“Your god loves me more than you.”
*
I was sitting with a patient recently, at the foot of his bed in his room. He was in one of the nicer rooms in the warren that is the hospital: spacious, sleek, with a wall of windows and furnishings in whites, grays, and brushed steel. I was grateful to have found a chair. I prefer to sit in patient visits, especially if there’s a chance that I’ll be there for a time and we’ll be able to have a meaningful conversation. What we talk about is almost always up to the patient: family, treatment, anxieties, frustrations, or even if we talk at all. Today this man was sharing with me his faith journey. Like many patients I see here, he started out in the Catholic tradition, and through a circuitous route, has wound up worshipping in a large, mainline Protestant denomination. This winding road isn’t a problem for him, experientially or theologically. When recounting a near-death experience, he shared, “No one asked me for my papers, no one said, wait which one are you—or, you know, you have to pick one—there was none of that. You know this, all these different traditions, that’s us, you know, that’s a construct.”
I nodded silently. I think along similar lines often, and seldom do I hear people say this. Often when I enter a room, I get a look and someone says, I asked for a priest, or I hear what religion are you? as if religion is a precursor for our capacity to be present and vulnerable people together present to one another’s experience of illness, struggle, transformation, or death.
It is not.
But not today. Today, I could be with another person who does not need me to wear a collar or be a different gender or race or sexuality in order to shed tears with me about his anxiety of how his daughters will cope if he dies as a result of his surgery this afternoon. True, after we have prayed together, he does ask me for a priest to come and offer him Sacrament of the Sick and the Eucharist: evidently his Protestantism is not flexible enough for him to allow me to share with him the Body of Christ, or anoint him and offer him to the safe touch of God. I’m not bothered by it. (Incidentally, I have questions about why I’ve chosen a profession that invites so much rejection of me, but that is an exploration for another day. I suppose the TL;DR answer is that I haven’t chosen it, I’ve been called to it.) I make a note to put in a consult for the priest who will be in later in the day, and I take my leave. Some days, like today, it’s so busy that it’s easy for me to confuse one patient with another, but all day this gentleman lingers like fragrance on my clothes. What he shared about the meaning of faith communities, about his family, about his theology: they turn over and over in my mind.
There are communities he has been in, and I have been in too, where the badge of belonging is significant. What do you believe is a way of determining who is in and who is out, who is “safe” and who is “threat”. There is simply no room for the radical notion that there is no such thing as binary, dichotomy, duality. To consider that this is possible is to give yourself away to something or someone that will almost certainly hurt you. I have clear memories of growing up a Black woman in a white Midwestern suburb, and learning the hard way that my brand of Black did not belong with the accepted brand of Black in my communities, sometimes—and quite painfully—not even in my own family. Having come out as bisexual not too long ago, I wonder if I will come to experience the biphobia and erasure that I read about from others in the bi community. Will gay and lesbian friends I haven’t yet made whisper about me, or condescend to my face, saying that I’m lying to myself, that being in a relationship with a straight man makes me straight and not queer, or that my relationship is destined to degrade while I’m on my way from straight to gay, as if bi is no more than a junction on a train line? The nature of belonging feels incredibly divisive in faith communities. My faith tradition of origin has in its history a legacy of determining whose faith is real and true enough, who is a heretic, who is a witch, who is other in some “dangerous” and “threatening” way that must be destroyed. As someone traversing the path toward ordained ministry in the Christian tradition, I acknowledge this openly, and doing so allows me to recognize it in other places, spaces, and moments. It doesn’t give me more power, nor authority; it gives me a kind of experience that comes from previous and repeated injury, injury my faith ancestors have inflicted, injury my faith ancestors have repented, injury my faith ancestors have denied.
If my patient is correct, if these assemblies of theology, polity, ideology, and practice that we have gathered ourselves around and called religion is a construct that allows us to understand That which is Greater, what do we claim to be true about our particular construct? What can I distill mine down to, and does it look the same as yours? If not, or if so, so what?
