Hi. My name is Megan and I’m a recovering addict. It’s been a little over two months since I quit church. Worshiping at a Quaker meeting, attending a Baptist school, participating in nondenominational youth group, leading interdenominational summer camps and campus ministry, and hanging out with friends of various Christian creeds, church was a constant presence throughout my life. But familiarity bred carelessness. I never anticipated church becoming a problem.
After college my career didn’t pick up like I thought it should and I had to move back into my childhood bedroom. Depression soon took over and I turned to church to take the edge off. Leadership was my drug of choice. I threw myself into teaching Sunday school classes and volunteering for service projects. Each lesson, each board offering more responsibility, each charitable endeavor gave me a hit of control. Everything else in my life was crumbling, but I could perform well in God’s house. Nobody seemed the wiser or, if they were, seemed to care about my circumstances outside the sanctuary so long as kids got taught and committees got manned. It went on like that for another year and a half.
Sunday morning services serve as space-less places. We fill them up with songs and sermons and passings of the offering plate (with background music, of course). What we really need is silence—space to listen. Why are we afraid?
Maybe it is because the openness of unprogrammed worship—in paring away the outside noise—leaves us no choice but to face the noise within: hypocrisy, phoniness, the false self we project (a fragile image).
It has been six months since the Friends World Committee for Consultation (FWCC) World Plenary conference in Peru with the theme “Living the Transformation.” I have experienced that transformation.
I have learned that transformation surprises us. It happens when we are still.
The fruits of the spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control—all of which can be experienced during transformation.
To be transformed, one must go through a process of change.
Charismatic movements throughout Church history have identified water-baptism as a charismatic experience, an awakening or activating experience that stirs up the gift of God within and enables a believer to walk in the power of Christ’s ministry.
Quakerism has never practiced water-baptism. From the beginning, baptism was seen as an inward work of God. Water-baptism was seen as empty ritualism that gave a false sense of spiritual security to those in the corrupt established churches. But even though Friends do not practice water-baptism, the Friends view of baptism shares some dimensions with that of Charismatics.
Isaac Penington wrote, “The promise of receiving the Spirit is upon believing, and it extendeth to every one that believeth. ‘He that believeth on me,’ as the scripture hath said, ‘out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water;’ but this spake he of the Spirit, which they that believe on him should receive…but every one received so much of the Spirit as to make him a son, and to cry Abba, Father, and to wash him.
Not listening lies at the root of spiritual abuse.
So, fittingly, I think listening lies at the root of spiritual abuse recovery.
It starts with telling one person — a counselor, minister, mentor, or trusted friend. Eventually, some people benefit from wider audiences, perhaps sharing their stories in creative ways.
COUNSEL: “I’m Listening”
Michael Nichols’ The Lost Art of Listening says that effective, restorative listening boils down to taking the speaker seriously, not interrupting, and not judging.
Sometimes religious people are the worst at taking people seriously, not interrupting, and not judging. Unfortunately, religious people might not take people seriously if the speaker is a woman or if they’re young (to which I would say Galatians 3:28 and 1 Timothy 4:12 and plenty-more-where-that-came-from). They might interrupt because, well, they’re human and we all interrupt too much…but also if they think the story they’re hearing is getting uncomfortable and they’d rather dish out a nice scoop of Bible verses with a prayer on top.
Christians who are white seem to often get into conversations about “Christian” being the only identity/label that matters. They wax poetic about how this is core to their faith and often weaponize this idea against people of color, and especially against LGBTQ people.
The problem I have with this is that it’s a narrative that only works for the dominant group in a society. Dominant or majority groups have the ease of society being mostly if not entirely centered on them. As such, they don’t have opinions or labels forced on them by an outside group because no one else has the power to do that effectively. Yes, people can call you names, but power is being able to create policy or economic disadvantage for a group that you don’t belong to.
A drum circle is fundamentally a listening exercise.
