Sarah Bessey wrote an essay on the ‘deconversion’ of assorted famous(ish) Christians who've lately made the news. It’s part of her subscribers-only section, and she talks about how she’s tempted to filter their stories of ‘deconversion’ through her own lens of experience, which was to walk away from the faith community she’d begun in - but not to walk away from Jesus, and to rediscover Jesus before finding a community among whom they could worship. In the essay, she acknowledges that this may not be the experience of the people who are confessing their ‘deconversion’, and she can’t cast it in terms of her own experience because she is not them and the experiences that have formed them as people and Christians are not her experiences.
In the last twenty years, I’ve come to understand just how...messy...humanity is. And Christianity with it because the heart of Christianity is all about the heart of humans and the heart of God and how they relate to each other. At this point in life, I feel like there must be nuance because we live in a world of uncomfortable grey zones and life and existence and chaos-entropy-sin gets in the way even as we strive to do the perfectly right thing...
I don’t know if I always succeed.
I do know that I’m not always comfortable with it. I know that my faith is a journey and there are rocky stretches. And I know that insofar as being someone who other people would trust with their faith journeys – as comforter and friend and possibly guide and acolyte – requires me to be more loving than correct – particularly among the groups that I feel more called to minister among: people who have turned their backs on the church and their faith community - and to trust in grace. I like to think of it as a connection that won’t be severed on my end – that’s open for them if they want it to be, that can be a personal connection to Christianity rather than the big amorphous conservative-face-of-Christianity that is mostly depicted in hardline opposition to something. That’s very uncomfortable. And discomfiting. And complicated.
In this, I’m enjoying Pete Enn’s The Sin Of Certainty and Rachel Held Evans’ Inspired to remember that the divinity of God’s revelation can still shine through our flawed humanity, but that we have to be careful about assigning divinity to one category or another of human action.
Yet God has extended grace to me – I don’t have to be right or better or correct – I can just be loving. And sometimes that loving will include words specific to the God who has extended grace to me, and sometimes that loving will involve shutting up and letting care be my words.
Not all answers are neat. A divine God crucified in bloody sacrifice to display the seriousness of our ‘fuck you’ to Him while simultaneously paying the consequences of that ‘fuck you’? Was messy. So, so incredibly messy. And yet God was willing to come and be messy with us in the now.
--
Lately I feel very much like I’m not a good fit in Evangelical churches. But I’m pretty sure I’m not a good fit in Pentecostal ones either. And I’m not a good fit in the ‘usual run’ of Uniting churches – more about social good than the good news of God wanting us to be with him. So maybe I’m just not a good fit anywhere in the church?
Does that mean I’m not a good fit for God?
I certainly don’t believe that.
Maybe I’m not the only one who feels this, or maybe it’s a function of my life stage. Maybe this is the swinging pendulum of intimacy and emotion that carries me from feeling like I’m an accepted part of a community to hearing the message of “we don’t like your thoughts here, take them and your questions somewhere else, because we only want righteous certainty here” in the space of six months.
But I'm not willing to let go of God and His word has assured me that He's never going to let go of me so...
I guess it’s the messy and uncomfortable and complicated for me.
Wednesday 28 August 2019
Wednesday 21 August 2019
An Unpaid Upper Servant
Up to fifty years ago, there are not many stories about women like me.
Single women content to be without a man, childless women who didn’t long for children, working women who aren’t doing menial tasks unpaid, women who have the right to bodily integrity and the laws to demand redress should this be infringed upon (admittedly with likely caveats as ‘dressing modestly’ and ‘being in the right place’ and ‘coming from the right kind of people’)...
The daughters of Zelophehad had to argue for their inheritance before the Law. In the absence of any other testament, should my parents die, the Law will automatically include me in their inheritance. I am accorded the right of inheritance as a bodily heir of my mother and father, and an emotional heir of my stepfather.
How far we’ve come.
And yet how far we could still fall.
There’s an LM Montgomery story in the book Tales Of Avonlea, where a barely-teenaged girl is given her newborn brother by her mother and charged to look after him as the mother dies. The pair are sent to an uncle who resents the pair being dumped upon him but who isn’t willing to turf them out for fear of being seen as unkind to his relatives. They grow up, the sister ‘mothering’ her brother all the way, looking after him, keeping house for him when he grows up. Only...when the brother marries, his wife doesn't want his sister in the house. So the sister goes back to the uncle’s house and takes up a position as ‘an unpaid, upper servant’.
That would have been my lot 100 years ago, even in China: an unmarried woman in a common family would be an unpaid assistant to the married women of the household.
Financial status is not the same as personhood status, but it matters a lot on our capitalist, money-oriented world where the worth of a person is noted down in their earning/productive capacity.
