I believe in God the Mother, Whose womb gives birth to mystery, Who nurtures all that is, Visible and invisible.
And in her strength, intuition, and softness To cradle the inner child of my heart Tenderly, soothing hurt.
I believe in the spirit of this mother To fiercely protect, Warding off attempts to wound my very nature Love from love Light from light Seeing the true essence of my being.
Through her I know my connection to all else, For me, And with me, In the feminine that is not a construct But is the abundance of mutuality, Receptivity, And fecundity.
She, who is neither opposite nor opposition, But a cosmic bringing-together Where the new unfolds. One aspect, often suppressed, Never subsumed, Always rematerializing. Moon energy, renewing after waning.
I affirm the beauty of her infinite variety Originating from the same source.
The mother presence from deep within Binding up my woundedness, Creating balance, Bringing forth wholeness as a gift to the world.
Amen
(Note: Heartfelt gratitude to Ryan Keebaugh for asking me to take on a new project that led me to these words. Looking forward to hearing how it all comes together!)
[Image description: sanctuary of St. Patrick’s Episcopal Church. Curved wooden pews, sunlight streaming through the windows, with the altar in the background.]
Note: I wrote this in 2013 after meeting with Jackie, the priest who is the rector at St. Patrick’s in Lebanon. For those who may not know this part of my story: I was raised in the evangelical church and in 2012, after a time of personal and spiritual unraveling, I stopped attending church altogether. I wasn’t sure what I believed and if I’d ever go back to church once I figured it out. In March 2013 I got up one Sunday morning, googled “Episcopal church near me,” made my way to St. Patrick’s for their late service, and have been part of that community ever since. Today is Jackie’s final Sunday before her retirement and it feels right to me to share this little glimpse into one of my first conversations with her. She has had a profound impact on my life and I’m so grateful I am able to be part of the wonderful community she has helped create over the past few decades. I wish her every blessing as she moves on to her next adventure.(Also, for several years I participated in the #OneWordChallenge and the word I chose at the beginning of 2013 was ‘weave’)
April 19, 2013
Yesterday, when I sat in the old, worn pew in the back of the sanctuary and we chatted, I have to admit I began a bit guarded. When I’d called the church office to ask about newcomer classes, she suggested that rather than waiting for them to arrange another session, I come in and meet with her, the parish priest. I know I’d readily agreed to it, but I was still a little nervous.
The rectory office was in the midst of a re-organization effort and the common area was busily being rearranged for an upcoming activity, so the sanctuary was the only free space when I arrived at our agreed time. It was mostly quiet, save for the kids from the free preschool they run listening to a lesson up on the stage. It’s not an enormous church, but the last pew is far enough back that we couldn’t hear them.
She asked about my church background and what brought me to St. Patrick’s. In a few quick minutes I explained growing up in church and then trying to find the right place after the boys were born and then becoming a church drop-out to study my faith and try to figure out where I belonged. I tried very hard not to ramble. I think I did okay.
We talked about what I’ve been reading — Richard Beck, Rachael Held Evans, Thomas Keating, Barbara Brown Taylor, Miroslav Volf. She is a good listener. Sunlight was streaming in through the windows and it felt like a holy moment, even though I’m not sure I believe there is such a thing.
Looking me in the eyes, she said, “You are so young and that is quite a journey. You are brave to keep trying. A lot of people give up.” I detected no hint of condescension or insincerity or flattery in her voice. I kept my composure and asked about her journey, but my heart was breaking open in the most excruciating and beautiful of ways.
When she considered her words and said that she knew there were some things she may be wrong about, but that she kept praying and seeking understanding and grace, I felt hopeful.
When she said that I would find people in the congregation who held opposing political and social views, she stretched her arms out wide to demonstrate the full reach of those differences. But when she assured me that the congregation strongly believes we are one in Christ and are called to share the table even with those differences, I felt like I was hearing the church I’ve been listening for.
