After writing parts of this, I spoke openly to a couple clergy members about my feelings. New questions and perspectives arose, but it was important to me to preserve the original sentiments and voice I captured in this piece before I had insights gained from dialogue. This will be the first of a series in which I explore being a Christian, specifically an Episcopal Mississippian, in America today. Each piece will be in conversation with the others as I continue my own conversations with laypeople and clergy.
A litany of hurt
The first time church hurt was when I learned what prayer felt like. I was preparing for my First Communion, and I started out two steps behind, like a kid who goes to kindergarten not knowing her colors or shapes and feels defeated before they’ve even begun.
We were not regular churchgoers. All the other kids seemed to know their Hail Marys and Our Fathers and didn’t need to recite them under their breath over and over like I did so the words could be ready, like a cocked gun, if called on to pray. This was prayer–that anxious fear that I would disappoint. Prayer was embarrassment and the feeling of missing something essential in my very being.
As a kid you can’t tell yourself, “Hey, sweet thing. No big deal. It’s not your fault. No one’s taught you these prayers yet. That’s all that it is. Good for you for learning them now!” You can’t tell yourself these things. Instead, you feel like the stupidest creature ever born and like one more day of not being found out is one more day of success.
The next time church hurt was when I received the message that I wasn’t right for church. My grandparents took me one Sunday when they were visiting us. Church was where we went in the uncomfortable clothing to do things I didn’t know how to do.
I was eight years old, and I remember sitting in the pew looking around at people as they walked back from communion. My grandfather leaned over and in a whispering bark, with breath that warmed my ear, told me, “We don’t go to church to look at people.”
My eyes shot to the ground. I looked at my hands in my lap. I looked straight ahead. I looked up and counted the bricks that made the wall. I looked anywhere but at a person. Got it. Church is not about other people. Whatever you do, don’t look at a person. And if church ever was going to be a warm, safe space for me as a child, then not then. Not when I, ever the curious observer, used my eyes to learn what a place really was and to try to get a glimpse of what sparkled and ached in someone’s heart. Not then. If this was church, church wasn’t for me. And I wasn’t for church either.
Church hurt again four years later when a priest who was like a family member was discovered to be engaging in some unholy, criminal practices. This priest had officiated my parents’ wedding, baptized me, and came to our Easter dinner at times. My grandma was his personal cook throughout my childhood, and I had gone to work with her often before I started kindergarten. I had fed Father Matthew’s cockatiel named Jacob and helped clean its cage. I had sat next to him at the lunch table day after day, on lamb chop and mint jelly day, on steak and potatoes day, on fish day. He had called me “Teacher Catherine Amanda”, and he was one of my pupils, along with Fifi the Buffalo and whichever other stuffed animals were in attendance that day.
Father Matthew fired my grandma when she was just short of meeting her retirement after she discovered he had been embezzling money from the church, along with her best friend, who was in charge of the church finances. He threatened her when she said she was going to notify the Archbishop. That pretty much destroyed my belief in the institution of Church when I was an adolescent.
Up came the questions
Around that time, I went to church one Sunday with my other grandma, and I started noticing some other things. I noticed the way she said her prayers quickly, always a hurried breath or two ahead of the congregation. O Lord, I am not worthy to receive thee, but only say the word, and I shall be healed. Why am I not worthy? I started to wonder. And why is Nana always saying her prayers like a kid who answers the question before she’s been called on?
When my family moved to Mississippi, church took on a whole different level. Kids at school asked me, “Where do you go to church?” as if it were as straightforward as asking me my name or favorite color. They had church friends, people they seemed to know almost as well as their school friends. I was ashamed to say, “I don’t.”
I heard of this concept of a “church home”, which was a completely alien idea. That church could be like a home had never happened for me in my life. Part of that is that home didn’t feel like home. Part of that is that I didn’t feel like my own home.
