In which I outline a managable goal

What I failed to talk about in my last tl:dr post about Christianity is that for a number of entirely predictable reasons when you have a spirituality like mine I hadn't been to church for a while. Up until a few weeks ago it had been somewhere in the region of four to five years. I had always been a little suspicious of people who referred to non church going Christians as being "in the wilderness" or offered trite predictions about a lapse of faith however with the church as an institution only driving me further away from any reasonable relationship with my faith it was the only course of action I could see other than sacrificing what remained of that in exchange for religion as socialisation which is not one of my preferred pastimes. Church more like a breakfast meeting than anything meaningful.

Recently I have been reading more intensely about biblical translation and the creation of the New Testament. I came to the conclusion that as I have a basic distrust for the choices made by the Council of Nicaea there was no reason that I had to restrict what I considered to be my spiritual texts to a King James translation of the approved books. Right now my shelf includes the Oxford Annotated Study Bible (New Revised Standard Edition), the JPS translation of the Tanakh, Misquoting Jesus, Lost Christianities and Eves Bible.

A month or so ago I was having dinner with Father and we were once again discussing my dearth of church attendance. He made the unfortunately good point that my observations are no good to anyone else unless I share them and as my friends nowadays are almost entirely atheist and pagan they wouldn't be able to offer much assistance as far as improving my arguments went. He knows me quite well and as this slowly sunk home over the next week so I decided, to hell with it (so to speak), I'd give church a try once more. I had already saved a list of likely churches against the day I might need them and flicked through looking for one which matched what I wanted best while being a reasonable distance from the house as even I with all my good intentions am not too keen on traveling too far on a Sunday.

And here we are ladies and gentlemen, attending church once more although I don't feel that my obviously reduced expectations of what a church can or will provide will be a barrier to getting something useful out of it. I have managed to order my life in such a way that I only spend time with people that I have something in common with outside of work and I'm paying for it now as I have little to no idea how to cope with people who don't. I am trying to make the smallest number of compromises necessary, I don't expect to find a group of people who enjoy occupying the far edges of Christianity but I do expect them to not make me so angry that it drives me further away from my faith.

Manageable goals, that's the ticket. I'll let you know how it goes.