Letting Go…

I have a love-hate relationship with church. As a pastor’s wife in the Christian tradition, I’m not supposed to say that.  I’m not supposed to use words like “hate.” I’m not supposed to feel hate, even; but I just did, and even though I work daily to make peace with how and why the hate seeded and grew, sometimes I still do, and I know that for me and for people like me, addressing it honestly and transparently matters. One part of me that contributes to this rocky relationship is that I am wired to remember and feel the intricacies of my common and uncommon life experiences in vivid, painstaking detail (albeit through my own lens of perspective, age, and bias). I’ve worked hard to accept this part of me with self-generosity, but that acceptance doesn’t soften the pain born of this characteristic at all. I remember and replay conversations from twenty years ago as if they happened yesterday; I remember the tone in which words were spoken, slight changes in facial expression, nearly imperceptible shrugs of the shoulders, and uncomfortable glances between conversational partners. Though sometimes I wish and even pretend I were different, I don’t easily forget, and I don’t easily let go.  These dispositions bless my life with the ability to attach to people and to love very deeply and curse me with a sometimes-crippling inability to live open-handedly and to move on from painful exchanges, and all that makes working and living within a faith community both incredibly beautiful and incredibly hard. 

I’ve known for a long time that my painful experiences embedded in church life were small spot fires, burning here and there, never really receiving the time or attention they needed in order to be tended to, subdued, and blended back into the soil of my life. Recently, though, relationship-ending conversations over faith and doubt with close, deep, heart-and-soul-connected friends followed by the publicly ugly treatment of some family members of ours in ministry poured a line of gasoline from one small fire to another, and before I realized it, a conflagration raged, threatening to burn down every solid relationship in my life. For the previous 39ish years of my life, in the face of loss, I ran toward the church to find refuge and direction inside the safety and love of community, but today, I can’t; in fact, I am taking slow, deliberate steps in the opposite direction – because I know with every fiber of my being that it’s the church within me that’s on fire.

I’ve lived as a pastor’s wife (or, in the Church of Christ tradition, a minister’s wife) for 22 years. Tony and I were both raised in the Church of Christ – a weird little Christian denomination sometimes known in Christian circles today for its historical aversion to both instrumental music and women in leadership.

Across the moves that peppered my childhood, this church provided a source of consistency and belonging for me. The communal practices of baptism, prayer, sermons, hymns, and weekly communion in addition to ways in which the community cared for one another – providing meals, care, and company for the ill and elderly, celebrating one another’s major milestones like graduations, marriages, and births, and grieving loss and pain through funerals and prayer meetings – those timbers built a home and a chosen family for me. That home and that family is where I formed friendships, found and gave comfort, felt cared for, felt surrounded in the very best ways, and eventually rooted my life with the love of my life. Despite its obvious imperfections, this chosen family gave me a place to know and be known and formed my foundation of purpose, hope, and love for others. I am forever grateful for these gifts. In this context, I’ve built my identity, my values, the core of who I am – all timbers that have held me up and served me well, mostly. As anyone who has tried to foster a genuine and deep faith has likely done, I have questioned many tenets of the faith I’ve been a part of – those beams that built my home. I’ve never respected or appreciated the subjugation of women formulated on what I believe is a misinterpretation of a scriptural premise that is intended to highlight God’s heart for absolute equality of all people – subjugating the idea, I believe, that anyone should ever be subjugated at all.   I’ve hurt over the ways that I and the community as a whole have treated people, and I’ve wrestled hard with the difference between love and concern for others and cultural / ideological hegemony.  I have tousled about for years with knowing when to test the beams’ strength by speaking up and when to trust in their strength by remaining silent and staying humble. What I didn’t really realize until our recent life disruptions and losses of the closest community we’ve ever had was that the same timbers that framed the home I lived and moved about in for my entire life have been splitting and splintering for a very, very long time, creating magnificent kindling just waiting for ignition.

 In childhood, various teachers and influential figures in my life taught ideas in church that didn’t resonate with what I believed to be good and true; moreover, they didn’t resonate with what sense I could make of the words of Christ.  In one of my elementary Bible classes, a teacher who was always kind and loving to me and all kids in her class, explicitly taught that Black skin was the mark of Cain referenced in Genesis. I recognize all of the terribly systemic, cultural, and ontological influences that shaped that way of thinking now, but even then, I felt embarrassed at the idea and even ashamed at what I can now name as ideological violence being taught in my own community, and I found the idea ragingly inconsistent with the words of Christ. I am fairly ethnically ambiguous, but in that moment, I remember wanting to shed everything about me that could be identified as racially White because White seemed to equaled oppressor, and even as a kid, I never wanted people to hurt because of me. I didn’t want anything to do with being an oppressor.  I felt sad. I didn’t have language to talk about it, then, so I didn’t, not to anyone, which was the beginning of a lifetime of voiceless complicity.  A beam or two splintered that day.

