Crying out to Love, sometimes called Jesus, sometimes called Light

On Friday morning, I was attending one of my best friend’s fathers’ funerals. I had helped her clean her mother’s home with her father after her mother’s passing just 4 years ago. While I was standing around before the funeral, surrounded by his friends and family, I spotted another mutual friend who was in the midst of talking with an older couple. I approached to say hello to her, and she introduced me to the couple. They asked how I know the deceased and I said his daughter is a good friend. How did I meet the daughter? In college, but we became friends in Kazakhstan. Our mutual friend regaled stories of how we all went to the same campus ministry and church for a long time, having also gone to KZ and Africa together on mission trips. The couple then asked me where I go to church presently, and I answered honestly and said nowhere. The older woman grabbed my hand and with the dramatic flair of a Broadway star, she began to cry and beg the question “how do we keep losing all of our young people from the church? There are literally thousands of you! Why did you leave? Please tell me!” the last request with a simultaneous pulling of my hand into an embrace I wasn’t asking for.

I was at a funeral and had come with thoughts of grieving and wanting to be there for a friend, and I was instantly transformed into a ball of rage and frustration at what I felt was a transgression on my boundaries. I had to will myself to focus during the funeral without becoming angry that someone would launch into a soliloquy about how youth are leaving the church, the only solace being a sigh of relief at still being considered ‘a youth’ in my mid-30s.

I am in the midst of “taking a break” from the church, and trying to redefine who I think Jesus is. I grew up Southern Baptist and then started attending an evangelical, non-denominational church ministry in college and continuing on that path until a few years ago. My family is non-traditional in the realm of religion. My father is agnostic and my mother is still clinging to the Southern Baptist church with a grip that is killing her for the sake of her mother, a devout conservative Southern Baptist woman through and through. When I ‘left’ the Baptist church to attend an evangelical church that believed in the Holy Spirit, my mom didn’t speak to me for the good part of two years, believing I had joined a cult. She wrote me, desperate for me to turn back to the Baptist church. ‘Speaking in tongues’ was of the devil and something I had begun to do that terrified my mother. She even went so far as to drive to Auburn, where I found her sitting on my bed after class, crying. She told me that if I walked out of my door to go to the ministry meeting our college group was having, that she would take my car, my house, and she would call the school and take me out of college entirely. I walked out and called my father. Thankfully, he was on my side and sternly spoke with my mom about that being inappropriate. Cue not being spoken to for a couple of years while I was on the dark side.

And still, I stayed true to the church and to my faith. I believed that Jesus and Holy Spirit were real and they were not confined by religion. I claimed a spiritual journey that wasn’t bound by people or indoctrination. I continued to speak with my dad about Jesus and how he provides for me financially for mission trips, and continued to pray for the sick and dying, believing for miraculous healings that never came.

Growing up, my family were nomads of sorts. We moved 13 times while I was growing up, and I attended a total of 11 schools. Every state and town we lived in, I attended the Baptist church with either my mom or my grandparents. When I was 11, I lost my grandfather and best friend to cancer. My grandmother lost her mind briefly and came to live with us. I had night terrors for years. I would wake myself up screaming and developed sleep paralysis. I then lost a dear friend to suicide, then one to drowning, then one to a shooting and then a pair of sisters I was friends with died in a car accident. The deaths didn’t seem to slow down or stop and with everything in me I clung to the church and to the mutual belief in Jesus that I shared with friends. So I didn’t believe in the specific Jesus my mom did, and I had faith in a Christian God where my father didn’t and I clung to that faith. Jesus would heal my broken heart, I was sure of it. Church provided the constant comfort in my life that I needed.

I got my undergraduate and master’s degree in social work and I began to work in the field right away. I had an internship in a domestic violence shelter, where the highest number of abusers reported were on the police force, another internship with an AIDS clinic in Birmingham where I worked with drug abusers in recovery, who were also homeless, who were also HIV+. I moved to Nashville and worked in an inner city school where shootings were fairly regular, and gang violence is a reality, and working within a broken system and culture of poverty was very real. I became immersed in the suffering of others and began to believe that more than ever I was living out the gospels, Matthew 25: 35-36, “ For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.” I was near to the brokenhearted, like Jesus told me to be.

