Category Archives: Faith and Doubt

The Priesthood of All Survivors

I’m having doubts about my place in the church.

As I overcome trauma-induced beliefs that made me fear direct communication with God, I have less need for a giant mediating structure to serve as a lightning rod. As I gain confidence in my own perceptions, and in the availability of forgiveness for my faults, I have less need for sermons saying how everyone “should” feel and act.

I still long for a community centered on Christ. I want to give and receive the support, spiritual insight, and deep friendship that a shared faith journey can offer.

However, as I work towards higher levels of psychological integration and adulthood, I have to be part of a community that’s consciously working the same program. As I choose to break familial patterns of nonconsensual intimacy, I have to be part of a community that’s organized by consent and choice, not guilt-tripping the unchurched.

Such a community doesn’t form spontaneously in every group of people that calls itself a parish. It either has to be steered in that direction by an insightful pastor who is willing to yield power to the laypeople, or assembled outside church walls by the individuals who need it.

C.S. Lewis once wrote that the local parish, precisely because of its randomness, teaches the spiritual discipline of learning to share fellowship with people for whom you feel no natural affinity. This is an important practice, but I think he was wrong that a person’s hand-picked circle of spiritual friends is more likely to be a group of yes-men than the traditional church. Intentional communities can be diverse if they make a commitment to be so. (See, for example, the Freedom Circles at the Becoming Church program that I visited this spring.) Plus, there is a difference between the fruitful discomfort of listening to people outside your own race, social class, etc., and the pain of being a survivor in a church that doesn’t prioritize relational safety.

What about the sacraments? My mystical, physical union with Jesus in the Eucharist is my strongest reason for choosing church attendance over quiet reflection with Morning Prayer on my iPhone. When I see my fellow parishioners approach the altar rail, our relationship becomes solemnized, revealing a dimension of interconnection beyond ordinary acquaintance. I sense the possibility of the Body of Christ. It isn’t something I can access in solitude.

Surely the official church still has a monopoly on this power…or does it?

Feminist Catholic theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether wrote the following in her book Sexism and God-Talk (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983).

The residue of clericalism gives even liberal Protestants the impression that the administration of the sacraments is a function that most especially must be exercised by persons set aside in specialized ministry. But, in fact, representation of the community in rites of baptism, forgiveness, or Eucharist depends very little on specialized skills of learning. It is significant that the New Testament contains many words for special charisms and skills, but that they are not identified with special offices responsible for the sacraments of baptism or Eucharist…

…[As] people become empowered to make their contribution to shaping the worship life of the community… leadership does not disappear but assumes its true functionality when it is liberated from clerical monopoly over ministry, word, and sacrament. Leadership is called forth from within the community rather than imposed on it in a way that deprives the community of its own self-articulation. (pgs. 209-10)

This radically Protestant idea had never occurred to me. I set it aside as a memorable curiosity for several years, until now, when I realize I need a healthier reason to stay than “Where else can I go?”

Codependence taints the American church’s strategies for retaining members. A quote popped up in my Twitter feed from a progressive evangelical blogger. On the Internet, I’ve seen it variously attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr, Chuck Swindell, and Chuck Colson. “The church is a lot like Noah’s ark. If it weren’t for the storm outside, you couldn’t stand the stink inside.”

As a relationship move, this is like telling your wife, “Go ahead and try to leave. You couldn’t make it on your own.” It’s a counsel of despair, casting would-be reformers within the church as whiny children who won’t accept that life isn’t perfect. Actual children, to survive, have to convince themselves that the “stink” of their dysfunctional families is better on balance than the “storm” of an outside world where they’re not yet capable of living independently. But we’re adults now. “The world” is us. A church held together by fear and shame can never help its members recognize toxic interpersonal patterns in their own lives.

When I first became a Christian, I was a young woman fighting for the right to marry and leave my abusive home. I resonated with the church’s self-presentation as a tiny raft of stability adrift in an ocean of danger. When Christianity told me that human beings were helpless and sinful, I was relieved, because that was how I felt all the time. It was validating to be able to admit my imperfections to a supportive community, not like my home where any flaw would be pounced upon. Like my mother, the traditional church faced the fact that the world is full of bullies, sexual predators, and plagues of locusts–which is true, up to a point. The church promised safety without isolation, a huge step up from my life before.

So my disillusionment with church makes me feel very guilty and sad. I feel like I’m abandoning the institution that helped me reach escape velocity from my biological family. But this, too, is part of growing up. In Buddhist teacher Phillip Moffitt’s essay “Healing Your Mother (or Father) Wound“, he speaks of initiation as the fourth and final stage that good parent figures must complete, to release their protégés into adulthood with a blessing.

I’m reminded of Ray Bradbury’s short story “Jack-in-the-Box“, where a paranoid mother creates an elaborate ruse to convince her son that their house is, in fact, the entire world. When a crisis forces him to venture outside, he at first thinks that he must be dead:

Everything before him was new. Odors filled his nostrils, colors, odd shapes, incredible sizes filled his eyes.

If I run beyond the trees I’ll die, he thought, for that’s what Mother said. You’ll die, you’ll die.

But what’s dying? Another room? A blue room, a green room, far larger than all the rooms that ever were! But where’s the key? There, far ahead, a great half-open iron door, a wrought-iron gate. Beyond a room as large as the sky, all colored green with trees and grass! Oh, Mother, Teacher…

The story ends with a policeman bemusedly describing the strange kid who just ran past him.

“…He was laughing and crying, crying and laughing, both. He was jumping up and down and touching things. Things like lampposts, the telephone poles, fire hydrants, dogs, people. Things like sidewalks, fences, gates, cars, plateglass windows, barber poles. Hell, he even grabbed hold and looked at me, and looked at the sky, you should have seen the tears, and all the time he kept yelling and yelling something funny.”

