Why should a pastor continue to find a strange fascination and even love for pieces like this? It's a sad, mournful love, yet a love of his honesty and willingness to share it with the world.
It's not a particularly dangerous truth to share. There are many who cheer when someone walks away from the church and the faith. I'm certainly not cheering, though really neither is he.
The book of Ecclesiastes says that God has placed eternity in our hearts. Neither our hearts nor this world are able to contain "eternity" resulting in an ache, a restlessness, an itch that we can't seem to fully scratch.
I doubt I could ever have written the previous sentence if it hadn't been for that great Catholic who wrote most famously about the itch that can't be scratched. Read @lukeburgis recent Substack about Augustine. https://read.lukeburgis.com/p/the-directional-language-of-interior
Augustine did leave his concubine and son and sought a chaste life. He didn't go into the desert and live like St. Anthony. Be became a Bishop of a city in North Africa and wrote and wrote and wrote...
John Vervaeke talks about "domicide" as part of the Meaning Crisis. It is your loss of your home. Part of the specific trauma of the @CRCNA these days is domicide. The loss of home. https://paulvanderklay.me/2022/06/28/kkdm-rod-dreher-dust-up/
What comforts me is Hebrews 11. Wrestling with God is a journey of the homeless looking for a home they have fully known in this life with our hearts pierced by eternity.
So @SteveSkojec , you don't travel alone. Whatever label you are using to try to fit to where you are today I get your domicidal pain. I don't know if that's any comfort to you or not. I hope it is.
We Christians are pilgrims! We pastors are pilgrims. For decades we may reside in a denomination but that clearly cannot be our identity. We are on the move. A sense of homelessness from time to time is healthy- perhaps a prompting that embraces the reality of the faith walk.
The screeching egoic need for societal validation from these quasi celebrities irritates me to no end. While I have sympathy for the individuals... our society has devolved into a mass of pathetic Naval gazers who need others to pat them on the head and tell them that it will be okay and that they are good people. How did we become so weak in character? Well the "men without chests" are going to get ground up in the world that's coming. Buckle up kiddies because it's going to be a bumpy ride and most of you in the West are not ready for it.