The Performance

Last winter, I chased a pair of evangelizing men off my porch. Not literally. Not broom in hand, flailing back and forth, but with firm words, I let them know their visits were no longer welcome. One of the men had graced my porch multiple times, always bringing some new face along to show them the way. Each time their silver sedan came to a careful stop on our driveway, I had opened my front door, chatted a while, and taken their pamphlets. This final time, though, I wanted to know how welcomed I would really be inside their house of worship.

“I do have a question for you. Do women hold leadership positions in your church?” I had asked after the polite exchange of familiar greetings.

“Oh yes! Of course!” came the quick reply.

“That’s great. Like what?”

“Oh, well, women are instrumental in teaching our children through Sunday school.”

“And what about the larger congregation? Can women teach from the pulpit?”

“Oh, well, no. The Bible is very clear about that,” he said with a smile. “You know the Bible says that men are to be the spiritual heads of the church and the household.”

This set off a Q&A period that is not worth revisiting, after which I let the men know their efforts to convert our family would be hopeless. Our home did not fit inside their gender hierarchy, and we would not be worshiping any version of God who perpetuated this nonsense either. There was no need for them to waste their time on my doorstep.

About a week later, a letter arrived, hand-addressed to (big surprise) my husband. Inside, there was a plea to him that while the world was turning evil, he could still save his family. He was then encouraged to contact the phone number scratched out in an aging man’s shaky cursive.

I am so tired of these weak and fearful men. What a pitiful existence it must be working every day to ensure some pecking order you were promised by the insecure men who came before you. That is not power; that is performance, and I will not sit for it any longer, nor will I allow my boys to ingest this false superiority and entitlement.

I grew up going to church most Sundays, perched next to my parents in some non-denominational pew or flipping through hymnals while either of my grandmothers’ bid good morning to their friends at the Methodist church. Every once in a while, my then-devout Aunt might bring me along to her more spirited Sunday morning, and I’d watch as believers spoke in tongues and raised their shaking hands toward the sky. I remember those hours, standing quietly between my aunt and my cousin, one shouting to the rafters, the other looking at his feet. The cries from the congregation would grow louder, as I watched the second hand on the clock slow to a stop. Still, always the shy one, I rarely took the invitation to join the other children at their story time, preferring the eventual sermon (and near invisibility) I found inside the adult congregation.

And I was always listening, to the prayers and anthems, but most importantly, the words pouring down from the pulpit. Those words stuck, instilling fear and loads of shame, but, at the same time, an undeniable love that has never left me. I have seen this love arrive in the most surprising and yet utterly predetermined ways – through full moons and feathered signs, via perfectly timed sermons and the women I’ve met at the coffee hour that followed, through jobs never taken, foreign roads taken instead, and in the faces of children I have been meant to mother since before this Earth took shape. This love has followed me from those words spoken by aged men, through the deaths of the grandmothers I sat beside all those Sunday mornings, and into this time as I watch the church betray itself and that very love that was sparked all those years ago.

All of that danger we were raised to fear, all of that evil lurking outside those blessed walls, it turns out that was the love all along. That current of ever-present, ever-expanding love moves and breathes inside of me. It lives more inside of the trees than any building those trees might be felled and sanded and stained to make, and until the church allows that love to flow as it will instead of bottling it up and branding it for profit and power, I cannot go back. This life force, this God, cannot be contained in a book or a building or the mouths of men. This God will not be used to oppress or control or diminish one love over another or entire populations of people over one single president.

I am the dangerous one now. I am the one those sermons told me to fear. It is dangerous in this America to love your neighbor, to extend grace and compassion, to place your body in front of that neighbor while bullets rip through your back. It is dangerous in this America to love people without proof they are worthy of it. We are all worthy of it. My son has learned this lesson early as a fellow student has been trying out his own brand of growing evangelism in their middle school classroom. He has, of course, chosen my child as his training doll.

“He keeps telling me that if I’m not a Christian, I’m gonna go to hell. Why would he believe in a God that would send somebody to hell for not believing the same exact thing they do? And why would I want to go to a church where they think that?”

It was the exact question that had stopped me halfway to the car one Easter Sunday, the same question that has kept me from attending church ever since that morning when I realized I couldn’t lie to my children the same way I had always lied to myself. The God they were selling was too small, too narrow. I want the big, wide open, all-around-us God that I was shown through the people inside of those churches and outside in the “secular” streets. The one that lives in the lakes and the rocks and every single face I meet, in the brilliance of my children and the sacredness of myself.

That morning, when I turned back around and told our family to change their clothes, we were going on a hike to the lake instead, I knew I couldn’t lie any longer. In those coming days, when my kids inevitably looked me in the eye and asked me to explain:

“Why does God value men over women?”

“Why would God bless a country for funding bombs that incinerate children?”

“Why wouldn’t God want everybody to be safe and fed?”

“Why would God send someone to hell for believing in God their entire life, but, like, not the ‘right’ God?”

I would tell them, “That’s not God. That’s people playing God.” That’s the performance.

Ashley, Woman of a Certain Rage