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Faith, Help Us Understand, Learning lessons

Kathryn, Help Us Understand

I am excited today that Kathryn will be our next Help Us Understand interview, and help us she does! These interviews will be a bit longer than my normal posts, but these are complex subjects and worthy of creating a bit more space.

Kathryn, we are grateful you are here today. Thank you for trusting us enough to listen to you and for the ways you will help us understand those who are spiritual better.

Help Us Understand 560 Kathryn

What does “spirituality” mean to you? If you practice some form of spirituality, what does that look like?

To me, “spirituality” entails a sense of connectedness. When I was a Christian, I interpreted those experiences of connectedness in terms of a connection to God. When I left Christianity behind, I fully expected that my spiritual experiences would stop. They didn’t. In fact, they didn’t change, not even a little bit. All that changed was my own interpretation of them. Instead of telling myself, “This sunset is such a testimony to the glory of God,” I started telling myself, “Wow, what a beautiful sunset!,” and leaving it at that. Instead of telling myself, “The Holy Sprit is giving me the strength to keep working,” I started telling myself, “This is great—I’m totally in a state of flow right now. This is meaningful and satisfying work.” Instead of telling myself, “I think God spoke to me just now!,” I started telling myself, “Something new just occurred to me.” And my new interpretations frankly felt a lot more honest than my previous ones had been.

What has been your experience with Christians and the church?

I grew up in the church, sang in the choir, and joined every Christian activity I could find. I considered myself a Christian from a very young age and many, many times rededicated my life to Christ, just to be sure. I studied for seven years(!) at a highly ranked Christian college, and served overseas for six years. Upon returning to America, I went on to get an MDiv degree at a large interdenominational seminary and pursued ordination in my denomination. I was awarded several prestigious scholarships, not only for my academic achievements, but also for my spiritual leadership and example. I was a teaching assistant for so very many classes in seminary, entrusted with the responsibility of grading and providing comments on other students’ deeply reflective papers.

Christians, I was one of you, and a very devout one at that. It never, ever crossed my mind that I could possibly ever leave the Christian faith. Then, at the beginning of my final quarter of seminary (AFTER I had already walked at graduation, mind you), things began to fall apart.

My church, who had supported me in many ways through three years of seminary and the initial steps of the ordination process, casually decided to hire a new pastor who didn’t believe that God calls women to ordained ministry. They gave me a friendly heads-up before the new pastor arrived. I believe they honestly thought that as long as I knew in advance that my new spiritual leader, who would guide me through the rest of the ordination process, was quite certain that I was not called to ordained ministry solely on the basis of my gender but had committed to walk me through the process anyway, all would be well.

I was speechless, at first. Then I shared my misgivings in private with a fellow female seminarian who attended the same church. “How could he guide me through the process under these circumstances?,” I asked. She was horrified to hear the news, of which the rest of the congregation was still in the dark, and began telling other friends. Pretty soon the church leadership was calling me to express their extreme disappointment in my “breach of confidentiality;” asking me to talk to every single person I knew of who knew, and tell them to not spread this information any further; and telling me that Satan was working through me to try to divide the church.

Mind you, all I had done—ALL I had done—was tell one friend that I was worried about the fact that I was about to have to pursue ordination under the leadership of a pastor who did not believe in the ordination of women.

My world was shattered. That same week, I began my required hospital chaplaincy internship. It was intense. My very first day on the job, I saw a dead body for the first time ever while also trying to help 15+ family members in the room come to terms with the sudden death of their middle-aged loved one. I actually did okay on that one, I think, but I was pretty stressed out, as you might imagine.

It soon became apparent, though, that dealing with dead bodies, hysterical people in grief, sick people estranged from their children, and the like, was the easier part of the job. The hard part of the job (and I say “job,” but this was actually a 10-week unpaid internship required for graduation) was the meetings with my chaplaincy supervisor.

My supervisor strongly believed that the only way to be a successful hospital chaplain was to have all of your defenses shattered, to be broken down into nothing but raw emotion and experience, to hit rock bottom, and then slowly rebuild from there. Ironically enough, this was exactly the kind of shattering experience that I was having in my life, only not especially involving her.

