Been in a funk the past couple of weeks, spiritually speaking,
I’ve been tiptoeing into peripheral involvement with a particular Catholic group, and I honestly feel like the Holy Spirit has drawn me to it. Although I love this group’s practical approach to spiritual formation, I’m still not sure how I feel about the conservative culture that surrounds it.
The people I’ve met in this group are nice enough, but there’s a tendency by many of its members and fellow travelers (I’ve been an aspiring fellow traveler) to be rigidly on the right, culturally and politically. I’m conservative in many respects, but I’m uncomfortable with rigidity and the inability of others to grasp nuance or context. This is the kind of rigid vibe I get sometimes at my parish, even though I love it to death and feel like it’s where I’m supposed to be.
I’ve become acquaintances with a fellow parishioner who is a member of this group, and we generally get along wonderfully. But then she started giving me advice about parenting – maybe I ought to talk to our parish priest about this D&D business that F is getting into, maybe it’s spiritually problematic, maybe F would love to meet other girls associated with this group at a retreat or something – and my enthusiasm about this group almost immediately derailed. Suddenly I felt suffocated; I get this way when I’m being lectured on deeply personal things like parenting by people I barely know. (Her insistence that there’s a lot of Capitol Police killings of January 6 demonstrators that “the media doesn’t talk about” kind of threw me off, too.)
So, I can now officially log two separate funks plaguing my psyche – this one and the one about my sense that I might be on the autism spectrum – that were triggered by people ostensibly trying to be helpful.
I could use a break right now. From everything.