Spritual Things

So worship at the Seminary was interesting today. Frank (our pastoral care professor) preached on the theme of " A God who is against us in all the right ways" not a typical warm fuzzy sermon, yet still inspiring and caring and well done and making me think and all that jazz. Also the sacred dance group here is particularly good right now- they provided a powerful visual to go with a song called "God is Here" and it actually ended up moving me to tears. I don't know what is going on with me faith wise right now. Spiritual things are always at the front of my thinking (and maybe always have been, but now I am more aware of that). I am constantly searching for God's presence in the world ,in the community, in the people I interact with, and I have no doubt that God is here- alive in all creation -- and as my denomination says "still speaking"... but the trickiness of life right now is that I feel really disconnected from church. and not just my local church, but from churches in general. I am able to find spiritual communities to worship with every few weeks and to have biblical and theological conversations- but that is because my job gives me the opportunity to help form such communities every few weeks. In the meantime- I can't seem to find a local community that doesn't make me sad. And when I worship in the local UCC churches that I am connected to- I get so frustrated and anxious and aware of our own hypocrisy that I want to jump out of my skin. I don't have any idea where I am going - either with this post, or with my life of faith. But this is clearly a time of growing pains for me- and I have no sense of who I will be when it is over. I also have no idea what impact all this may have on Isaac, and that worries me a good bit. I am such a liberal- but i believe strongly in prayer. I want justice, but know that I am falling short on working towards it. I am tired of the church as it is currently- I am tired of divisiveness and the inability to wrestle with the discordance of life without hurting each other. I want to have deep and meaningful and hard conversations that end with people still praying for each other (not against each other) and that end with us feeling more diverse, yet more united by the Gospel message. How can that be? How can I bring something like this into being? The uu's have tried but they seem even farther off base than the ucc's. And I think in many ways- the ucc is as "just" a church as there is out there- but UGH! It's still nowhere near the vision I long for... I will keep thinking and praying and knitting on these things...