Single women content to be without a man, childless women who didn’t long for children, working women who aren’t doing menial tasks unpaid, women who have the right to bodily integrity and the laws to demand redress should this be infringed upon (admittedly with likely caveats as ‘dressing modestly’ and ‘being in the right place’ and ‘coming from the right kind of people’)...
The daughters of Zelophehad had to argue for their inheritance before the Law. In the absence of any other testament, should my parents die, the Law will automatically include me in their inheritance. I am accorded the right of inheritance as a bodily heir of my mother and father, and an emotional heir of my stepfather.
How far we’ve come.
And yet how far we could still fall.
There’s an LM Montgomery story in the book Tales Of Avonlea, where a barely-teenaged girl is given her newborn brother by her mother and charged to look after him as the mother dies. The pair are sent to an uncle who resents the pair being dumped upon him but who isn’t willing to turf them out for fear of being seen as unkind to his relatives. They grow up, the sister ‘mothering’ her brother all the way, looking after him, keeping house for him when he grows up. Only...when the brother marries, his wife doesn't want his sister in the house. So the sister goes back to the uncle’s house and takes up a position as ‘an unpaid, upper servant’.
That would have been my lot 100 years ago, even in China: an unmarried woman in a common family would be an unpaid assistant to the married women of the household.
Financial status is not the same as personhood status, but it matters a lot on our capitalist, money-oriented world where the worth of a person is noted down in their earning/productive capacity.
Thursday 15 August 2019
I Kissed Christianity Goodbye
A bruised reed He will not break;
A smouldering wick He will not snuff out.
Do you wonder, sometimes, who you've injured on your journey through life and faith?
I do.
I wonder if there are people for whom my words might have been the last straw; whose smouldering wicks I snuffed out with my thoughtlessness.
The verse "he shall wipe every tear from their eye" has always seemed to me a very poignant indictment on humanity. Because sin is basically the inflicting of tears upon other people through our inability to be wholly holy - set and aligned with God and who we're meant to be.
We may not be bad people, but can we truly say that nobody has ever gone away and wept or grieved or screamed or ached at something we've said to them, something we've done? Because sin isn't just the slaughter of innocents or cheating on your partner, telling your children they're no good, or lying to the tax office...
Sin is also taking our ire from a bad day out on someone else who can't snap back at you.
It's not noticing that the woman who sits across the breakfast table from you is breaking her back to make your life as comfortable as she can and bearing what you can of her burdens.
It's turning your shoulder and hunching away from someone who loves you because you don't feel like responding in that moment.
It's denying someone else the respect or approval or appreciation they've earned, or even the respect and dignity that God views them with.
Why can we see a cluster of cells that have grown for a mere 22 days as more worthy of our time and attention than the bewhiskered, smelly, grim-eyed piece of humanity with the cardboard sign saying, "Lost my job, got turned out of my house, struggling"?
--
No, I haven't kissed Christianity goodbye. God willing, I never will.
But I have Questions.
I don't think that's wrong - and it's relieving to know that other people of faith are saying "it's okay to have questions, to shrug and say 'I don't know', to wonder and worry and not be certain.
Thursday 8 August 2019
bricks in the middle of dinner
So, decriminalisation of abortion has passed the House in NSW. It’s likely to pass the Senate.
What happens next, Christians? What’s our next move?
I suspect that the hierarchies (Anglican, Catholic, ACL) will just push for it to be revoked. Just go with the good old ‘Thou Shalt Not Abort’, picketing people who go to doctors, or hospital wings with YOUR BABY IS A PERSON TOO, and declaring women who have had or are contemplating abortions as irrevocably emotionally scarred (with a jolly good side helping of ‘God Can Never Forgive You For Killing Your Baby, Unless You Live In Constant Guilt In Which Case, He Is Merciful And Kind But You’re Still DirtyBadWrong’).
Is this a setback or an opportunity? And when I say ‘opportunity’ I don’t mean an opportunity to preach The Good News Of Abortion Is A Sin And You Just Have To Not Do It; I mean the opportunity to Love Our Neighbour. Are we willing to Love Our Neighbour – and let our fellow Christians love their neighbours without getting in there and Telling Them The Good News Of Abortion Is A Sin?
Example: A Christian friend on FB posted a thoughtful piece about abortion – about the balance between the life of the woman and the possible life of a child, and how society had failed the woman when she felt abortion was the only option. It would be a vastly insufficient statement for the people who are ‘NO QUESTIONS, NO PERSUASION; SHE WANTS, SHE GETS.’ But it wasn’t a screed for public consumption, it was a conversation between this woman and the people who read her FB. And one of her friends responded in the same style of conversation; personal, pointing out that the laws are not just for Christians but for everyone – that the options should be there.