“What did he yell?” asked the pedestrian.

“He kept yelling, ‘I’m dead, I’m dead, I’m glad I’m dead, I’m dead, I’m dead, I’m glad I’m dead, I’m dead, I’m dead, it’s good to be dead!'” The policeman scratched his chin slowly. “One of them new kid games, I guess.”

He who loses his life will find it…

 

Why Believe in a Need-less God?

Televangelist Victoria Osteen took some flak in the Christian blogosphere last week for a video clip where she says that we should worship God and do good because it makes us happy, and God wants us to be happy. Osteen and her husband Joel are regular targets of critique from other evangelicals who say their message is too upbeat, sin-free, and self-serving. In response, Eric Reitan, a progressive Christian philosopher whose work I admire, wrote this post suggesting that Osteen (in her simplistic way) was putting forth a legitimate Aristotelian theory of true happiness as being in harmony with virtue, as compared to the Kantian view that we’re only virtuous when we act from pure obedience and ignore our own happiness.

I’m Team Aristotle all the way, but that’s another post. What struck me, this time, was that Reitan, Osteen, and probably most of her conservative critics share the common assumption that God does not need anything from humanity. I often hear it said that prayer is for our benefit, not God’s. On this point, evangelicals who emphasize God’s sovereign perfection find common ground with liberal Christians who have trouble believing that prayer could supernaturally alter the course of events. Here’s Reitan’s characteristically clear restatement of this widespread doctrine (boldface emphasis mine):

Here’s what I think Victoria Osteen gets right: When you worship and obey God, you aren’t doing it for God. Doing it for God’s sake makes no sense, because the infinite creator of the universe doesn’t need anything from us in order to be fulfilled. God doesn’t need to be glorified by us, as if God is somehow diminished by failing to be properly fawned over. If there is a need here, it’s our need. We can’t be fully actualized human beings if our priorities are wrong…

…On Christian metaphysics, Victoria Osteen is exactly right when she says we don’t worship and glorify God for God’s sake. We do it for our own. God needs nothing from us, least of all our worship. But if we think God is worthy of worship, then failing to worship God displays a disorder in our value system that will compromise our ability to love others and find joy in life. And if God is the infinite source of value, then connecting with God in worship becomes a way of communing with the good, of letting it enter into us, in a self-actualizing way.

I believe that the boldfaced statements above seriously overstate the case. It’s a leap from “God doesn’t need Hir ego stroked”* to “God doesn’t need anything from us.” This doctrine, which we take for granted as orthodoxy, has hidden negative political and pastoral consequences. Because of what I’ve learned from feminist and disability theology, I am compelled to question the equating of “need” with weakness, imperfection, or immature egotism.

*(I’m trying out the gender-neutral pronouns “zie” and “hir” to refer to God, rather than locutions like “Godself” which I find awkward. Respectful feedback welcomed.)

My analysis is indebted to the philosopher Sara N. Ahmed, who blogs at Feminist Killjoys. Ahmed’s posts often riff on a word that has been negatively applied to a marginalized group, teasing out its complexities with a poetic technique of free association, and turning it on its head to ask whether the shunned trait is properly attributed to the person who “fails” to fit, or the social environment that fails to be welcoming. See, for instance, her thoughts on fragility, imposition, and how a person becomes classified as a stranger.

Though human psychological categories only capture one aspect of the infinite God, we Christians have been invited to relate to God in human terms through the Incarnation. Any concept of a personal God contains value-judgments about the best kind of person to be. These judgments then affect how we treat people who seem different from that ideal. (For instance, the mainstream depiction of God as white and male reinforces some Christians’ sexism and imperialism.) That’s why I think it’s legitimate to ask whether a God without any needs would be a good Person to love, or be loved by.

Where does it come from, this idea of strength as not-needing? What kind of relationship can one have with a Being whose superiority is defined thus?

The need-less God doctrine is partly a product of classical Greek philosophy, in which an entity that is changeless is considered more perfect than one that changes, and an un-caused entity is more perfect than one that is contingent or dependent. However, the Christian’s “personal relationship with God” was not part of this philosophy. These ancient thinkers were looking for a nobler and more mature alternative to the anthropomorphized Greek gods, who were petty, ego-driven, and lustful.

Centuries later, Enlightenment philosophers levelled the same charge against the Old Testament God. To modern people in a pluralistic society, Yahweh’s smiting of Baal-worshippers doesn’t make sense. We are, or should be, burdened by the memory of genocides that claimed Biblical justification. So we read these stories and only see an insecure tyrant. This is the argument that Reitan references when he says God doesn’t need to be fawned over. Reitan wants to salvage the Biblical God by placing Hir above human foibles.

But narcissistic needs are not the only needs. Not-needing, in fact, can be just as egotistical. Imagine God as a parent–something the Bible encourages us to do. “Here, Daddy, I painted you a picture.” “Thanks, but I didn’t need that.” What a cold response to our heartfelt offerings. God is already perfectly fulfilled without any gift from us. Some of you may know what it’s like to have a parent like that. It doesn’t lead to a life of freedom and grace. It breeds perfectionism and self-doubt. Another variation is the caretaker personality who always has to be the giver, not the receiver, because pleasing others is a way to stay in control.

Equality is not necessary for a healthy relationship (e.g. parent-child, God-human), but mutuality is. If our acts of worship are not fulfilling to God as well as to us, the relational aspect fades and the very presence of God becomes needless, a mental placeholder, a merely theoretical component of our religious practices.