When she said that they aren’t always perfect at it, that they are a place comprised of people which means they will never be perfect, I laughed and told her that if she’d tried to convince me her church was perfect I would have known it was not the place for me. I told her that her congregation was the most welcoming I’d ever experienced and that each Sunday at least two people I hadn’t met yet made a point of chatting with me, and she said she was very glad to hear I’d been made welcome.
She didn’t try to pressure me to continue attending or for any kind of commitment, she simply said that based on our conversation, she thinks the Episcopal church seems like a good fit for me. She encouraged me to call her if I have any questions and agreed to come up with some books for me to read to learn more about their traditions and beliefs. And then she gave me a big hug and said she enjoyed talking with me.
I waited till I got to my car to let the tears fall.
At the beginning of this year I didn’t know if I would ever feel at home in a church again. Four months later — after only six Sunday mornings there — and I can’t imagine finding anywhere else that feels more like home.
They are having a dinner/fund-raiser Saturday night to benefit the local interfaith homeless ministry. She’d seen that I signed up to attend and as we discussed it, she mentioned that she is going to speak for a few minutes beforehand. The topic? Weaving the Fabric of Life.
Maybe there is the slightest possibility I do believe in holy moments after all.
[Image Description: Dirt path along the side of a meadow in Rocky Mountain National Park, mountains in the distance.}
What will people think? Always bear that question.
They will know we are Christian by our christian values, christian t-shirts, and prayers around flagpoles at public schools we don’t even attend because we are separate, not of them.
Listen to us, your elders, we will show you the way you should go, to mold you into the perfect christian image.
You will not lie. You will not mock. You will not disrespect. You will not forget your manners. You will not lust. You will not cheat, or you deserve just what you get.
If you disobey you deserve the blistered bottom, the lost meals, the harsh words, the shaming, the threat of being shunned. And you will call your friend and tell her you can’t attend her birthday because you broke the rules.
These are the consequences I learned.
You taught them from your sanctuaries, your kitchen islands, your youth group bible studies, your conferences, your words, and I believed you
until I didn’t.
Until I saw the fear I was painting on my own children’s faces, the pain I caused, the shame I inflicted, when I doled out the same manufactured consequences.
Love had to be another way.
Love is kind, patient, protects, does not grow calloused to another’s pain.
But you said I was going astray, ruining them. They would never know right from wrong.
Now I see that was the ruse all along.
To excuse lying if it gets you the court seat To excuse mocking if it only targets “them.” To excuse disrespect if you think it’s deserved To excuse lust if it might have been a joke To excuse gaming the system if it gets you what you want.
To think the end justifies the means, while keeping us all from seeing the means are often everything you told me was wrong.
You would have been my elders but now we’re just adults on different paths with different understandings of God.
I know this sounds like anger. I have been angry. I have argued and tried to convince. I tried to go and never look back.
But I now I see another truth: We’re still part of each other. We were all caught up in the same misguided tide. And my rage, my desperate attempts to convince you, my wanting you to be ashamed for your complicity, have roots in the same poisoned well.
More shame or pain or hurt will never turn the tide. Even if the ruse tells us it’s deserved.
This is the hard part, it calls for courage, for unguardedness I’m not sure that I possess.
I still have far to grow.
I know I can’t come back, But I can be here, arms unclenched, in this loving, spacious wilderness, holding this painful tension, trying, while love beckons you with kindness, with patience, with your own new path.
Because the good news isn’t politics and anger, punishment and fear.
It’s letting go. Breaking free. And finding life anew.
It’s not natural to us, not our nature, to embrace duality, not each other. It’s manufactured for their profit, like their power, like the system, inflating as we buy in.
When we sanction this detachment, choosing Ideology, Rhetoric, Catastrophizing, Shame, the machinations infiltrate, trojan horse, wreaking havoc from within.
The chasm between our hearts expands unconstrained. While we suffer broken lives and broken bonds, the officialdom’s interests served by our misplaced discontent.
