Church: A Place of Pain–and Healing. | Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Church: A Place of Pain–and Healing

I spent a wonderful and healing couple of hours at a friends’ house over pots of tea recently.

She said that there was not a Sunday over the last few years when she did not leave church in tears, and sob on the way home. I was astonished. Partly because this friend is a warm, loving, much-loved, highly gifted woman. Partly because it has also been my experience–though not over the last year, and not floods of tears, because I don’t cry particularly easily and besides I have young daughters whom I don’t want to upset–but the experience of leaving church very sad is a familiar one.

For me, for my friend, for many of my friends whom I have talked to. Probably many of your friends too.

Why? Well, we come into church with overly high expectations. We forget that everyone else is also a flawed sinner, just like us–though in the nature of things, some will be far wicker, some far holier. We forget that the church is a conglomeration of interlinking social circles, and the snobbery, social climbing, cruelty and exclusivism that are part of social life can and does migrate to the church. That churches are full of people who have forgotten their first love of Christ, and view it as club to make friends and influence people.

Well, in the case of my friend–she is a very gifted woman, who had won acclaim, prizes, reviews, recognition in her field (a field which I have no giftedness or even competence to judge, so I am wowed by the external worldly corroboration of her talent). However, much younger people ran the ministry in which she had ministered for years–and she was not allowed to exercise her gift.

This being forced into apparent unfruitfulness is a familiar source of grief to many of my women friends.

My friend said that her days in the church are numbered.

* * *

Oh no! I thought.

How does one know when to run, and when to stand still?

In our early years of marriage, we moved enormously with my husband’s post-docs, jobs, and plush visiting positions (no teaching, just research). Let’s see– from 1989 when we married, to 2006 when we bought our current (and please God, last house), we lived in Binghamton, New York; Cornell, Ithaca, New York; Stanford, Palo Alto, California; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Williamsburg, Virginia; Manchester, England, and then Oxford, England.

And went to at least one church in each of these cities in which we were aliens and strangers.

How pick the church in which you want to put down roots for a season? When early on, I complained that the people of a particular church were not particularly friendly, an older Christian said dismissively, “You don’t go to church for friendships; you go to church to worship God.”

So that’s one test of whether a church is for me. Can I worship God well in the worship? Do the sermons speak to and minister to my spirit? Fortunately, for me, the answer is yes in the church I currently belong to, and so I stay. And I think as long as I encountered God in the worship and in the word, I would stay in a church.

But a church is also a community. I use the blessing test. Am I being a blessing to people in the church? Sadly, at the moment, an out of church ministry is absorbing much of my time, so it is not clear whether I am indirectly being a blessing to people. I sincerely hope I am. I would so love to be blessed like God blessed Abraham, “I will bless you, and you will be a blessing.” To be a blessing in and of yourself, so that people are blessed just by being with you. A mentor of mine, Lolly Dunlap was like that. I recently had coffee with an Anglican priest and writer, Michael Wenham, who was also like that. I would like to be sweetened and gentled by the spirit of God to become like that too.

So I guess, if one can worship God, and bless people, one should stay in a church, even if it is a place of pain.

* * *

A few days ago, I had one of those tear-filled conversations which are trademarks of churches which are places of pain with someone who had significantly wronged and injured me. And not even with significant malice–just carelessly, not knowing the full extent of the hurt she caused me. Jesus says of the Jews, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” And we never know the full extent of how we injure others. Or vice-versa. As a character in Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree explains, “What took up one degree of your circumference took up 360 degrees of mine.” And that’s the way it goes.

And, phew, I forgave this person whom I had wrestled to forgive. (http://theoxfordchristian.blogspot.com/2010/11/forgiveness-weight-off-your-shoulders.html). For I was able to see standing behind the small her, the big Christ. The big Christ watching with concern as I shoved into a dark pit. Watching me there with concern. Waiting till things shifted in my spirit. Giving me a hand out. Leading me out of the pit into a place I would not have had time for if I had stayed in the busy place before-pit.Unbelievably using the pit experience to upgrade me. To release me into a ministry I LOVE and am rather good at (IMO) which I would not have had time for before my sojourn in the pit.

Small enemies; big Jesus.

When church is a place of pain that is one reason to stay. Nothing can happen to you unless God permits it. God can use a wilderness experience to show you his love. God can use the inevitable suffering when conceited and arrogant sinners rub up against each other to prune you, so that you are a better person after it. The pain of rubbing up against others (whether we were the sinners or sinned-against) is a part of pruning –so we may come forth as gold.

* * *

The Trappists added a fourth vow to the traditional three–poverty, chastity and obedience. This was the vow of stability. To stay in one place.

Why is it good to stand still? (I am an ex-Catholic, and as I may have said somewhere in this blog, in fact, wanted to be a nun as a teenager, and joined Mother Teresa’s convent. Hence my quotes from Catholics, in whose thinking I was immersed for so long a time). Thomas a Kempis writes in The Imitation of Christ, that wherever one goes, one takes oneself, and one will find oneself.

So, if the reason church has become a place of pain is partly one’s own sin, there is no sense in running. You will take yourself–and find yourself. Painful circumstances will repeat themselves with dreary monotony u
ntil have become the New Creation Christ intends to make you.

Here’s a favourite quote from Bob Pierce, founder of World Vision,http://theoxfordchristian.blogspot.com/2010/04/bob-pierce-founder-of-world-vision-on.html

“God answers all prayer. He does not answer our selfish, materialistic begging. He does not move into our sinful situation. He moves us out of our sinful situation into Himself. God sometimes moves slowly. Sometimes we don’t lack faith, but patience. Wait patiently for HIm, and He will give you your heart’s desire.

1) if the request is not right, He will answer, “No.”

2) If the time is not right, He will answer, “Slow.”

3) When you are not right, He will answer, “Grow.”

4) When the request, the time and you are right, God will say, “Go.”

That’s when miracles happen.”

So, when there is suffering because of rubbing up against other people,don’t run. Because God has us repeat each class until we have learnt the lesson. How much better then to grow?
* * *

And when one is innocent, like the friend whose story led me to write this. She is lovely. She just happened to be far more gifted in what she wanted to do in church than the younger mediocre people who ran that ministry. Who were threatened and jealous. Should she stay?

Hard to say. I think of Milton plaintively writing of

That one talent which is death to hide,

Lodg’d with me useless, though my soul more bent

To serve therewith my Maker, and present

My true account, lest he returning chide.

And the answer he received from God,

God doth not need

Either man’s work, or how own gifts: who best

Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state

Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed

And post o’er land and ocean without rest.

They also serve who only stand and wait.”

So whatever gifts we have are from God. They are HIS. He can use them or not as he pleases. He can put one on the shelf, and present us with another (which to my surprise he has done with me, in recent years.) It is more important to learn to surrender our will and our spirits to him, and to learn to love people than to use gifts. For when the time is right, and God says GO, it is true, (though sometimes hard to believe this) NO ONE can say No.

* * *

Butterflies are beautiful. Bees give us honey. So, if God has led us to a place, and has not told us to move, it is good to stay. And make honey there.

In one of most beautiful tales of redemption in American literature, (in literature?), The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne stays in the judgmental, bleak, cruel church and town which had judged and condemned her for her sin. She wears the scarlet letter A for adulteress. Through her humble acts of love and mercy, the letter A changes its meaning. Most people now assume it means A for angel!

So, until God tells us to move, it is, in my opinion, good to stay rooted in Christ, and grow and be fruitful like trees planted by streams of living water, which will bear their fruit in due season, and whose leaves shall not wither.