At first I did try to share some of my difficulties and concerns regarding recent developments at my church, but her responses were unhelpful. She said things like, “And WHY are you still going to this church??”… as if it were the easiest thing in the world to simply drop three years of membership, ministry, and ordination-seeking, and start over somewhere else with strangers. Her responses added to my staggering, screaming pain, so I stopped sharing my vulnerable places with her. She flipped out.

I did my job well, reflected deeply on my experiences as a hospital chaplain intern, and even connected themes I experienced to some things from my own family of origin, but I did not give her the free access to all of my vulnerable emotions that she was seeking. Even so, I barely survived the summer.

A mentor of mine had to provide emergency emotional support on several occasions, all related to my chaplaincy supervisor. I did stop attending that church and visited several others. I horrified myself by exploring ordination options in the “liberal” branch of my denomination, the branch that (according to my religious upbringing) was NOT faithful to God or to Scripture. But mostly, I was just trying to cope, hanging on by a thread. And at the end of the summer, my chaplaincy supervisor wrote me a scathing evaluation, which of course became a permanent part of my student file at the seminary.

I graduated. I found a job teaching English, which is what I had been doing overseas. I settled into a “liberal” church in my neighborhood for several months. The people there were very nice. I introduced myself as a refugee from the more conservative branch of our denomination, and they welcomed me with open arms. I made friends. I got involved. There was a path forward there for me; I clearly had the option to pursue ordination through that church where the head pastor was a woman, and no one would ever question my calling on the basis of my gender ever again.

But I was still in pain, and I didn’t want to make any rash decisions. I attended church each Sunday as an ordinary layperson. I struggled with the ideas of “surrender,” “submission,” and “radical obedience” to God. I knew that the Christian God required them. I didn’t know if I could survive them.

One Sunday, the theme of the Scripture readings and of the sermon was, “Surrender to God.” I hurt my way through each Scripture as it was read aloud. Then came the sermon. The exegesis was perfect, flawless. I had an MDiv and had been a teaching assistant in preaching classes, so I knew how to tell if the sermon is really accurately unfolding the meaning of the relevant Scriptures or not. This sermon was absolutely 100% faithful to Scripture.

And I could not survive it. I could not live in a state of surrender to God, and also survive. More specifically, I was not at all sure that a posture of “surrender to God” was likely in any way to help me access or come closer to whatever Deity or Absolute Truth might lie beyond human understanding.

However, a posture of “surrender to God” now seemed EXTREMELY likely to help me get into situations where I was vulnerable to being hurt by other people’s pride, selfishness, misguided thoughts, and plain human ignorance, as they spoke to me out of all their human failings in the name of God. And I blamed the structure of the Christian faith for taking ordinary, fallible humans, and elevating them to positions of “spiritual leadership” wherein their own human brokenness now has a senselessly large amount of power to hurt other people.

Sure, part of the Christian duty is to be obedient to God over and above any human, and to examine Christian leaders to determine whether or not they truly are being faithful to the Word of God. But even good, faithful, well-meaning leaders can change in an instant—mine did—and ANY human, given the heady power trip of being a spokesperson for GOD, is susceptible to causing great pain. “Any God worth his salt,” I told my very concerned mentor, “would be disgusted by Christianity.”

In the case of my new, kinder church, though, there was no disconnect between the words of the leader and the words of Scripture. The sermon was completely accurate to the text. The Christian God himself was, through Scripture, saying that we must place ourselves in a posture of surrender to God. The problem was that there was no real way to know what God might or might not ask you to do next.

The Bible is full of paradoxes, let’s be honest, and there are at least 10 different, contradictory ways—all of them based in Scripture—to answer many important questions. This is why so many different Christian denominations exist. Any Christian leader you talk to is going to tell you that his/her teachings are Scriptural. And by and large, they all are. And they are all different from one another. And they all, somehow, mysteriously, also reflect the specific culture, time period, local setting, personal beliefs, and personality of the leader in question.

Submit myself… to what? There was no telling what I would be asked to do next… but whatever it was, was far more likely to play into the human thoughts and plans of somebody, than to somehow access an infinite God. In fact, from a posture of surrender, there was no way to rise above the noise of human thoughts and plans at all—they were deafeningly loud—and yet that is what the Christian God required. I could not please him.

