“I will, with God’s help,” I said. Tears clouded my eyes.
“Will you proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ? Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself? Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?”
I will. I will. With God’s help, I will.
In the silence that followed, it was as if all the amorphous vagaries of my faith coalesced into a single, tangible call: Repent. Break bread. Seek justice. Love neighbor. Christianity seemed at once the simplest and most impossible thing in the world. It seemed to me confirmed, sealed as the story of my life—that thing I’ll never shake, that thing I’ll always be.
In her memoir Still, Lauren Winner recounts the story of her friend Julian. When Julian was just twelve years old and preparing to be confirmed, she told her father—the pastor of the church—she wasn’t sure she could go through with it. She wasn’t sure she believed everything she was supposed to believe, at least not enough to make a promise before God and her congregation to believe those things forever.
He father told her, “What you promise when you are confirmed is not that you will believe this forever. What you promise when you are confirmed is that this is the story you will wrestle with forever.”65
Mine is a stubborn and recalcitrant faith. It’s all elbows and motion and kicked-up dust, like cartoon characters locked in a cloudy brawl. I’m still early in my journey, but I suspect it will go on like this for a while, perhaps until my last breath. The Episcopal Church is no less plagued by troubles than any other, but for now, it has given me the room to wrestle and it has reminded me what I’m wrestling for. And so, with God’s help, I keep showing up.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Wind
The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.
—John 3:8
NICODEMUS CAME TO JESUS IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT. A prominent member of the religious establishment, he had questions for the radical rabbi who was making news around Jerusalem, but feared for his own reputation should he be spotted in the company of a man who dined with sinners and who had just made a big ol’ scene overturning tables at the temple.
In art, the two are often depicted conversing on a flat rooftop, stars above their heads, faces lit by lamplight. You can almost hear the anxious hush in Nicodemus’s voice as he confesses, “We know you are a teacher who has come from God, for no one could perform the signs you are doing if God were not with him.”
But . . .
Jesus wasn’t playing by the rules. He was healing on the Sabbath, associating with lowlifes, criticizing the religious leaders. The incident at the temple had not gone over well with Nicodemus’s friends.
Still, Nicodemus knew Scripture well enough to know God works through unexpected people: a seventy-four-year-old childless nomad, a criminal escaped from Egypt and afraid to speak, an impoverished Moabite woman, a shepherd too young to be king, a Persian concubine. He wasn’t ready to discount Jesus just yet.
Jesus tells Nicodemus the Spirit is like a womb. To see the kingdom of God you need brand-new eyes. You must be born again.
Nicodemus doesn’t understand.
Jesus says the Spirit is like water. To see God’s work, you must be washed, renewed, reborn.
Still Nicodemus scratches his head.
Jesus says the Spirit is like wind. Employing a bit of wordplay, he uses the Greek word pneuma—which means both spirit and wind—and says the windy Spirit blows wherever it pleases. You can hear the windy Spirit, Jesus says, and you can even see its effects. But you don’t know where it has come from and you don’t get to tell it where to go. The windy Spirit just shows up. The same is true for people who have been reborn, for people who see the world with brand-new eyes. It’s not because of their parents, or because of their status, or because of something they did, something they achieved. There’s nothing on the outside, nothing physical that sets them apart. The windy Spirit just shows up and changes everything.
“You’re supposed to be the expert!” Jesus cries. “Don’t you know this already?”
This isn’t something you can see with regular eyes, he says, and yet it’s as plain as a hand right in front of your face if you know how to really see.
Nicodemus, it seems, eventually got it. He later defended Jesus when he was criticized by the religious leaders and, most notably, was near the cross when Jesus died. We tend to speak disparagingly of the Pharisees, lumping them together in a single group we’ve made synonymous with hypocrisy, and yet a Pharisee risked his reputation to speak up for his friend, a Pharisee stuck with Jesus after most of the disciples had run away, a Pharisee personally cared for Jesus’ body when it had been all but abandoned by the world. Even a Pharisee, it seems, can be visited by the Spirit. Even a Pharisee can see.
This is what’s most annoying and beautiful about the windy Spirit and why we so often miss it. It has this habit of showing up in all the wrong places and among all the wrong people, defying our categories and refusing to take direction. Nicodemus struggled to see the Spirit outside the religious institution. Today, some of us struggle to see the Spirit within the religious institution, often for good reason. But God is present both inside and outside the traditional church, working all sorts of everyday miracles to inspire and change us if only we pay attention.
“None of us can control what God does,” says Sara Miles. “But we can open our eyes and see what God is doing.”66
Sometimes I wonder how much I’ve missed because I haven’t bothered to look, because I wrote off that church or that person or that denomination because I assumed God to be absent when there is not a corner of this world that God has abandoned.
We can’t see the Spirit directly, but the apostle Paul said we will recognize its effects:
Love.
Joy.
Peace.
Patience.
Kindness.
Goodness.
Faithfulness.
Gentleness.
Self-control.
