I blew a fuse - badly

I was sick as a dog this weekend.

It started with an incident at church on Saturday night: outwardly a minor skirmish with a fellow deacon. I slept badly that night, struggled through the Sunday morning liturgy, slept most of Sunday afternoon and went to bed early, sick.When this happens, I know there is something seriously wrong. That I have blown a fuse badly.

My reading is this:

I have a difficult family background (which is why I rarely speak of this part of my life). A lot of my behaviour as a boy and teenager – including being too ‘good’ at home and school – was subconsciously an effort to keep together a misfunctioning family.

It is a pattern (trying to hold together a system for which other people should be responsible, – in this case my father) – I have found myself repeating, if I am not very careful, at different stages in life. At some stage the subconscious revolts and I am violently sick. It happened in my second job, in a malfunctioning American bank in Germany with an abusive boss. I resigned shortly after. It happened several times at the monastery, with a novice master whom I felt deeply uncomfortable with (rightly, it turned out later). I left.

I think this is what happened this weekend: this time the misfunctioning system which, for some reason, subconsciously, I try to help keep together, where the people responsible are failing to do their job and leave others to pick up the pieces, is the Russian Orthodox Church in Belgium, of which I am an unpaid deacon. It got too much, and the fuse blew.

The question is now whether to stay, leave or (the common solution) retreat just far enough to be out of harm's way.