I decided to not be confirmed when the time came. I had been attending confirmation classes and moving forward in the process. Then one day, it occurred to me that I didn’t have to do it.
I had all these questions about what it meant to be a Christian and to be a Catholic, specifically. I didn’t know if it was right for me, if it was something I needed or even wanted. You see, I had this strange notion that I wasn’t prepared to confirm something I didn’t know I believed or not.
But you’ll upset Nana. Can’t you just do it?, my dad asked. No, I couldn’t.
One more time, with meaning
When I came to the Episcopal Church in college with the boy who was descended from a line of Bishops, the boy who would later become my husband, I came reluctantly. I came wanting to be surprised, though, because this guy sure seemed like a good person, and if he thought this church thing was good, then I really hoped it could be.
It was. It was a good place. I still had questions, but this was a place that seemed to encourage questions. I learned that being a Christian was about more than following rules.
I learned that faith was a place where you didn’t have to feel stupid for not knowing all the answers, and that, on the contrary, you could live with a belief in the questions.
And I learned that church is about people, that if God had not come to Earth in flesh–flesh we could see and touch–then this whole Christian thing would be called off. I felt like I was given the permission to stare at Jesus and to try to figure him out. I felt that he had been watching me, too, and loved me as I was.
When I decided to be confirmed into the Episcopal Church as a 22-year-old, it was because it meant something. It meant something for how I wanted to live my life.
“Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?
I will, with God’s help.
Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?
I will, with God’s help.”
Some family members refused to come to my confirmation. “It’s not a good thing or something we should really celebrate… because you’re leaving the Catholic Church.”
A new hurt and new questions
Last year I was hurt by the church again. A priest I loved and respected, the man who lead us through a very formative, intimate process of premarital counseling, was later revealed to have accusations of sexual harassment and misconduct against him. By that time in my life, I was used to church hurting and to men spiraling out of control, hurting and controlling others to get the power they needed for themselves.
When we received the news of what had happened, I wrote, “I don’t really feel anything. Just one more man in my life who had to control, who had to abuse, who didn’t turn out to be whom I thought he was. Actually I’m angry. Why must I find myself stuck in these webs of patriarchal abuse? Again? Really, again?”
What I heard in the aftermath of these accusations coming to light was how he had found ways to isolate people from each other so they wouldn’t talk about what was happening. He found ways to lure them into silence and into doubting themselves more than him. It sounded very familiar from patterns of abuse I had experienced, and I started to consider how easy it is to abuse in a church setting.
I tossed it over in my mind: “At church we have people who give others the benefit of the doubt and choose to see the good in them. The helpers of the world, people full of compassion and practicing grace. The ones who put themselves last, who forgive and give second and third and fourth chances. You will find many people like this in a church and probably even more on a church staff.”
I began to see how the noble virtues of a life of faith could make us enablers of abusive people. Now I see how they can also make us perpetuators of abusive, unjust systems. Without being instructed in the complex layers of kindness, peace, joy, patience and love, we can allow our faith to turn us into something less that what God created us to be. We allow our common life to be a shadow of the kingdom.
Is the church a place where our silence is blessed? Does our faithful humility become a dumping ground for mistreatment, an excuse for keeping us small? Do we convince ourselves that we are not important enough to speak out in a bold way that may draw too much attention to ourselves or that may hurt someone?
Blessed are the peacemakers. Are peacemakers people who are just nice and polite? Are they people who “keep the peace” by smoothing over problems, who keep it with their silence and their words that could upset no one and, thus, say nothing?
Church in the darkness
Imagine going to church on Sunday mornings. You sit in the pews before the service with these words in your heart after another life has been taken: “Black lives matter”. You sit in the pews after a travel ban on predominantly Muslim countries is imposed. You sit in the pews after refugees are turned away. You sit in the pews after seeing angry white men march through the streets with torches and swastikas and rifles. You sit in the pews after your own family has insulted you for standing up for what you believe.