I saw love in the little church family that hosted, catered, and paid for the wedding of a young couple whose parents were not in the picture. I felt joy as I sang “Jesus Loves Me” with a chorus of kids orphaned by HIV/AIDS as our van tumbled through the bumpy streets of Hyderabad on our way to Sunday school. I witnessed peace when a Palestinian man and an Israeli woman, both of whom lost children to the conflict in their region, urged a room full of Christians to let their friendship be an example of looking for the humanity in one another. It was patience that brought the female minister to the bedside of the parishioner who vocally opposed her ordination but had no one else to visit him when he got sick.
I saw kindness in the man who, for many years, helped a special needs student at his school use the bathroom twice a day, but whose actions went uncelebrated until his funeral when the student himself gave testimony. It was goodness that inspired an online community to raise enough money to send a mother of eight diagnosed with stage-four pancreatic cancer on a weeklong beach vacation with her family.67 I watched faithfulness when Brian Ward spent hours and hours preparing a sermon he would deliver to just five people. I felt gentleness in the hands that washed my feet in a moving initiation ceremony when I was an awkward freshman in college, anxious about starting over again. And I have admired, deeply, the self-control of my friends Justin, Matthew, Rachel, and Jeff who advocate for the acceptance of LGBT people in Christianity, often to harsh and cruel criticism, and yet continue to love and serve the very people who turned them out of the church, refusing to meet anger with anger or hate with hate.
The Spirit is like wind, like fire, like a bird, like a breath—moving through every language and every culture of this world, bursting out of every category and defying every metaphor.
Who’s to say where She will travel next?
PART V
I
Anointing of the Sick
TWENTY-NINE
Oil
You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.
—Psalm 23:5
TO THE FREED SLAVES, GOD SMELLED LIKE CINNAMON, cassia, olive oil, and myrrh—sweet and earthy, nutty and warm. When Moses met God on Mount Sinai, God sent him back with a recipe for oil. This oil would anoint the temple, the altar, the religious furnishings, even the priests. No one else was to use that same perfume, God said. “Think of it as holy to me” (Exodus 30:22–38).
We know now what the Creator knew then: that the olfactory nerve is connected to the amygdala, the part of the brain associated with memory and emotion, which is why the fragrance of a particular flower or the scent of a certain soap can suddenly flood a body with a memory, stunning in its visceral clarity. God wanted his people to know his scent. He wanted them to remember.
And so the pages of Scripture positively drip with oil. Nearly two hundred references speak of oil to light lamps, oil to soothe dry skin, oil to honor guests, oil to mark a sacred place, oil to solemnize a commitment, oil to entice, oil to comfort, oil to consecrate, oil to heal, oil to anoint priests, prophets, and kings, oil to prepare a body for burial.
To the ancient Israelites, prayer smelled like frankincense—balsamic, resinous, piney—said to be especially sweet to God’s senses and thus continuously burned in the temple. Cleansing smelled like fresh hyssop, sex like cinnamon, saffron, and nard. Royalty smelled like myrrh—warm, pungent, and woody—an oil also used in burial and to celebrate weddings. Wealth smelled like thick, aromatic spikenard, temple sacrifice like hyssop and cedarwood.68 For anointing, the prophets employed olive oil, perhaps with a touch of sweet cassia. To be anointed with oil was to be chosen, consecrated, and commissioned for a holy task. Messiah, or Christ, means “Anointed One.”
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,” the Messiah said, “because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free” (Luke 4:18).
“You have an anointing from the Holy One,” said the apostle John to his fellow Christians “We are to God the pleasing aroma of Christ among those who are being saved,” said the apostle Paul.69
The ancients knew, too, the healing properties of oils, which were applied to wounds and ingested as medicine. When James instructs the early church to anoint the sick with oil and to lay their hands on the sick and pray, the prescription is both practical and spiritually significant. The journey through suffering is a fraught and holy commission, one the Messiah himself knew well. Healing may come through medicine, through prayer, through presence and scent and calming touch, or through the consecrating of the journey as holy, dignified, and not without purpose or grace. The Catholic Church defines the anointing of the sick as “the conferral of a special grace on the Christian experiencing the difficulties inherent in the condition of grave illness or old age.”70 Even in death, the sick are anointed, reminded that the seal of the Holy Spirit is more permanent than the grave.
There is nothing magic about oil. It is merely a carrier—of memory, of healing, of grace. We anoint not to cure, but to heal. We anoint to soothe, to dignify, and even in our suffering, to remember the scent of God.
THIRTY
Healing
When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand.
—Henri Nouwen
CLAIRE LOVED HER BUSY, METROPOLITAN CHURCH.71 IT was where she connected with her best friends, where she met her husband, where she supported and served a homeless ministry, where she fit. When her husband secured a job on the church staff and Claire learned she was pregnant, life seemed to be falling into place.
“Two months before the baby was born, our house flooded and we had to move out,” Claire wrote in her e-mail to me. “One month before the baby was born, my parked car was hit and was rendered inoperable. One day before the baby was born, he stopped moving.
