I am deliberately writing this week’s edition while watching “Succession,” so I think I’ll be able to skip the crying. We’ll see!
Today’s Christian Featured Pets of the Day are Shadrach and Romero.
Their human companion, Megan, says: “Shadrach is the large orange tabby. He came to me as a gift from a small church in the eastern mountains of Arizona. I was supply-preaching for them on Pentecost, during the worst wildfire Arizona had ever seen (which was both liturgically appropriate and super-unfortunate, seeing as Pentecost is heavy on the ‘Fire! Wind!’ Imagery). This tiny church was doing their level church-y best in the middle of the emergency, and was coordinating relief efforts with the Red Cross, specifically housing ranch animals, and donating feed for animals that had been dislocated due to the fire. During the service, the woman coordinating these efforts stood up, and announced to the congregation that I was taking home a cat, to widespread applause and cheers—and to my total surprise. But so it was—as soon as the lady brought the cat over to me, Shadrach leapt out of the carrier, climbed up into my lap, and began to purr.”
”Shadrach’s main hobbies include lounging, sleeping, chasing one stuffed blue ball (not any other toys—just this single one), and keeping the rest of the household in line. When he wants attention, he muscles his way into your face, and purrs emphatically until you pet him. He rules over all things, and is not afraid to let you know it.”
“Romero is the brown, white, and black tabby, and is about a year old. I adopted him from the local cat rescue, and he promptly fell deeply in love with Shadrach. Like his namesake, he has absolutely no regard for his personal safety, and literally has his heart on his sleeve (he has stripes that form a heart on his shoulder.). He also refuses to play with nearly all the fancy cat toys I buy him, choosing instead to play with the studs that hold my clerical collar together, and any piece of plastic trash he can locate (his sense of preferential option is strong.) He adores Shadrach, and Snoop, my husband’s dog, and spends long hours grooming the both of them. He did enjoy swiping the baby Jesus from the crèche display at Christmas, but I choose to think this was to show his devotion, rather than for nefarious purposes.”
Thank you, Megan, for sharing these darling cats with us.
Because you loved the Rev. Jordan so much, I wanted to make sure to take the time to feature a lot of various Christian stories going forward, so I reached out to my obscenely talented friend, R. Eric Thomas, who has a new book of essays coming out later this year, called “Here For It: How To Save Your Soul In America.” Not only did he write this lovely and moving thing for us, he also gave us (at my request) a reading list for Christians who would like to learn about some different perspectives:
So, there I am, a black, queer, cis Christian man, standing in a Presbyterian church on the Sunday before Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, holding hands in a circle with the rest of the largely white congregation as we sing “We Shall Overcome.” I look to my left: a Caucasian! I look to my right: Another! And I think to myself, Who is this “we” we’re talking about here? Which feels un-Christianly. And maybe... racist???
I have never not identified as a Christian. I was raised in an all-black Baptist church and accepted Jesus as my savior when I was 3. Writing that, even in a forum like this which is objectively pro-Jesus, I feel defensive. How could I have known what I was doing? (First answer: I was smart for my age, the Lord works in mysterious ways, etc.; second answer: I couldn’t have known what I was doing but whomst amongst us ever does? This is salvation of the soul we’re talking about. It is impossible to understand, like the rules of the McDonald’s Monopoly game.) I sometimes wish that I could go back to the place of open-hearted, full-throated belief. As I grew older, I began to have questions about a lot of my church’s more conservative practices--questions that were welcomed and nurtured by my parents but not by church leadership. I also privately wondered why there seemed to be such a clear connection between my black church’s understanding of ourselves as sinners and the sufferings we endured that, to my mind, seemed institutional and tied to race and class. We never talked about it but as I grew older, I felt like it was impossible to separate what believing in Christ is from what being a Christian in America is. And for me that was wrapped up in race and history of Christianity being misused to reinforce white supremacy. When we sang “We Shall Overcome” at another, more liberal church years later, what exactly were we hoping to overcome?
I feel like a bad Christian a lot because my faith requires that I have questions, which seems antithetical to faith. But that’s where I am. And that’s how I found myself inside a church that had once split in two in a bitter dispute about abolition, singing a Civil Rights anthem and wondering what I was doing.