In fact, I increasingly found it morally abhorrent to do so. The Christian God functions as a stand-in for all kinds of human weaknesses, writ large. As they say, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. I could not survive under this kind of corrupted authority, and I was actually disgusted at myself for having been on the path to become an ordained spiritual leader myself and doubtlessly project my own human follies and foibles onto others in the name of God. Yes, I might have helped some of them, but I can still do that now, in my own voice. I will never again claim to be speaking for God, whoever or whatever he might be. Come on.

The following Sunday was my 30th birthday, and also the first Sunday that I had ever intentionally not gone to church when there were no circumstances preventing me from doing so. I kind of sweated through Sunday morning in my small apartment. I was afraid to do anything on Facebook, lest anyone notice the time of my post and wonder why I wasn’t in church.

This fear subsided gradually as the church-free weeks went by. No one really noticed that I had stopped attending. One day an assistant pastor called me, short on time, to see if I could lead a Bible study at the last minute, and got more information than he had bargained for (and still had to find someone else to lead the study!). Major Christian holidays like Christmas and Easter felt painful and empty for some time. But I could not go back.

I missed it, but the whole point of going to church is to worship God—and after having come to realize that the “God” of Christianity is really like the little man behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz, I could not make myself pretend to worship him.

If you were a part of a spiritual group/community, what would you want present? What would you not want present?

This is an interesting question. I do miss the community, friendships, routine, music, beauty, etc. of church, and have looked a bit into traditions like Unitarian Universalism. The problem is, the things I miss most actually hinge on the sense of coming together to worship something greater than ourselves. In a choose-your-own-adventure religious environment, the unity—the awe and wonder—is lost. I now feel far more of a sense of connection outside of any kind of religious environment than within one. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’m a candidate any longer for any sort of official spiritual community. That ship has sailed.

What are some of the unanswered/difficult questions that you continue to wrestle with?

Well, Christianity does have the benefit of having lots of answers to give about the origins and meaning of life, where people go when they die, and other questions of that genre. I don’t buy those answers anymore, but it was kind of nice when I still could. I don’t have answers to such questions anymore; I don’t think the universe grants such answers to us. But it sure would be nice if it did.

What do you wish Christians and the church understood?

When I left Christianity, I lost virtually all my friends. Stop for a moment and consider how many friends you would lose if you lost ALL of your Christian friends. Some were horrified by my change of heart, and told me so. Many, many, many found the thought of me going to hell one day so emotionally distressing that they broke down in tears, inconsolable, and I had to spend quite a bit of time taking care of them emotionally even though I was the one with the difficult news to share. Some tried to stay with me, thinly disguising their attempts to get me to return to the fold. I understood them too well; I used to employ those very same tactics myself.

The whole “telling my friends” process was so ridiculously emotionally draining that I stopped it as soon as I could. I had graduated, and I moved on to take a job in another state, so I simply disappeared from the lives of friends with whom I wasn’t super close. Some of these friends appear occasionally on my Facebook page and make comments in Christian-ese, assuming I still share that language. I ignore the religious references and simply respond to the main content. It would be far too exhausting to deal with the fallout of trying to explain to all of these less-close friends that I am no longer a Christian.

In short, being a former Christian is lonely. Very lonely. It’s lonely when you tell people, and lonely when you don’t. It’s lonely when your two best friends today both happen to be Christians who never knew you as one, who know your story, who accept you, and yet whose larger circles of friendship you can never join because they center around church and Bible study groups. It’s lonely when your husband is non-religious just like you, but has been non-religious all his life and cannot relate to your past religious experiences. It’s lonely when you know other former Christians… but only through their books, blog posts, or internet discussion groups.

There just aren’t too many people out there who were once extremely committed to the Christian faith but adhere to it no longer. I have felt less lonely in this regard just one time in the past seven years, during a conversation with a Muslim friend who was once a very devout Muslim and is now trying to come to terms with her faith in the context of her more recently modern, Western, liberal lifestyle. The ways in which we had expressed our devotion to our respective faiths as young people differed greatly on the cultural and religion-specific details, but the emotional journey was so very similar.

At one point she was very nearly recruited by an extremist Muslim group, and she now shudders to look back on her former naiveté. She really thought at the time that if she was truly devoted to God/Allah, then that was the path she should take. It made me shudder to think of what I, too, might have so easily become had I grown up as a devout Muslim rather than a devout Christian… but I felt less lonely.

