I Will Forgive You

I know this is not a normal post-church sort of entry, but it's one that I am beginning to find I can't get around. It is a fact of life I see time and time again in people recovering from spiritual wounds: there comes a time to move on. I may not be there yet and you may not be either, but let's look at this inevitable future anyway.

If you've spent any time in a religious institution and you're reading this blog willingly, you've been hurt by spiritual leaders or peers. God knows I have. My first induction to spirituality, beyond the Catholic church in which I grew up, was run by greedy megalomaniacs who manipulated whoever and however they saw fit in order to suppress their masses. From there, I went on to Teen Mania, and if you've ever seen Mind Over Mania or have been to the blog Recovering Alumni, then you have an idea of how that went. From there, I spent months in a church with an impermeable clique, and then found my first real home called Emanuel's House. Call me racist, but for months, I thought it was a prayer group that met at the house of a Hispanic guy named Emanuel. When I did finally attend, I was home within months. I did more growing in that church than I have in any other church. Some of that was thanks to some very involved and dedicated mentors. Some of it was because that is where I met most of the best friends I have ever had in my life (if you were at Emanuel's House and you're still on my facebook friend's list, you're among those people). However, as most good things must come to a close, this did as well.

I hope anyone personally involved in this will forgive me, but let me just say the pastor cheated... on so so many levels. It turned into yet another pastoral sex scandal, but was a much deeper community wound than that phrase can cover. The first man I ever deeply trusted on a personal level, who was my pastor and my close friend, had taken great care with that trust at first. Eventually, he got power hungry, like so many in any sort of leadership role. He manipulated me, my trust, and his position through lies and poisoning me against certain people, and certain people against me. My wound was one of the lesser ones, even after all of that. However, he cut an entire church deeply, one that functioned like a family, and divorced like a family too.

Then I moved, to North Carolina, and quickly found what would seem to be my next home--a church that seemed open and welcoming to people from all sorts of walks of life--including my hardcore sub-culture-identifying family. We spent several weeks there, feeling quite comfortable, feeling welcomed, feeling safe and liked. However, the longer we were there, the less welcome our differences seemed to be. We didn't even differ much on the levels of theology at that point, but we didn't fit the mold. We wore black, listened to loud music, played with our daughter instead of parenting like a boot-camp, and were honest people who hid very little--including how ill I was and how much we were in need, financially and otherwise. I had taken a turn for the bed-ridden, and my husband tried to support us on less money than he was promised at the job he took, and we couldn't make ends meet. We turned to our church who, in turn, told us we weren't involved enough to expect anything from them.

Now lets back up here: I was bed-ridden. The days that I did come to church, I would get dressed, barely, and then have to wait another twenty to thirty minutes before I had the strength to walk to the car. Then, on top of that, I didn't have the strength to sit up in their crappy folding-chairs, and so I would have my husband push in an arm-chair from the lobby just so I could go to church. And the pastor, who had never once come to visit me while ill (remember, that thing Jesus said about those who call him "Lord, Lord," but didn't visit the least of his while they were ill?) finally came to my house to tell me I was too needy, talked about my illness too much, didn't contribute enough to the church, and that if I wanted to expect any help from them, I would have to change that. In foolishness, I forced myself to endure a few more months there before I left and never, ever looked back.

Then there's the wounds I've endured from people who consider themselves far more spiritual than myself. I've been accused of and called many, many terrible things by anyone from strangers who don't know me to family who are supposed to love me. It's been enough to store up a huge list of debts and wrongs and entitlements, big enough to fill a house. And really, some of these people do owe me--if nothing else, an enormous heartfelt apology. I could go on all day about the hurts I've suffered, and I have, but they're starting to weigh me down and I am sick of carrying them.

Before you tune me out, I'm not saying I will ever submit myself to some of these entities or ever have a relationship with these people again. I'm not suggesting that we all let these people and places who have hurt us continue to do what they're doing. I'm not saying, "forgive because it wasn't really that bad," because, yes, it really was. I'm not even saying to do the churchy thing and forgive because it's "the right thing." See, I say that because I think we are often missing the point of forgiveness in our sermons and counselling. We forgive because WE need to. Not because they deserve it. We let go because we need to move on, not so that we can allow them to move back in. I'm not saying that we should okay the behavior that hurt us or give them permission to move back into our hearts. (Sometimes that's the right thing to do, and sometimes it's the worst thing we can do for our own mental, physical, spiritual, or emotional health.) What I am saying is that, for every wound we've received, we deal with it however we need to. Vent. Bitch. Turn off the computer or phones for a week. Shut some people or places out of your life and move on from them. It doesn't matter how we do it as long as we don't sweep it under the rug, don't down-play it, and don't ignore the gaping wounds in our chests. Jesus never said to do that. No healthy psychiatrist did either. No, that was guilty-as-hell people telling you that your anger was sinful, that your cussing into your own pillow was obscene.

All I am saying is that when we hold on to those hurts too long, they start to decay in our hands and all we have left is a stinky pile of death reminding us, not of our rights, but of our pain. And that, my readers, is why we must forgive, and why I will forgive, even if we never give that person or place ten seconds of our time again.