Finding Sanctuary Outside of the Sanctuary

How do you respond to bad news?

When tragedy happens, what do you do? What words do you say when someone tells you they saw the person who assaulted them? What do you do when your partner is experiencing intense depression and you can’t help them? Or when your friend’s parent has less than a year to live? What do we do when life is just too heavy?

What do we do when our people are hurting?

People respond in different ways. What is miraculous is how quickly individuals come together in crisis. While it’s unfortunate that it often takes a tragedy for a community to form, there is power in the compassion that everyone has in that unity. There is power in sanctuary.

When we hear the word “sanctuary,” many of us think of the room with wooden benches and stained glass windows in a church, or a nature sanctuary.

sancŸtuŸary \ˈsaŋ(k)-chə-wer-ē\

noun

a place where someone or something is protected or given shelter

the protection that is provided by a safe place

the room inside a church, synagogue, etc., where religious services are held

(Merriam-Webster)

What about sanctuary in people? Think beyond the cinder block walls of worship communities. The buildings would have little meaning if it weren’t for those who fill them. There is sacredness when friends and family members come together, forming a space for those who are hurting to be filled with healing.

When I think about finding safety in community when trauma happens, I also think back to the conversations about how church is changing. What is church when we really get down to it? Looking beyond the building walls, it’s that community of people coming together to provide safety, comfort, shelter, and support.

Recently, I’ve taken to going on walks with a friend of mine. There’s sanctuary in being able to spew out words to another person and not feel judged. That feeling of having another person next to you along your path, literal or figurative, is a motivation and a comfort as you push through the sludge of life.

Can walking outside be a form of church? That’s what church is about, right? Being with another person, or people, as you experience something that’s bigger than yourself. I like to think that church doesn’t just happen in a sanctuary; the feeling of sanctuary can be found in many places, or people. Walking outside, or sitting in church, alone or with someone else, there are multiple ways to feel sanctuary and comfort.

"Un-vogue" to be sad: Depression and the church

This past Sunday, my university hosted a forum discussing the intersections of spirituality and depression. The keynote speaker for the forum was Reverend Dr. Monica A. Coleman. She is an associate professor of theology at Claremont School of Theology in Southern California and she speaks openly about her experiences with bipolar disorder in her blog and lectures.

In her discussion, she reflects on how she’s often felt that it’s  “un-vogue” to be sad in the Christian tradition and that “ we are too blessed to be stressed.” Over time, she has come to realize that God doesn’t need us to be happy all of the time. God gets it because God created us.

To hear that we are theologically created in God’s image with all of our flaws and shortcomings was a relief for me. Dr. Coleman’s words were more than academic for many of us at the forum. It resonated with me as someone who lives with depression and anxiety. In the times that are harder than most, a reflection that said that God is totally cool with how we are, as weird as we are, was needed.

In addition to finding solace in God’s affirmation of us, one of the points that Dr. Coleman brought up was the impact of community. For her, being in community is sustainable and something that brings her out of a depressive state. So how can religion be responsive to those experiencing mental illness?

Community. Remember when I talked about koinonia? As human beings, we have been created in community with other living things. As Rev. Amanda Lunemann, associate pastor at Hamline Church, told me over coffee, “we are not created to be in isolation.” It is not conducive to our already ailing brain chemistries to be isolated. Beyond the rising virtual connections in technology, there is a deep hunger for physical, face-to-face human interaction in spaces that are non-judgmental, often flexible with our schedules, and honest.

As church communities, how do we create those communities? Rev. Ruth MacKenzie of First Universalist Church in Minneapolis argues in her sermon that there are qualities of culture that we need to pay attention to: warmth, respect, beauty, expression, uninterrupted time, honest assessment, kindness, and connection. Demonstrating these qualities will not instantly cure someone of illness. However, it can provide a space where we can heal without judgments.

For Dr. Coleman, a part of creating a culture of welcome involves churches doing a better job of talking about mental health by first recognizing that mental illness is not a lesser form of ailment than physical illness. Churches can demonstrate this by ministering to the wholeness of each person in sermons, mentioning trigger warnings if dealing with more intense topics, and providing safe spaces that allow for tough questions in and outside of church.

