when job and life conflict

I love working in churches, and doing music with the people there. That much is a given - a lot of people haven't found something they truly love to do, and I'm lucky in that way. But it's a Catch-22 - because I'm working when I'm in churches, I never get to experience the spiritual refreshment that just being there and experiencing the service can give. Also I don't have the liberty to neccessarily choose my church. I like to sit in a really interesting and progressive church, my mind open to the ideas. But some churches are dogmatic or over-simplifying, and I feel like I need to close my mind, just a little, to keep the silly formulas and guilt trips they lay from creeping in. It's exausting to try to segment your mind this way - to go to a worship service and not truly participate is terribly exausting. I now know how my less- or differently-religious friends have felt upon sitting in church, wondering if they should mutter the "amens" that didn't come from the heart.

I sit quietly during the Apostles Creed, because I don't believe in the recitation of creeds in general, and because I don't agree with many of the statements in the Apostles Creed specifically. I don't like doing that, but I didn't like saying it, either. I respect the people around me, who agree with it wholeheartedly. This is part of their faith, and that faith is part of what makes them the good people I know them to be. I want to tell them that I'm not protesting. I want to tell them that I don't think they're wrong. Maybe every word is true. But I don't feel those truths deeply enough to proclaim them to a room of people, outloud. It's a moment when I know I don't belong. It's a sad 30 seconds for me.

I loved working with the choir, though, even the disappointments and setbacks. I love caring about something I get paid for. It feels like the ultimate freedom. I remember the first time I felt that way - when I stood on the roof of the Court St parking deck, in downtown Frederick, after nailing my Homewood nursing home interview. I was about to get paid to do something I had previously volunteered to do. I looked down at the city and for the first time, it was MY city.

"When you are home, you see the streams running, you feel the wind blowing, you hear the fields singing, you are aware of the earth. Home is open eyes - not comfort, but freedom"

Where is home? Is it the place where you can run to to find safety? Is it with your family? Is it where you were born? Is it where your friends are? Maybe home is not freedom after all, but a different kind of captivity. It's the place where you choose to be imprisoned. It's where you draw the line - I will make these sacrifices. I need these things to survive. I do not need these. So maybe home is about choices. What a mystery is belonging.

"How strange and powerful, the love of home.
Stranger sill to be alive at all,
to be anywhere, in all its endless detail,
and the millions of tiny locks that will be broken
before you can be released from where you are
to return again to the place,
so many years ago, you started from,
the nothing that is everywhere but here."

-Michael Creagan