As the drummers play together, a pulse emerges, a pattern that they are all following. Once this pulse has been established, things get interesting. Some drummers will want to build on the pulse, playing around or in answer to what they hear, which eventually shifts the pulse to something new, maybe something exciting. Others prefer to rest in the foundation of the established pulse.
The thing is, an effective drum circle needs both—in fact it thrives off of the dialogue between where we are and where we are going. If everyone stays with the pulse, the drum circle becomes repetitive and stagnant. But if everyone tries to push ahead, the group loses clarity and becomes chaotic. The power of the drum circle's sound is in the common beat that grounds it. It only works if we all enter in with what we have and contribute as we can.
I chatted with the church ushers in the sanctuary while they handed out bulletins before worship. We joked that I’d keep my eyes on them to get the signal for when to stop preaching. A gentleman in his eighties smiled and said, “Please don’t babble on because then we start squirming in our seats.” I promised to keep my message on point.
The main point of my visit was to open conversations about mental illness, based on my first book Blessed are the Crazy. I’ve learned that when I share about how my family is impacted by mental illness, it gives other people permission to share their stories.
It’s been hard to write, talk, and even think about God as of late. A major life change snuck up on me, devastated me, and left me questioning everything. To be honest, I’ve been wrestling with hopelessness, doubt, and fear on a fairly constant basis the past month. Even as I’ve been able to get my head above water, and as I’ve reconnected with God, I’ve still been pretty hopeless about church. I’ve been haunted by thoughts like, “Maybe it’s time to let the Church die. Maybe it’s a waste of time to try to keep these institutions running. Maybe we need to abandon the Church as we know it.” I am struggling nowadays reconciling institutional Christianity with Jesus. This could just be my 8 wing acting up (for Enneagram nerds) or maybe I am just bitter, but the American Church models and breeds capitalism, white supremacy, nationalism, and it may do some good, but is it worth it prolonging its death for that?
Anyone who claims to be a pacifist, or at least to practice an ethic of nonviolence, has been challenged about its application. It’s not practical, people say, it’s not realistic.
The challenge is especially common during times of imminent or ongoing war. To combat evil or rescue the powerless non-violently is impossible, they say. But I think there’s something deeply true and promising about impossibility.
"You go home and you sleep well at night in your bed and you sit here in suits and talk about these things, but what are we going to do? I’ve been a refugee for 5 years. No more. What if I was your daughter? What if I was your family? What then? There is no mercy for people without legal status. There is no home for refugees.”
Today I attended the first day of my first conference for refugee week.
Check in for the conference began at 9am. I went to bed at midnight last night. I woke up at 6am. Jet lag. Oh well. It meant I had time to get coffee before the conference and made me more at ease knowing I had time to get lost.
When Aboriginal people gather there is always dance. Dance is central to the engagement with life.
Dance involves three dimensions.
There is first of all the music that flows through our bodies and touches our hearts. Music energizes. It is central to all social struggles.
Along with music there are words. Words engage our minds. They call us to think, to wrap our heads around the complex dynamics at work in society; the words help us name things as they are and to discover what needs to be done.
Jesus said that loving your neighbor is the greatest commandment next to loving God. Even more, Jesus did it. He loved people without regard for his reputation, safety, popularity, or even his life. The rabbi who defended adulteresses and prostitutes. The holy man who touched lepers. The king who was abandoned to torture and a humiliating public death.
We speak of his suffering in reverent tones because that's how he atoned for our sins. That's the theological side of the story. But the human side of the story is that his sufferings came as a direct result of loving the despised and unwanted. The hatred, the persecution and the outrage were the result of Jesus healing a withered man's hand on the Sabbath and speaking up for a woman who wiped his feet with her hair (not to mention all the other scandals). So when Jesus commands us to love as he loved and also commands us to suffer as he suffered, he is describing two sides of the same coin. You cannot love the way he loved and not suffer the kinds of consequences he suffered.
Before coming out, I thought that reactions from my loved ones would be black and white. It's easy to expect immediate acceptance or immediate abandonment—what I wasn't ready for were the awkward tense moments.
