time in their lives when they needed our family the most… They both grew by leaps and bounds and I WAS WATCHING.

If you want to donate to that vision, you can drop money into my Paypal account. Because we already have a treasurer, I cannot touch that money if you designate it as such. Eventually, All Sinners will have its own bank account, but for now looking at transaction notes and categorizing will have to do. It’s not a requirement to be my reader or my friend. It’s just two things. The first is that this vision is cool, and you’ll probably want to join it. The second is that you CANNOT say yes if I don’t ask.

When Rev. said the word “Leslieisms,” it occurred to me that I am so out of touch with myself that I have very little concept of what that means. Inside my head, I’ve always been trying to protect someone else, so I have no idea what I look like on the outside. I am only now able to join society in a meaningful way, because until now, I have lived outside it. I had to. Really engaging meant letting go of the shame and pain I’ve carried until now. Really engaging meant I had to tell people I was trying to protect Diane. Tell people I am so overloaded with emotion that I cannot function in my daily life because I don’t care about anyone or anything except not letting anybody find out who I really am… which is one of the most beautifully manipulative people you’ve ever met in your life who is trying to admit that and fix it so that it never happens again. I have the will to be good-natured but not the ability. I have to break it down and reform it so that the chords I have with other people only hit the ones they’re supposed to. The ones that reflect pure, white light.

I have come so far since I decided to talk, and now feel like a warrior rather than a weakling. When I stopped spending processing power on how to keep Diane safe from where the chips fell, my stars aligned like they hadn’t before. I could spend time thinking about how I was going to handle things, instead of how “we” were.

I feel something that I haven’t felt since I was a kid.

Me.

When I was 23 or so, my boss had us take an inventory of our strengths and weaknesses. For instance, there are people that are good at organizing, people that are good at customer service, etc. My result was “the Plant.” The plant is the visionary of the group. You don’t necessarily want them in the trenches because visionaries don’t thrive there. They thrive in think tanks. It’s what I do. It’s what I’m good at. It’s everything I’ve been preparing to do and haven’t been actualized enough to use the skills that I have to prosper myself instead of everyone else. I mean, that’s my job, to promote everyone else, but at the same time, it shouldn’t cause me to ever lose my self-esteem or preservation. That is my work to do with a professional, and not anyone’s process but my own.

However, in the meantime I have realized that I grew up as a preacher’s kid, and followed my abuser to Oregon where she was also part of a church plant, so I have in total 27 years of experience in terms of shadowing a pastor without taking up the mantle myself. I have seen church conflict tear things apart in a Titanic-like fashion, and still, both my dad and my abuser’s wife taught me how to deflect it. How to use it. How to turn pain into prosperity if only you’ll allow it to happen and stop standing in your own way. To me, that is the seat of faith… using all your senses to try and understand the world around you. I have said many times, and will say it many more, that what does it matter if God is real or not? God is not in your big picture crap. God is in the details.

When I figured that out, I decided to start a Bible Study at my house to try and reinforce that church matters- to use my podium to say that faith is as much my comprehensive response to life as my writing. I want to help grow Epiphany until it’s safe while I finish my degree and decide upon one of two things. The first is going to seminary. The second is joining the confirmed minister program and learning on the job instead of putting my vision on hold while I go to school. However, I would not rule it out as I am fascinated by academia and it would make me a better preacher in the long run… not from the standpoint of teaching me HOW to preach. That’s different. They could give me the tools to express what I mean in other people’s words so that I have a chance to reflect and respond and tell you about my experience with the divine.

To that end, I have started a church plant called “All Sinners…” Or at least, that’s its nickname. We haven’t come up with an actual title- this is more like a codename for the project. The actual name is still being decided because there are so many good images to choose from. Jacob wrestling the angel. St. John, who feels God instead of thinks it. Community Church of the Serendipity to play on my current church. Whatever it is, it will contain an image of struggle, because that’s what we’re all here to do. Get the fuck over it and learn to cope with the outrageous amounts of data coming at us.

This will be a church of amazing magnitude simply because I don’t care who shows up. My version of Christianity is quick and dirty. Get out there and feed all the people you can, all the time that you can. I want a church where all the names for God have room to breathe. Hindi prayer flags as well as Buddhist shrines as well as a Menorah and a blessed Koran. The perfect picture of my church that I want you to take home is building a church in Anacostia instead of in Georgetown.

In the space of 12 hours, I have found a treasurer, a groundskeeper, a CTO, and a possible associate pastor. The groundskeeper and I have designed a three acre plot, although we don’t know where it will go. In terms of architecture, we have three ideas. The first is for flat land, like Houston. The second is designed to be built on the side of a hill, like Austin. The third is designed for the Potomac river. If we are successful, I will start all three. My gift is not in maintaining a church, but in sparking one to become self-sustaining. I mean, come ON. Look who I was raised by. If I don’t know how to ask for money by now, I clearly have not been paying attention… but I have been. I know more about humble leadership and the idea of Jesus as CEO than I do about myself.