As an activist for trauma-informed care in the church environment, I come up against need-shaming all the time. Like any minority group seeking inclusion, our concerns get dismissed as “special needs”. This formulation assumes there is a normal way to navigate the world and I am demanding an exception. In fact, “the world” is just one possible arrangement that works acceptably for the current majority who have a voice in the system. To not have needs, or not be perceived as having needs, or not have to meet your needs in a way that involves other people–is this really a virtue of self-sufficiency or unselfishness, or is it mainly good luck that you have the kind of needs that are met by your environment?

The church will never truly resist domination by the “special needs” paradigm until we stop need-shaming God. We stigmatize each other’s dependence and vulnerability when we recoil in horror at the idea that God could ever experience these states with respect to us.

And yet, the crucified Christ hangs on our wall.

Jesus was needy and vulnerable from his birth as a human baby to his death on a cross. We often talk about this episode in the life of God as though it was temporary, like a journalist slumming among the homeless to show solidarity and gather information. The wounds of the risen Christ tell a different story. What if everything we fear about “neediness” was really an eternal part of God’s essence?

I think mainstream theology is wrong both about what God would need (if Zie needed anything), and what happens when God’s needs aren’t met.

As for the “what”, the prophet Micah said it succinctly: Do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with God. We’re just not used to thinking of these as needs, as well as commands. But a loving God would feel pained, would be diminished, when we don’t act lovingly ourselves. In Matthew 25, Jesus puts himself in the position of the beggar: “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” He has to spell it out for the disciples because they can’t imagine seeing the Messiah sick or hungry or in prison.

And what actually happens when God’s needs aren’t met? Does Zie have a narcissistic tantrum and kill lots of innocent bystanders? Well, the Book of Judges might give that impression, but there the real problem is the primitive feudal concept of what God needs, as well as the unskillful means. Or does Zie collapse into a big pile of weepy tissues, leaving no one in charge of the universe? (God is a girl, she’s only a girl…)

These are the two hurtful stereotypes that come up when survivors advocate for our own needs. We are made to appear simultaneously tyrannical and weak. In reality, people who face their own pain and take care of it are the most self-sufficient and safe people to have in your community.

Instead of need-shaming, let’s imagine that God feels pain and lack because of human sin, and still carries on with love, strength, equanimity, and nonviolence–just like a trauma survivor who’s doing her healing work.

An Un-Chosen Person: My Jewish Way of Being Christian

A few weeks ago, I forwarded an article on the New Atheism to a longtime friend with the message, “This seemed like something you would appreciate, as a historian and ex-Christian!” My friend is a scholar of the history of science and its intersection with religion and politics. He grew up in the evangelical heartland but is highly critical of its beliefs and emotional dynamics. He replied:

“How could I claim to be an ex-Christian after I was indoctrinated to be a Protestant fundamentalist and have spent most of my life in Christian circles and societies? Only by defining a Christian abstractly and intellectually as an adherent of certain doctrines would it be possible to say I’m not a Christian, i.e. that I do not or no longer subscribe to a certain creed or screed of metaphysics. Sociologically, ethically and even to some extent intellectually, how could I be other than a Christian? The same can be asked of you, Adam [my now-Buddhist husband] and all my atheist Jewish friends in relation to a different religious heritage—how could y’all not be Jews (whatever else you may also be)?”

This brilliant, unexpected twist on self-definition set me wrestling once again with my complex feelings about my heritage. Even calling Judaism a “heritage” is difficult for me for two reasons. For one, I was not raised Jewishly enough to fit in and follow along when I tried to take up Jewish observance in my early 20s. I didn’t have the shared memories of youth camps, ethnic recipes, rites of passage, or the general sense of unquestioned membership in an extended family. I was like an adoptee who goes back to her birth country, only to find that she’s too Americanized to blend in with the people who look like her.

The second reason for my unease relates to the blending of religion and ancestry. I chafe against the implication that I’m not allowed to discover my own religious worldview, the one that solves the problems of my life. “Heritage” suggests that my parents’ and grandparents’ beliefs are the filter I must see through, or the weight that I’m obligated to carry on my journey. It gives other people the right to intrude on my most private and sacred relationship (with God), simply because I share their genetic material.

And yet, ironically, this objection is so powerful for me because of my psychological heritage as the child of a narcissist. A freethinking narcissist, to boot, who didn’t expose me to synagogue and Hebrew school because she’d found those institutions oppressive and lifeless during her own youth. My bio mother was “spiritual but not religious” before it was cool.

She also got me a passport when I was born, to escape to Israel if America ever turned against the Jews. She told the story of FDR refusing to accept boats of refugees from the Holocaust. She said Jews were outstanding in society because we valued education, debate, and questioning.

I have strong emotions about the endless conflict in Israel but no useful insights, so let’s leave that topic aside. If I have anything like a Jewish identity that I’ve taken into my Christian life, it consists of this outsider consciousness and the spirit of free inquiry that was formative in my upbringing. Because Jesus was Jewish, too, it seems like a legitimate perspective from which to critique the authoritarian and unworldly features of Gentile Christianity that cause me so much distress.

For instance, when I feel the dead hand of the past suffocating me in debates about Biblical inerrancy, I recall the Talmudic story (Baba Metzia 59b) where two factions of rabbis are debating a point of kosher law. One group successfully calls on God to do miracles as a sign that their position is correct. But the other group wins the day by countering that the Torah is on earth, not in heaven. Having given the law to humankind, God has to step aside and let us figure it out! Delightfully, the story ends with God laughing that his children have bested him.

Going back to my scholarly friend’s distinction between identity and beliefs, I also think often of the Jewish emphasis on spiritual practices when I become angry or frightened at the Bible passages in my daily prayer liturgy. Not to put my situation on a par with his, but I take comfort in Elie Wiesel’s anecdote from Auschwitz, where the prisoners put God on trial and found him guilty…then said the regular evening prayer.

