by Dixcy Bosley-Smith
About a year ago I had a spiritual crisis. A wilderness experience right in the middle of the GOP debate on religion and reproductive rights. It was related to a very special invitation to accompany an elderly friend to an event honoring him. Strangely enough, this great privilege thrust me into a place where I felt very alone. As a helplessly pathetic extrovert, I don’t do loneliness well.
Don had been my spiritual director and sponsor for entering membership in The Church of the Saviour, as well as “maid of honor” at my wedding. How could I say no despite my fear of unfamiliar, different-kind-of-Christian gatherings? Off we flew. I clung to Don through the fancy steak dinners, the worship services, the photo shoots, the financial reports in the expansive board room, the conversations full of salvation language. It was a kind of physical and spiritual clinging to this one man who for me has represented a resurrected spirit—a faithful servant—a person through whom Christ appears.
I had met Don while I was in nursing school in Lynchburg, VA. I came to DC, and a few months after working at GW Medical Center during the terrifying start of the AIDS crisis, it was God’s design that I would reconnect with Don as we shared a mutual call to accompany persons living with this modern day leprosy. Those years of shared call were holy years, when meeting Jesus face to face was not a rare or random event but a predictable, daily epiphany. We wanted to pioneer a new way of being love against a very toxic social and religious message of hate. The AIDS mission group came into being. We knew as a community of faith that it was not just the person who had the disease; the parents, the community and the Church also were infected with a debilitating and fatal virus called FEAR.
So now, fast forward 25 years. Don was going to be honored as the founder of a pretty well-known organization, world-renowned in Christian circles, and he wondered if I could accompany him because of his own diminishing state at 88 years old. We were boarding the plane when I said to a line of businessmen waiting to board, “Excuse me, everyone, this is the founder of [name of organization],” and no kidding, five men shared stories on the spot!
What was his dream in 1954? Don was moved by the spiritual and radical courage of Branch Rickey, the manager for the Brooklyn Dodgers, who broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball by hiring Jackie Robinson. Don became friends with Branch Rickey and admired the way he used his position of power to change lives, create unity and ultimately help build the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. What if others with influence used their fame and fortune to serve God and create a better world?
I celebrate that this organization was created with the intention of channeling status and power into a commitment to serve God, but I regret that the current focus seems to be more on personal morals and individual salvation rather than on radical, costly social change. Maybe my crisis came from being reminded that “getting saved” means such different things to different people. Maybe it was the conversation at dinner one night when a woman told me she also had worked with AIDS in the 1980s, that her brother had “participated in that perverse behavior” and how she made him repent and come to Jesus before he died. At which point I took a deep breath, and then another, and inserted that I suspect her gay brother came to Jesus simply because he experienced Christ’s loving care for him through her.
This is getting serious. It’s time for a joke:
“Did you hear about the time Jesus and Satan were at their computers, writing reports, doing spreadsheets, when suddenly lightning flashed, thunder rolled, and the power went off? When it came back on, Satan bowed his head and wept because his computer had lost everything, but Jesus had no problems because Jesus saves.”
The very next morning after getting home, I walked the kids and dogs to school, and then I literally bolted to the Potter’s House, went right to the kitchen, sat down and unloaded my emotions to Mary and Joe. Then I heard there was a meeting upstairs at Becoming Church, and I didn’t care who or why folks were meeting; I knew I would be welcomed. I snuck in, sat, listened and wept. My tears related to that lonely space I felt with the idea of not being able to accept another path to understanding God.
When I consider the Church (big C) today—the rules, the performance, the dogma, the “are you in or are you out” exclusivity—the religiosity seems completely counter to the simple “invasion of the Holy Spirit” that the disciples experienced in the Upper Room. It was an invasion of love, an invasion of knowing and being known, an invasion of peace—a peace that empowered them to spread this radical message of love in a very violent world.
What a cool guy Jesus is. His love invades and occupies people’s hearts.
For a Servant Leadership School class, Kayla asked us to read Barbara Brown Taylor’s book, An Altar in the World, about how to find meaningful ways to discover the sacred revelations of God. An image that spoke a loud YES to me was this:
“Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars.”
Some of my closest adult friends are atheists. Why do I hang out with them? Why do they hang out with me, a person of faith? Maybe it is the risen and present vision of Christ I see in each of them. Their lack of seeing does not threaten my faith. If anything, I think I am too lazy to be an atheist. It takes a lot of work NOT to believe in God. It would be like trying not to breathe, trying not to know something you know. Not to believe in God is like trying not to love someone you love.
God’s Spirit is in the everyday sacred. Indeed God’s very breath is all around us. As the poet Kabir has said, “He is the breath inside the breath.”
Dixcy Bosley-Smith is a community member of Eighth Day Faith Community.