My father was a minister when I was growing up, which is kind of like being the President in the Hilary Clinton sense of the word. I sat at my dad’s feet and soaked up everything he exhibited in preaching, working with people, and creating defense mechanisms to keep himself safe from other people’s stories. Then, I moved to Portland to be with Diane & Susan, and spent another ten years learning how Susan dealt with all the same issues. I have been shying away from my destiny since I was 20. I finally decided that it was time to get out of the Matrix and start designing my own order instead of living in someone else’s.

This would not have happened without Tony. Even without being in my life, she set the precedent that I did indeed have the ability to speak truth to power, and especially in DC, I want a place where Democrats and Republicans can worship together in peace, because I don’t care about their masks. I care about their inner children and how to heal them. As Sunshine pointed out, shame is the emotion that every therapist in the world is trying to get rid of, and even though I ended that phrase with a preposition, I fully believe she is right.

I picture a vibrant arts center. The treasurer suggested that we should all get together and drink wine and paint our own images of God. He was kidding, because he didn’t know that I’m an Episcopalian, apparently, so I think his brain exploded when I said “there’s an idea. Our favorites can be the stained glass in the sanctuary.”

The Bible Study is for everyone. The journey is for me.

Can somebody lend me eight bucks for a six-pack? I need to celebrate and nurse the feeling I’ve jumped into the Potomac without my clothes on. Don’t worry, I’ll share with Dana, Aaron, and toast to Tony in the cloud.

When I lived in Portland, I had a friend named Donna who would do something miraculous. Every year that she was cancer-free, she tattooed the number somewhere on her body. Her bout with breast cancer was so severe that decorating her body with time seemed like the only natural response.

I don’t have one, two, three, and four tattooed on my body, but they are certainly scratched into my psyche. I also couldn’t have done this alone. My friends picked me up when I couldn’t pick up myself. They heard my pain, and more of it than I ever should have shared with an untrained bystander. They cried with me, they bled with me, they helped me release a thunderstorm to wake up in mist and rainbows.

I am listening to classical music on Spotify…. monster pieces like The Four Seasons and the Planets and Mahler V. My emotions are spilled out on the table like salt, because that’s what that bastard Holst does to me. It’s all the beauty, all the pain, all the ugly, all the intense rage-dissipating moments where I feel clearly that we are not alone, that there is a creator, and most likely his (or her) name will have a Bach in it somewhere. Although God, to me, is much closer to P.D.Q. than J.S.

Speaking of which, the first time I heard Ipheginia in Brooklyn, I was rolling on the floor laughing. Peter Schickele (the famous researcher of P.D.Q.’s large body of work that sounds, according to the scholar, like one of his legs is shorter than the other). He also said that P.D.Q. managed to write parts for oboe and bassoon without the use of double reeds. You can hear it when the trumpets come in on their mouthpieces buzzing “Jesus Loves Me.”

It is one of the things that has made me laugh since I was a teenager. Good to have things that don’t change, especially as I look back over the sea change from destruction into construction. I had to deconstruct the idea of what basic elements of life looked like since I’d skipped them the first time around.

I am aware that the entire world must think I’m actually a fifteen year old boy by now, and that’s not *entirely* wrong. I just try to be one of those people that looks approachable so that if something is wrong, I look trustworthy. I don’t have a collar, but I try to be a minister regardless. It’s the side of myself that I choose to foster given the dark side that nags at the corner of my eyes like a Grimm. Like a Grimm, I see things that other people don’t. I see the pain in your shoulders when you walk, but I can’t cure you. I can only heal you, and I will give you everything I can in the three minutes I will interact with you and feel comfortable about it. I have short attention span theater, but I promise those three minutes will be very, very important to you. I will ensure it. I will lift you up with my words and my smile and the fact that I think you are perfect in your flaws and I can take them….. for three minutes. That’s about as long as it takes for me to realize that I have opened up a huge chord of energy with someone and as they feel it, they relax into the same space they go to when they pray, and they ask for attention in the most loving of ways because that’s what we all do. We all ask for each other’s attention, nicely or not. I cannot stop being true to who I am, so that’s why I am a hermit. I want to care about you. I want to love you until I can’t anymore, I am so full of your life and energy that when you’re hurt, you have the ability to hurt me. This is not a problem with anyone immediately close to me. This is cumbersome at the grocery store, when I want to fix every crying child and every screaming adult and all the disgruntled employees and I don’t want anyone to hurt in front of me, ever, because I can’t fucking take it. I will emotionally bleed out, and have done it. I just want to fix the whole world, and thanks to my blog, the whole world is fixing me.

