IF YOU’RE KILLED ON ZOOM YOU DIE HERE
This is your body
Breaking up
At 50 megabits-per-second
Straight to my front room
A three-by-four of eyes and mouths
Unanswerable sound
I love you for an hour every day
The pixels of our faces numbered
We are better than a multiplex of data
Gathered
Each one to our own home
On the night you were betrayed
We took the slice and blessed it
Everything is what you make of it
A host of fragments un-assembled
At our private suppers
I have eagerly desired to be left alone
Forgive me
For I do not know what we are doing
Carolyn Whitnall, 2020
The other day I requested a Zoom link that I never received. It was for a church thing. The common sense response would've been to ask again, over a different channel. But I was tired and lonely and sad and so I just skipped the session and chalked it up as the latest episode in the lengthy, rambling narrative of rejection that, when I'm tired and lonely and sad, feels like the entire story of my relationship with church.
It's not a fictional narrative. There's been some pretty big and concrete actual hurts and letting-downs over the years. And the feeling of being excluded from a community that you devoutly understand to be the Body of Christ – a community that is supposed to be the embodiment of love and welcome and goodness in the world – it doesn't exactly resource you against spiritual anxiety (God has rejected me!) and social isolation (if Christians don't want me the 'unsaved' certainly won't).
But it's a narrative that starts to write itself, if I'm not careful. I approach new relationships and scenarios so guarded and inexpectant that other people wouldn't know how to 'accept' me if they wanted to. And I interpret the normal everyday shortcomings of interactions between finite humans in the worst possible light, while failing to give the normal everyday pleasant connections an equal part in my 'story'.
Lately, of course, even the most socially-integrated of us have been propelled into greater isolation than we're used to. If I'm honest, there's been an element of relief for me in the involuntary separation from others. But it's also lured me into gloomy reminiscence. My relationship with church – already extra-strained by some stuff that went down just before lockdown – feels like a "live issue" rather than the latent one it had been for a while. Which is not necessarily a bad thing if it prompts me to work it through but, urgh, effort.
Thing is, though, what is church? On days not wholly dominated by spiritual anxiety (which is most days, these days, hurrah!) I believe I am church no less than the rest of us. Which means ... I am co-responsible for us growing into the embodiment of love and welcome and goodness that I believe we are meant, with God's help, to increasingly be. We failed to be this when I most needed us. To seek my own healing is to seek our healing – and to call out the wrongs done to others is to recognise my own complicity. [1]
"Church is family" we chime, as though that's somehow cheering or reassuring. Ha. "Church is family" means we're in this for the long haul; it means no choosing who's in and who's not; it means the things we do and say to each other cut to the core of each other's identity. (It absolutely does NOT mean that individual Christians have a duty to "attend" no matter how unsafe, unwelcoming or inaccessible our spaces are to them. Our absent siblings are no less a part of us; their absence is on us and is an aching loss.) "Church is family" isn't a shortcut letting us off the effort and pain of community building; it's a reminder of how crucial that effort is, and an indication of how painful.
Attempting this 'remotely' has presented challenges, raised questions. Caused problems. But are they wholly new challenges, questions and problems? Or are they better understood as novel variations on pre-existing issues that we have normalised / invisibilised instead of tackling / grappling with? Accessibility is a prime example. In the shift to online gatherings, we've been rightly concerned about excluding people who don't have access to technology, or who aren't at ease with it. Meanwhile, disabled Christians have been alerting us to the inaccessibility of our buildings and in-person events for DECADES – and change has been shamefully slow, especially compared to the lightning speed with which we adapted for the sake of the privileged majority during lockdown. [2]
If we're worried that we'll all get too comfortable "doing our own thing" – picking a service from a global selection and tuning in from home when it suits us best – then maybe we were underestimating the consumerism and individualism that already (more quietly) pervaded our business-as-usual. (This comes up for me quite a lot; see e.g. Sunday Mourning and It's Not Personal). If we're questioning the meaning of solo communion and other observances – or, for that matter, if we're just assuming it uncritically! – perhaps this shows up a lack of depth in our prior understanding, or a lack of awe in our contemplation of mystery. If our faith has been buffeted by a mismatch between expectations of miraculous deliverance and the persisting presence of the virus, in the varying ways it impacts each of us – well, many Christians testify to God's provision in the midst of the greatest of hardships, whether or not rescue occurs. [3] If we find ourselves at stark odds with one another – about any of these matters, and / or about the 'right' response to the whole situation, the 'right' format and pace for church moving forward – these are almost certainly not new differences, just differences that never came up before. Disagreeing like this does not destroy our unity, it exposes the shallowness of it, and gives us an opportunity to understand one another better and maybe even arrive at a deeper, necessarily more complex unity. Eek, but that doesn't sound fun, or easy, hey.
We had Hebrews 12 in our YouTube service the other day, one of my favourite passages. We didn't get to the last bit, but I've been thinking about it since:
At that time his voice shook the earth; but now he has promised, “Yet once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heaven.” This phrase, “Yet once more,” indicates the removal of what is shaken—that is, created things—so that what cannot be shaken may remain. Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us give thanks, by which we offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe; for indeed our God is a consuming fire." (Hebrews 12:26-29, NRSV)
"So that what cannot be shaken may remain". I'm not suggesting we interpret the pandemic eschatologically! (At least, not any more than any other human happening in time and space). But it seems to me that church – the messy business of being Christ-centred community in the messy midst of history – has to do with "what cannot be shaken". And as we continue to come to terms with the removal of things that we take for granted, perhaps it is a time to re-discover "what remains".
[1] Two excellent books I've read recently (Karen Baker-Fletcher's Dancing With God and Cynthia Crysdale's Embracing Travail) have overlapped around the idea that some people enter the narrative of the crucifixion as 'crucifiers' in need of forgiveness, while others enter it as 'crucified' in need of healing – both of which (forgiveness and healing) are made available in the resurrection. But we are all in some part victim and perpetrator, and it is this discovery (within the embrace of God) that helps to end the cycle of violence resulting from our perpetual projection of evil onto an 'other'.
[2] See, e.g., The Church Proved It Can Get Creative, Let's Not Stop Adapting in 'Christianity Today': "[S]ome disabled churchgoers have remarked how frustrating it is that it took a global crisis for many churches to offer more inclusive and accessible options for their full involvement and participation. [...] This moment invites us to be flexible with how we structure our church meetings for the sake of including more members of Christ’s body."
[3] This is an important theme in womanist theology; see, e.g. Sisters In the Wilderness, by Delores Williams.
[Thumbnail photo cc. by Chris Montgomery on Unsplash.]
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