The phrases, images, and rituals of the Book of Common Prayer are part of me at a level deeper than agreement or disagreement. Sometimes that makes me feel helpless. I chose to become a Christian, it’s true, but I was also responding to the fact that Christianity was already a part of me, through immersion in Western sacred art and music. Who can explain why my family’s trove of Jewish-American literature and Isaac Singer folktales didn’t speak to me so personally? Was my conversion a response to God’s call, an assimilationist desire to break my family’s isolation, a rebellion against an overbearing parent? Perhaps it only matters because the abused child in me is still desperate for freedom, triggered by the idea that an all-powerful being would initiate a relationship with me. Was I ever free to refuse consent?

“Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door…” (Rev. 3:20)

At the end of all this reasoning, I don’t genuinely doubt that Christianity was where God wanted me to be when I converted. Do I still belong there? I’m going to pray my way into the next step. My (Jewish) Jesus likes people who keep asking questions.

Religious Rights and the Common Good

I grew up in a high-rise on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The dominant group in our micro-neighborhood were Orthodox Jews, though there were also numerous Hispanic families and some Irish, Asian, and liberal Jewish folks (like my family). Our building had 20 floors with seven or eight apartments each. Many modern Orthodox Jews interpret the prohibition on lighting a fire on Shabbat to forbid activating electrical devices. You may have heard of the tradition of the “Sabbath goy”, the non-Jewish person who helps his Jewish neighbor by turning on her light switch or oven on Friday night. In our building, from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, one of our two elevators was set to run continuously, stopping at every floor on the way up and the way down, so that observant Jews wouldn’t have to push the buttons.

This arrangement irritated me, perhaps unreasonably. It’s hard to separate my judgment from my general feeling that the Orthodox in our neighborhood acted superior and unfriendly to those outside their tribe. (See, for instance, the recent New York Times exposé on how Rep. Sheldon Silver and his Orthodox supporters blocked low-income housing for Hispanic families for 40 years.)

The Sabbath goy routine, legal fiction though it be, potentially builds interfaith friendships. It might foster gratitude for the kindness of strangers, and awareness of one’s dependence on the goodwill of others. The Sabbath elevator imposed that role on all of us without asking. The impact on the environment could be considered selfish as well, though maybe they offset their carbon footprint by not driving cars on Shabbat. A longer wait for the elevator on Friday night is a relatively minor imposition, but symbolically, it felt like a statement that some people thought they were more important than their neighbors.

On the other hand, every accommodation of someone’s rights may come at a cost to someone else. My church is undertaking a major capital campaign to make the building handicapped-accessible. We also hire a sign language interpreter for every 10 AM service. A skeptic could say that’s money being taken from “the rest of us” to benefit “a few”. However, we recognize that the space and priorities that we may have considered normal are designed to benefit the majority and ignore others, and that’s not acceptable for a community whose motto is “Given to Hospitality”. The Orthodox in my old building may have felt marginalized and handicapped in the wider society, where they had to work hard every day to maintain their purity boundaries. They wanted one place where they would have the privilege of not thinking about how to get from point A to point B.

The complex power dynamics of the Sabbath elevator are on my mind because of the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby ruling on religious exemptions for employers, which I blogged about in my last post. We’ve reached a peculiar juncture in Free Exercise Clause law, where the right to do something religious has morphed into the right to make someone else do something, for religious reasons. That is to say, at what point are you offloading so much of the burden of your religiously motivated behavior that it is no longer “your” free exercise?

The many Sabbath observance rules, adapted for modern times, stem from the central directive to let yourself, your servants, and your animals rest and honor God. But if you’re causing another human being to work on Shabbat, isn’t that worse than making a machine work? Or does he matter less than a machine because he’s a goy?

Classic case law on the free exercise of religion involved personal choices that were at odds with bureaucratic uniformity. No third parties were being burdened by the observance. Even then, religion didn’t always win. In Goldman v. Weinberger (1986), the Court said the Air Force could forbid an Orthodox Jewish officer from wearing his yarmulke while in uniform. In Employment Division v. Smith (1990), the Court said the government could ban sacramental peyote use under the generally applicable drug laws, notwithstanding the Free Exercise Clause. While these specific outcomes seem too harsh and rigid to me, they stand for a principle that today’s Court has all but forgotten: Sometimes you have to play by the rules of the wider society and eat the cost of your difference, because civil society would become ungovernable if every law were vulnerable to a thousand individual carve-outs.

In 1993, Congress passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) to restore a more generous standard of review for Free Exercise claims than the court had applied in Smith. RFRA affirms that Free Exercise challenges apply not only to laws deliberately targeting religious practices, but also to neutral laws that incidentally burden a person’s exercise of religion. Hobby Lobby brought its objection to Obamacare’s contraceptive mandate as a RFRA claim.

RFRA expanded the class of laws to which Free Exercise objections could be made. Meanwhile, this Court has been stretching the definition of religious practices to encompass virtually any behavior that is religiously motivated. Together, these trends exacerbate social inequality and fragmentation.

How is it “your” freedom of religion to fire disabled workers, or prevent your employees from unionizing, or impede women’s access to healthcare? Why should the state help you shift the cost of your religious preferences onto nonbelievers? This takes Free Exercise too far beyond the personal acts of worship or ritual observance that the Founders likely envisioned. The logic of the Hobby Lobby exemption is the logic of theocracy, where there is no legitimately secular realm of human action. Maybe that’s your sincere religious worldview, but it’s not the worldview behind our system of government. The Constitution is meant to preserve a separation between church and state. It’s bad faith, in every sense of the word, to exploit the Bill of Rights to reach a result hostile to its values.

