It’s hard to talk about your dying marriage when being a Christian is your literal job.
I lamented and buried a dead thing in the midst of a global pandemic for non-pandemic reasons.
Both sentences to say: almost entirely alone. Death inside death—outside gates constructed by those who claim to believe resurrection.
It turns out when you choose the margins sometimes the margins choose and embrace you right back—identities used to exclude added by the minute. (Or at least every month or so.)
I mean this practically, of course. For years I’ve written about the warm welcome and embrace of my neighbors, the ways they have loved me, put up with me, accepted me, taught me. Recently someone asked how I, a middle-class white woman, received my political education. “How did you come to anti-racism and justice work,” they wanted to know. “I got my education on the couches of my neighbors and the streets of my neighborhood,” I told her.
But also, somehow in choosing to stand with the marginalized I have become marginalized myself. Not in the same ways, of course, I am still who I am and carry all the class and race (and many other) privileges that come with me.
I don’t mean to say that committing to solidarity years ago is why my kid ended up behind bars or another is gay or my marriage died—only that the Divine has a mysterious way of drawing us towards themselves/ourselves that, at times painfully, frees us from any sense of control. Showing us a more expansive way of being, a truer more vulnerable kinship.
Somehow when we choose solidarity, we create space to be chosen back. An opening occurs, a crack at first, with potential to turn into a gushing gaping hole in everything we thought we believed—about the Divine, about those we stand with, about wholeness and hope and healing. Scales fall, if you will, and the gushing is sanctuary.
In the act of being chosen there is still choice—this is not a prying open of clenched fists. (I know because mine are regularly clenched.) I don’t believe the Divine pries. It’s just not a consentful path to liberation, and if God is love and love is freedom… then the prying-open-clenched-fists math doesn’t math.
I think perhaps God is an opportunist, seeing the tiny crack under our barely raised pinkie and pulling us outside the circle, where there are no boxes to fit into, no right or “Godly” way of being—only the Divine who could never be contained. Finding Them inside ourselves. Finding Them inside everyone.
I’ve been embraced by those with hope infused in their DNA, those locked outside the church’s doors, those who claim no god but overflow with Love. It is their embrace that has kept me alive in the aloneness of divorce amidst a global pandemic. It is outside gates constructed by those who claim to believe in resurrection where I have been sustained, where the Divine has met me in the embodied souls of others long othered.
Being on the edge of one world means you have a front-row seat to the next one. And it is this location in which I dare hope for something better—for myself, my neighbors, all of us. Mostly I cannot help it. I have been chosen, a chosenness available to all of us, if only we’d step outside our constructed walls of exclusion to experience it.
I wanted to write an essay about solidarity and the margins—how I thought it was a choice. But the lines of what I’ve chosen and what has chosen me are so blurred these days I cannot say for sure. And there are so many things I cannot say for sure. Mostly what I know to be true is that I’d make a really crappy atheist, that I cannot help but see God in the sunset I chase to the river, or the ragamuffin community organizers who fed my family for a month when the bottom dropped out of our lives last summer, or the woman singing to her dog outside Target. I am broken open by the last year, so very close to the end of myself, and it is here where, surprisingly, an old white guy’s words comfort me:
"This is the sacred space where the old world falls apart and a better world is revealed.” Richard Rohr says, and I don’t know, I am apt to believe it.
Book Recs
Unattended Sorrow is the best book on grief I’ve ever read. Nearly every page is dog-eared and underlined.
Heart Talk: Poetic Wisdom for a Better Life by Cleo Wade and What Kind of Woman by Kate Baer were exactly what I needed this month and I might have cried my way through both.
Pod Recs
I’ve had a hard time absorbing podcasts lately, but nearly everything Glennon, Abby, and Sister say is pure gold. I especially felt seen by Eff Perfection: Let’s Rest in the Rubble Together.
adrienne marie brown took all the words from my body and made them better in in case it helps / bell hooks asé.
Listening to Jaiya John’s voice every morning is saving my life.
A second time now, your words are my reality (It’s hard to talk about your dying marriage when being a Christian is your literal job. I lamented and buried a dead thing in the midst of a global pandemic for non-pandemic reasons).
Thanks for sharing your story with the world.