An example of the qualities mentioned earlier is seen in churches that talk about mental illness with compassion and sensitivity. We need to talk about mental illness, affirm the human soul, and validate our friends’ and family members’ struggles as just as real as any other. In churches, we can do that in the pulpit, we can do it at coffee hour, and we can do talk about it one-on-one. No matter how it happens, we need to bring to light all levels of suffering.

To say that churches offer no room to talk about mental illness is false and over-generalized. A more accurate claim is that churches need to become better at providing spaces that are mindful of all human experiences, visible and invisible. We can be in dialogue with one another. There’s already a stigma with mental illness and frankly, we need to move beyond our fear of it. In order to rid ourselves of that fear, we must recognize mental health as something just as important as physical health. 

In our connections with one another, we must minister to the wholeness of each other, allow for personal expression, and provide uninterrupted time, warmth, respect, and kindness.

Weird Humans Together in Community, Otherwise Known As "Koinonia"

I had the honor of spending last week with a group of fellow students and one staff person from my school in San Francisco doing service work in areas related to queer and intersecting identities. We stayed in a hostel in the Tenderloin, which is essentially Skid Row of San Francisco. There was overstimulation from a new environment and experiences, but I think one of the hardest things we faced as a group was the overwhelming presence of people experiencing homelessness on our walks to and from the sites we volunteered at.

Having lived in the Twin Cities for the majority of my life, the presence of people experiencing homelessness has been made clear. However, I’ve noticed that we’ve been conditioned to move past the people on the medians holding up cardboard signs with “God Bless” written on with sharpie. We ignore their humanness.

In San Francisco, we learned quickly that in order to cope and grow with the overwhelming presence of people in need of food, shelter, health services, and even the simplest “Hello,” we had to see them as humans. We had to realize that everyone we encountered was a person. We made it a point to ask how their days were going, we listened to their stories, we were pained when they shot us down with profanities.

We prepped meals for and served them to people of different socioeconomic backgrounds, we canvassed for San Francisco Women Against Rape, we cried when we felt we weren’t doing enough, or even too much, we ate food, we cried some more at cat videos, and we had nap puddles. We were outside our comfort zones from the moment we walked from the transit station to the hostel at 12:30 that first night in the Tenderloin to the sleepy moments we left.

All of it was in community with one another. (Even the moments of some dire bathroom emergencies.) Our little community was intentional in our service to not only the nearby neighborhoods, but also to ourselves.

In Greek theology, the term koinonia (koy-no-nee-uh) means communion, Eucharist, to be in community or fellowship with one another.  Koinonia is a key theological term. It isn’t restricted to the walls of a church. It pours out into the streets of the Tenderloin of San Francisco, it happens in the middle of reflections after a long day of manual labor, when we want to curl up into a ball and turn into an introverted gremlin, our people are there with us and they bring koinonia.

As I talk to people about whether or not they think church is a worthwhile institution, I’m finding that the biggest thing people yearn for in terms of worship is a sense of community. And not the kinds that gather together, is silent during worship, mouths the Our Father, and moves on with their daily lives. I mean the kind that moves together, that feel together, that acts together in service, all while simultaneously uplifting one another in our confusion, doubt, frustrations, fears, and heartbreaks. Intentional community.

Koinonia is not a simple thing to create.

Nadia Bolz-Weber explains in her book that as her church House for All Sinners and Saints (HFASS) aged in years, “the lack of growth in church attendance was maddening.” Later, when the congregation grew, she was still frustrated when she found that a large portion of new members were from the ‘burbs, driving into HFASS because it was new and more authentic and cool.

To have a community of weirdo hipsters is awesome because many of us have felt excluded from the normalcy of the world and we finally have place to be ourselves. We create a new kind of normal. The problem that might bring up is the restriction of other people’s “normal.” To be part of a community that has endured being frowned upon by social norms, it’s pretty hypocritical to exclude others because “they don’t look like us.”

How do we include other people’s kinds of normal? By realizing that there is no set definition of the word “normal,” by removing prejudices of people’s experiences and embracing them for what Nadia calls the greatest spiritual practice: simply showing up.

The point of intentional communities is the first two letters of “intentional.” Everyone is “in,” everyone gets their own letter jacket, and everyone is welcome to join in on the team cheer (be it the Our Father, a team cheer, or the Beyonce song that plays over and over…)

Tell the people in your communities that it is good that they are there. Learn from them, listen to them, grow with them. Acknowledge and embrace their humanness.