You sit there waiting for the service to begin, hungry for some kind of open recognition of the pain that you are feeling and, if not a path forward, then at least empathy and a clear enough acknowledgement that you know the pain has truly been seen.
And then you don’t hear it. You leave with the same hunger you had when you arrived, but now it’s also anger and confusion. Now the hunger is gnawing at you because isn’t this supposed to be a place of healing and reconciliation? A place of the soul? Of truth? What are we doing on our knees if not offering our lives to God?
Today church hurts. Because I worry that maybe clergy aren’t who I thought they were, and maybe what we’re doing together as Christians isn’t what I thought we signed up to do.
What it means to love
The day after the presidential election, I was devastated. It was hard to get out of bed. The pain I felt went much deeper than political loss; it felt like a betrayal by our country. It felt like that day our country took off its mask, and I saw that we weren’t who I thought we were.
It felt like a crisis of morals, and the differences between me and the people who voted for that man, including people in my family and neighbors with Trump signs in their yards, felt insurmountable–how could we share a common life? How could we do it when this man went far beyond repugnance into a realm of activating my wounds of previous abuse? He split open those deep wounds and trauma from my past, making them something to once again face as a reality in my daily life. Could others not see who he was? Or did it just not matter to them?
That morning a clergy member started posting smiling photos of himself with people from all walks of life from his community. They all said something like, “This is Sheryl. She’s my neighbor. I love her.”
When I saw these photos the morning after the election, I had been literally lying on the ground in the dark with tears coming down my face, partly numb, partly outraged, partly in mourning. I’d been trying to basically just keep my five-month-old fed and physically safe. Nothing else could be expected of me that day. I had to get out of the house and seek refuge somewhere else because I began to feel my depression sinking its teeth deep into me, and it was becoming crushing.
I opened Facebook on my phone and saw those smiling neighborly selfies of love, people who looked ok and were moving on while I was plastered to the floor. I thought, “Wow. Good for him. I’m not there yet.”
Now I think, “Is that really the place where I needed to be?”
You see, an open-ended imperative to love without any other instruction of what that looks like can lead to a place as dangerous as hatred. Let me tell you where this took me.
In the name of love
My inexperienced, dogged pursuit of love kept me in an emotionally and sexually abusive relationship that escalated over four years, despite my best efforts to cure it with what I thought was love.
This is how love manifested in my head.
His brother was an alcoholic, and when I drink, it hurts him. Alcohol’s not that important to me…If I give up alcohol, then he will love me how I want him to. Love is selfless. It’s selfish of me to keep doing something that hurts him. Love is about sacrifices.
He just wants to spend time with me. He’s protective of me and doesn’t want me out at night. If I give up going out with my friends, then we can love each other well. Love is giving the benefit of the doubt and fixing our eyes on the good over and over again.
If I do what he wants me to do in bed, then he will be satisfied. I’m just not adventurous enough. I should learn to like these things. Isn’t this what love is–serving the one you love?
And all along, when doubts arose, he was there saying, “If I didn’t love you so much, I wouldn’t act this way.”
I didn’t want to hurt him. I didn’t want to lose him–he said no one would ever love me like he did. I thought love meant not hurting someone. So I hurt myself instead. And he continued to hurt, too, in a deep place I could never reach no matter how hard I tried to love.
The best intentions to love can be perverted into something that is not love, into a place that can do far-reaching harm.
The way I’m being asked by some clergy to love right now rings alarm bells in me. And you better believe that after escaping abuse, I take those alarm bells seriously. I don’t have to see the fire to evacuate the building. I don’t even need to hear the alarm. I’ve walked through the fire, and I can feel the heat of it around me, like a snake can sense the heat radiating off bodies around it. I can smell the smoke long before I can see it.
I can’t do it. I can’t love in the same ways that enabled abuse in my life. I can’t love when I feel like I am in hiding. I can’t love by making myself responsible for other people’s feelings and folding myself smaller to avoid hurting people. I can’t love in the silence that protects the hurt between us. It feels inauthentic, and it feels dangerous.