I wasn't ready for feeling like it's inappropriate to discuss my plans for the summer as I will be taking part in the city's Pride festival as a volunteer, attending a Gay Christian Retreat on the mainland and most likely heading to Pride in Vancouver to meet up with some friends.
I wasn't ready to feel uncomfortable about asking my straight Christian friends to come with me to some of these things because I'm nervous about going alone, and I certainly wasn't ready to feel childish for asking my LGBT friends who don't profess Jesus if they're going.
Over the years, I have often heard the statement, "Racism hurts everyone."
I've been confused by that, since I myself am not a person of color and I didn't see how I was being hurt.
In 2010 and 2011, I attended the annual national White Privilege Conference and that statement--Racism hurts everyone--has worked on me. But it wasn't until the intersection of two things coming together that my heart and spirit opened to that Truth.
First, a local Quaker friend pointed me to the words of Philadelphia Friend Arlene Kelly:
We are not a homogenous group seeking to become more diverse; we are an incomplete organization seeking to become more whole. --Friends Journal, October 2010
I have a confession: I don’t regularly or actively participate in a faith community. It’s not something I’m proud of, as somebody who works for a religious organization, but honestly, church is more draining than life-giving and I’m done trying to make it work.
At least for now.
It's not that I’ve never had an edifying experience in church. In times of discouragement or discernment, I often return to the promises prophetically uttered by lay ministers in the charismatic church or hear a Friend’s vocal ministry bounce throughout my head and lead me into Light. But time after time, I’ve tried to find my voice in such spaces, I’ve tried to find ways to serve and grow in such communities, and it hasn't worked. I just haven't been able to get grounded in a spiritual community.
So I’m done. At least for a little while. And I think that's OK.
Lightening our load of possessions brings a lightness of spirit, even freedom.
Not so many years ago, a friend of mine left for California on an early spring morning. He was working there for the summer. He was supposed to have everything packed up and ready to go by 6:30 that morning. Of course, he put it off until the last minute. Of course, his alarm clock didn’t go off. And he wasn’t able to finish his laundry. And he didn’t have room for even half the stuff he wanted to take.
There are two companions that vie for my acknowledgement along life’s journey. They both whisper to me. One of the predictable companions is an old, old message-companion that I’d like to dis-invite to my journey. This companion’s name is Not Being Enough.
In my familiar surroundings, I seldom give this Not Enough companion much notice but when she does appear … before I know it I find I am rehearsing my stories which affirm, a message that I am not enough. Not enough to be a good spouse, parent, friend, pastor, teacher, follower of Christ, a contributing member of the human race. This companion whispers fear, self-doubt and shame. Can you relate
Sometimes I have a bad day. I know, amazing, but true. It doesn’t even have to be a big deal, like flood, fire, or famine, to get me feeling off-kilter. Sometimes it is a passion I have that doesn’t seem to be shared. Sometimes it is injustice. Sometimes I just feel tired, and sad, and frustrated.
And I’m learning that this is ok.
I fall into that category of people who cope by stuffing emotions deep down inside. Truthfully, emotions are powerful and sometimes that power feels dangerous. Letting emotions out can seem like a lack of control or a loss of the ability to process through things logically. Coping mechanisms are great for life or death situations, but most of my life doesn’t take place on a literal battlefield.
I think the closest I have ever felt to God was laying on the bathroom floor in a psychiatric hospital with my shirt soaked in urine and knowing that my life was a mess and finally becoming okay with that.
It was 5 AM or so, I think, and I woke up to a nurse rapidly spewing indecipherable words, and I nodded and nodded and nodded to keep her from talking too much, and she pulled a needle out of her cart and poked me and then left.
As she left, I decided to pee. I got up and felt a bit dizzy but I thought nothing of it until I strained a bit to push out my pee. And as I strained, everything became black and I fell on to the floor, pissing all over the bathroom and myself.