Leaning Into The Discomfort

I was thoroughly buoyed by my first couple of conversations outside church walls. I had had a great conversation with a sheriff, a county commissioner and a parishioner of mine had started a new ministry as a result of her conversations outside church walls. No doubt about it—I was on a roll. And then it happened. I knew it would eventually.

A neighbor of mine was brutally honest with me about his experience with church.

The church had hurt him deeply. He could barely speak of it. As a man who is queer, he had been hurt. When he was younger, he had come out to a friend. The friend had told someone else and soon, this young person found himself surrounded by Christians who wanted to exorcise the demon out of him. Wanted to pray the gay away.

Just talking about this awful experience brought tears to both of our eyes.

I wanted so badly to say, “My church wouldn’t do that! We have glbt members and clergy.” My intuition however told me to just shut up and listen.

So I did. I listened. I cried. I looked him in the eye. I let silence come and sit with us in the discomfort.

May I ask for your forgiveness? I said after a little bit.

You didn’t do it. He told me. A person that belonged to the same group that I did had hurt him I told him. The least I could do is say, “I’m sorry.” I asked him if I could shake his hand. We did.

I’d like to say that it was a Kodak moment; that everything was tied together perfectly by the end of our conversation, that all was neat and tidy. However the truth is I parted from him with deep sadness and I could tell as he walked away that the conversation was far from resolved. He was still hurting and so was I.

Fear in the church for all too long has trumped grace and love.

Fear that love couldn’t possibly be present in queer people so we better change ‘em to be like us. That’s what one part of the church says. That’s fear trumping love.

And before any of us lgbt inclusive church folk get too smug, fear plays in our circles too.

While anti-gay Christians are out there doing their thing, we sit back complacent and say well, Christians have a bad reputation in our world. I better not let anyone know that I’m one of them too. I might offend someone. So we say nothing. That’s fear trumping love too.

There’s no doubt about it—having these conversations is a risk. That’s probably why must of us don’t want to do it. We’re afraid of what people might tell us or what we might hear or feel.

But here’s the thing: I think we are called to have the hard conversations, to let love trump our own fear and yes, lean into the discomfort that others have caused in OUR name.

And here’s the REAL hard part. If we are courageous to show up and have conversations with people, even uncomfortable painful ones, the real work is to just shut up and listen. Not offer platitudes, or quick fix answers. I can’t tell you how much I wanted to tell my neighbor, but my church would NEVER do that. However, that didn’t matter too much. I would have been saying that for me, not for him.

I don’t know if my neighbor will ever heal from his experience. I don’t know if my apology mattered. What I do know is that I listened. I cried with him. I don’t know what the conversation meant to my neighbor but I will say this: I am changed because of I stood with him in his pain.

Beloved, I hope that as we venture outside church walls and have conversations, we are whole hearted enough, to witness to the painful conversations, compassionate enough to lean into the discomfort and live with it. I hope we can stand in loving solidarity with our neighbors listen, weep and say, I’m sorry.

That’s how love might just win out over fear.

George