When church feels unsafe
Church no longer feels like a safe or holy space for me. What is not being said by clergy is making church feel like a complicit space where our silence is a sacrament of white male supremacy, an outward and visible sign of our fear and support of this culture.
When I say it’s not a safe space, I don’t just mean intellectually. I mean that I can’t bring myself to go there. Despite my best efforts to convince myself that church is a safe space, I get anxious when the time comes. One day we were about to turn into the parking garage of our church, and I told my husband, who was driving, “No no no! Don’t turn. Keep driving”, the same way I would if I saw my abusive ex-boyfriend in the direction we were headed.
I feel it in my body, in my racing heartbeat, in my tightened muscles, in my shallow breath. The feeling of the hunted.
Things do not feel ok for many of us. We don’t know who to trust. We’re skeptical of what is real in this age of “fake news”. Our president is doing his best to mess with our heads, and who else is? Who can we trust?
It feels like another day of gaslighting when I say, “Black lives matter” and “What about refugees and immigrants?” and “What about transgendered people?” and “What about women who need health care?” and the Church doesn’t say, “Yes, I see it, too” but instead says, “We’re ok. Onward together.”
I want people to stop telling me we’re ok when we don’t feel ok. That’s what the silence tells me: You’re ok. It’s not worth mentioning.
I want the church to stop giving me vague platitudes to love, like we basically just need to hug it out–when it doesn’t feel safe to be hugged by the people around me, people who may support a man who said, “Grab ‘em by the pussy”.
You can’t cover our pain with your love. I don’t feel your love unless you acknowledge and can sit with my pain.
Moving the Body of Christ
I haven’t gone to church in months, and I know many young people who have similarly walked away. We meet instead in our homes or in coffee shops and tell stories like the ones I’m telling here. We try to reconcile the Gospel we’ve read with what we hear from the pulpit and see before us.
You are losing us. You are losing young people who need to hear the bold message of the Gospel speak to today’s times. We are looking for a community of Christ followers who are willing to take risks and have difficult conversations out in the open. Imagine what that kind of love could do.
I’m not at church for social mixers and to find more friends and to feel good. Yes, I want fellowship and community, but I’m there because I want to be a part of the Body of Christ.
Teresa of Avila said, “Christ has no body now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he looks compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good. Yours are the hands through which he blesses all the world.”
If we are the Body of Christ, our bodies need to get moving. Our usual, tried-and-true ministries are not going to be enough; bodies need response to emergent needs. We need triage here. I feel like I’ve been in the waiting room watching people have heart attacks and bleed out while the doctors stand to the side.
If I go to church and don’t feel this Body rushing to meet the needs of the hurting world at this moment in history, then there is nothing for me there.
I need to hear the Gospel in its radical fullness as to how it guides us through this difficult time when refugees aren’t welcome, white supremacists are emboldened by a centrist, neutral narrative, and every day there seems to be a new assault to racial, gender, and socio-economic equality. People are hurting.
If these things are not being addressed, then what are we as Christians here for? If we’re not being taught how to love these hurting people well–if they are not even named in our prayers–what is our purpose?
Because right now it feels like we’re only trying to love people who are made uncomfortable when we look at those who are suffering. And we’re not even loving them well with our avoidance. Right now it feels like we are enabling division and misunderstanding by avoiding difficult conversations.
Jesus came to us in the flesh. I need clergy to put some flesh and bones on this love narrative. I need clergy who can touch the places where the world has wounded us and say, “Your pain is real.” I need clergy who will turn our eyes toward our suffering neighbors and send marching orders to the hearts, hands, and feet of this Body. I need clergy who are more concerned with helping those who are suffering than hurting those who are comfortable.
A love movement doesn’t run from pain. It runs toward the pain. Because it knows that that’s where the healing happens.
Photo credit: Christopher Guider
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