I had signed up to serve for a tea for persons of color who were also working in the inner city with another ministry. It was a night of delicacies and pampering for these women which I fully supported and had been excited about being a part of. That week at work had been so exhausting and intense, that by the time the event came I was worn out, but still wanting to serve. I figured that my church of all people would understand, especially the other volunteers at this event, an event specific to serving persons who are working within the same population I was. So when one of my fellow volunteers asked me how I was doing, I thought it was safe to answer honestly. I said it was really rough, that there had been two shootings just this week, and the most recent had happened earlier this morning. A middle school youth had been shot and killed right in front of a bus full of children, and I was the grief counselor on call for that school to meet with not just the students, but also the adults and persons who had witnessed the event. That included the cafeteria worker and neighbor who first reached the body, the victim’s mother, and the victim’s brother and cousin. It was heartbreaking and difficult to not break down and to be there with this family and these persons who had just had a life-altering event happen in front of them. I didn’t give all of these details, but I did mention the shootings and the volunteer asked what they were about in horror. I answered that the first one was gang related and the second was an accidental drive by. She then looked very confused. Gangs? I thought that was only in movies, surely you aren’t insinuating that is a real thing? I confirmed that yes, it is, and not only that, but it is happening only 30 minutes away. Cue the disillusionment that was the start of my unraveling.

I had a difficult time allowing myself to truly examine my surroundings. My life had always been a dichotomy of home/work life and church life, but something switched in me that day. There is an element of pride in here I cannot ignore, an inflated sense of personal ego that I understand is a part of the problem. A sense of “I am helping the poor, why aren’t they?” that is sour to taste. Truly, my unraveling is at the mercy of a crippling ego that I am trying to break in the midst of trying to figure out who God is. I began to only see my church as white and wealthy and I actually prayed to God asking him to let me leave and go somewhere else. I heard back from him “be the change you want to see in the church.” So that phrase kept me there, in that congregation, for a few years. But I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t get past the fact that I was driving 30 minutes to a health and wealth, white washed congregation that seemed clueless of the lives outside of their very doors, while I worked in a predominately African American project housing area and school and the segregation was overwhelming. James Baldwin said the most segregated institution in America is the church, and honestly, that sickens me but it seems to be glaringly true. I couldn’t reconcile that the Jesus I had been trying to follow wasn’t looking anything like the Jesus that I heard about in church, he looked more like the Jesus I saw in the streets and in the broken. So I left that church and found one that had a focus on racial justice and equality, where I attended a race and gospel class after services. The class was diverse, but the church remained “white as snow”- as was our congregation description by an African American pastor who was invited to speak one Sunday.

On top of the turmoil of being a person torn between two worlds in the same neighborhood, I attended yet more funerals. One of them, a mere month ago, was for a high school friend; he was cleaning a gun that was supposed to be empty and it discharged into his stomach. He called his wife, one of my best friends, but she missed the call before he called 911. He died before the ambulance arrived. It was four days after they had all celebrated their daughter’s first birthday. She is the spitting image of her dad. And yet again, in the funeral service, I heard “he wouldn’t want you to be sad, he is in Heaven and therefore doing better than any of us” and something broke in me again. Something shattered. Because honestly, fuck that. I have been to too many ‘Christian’ funerals where we are told not to cry because the person is in a better place. And I will not do that. I will grieve and I will mourn the loss of my friends and family, I will cry and be angry and scream and cry out, and I am tired of being told to sit silent and praise God in the midst of it.

So this is where this older couple found me, at another funeral, where they shed tears not for the deceased but for my apparently forgotten soul since I had left the church. An angry, confused, desperately seeking person trying to figure out just who Jesus is. And I hope to. I hope to redefine him, to find someone who looks like and embodies kindness, but I am no longer convinced that is in a church. Maybe it is in nature. Maybe it is in simple acts of kindness, or moments of loving embrace and honest conversation. Maybe it is the light in each religion practiced on the earth, and he is an expression of the purest parts of each one. I am not sure who he is right now, I am not sure who I continue to pray and cry out to, but it is too much of a habit not to continue to cry out. I now cry out to Love and sometimes call him Jesus and sometimes God and sometimes Light but I must have someone to speak with, to sort things out with. Some entity to give me hope when everything feels crushing and difficult around me. I am not willing to give that up, but I am also no longer willing to go into buildings where there is no diversity, and accept sermons where there is no room for emotions. I will cry and I will scream and I will lament with my brothers and sisters from every background and I will do it at a kitchen table, on a couch, in a coffee house, but I cannot do it in a church. And that is something I am telling myself is okay, one day at a time.