Sunday morning.

[rivka]

It's Sunday morning, and I don't want to go to church.

Nine years ago, Michael and I made the decision that we are a family that goes to church whether we feel like it or not. That goes double now that we have kids in Religious Education. Church is the way it is. But I'm not feeling it, and I haven't for a while.

Well, I have a toddler. I haven't been able to sit and listen to an entire service in... yeah, it's been a while. Michael does half the Colin duty, but he does it on the weeks that I am occupied during the service teaching Religious Education. (Which by the way, I have not been enjoying at all.) We could have made a push to get Colin comfortable in the nursery, but we haven't. I confess that I don't feel particularly motivated to do it. I don't feel like I've bonded to our new minister, so I guess I've felt less of a drive to get Colin settled so that I can go hear the sermon.

Michael, of course, is hugely involved in church leadership. Hugely. He's the vice-president of the Board of Trustees and the chair of the Stewardship Committee. We're swinging into stewardship season, so church business is about to start taking even more of his time than it already does. And the Nominating Committee has asked him to stand for presidency of the congregation this coming year. They don't really have any other candidates. It's something he is called to do, and he'll be awesome at it, but I'm dreading it.

I kind of feel like, the more that Michael does at church, the less there is there for me. Church starts to feel like an obligation, something that cuts into our family time and demands that I do a lot of extra solo parenting.

I don't know. It's not like my feelings about Unitarian-Universalism have changed at all. And it's not like I don't respect the value of our church as an institution. But I don't feel like going to church is feeding me. It just feels like work.

I know there are people on my friends list who have been committed to a church or another institution for the long term. How do you handle the down cycles? Or don't you have them?

Comments

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

i am having a similar yet entirely different problem-- i found the unitarian church here in town where all the atheists go, and am trying to get myself to go there. however, it's all the way across town, i continue to be really quite astonishingly introverted and there are HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE I DON'T KNOW THERE, there are a few "wow, msp is a small town" social weirdnesses going on with the people i do know, and the church, despite having been built recently enough to have an elevator, still wouldn't recognize accessibilty if it came up and bit it in the ass. (four story building, the elevator goes to the middle two, the main bathrooms are on the stairway landings, the handicapped parking spots are on the side of the road where you're not currently allowed to park in minneapolis, and the less used entrance where there is therefore more parking enters on the bottom floor where there is no elevator. ugh.) which is to say, i get to 9am on sunday and i think "i could get up, get dressed, go out into the cold, walk for some undetermined distance on slush, hang out with people i don't know, hope i click with some of them and make friends, orrrr i could go back to sleep." sleep has been winning a bunch, even though i am trying to remember that a) it'll be good for godot and b) in a few years i could probably teach owl which would be the coolest thing ever.

tl;dr: whine whine whine whine i feel your pain whine.

anyhow. when there's an organization that i'm committed to that's not doing it for me, i will step back, reevaluate what i'm doing, and put it at a level that works better for me. i'm about to resign from a board that i'm on because i'm really frustrated. but i'm going to continue to be involved with the organization. a few years ago i didn't work on anything at wiscon at all, because i (ha) thought godot would be here shortly, and that i would need to not be working on things because i was busy. drove me nuts; this year and last year i'm running two small departments and working on a large one. the superhuge convention here in town makes me want to tear my hair out at an organizational level, so i no longer work on it and took a year off from going to see if i missed it. i did, so now i go and try not to interact with the parts that make me crazy.

i am not sure how much of that is applicable to an every-week sort of community, rather than a once-a-year and also some other times too sort. but as you know i ramble on in the hopes that some of it will be useful to someone. ;)