In the spring of 2021, I began having mystical, healing experiences that radically transformed how I understand myself, the world around me and God. These encounters with the Divine have influenced everything: how I get dressed in the morning, talk to God, my relationship with Scripture.
Some of these experiences have been nothing short of fantastical. There was the time a raccoon bit me while I meditated in my garden. Or the time Jesus visited me during a Reiki session. More often, though, the reminders of God’s presence come in subtle ways: the swarm of birds that prances around the various feeders in my garden, the tenderness I feel during a vulnerable conversation. Some days the sun shines in a way that catches my eye and reflects to me that even in my dreariest moments, I am light. These moments show me that I am not alone; I am surrounded by a cloud of witnesses cheering me on from beyond and making themselves known whenever I slow down enough to welcome their encouragement.
Each of these healing experiences has offered a glimpse of the eternal in a singular moment. They remind me I am an infinite being having an incarnational experience, and my body is the holy vessel for my Spirit in this time. They have awakened something in me that has been present but dormant all my life. This recognition is lovely on an esoteric level, but it has been beneficial over these last few months in a rapidly transforming geopolitical landscape. These mystical encounters have helped me remain calm and clear in who I am, even while I continue to hear debates over my personhood as a trans and nonbinary person.
…we are all manifestations of the divine imagination, children of a beloved Source and Creator of all that is. At the core of our physical and spiritual selves alike, we are connected. We are one.
My healing experiences over the last few years have underscored our interdependence as part of creation and, at the same time, our oneness in God. We are connectional beings made of water and earth, bound to this creation and one another on a cellular level. Even deeper, we are all manifestations of the divine imagination, children of a beloved Source and Creator of all that is. At the core of our physical and spiritual selves alike, we are connected. We are one.
Together, yet alone
We are all one, but we are lonelier than ever. Despite the guise of connection offered through social media, people are living increasingly isolated lives, lost in a dream of separation where we do not know our neighbors, and we do not know ourselves. Rates of loneliness have skyrocketed from pre-pandemic levels, leading to increases in dementia, heart disease, stroke and premature death, among other things. Although COVID-19 spotlighted our disconnection, we didn’t arrive here overnight. We’ve been moving toward this moment for centuries as White supremacy, settler colonialism and theocratic imperialism have worked together to spread the disease of isolation, leading to the epidemic of loneliness we now find ourselves in.
Now more than ever, people need spaces where they are seen and affirmed. We need spaces to connect beyond the surface. We need to grapple with profound questions and navigate conflict, knowing we are held and supported by a community that will show up for us. As we witness institutions crumbling around us, we need localized networks of support and healing. Ideally, faith communities would serve as the hubs of connection we need right now. However, the reality is that most people today either don’t feel safe attending church or don’t see its relevance in daily life.
This time of transformation is unparalleled in our recorded history. We are watching on a global scale as institutions crumble — institutions that have defined who we are and how we live in relation with one another. This transformation is happening in virtually every sector of the world, including the institutional church. By the institutional church, I mean the entity established in 325 CE at the Council of Nicea, along with all its denominational iterations. This institutional church is distinct from the church universal, the body of Christ, which connects us with the truth of our collective oneness in God. It is eternal, bound by neither time nor space. No institution can hold our oneness; no definition can adequately name it. Everyone has access to it because it is in everything. Our oneness is always here for those who have eyes to see it.
This time of transformation is unparalleled in our recorded history.
The institutional church
The body of Christ has been present within the institution’s history, of course, but has often thrived despite that fact, more than because of it. Because of Christianity’s relationship with imperial power, the history of the institutional church can be traced following the tension between the living Spirit, which enlivens us to embody the way of being that Jesus modeled and to foster the structure that seeks to maintain that way of being through right beliefs and practices.
Often in conversations within the institutional church, we become stuck in a scarcity mindset. We see shrinking attendance and finances — and despite every bit of research telling us no magic button will turn this ship around, we continue to look for such a button. Either we try new programs that simply regurgitate the old ones, or we ignore the reality of the situation altogether, telling ourselves that things will rebound and the church will once again shine. We seldom stop to reflect, honestly, that at no time in history has this institution shone without simultaneously casting a shadow of exploitation, genocide and greed. We get so caught up in trying to fix things that we never stop to ask whether this institution is actually contributing to our current loneliness and despair, and whether its crumbling is a necessary step in birthing something more aligned with what Jesus called us to be.
When I think of the institutional church, I think of the rich man in Mark 10. He is earnestly seeking healing when he asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life. The exchange makes clear that he’s a deeply religious man. He has been following all the steps he’s supposed to follow, ensuring the protection of the tradition handed down to him. Yet he is missing something. His question about eternal life tells us that despite his religious devotion, he doesn’t get it. He has eyes, but he cannot see.
Jesus reminds the man of the second half of the Ten Commandments, specifically addressing how to live in right relationship with our neighbor. Wealth has a way of preventing us from living in right relationship with one another. For this man, money and status have buffered the vulnerability usually found in relationships among those forced to the margins by a society and a religious structure more focused on upholding the institution than on embodying love of God, neighbor and self. The rich man’s question illustrates that he can feel there is more to life than the trappings of status, wealth and religious practice. Yet his inability to follow Jesus shows how much power those trappings have over him. The rich man goes away, shocked and grieving.
The scene follows the Markan structure of both a healing story and a call story, but it fails on both accounts. Jesus loves this man. He even invites him to come along as a disciple. Yet because he cannot relinquish his money, the man walks away unhealed and unfree. He has made money and status his idol, wrapped in the veil of religious authority. By all outward appearances, he’s the image of health and pedigree. I doubt he even knows he’s sick.