In elementary school, our church leaders fired our preacher for theological differences during Christmas week, and my dad encountered him outside crying on the church steps heavy with worry for how he would provide for his family. I questioned quietly, internally, how anyone could read the words of Christ (even as little as I understood them as a child) and treat another human being with such deep disregard. In middle school, when my sister and her friends brought their friend who was an atheist to a youth event; instead of welcoming her with love because she is a human being and deserves that, one of our youth leaders told her explicitly that wearing shorts to a church event was inappropriate. She never came back. I can still hear the beams cracking.

Just before Tony and I became paid ministerial staff in college, the preacher at that church had an affair with the secretary. In another church experience, the youth minister Tony replaced had had an affair with a teenager. In a different position, Tony experienced a lot of conflict over books he read with the youth and their misalignment with the values of the governing body of that denomination. A woman in one of the churches we served was not allowed to be a part of the worship team because leading worship was considered a leadership position, and this woman had a questionable past. The fires ignited.

And then, then we had an opportunity to come back to the church that we consider our home. As a teenager, that church gave me a community and a place to feel at home. No matter what happens, I will always value that season and the people who cared for me in it. My best friends were found there; the love of my life was found there. That community saw me enter high school, climbed literal and figurative mountains with me, saw me get my license, forgave me when I hit one of their cars shortly afterward. They celebrated my graduation, sent me care packages in college, they watched me fall in love. When Tony and I got married at 18 and 20, people there had to be a little worried to say the least, but that community threw us a wedding shower anyway at a time in my life when I desperately needed someone to celebrate the event. I didn’t have many friends; I felt scared about this huge step in my life, and their support helped me feel more secure.  Two years later, when our first son was born, they sent congratulations and a quilt, and they did so again for the birth of our second son two years after that. I will forever treasure being remembered and valued enough for people to reach out to me during my own major life milestones, and I learned from them how this could communicate love to others. Despite the small faith fires already burning, this home-going in life and in ministry held such hope and possibility for me. I loved the community as a whole and the people who had poured their lives out for me when I was a kid, and though I don’t regret my enthusiasm, it blinded me to much of the potential pain ahead.

At the time we entered ministry in our home church, I had already been diagnosed with a blood disease that would eventually become cancer. Because of our experience in our previous church, Tony and I were already searching desperately for people who were also looking for something deeper out of their faith. We found what we were looking for at the time in a whole movement of people who believed in and experienced life in ways that we believed were consistent with the narrative and life of Christ in that whole-life, something-more, something-deeper way we were after. The loud, charismatic nature of the circles we found ourselves running in was foreign to many in our quiet acapella-centered home-church, and a lot of the ways in which worship and prayer are conducted in those circles look bizarre to many other Christian communities. I am sure that in our excitement at what we were discovering, we were pretty obnoxious. We probably behaved arrogantly.  The passionate pursuit of something deeper and more authentic is messy and gets so mixed up with other very human motivations sometimes.  I’m sure we prioritized enthusiasm, sometimes, above respect; excitement above honor; and when we wanted to go and spend the summer learning from and ministering alongside people in Mozambique whose ministries to orphans we still consider to be the most powerful in human history, we gave many people in our community, including our leadership, heartburn. 

I struggled mightily with this. I was, at that time, more excited and more deeply committed to what I understand to be God than I had ever been, and it caught me completely off guard that I was in deep community with people who think very differently than I do. Until this conflict, I lived unaware of how differently we viewed the same words, the same ideas, the same God. In what I’m sure was a difficult effort to keep everyone happy and to reduce friction as much as possible, on a Sunday morning, one leader read a letter to the congregation stating that the leadership did not support us or the theological suppositions of the group we were going to Mozambique with and that our time off, not the church’s financial contributions, was the church’s support for this mission. This letter was read in front of the entire community that I considered to be my chosen family, whose kids we fed in our home, whose plays and games we attended, whose victories we celebrated for years. While I understood the reasons for those actions and the difficult position our faith journey had put our leadership in, at the reading of the letter I was sad, humiliated, crushed to the point of heavy, hot tears as one friend came, put her arms around me, and ushered me out of the auditorium to hold me while I cried.  Though this letter was the expression of just a few people (some of whom have apologized and repaired relationship since), pain is a skilled generalizer, and it felt like the entire church was against us going to participate in this incredible work of feeding and caring for kids in need despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary. If the fires were lit before, they were in full flame now.

