At some point I realized that I do not have any use for a religion that only benefits me. I wanted the community that had been outlined by Jesus and other biblical writers where we love our neighbor as ourself and my neighborhood included a lot of people facing challeges that I was protected from. But my own comfort was not the goal. Some privilege cannot be shared. I could not take the privileges of my whiteness or my cis genderness and wrap them around my friends to keep them safe when I wasnt around. Loving them meant understanding and believing in the realities that they faced. Loving them meant supporting policies that would let them live healthy and safe lives. 

There are a lot of scriptures about love. Maybe even more scriptures about love than any other single topic in the bible. So it amazes me that more Christians do not pursue love as a spiritual discipline. As I was leaving the church, one of the things that cut the ties I still felt was listening to Christians disparage compassion as just an emotion that is commendable but which lives somewhere below logic and reason. I thought it was a fruit of the spirit and a key component in the second greatest commandment. I thought we were supposed to imitate the compassion of Christ. And I was tired. I was so tired of telling people what should be obvious. If your love does not have you wishing, hoping, and working towards the health and safety of those around you, you don't really love them. If your love has you talking over the person you are trying to help and telling them what they really need instead of listening, you dont really love them. 

But I realized at some point, maybe even with my mom's voice coming through the telephone, that love wasn't a spiritual discipline for them. I had to choose. Could I abandon my most honest, authenthic understanding of the first and second greatest commandments to keep the peace? Was there a point to a religion that espoused a love that conquers death but which coined the phrase "toxic compassion"? Truthfully no. If I believed the words I had read and studied, being faithful meant following the law of love even if that took me out of the church. I am not the best biblical or theological scholar. I am probably not even in the top 40%. But I choose to believe Jesus when he says "by your love people will know you." And also, "if you love only those who love you, what reward will you get?"

Another step on this journey was the day I heard a coworker talking about someone in their family harassing them which they summarized as, "there's no hate like Christian love." Oh how I grieved to hear that. It had been years since I had introduced myself as a Christian and I knew exactly what they meant by the phrase, a dozen scenarios I had witnessed flashed through my mind, but I grieved because of a truth that shouldn't be true. What would Jesus think to know that that's how so many people view their Christian neighbors--"these people say they love me, but if this is love, I wish they'd hate me." What is the point of a religion like that?

Am I a Christian? Am I not? I don't know. I still talk to God and my imagination of God is built almost entirely of the Christian workdview. But I don't think most churches or most American Christians want me. I am well aware of how much I don't measure up. For one, I have rage and grief where "good Christians" have temperance and long suffering. And I wish to God that I knew what to do with the rage and grief. But if He wont take them away, I ask that he send companions who understand that these too are gifts, albeit not the gifts I wanted.

I want to say that I don't recognize the religion that I was raised on. I want to say that this fanatical nationalism, this disregard for the fruit a person bears, this victim complex whenever Christianity isn't supreme... that it is something I never saw coming. But the reality is that I just clung to few folks devoted radically to love and ignored all of the rest. However, the more people you meet and the more people you love, the harder it gets to ignore things that are happening to someone else. Yes, you could walk by, but that's your friend lying facedown in the ditch and you love your friend. And no matter how many times a Christian Nationalist invites you to define love as holding people accountable to your understanding of morality, that isn't it. And it's not even what was modeled in the Bible. Jesus was hard on folks who were traditionally successful and viewed as worthy. But he was unnecessarily kind to the people on the margin who could do nothing for him. I say that to contrast with the people who claim his name the loudest now. 

I think often of the Good Samaritan. I think more about the Good Samaritan now than I ever did when I went to church regularly. I think about how Jesus is surrounded by people and a rich young man comes and asks him how to get into the kingdom of heaven. And he tells him in front of everyone to sell all of his things and give them to the poor. And I think about Jesus eating with tax collectors. And talking with divorcees and prostitutes. And I think about how politics is really just how we organize people, organize society. I think about how political every single one of the stories of Jesus is. And I think about how gutted those stories often are in their re-telling. How many times did Jesus say the first will be last and the last will be first, and how many times does the New Testament says that God does not show favoritism? And how should those things inform how we organize people, how we politic? I think about James telling us that pure religion is looking after the foreigner, orphan, and widow and how those were all of the most vulnerable people in that time and place. 

I think about how the trans people that I have known in real life have gone out of their way to be kind because they know just how hard life can be. And I think about the immigrants in my life, especially the brown ones, have given me so much more than they have ever taken, especially in hospitality. And I think about what happens when you believe the stories people pass around instead of your own lived experience, but that you still have to be aware of what a drop in the bucket your lived experience is. And I think about the Good Samaritan who is the hero of the story. And I think about Jesus telling a gathering of Jewish people at odds with their Samaritan neighbors that they should be like the Samaritan in the story if they want to follow the greatest commandment. And how Jesus asks the crowd if the priest, Levite or Samaritan was the good neighbor and the expert in the law did not say "the Samaritan" but said "the one who had mercy" as though "Samaritan" was a loaded word.

And I wonder if the American Church will ever be associated with mercy. 