Hobby Lobby’s Questionable Theology

Last month, in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, the US Supreme Court issued the controversial ruling that Christian owners of closely held for-profit corporations had a religious liberty right to deny contraceptive coverage in their employee health insurance plans. Hobby Lobby and two other companies had sought exemptions from the section of the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) that required birth control coverage at no extra charge to the employee. The company owners claimed that they believed life begins at conception, and therefore it would violate their beliefs to facilitate the use of birth control methods that sometimes prevent implantation of an embryo. The Court ruled in favor of the employers, holding that corporations are “persons” for purposes of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (a statute that prohibits government from indirectly burdening the free exercise of religion).

I am 42 years old, apparently infertile, happy with my current number of children (one), politically pro-choice but morally troubled by abortion. I depend on birth control to manage a reproductive health condition that would otherwise be severely disabling. This court case reminds me how privileged I am to work for a nondiscriminatory employer (myself) and to have enough money to pay for birth control out of pocket. I don’t have to be afraid of having more kids than I can support, or of losing my job because of disability-related absences. That’s precisely why Hobby Lobby angers and frightens me, as a woman and a Christian. The gospels tell us that basic security shouldn’t be the privilege of the few.

Let’s assume, for purposes of argument, that abortion and contraception are sinful. Is it theologically appropriate for Christian business owners to leverage the power of the state, and the economic power of employer over employee, to avoid being tainted by participation in these sins? I don’t believe so.

Note that the plaintiffs were not arguing that their exemption would actually result in fewer women using birth control (although this is clearly what they want). The Court assumed that the Obamacare mandate was valid and a compelling government interest. They were just dickering over whether there was a way to implement it while allowing Hobby Lobby’s owners to keep their hands clean.

Jesus denounced the Pharisees for obsessing over personal religious purity at the expense of socioeconomic equality. After Hobby Lobby, who is going to have the most difficulty accessing the medications they need? Women who are too poor to pay out of pocket, who have fewer job skills and opportunities to find a different employer. The Hobby Lobby exemption is a private-sector version of the Hyde Amendment prohibiting Medicaid funding for abortions; both create one law for the rich and another for the poor.

I don’t believe Christians should take advantage of economic inequality to enforce what we believe to be God’s will. Coercive shortcuts reveal our lack of faith. We’re not willing to make personal sacrifices to bring about the outcome we desire, like the Pharisees who laid heavy burdens on others that they didn’t bear themselves. Instead of cutting off their employees’ family-planning options, Christian-owned corporations should go out of their way to ensure that their employees have adequate childcare and wages to support a family.

Jesus portrayed the kingdom of heaven (on earth) as a place where everyone has food, shelter, health, and safety, not because some more powerful person thinks they deserve it, but because everyone is a child of God. That kingdom is far from our current reality. Workers depend on employers for basic survival needs. That power gap is evidence of our fallen world, not something to be exploited and widened in the name of “Christian values”.

Becoming Church: My Field Trip to an Intentional Christian Community


In late April, I attended the Second Acts Conference in Washington, DC, an initiative of the intentional Christian community and social justice coalition Becoming Church. Becoming Church is an umbrella organization for small-group churches (a dozen people maximum) that follow the Church of the Saviour model of “journey inward/journey outward“. Grounded in their faith in Christ, members support each other’s personal spiritual transformation and work together on service projects in their city.

Their vision for social change is both radical and humble. Radical, because they want to be used by the Spirit to attack systemic injustice. They’re not content to provide palliative care to the less fortunate, or as they prefer to say, “the under-resourced”. Humble, because they try to operate on God’s timetable, not their own, and eschew ambitious arms’-length initiatives in favor of intensive long-term relationships with a few needy individuals at a time. The combination reminds me of Partners in Health.

The topic of this year’s conference was criminal justice reform. Mass incarceration (mostly of poor people of color) due to the War on Drugs, and the legal disabilities placed on ex-offenders, have created a permanent under-class with few opportunities to re-enter society. People with a criminal record, or sometimes even an arrest record, can be legally discriminated against in housing and employment. They’re ineligible for most professional licenses, both white-collar and skilled trades. Essential federal benefits, including food stamps and public housing, are unavailable to them and their families. In many states, they have no right to vote. Barred from the legal economy, many ex-offenders predictably return to prison. (Look for a future blog post about Michelle Alexander’s devastating book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, which was a foundational text for our conference.)

Becoming Church is working toward an ideal of 0% recidivism. They acknowledge that not every “returning citizen” will choose to turn his or her life around. But that doesn’t diminish our collective responsibility to remove every obstacle to their re-integration into the community.

Becoming Church has adopted a multi-pronged approach of prayer, activism, and social service. Their latest activist project involves buying stock in the largest private prison companies and speaking out at shareholder meetings. The small church groups in DC and Baltimore that spearheaded the conference operate “Strength to Love” halfway houses for returning citizens. These houses offer a structured and sober environment, skills training, spiritual support groups, and community gardens where residents can grow and sell fresh produce. We held our Sunday morning worship service in one such house in Anacostia.

You can find out more about their criminal justice reform work (donate! volunteer!) at their spin-off website, Why We Can’t Wait.

For the remainder of this post, I want to reflect on some striking differences between the Church of the Saviour model (as I briefly experienced it) and the mainline churches I usually attend.

Spiritual Growth, Not Church Growth

When a Church of the Saviour community grows beyond a dozen people, they’re supposed to split off. The accountability and support relationships among members are so intensive that it would be unwieldy to build that kind of trust in a larger group.

