What happens?

The day after I gave birth to Sarah Katherine, I remember standing at the window of the hospital room, looking out at the people walking around and thinking, "do they know my life just totally changed?"  I remember Chris and I snuggled in the hospital bed with our first born and saying to one another, "our world just stopped and totally shifted and yet outside of this room people are going to work and school and running errands like nothing has changed, not knowing that just a few paces away people's lives were changed never to be changed back.  The world fundamentally changed for us; this is huge but outside of this room life just continues in the same way it did 24 hours ago."  I remember feeling like I am different and I will never go back to who I was a few days ago, but no one will know just by looking at me. And I remember feeling like I was frozen in this change and the world going on around me was like watching a movie.  I felt this each and every time I had another child.  I've described this feeling to others and have been told others have had  similar experiences.

I have also felt this at other times n my life--the death of my grandmother, the divorce of my parents..and I'm told by others that they have had this experience--at an engagement, a wedding, a death, a diagnosis.  Although these experiences are often personal, in the church we mark them as a community.  We acknowledge and honor them through the blessing and baptism of a child, a wedding, a funeral, through prayers of the people, healing services, and various other rites.  We bring our individual stories, our stories that shape and form us and unite them to others' stories in the community and ultimately to the story of God.  It is important, and it is powerful.

But that's not how these experiences always happen; they are not always positive and life giving. Sometimes these experiences come with an immense amount of pain, sometimes they come out of nowhere and knock you off the very foundation of your life you believed was solid.  Sometimes these moments come, these life changing shifts come when you least expect them and feel the least capable of managing them.  And then what happens?  What happens when your world changes and you are alone?  What happens when what in the past has been a  feeling an experience of life change that you share becomes an experience of isolation and shame? What happens when this shift becomes a dagger repeatedly and unceasingly stabbing your heart and you're in the dark sobbing, howling, from the depths of your soul, trying to make sense of this new world that has just been forced upon you, and you're alone?  What happens when this experience reaches out and seizes your heart and soul engulfing you in a fear and state of panic that never leaves you and there are only a very few people with whom you can share? What happens when initially the first few minutes that you wake up every morning are some of the only peaceful ones you have because you haven't yet remembered, and then over time even as you begin to adjust to your new normal you never know when the fear and anxiety, the shift, will violently penetrate the life you're trying to begin to live again?  What happens when the church, the very place you have marked every other shift becomes the very place you least want to be?  What happens when you no longer feel safe in the place where you have always sought refuge?  What happens when even thinking about the church illicits feelings of isolation, fear, and shame? What happens when you are in need of comfort and love and support and the comments people in the church have made in the past continually reverberate in your mind like a never ending recording taunting you and daring you to expose yourself, but you know or believe that sharing this will only bring judgement, condemnation, gossip, pity and alienation?  What happens when you begin to doubt the church you have seen rise to so many occasions and help those in need because it is the ordinary days, the casual conversations that happen in church that in your pain you remember?  What happens when it is those memories, the memories of comments carelessly made, when it is in those offhand minor innocent comments through which you are suddenly and acutely aware of the attitude of intolerance, judgement, and self righteousness hidden just below the surface?  What happens when you realize you may even have uttered some of them?

As I was thinking about all of that, praying about it all, I remembered a question that was in the Ask the Clergy box this past weekend at Spring Gathering.  It said, "Does God disown gay people?" (that was the question, but any thing can be placed after 'Does God disown____________')  I immediately and solidly and probably fiercely said, "Absolutely not.  God doesn't disown anyone--no one; God loves everyone, no exceptions."  I believe that--no experience, no life changing moment can ever topple me from that foundation regardless of inane comments people in the church make.  But this morning I'm left with this question, God disowns no one, but knowingly or not, does the church?  I'm afraid that may be the answer to the "what happens?"  and this challenges me, and I hope it challenges the church, but today, today I am just sad.