Meta Commerse
Meta Commerse
By Meta Commerse

Growing up in the Missionary Baptist Church gave me some of my fondest memories: sitting on the wooden pews, marching in, duly robed with the choir, hearing and singing all kinds of music. Music from the fields of slavery that nobody discussed but everybody knew. Protocol so tight and strict, the style, color, texture, flavor, and feeling of church, a force powerful enough to plant itself deep in me, never uprooted.

I left the church during the Movement and my adolescence. The church had taught me all it could. My elders disillusioned me. The blissful ignorance of the old way was not my destiny and, by my own inner resources, I somehow knew that I could take God and my faith with me, that the church couldn’t monopolize these things. Such an important awareness for that age, the gulf and contradictions between my need for the truth and the church’s teachings were great.

For the decade I remained “unchurched,” I refused to take my babies there. I had no language then for what I know now of the church’s complicit position on serious gender issues, domestic violence, and sexual abuse. That its institutional silence allowed such things meant its religious authority presided over the secret suffering of women and children.

Finally, a way to return to organized religion opened, called “universal awareness.” Today’s “Gospel of Inclusion” is based upon the oneness of all humanity, not the need to separate, judge, and condemn. Welcome change trickles into our community, the kind of all-embracing change that makes the scribes-and-Pharisees way we’ve done church obsolete.

I cherished the old atmosphere, the old church and pew, the handed-down hymns from our ancestors. Periodically, I’d return to my home church just to have that feel and sound wrap around me again. That is, until our home pastor retired and the young pastor took over, bringing more of a hip-hop style of worship. This caused me to wonder how much of the old way we should protect for posterity. Similarly, with serious, life-threatening issues such as AIDS, sexual abuse, and domestic violence so prevalent in our community, what does our silence say about what we value?

The trappings of our faith belong to us! They’re ours, manmade, part of our heritage, devised long ago to meet the needs of our people when their very survival was at stake. Look how far we’ve come. No longer powerless, no longer in the fields, we’re spiritually mature, fully equipped, and prepared by history to update our way of doing church for new times, new surroundings, for the pressing needs we face today. It’s time to use our extraordinary creativity to meet the extraordinary challenges of 2013, time we put away the old wine lest it burst the new wine skins.

 


Meta Commerse, author, playwright, and speaker, holds two masters degrees from Goddard College in Vermont and is an instructor of English and History at Haywood Community College.

1 thought on “Spirituality – Step One

  1. I feel a strong alignment with this writing, Meta. I grew up in the Pentecostal Hoilness Church. When I’ve found myself yearning for church in recent years and visiting churches seeking the pieces that were uplifting, nourishing and restorative no place really met my longing. There are wonderful congregations in Asheville, to be sure. But nothing was quite right.

    There were parts of church I wanted to do in the familiar way and parts I wanted to do in ways that matched my current spiritual state. In the end I, along with several others who told me they had the same longing, made our own church. I’ve been surprised by how loud the voice-in-my=mind-that-says “Who do you think you are? has tried to be. I’ve been gratified to hear another Voice quietly say, “You are my Child. I’m well pleased.” All good things to you, Meta.

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