Beautiful, Terrible Community*

An intense weekend in congregation land

This week we released a bonus episode of The Sacred, the podcast I host, to keep us going between series. It was what my younger colleagues tell me is an #AMA - ‘Ask me Anything’, and so I had a lovely time responding to questions from listeners. Two key themes emerged, one of which was the difficulty of surrender, and the other, the challenge of community. A listener longed to be part of a spiritual community, but had felt unwelcome and rejected the one time she had tried to visit a church. Another had been hurt by community and didn’t know if it was worth continuing to try and be part of one.

My life is unusually community orientated. By that I don’t mean I am very civically responsible (there is definitely room for improvement there) but that I have chosen to live close up with other people. Firstly, in what I sometimes call a “micro-monastery”, sharing a house with another family alongside my husband and kids. Secondly, by being part of a local congregation, in walking distance from our house, alongside many of our neighbours.

This all make sense. As I wrote about in this series, relationship is my deepest value, the one I want to define my life. I am a communitarian, and believe our need for each other is inescapable and that isolated lives will slowly kill us.

That doesn’t mean it’s easy.

Since I recorded the episode with my encouragements to listeners to persevere in their search, I had forty eight hours which summarised for me this paradox.

Last weekend, my husband and I spent a lot of time, including our Saturday night, in complex, painful conversations. The congregation we belong to is urban, and extremely diverse. We have an even spread of ages from infant to elderly, I would guess twenty mother-tongues, every skin colour you can conceive of. You will find someone who lives in a large, renovated house and works in the city sitting next to someone who hustles in the gig economy and lives in mouldy, insecure social housing, next to several pews of Iranian refugees who are being housed by the council in the Best Western and are not allowed to work at all. One week I prayed with a woman who had come with her wife and child and was attempting to re-engage with church after feeling that it wasn’t safe for her as a queer person. Directly afterwards, I prayed with someone who wanted her son to be released from the ‘spirit of homosexuality.’

This level of difference is rare and extraordinary. It is also tricky. It is a heavy burden for any leader, who is inevitably going to piss someone off every time they open their mouth. It means there have been real and deep wounds inflicted by members of the congregation on each other, some of which aren’t fully healed. Last weekend my husband and I felt we needed to raise some things that were troubling us, but in so doing we knew we might ourselves cause pain. Disagreement is inherently uncomfortable. We can’t help but be triggered, to varying degrees, into fight or flight. The natural response is to feel beleaguered and defensive, or to go on the attack ourselves, finding all the reasons the other person is in the wrong. The temptation to blame and even shame those who (in identity or beliefs or even just temperament and style) are different from us is ever present. I find it requires a huge amount of concentration to resist. Honestly, left to my own devices I would too often just seethe, gossip or disengage.

I’m trying to do those things less, hence our attempt to speak honestly and directly. After those hard conversations, even though they had been healthy and graciously received, I was knackered. I knew that there would be more. Our church, like any that belong to the Church of England - is imminently going to have to face the question of sexuality in a more direct fashion than many have been used to, because of recent decisions by Synod (the governing body of UK Anglicans). There may be trouble ahead. A huge part of me felt like running away from this community, to hunker down with people who agree with me on everything, who see the world from my exact perspective. I know those people don’t really exist (even in our own home) but I’m sure if I tried I could get a good deal closer. I could go somewhere where people do not make theological, political or aesthetic choices I disagree with. Somewhere with better coffee. My community does not adapt to my preferences and is riven with petty annoyances. Honestly, some days, it feels terrible.

Also last weekend, we had a new friend over after church. She currently solo parents two small, delightful, high energy children. As any of you who are single parents will know, it is exhausting, even when you are as skilful and dedicated and loving as this woman is. Because we have more than the usual number of adults in our home, it makes sense to throw her kids in with ours, and they had a great time running around while she was able to get some downtime, falling asleep on our sofa in a quiet corner. I put a blanket over her, and was tempted to kiss her on the head.

One of the myriad community activities our church runs is “dads and lads” (and dads and daughters) camping trips every year. As we gathered round our table for kids tea (pasta, obviously) one of our young visitors asked my husband if he’d take him this year. There was a brief, emotional pause. It was an easy yes. Last year, my husband had witnessed the five godfathers from church of another boy, the adopted, neurodiverse son of a precious friend who also parents solo. He knew the Church Dads, en masse, would show up for this kid too.

This principle, that communities create more capacity for care and can therefore ease the caring burden on us all in the times we need it, goes beyond just parenting. Another member of our congregation is getting married soon, and almost every element is being hand made or baked or sewn by someone in church. When we were skint but needed transport someone up gave us a car, and another time we received an anonymous wedge of cash marked “for therapy” during a mental health crisis. Children’s clothes and baby kit are basically held collectively, circling round and round to whoever needs them. It makes sense on a very deep level, this living in step with others, this ethic of commitment and shared responsibility.

Honestly, some days, community is absolutely beautiful.

Both these things are true. For most of my life I unconsciously thought there was a sort of ledger, with the beautiful and terrible stuff as two lists. Ideally your community would be almost all good, but as long as there was more good than hard you’d be ok. I no longer think that. Often, the hard is also good, in disguise.

It is good for me to part of something that is not personalised. My ego (or what my tradition sometimes calls my flesh) does want to be the centre of the universe, never inconvenienced or irked, but the deepest part of me knows that doesn’t lead to fully aliveness. The centre of the universe is not my proper place, not what humans were made for. Decentreing myself (in healthy, boundaried ways) feels like a relief.

Having to be alongside people different from me is hard, but it is also life giving. There are limits to this - you will know how much you can tolerate, given your own history and identity - but the limit shouldn’t be “anyone I don’t instinctively feel warm towards”. We tend to feel instinctively feel warm towards people who remind us of ourselves, if we’re honest, and that isn’t a very useful boundary. Learning about the lives of the Iranian refugees, and the woman worried about her son, and my queer friend, and the rich banker - is much more interesting. They are fascinating and complex and precious, all of them. I wouldn’t have met some of them anywhere else.

Few of us have been formed to stay with these healthy discomforts. We have received the opposite messages, implicitly and sometimes explicitly. Because you’re worth it. Do it your way. Follow your bliss. Find your tribe. We need a big Why in order to shrug off that messaging, to actively choose community even when it is not giving us the warm and fuzzies. That why will be different depending on your context, but their strong why is the reason religions have often provided the most enduring containers for community. They offer an effective antidote to individualism. “Love each other as I have loved you…because you are part of one body, and you need each other” is a message I need to hear, again and again.

Discerning where the line is between a community that is hard in ways that are healthy for us and one that is actively dysfunctional or harmful is really difficult. I don’t pretend to have the answer to that, a rule that we could apply. I’d be interested in your insights in the comments, as people I suspect have been in and out and round the block on some of this stuff. I just know that despite our intense, exhausting weekend, I need community, terrible, beautiful community, to grow up my soul.

What else I am up to

• I wrote this essay for Comment Magazine about keeping sacred time.

• I appeared in several episodes of Justin Brierley’s new podcast series, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, including this on on Ayaan Hirsi Ali

• I was a guest on the podcast The Longest Day, talking about a very challenging period we experienced in our journey to living in community and what I learned from it.

Image by Vinoth Chander

*I realised after I wrote this that the phrase had been incepted into my mind from the title of Kate Bowler’s new book, Have a Beautiful, Terrible Day! which I have not read yet but if it’s anything like her others will be wonderful.