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Kathryn, after hearing your story, I am moved to respond. But in the spirit of listening, I simply say thank you. Your words will not lightly be brushed off of me or others who read this. We appreciate you helping us understand. Thank you.

(In the spirit of listening, comments have been turned off. You may read other interviews here.)

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1 Comment May 13, 2016

Faith, Help Us Understand, Learning lessons

Jane, Help Us Understand

I am excited today that Jane McKay will be our Help Us Understand interview, and help us she does! These interviews will be a bit longer than my normal posts, but these are complex subjects and worthy of creating a bit more space.

Jane, we are grateful you are here today. Thank you for trusting us enough to listen to you and for the ways you will help us understand those who are spiritual better.

Help Us Understand 560 JANE

1. What does “spirituality” mean to you? If you practice some form of spirituality, what does that look like?

To me, spirituality means the belief in a higher power. I don’t believe one need be religious in order to be spiritual; that is, it’s possible to not practice ritualized worship, but still have an intrinsic spirituality.

2. What has been your experience with Christians and the church?

I was baptised in the Episcopal church in the Denver, Colorado. We left that church when I was a baby because the priest (who was my father’s college chaplain and mentor) was horrible to my mother and the other ladies of the Altar Guild. Then, we became Catholic for two years, around the same time that Pope John Paul II was visiting Colorado for World Youth Day. We left that church because “they knew three hymns and the priest was a heretic” — my dad’s words.

We then joined a Western Rite Orthodox Church, where we attended until I was 12. We left that church and my father was ordained as an Anglican priest–we used to drive 2.5 hours to church in Cheyenne, Wyoming so he could practice at his own parish on Sundays. My father got into a disagreement with the bishop of his diocese, which drove him briefly away from the Anglican church, so we went back to the Orthodox Church for a few more years.

We left that church again because the priest began preaching politics during his sermons… but more than that, when my father spoke to him about it, he began mentioning our family in his sermons as dissenters. This was the church in which I had found faith, and I deeply felt the loss of this church family. My family then joined an Anglican Church, which I only attended sporadically because of college, but by then, I found that I disagreed so fundamentally on large socio-political issues that I couldn’t attend ANY church with a clear conscience.

When I moved to California, I briefly joined an Anglican Parish, but the priest put pressure on me to go to seminary (after I told him that I had BRIEFLY flirted with the idea of becoming a nun four years prior instead of going to college), and we argued so fiercely about gay rights that I found it impossible to continue to associate myself with him or the church. I have not returned to any church since.

I would consider myself to be agnostic at this point. My best experience with Christians has been through a Christian Women’s writing group that I’m involved with, which I joined when I still felt a connection to calling myself a Christian. The women in my group are very much in agreement that faith is a personal journey, and put no pressure on each other to ‘fit’ into a specific ideology or theology. They’re supportive, kind, and many even share my extremely liberal political views. They’re also patient with those of us who no longer consider ourselves members of the church. But my experience in the church, when actually attending a church, was frustrating.

I used to be told that I had to wear panty hose and a skirt at church, because it wasn’t appropriate for a woman to show her legs. That I couldn’t show my bare arms. That I’d go to hell if I ever got a tattoo. That I’d go to hell if I had sex before marriage. That women couldn’t be priests/deacons/subdeacons/preachers because of the Apostolic succession of MEN. That truly holy women covered their hair in church.

Despite feeling like I was being held to impossible standards, I had it good when it came to being “allowed” to mostly dress how I wanted to for church (I wore dress pants whenever I got the chance) and my clothing really wasn’t policed at home (and on the few instances my parents said anything, I laughed it off). I could cut my hair however I wanted, and I’ve since gotten tattoos, and taken ownership of my sexuality… but it’s no thanks to how my identity as a woman was treated in the church.

If I wore a shirt that the Priest’s wife deemed inappropriate during our time at the Orthodox church–when I was going through puberty and growing into my body and my identity–my mother would hear about it. I once got into a heated argument at my parents’ Anglican church with a woman who was telling me about a crime show she watches. A female character on the show was raped, and the woman told me that the character was “asking for it, considering how she was dressed.” I never felt like I could go back to that church again, if that was how women thought of other women.