Do I believe more or less at 38 than I did at three-years-old? Do I believe more or less now than I did 5 years ago on MLK Sunday? Will I believe more in the future? If political outlooks change or the waters rise? I don’t know the answers and though I desperately want them, I’ve found that questions and doubts are integral to my faith journey. I mean, even the Disciples were sometimes like, “Uh, quick question: what?” I’ve found congregations where those doubts are welcomed, including my husband’s (oh, I’m now married to a white pastor; talk about burying the lede!) And I’ve been introduced to a wealth of books and writings from theologians and fellow travelers who have wrestled with the same questions. Here’s a couple of texts that continue to be helpful to me. Many of the authors don’t agree with each other, but maybe they shouldn’t.
Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk by womanist scholars Delores S. Williams and Katie G. Cannon
God of the Oppressed by James H. Cone, leading advocate for black liberation theology
Disunity in Christ: Uncovering the Hidden Forces that Keep Us Apart by Christena Cleveland, about structural racism in the church
Roadmap to Reconciliation: Moving Communities into Unity, Wholeness and Justice by Brenda Salter McNeil, Eugene Cho, and J. Derek McNeil
Gracism: The Art of Inclusion by David Anderson, pastor of the multicultural, progressive church my parents now attend.
Thank you so much, Eric. You are always a gift to me.
We have a very serious prayer intention today, which I would encourage anyone who finds eating disorders, suicide, or self-harm triggering to skip. We’ll see you later on.
Our reader’s sister was diagnosed with anorexia at the beginning of last year, at-home treatment is not going well, and hospitalization is looking more and more likely.
Via our reader:
Through the course of her treatment, she has also been diagnosed with autism. This has been really helpful in terms of understanding who she is, how she processes things and why she responds to certain things in ways that we, as her family, haven’t always understood. As it turns out, autism over-indexes among anorexia patients.
She is in a really terrible place. She had made considerable progress physically – managing to get up to a ‘healthy’ weight, just about – but the recovery just wasn’t there mentally, and now she is really backsliding. She is losing more and more weight, and she has incredibly distressing meltdowns, which she is on medication to diminish. She frequently expresses suicidal impulses, will bang her head repeatedly against the wall, leave the house with no shoes, phone or keys... It goes on.”
In amongst all of this, my mum is dealing with it pretty much solo. My dad is a church minister and very often at work, and I live in another part of the country. My sister’s decline coincided with/was at least somewhat triggered by a move to a different area last year, for my dad’s new job, so they don’t have any family or friends in their immediate neighbourhood.
Last year, Mum took 4 months’ unpaid leave to care for my sister full time. That wasn’t sustainable (keeping a family of three afloat on just a church minister’s salary isn’t easy). She’s back at work part time now, but she is still by far the primary carer for my sister. (My sister and I both have complex relationships with our dad, which is a whole other email...) All of this is so tough on her – caring for a severely mentally ill person with limited support. Plus, she has her own issues with food, which have particularly surfaced over the last year, meaning she is now on a waiting list for treatment for anorexia herself (although she is not in a crisis state like my sister).
(It is worth saying that we live in the UK, and the treatment and support we have all received from the NHS throughout all of this has been truly amazing. We are very lucky in that respect. But still. They’re overstretched, and so much of the caring is left to those at home.)
Basically, this is just an email to say that it’s all a total clusterfuck. Everyone involved is deeply sad and in immense pain, and it is difficult to see any hope in it all. I am so worried about my sister and I am so worried about my mum. I would be so grateful if you would pray. I’m in a bit of a (very) distant phase with God at the moment, but I am doing my best to believe and practise through it. This whole situation frequently feels entirely hopeless. Academically, I know that it isn’t. I think I believe that God sees it and cries with us and is working. But it’s just so hard to know it in any way that feels real.
Let’s take a moment to hold our reader and her family in our hearts and our prayers: for relief, for resources, for help, and for grace.
Our second prayer request of the day is also a difficult one:
I honestly didn’t know who to come to with this. I’m going to have to come up with some variation of “personal prayer request” for my friends but I wanted someone to know.
We had been very close, I thought, but I just found out my (evangelical) sister has betrayed my confidence on a number of occasions to my evangelical parents; notably, she told them I was dating my partner, who is an atheist, before I was ready to tell them, and most terribly, she outed my partner as bisexual to my parents, a fact I had mentioned in passing about my friend before we were in fact dating and long before I ever imagined they would ever meet. He’s not even out to his parents.
