About

I have this little church.A few months ago, we made some changes and made sacred room in our pulpit and in our leadership for the voices of women.  Some faithful people couldn’t make the shift and they left us for other places. It broke my heart a hundred times over because I love them so very much and miss them deeply.  Such is life. On we go, but never quite the same. And so my little church is a bit littler than it used to be, but at the same time, in God’s miraculous loaves-and-fish kind of way, it’s still bursting with stories and songs and babies and other good things, too. We take communion every week. This is an uncommon practice for a church like mine.We aren’t liturgical, not really.  We don’t use the Book of Common Prayer and we don’t follow the church calendar the way Anglicans and Episcopalians do. I secretly wish we did all those things because their steady, cyclical nature can be such a comfort to a fearful, wandering soul like mine, but I know who my people are and I’m not turning loose now.  I want to know them when I’m old and so I stay with them. We are all messed up, but we are with each other. It’s not perfect but I don’t have a better idea.At the end of the service every week, there are two people on each side of the modest pulpit.  They’re holding the bread and the wine and we stream toward them, a few at a time.   When it’s my turn, I wrap my hands around the hands that offer the meal to me. I plant both my feet and claim all the space and time I can.  I try to breathe deep and look right at her eyes while she speaks, trying to believe her words more than I often do and desperately hoping to be shifted by them again. “This is the body of Christ, broken for you.” I take my piece, no more and no less, always enough.“This is the blood of Christ, poured out for you.” I dip my bread in the cup and raise it to my lips, wishing I could circle round and have another go before the service ends and I have to face the world with its lack and hurt again.   I turn, savoring my portion, blinking back tears that always press in anyway. I walk past the people praying at the front, the ones who stand ready to receive and pray with anyone who pauses there.  I hardly ever make eye contact because I know if I do, I’ll be sucked in. And what will I say if I’m sucked into the beloved embrace? It’s too tender for me, so I don’t know. There’s too much to say, and I can’t say any of it.  That’s the truth. If I did make eye contact and find myself enveloped I think it might go this way. “The Kurds, brother! The Kurds are suffering and dying and it’s our fault.  The hospital’s been bombed!He shot her in her bedroom.  Right in her own house! Did you hear me? There are people who won’t accept that privilege exists, and that they have it.  There are people who are afraid of equality because of what they stand to lose. They won’t hear the truth and it’s hurting everyone.We are still separating families, still imprisoning people for profit.  It’s so big now I don’t know how we will ever dismantle it.I keep finding these seeds of racism everywhere I look, including in me.There’s another election coming and I am so afraid I don’t know what to do!  And people still tell me I’m too political and I’m worried they’re right.The people I love the most are hurting, suffering, struggling to bear up under the weight of their own brains that don’t work the way we wish they would, their marriages that are crumbling to dust, their children who are wandering, and the doubts and fears that plague them at night.And I can’t stop this guilty panic that slides into my brain as the moon rises each night.  My family is relatively safe, our school is well supplied, we have health insurance and a two-story house, and I don’t think I can live with the guilt of it all for much longer!  What do I do with the world when nothing is fair? What do I do with God when some of us are out here in the full sun and some of us are freezing? How do I live with my eyes and hands open and still hold onto some scrap of my mind in this world where so much is broken and sliding around?”I won’t say all of that, though.  I’ll blink back my tears and make my way back to my seat.  And it will be enough, because those people at the front don’t have the answers I want.  I know them and they’re already giving me what they have.Maybe we stand at the front of the church and offer the bread and the wine to each other each week because it’s still the best thing we have.  Maybe we do it because we know it’s really the only thing we have. Maybe I resist the urge to grab onto somebody and demand answers because I know the body and the blood are the answers to all the questions I won’t ask.  Maybe leaning into the questions at the altar would help. I don’t know. I wish I could tell you that I have a firm ethos, like I used to.  I wish I could tell you that I understand how human will intersects and co-creates with God.  I wish I could stop thinking about it altogether, actually. At least sometimes, I really do. I wish I could tell you that I always find the Bible a delightful read and that it answers my questions and soothes my soul every time I read it.  Of course, sometimes it does. But other times, it unsettles me, throws me off course, wears me out. And I know I’m not the only one.  I often return in my imagination to the day I found myself standing in my religion professor’s office,  a breath away from throwing in the church towel and calling the whole thing off. I remember that he didn’t try to offer me any logical arguments or long-winded reasons why faith in the God of the Bible, in Jesus, was something I could hold onto.  Instead, he asked me a simple, quiet question.“Have you experienced Jesus?”That was it.  I had, I knew I had. I had experienced a lot of confusion and doubt too, but I couldn’t claim I hadn’t experienced the risen Christ.  I don’t know how to explain the experience of Christ in black and white, but if you want to know what I mean, maybe you should ask me. I think a lot about what the Bible says that Jesus said to his followers at the very end about going to His Father and what we could expect in place of his living body among ours.   In The Message translation, Jesus refers to the Holy Spirit as our Friend.  He assures us that our Friend will make everything plain to us, and remind us of the things that He said. It’s almost as if Jesus knew that we would be exactly who we are.Jesus knew things weren’t terribly plain.  Jesus knew this would all, at times, seem a little far-fetched.  He knew that we would need help to remember the way home.  He knew I would need my people, standing in the front, offering me the bread and the wine over and over again.I don’t often volunteer to be the one to stand at the front, receiving the people and offering the elements.  The body of Christ, broken for you. The blood of Christ, poured out for you.  I can hold steady for the first half dozen or so people.  And then they just keep coming, each dragging a load behind, or with weights tied to their shoulders. Some of them don’t make eye contact.  I don’t take it personally but I wonder what presses their eyes downward. I say the words and offer the bread. I have nothing else to offer. The body of Christ, broken for you. The blood of Christ, poured out for you. Pretty soon, my eyes can’t hold the tears back anymore and I start to choke on the words that ring truer each time I hear my own voice repeating them.  Maybe my Friend knew I’d need to say them, too, not just hear them said.The body of Christ, broken for you. The blood of Christ, poured out for you.There are mysteries. There are questions. There are arguments for and against a life of faith. There are as many camps as there are steeples and lots of people hold their nitpicking convictions more closely than their neighbors. I know I’m not right sometimes and I’m sure they’re not right sometimes, too. The only thing I know for sure some days is the simple experience of the risen Christ and the people, down at the front with the wine and the bread.And for a little while at least, it’s enough.