The Aforementioned Cantata

It has been a few days and now the shock is wearing off that my eighth grade history teacher saw me and recognized the face of child abuse/neglect. Here’s why I couldn’t tell her the truth. She was friends with members of my church that adored Diane to the ends of the earth… and as an enabler, you ALWAYS PROTECT THE PATH. I did not want worlds to collide, and I probably could have been assured of her confidence, but I chose not to trust her because I was afraid Diane’s image would be ruined, and I couldn’t have that. I would have died first. I was so dedicated to the idea that I “asked for it” that I couldn’t breathe. I needed my church life and my school life to be completely different compartments, and for them to leak was to cause a massive wake of destruction. I can only hope that there is not a massive wake of destruction now…. that time has tempered people’s reactions because it happened so very long ago and there has been no proof that there are others like me.

It is why I am so married to the Internet now. I’ve been living in two worlds since I was 12 years old~ the Internet was just an extension of the metaphor. In one world, I was a preacher’s kid, bubbly, bright, charming….. in the other, I was a monster. I thought things that justifiably scared me, and I still think things that make others keep the lights on. I just try not to say those things out loud and I have to try really hard because I am always on the “think it, say it” plan.

I remember after Diane moved to Dallas, she came back to Houston to sing at St. Mark’s when I was one week away from turning 16, and I had a full-on panic attack, so short of breath that I was going from red to purple because my hair wouldn’t do what I wanted it to do and my clothes were itchy and it was just enough to be the tipping point that screwed me to the wall emotionally. I went into a rage and screamed at the top of my lungs. I didn’t even know where I was. I didn’t know I was reacting to trauma at the time. I just thought that all people went through this much anxiety. That my crush was so intense that it was leading me to feel this pain. If I wasn’t so crushed out, I wouldn’t always react like this and we could be normal friends if I ever got over myself. To me, she never crossed a line. My friends have become the gatekeepers when it comes to my emotions regarding Diane. I give them permission to protect me, because I know from past experience that I cannot.

I cannot.

It was too loving, too tender, too seductive, too intense, too “I want to get under your skin in the next five minutes.” By that, I mean that after our first conversation. First. I was hooked. I could no more let go of her than I could let go of my own hand.

I thought that “Be Thou My Vision” would be the anthem for a couple of Sundays ago. Not so much. It’s this Sunday. I decided that I couldn’t be weak about it any more, and as the accompaniment started my hand balled into a fist and my nails involuntarily dug into my skin until it hurt. Having something to focus on other than being mired in memories kept me from flooding and I made it through without having to leave and come back. The first time, I ran to the bathroom to throw up. The second time, I went into the workroom and cried my eyes out. I was shaking and shuddering with grief and the church secretary came in. She was startled beyond belief, but not more than me.

My eighth grade history teacher saw me and validated my pain. I let that wash over me as the tenors began their cascade. Then Wayne showed up. And Sherry. And Matt. Then Stacy, Melinda, Lisa, SarahAnne, and all the rest just showed up and stood around the room and I could hear their voices and it was heaven in a moment, just like I needed it to be. I needed something to cut through the tape that causes my nerves to lose myelin and my face to lose blood.

The lifeline on my left palm looks like hell, but I was able to give my section the support it needed, and it was more important to me than feeling my own pain. To me, it is a hallmark of rising above survival mode.

It can only get better from here.

This article explains it all.

The comparison that the author draws is to an old friend you run into at the grocery store, and are surprised by how she looks. The comparison I draw is what would have happened if you met me in the grocery store when I was 11 vs. when I was 14.

By 14, I was the same absolute shell of a person, and 99 percent of my processing power was used for two things. The first was trying to predict everything she was about to do or say so that I could be prepared for it- positive or negative. The second was how to keep my feelings running underneath the surface so that no one could tell I was doing it except me.

I am a terrible fucking liar, because my words seem sincere and you can look at my body and tell they’re not true… but you won’t, because you don’t want to get that deep and even though I’m a bad liar, I am a beautiful one. It’s ok.

I don’t want to get that deep, either.

I want to protect myself from the outside world, because even though what I have is a big ball of emotions that torture me all day, every day, I know them. I walk them daily. They are mine, and we get along now. To introduce a different emotion is scary. I am doing what I can to maintain and I cannot do any more. If you change one thing the house of cards comes tumbling down and I will not forget it was you that threatened my house.

The friends I have now are the ones that kept torching my reality even when I said I couldn’t take it and please for the love of God, stop.

It was so wrong, and so comfortable.

Last night Christine changed liturgy for me forever, and taught me why I like being an Episcopalian so. damn. much.

She said, and I’m paraphrasing, that sensory perception is the seat of worship. I said that it didn’t matter to me whether God existed, because I wasn’t here to change God. I was here to change me.

She said that Episcopalians believe everything matters. That touching the bread, touching the cup….. IT. MATTERS.

And then I thought about how my knees automatically bend when I hear, “we do not presume to come to this thy table…..”

I’m Rite I. Yes. I am THAT Episcopalian. A very member incorporate of the mystical body….. bitch.