Temptations in Unemployment Wilderness

Almost three weeks into the gift and blessing of my "hermitage", being in the wilderness does not seem so hard. I wonder if Jesus felt this way at some point during his time in the wilderness just after he was "driven out" by the Holy Spirit. (I sometimes wonder what the Holy Spirit drives: a Honda Accord, so people could say they were all together in one accord?). Of course Jesus did not have the option of driving into town to go to AA meetings, or coffee shops for internet access, or lunch with good friends when the isolation was too great.

But if I can put myself in the same company as Jesus, I do believe I have been tempted in this wilderness of unemployment that I've been in. And as all spiritual lessons seem to come in threes, I, too, feel I have had three different temptations.

The first temptation I experienced was the temptation to be a victim. After that first breathtakingly bewildering experience of realizing, oh my god, I won't have an income soon. I don't know what I'm going to do to "make a living", there is the overwhelming urge to run around screaming from the rooftops, and get others to say oh my god with you. Since it was the church that I was talking about, I knew it wouldn't be hard to find people (who later found me) who would say, "I wouldn't think the church would lay off anyone," as though the church was somehow exempt from the rules of economy, and that when the church's expenses were greater than its income, a God-flow of money would just fill its accounts again. This type of thinking was what got me in this position in the first place: people who considered the church a place for solace and comfort, but didn't feel responsible to help keep it afloat financially.

One woman in AA actually said in a meeting, "wow, it's bad when you get fired by God," which made me laugh, but touched a really deep fear deep inside me that God was trying to tell me I should leave the church and the priesthood, and that if I didn't, it was like someone in an abusive marriage who stayed in the marriage out of fear of the unknown and the fear that the real world was a lot scarier than anything the relationship could dish out. I still don't know for sure that this is NOT God at work, but friends who seem to see things deeply keep steering me away from this thought, and keep telling me I AM a good priest, and the church needs me.

But this reassurance did not keep the second temptation at bay: the temptation to believe that I am not of value if I d not have a job. Now, this is probably a very common belief in our culture. What we DO, how much we MAKE, how many people we INFLUENCE, how much power we have is the way the world measures a person's worth. But I'm a spiritual person who believes in God's love, and tells people all the time that they are ALREADY loved by God before they ever get out of bed and make a dent on the problems of the world. We can't earn that love, and we are priceless by our very being alive. I tell other people that, but when the rubber meets the road, or when the fears come and roost, the temptation is to feel a lot more like a failure than a beloved child of God.

This particular temptation has taken an interesting spiritual twist, though. I know, even at the heart level, that I am worth more than just what I do. Where I feel as though I don't measure up is that right now I am not contributing any work with the poor or comforting someone who is feeling downtrodden, or giving BACK to the world. I fear that I will become a self-absorbed narcissist who does not care about the needs of the world, which by any standards are worse than anything I am experiencing. We liberals do believe, more than we might like to admit, in a works righteousness world. And it comes back to bite us.

The third temptation hasn't hit full force right now, but every once in a while I can see it peeking up over the mountains surrounding my hermitage. That is the temptation to despair. You could say that so far, I keep telling myself not to go there, not to allow myself to entertain the thought that maybe I'm supposed to experience going completely broke, or the humility of having to work at Walmart, or even having to declare bankruptcy and give up my dogs and go to live in a shelter. Why shouldn't I? There are certainly plenty of people who have had to do this, and God doesn't love me any better than them, so why not me?

There. It's out there. I named it, and it makes a lot of sense, rationally. So do the worst of temptations in our various spiritual wildernesses. They are cold, hard and rational, and don't leave any room for grace or miracles or people who swoop in generously like the friends who are letting me stay in their home right now. I'm also doing my part, and applying to every position for which I might remotely qualify in the church, on Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com and even Boulder County unemployment, which I don't qualify for, by the way, because the church doesn't pay in to unemployment insurance, because the church almost never lays anyone off, I guess. Don't get me started; it might set me off into being a victim, which I was hoping I had left behind me securely.