Losing My Soul

Content warning: suicidal thoughts, self harm, homophobia

I sat in my office yesterday with my phone in my hand, a little drained from having paid our second power bill of the winter season. This woman had called the church as a last-ditch option, having tried getting help from a few other agencies and being denied for complicated reasons. I met her at Wal-Mart to get the power bill from her as she went into work and she said, “I’d hug you, but I’d spend half my shift crying.”

I know the look she had on her face. I’ve had it myself. It’s a look that reaches down into the rest of your body and makes you rigid and brittle. It’s that “holding it together” look, the one that comes from convincing yourself that you have to make it through today without falling apart. I had that look on my face for most of seminary and I just had myself to care for. I can’t imagine being a single mom working a full-time job trying to care for a son and yourself and still finding that your funds are coming up short. I know the look but I can’t imagine her life.

Back in my office chair, having just got off the phone with the power company, I thought about the sermon I preached a few weeks ago about Zacchaeus, about how after talking to Jesus, he poured his wealth back into the community. I called out the Waltons in that sermon, asking what it would be like if they took their combined $200 billion in wealth and gave half of it to the poor and then paid their workers something better than a living wage. What a different world we’d live in, a world where this mother wouldn't have to worry about paying her bills.

I thought about the coats that I needed to sort for our winter clothing drive, the ones we’ll bless on Sunday. I thought about the cans we collected for our food pantry that I had just helped load into the back of a pick-up truck, driven by a volunteer who had himself once needed to use the food pantry while he got back on his feet. I thought about the phone bills we’ve paid, the visits I’ve made, the time I’ve spent just listening to people who need to be listened to. I thought about the meetings upon meetings I’ve sat in to try and start some much-needed literacy and child advocacy and programming. I thought about all that we’re doing and all that we hope to do and I got mad.

So, of course, I took to Twitter. Now, I interact differently with Twitter than maybe others do. Usually, I do a lot of reading, a lot of thinking, a lot of listening to people I might not otherwise get to interact with and a lot of bookmarking resources to learn more. I’ve cultivated a space on Twitter where I can learn and be pushed and while I am guilty of mindlessly scrolling from time to time, more often than not, I leave Twitter with a new piece of wisdom or insight than I had before, rather than leaving with rage and a hardness of heart.

I went to Twitter because my anger was a half-formed thought and I wanted to lay the situation out for others who might not be thinking about it. Because while I could have dragged Wal-Mart and made comments about how religious organizations are subsidizing corporate greed, that wasn’t the point I wanted to make. I was thinking about all the work my church has done, my tiny country church with maybe 20 people in worship on Sunday now that the snowbirds have gone home for the winter, and how the current troubles in the United Methodist Church jeopardize our ministry.

So I talked about all we’ve done over the past few weeks. I talked about how a split in the UMC would damage and maybe even end our ministry. I talked about the rural church as both a band-aid on poverty and the prophetic voice speaking out against the systems that cause and ensconce poverty in this, one of the richest countries in the world. I mourned all the good work that might go undone and I spoke out against those who think things will be fine regardless of what the denomination decides to do. If rural churches close because of what’s decided at the next General Conference (and they really might), we will be depriving rural areas of the only safety net they have left.

Now, I have an interest in the current fight in the UMC over the ordination of clergy in open same-sex relationships. I’m not dismissing the importance of the fight for inclusion and I wanted to make that clear in my thread. So at the turning point of the thread, I said, “It’s not just that what’s happening at the highest levels in the UMC is causing tension in congregations and, more importantly, continuing the spiritual and mental abuse of LGBTQ+ United Methodists, it’s that the ministries of the local church are being damaged.” My point in this thread was not to ignore the depth of the struggle in the currently united Methodist Church, but to witness to another reality on the ground. People will go hungry as a result of our fight. When the body of Christ is divided, it cannot be the hands and feet of Christ in the world.

Someone I didn’t know replied to this tweet. They read the whole thread and agreed that the loss of rural ministries was sad, but that, “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” In essence, they said, all the works of my church didn’t matter if we allowed gay people to continue in their sinful ways, to the detriment of their, the gay people’s, souls.

What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul.

I haven’t replied to this person and I might not ever. Having looked at their page, I can tell they’re quite convinced of their position and while I believe deeply that we have to talk to one another if things are going to get better, it would take a lot out of me to engage in conversation with this person.

Because I could go back to Mark 8, where this verse comes from, and point out that this is the chapter in which Jesus feeds the 5000, heals a blind man, and warns against the yeast of the Pharisees, those who were more concerned with their own righteousness than the well-being of the least of these. I could point out that this verse comes from Jesus’ speech telling his disciples to take up their cross and follow him, meaning that Jesus was telling them to eschew any hopes of a political power or a violent uprising but rather to commit themselves to execution rather than compromising on their love of the poor and their commitment to reforming the corruption of the religious systems around them. I could pull out my list of counter-arguments to each of the verses in the bible that condemn same-sex sexual encounters or make a theological and hermeneutical argument that our God is a God of abundant love, using passages from the New Testament letters that were closest to our founder, John Wesley’s, heart. I’ve done the work. I could lay out my case based primarily on scripture while also incorporating the tradition of the church, using my reason, and incorporating my experience of God, as is our theological task. I was baptized a United Methodist, raised a United Methodist, confirmed a United Methodist, educated in a United Methodist seminary, and I serve as a United Methodist pastor, licensed and appointed by Paul L. Leeland, the bishop of the Western North Carolina Conference. I have the bona fides to engage this argument with integrity.