Contrast that to the endless bragging or hand-wringing about membership numbers in traditional churches and denominations. Our churches keep score by the numbers. We treat growth as a verdict on the rightness of our theology or political views, relative to other churches that are shrinking. Or we let ourselves be led by economic imperatives to fill the pews so that we can maintain our buildings and staff.

The Church of the Saviour groups do own a number of properties, but as I understand it, these are mainly for the benefit of the community, not worship spaces. Examples include a hospice care house for homeless people, an arts center for youth, the Strength to Love houses, and several small apartment buildings for low-income tenants. In most cases, each service project is spun off as a separate 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

The needs of the neighborhood drive the church groups’ ownership and use of real estate. The property is a resource for the neighbors, whether or not they attend church. By comparison, a traditional church has its own property which needs financial infusions, and invites neighbors to join so they can contribute to it. (Yes, I’m being cynical, I know we also want to spread the gospel, but the structure of the institution tells a different story.)

Inner Work Comes First

For Church of the Saviour communities, personal spiritual formation is the foundation on which the social gospel is built. Members help each other remain emotionally honest and open to God’s presence. Like a writing workshop or a Weight Watchers group, they bolster each other’s commitments to the spiritual disciplines (prayer, meditation, journaling, tithing) that might otherwise go the way of so many New Year’s resolutions.

This is because they understand that God does the work of transforming the world, not us. We’re just the “donkeys” who devotedly carry our little piece of the great burden.

Now, I’ve only spent three days with these folks, so I can’t say whether they’d start piling on the “shoulds” during a more long-term relationship. I can only observe that I never once felt burnt-out, pressured, guilt-tripped, or commanded to serve others in a particular way. Instead, during the support group check-ins and prayer times, the facilitators constantly invited us to share what the Spirit was doing in our lives. We were given opportunities to be educated about social problems, and encouraged with detailed case studies of successful outreach. Then it was up to us to discern our personal path to discipleship.

On several occasions, one of the conference leaders proposed that Christians are not spiritually prepared for the work we have to do. We haven’t taken stock of the sacrifices and suffering that might come our way when we stand up for justice. We aren’t sufficiently plugged-in to God’s love to be able to respond with compassion and equanimity when wrongdoers lash out at us. Our first priority must be knowing Jesus in our hearts.

By comparison, the liberal church frequently preaches Jesus as the supreme giver of homework assignments. We’re told that we should tackle huge structural injustices through individual good deeds (some of which, to me, sound strategically ineffective as well as inadequate) because “Jesus cared about the poor”. We don’t hear nearly enough about spiritual practices that would replenish our strength, ways of reconnecting to God’s love and getting support from our church family.

Church of the Saviour appears to understand that superhuman challenges require superhuman assistance.

I’m Not Okay, You’re Not Okay, but Maybe We’re Okay

Friends who’ve been through 12-Step programs have quoted these wise maxims to me: “You’re only as sick as your secrets” and “Don’t compare your insides to somebody else’s outsides”. I didn’t hear these exact phrases at Becoming Church, but these principles inform their accountability practices.

Church of the Saviour was conceived as a community of racial and economic reconciliation. Participants undertake to let go of the status markers that keep us separated from one another. Money can
easily become an enabler of ego-defenses and falseness. It makes us feel superior or simply allows us to hide dysfunctional aspects of our private lives.

Therefore, Church of the Saviour offers a more intensive membership track (in addition to spiritual support groups) where you make your financial statements transparent to the group, and accept guidance from them about developing a spiritually balanced relationship to money. Members also hold each other accountable for sticking to regular prayer practices, and try to keep each other on track in their personal lives, such as guiding a married couple through a rough patch. Members choose annually whether to renew their commitment to this intensive track. There’s supposed to be no judgment attached to the decision either way. It’s my understanding that they can still remain in the small group.

This is the part of Church of the Saviour that I have mixed feelings about. I don’t think I would adopt this model for my future Christian community for trauma survivors. People with my kind of history have been trained to submit to others’ judgments instead of developing our own sense of right and wrong. We are hyper-sensitive to emotional cross-currents in social situations, and can have trouble hearing our inner voice over the noise of others’ expectations. Reclaiming our privacy is a big part of our healing. This ties into a larger problem with Christianity–assuming that everyone’s main problem is taming an inflated ego rather than rebuilding a crushed spirit. (Or both at once, since parts of the self typically become inflated to protect other vulnerable parts.)

Based on some remarks from the conference, the accountability program seems based on notions of “objectivity” and self-suspicion that are quite mainstream in traditional Christianity, but that I have come to reject. Participants expressed the view that left to her own devices, the individual will be selfishly biased in her own favor, but her fellow group members have no motive to misjudge her.

In my experience, this is not true. Bias against a particular person isn’t the only obstacle. Most of the time, we have trouble even seeing that person through the fog of our own projections and pre-existing opinions. I mean, that’s what racism is, right? I don’t want to have negative stereotypes of African-Americans, I don’t hold that as an ideology, I try to overcome racist beliefs when I notice them, but I probably still make a lot of subconscious assumptions about people based on their looks and cultural markers.

My false diagnosis by adoption clinicians currently has more traumatic charge than memories of my abusive childhood. I don’t take the latter so personally, since I thoroughly understand the suffering that clouds my mother’s mind, but part of me is still tempted to internalize the former, because I can only speculate what (other than my “objective” presentation) made them see me as so repellent and damaged. The belief that they had “no reason to be biased” seriously messed with my head for years.

