Monday or Tuesday this week I was forwarded an email written to my SO from a mutual acquaintance (and, for me, a former almost-colleague). We’d each gotten to know him at different points in our church camp life cycle, and our paths have had a way of looping back to each other through other people over the years, in a way that only co-religionists can pull off. If I had pursued ordination after seminary, we would have been fellow ministers and probably allies.

In the email he sent me indirect greetings from a former charge of mine during my life as a youth director. My old student, he said, often mentioned me fondly, now some ten years later. My old youth, he said, is now in graduate school studying to be a minister, just like his old youth director.

I hadn’t heard anything from anyone from that church in, well, almost ten years. The last thing I remembered hearing about him was that he turned down a sports scholarship at an Ivy League school to go to the nearest state commuter college–so he could be close to his parents and his girlfriend. And I’d heard that a fundamentalist I faintly knew had taken over as youth director there just as he would’ve been graduating from high school.

Intrigued by the email, I googled my old student. After I dug through all the old news stories about him winning track meets back in high school, I found something current. It was from the charismatic Methodist church I attended just before becoming his youth director. I clicked on the link. He was leading the college group. With the fundamentalist who was his youth director during his senior year.

The same day I read a heartfelt essay by the Dolebludger. (The Australian phrase “on the dole” is roughly the same as the US “on welfare.”) As a young man with green sensibilities he chose a degree in “social ecology,” a choice that continues to make him unemployable over a decade later. In the essay he writes:

The choices I made as a young man in creating my adult identity I now have to deal with today. Some I can live with (my favourite SF novels), some can be unmade (long hair), some can be forgotten (stovepipe trousers) and some can be ignored (anarchist dilettantism). But some choices are unchangeable and unchanging. Some choices create ineffectual futures, times in which past sacrifices are nullified not rewarded.

One meaning of “decision” is a cutting off of possibilities, eliminating the many could be’s for one will be. In my case, my adolescent choice to go into the ministry was shaped by the hopes of my fundamentalist/charismatic community, my budding depression and desire to assuage it through “spiritual highs,” and the fears of the future of a bright working class boy who went to a upper middle class high school.

I am good at theology, and I can hardly keep from it. My shyness and love of reading made me into an excellent liturgist. I can teach religion almost off the top of my head, especially to adolescents. And I can virtually see systems at play in a group of people; walking into a new church was always a thrilling vista of constantly shifting, interconnecting webs.

But those are the skills of a minister, and a minister I am not. Those threads of relationship that I loved watching and growing and moving in between, many of them–too many–turned out to be abusive. Over the course of ten years, I realized that my receiving ordination would be akin to knowingly marrying an alcoholic. And my own tendency to channel my depression into religious addiction didn’t help matters.

And so the greeting from my former youth brought out a wash of competing emotions. I was proud, and humbled, that he even remembered my all these years later, much less that he admired me. I was honored that I had a role in his going into the ministry. I was comforted that he had crossed paths with an old colleague who I think well of in spite of huge theological differences. But I was also terrified that my God-binging was still having an effect some ten years later. I regretted all the harm I had done, sometimes naively–sometimes deliberately, sometimes desperately–while in the ministry. I wondered if others were going into the ministry through my influence, and then felt the same rush of feelings all over again. But most of all I was shocked that he was serving at the same church where I had made my final steps out of fundamentalism–a church that did not easily let go.

The Dolebludger muses that we define ourselves by rejection–by what we reject, and by what rejects us. In a haunting echo of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, these two movements–the rejecting-ness and rejected-ness–want to feed into each other, reminding us of choices made and choices missed, by us and for us. At times their mutual attraction strengthens each other, each lending the other a hand. At still other times, they seek to annhilate each other, leaving us dependent on will of the survivor.

The long hair, I wish I had kept. The choice of graduate schools, I wish I had postponed. The treatment of depression, I wish I had started sooner. The fundamentalism, I wish I could erase completely. But some choices are already made.