This division, lined with border walls and severed ties, mirrors back our worst projections. We get caught up, lose ourselves, lose each other to the machinery for whose gain?
We aren’t meant to cling to separations, grasping empty metallic promises churned out from the engine of the status quo.
We’re meant to live in seasons— Sowing and growing Renewing and letting go— the living things we are.
Neither manufactured division nor false unity will save us. Only clear seeing of complexity, of the need to repair harm, of the unsustainability of this us vs. them, all or nothing, dichotomy.
We are too much, too many to be flattened into two.
I would not allow myself hope. Not after before. But I did think I would feel— perhaps not joy— but relief, reprieve if it turned out this way.
But I don’t feel any of that.
All I can feel is grief. An unrelenting ache. Awash in grief.
I’d thought that after knowing, after experiencing the reality of the last four years, more hearts would change
and they might not choose him. So many people chose him. Not the majority, but too many.
Even though I haven’t believed for a very long time that America (at least the United States part) was ever truly great, I wanted to believe the people saying it was would at least make a play for fairness and upholding her institutions.
But too many turn blind eye after blind eye, ignoring harm and corruption, lies and death.
Dismissing pain and alarms like a parent when their child cried and said she did not want to “play” with her abuser, only to be sent back again and again
because listening, validating her fears, keeping her safe, might have made them look bad.
Or not in control.
And there are people who fear loss of control more than they love their daughters. People who fear loss of power more than they love their neighbors.
There are people who will double-down on an idol they worship while convincing themselves they are worshiping the God of love.
And I do not know how to bridge the chasm between my heart and theirs. I’m staying curious about possibilities, but I do not yet know.
Several people have pointed out that I seem to dislike our current president and I want to clear up a few things: I do not simply dislike him or merely think he has an unpleasant personality. As a survivor of sexual abuse, I hate that our president is an abuser and that this fact did not disqualify him in the minds of so many.
Regardless of what you may want to be true, someone who so willingly violates another person and shows no remorse, but rather brags about it, is not a fit leader. Such a person will willingly violate other moral standards and not lose any sleep over doing so. And when he does violate all manner of other principles of decency and ethics with impunity, the response should not be to fall back on conspiracies, but rather to deal with reality.
His administration’s cruel treatment of immigrant children, poor and homeless children, protesters, and families struggling due to the pandemic should show you that he does not care about your children or some hypothetical trafficked children or unborn babies. All he cares about are his own polls and ratings and advantage.
Regardless of what television shows tell you to trust him or what other public figures of questionable standards you invoke to support him, I will not betray myself by taking up his cause. If you support him, I will probably be able to find it in my heart to give you the benefit of the doubt and see you as someone whose conditioning and life experience have made it difficult for you to see him as he really is, but I will never willingly accept the authority of an abuser.
And as for his farcical attempt to convince evangelical Christians that he is one of them, I remind you that actions speak louder than words. A wise friend once told me that if I’m struggling to discern if something or someone is of God, I should look for the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, and self-control. The president displays none of these.
I assure you that what you may perceive in me as partisan dislike for the man or an embrace of liberal media rhetoric, is nothing of the sort. It is anger that an abuser has been given such a platform and grief that so many people who identify as Christian have convinced themselves that he is someone they should support and follow. And, admittedly, I struggle with how many of his supporters would rather tell me “Fuck your feelings, libtard!” than care at all about the women he has abused and violated and what this says about the kind of person he really is. Comparing him to other people who have also done things that are wrong in no way absolves him of his own behavior.
I, too, hate the division politics are causing these days. I hate that I do not feel comfortable or safe engaging with many people who I consider friends. I hate that I have lost friends over expressing my views of the president or my support for people suffering injustice. But I spent too many years betraying myself by accepting abusive behavior in leaders because I was taught falsities about grace and forgiveness and my own worth as a woman. And I have put way too much time into unlearning and healing and dealing with what I survived. I cannot and will not go backward.