As I grew into my identity as a cis-gendered! bi-sexual! hetero-romantic! tattooed! liberal! feminist! who doesn’t believe in the antiquated idea of virginity, and is pro-choice, pro-abortion, pro-contraception, and an LGBTQ+ ally… there just didn’t seem to be room for me in the churches I attended as a child.

3. If you were a part of a spiritual group/community, what would you want present?

What would you not want present? Support for the rights of women, people of color, LGBTQIA2s+ people is essential in my mind. But, the main thing that has driven me away from the church is a lack of support for what I feel are exclusionary views. I can’t justify being a part of any group who I feel classifies their love for other human beings according to the other’s personal lifestyle choices, ie. their right to choose who to love, etc.

It’s like, “I love you, but…” Conditional love has no place (in my opinion) in a religion that claims to be “all-loving”. My spiritual community must love all, have compassion for all, and support basic human rights. My womb must not be a topic of discussion–unless to say that it belongs only to me. My sexuality must not be a topic of discussion–unless to say that I have a right to love whomever I choose. My clothing must not be a topic of discussion–unless to say that it is my right to wear what makes me happy.

4. What are some of the unanswered/difficult questions that you continue to wrestle with?

When my father got extremely ill, and my brother came forward as an Atheist, he asked me, “how can an all-powerful God let Dad get sick?” He’s right. Why do people suffer if God is all-loving? Why do humans kill other human beings? How can any God let such suffering happen? WHY does my uterus determine my right to paradise? Why is my attraction to both women and men considered unnatural and sinful, when humans are not the only mammals on Earth who exhibit homosexual behaviors? Why does the length of my skirt matter to a God I cannot see, hear, or touch–who is not made of Earth like me, who supposedly created all things?

5. What do you wish Christians and the church understood?

Christianity is supposed to be a love-based religion, but there is a whole lot of bad press for Christians right now as God is used on extreme television programs to justify institutionalised gender inequality (and violence against women), disdain for the poor, lax gun control laws, and the fight against marriage equality. Yet, the majority of Christians I know (especially those in my age bracket) have nothing but love to share. It’s that love that will help spread a better image of Christianity, instead of what the media shows.

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Jane, after hearing your story, I am moved to respond. But true listening doesn’t involve much talking, so I simply say thank you. Your words will not lightly be brushed off of me or others who read this. We appreciate you helping us understand. Thank you.

(In the spirit of listening, comments have been turned off.)

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Leave a Comment March 1, 2016

Faith, Help Us Understand, Learning lessons

Ellie, Help Us Understand

I am excited today that Ellie Ava will be our first Help Us Understand interview, and help us she does! These interviews will be a bit longer than my normal posts, but these are complex subjects and worthy of creating a bit more space.

Ellie, we are grateful you are here today. Thank you for trusting us enough to listen to you and for the ways you will help us understand those who are spiritual better.

Help Us Understand Ellie 560

What does “spirituality” mean to you? If you practice some form of spirituality, what does that look like?

This is something very much in progress for me. I am still detoxing from a lot of the spirituality I grew up with, so I’m being very careful in how I integrate new approaches. But there are a few things I practice.

When grief presses in, I like to sit on the floor and light a candle. I loved this tradition in the Anglican church. I’m not totally sure what it symbolizes for me now, but it’s a chance to stop and sit in the pain and allow it space to breathe. I always heard that part of the point of prayer is to change our hearts, not God’s. I think this space does the same thing for me now. I try to let myself be changed by the grief. I let myself be made softer and more compassionate by it. I remind myself that I am strong enough to bear it and I don’t have to hide from it. It won’t break me.

I have also started practicing radical acceptance. I acknowledge that the world is the way it is, as much as it pains me, and I recenter and find myself within that. I am working on accepting my full humanity and believing that I am an acceptable human being after 25 years of thinking I am flawed and broken and disgusting and only passable because of an external sacrifice. Accepting my humanity and that of others has become a spiritual experience for me.

Meditation helps with this, because it reminds me that I exist apart from all the pressures and pulls and structures and society around me. There is a “me” at the bottom of all that, and she has really good things to say and to contribute to the world.

What has been your experience with Christians and the church?

Intense. Complicated. Extensive. Diverse.