 Before, throughout, and beyond that experience, though, we always had our small group – our closest connections, our most intimate support. Because of the strength and longevity of that group of friends and the way that we held and carried each other, I think I doubled down and tightened my grip on that source of support.  I hoped and believed it wouldn’t ever change which was far from realistic, but I wanted that closeness and those people to remain the same forever – a life-long refuge from everything else in our lives. For that season, our group was all on the same page, prioritizing love for each other, pursuit of love for our community, and close, deep connection with God.

We had difficulties, but this little interdenominational group was everything I ever hoped church could be.  Maybe I was ignorant, and maybe I just didn’t want to see the likelihood that that cocoon of safety wouldn’t and shouldn’t last forever, so when, a few years later, Tony and I had to face the difficult realities of our sociopolitical climate, the broader evangelical conversation, and what it meant to the very valuable immigrant, LGBTQ+, and people of color with whom we have loved and have shared life, we had to ask hard questions and explore our faith and doubts at harder and deeper levels, and it marked the beginning of the end of the group as a whole.

One of the values Tony and I share is growth; in that, we will likely seek a greater understanding of what / who God is and what that means in the world as it changes for the rest of our lives.  We aren’t afraid to question ourselves and our beliefs, and we do everything within our power to change when we realize we are wrong.  Though we tried our absolute best to proceed with the greatest honor and respect we could muster for everyone involved, it became clear that deep relationship with our small group was no longer productive of love and goodness for all of us together. It was time to leave the cocoon. I was broken-hearted and angry, not at anyone, but at the loss in general. And a few months later, when some family members of ours who’ve spent their entire lives in ministry found themselves in the same situation as ours pre-Mozambique, though for different theological variances, the fires grew, and the gasoline poured. The fallout, the nastiness, the destructive way in which problems were and are being addressed has changed all our lives and our faith journeys permanently. I ache for our family members, and my pain at watching their pain has become my definitive breaking point. The match has been lit and dropped. Over the next several months, I got angrier and angrier at almost everything and grew less and less able to be with anyone in my own faith community.  I felt and still feel lost and so, so shattered by it all.

But even more than lost and broken, today I am tired. I am tired of the judgment. I am tired of the hatred. I am tired of the anger. I am tired of the defense of particular and hair-splitting theologies at the absolute expense of human hearts. I am so, so, so tired of all of that in myself and others. And so, as I wade through this chest-deep pain while the fire rages, I am learning bit by cellular bit to open my hand and let go – let go of trying to fix anything, let go of the fight, let go of my need to be understood and respected, let go of living into some idea of who I “should” be, let go of any expectation that people will ever understand how badly they hurt me and others, let go of the desire for an apology, let go of my idea of what ministry should look and feel like, let go of hope, let go of striving, let go of putting the raging fire out, even.  Today, I just want to let it all burn to ash, so when it’s done, I can clear the ground, till the soil, and build something new and beautiful on the foundation of very pure, very simple Love that I sincerely believe is the heartbeat of the life-force that is God. In that, I can value our small group for what it was – amazing people who supported and loved us well and for whom I am better for having known, and who now are on different and mutually beautiful paths. I can value the relationships I’ve been privileged to have for the time I’ve had them without an ounce of regret.  I can accept that circumstances and people change, sometimes for better, and sometimes for worse, and that change doesn’t devalue the good experiences I have had with them. I can live the lessons of cancer and stay only in today, doing only what I can today, loving only who is in front of me today…Feeling sad for change is ok. Feeling the pain of loss is ok. Feeling anger or hate, even, is okay, as long as I’m not destroying another in it, and when I feel ready to get through it, and be in a different space, I can open my hand, one finger at a time as quickly or as slowly as I need to, respecting and honoring the deep beauty of how I am creatively and uniquely wired, and LET. GO.

Even though with every shuddering step I take away from the church in this season of my life, I feel afraid, sad, disappointed, and angry at so much loss, in this flight from the church that has shaped my entire identity, I am finding some of the most beautiful sources of fire-quenching, life-giving water in the most unexpected places outside the church, and I am gratefully relieved.  Thankfully, the source of peace that I call God isn’t now and never was confined to a church; rather, I’m discovering that divinity can be found everywhere I look. It appears in the resurfacing of friends I thought I’d lost forever, in the compassion and understanding arms of family who have long since left church behind, and in people who have accepted and loved me even after I arrogantly judged or rejected them in the name of Christ. These glimpses of the divine are teaching me now what I never imagined I’d have to learn because of my relationship to own faith community – how to let go. And the “letting go” that I’m learning about outside of the church will be, I believe, what saves me from the fires that started within it.