I told my partner and he has been sweet to me but very upset and traumatized.
I feel awful. I feel I’ve endangered my relationship with my partner and that my family has demonstrated that they are unsafe for him. He doesn’t trust them, especially my sister, and I don’t blame him. He doesn’t want her to visit us, and I understand, but I wish it wasn’t that way.
I do enjoy spending time with my family and I hold out hope that getting to know people who are different from them will help them become more understanding, but I’m very hurt and I feel my sense of family has been chipped away at.
This is a request for both prayer and money, from a trusted reader:
My friend Tom is the national director of the Universal Coalition of Affirming Africans - Uganda (UCAA-UG), a group dedicated to LGBTI inclusion in the Christian church in Uganda. A few months ago, UCAA-UG's offices were broken into and much of their equipment stolen. They've been able to rebuild security since then, but this week has been brutal: an ex-gay group petitioned the Speaker of Parliament to re-table major anti-homosexuality laws, and the Archbishop of the Church of Uganda today released a statement that "We rather go to heaven poor than going to hell with a lot of money [from LGBTI donors]."
Overall a shitty time for Tom and his colleagues, and for the queer community in Uganda in general. I don't know if you'd be willing to share any of this, or if you'd like to see more documents from UCAA-UG (Tom has shared the strategic plan with me), or if this is just an ask to broaden the net of prayer around queer Ugandans.
This poem by Franz Wright has been exceptionally powerful to one of our readers, and I hope it is to you as well:
The forgiveness! I know it
will be freely offered
or it won't, and that is all --
and no one may bestow it
on himself.
If it is to come
it will come of itself like a separate
being,
a mystery, working
unseen as a wind causes still
leaves or water to move once again.
And hide me in the shadow of Your wings.
Let the heart be moved again.
Henri Nouwen, a saint we lost too soon, has a beautiful slim book called The Inner Voice of Love, which, being fragmented, can be read through or dipped into at any moment.
It’s especially powerful when you understand the context in which it was written, as his publisher gives us here:
This is Henri Nouwen’s "secret journal." It was written during the most difficult period of his life, when he suddenly lost his self-esteem, his energy to live and work, his sense of being loved, even his hope in God. Although he experienced excruciating anguish and despair, he was still able to keep a journal in which he wrote a spiritual imperative to himself each day that emerged from his conversations with friends and supporters.
For more than eight years, Henri Nouwen felt that what he wrote was too raw and private to share with others. Instead, he published The Return of the Prodigal Son, in which he expressed some of the insights gained during his mental and spiritual crisis. But then friends asked him, "Why keep your anguish hidden from the many people who have been nurtured by your writing? Wouldn’t it be of consolation for many to know about the fierce inner battle that lies underneath so many of your spiritual insights?"
This is the excerpt which came to me today:
Give Gratuitously
Your love, insofar as it is from God, is permanent. You can claim the permanence of your love as a gift from God. And you can give that permanent love to others. When others stop loving you, you do not have to stop loving them. On a human level, changes might be necessary, but on the level of the divine, you can remain faithful to your love.
One day you will be free to give gratuitous love, a love that does not ask for anything in return. One day also you will be free to receive gratuitous love. Often love is offered to you, but you do not recognize it. You discard it because you are fixed on receiving it from the same person to whom you gave it.
The great paradox of love is that precisely when you have claimed yourself as God’s beloved child, have set boundaries to your love, and thus contained your needs, you begin to grow into the freedom to give gratuitously.
On days when I do not know if God loves me, I know that Henri Nouwen loves me, and he’s dead, and I carry on.
This may not seem appropriate, but it does reflect the intersection of my belief in God and also my love for possession movies, so please read the thread:
I love you, and Jesus loves you. Where are you at today?
I’ve been job searching (and would appreciate everyone’s prayers) and cover letters are the bane of my exist (seriously in need of prayers) and yesterday I applied for a faith based job and got to write my cover blurb talking about Jesus and quoting scripture and it was such a fun twist from the other million cover letters!
If you become possessed I think someone should gently comfort you, but it also could be a SMIDGE your fault because of collecting cursed objects on sale