I feel like I need to establish my “church girl” chops so I can validate my journey, but I’m choosing not to, in the somewhat optimistic hope that people will simply listen and allow my experiences to be my own instead of interpreting them for me or finding “the” reason things happened the way they did J

I had a pretty isolated, fundamentalist upbringing, centered around conservative politics and independent churches. “Literal” readings of scripture abounded, so there wasn’t room for other views or interpretations. We supposedly believed in grace and faith, not legalism and works, but in practice, if you didn’t behave according to the “code,” you were said to be out of God’s favor or at least not living “God’s best.” To prevent this, strict, authoritarian parenting and avoidance of worldly things was the norm.

I followed this up with years of homeschool speech and debate, which focused on apologetics and defenses of faith with a side of shaming and purity culture. Through all of this, I loved Jesus and the church and wanted nothing more than to share that love and win people to Christ. What I didn’t realize was that I had been taught to bury my identity, my voice, and my feelings in order to conform to what the church taught me was holiness instead of being allowed to flourish as a flawed, beautiful human being.

After all that, I went to college overseas and got a refreshing dose of modern Anglicanism. I loved it – the history, the tradition, the spirituality, the awareness of other cultures and the issues facing the world. It was so open compared to the closed-off fundamentalism that I grew up in. It was a truly wonderful experience. So my faith grew and expanded and my picture of God blew wide open as I realized people in other parts of the world have been practicing faith far longer than we have and they have all sorts of different opinions on things. Did you know that a huge theological debate in Africa is whether dowries are biblical? I started to separate what was cultural from what was actually biblical and brought a lot of that awareness back to family and organizations back home.

I moved to Germany after I graduated, and that was when things started to fall apart for me. I worked in a lab under a boss who was emotionally abusive, and I attended a church plant run by a Texan family that was very similar to the non-denominational churches I grew up in. After four years of attending an intellectual, culturally aware church in England for four years, it was hard to go back to the anti-intellectualism, lack of understanding, and “the Bible alone is enough” worldview – especially when they meant “the Bible as interpreted by Americans is enough.” I had already seen that faith was much broader than that and knew if there was a God, he had to be much bigger than that to encompass all the things I had seen and all the beautiful people and cultures of the world.

Still, I did my best to hold on to faith as my health and emotional well-being disintegrated at work. I prayed and read my bible and listened to Christian music and sermons and prayed in tongues for my boss to start treating us better, and he didn’t. Eventually, I came home and collapsed on my parents’ couch for six months. I was diagnosed with POTS, related to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and my energy levels are still pretty limited.

For years after that, I got therapy and explored other types of Christianity. I learned about hermeneutics and tried to make sense of things. I started to realize how much trauma I had experienced in church growing up – how much of my sense of self had been stripped away by doctrine and homeschool Christian culture and authoritarian parenting and spanking and strict fundamentalism and isolation. I realized how a lot of that had set me up for the emotional abuse by my boss, even if it wasn’t directly abusive. I had internalized the idea that abuse and suffering and sacrifice were what made us holy, and I thought I had given up before “God could bring the victory,” making me a spiritual failure. And yet, I wanted it all to be true because it made me feel safe and certain of the way the world worked.

Eventually, I realized that the sense of safety in my home evangelical community was only possible because they excluded people who were different or who threatened their idea of how the world worked – including people who didn’t “get the victory” in whatever their struggle was. There was no room for beauty in a messy, flawed world, only in God’s perfection, and that led people to overlook, write off, and even worsen the struggles of everyday people, especially marginalized ones. Their “toolkit” for facing the world only worked in very limited circumstances, and they fought tooth and nail to preserve those limited circumstances so they didn’t have to change their beliefs. Once I saw that, I couldn’t be part of it anymore. That safety and certainty comes at too high a price for me now.

There are forms of faith that don’t exclude other views, and those can be really wonderful. But because so much of my upbringing was focused on believing the right things out of fear, I decided to intentionally let go of belief for a while. I think the things that are real and good and healthy will come back to me on their own, organically. But I still experience a lot of fear and guilt about religion, and as long as that’s my primary motivator, I don’t think I can have a healthy or authentic relationship with faith.

If you were a part of a spiritual group/community, what would you want present? What would you not want present?

