God in America.
We must become store houses of hope!
I recognize that the words I’ve chosen to use in this piece above are quite severe, quite pointed; possibly even bordering on dualistic. The poem is one I came across in an old journal the day before our most recent election. A late-night collection of thoughts and feelings; one that couldn’t possibly contain all the nuances of spiritual loss and rebirth. But I allowed the flow of these – almost combative – words, because I wanted to dig out a painful truth. One that has lain hidden within me, and I needed the sharpness of strong words in order to reach it. Please allow me to explain.
I was born in the west of Scotland and raised in an intentional Christian community; a spiritual retreat center where prayer, singing, silence, nature, even dance, were a normal part of everyday life. It was the 1970s and the Jesus People movement was in full swing. It was an extraordinarily beautiful place to begin life. I have no memory of learning about “God” … God was in everything … every part of everyday life. Our joy in the good moments and our solace in the painful, ugly ones.
At age twenty-one, I came to the U.S to attend a Christian youth event. Here I met my husband and a new chapter of my life began. The first eleven years of our marriage were spent in New Orleans, Louisiana – the deep south – a culture I found incredibly contradictory and difficult to adjust to. There was so much religion, so many churches, but also, so much classism and racism. All the rules seemed to have changed and I had no idea how to follow them. I had been raised “Christian”, and yet I couldn’t – no matter how hard I tried – fit in this most “christian” of societies.
Instead of love being the highest rule, appearances seemed to be the priority. Instead of depth of intimacy with Spirit, promotion was the order of the day. The promotion and sale of church as a socio-political force to join, a lifestyle choice, like shoes, or a new kitchen. It was us and them. Those inside, the saved – and those outside, the lost, the damned.
Those first few years – my early twenties – in America, I tried hard to make it all work. After all, “Christianity” had grown my roots, hadn’t it? My first born identity had been with Spirit and the primary way I’d been taught to engage with that identity was through community – in other words, church. But, even working as a worship leader in a large congregation with influence and swagger, my spirit felt gas-lit.
Despite the handful of genuine spiritual seekers I met there, the guidelines for right and wrong seemed to have been mislabeled. Service to the poor was the last item on the establishment’s agenda and the institutionalized Sunday production just wouldn’t sit right with my being. Like a chimp at a tea party, I couldn’t make these clothes fit! I was constantly in trouble, tripping over my own feet in what I wore, how I spoke, and of course, my left-leaning socio-political views.
And so, like many others in those early 2000s, my husband and I left the church. For me, this change was wonderful; a liberation! Once the burden of “trying to get it right” was lifted, my spirit soared. I was in love with the God who lived in the depths of my being, again. The Christ I met in every human face, every greening leaf of nature and every blade of grass.
But for my husband, and in fact, for many of our spiritual companions, leaving “church” meant passing through seasons of bewilderment, deep grief and pain. It felt like a betrayal of all they had held dear, all they had known as “TRUE”, to allow themselves to listen to that call. Not a call that came from an outer clerical authority, but a deep, inner, piercing call. One that was asking them to lay down an ailing spiritual identity, to let it die, and to trust for a new spiritual rebirth. A rebirth which many would not tangibly “see” for years!
This narrative is so common now – the deconstruction of a religious life in order to find a deeper intimacy with the Creator – that we’ve been hearing it echo from every corner of our spiritual culture for many years.
As the decades have passed by, my husband and I have occasionally peeked back through the curtain to check on the “church life” we left behind. What we’ve seen has only confirmed the path we’d taken. As western culture has progressed to become more inclusive, more open to those on the margins, the American church (at least, the more conservative portion of it) has become more and more exclusive, more rigid and more enclosed.
This last decade the church in America has very clearly chosen its public identity. They’ve crowned themselves a new king. One who can give them the deeply desired political power they’ve sought: the control and dominance of others – the “policing” of society’s morality – which they’ve so tragically mistaken for the kingdom of God.