Especially now that there are phrases like "toxic compassion" coming out of the mouths of preachers. And how the best that any of the church folks I grew up with can do, is distance themselves from politics and strive to be "a political". But Jesus didn't shrink from politics. He turned down the offer of political leadership and power, but he outlined in every story how we care for our neighbors, our enemies, and our oppressors. There actually isn't anyone anywhere that Jesus said it was ok to leave them in the ditch. And I know everyone is stuck in fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. But I keep wondering if the reason Jesus had to use a Samaritan as his example of following the two greatest commandments is the same reason I had to leave the church to find people who cared about the same things I cared about. 

God is Love they say
But I have felt love at their hands. 
I have heard love fall from their lips. 

It twisted and turned. 
It slid right off of me when they looked away.
And none of it was strong enough to save me. 

It turns out that a lot of what I had learned about love
Was how to be quiet enough, flexible enough,
how to be small enough to be convenient.

Because the most important thing about Christian love
Is how it makes the giver feel. 

And they will redefine every word in the dictionary 
Before they make room for my sharp edges,
My burnt and frayed ends that hang like question marks.

I have always known the exact details of how I am
not quite what people want me to be. And that
I am not trying to be who they want. 

I think that last part offends them the most.
But I come by it as honestly as a person can. 
That is to say, I struggled to meet the expectations for as long as I could. 

But you can only tread water for so long.

All any of us can do is try to love others
the way we would like to be loved
until they tell us what love means to them.

That is where I find God these days.
In the people brave enough to say, 
"I want to love you better. Show me how." 
And, of course, among those who say, 
"I would like to be loved better, can I teach you?"

The trust it takes to ask for something different is the holiest thing I've ever known.

Winter Wind

Winter has a different kind of wind.
It rips and strips everything soft.
Golden leaves
silver seed tufts,
runaway wrappers.
They all split and scatter
until all that remains are
trembling branches,
a sidewalk scrubbed raw,
and the cold. 

gentle

I take out my phone and write in the notes, "be gentle with yourself." Not even 12 hours later, my phone rings and I hear that my cousin has been murdered by someone she loves. 

My mind shatters. 

My spirit splinters. 

Every metaphor for grief and loss and death that I've ever heard or read finds me over the next few days. I cannot hold the truth of reality without crumbling. I open my notes to try to write and put order to the experience. The phone app blinks open where I had left off, "be gentle with yourself". I close my phone. Those words are too hot to touch. 

I don't even know if I have a self to be gentle with. There is only pain. And my pain is a socket connecting me to all of the pain in the world. I am electrocuting and I cannot let go. I stop looking at the news because I can no longer separate myself from anyone else. The war in Gaza in particular breaks me open again and again. The bombings are in my living room. The wails of the survivors all sound like my cousin leaving. 

I don't know what has happened to me or why I can't even make a pot of rice without crying into it. I only know that I feel as though my skin is missing and all the heartbreak in the world is a howling wind against what is left of me, exposed nerves and all. I struggle against the words 'be gentle to yourself' and can only make sense of them applied to others. 

Be gentle with the coworker caring for their hospitalized family. 

Be gentle with your mother. 

Be gentle with those grieving near and far. 

That first week after my cousin passed, I have never felt more connected to world's gaping loneliness. And I guess if we are making morals, the greatest grief is that we are all each other have and we fail to treat each other that way.

I am far from home today. So far. A 6 hour flight to be exact. On the opposite side of this giant country. This bully of a country. And I am watching the news come in. Palestinians herded and corralled into the most densely populated corner of the globe and then bombed. And some folks think this is what God wants. They think it deeply with their whole being. And I have never felt further away from God in my life. Not just because church going politicians are signing bombs with hearts, though that has my stomach churning. But because so many people in my life are so very quiet. And it feels like God is quiet. Or sleeping. Or on vacation. As Rafah burns there are so many quiet people. From George Floyd until now, I feel like I have watched the faith I grew up with be choked and burned as the people who claim to be the hands and feet of God say and do so little. I think of the whole concept of Jesus on Earth. I think of the life depicted in the gospels where he constantly walks into politically charged situations with such a clarity of purpose. I think about Jesus in the homes of centurions, prostitutes, and tax collectors - calm while people accuse him of this or that kind of ideological misstep. I think of Jesus angry, whip in hand, turning over tables in the temple while people try to get him to be calm. He was not what they had prepared for. I think to myself, THAT version of Jesus would know what to do while Rafah is on fire. I wish I could find him. 

A Writing Assignment

I come from Big Sky country.

A place where the sky rolls out like a map with no edges, and you can't help but watch the clouds go about their day. 

I come from an unbroken line of partially broken women who hold up the sky with their bare hands and broad shoulders. 

Women who go to church to spill all the secrets that don't fit inside and don't want to be hidden. 

Women who go to their kitchens like they are going to stop (or start) a war. Casseroles for the grieving. Meat and potatoes for the overwhelmed and alone. Meringues and pies for celebration. Every dish a prayer. Every crock pot a loaded weapon.

I come from don't talk it about unless you can do something about it. 

I come from so many things you can't do nothing about. 

I also come from long grass and pine needles baking in the sun. From short autumns and long winters. From the inkiest of nights with the brightest of stars. From untamed rivers and a once small town that swells against the boundaries made by mountains and water and sky. 

I come from the longing that builds and builds and builds when you have to hold so many impossibly beautiful, fragile things in the same hands that have had to hold up a sky with no edges.