The Slow Way Newsletter: Healthy Frameworks, Broken Spirits, and Why We Don’t Have to Hurt Ourselves to Love the World
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unhurried thoughts
Healthy Frameworks, Broken Spirits, and Why We Don’t Have to Hurt Ourselves to Love the World
In late May I bought and planted two mandevilla, beautiful flowering vines that send out a sweet, garden smell. They’re white and add this whole tropical vibe to my Jersey yard. And they’ve been growing for the past two months, happily blooming and plumping up in the front garden of my house.
I’ve had this plan to put a trellis behind them. They are made to grow upward, after all. But I’ve been traveling, doing summery things, and pulling weeds. I finally got around to it this week and found that those delicate vines had been wrapping around each other along the ground for the past two months, intricate vine hugs, a puzzle of intertwined green things. To begin to help them grow like I’d originally intended I unbraided them as delicately as possible and set them curling in the opposite direction, moving upward along the side of my house, away from the comfort of the ground.
I’ve been reading Julie Rodger’s memoir Outlove, her story of coming of age queer in a conservative evangelical setting. Her gifts for relational connection, communication, and pastoral care placed her in leadership positions in the middle of the American Christian Church’s reckoning with theology around same sex releationships and LGBTQ inclusion. In it she’s a ping pong ball, wanting to please her family, the Christian subculture she was raised in, and those in authority over her. And in those spaces, she is batted around, used to promote an ideology that she eventually discovers is crushing the bodies and souls of other LGBTQ folks around her, including herself. If you haven’t read it yet, please do.
Before I left you all hanging and went away on vacation I told you I was listening to “The Turning,” an investigative, interview podcast about the nuns who left the Missionaries of Charity, the order founded by Mother Theresa. I finished all ten episodes this week and walked away holding a heaviness about the ways we use and misuse the teachings of Jesus. The ways we can strive to serve and give our lives away, and still miss wholeness and bring suffering on others. I felt that deeply as I listened to the sisters who left the Missionaries of Charity share their stories of spiritual abuse, relational deprivation, and suffering for the sake of suffering. I wonder how many of us who consider ourselves followers of Jesus have ever been taught that we don’t have to hurt ourselves in order to love the world, that faithfulness and pain don’t have to go hand in hand?
I’ve been thinking about Julie’s story and the story of the nuns in The Turning, and about the first of the Beatitudes in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. How little we understand what Christ taught on that mountainside. What does it even mean that heaven actually belongs to the ones who are least spiritual among us? That the weak in faith, the broken ones, are the ones who experience the presence of God, the blessing of God, in a way the rest of us (who think we’ve got it figured out) may never understand.
As I sink deeper and deeper into my study of the Beatitudes I imagine Julie’s story of abuse at the hands of the evangelical gay-reparative machine, and the slow undoing of the faith of the sisters who gave their lives away to the service of the poorest of the poor. I think about what Jesus could have meant when he gave the keys of heaven to the folks who everyone else said shouldn’t belong there.
And I thought about my mandevilla vines, clinging to one another but growing down into the dirt because I didn’t take the time to offer them the proper framework to wrap themselves around. Maybe the failures of the Church have less to do with intention and more to do with how we care for ourselves and one another? The teaching of Jesus can be used to crush and shame and break the spirits in our care. Or they can be used to lift up the delicate vines, clinging to one another, trying to grow but sometimes missing the trellis.
Growing upward is a slow work, but it is actually natural for a plant to reach for the sun, the life source. What I’m saying is that it doesn’t have to be this way: this wake of broken people, crumpled behind the machine of Church. But healing the poor in spirit is a slow work. No machine can do that. It requires that the work of faith be offered with tenderness, and full awareness of all of our humanity. We have to reteach ourselves and those around us that service does not mean self-hate. Discipleship does not mean denial of our bodies, our relational needs, or our human desires for love. I really believe faith can be whole, can be offered in a way that allows us to be human. And if it doesn’t, it’s not the Kingdom Jesus talked about, because that one belongs to the ones who have been crushed, not the ones who do the crushing.
a slow practice
Give yourself a few minutes today to think about moments when spiritual teachings hurt you, or when you hurt others by your own actions or teachings in a spiritual setting.
If the memory that comes to mind is something that happened to you, give yourself some time to sit with that event or season. What did you feel? What were your intentions? Who hurt you? What do you imagine were their intentions?
Now imagine Jesus, sitting on a hill teaching The Beatitudes to a crowd of people in his first century getup. Listen to him speak about the "Poor in Spirit." Hear his words: "heaven belongs to them." Now, watch that experience of pain again in your mind, whatever moment in the Church or in a spiritual or religious setting that hurt you, that caused you pain or trauma. Now, imagine Jesus standing up from his cozy spot on the side of the hill, walking past the others who are listening, and entering into the room where you are. Watch Jesus move past the ones who have hurt you and stand before you in the midst of your suffering.
Listen to him say the words, this time looking right in your eyes. "Blessed are the poor in spirit. Heaven belongs to them."
You don't have to say anything back to him. But you can if you want. You can ask for help. You can ask for clarity. You can ask for healing. But maybe you just want to sit in that space with your former self, the hurt one, when you were a vine clinging to itself, longing for a better framework to raise you up.
Let the healing presence of God remind you that you weren't intended to grow into the dirt. Ask God to raise that "poor in spirit" part of you up to the trellis. Ask God to not only help you heal, but teach you how to practice faith in a way that is whole.