[image description: tiny green plant growing through ashes and cinders]
Moored too long in patrimonial shroud to one-size-all, monoculture wasteland.
Groping, gasping, I caught a spark– “Love is kind”– and fanned it into flame.
Flame, turned roaring fire, burned it all to ashes.
What is God? Or who? Can I still want God to be? If God is love and love is kind, perhaps. If God is man’s image, guns and flags, domination, subjugation, exploitation, then
No.
I cannot want that.
Now I wait, lying fallow, losing track of seasons. Scorched foundation, Nothing
Now when Job’s three friends heard of all these troubles that had come upon him, each of them set out from his home—Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite. They met together to go and console and comfort him. When they saw him from a distance, they did not recognize him, and they raised their voices and wept aloud; they tore their robes and threw dust in the air upon their heads. They sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great.
Job 2:11-13, NRSV
I cannot read Job these days without wondering if white churchgoers are Job’s friends. Becoming aware of suffering, setting out with good intentions to console and comfort. Loss, injustice, brutality, disproportionately levied against our Black and Brown neighbors. Unsure of what to do, our silent solidarity turns to silence. Or worse.
Does God see Eliphas, Bildad, and Zophar in our initial distress turning to silent bystanding? In our sitting for days and nights without speaking a word? Without moving to ameliorate or defend? In our thoughts turning from dismay to evasion and pontification?
In our blaming, “if they had not looked wrong, done wrong, moved wrong, this would not have happened,” Does God hear Eliphaz telling Job, “Think now, who that was innocent ever perished? Or where were the upright cut off? as I have seen, those who plow iniquity and sow trouble reap the same.” We soothe our own discomfort. Our self-assured innocence will protect us while claiming their outcome imputes guilt.
In our justifying, “We also experience violence and hardship. Your suffering is not worse, not systemic, not disproportionate,” Does God hear Bildad arrogantly claiming, “Does God pervert justice? Or does the Almighty pervert the right? If your children sinned against him, he delivered them into the power of their transgression. If you will seek God and make supplication to the Almighty, if you are pure and upright, surely then he will rouse himself for you and restore to you your rightful place.” We convince ourselves that people get what they deserve, thus absolving us of responsibility to comfort and protect. We claim only the first and last words of “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
In our our appeals to higher authority, conflating man-made systems with God’s will, in our insisting “God is in control, things are as God wants,” Does God hear Zophar telling Job, “Know then that God exacts of you less than your guilt deserves. Can you find out the deep things of God? Can you find out the limit of the Almighty? If he passes through, and imprisons, and assembles for judgment, who can hinder him? For he knows those who are worthless; when he sees iniquity, will he not consider it?” We refuse to question inherited beliefs, structures, lies. Law and order is God’s design, right? Who are we to interfere?
Daily we hear the echo of Job’s words, “Even when I cry out, ‘Violence!’ I am not answered; I call aloud, but there is no justice.” There is no safe walking, no safe sleeping, no safe driving, no safe breathing. Rage and grief spill over, filling streets, disturbing peace, cars on fire, voices raising.
What does God think when, with Eliphaz, we respond, “What do you know that we do not know? What do you understand that is not clear to us? The gray-haired and the aged are on our side, those older than your father. Are the consolations of God too small for you?” We look only at outlier symptoms, ignoring the roots of oppression and pain growing for generations. What will we reap for our continued blaming, denying, justifying?
God had words for Eliphaz and his friends: “My wrath is kindled against you and against your two friends; for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has. Now…my servant Job shall pray for you, for I will accept his prayer not to deal with you according to your folly; for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has done.”
Let us put aside this folly of blaming our neighbors for their suffering. Let us see our own complicity. Let us listen and learn and be humble. Let us speak the words that are right. Let us take the actions that are right. Let us work for restoration and be a blessing to each other.
The Forest and the Trees 