letter to a sister healer

(I’ve been working on letters to friends and composites of friends who’s conversations, stories and life I’ve found meaningful.  This will (hopefully) be the first in a series of these letters that I post here.  Apologies for the length- I know that this is way too long to be a blog post.  Think of it more as an essay that I just happened to have posted to my blog, for lack of a better venue.)

Dear Soul,

Henri Nouwen began “Life of the Beloved” in this way:  “All I want to say to you is, ‘You are the Beloved.’”

You spend so much of your time, your energy, your life bringing that message to people who do not feel themselves to be beloved.  The lost.  The hopeless.  The forgotten.  So many times you have reminded me that I, too, am beloved.  I feel this message at the very heart of your life as a Christian and as a Human. In a way it seems odd to remind you (of all people) of such a very basic fact.

But in a much truer way, it is painfully familiar.

I think part of it– a large part of it– is tied up in our lives as women.  We are not comfortable being the comforted.  We are taught from such a young age to be mothers, to care for people whose burdens are seen as greater and more significant than our own.  We are not– we are told– the ones who suffer the cross.  We are the ones who weep at the foot of the cross.  And so our pain is less, complementary, secondary.

I’m sure that these words make you cringe.  You and I like to think that we are beyond the old, patriarchal church.  But, if you are anything like me, you know that this internalized pain can be very hard to unlearn.

I, myself, know that even as I claim my belovedness with words, I still find ways to deny it with my actions.  It is so easy to champion the cause of women’s empowerment and feel-good spiritual love-fests, while secretly thinking I am talking about “other women’s” value, significance and belovedness.  I still face the ever-present voices that dismiss my depression, my weakness, my pain, as “silliness” as they demand that I get on to caring for others.

This is why I feel the urgent need to tell you that your pain is real and significant, even as I dismiss my own.  Because in hearing you express so honestly your own fears and pain that day, I caught a glimpse of my own pain and it became clear that any words that I could say to comfort you were also needed by me just as urgently.  Again, through our friendship I am reminded of this miracle called Eucharist, which is to say that our salvation is all tied up in one another.  That in trying to be some small comfort for you, I am able to find the tools for my own liberation.

So I will tell us both: salvation was meant for our problems, too.

I think of that woman who Jesus cured from– what is delicately called—hemorrhaging. It’s a miracle itself that such a story would even make it into three of the four gospels.  Even now our scholars and priests can’t talk about menstruation without using bizarre euphemisms.

Anyway, after speaking with you I find myself thinking of her more often.  This nameless, forgotten woman who stole a moment with Jesus in between his attending to Bigger And More Important People.  I can’t help but imagine her there, watching Jesus cast a legion out of a possessed man and into suicidal swine.  I see her watching him go off to raise wealthy Jarius’ daughter from the dead (funny how we know Jarius’ name, but not the name of his daughter, as if the miracle were more about salvaging his property than saving her life).  I imagine that as she saw Jesus attending to all of these Very Important Problems for these Very Important Men she felt so incredibly ashamed of her illness.  I imagine her wishing that she, too, could be possessed, or dying, or have a dying child.  Why oh why did God curse her with this embarrassing, shameful, silly blood?

I imagine that’s why she couldn’t find the words to ask Jesus to heal her.  I imagine that’s why she just reached out and grabbed his cloak, hoping not to be noticed.

I have come to think of her as the Patron Saint of Embarrassing Problems.  I suspect that she made it into the bible (three times!) because all of those scholars and bishops knew that she held a very important biblical truth, even if it was one that they couldn’t name.  And I think that the truth is this:

Embarrassing problems, problems that can be trivialized and mocked, are the most dangerous kind of problems.  These problems without names are killing us.  They might be the most deadly problems on earth.  They kill us with AIDS.  They kill us with suicide, and domestic violence, and addiction and even when they miraculously don’t kill our bodies they always (absolutely always) kill our souls.

And if these embarrassing problems, these problems we lack words for, are our most deadly problems then they are of the most concern to our God.  We were given a God born in an embarrassing manger to an embarrassingly unwed mother and who died on an embarrassing cross.  The Patron Saint of Embarrassing Problems wants to tell us that if this God thought that her problem was real enough to be addressed then none of our problems are too silly.  Because Jesus came to save us from everything that’s killing us.  Not just War and Racism and Capitalism, but from those lowercase, personal, embarrassing violences, too.

The truth is this: our problems will always seem embarrassing.  These men who tell us that women’s ordination must wait until we’ve put an end to nuclear weapons, these priests that tell us that queer issues are too controversial for our parishes, will always tell us that our problems are silly, insignificant and less.  They were doing it 2,000 years ago and they’re doing it today.  And they rely on us to uphold this myth that Christ is being killed in the battlefields, but not in the bedroom.  So, they tell us not to be selfish.  They tell us to think of others first.  They remind us of our role at the foot of the cross.

Which is why this claiming of our pain is the most radical, the most Christian thing that we can do.  We have to take back God from those who would paint God in their own images, but who would reject a God that looks like us.  We have to stand on the shoulders of The Patron Saint of Embarrassing Problems, and we need to reach even farther than she did.  We need to be the ones who are brave enough to name our pain aloud and unashamed.  We need to do this as citizens of a new, Upsidedown Kin(g)dom where the last are first and shame has been banished.  We need to do this for each other.  We need to do this for ourselves.

In continued love and admiration,

Christine

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