A Christian aquaintance promptly posted a counter-argument, didactic, with a ‘tone’. Said acquaintance is a lovely Christian woman, but...let’s just say she once accused me of trying to make a baby gay by giving him a quilt that had a patch which featured some pink. The conversation wasn’t lost, exactly, but the effect was rather like a brick dropped into a dinner party.
I imagine that well-meaning Christians across NSW are, this morning, happily dropping bricks into dinner parties and thinking they’re doing the Lord’s work.
I don’t want to drop a brick into conversations; I want to find ways to build, IDK, a pizza oven out of the bricks and then invite people around to see my pizza oven, eat the pizzas from it, see how it’s useful. We don’t have to be brick-at-dinner-party people, we can be make-the-pizza-oven-and-invite-people-over people. Obviously, it’s so much easier to drop a brick into a dinner party than it is to build a pizza oven – snappy comebacks on social media are so satisfying, how we love to spit them out! (Prov 18:8) - but I’m pretty sure that the pizza oven will get more people over for dinner and make better connections.
Yes, that’s a really mixed metaphor, but it also illustrates the point: we need to do less brick-dropping and more pizza-oven-building. (Or, you know, BBQ grill building; the BBQ at the house I grew up in was a brick niche near the patio, with a grate over it, and a gap to shove the wood in and shovel the ashes out.)
That’s hard work – planning and building something that’s not immediate and more difficult, with no promise of the brick actually being appreciated (although the whole pizza oven might be admired). But people are much more likely to appreciate bricks with a role and a purpose and in an appropriate context; and in the same way, people are more likely to comprehend Christianity as something worth investigating when they’re not having Christian values shoved in their face but are seeing it as a new and different paradigm to the current worldview. Which, of course, requires us to be willing to develop a different paradigm. When the comes to abortion, it’s one in which the emotional, physical, and fiscal needs of women contemplating abortions are considered as well as the child. Which is what I feel my friend on FB was trying to highlight at the same time as she spoke about abortions and the sadness that they had to take place.
Implementing such a paradigm will cost Christians time and energy and effort with no guarantee of return and (possibly more important to your average Christian) no option to paint ourselves as the morally righteous cruelly and casually rejected by worldly sinners intent on celebrating their sinfulness.
I guess I consider that to be part of the ‘take up your cross’ bit of following Jesus.
What happens next, Christians? What’s our next move?
I suspect that the hierarchies (Anglican, Catholic, ACL) will just push for it to be revoked. Just go with the good old ‘Thou Shalt Not Abort’, picketing people who go to doctors, or hospital wings with YOUR BABY IS A PERSON TOO, and declaring women who have had or are contemplating abortions as irrevocably emotionally scarred (with a jolly good side helping of ‘God Can Never Forgive You For Killing Your Baby, Unless You Live In Constant Guilt In Which Case, He Is Merciful And Kind But You’re Still DirtyBadWrong’).
Is this a setback or an opportunity? And when I say ‘opportunity’ I don’t mean an opportunity to preach The Good News Of Abortion Is A Sin And You Just Have To Not Do It; I mean the opportunity to Love Our Neighbour. Are we willing to Love Our Neighbour – and let our fellow Christians love their neighbours without getting in there and Telling Them The Good News Of Abortion Is A Sin?
Example: A Christian friend on FB posted a thoughtful piece about abortion – about the balance between the life of the woman and the possible life of a child, and how society had failed the woman when she felt abortion was the only option. It would be a vastly insufficient statement for the people who are ‘NO QUESTIONS, NO PERSUASION; SHE WANTS, SHE GETS.’ But it wasn’t a screed for public consumption, it was a conversation between this woman and the people who read her FB. And one of her friends responded in the same style of conversation; personal, pointing out that the laws are not just for Christians but for everyone – that the options should be there.
A Christian aquaintance promptly posted a counter-argument, didactic, with a ‘tone’. Said acquaintance is a lovely Christian woman, but...let’s just say she once accused me of trying to make a baby gay by giving him a quilt that had a patch which featured some pink. The conversation wasn’t lost, exactly, but the effect was rather like a brick dropped into a dinner party.
I imagine that well-meaning Christians across NSW are, this morning, happily dropping bricks into dinner parties and thinking they’re doing the Lord’s work.
I don’t want to drop a brick into conversations; I want to find ways to build, IDK, a pizza oven out of the bricks and then invite people around to see my pizza oven, eat the pizzas from it, see how it’s useful. We don’t have to be brick-at-dinner-party people, we can be make-the-pizza-oven-and-invite-people-over people. Obviously, it’s so much easier to drop a brick into a dinner party than it is to build a pizza oven – snappy comebacks on social media are so satisfying, how we love to spit them out! (Prov 18:8) - but I’m pretty sure that the pizza oven will get more people over for dinner and make better connections.