I had a dream a while back that I was in a sort of multi-faith education, worship, and community center. It was in a big warehouse, and every faith group – including Catholicism, Islam, Judaism, Evangelicalism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Secularism – had its own room. They were beautifully decorated with art, fabric, meditative stations, relics, and books, and there were no doors between them, so when each group would have services, the other groups could hear them praying, talking, and singing. You could wander freely between them and engage with the people and their history and rituals, learning from each other even while you practiced and shared your own beliefs. I would love to build that space.

If I were to join an existing congregation somewhere, it would be important to me that people be viewed first as human beings and second as members of the community. I would also want to see compassion and understanding of the complexities of the world and thoughtful, careful analysis of current issues. I would need it to be low-key, and I absolutely need the leadership to focus on peoples’ well-being and proactively do their best to prevent abuse in all forms. I would want to see scripture and theology evaluated and practiced with a hermeneutic of love and acceptance above all.

What are some of the unanswered/difficult questions that you continue to wrestle with?

Is love enough? It’s about the only thing I believe in right now, but there’s so much darkness sometimes. I don’t know if it’s enough to win in the end. But I feel like it’s worth holding on to, because it’s the best chance we have to build something different. It’s the highest good I’ve seen and experienced in my life.

What do you wish Christians and the church understood?

That we are all people with valid journeys and something to offer. It seems really basic, but I was brought up thinking that Christians have this mysterious “key to life” that no one else has, so no one else is worth listening to. I think religion does offer a lot of tools and vocabulary to deal with the complexities of life, but so do philosophy, science, history, and the lived experiences of our friends and neighbors. Sometimes Christians unintentionally use language that makes Christianity the “default” setting and then try to find a way to include me in that, instead of acknowledging that I have a full identity and worldview on my own. I’m not ex-Christian or post-Christian, I’m Ellie, and I’m complicated :)

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Ellie, after hearing your story, I am moved to respond. But in the spirit of listening, I simply say thank you. Your words will not lightly be brushed off of me or others who read this. We appreciate you helping us understand. Thank you.

(In the spirit of listening, comments have been turned off.)

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January 28, 2016

Help Us Understand

Introducing: Help Us Understand

“One of the most sincere forms of respect is actually listening to what another person has to say.”

– Bryant H. McGill

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“The L in love stands for listen.”

Marsha Young (go Mom!)

Help Us Understand 560

One of my frustrations with the world is that we don’t know how to listen to each other and seem threatened by difference. While I can’t change the world (duh) I can try to model listening at The Messy Middle. With this is mind, “Help Us Understand” will be a 12 interview series this year (one per month) with people people who consider themselves to be spiritual but not Christian.

Too often Christians have judged and made assumptions about peoples’ spiritual and religious beliefs without taking the time to listen and understand what they are actually saying. A friend and I started working on this project in November but he had to bow out and gave me his blessing to continue with it.

In the spirit of listening to people, I’m going to turn off comments on the interviews. I’m doing this because while I  trust that those who normally follow The Messy Middle would be respectful, this is a public space and I’m not interested in debating people I don’t know. Instead, I am interested in creating a safe space for those willing to share with us.

Listening can be hard, can’t it? :)! But I know we can do it.

Here are the five questions I plan to use with each interview:

1. What does “spirituality” mean to you? If you practice some form of spirituality, what does that look like?
2. What has been your experience with Christians and the church?
3. If you were a part of a spiritual group/community, what would you want present? What would you not want present?
4. What are some of the unanswered/difficult questions that you continue to wrestle with?
5. What do you wish Christians and the church understood? 

I cannot wait to hear from them? Can you? I have been really encouraged by the interest and response and I believe you will be too!

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I have several interviews already completed, if you’d like to participate or know someone you think would be willing to help us understand, you can email me at messy middle (at) gmail (dot) com.

I am truly excited about this series. These are questions I genuinely want to discuss with people and I think you do too. So far, everyone I’ve interviewed has thanked me for caring enough to create space for this. I feel a bit weird to be thanked so much. Is it really that unusual? I look forward to these monthly interviews and thank in advance those who are willing to share with us. The first interview will be Thursday.

Each interviewee has expressed gratitude that we would want to hear from them and appreciate the opportunity to share. I can’t wait for you to hear from them too.

With blessing, Amy

p.s. you can comment on this :), just not the interviews. What do you hope to understand a little better? Which question are you especially interested in?

Here are the interviews:

  1. Ellie
  2. Jane
  3. Kathryn
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11 Comments January 26, 2016

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