For some months this winter I was feeling more emotionally and spiritually depleted than I think at any time since my early twenties. To explain why I’d probably have to write a book-length memoir, which I’ll spare you. But I do think it is an occupational hazard of trying to dream big to change the world.

As Michael Lerner writes in Tikkun‘s Core Vision, “We are trying to create something which doesn’t have an exact analogue in contemporary life. The truth of the matter is, many of us are wary of any organization — they remain human institutions, susceptible to the ever-present reality of human frailty. The capacity to under-whelm, frustrate, disappoint, and madden is common to all human organizations, whether spiritual or secular, whether on the left or the right or in the middle.”

Finding sources of support in a new place can take time. My wife and I moved across the country so I could take this job. I miss my Unitarian Universalist congregation in Kingston, NY, where I drew sustenance every Sunday from services that spoke to an agnostic like me as well as to believers and atheists in our community. The minister’s language was inclusive and her sermons deep, we shared our Joys and Sorrows with each other, and in the meditations I had found, despite my despondency about my failures as writer and activist, the mysterious sense that things would be, or maybe already were, all right. Illusion, fantasy, or tapping into some ocean of reality beyond the ego: who am I to say? As she lay near death, overwhelmed with the sin and pain of the world, the medieval mystic, Julian of Norwich, heard Jesus say, “It is true that sin is the cause of all this pain; but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”

I am an ex-Christian who does not enjoy Christian services. So it’s a great surprise to find myself saying that the experience that has most helped to revive me in recent weeks has been going to First Congregational Church in Oakland. There is an openness about our brokenness and failures at that church, combined with a warmth and joy, that is unlike anything I have experienced before. I hold my nose, as it were, about the Christology and the language of a personal Mother-Father God and work hard to translate it into acceptably agnostic terms, because of the experience it enables for that congregation, and through them for me. I find myself, a notorious non-cryer, standing with tears running down my cheeks when the pastor’s empathy embraces us all and her stunning singing voice lifts us into alleluias. We have published her in Tikkun: Rev. Lynice Pinkard (photo at right).

Easter was amazing. A gospel choir rocked the church, along with Latino praise songs and a U2 anthem. The choir director is a Muslim. Pastor Lynice got up and said that all this show was great but not the point: the point was the suffering in the congregation and outside it, the people who felt there was no way forward, the addictions, foreclosures, lay-offs, illnesses, split families, homophobia, racism, and Empire Affective Disorder… but the Easter message is that where there is no way there is a way. She was crying, many of us were crying, but there was joy and life breaking through. Hear the sermon here.

At that church I keep thinking of Dylan Thomas’s “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.”