Yes, that’s a really mixed metaphor, but it also illustrates the point: we need to do less brick-dropping and more pizza-oven-building. (Or, you know, BBQ grill building; the BBQ at the house I grew up in was a brick niche near the patio, with a grate over it, and a gap to shove the wood in and shovel the ashes out.)
That’s hard work – planning and building something that’s not immediate and more difficult, with no promise of the brick actually being appreciated (although the whole pizza oven might be admired). But people are much more likely to appreciate bricks with a role and a purpose and in an appropriate context; and in the same way, people are more likely to comprehend Christianity as something worth investigating when they’re not having Christian values shoved in their face but are seeing it as a new and different paradigm to the current worldview. Which, of course, requires us to be willing to develop a different paradigm. When the comes to abortion, it’s one in which the emotional, physical, and fiscal needs of women contemplating abortions are considered as well as the child. Which is what I feel my friend on FB was trying to highlight at the same time as she spoke about abortions and the sadness that they had to take place.
Implementing such a paradigm will cost Christians time and energy and effort with no guarantee of return and (possibly more important to your average Christian) no option to paint ourselves as the morally righteous cruelly and casually rejected by worldly sinners intent on celebrating their sinfulness.
I guess I consider that to be part of the ‘take up your cross’ bit of following Jesus.
Wednesday 7 August 2019
it's the little, loving things
I learned last night that a previous minister of our church wouldn't let a couple get confirmed (a number of years ago) because they were living together but not married at the time. The couple is in my bible study and they said that in the country where they come from, they had to be confirmed in order to get married in a church (heavily Catholic country). They're not bitter - more amused - and they serve in the church and are integrated parts of the community which is surely the grace of God at work in their lives.
Still, I sometimes wonder if we let our dogma get in the way of our love. We're more concerned about being 'correct Christians' than 'loving Christians'.
--
What does middle-aged faith look like outside of the 'spinster' box?
What does love look like when you don't let dogma get in the way?
--
NSW is trying to get abortion off the criminal code.
This is going about as well as expected.
I think it needs to be non-criminal and legal. BUT I also think we need to provide measures of prevention when it comes to sex (including sex education and contraceptives for both men and women), we need to provide support options for women who don't want to be left carrying the literal baby when the man they're seeing decides to nick off, we need to provide security for women who are in abusive situations and for whom pregnancy is one more fetter, we need to work on our social expecations of women as caregivers and family anchors, and to do all this requires committment and a willingness to put resources towards this that's so much more than just "don't get an abortion!"
Plus, there's a lot of nastiness coming from conservative Christians about this. I just want to tell so many people: "Look, don't @ me regarding 'the other side' - they haven't been called by grace to live lives of love and service in the name of Christ!"
Christians like to talk about how they're loving the world by imposing values on it, but the attitude I see is that most of us would rather be correct than loving. Correct is clean and sterile, it's definitive and certain, it's the logical, rational, proper way to go! Loving is messy and complicated, requires constant maintenance and repair, and might end you up on the Wrong Side Of The Church People...
It's purity culture, the Christian way.
Jesus could be loving and correct; he was God. I suspect us humans will have to make do with being Loving over being Correct. Correct sure feels good on our side, but it mostly sows bitterness in the people we deem Wrong.
Still, I sometimes wonder if we let our dogma get in the way of our love. We're more concerned about being 'correct Christians' than 'loving Christians'.
--
What does middle-aged faith look like outside of the 'spinster' box?
What does love look like when you don't let dogma get in the way?
--
NSW is trying to get abortion off the criminal code.
This is going about as well as expected.
I think it needs to be non-criminal and legal. BUT I also think we need to provide measures of prevention when it comes to sex (including sex education and contraceptives for both men and women), we need to provide support options for women who don't want to be left carrying the literal baby when the man they're seeing decides to nick off, we need to provide security for women who are in abusive situations and for whom pregnancy is one more fetter, we need to work on our social expecations of women as caregivers and family anchors, and to do all this requires committment and a willingness to put resources towards this that's so much more than just "don't get an abortion!"
Plus, there's a lot of nastiness coming from conservative Christians about this. I just want to tell so many people: "Look, don't @ me regarding 'the other side' - they haven't been called by grace to live lives of love and service in the name of Christ!"
Christians like to talk about how they're loving the world by imposing values on it, but the attitude I see is that most of us would rather be correct than loving. Correct is clean and sterile, it's definitive and certain, it's the logical, rational, proper way to go! Loving is messy and complicated, requires constant maintenance and repair, and might end you up on the Wrong Side Of The Church People...
It's purity culture, the Christian way.
Jesus could be loving and correct; he was God. I suspect us humans will have to make do with being Loving over being Correct. Correct sure feels good on our side, but it mostly sows bitterness in the people we deem Wrong.
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