Healing from the Cracks

You can’t really see the cracks in your belief system until you spill a little ink on them. After that, they become too visible to unsee.

He was telling me about his experience in a particular church and being reared in that faith tradition. “You’re a fish swimming in it,” he said. “It doesn’t occur to you to question the water.”

But then came the covid-19 pandemic. The church made decisions he felt were brash and even harmful, especially to its most vulnerable members, re-gathering for worship services and scoffing at wearing masks mere weeks after the world had gone into isolation for everyone’s safety. Soon thereafter, public cries for racial justice—when George Floyd was killed from a white police officer’s knee on his neck—were met with the church’s silence and inaction, and even some admonishment of peaceful protests and the Black Lives Matter movement.

Was this the Way of Jesus? Was this the Christian faith he and his spouse had given their lives to? “Aren’t we supposed to look out for the least of these? Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly?,” he thought.

From his wife's perspective, it had become too troubling to navigate. In their more evangelical faith tradition, women cannot be leaders. She had always accepted her exclusion from decision-making until now. The patriarchal power structure had damaging effects on the whole body of Christ. She couldn’t unsee the cracks.

Last Sunday, our adult class started a three-week conversational study drawing from Brian McLaren’s book Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned. In that open, hospitable learning space, several of us spoke about faith communities we had been immersed in along our journeys to this point. Doubts, disappointments, and disillusions were shared, pinpointing some of the cracks we could not unsee: anti-semitism, colonialism, prioritizing institutional preservation over helping people, toxic theology, and, in resonance with my friend’s spouse, white patriarchy. As McLaren writes, “A white Christian patriarchal universe is not a safe place for women, children, racial and religious minorities, and nonconformists, and neither is it a safe place for the earth and its nonhuman creatures. After all, in white Christian patriarchal minds, the earth and all its creatures exist for the ‘use and profit’ of white Christians (to recall a toxic phrase from the Doctrine of Discovery).”

Yet, despite the cracks exposed in the Christianity to which so many of us give our lives, there is goodness. As Leonard Cohen sings, “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” And as the apostle Paul writes in his letter to the Romans, “All things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.” Our doubts, disappointments, and disillusions, faced with honesty and vulnerability, can help us heal from the cracks in our belief system’s foundation and see anew how the faith we practice is firmly planted by rivers flowing with justice, mercy, and love, and that it is meant for the healing of this whole world’s brokenness and so much needless pain.

Every time we observe the sacrament of communion, I see people coming forward to receive bread and wine and juice—the Christian elements of life and love—many of whom are healing from the cracks in their religious foundation. I hand a piece of bread to someone who I know decided to leave a church after decades of giving her life to its mission, its beliefs, and its community when the church voted against the ordination of gay people, and the recognition of same-sex marriage. With tears in her eyes and the body of Christ in her hand, she says, “Thank you, Jesus.”

Healing from the cracks can be deeply painful, while also being profoundly joyful. To me, that mysterious paradox is a hallmark of Christianity. It’s what this faith we practice is all about: lamenting the reality of our hurts, and healing from them together as we walk toward new life.

Someone gave a testimony last Sunday from the pulpit where they said, “You are a congregation that is committed to following Christ, which means nothing more or less than you are a congregation committed to caring for one another, and to caring for all of God’s children, wherever and whoever they are. Every Sunday morning when I look over our congregation, I see people who are hurting, some of whom have been hurt by the church of all things. And that grieves me so much. But I also see people who are loving each other through that hurt and that pain. I see the wounded caring for the wounded. To me, that is a taste of heaven.”

Many of us are healing from cracks, some of which we can’t fully see, but we still feel them in our inmost being. Those doubts, disappointments, and disillusions are invitations for us to love one another as Christ loves us; because helping each other in our healing from the cracks is a glimpse of the very thing we pray for when we say in one voice, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”