Craving a messy faith
My “place” in the Church is not well defined these days. I’m an Anglican priest without a parish. I collaborate on building this community of “post-church” people but not with the goal of making them part of a church, although we are technically a church. I’m a Christian … still … I’m pretty sure, but not expressing it in any one way. If you are a person who prefers their leaders in a clearly delineated worldview, and you find me confusing, well, try being me.
Debie Thomas has been a “friend of Harbor” since our early days. She has been a speaker and we have quoted her many, many times. This year she is the speaker for our Harbor Retreat at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico. Her most recent book, A Faith of Many Rooms: Inhabiting a More Spacious Christianity, is her own memoir and a kind of guide to those trying to find their own place in a faith that may not always seem like it is for them.
In this book, Thomas offers us a faith of belonging and home community, one that is big enough for her race, gender, culture, and feminism. She says this (Full disclosure, I have not finished the book):
I’m learning to return to the story on my own terms, looking for gaps, looking for nooks and crannies, looking for flexibility. I’m not afraid of messiness; I crave it. If there’s room for messiness, there’s room for me. (p. 19)
I, too, crave messiness, because a mess really contains all sorts of things. That’s what makes it a mess! One of the reasons I let my office get messy is to not forget about things. I leave a funeral leaflet on my desk for months and months because there is a prayer in it I really love and I don’t want to forget it exists. It took me ages to move the pile of scratched up research transcripts off my desk because I wanted to feel a little closer to those people as long as I could. When things are put away into boxes, we tend to leave them there, ignored. Out of sight, out of mind. In my mess, things stay in sight and I can think of them regularly, even if it’s, “I probably need to put you away.”
In a mess, there is room for me. I don’t get shoved into a cupboard because I don’t fit the agenda of the group at that particular moment. I’m still there. They have to see me. That is significant for me as a woman who has been professionally discriminated against in ministry and as a queer person constantly having to remind the Church that we exist because everything in church life is centred around heteronormativity (What do you really mean by “family worship”?).
If you were to ask me for my testimony or my creed, you would be even more confused. So would I. Mostly because only a fraction of my faith is lived out in my head these days. I know God and God’s work in the world through my relationship with Jesus, yes, and, in the glimpses of the Kin-dom that I get to be part of in community, in family, in creation, in myself. Not only is it messy, it’s a different mess every day, sometimes every hour.
In this moment, I’m thinking that the only kind of faith that has room for me, a white, queer, cis-female who is probably too confusing to have a platform—and also has room for humans of many races, genders, and even education levels, locations, and languages—is a messy faith. I think God must have a messy office, too. How else do They see each of us so completely and eternally? The messier, the better, I say, because the messier we are, the more we are combined and interacting with each other in all of our astounding singularness and beloved community.
