About
My name is Sage Currie and I am an ordained Swedenborgian Minister. This January 2010 I accepted my first solo pastorate at the Fryeburg New Church, a delightful church nestled in the small town of Fryeburg in western Maine.What has felt like a winding path, is starting to feel more circular as I settle back into this region of Maine where I was born some 33 years before.
I came into the world only about 15 miles away in Sebago, ME where my parents lived in an old farmhouse with many other friends/acquaintances/hippies in a settlement of sorts they called “The Yahoo Farm.” (No connection to the internet service mogul.)
How I journeyed from an early upbringing far from any “church” or traditional religion to ordained ministry has been a joyful, scary, beautiful, strange and enlightening ride.While perhaps not many of you reading this were born on communes or became Swedenborgian ministers… I imagine the story of growing up without church or religious practice but somehow “knowing” that there was something bigger going on behind the scenes of your life is a familiar experience.
We are living in a world where we don’t always have the language to express our experiences, but where we are experiencing God.
When my grandfather was told by his priest that he would go to hell if he were to marry my Methodist grandmother, the church that had been an unquestionably integral part of his youth was lost. He went from faithful alter boy to a man with no faith and much resentment in the organized church leaving this legacy for his children and grandchildren. I am sure there are many other stories like this one from my family. It’s a generational story, a story of our changing world where the practices of the “church” have clashed with the sense of lived spirituality and morality of our culture. And in many ways the church has been left behind. But we still yearn for something more.
My journey back to the church and ultimately to ordained ministry has been infused with this confidence that we are still a people that long to come together and worship God. We long to come together and remember the spiritual implications of our actions, to explore the deeper call to our lives here on earth, and to live this call out with each other. We need church.
But we need a new church, where we can be fully ourselves! I feel so blessed to be a part of building and participating in this new church in the world. I yearn for it. Perhaps you do to?
March 03 2010 09:40 am