On the other hand, the companionship of two dozen grateful, devout, and grounded people inspired me to envision a time when my options would be less constrained by my trauma history. I had moments when I was able to perceive that God’s power was so much greater than the power of the people who hurt me. I still think I’m too much of a loner introvert to join this kind of group, for the same reason that I don’t usually join writing workshops, but I wouldn’t be motivated by fear anymore. And I can imagine that an accountability group with good boundaries might be an interesting opportunity for some survivors to face their fear of intimacy.

Church of the Saviour has a refreshing humility about, and lack of attachment to, any specific institutional format. Their attitude (in theory, at least) is “this seems to be working right now, but go ahead and change it as needed”. I’m really grateful to these folks for helping me open my heart and mind to new possibilities.

Here’s a hymn we sang at the conference that made a big difference to me. Lyrics here.

Hail Thee, Festival Day!

Happy Easter, dear readers! Today we celebrate the miracle of God’s love triumphing over sin and death. Two years ago, on Holy Saturday, my own little miracle came into the world:

Shane had a wonderful time at the Easter service today at St. John’s. The handbell choir was his favorite!

I bit my nails less frequently for Lent. Because I knew you all were watching.

Survivors in Church: Insights from Disability Theology

A couple of weeks ago, I asked my therapist, “Will I ever get to the bottom of this pile of bad feelings, or is this my life?” I was going through another patch of nightmares and becoming frustrated. No new information was coming up; the incidents were way in the past, by now more thoroughly re-processed than Cheez Whiz.

I’d been operating with this image of my psyche as an overstuffed closet. As long as I was awake, I could keep holding the door shut, but every time I fell asleep, some junk would fall out. Eventually, though, wouldn’t I run out of old junk? Then I would have reclaimed my entire closet, to fill only with things from my fabulous new life!

But my therapist was like, “Nah, it doesn’t work that way.”

Some feelings will shift, she said; some memories will lose their charge, others will remain very painful but arise less often. However, PTSD is for many people a lifelong chronic condition. As Buddha said about suffering in general, the biggest thing I can do to ease my burden is to stop resisting it. Stop being surprised and frightened when it flares up again. Stop being angry at myself for not being “done” healing. There is no “done”.

I was thrilled!

It was a relief to stop blaming myself for my scars, and the survivor-introvert-Highly Sensitive Person in me loves predictability. But also, I was overjoyed that now I had a name for the liberal Christian indifference toward survivors, which I’d been awkwardly calling “normalcy privilege”.

Ableism.

On one level, the liberal church does a lot to ensure access for people with disabilities. Our parish, for instance, is one of the few congregations in the area with a sign language interpreter every Sunday. We’re undertaking a heroic capital campaign to add an elevator. The priest adapts the liturgy to say, “Those who are able, please stand”.

But as is usually the case in liberalism, the model is inclusion for the disabled, rather than disability as a standpoint for liberation theology. The latter, more radical posture would mean that the able-bodied/neurotypical people in charge would de-center their own experience, and invite the disabled to share what Christianity looks like in our lives.

For instance, where do we situate ourselves in the many gospel stories about Jesus healing mental and physical illnesses? (I’m treating the demon-possession stories as examples of mental illness because those were the manifested symptoms, but I don’t mean to imply the demons weren’t also real.) Liberal sermons about these stories are more likely to assume a non-disabled subject position for their audience. “We” are encouraged to emulate Jesus by healing others, or to overcome “our” prejudices about sharing fellowship with mentally challenged people. I will say that our church has made some progress beyond this narrow paradigm, through sermons about personal and family struggles with addiction, such as this beautiful meditation from lay preacher Vicki Ix at God Is Always More.

When we only talk about disability in the context of healing, that’s problematic in its own right. Of course those who feel afflicted want healing. Of course those who empathize with others’ affliction want to offer them something to hope for. But in reality, some conditions are incurable. While I don’t rule out miraculous divine cures, I feel that most of our energy should be directed toward overcoming obstacles to the disabled person’s functioning as an equal in our church, just as she is.

The pressure to manifest a spiritual happy ending can actually impair recovery. When there is healing, particularly for psychological conditions, it may not even be recognized by the non-afflicted, because they’ve been steeped in the ableist cultural narrative of triumphing over the disability rather than embracing it. For example, survivors who claim they’ve forgiven the abuser and released all angry feelings get more credit for being “healed” than survivors who have gone deep enough into recovery to feel righteous anger and finally love themselves.

Alongside the theology of healing, we need to develop theology that honors the disability as an genuine alternative way of being in the world. This is how some hearing-impaired people feel about Deaf culture. The autism community also includes many who want to celebrate their neurodiversity rather than eliminate it. In my recent post about survivors’ spiritual gifts, I suggested that the church could learn something unique from our trauma history and how we adapted to it.

The foregoing discussion owes much to Kelby Carlson’s essay “Crooked Healing“, which I found when Googling disability theology. Carlson, a music student and evangelical Christian, suggests that disability can be a vocation and a symbol of the universal human vulnerability that calls for God’s grace. Some quotes follow, but please read the whole thing here.

…It might seem strange to some that, as a lifelong person of faith, I would find the other’s desire for prayer to be so hard to respond to. Prayer is supposed to be an instrument of gratitude, intercession and doxology. But as a person with a disability, there is a shadow to the element of prayer cast over any interaction that directly involves my disability. As someone with a chronic (and, barring incredible medical advances, permanent) disability, this is a perennial problem I must navigate as a member of the church and aspiring theologian. On the face of it, this request for prayer seems harmless, even beneficent. But it is nearly always accompanied by an explanation: “I want you to be healed.”