But I don’t want to do that. Engaging in that way would be a repetition of arguments that have been made in book after book, pamphlet after pamphlet. We might hone our debating skills, but not much would change. And if I owed this stranger on the internet anything at all, other than the respect and dignity that all humans are owed, if I had some relationship with this person, this is how I would engage with them.

What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?

Do you know what it’s like to lose your soul?

Because I do.

I lost my soul when I leaned out my bedroom window and started burning myself with the cigarette that I had, up until that moment, been smoking. It didn’t hurt as I pressed it into the skin of my chest, the skin of my body that caused the men around me to sin with their eyes, even with it covered up. It didn’t hurt because I couldn’t feel anything. I was empty. There was nothing in me. If Jesus had tried to take me up to heaven in that moment, there would have been nothing for him to grab onto. A decade’s worth of shame had sent my soul somewhere else and left me bereft.

I lost my soul when, wrapped up in the arms of the man I love, standing on the rooftop of his apartment building, a thought came into my head that I should break away from him and jump the fence. I saw myself running, climbing the chain link, and falling falling falling until I hit the concrete twenty stories below. For the briefest of moments, that emptiness was back, that utter void within me as my soul fled elsewhere, and I almost did what the thought asked. It is only by some miracle that my arms tightened around my partner’s shoulders and my head buried itself in his chest and it is only by love that he knew to hold me just as tight for as long as I needed it. I can only imagine what thoughts went through his head, what prayers he raised, when my soul left me.

There have been dozens of times before and since when my soul has left me, when I have had to walk around like a whitewashed tomb, caught in the emptiness of the unachievable righteousness that had been taught to me in my youth. My soul, that part of me that connects to our God who is love, would be gone and I would be unable to love God or my neighbor or myself. My soul flees from this body that I was taught to hate and fear because its curves incite adulterous thoughts in others and because it craves physical touch. My soul flees from this body that can never do enough for God. My soul flees from this mind because it is convinced of my worthlessness, my sinfulness, my inability to be saved by Christ who can do all other things.

I am unable to be saved, of course, because I’m unrepentantly bi.

And so, my soul left me again after reading this tweet. My soul stayed gone, departed to wherever it is that she goes when the sin of this world blossoms into shame and self-hatred within me, as I drove home from my office. My soul was nowhere to be seen when I came around a corner on the winding road that leads to my house and realized that it would take no effort at all to let my foot sink onto the gas pedal and relax my grip on the steering wheel and run my car into the concrete barrier in front of me. My soul was already gone. Why bother keeping the rest of myself in this world? There’s no profit in it. All the good I could do doesn’t matter, because God made me with a defect in my sexual orientation that is irredeemable.

Do you know how hard it is to snap out of that? Do you know what a struggle it is to summon your soul back to you after it’s gone? Have you, for a second of your life, had to wrestle with a soul with propensity for flight, a soul that gained its wings because of what your church has taught you? Have you been unable to think, to breathe, to function because your soul has been paralyzed by your church’s, your church’s, decision to declare your God-given existence a sin, to proclaim you unworthy of the ministry you were so clearly designed for? Have you sat night after night carving lines into your thighs to punish your body for existing outside the church’s declared righteousness?

Because I have.

This debate is killing me.

And you’re right. No amount of good works in this world will save me. I could house every person in this world and still, I would lose my soul each and every time I accept into my heart the claim that I am unworthy because of my body and who my body is attracted to.

Because that’s what’s happening inside me every time my soul flees. Through my church, the purity movement taught me that my body was bad and that I was bad because my body was bad. Argue that that wasn’t the intent if you want, it was still the outcome. I have spent so many, many years of my life ashamed of this female body I walk around in, afraid of it, hating it for not being something safer, something less likely to cause sin. My church, my home, the body of believers who first taught me about Jesus, also planted the seed of my worthlessness, a seed that has grown into a terrifying monster of a plant that sucks in all that I have to give it. And now my church, my home, feeds this monster by condemning me in perpetuity for the horrendous sin of being a woman who is attracted to other women. There is no place for my soul to dwell with this monster inside of me.

And every time I have to listen to these lies about my worthiness in Christ, this monster grows. Every time I have to engage with someone whose theology feeds this monster, I lose a little more ground. It does not matter how many times I tell myself that there is nothing in this world that can separate me from the love of God in Christ Jesus, the church has created a flightiness in my soul and I believe the church when it tells me that I am lost and without hope if I remain the way I am.

I don’t know what the solution is. I’m working hard to root out the shame and worthlessness that the church has caused me, but it’s slow work when I’m routinely doused in shame again and again by the church. I’m working hard at my ministry because it’s the only thing I know how to do, even though the next General Conference could take this church from me. And I’m telling my story now because maybe it will reach someone who hasn’t been reached yet and help to change their mind and that feels a little bit like hope. I don’t want to leave my church, my home, but I’m also so, so tired of losing my soul. Because maybe I do agree with this stranger on twitter who reads the Bible the way I used to. Maybe it’s time to leave the church, no matter how much good I’m doing, because the church causes me to lose my soul.

In the meantime, I go back to folding coats and washing clothes for those who need them. I go back to writing sermons full of hope and challenge for people who need both. I go back to reading and watching and listening to things that keep my soul where it belongs, enmeshed with this beautiful body that God made for me, capable of channeling the everlasting love and grace of God into this world that needs it. I go back to developing practices that will keep my soul here with me, where I need it, so that I can do the work that Christ calls us to. I go back being as much like Jesus as I can be, with grace to cover all the rest, grace in the form of people who I love and who love me, just as I am.

And, like a mother praying that she’ll be able to keep the lights on for one more day, I pray to God that this is enough.