*
In Spanish, word translates to palabra, which has in its etymology parable or parabola, or I set side by side.
*
your god loves me better than you.
At my altar this morning, weaving in and out of my head among my mantra was this utterance. your god loves me better than you. On the heels of its echo I considered my Jewish and Muslim siblings, and the union where our Venn diagrams of religion intersect: That whose Name shall not be spoken, the Lord of Hosts, the Great and Merciful; Abraham the father of your faith, and mine; the seeds from which Semitic religions grow, and depending on who you ask, whence they mutate. I think of how often it seems these faith traditions have looked at one another and uttered this sentence to each other. I have the real way, we have said. I am chosen from among us, we say. I am the most blessed and beloved, we say. What is the takeaway of speaking to one another this way? It allows us to make those among us who are not chosen, who are not special, who are not on our same way, to be counted as less-than. It allows us to make a comparison that puts us in a one-up and them in a one-down. And if there is a they that is not we, and if they are one down, what can’t we do to them?
*
Words matter.
I say this because people around us are worked up about the words we use to name, claim, deny, rebuke the actions of our people, our governments, our allies, our enemies. Words matter. They are imperfect and narrow and ill-fitting approximations of the feeling or the experience or the reality we know and are trying to share. And they matter.
I recently reread some passages from My Grandmother’s Hands that have come into bright and sharp relief for me in the past months. Among them are the idea of clean pain and dirty pain. I don’t want to spend too much time on it here, but I’d encourage you to read it if you haven’t: it’s easy to follow, it has incredible, helpful strategies for being a person, and if you let it, it will change how you see yourself and the world from which you come. I think almost daily about the investment it asks us to take in our own trauma: not in allowing this trauma to define us, but to consider the ways in which trauma unmetabolized is running us.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will run your life, and you will call it fate.”
I look around the world and see war, murder, extermination, destruction, dehumanization, fear, and profoundly destructive duality. I see a determination and a clinging to the idea that there is us and there is they, and they are bad and we are justified, and we will see who has the final word. All I hear in this rhetoric—regardless of where it comes from and regardless of who it's demonizing and dehumanizing—all I hear is unmetabolized trauma. I think of patients and family members saying to me, bad stuff happens but I don’t want to think about it, what good does it do to talk about it, and I imagine pointing at a newspaper and say, you don’t have to talk about it, but the bad stuff has a way of finding its way to the surface whether or not you ignore it. I paraphrase a line that one of my favorite writers wrote into a story: when your pain is this great, of course the hair you tear out is your own, of course the house you burn down is your own home. The thing about unmetabolized trauma is that it doesn’t just harm those we visit it on, it harms us, too.
“Unhealed trauma acts like a rock thrown into a pond; it causes ripples that move outward, affecting many other bodies over time. After months or years, unhealed trauma can appear to become part of someone’s personality. Over even longer periods of time, as it is passed on and gets compounded through other bodies in a household, it can become a family norm. And if it gets transmitted and compounded through multiple families and generations, it can start to look like culture.”
That patient I recently sat with talked about dropping a rock into a cesspool and the “ripples of shit” that make its way out and effect everyone. I think about how the world has behaved since 2020, and since October 7, and about our unhealed trauma rippling out, and what consequence it will have, what will people two, five, ten generations from now be doing to each other (in the name of faith!) because they think it will keep them safe, because they need to feel like they belong. You will not hear me advocate for an us/them binary. You will not hear me advocate for any kind of militaristic conquering in my understanding of faith, of “good versus” anything else. You will only hear me advocating for a love so radical that it changes us. It doesn’t erase our traditions, it doesn’t dilute our identity; and it recognizes the threshold where these become obstacles to connection with one another, and the harm done by our mis- and dis-connection. This love invites us to reach and move beyond that threshold into a circle where none of us is on the outside. Because this love makes us vulnerable and invites risk, it has to be sourced by the Divine. We have shown time and again that we are simply incapable of anything else.