“I didn’t know that healthy, full-term babies could be born stillborn,” she said. “I went to the hospital with hope and fear. They never found a heartbeat.”
The church rallied, helping with funeral costs and meals, even providing a cabin for a weekend getaway for Claire and her husband. But when the couple returned to face down the long and arduous journey through grief, they found themselves alone.
“There are no worship songs for those mourning a traumatic death,” Claire wrote. “There is no testimony about feeling forsaken when God does not intervene to save a baby. We wanted so desperately for our church and pastor to struggle with us, to question, to face this ugly, brutal truth.” But Claire’s agony was met largely by platitudes—Bible verses, theological answers, promises of better days ahead.
Claire found healing outside the church walls—in counseling, among a couple of close friends, on Internet forums where faith, doubt, and grief were discussed openly. Eventually she and her husband connected to another church, but Claire still finds herself struggling to worship at times.
“My counselor says that being part of a church in the midst of grief can be like having ten thousand antennae,” she said. “Anything and everything hurts.”
I get a lot of e-mails from people like Claire, people who fit right into the church until . . .
the divorce.
the diagnosis.
the miscarriage.
the depression.
someone comes out.
someone asks a question.
an uncomfortable truth is spoken out loud.
And what they find is when they bring their pain or their doubt or their uncomfortable truth to church, someone immediately grabs it out of their hands to try and fix it, to try and make it go away. Bible verses are quoted. Assurances are given. Plans with ten steps and measurable results are made. With good intentions tinged with fear, Christians scour their inventory for a cure.
But there is a difference between curing and healing, and I believe the church is called to the slow and difficult work of healing. We are called to enter into one another’s pain, anoint it as holy, and stick around no matter the outcome.
In her book Jesus Freak, Sara Miles explains it like this: “Jesus calls his disciples, giving us authority to heal and sending us out. He doesn’t show us how to reliably cure a molar pregnancy. He doesn’t show us how to make a blind man see, dry every tear, or even drive out all kinds of demons. But he shows us how to enter into a way of life in which the broken and sick pieces are held in love, and given meaning. In which strangers literally touch each other, and in doing so make a community spacious enough for everyone.”72
The thing about healing, as opposed to curing, is that it is relational. It takes time. It is inefficient, like a meandering river. Rarely does healing follow a straight or well-lit path. Rarely does it conform to our expectations or resolve in a timely manner. Walking with someone through grief, or through the process of reconciliation, requires patience, presence, and a willingness to wander, to take the scenic route.
But the modern-day church doesn’t like to wander or wait. The modern-day church likes results. Convinced the gospel is a product we’ve got to sell to an increasingly shrinking market, we like our people to function as walking advertisements: happy, put-together, finished—proof that this Jesus stuff WORKS! At its best, such a culture generates pews of Stepford Wife–style robots with painted smiles and programmed moves. At its worst, it creates environments where abuse and corruption get covered up to protect reputations and preserve image. “The world is watching,” Christians like to say, “so let’s be on our best behavior and quickly hide the mess. Let’s throw up some before-and-after shots and roll that flashy footage of our miracle product blanching out every sign of dirt, hiding every sign of disease.”
But if the world is watching, we might as well tell the truth. And the truth is, the church doesn’t offer a cure. It doesn’t offer a quick fix. The church offers death and resurrection. The church offers the messy, inconvenient, gut-wrenching, never-ending work of healing and reconciliation. The church offers grace.
Anything else we try to peddle is snake oil. It’s not the real thing.
As Brené Brown puts it, “I went to church thinking it would be like an epidural, that it would take the pain away . . . But church isn’t like an epidural; it’s like a midwife . . . I thought faith would say, ‘I’ll take away the pain and discomfort, but what it ended up saying was, ‘I’ll sit with you in it.’ ”73
I know a faith healer here in Tennessee who understands this better than most. Becca Stevens is an Episcopal priest from Nashville and the founder of Thistle Farms, a social enterprise that trains and employs women recovering from abuse, prostitution, addiction, sex trafficking, imprisonment, and life on the streets. As the women heal through the therapy and community offered by the Magdalene program, they offer healing to others through the aromatic bath and body products they make from essential oils and sell in stores and online.74 At Thistle Farms, healing smells like lavender, tea tree, peppermint, and vanilla. It feels like lotion and body balm massaged into the skin. It looks like a flickering candle, and sounds like the whistle of a teapot singing from the new Thistle Stop Café. And it takes time.
“In making and selling oils,” Becca writes, “we are each reminded that healing is not an event, but rather a journey we walk as we make our way back to the memory of God.”75
That journey isn’t always a smooth one. Although 72 percent of women who join Magdalene are clean and sober two and a half years after beginning the program, like any other recovery group, this one knows the sting of disappointment, failure, wrong turns, and relapse. But love, Becca says, “carries us beyond the narrow path of believing that healing is moving from diagnosing to cure . . . Healing is a natural outcome of love. As we learn how to love, we learn how to heal.”76
Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church Page 17