I think of this man every time I meet with folks wringing their hands, trying to figure out how to “save” the institution. They’re doing everything the tradition has shown them to do. They practice in just the right ways. Some churches have endowments that will far outlast any of their members. Yet something is missing. Worship feels like a closed loop, with each passing year looking much like the one before, albeit with fewer and fewer people in the pews. These well-intentioned folks see shrinking budgets as evidence of failure, rather than as a well of resources that could enable us to build the body that Jesus invites us to enflesh.
Healing from religious trauma
I co-lead a new spiritual community in Richmond, Virginia, called Every Table.
We are a community focused on healing from religious trauma: the ways White supremacy, capitalism and religion have torn us apart. We formed in 2021 as a refuge for queer and trans people who had experienced religious trauma in the Christian church. From the start, we have drawn from the rich history of LGBTQIA+ resilience, which often shines most brightly in the face of rejection by families and faith communities. Queer people know that family is defined not by blood, but by those who show up and take care of you when the rest of the world turns its back.
As we build our community together, I often think about people who lived through the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. They danced, protested and created family together when their families of origin kicked them out. Worship wasn’t reserved for Sunday mornings; it was a way of being embodied in the freedom they claimed by naming who they were. They built systems of care because they knew the existing systems had no room for them. And in the journey, they found life together. They knew that no matter what happened to their bodies, they had claimed their authenticity and lived their truth, and nothing could take that away from them. They faced the certainty of death, and in doing so, they grasped eternal life. They died too young, but they died free.
Queer folks are not the only ones who have learned this, of course. All communities that have been pushed to the margins of society have had to learn to connect with one another on a human level, in ways prevented by capitalism and White supremacy. It’s not that being marginalized leads people to claim their humanity; rather, the systems we’ve established are so dehumanizing that only when we separate ourselves from those systems can we truly experience freedom.
Though not everyone who attends Every Table is queer, we lead from our queerness. We lead from the parts of ourselves we were taught to hide because we could find no space for them in the confines of the institution. We celebrate the individual gifts everyone brings to the table, and we honor the collective leadership among us. We permit ourselves to dream, try new things, fail. We’ve been through enough death and rebirth by now to know our own resilience and trust the voice within us that continues to beckon and encourage us to keep going.
It’s not that being marginalized leads people to claim their humanity; rather, the systems we’ve established are so dehumanizing that only when we separate ourselves from those systems can we truly experience freedom.
The Spirit’s transformative role in healing
The Spirit often moves most extravagantly in times of radical transformation. These kairos moments not only reveal new things about the Divine but also show us who we are, both as individuals and as a collective whole. Jesus came at one such moment, calling out exploitative religious practices and inviting people to see the law in its purest form as he modeled what it means to love God and to love our neighbors as ourselves.
We are living in another moment when the Spirit is doing something new. Along with all of creation, we are being transformed, invited to surrender to the movement of the Spirit as she brings forth new life. This process of death and rebirth is painful and messy, but it is also holy.
The institutional church could learn from those it has marginalized. As we move through this pivotal time in history, we need leadership that can see beyond the defined limits of our current systems. We need courageous practices that embrace the parts of ourselves we have been taught to avoid or to hold with shame. The work is not about diversifying the current landscape, but rather about trusting the vision and the wisdom of those who can see beyond it.
We are living in another moment when the Spirit is doing something new.
What can we do now?
One of the most faithful things the institutional church can do right now is invest its money toward repairing the relationships with those most negatively impacted throughout its history. Jesus tells the rich man that his relationship with money prevents him from healing and following. He’s not shaming or punishing the man. He invites the rich man to see that there is more to life than the trappings of wealth and status, and he encourages the man to experience the abundance of eternal life that is offered not only when we leave these bodies, but also on this side of the grave.
By creating a robust framework for reparations, we are planting seeds of reconciliation in our communities that will bear fruit so sweet that we will taste eternity. So often we talk about fiduciary responsibility in the church. Yet the conversations almost exclusively center upholding the institution rather than repairing the harm it has caused. Giving away our money is an act of surrender that acknowledges the dying institution that has prevented the church from fully embodying its potential. Such surrender also means using the resources we have in order to build something more in line with what Jesus modeled. We don’t know what’s on the other side of this transformation. We do know there will still be a church. By letting go of the thing that has prevented us from healing and instead following the way modeled by Jesus, we meet this moment of transformation, and we claim the power and authority inherent to who we are as children of God.
On a practical level, such transformation could manifest in myriad ways. It could look like a congregation that closes and decides what to do with the property. As part of the process, the congregation deeply examines the church’s connections with slavery and then gives the property (or the money from its sale) to communities descended from those who were enslaved.
This kind of repair could also look like a church with a healthy endowment and robust congregational life that chooses to spend down those funds specifically to support communities affected by the current political landscape. It might look like using financial resources to establish infrastructure that connects more directly with Indigenous people and the land — and supporting the efforts already happening in the community. Such reparations could also fund a queer-led grassroots organizing group that has been leading the neighborhood’s food distribution program for the last few years — rather than starting a whole new food distribution program as a desperate attempt to breathe life into an exhausted congregation. Such transformation looks like funding new ministries that embody expansive ways to live out the Gospel yet are often grossly underfunded.
This work is not for the faint of heart. Neither is this moment. As we claim the courage to move through it, we will experience the healing we desperately desire. We will remember that we are the church and we will feel the living abundance of God moving in and through ourselves, connecting us and all creation. The church will no longer be a place of loneliness and isolation. It will become a way of being that embodies the abundance of God in a whole new way.