As many have pointed out, Donald Trump’s reign in the church didn’t happen in a vacuum. He is not the source, but a symptom! What began as an “us or them” mentality, an ethos with its roots deeply entrenched in the foundations of the country, became an unsettling force, causing many to leave the church in search of a more genuine spirituality, and has now grown into a sprawling monster dominating our politics and culture with exclusion, blame, accusation, distaste and actual hatred for ANYONE who is not like “us”.
This monster has grown so vast and powerful, possessing even the hearts and minds of many “good” people – people who we thought would have known better – because it has used the very disguise of holiness … “God’s will” … as its “church-approved” public face!
Donald Trump didn’t choose the Evangelicals – they chose him, because he allowed them to secure a power which they had already been relentlessly pursuing for years!
This is a hard pill to swallow, and it seems we will have painful times ahead. But in truth, it doesn’t really matter. Please, don’t mistake my words here; I know how much it does matter! I know it’s likely that many souls will be wounded, many lives may be destroyed by what is coming our way as a nation and a society. But what I foundationally believe is that nothing can change the love of God – the God of Love, who lives in the depths of our beings. Who lives between us, as our very love for one another! Nothing … not life or death, nor powers above or below, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow … not even the powers of hell can separate us from the love of God.
The poem I share above is not about Scotland or the USA; one section of humanity or another. It’s about allowing us to acknowledge the religion which we have – as a society – utilized and weaponized against our fellow humans in our foolish quest for power. And … it’s also about allowing us to surrender in trust, to the infallible Love we meet again and again in our innermost beings.
The words I let myself use are forceful because I wanted to push past the gas-lighting confusion between institute and intimacy which occurred in my early twenties. I needed to say loudly to my inner self, the Divine Love you’ve known is Life, but the manipulating control of the establishment, for political gain, is not.
The last line of verse mentions the essential kernel: the last grain of us which will be “born again”. This line is about the ever-arriving, ever-present hope given to us by Jesus: that when we lose our lives we will find them!
This is a message we receive from all of Creation, with every changing season: death is not an end in itself, but a passageway to rebirth. Each bright autumn leaf cries out to the earth as it falls, “Here is my body, broken for you!” God had shown us this perennial pattern of their Self again and again throughout all of time, encouraging us that even though as we gaze around at so much global destruction and despair, it is in the emptiness of winter, the “dark night of the soul”, when all seems barren, that we truthfully meet GOD, our Beloved, at a deeper, newer, fresher, and yet even more ancient and elemental level.
Those of us old enough to have lived through real loss – the devastating dark nights of this earthly existence – know this to be fundamentally true. These current times of upheaval are not an end, because deconstruction is always for the sake of resurrection. Let us acknowledge this as we lift our eyes to this upcoming horizon and allow ourselves to be a hopeful light of encouragement – especially to the young – who must feel such intense hopelessness at this time.
My own daughter – who is pregnant with our first grandchild – sobbed on the morning of November 6th, “I don’t want my baby to be born in a country like this!”
My heart breaks for her despair, but even in my powerlessness I have hope. Even though I am just a regular, working-class mom. An average, everyday spiritual seeker, who – like countless others – lost her home to the greed of Wall Street in the recession of 2008. Who then watched that devastating domino-effect of loss, ripple into every area of her life, bringing with it depression, sickness and addiction, I STILL have hope. I have hope because I have experienced the whiplash of the establishment’s complete failure once before – and I have witnessed first-hand the ever recurring miracle of rebirth which brought me back to Life.
In the famished years of my story, I doubted there was even a possibility for resurrection, but in the fullness of time I have experienced its arrival; active, whole and completely regenerative within my life and being.
And so, I must allow myself not only to have hope, but to be a storehouse of hope. And I would encourage all of you who have lived through previous deaths and rebirths to do the same. We must be the fertile ground, packed full with nutrient-rich soil, made from the compost of our past losses, ready to give growth, energy and encouragement, especially to the young in these upcoming times of change.
America, for centuries, has hailed itself as the most powerful country in the world, but even this mighty, “great” nation is just a seed in the palm of the Creator, and we know that every seed must fall into the ground and die to itself, its husk broken open so that it might become – in time – a harvest of new life.