But what is wrong with this? Doesn’t the Christian religion hold out hope of ultimate healing? Doesn’t God promise physical restoration to those who have faith in his righteousness? Don’t we, as people of God, long for the day “when there will be no mourning, nor death, nor crying, nor pain?” Insofar as this vision seeks to give a glimpse of a new creation, reconciled to God, where we are in full communion with each other and with Triune Being, than I can only heartily affirm such an idea. But lurking beneath such a portrait is something that is far more troubling. It is the erasure of the past, and the elimination of disability as a means of living well before God…

****

…The project of constructing a theology of disability needs to steer between two unhelpful shoals. The first shoal is a kind of non-redemptive liberation theology. Liberation theology is generally conceived of as a project to free marginalized people from oppressive theological systems. Unfortunately it tends to ontologize whatever its marginalized category is—for example, conceiving of God as ontologically “black”, “female”, or “disabled”—and thus reconstituting the relationship between God and the world in such a way that God is eternally hostile to categories outside of that ontology. This way of conceiving of theology is unhelpful because it both goes beyond Scripture in adding to God’s attributes and refusing to stand under Scripture and acknowledge God’s desire for universal reconciliation. In this way much liberation theology is fundamentally “non-redemptive” because it collapses finite reality into infinitude. This is especially unhelpful for disability because it cannot acknowledge a progressive or redemptive goal into which disability might fall.

The opposite danger is to collapse disability into a grand narrative of sin in such a way that redemption of disability becomes redemption from disability. For those suffering with chronic disabilities, this means that their continuity of identity is effectively destroyed by an anomalous resurrection. Resurrection as conceived this way is not a renewal and transfiguration of an old creation, but an erasing of the old to make way for something completely new. This leaves those with lifelong disabilities left with no theological anchor by which they can live out their experience in relationship to God and the world…

****

…There are few things more potentially useful to the disabled experience than the idea of vocation. Vocation places disability in a wider spectrum of the sacred calling. It implies that disabled people and their able-bodied counterparts are on equal spiritual footing. More than that, it suggests that disabled people can be seen as conduits for God’s grace and service rather than it only images of a broken creation in need of “fixing.”

This doctrine of vocation restores the image of God to the disabled. In response to the worry that disability is evidence of sin, one can reply precisely to the contrary. While brokenness itself is evidenced of a creation longing for release from bondage, an individual’s disability is, subversively, a venue for Christ to display his glory…

The theology of the cross is a particular way of doing theology that disabled people can uniquely understand. It is the theology that acknowledges the “visible” things of God: namely the cross of Christ and visible suffering as the premier way of “seeing” God. God’s grace is manifested, paradoxically, in that which appears weak and nonsensical. In this view, one cannot blithely skip over the cross as a simple means to God’s vindication and resurrection. This results in an anemic view of suffering: something that is meant only to be patiently endured in the hope that perhaps someday things will get better. In contrast, St. Paul offers a paradigm for understanding weakness and suffering that is directly consonant with the theology of the cross [the thorn in the flesh]…

****

…The cross brings all ideas of human weakness into itself. Individually, the disabled can recognize the cross as the nexus of their relationship with Christ in his weakness, and realize that possessing a “thorn” is a means of grace in weakness rather than shame. Ecclesiologically, the disabled can be recognized as, in an important way, ikons of Christ’s redemptive suffering…

Have a blessed Good Friday, dear readers.

My Poem “Lord of the Storm” at Utmost Christian Writers

The poetry website Utmost Christian Writers, edited by Nathan Harms, has offered me a regular home for my spiritual writing for over a decade. This year I was honored to win First Honorable Mention in their annual poetry contest. My entry, “Lord of the Storm“, was inspired by memories of a family vacation on Martha’s Vineyard when Shane was about six weeks old. Nathan has kindly permitted me to reprint it below. The contest deadline is usually February 28, with prizes up to $1,000. Read the winners here (more runners-up will be posted on the site during the next week).

Lord of the Storm

Here is the ocean I promised you
salting your forehead with my fingertips.

Inconsolable joy.
Motherless, I mother.

Brown foam sucks the sand from under my toes,
digging a hollow shaped like my standing.

Six-weeks boy, swaddled blue as Cape waters,
your cries scouring my heart.

Down the driftwood stairs, down to the eroded coast,
carrying you, the first trust in my arms.

You came from a longer sea,
a more constant sun.

Neither of us belong to time,
un-homed from the country of sleep.

I’d thought waking for you would be no harder
than my old midnight pattern of terrors.

Three a.m. in the mildewed sunroom,
no one breathing but us and the dark waters.

All the silences wore off at once.
My ghosts became baby birds pleading not to starve.

Today’s ocean has hush enough
to spread spangled to the pearly horizon.

Each glinting wavelet a day of my history,
washing my hands as I lose it.

Your shrimp-pink fingers curl at my neck.
You open stone-blue eyes to summer’s glare.

You have no name for yourself or mother
or drowning or birth, so I will tell you:

That solid shape rocking on the distant current
could be a boat where a friend lies sleeping

as bravely as we will sleep tonight,
a man who knows where he comes from and where he is going.

Donal Mahoney: “Easter at the Nursing Home”

Reiter’s Block welcomes back regular reader and contributor Donal Mahoney. The characters in Donal’s poems are drawn from our everyday life, but the issues they confront have cosmic significance. They’re fresh and down-to-earth yet also timeless, as the gospel stories must have sounded to their original audience.

Nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart prizes, Donal Mahoney has had work published in various publications in North America, Europe, Asia and Africa. Some of his earliest work can be found at http://booksonblog12.blogspot.com/.

Easter at the Nursing Home

When bread
is this good
a morsel

will suffice
and when wine
is this good

a sip is enough
for the wraiths
and specters

coming toward
the altar now
on crutches

walkers
in wheel chairs
celebrating

the last Easter
some of them
will know

as they await
a resurrection
of their own.