“We believe in things like science,” a client tells me after learning that I am an ordained minister with the United Church of Christ.
I have been working with his family for three years and there has never been any indication that either this man or his wife think I am anything but very smart. In fact, they have often credited our work together with saving their family life and marriage!
I do not take his statement as an insult, but rather, as evidence of the depth of religion’s wounding on many, many people. Especially the depth of Christian wounding. I remind myself as I enter this holiday season.
I used to feel this way myself, in fact. For years after my Dad came out as gay and the church he founded voted him out, I wanted nothing to do with religion or religious people—especially not anything remotely related to Christians or church. I looked down on whatever “they” thought they knew about love (never mind justice) as a flimsy imitation of what matters most. At 16, I thought I knew what it took to survive in our world: wisdom, with a heavy dose of rationality leading the way. It still seemed obvious to me what “wisdom” and “rationality” included and did not (because, well … I was 16).
I later spent a decade having a brutal and fitful wrestling match with the God of my inherited religious tradition, and then another five years head to head with the institution of church itself.
Then, when I was 38 years old, I was ordained by a mainline denomination of the christian church with a tearfully grateful heart, still with some misgivings that I may never shed.
As I get older, I feel less and less certain of whatever I think is “true” about anything that matters enormously. But this much is clear:
Religion hurts people. Christianity has been a doozy in that area.
What I can say for sure is only what I know for myself: as the site of some of our biggest wounding as a society, I cannot escape the traps of my religion by trying to be above them. These are human traps, and my effort alone can not secure against them. Only once I see in my religion a mirror that magnifies both the potential for good and the potential for evil in me as a human person, only then may my tradition begin to help me navigate my way forward in exceptionally turbulent times.
My years of wrestling with Christianity and the church have shown me: there is nothing evil in it except what of that still lives in me, and only then because it remains untouched, unmoved, unhealed by the greatest gift religion walks me to the door of: a Mystery of a Love that exceeds human understanding.
For me, I live by faith, and practice my religion not because I find it “right” or “true,” and certainly not because I stand by everything done in the name of the God my faith tradition professes to follow. But neither am I religious because I have given up on my rational mind.
I am religious because for me, this is the best way I know to keep my individual human brain—which tends to inflate its own importance—securely in the seat of my heart.
I love my brain, and it serves me best when operated under the guidance of the felt sense of my flesh-and-blood heart … which, as a mother-heart, always always always seeks to serve and protect and provide for my child, and by extension, all other children whose fate is intertwined with hers, as well as the mothers, fathers, aunties, uncles, Godparents, allies and friends who, like me, love our children as best we humanly can.
I am religious today because walking this difficult path keeps me honest, and tuned into the voices I most need to hear to keep my eye on the prize: wellbeing for children, all children … and the vulnerable echoes of the child in each wounded adult walking on Earth, each one my sibling.
Christianity, was born of a human mother, after all. A Jewish human mother, named Mary, who is still revered across the globe by Christians, Muslims, artists, and people of no faith whatsoever. I feel my flesh and blood mother-heart comes a shade closer to being able to hear the Mother heart of all of our mother hearts, known by many names and no name at all. When my rational brain sits still in the space of my flesh and blood human heart, oriented to listen, I come closest to feeling ok, to feeling secure, guided, even in scary and turbulent times.
I will be in the chapel of Grace North Church praying with the ears of my heart to Holy Mother of all Mothers; praying that the the ears of my heart might be more open, more focused and attuned, on what matters most in the coming year. For children. For the future.
Please join me, if you feel drawn to sit together in contemplative prayer, meditation, or heartfelt silence of any kind.
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