April 6, 2023

Theopoetics of Exhaustion

I 

I sometimes worry about this newsletter becoming too much of a downer. It was born out of a desire to hold open a space between ‘queer’ and ‘Christian’ that isn’t usually afforded by mainline inclusion narratives, but I’m self-conscious of how much space I’ve dedicated to trying to express what kind of story I don’t want to tell. I’ve given ethical rationales for this that I stand by. But also, if I’m being honest, those narratives, and the theological debates in service of which they are often mobilized, exhaust me. Maybe part of my need to be so clear about what this newsletter is not saying comes from trying to break myself out of cyclical patterns of queer theological self-narrating that lead to exhaustion. 

Lately it seems like almost everyone in my queer circle, Christian or not, is exhausted, trying to navigate heady mixtures of overwork, precarious employment, systemic discrimination, hostile environments, mounting public hostility, and emotionally taxing personal circumstances. For queer Christians, this exhaustion can also become spiritual exhaustion when the church communities ostensibly meant to be spaces of peace, renewal, and communal belonging – yes, even ‘affirming’ or ‘inclusive’ ones – instead become sites of further obligation, scrutiny, and the demand to repeatedly give account for oneself, or require navigating convoluted social politics and sensitive egos in order to meaningfully contribute to the community. While the latter is by no means exclusive to churches – is in some ways an inescapable facet of living in community – the specific ways it manifests in church communities can be especially wearing. I know I'm not alone in feeling this way; so many of the conversations I’ve had with queer Christian/-ish friends and mentors over the past year or so have been laden with exhaustion with the church. 

What’s to become of our faith when the usual means of observance and belonging compound our exhaustion? I’m still trying to work out the answer to this question for myself; I find it increasingly difficult to describe my personal relationship to Christianity. But perhaps a start might be to name and affirm exhaustion as a position from which to inhabit a queer relationship to God and to Christian faith and practice, rather than attempt to overcome it. 

In gesturing towards a theopoetics of exhaustion, in trying to articulate why pursuing a harmonious synthesis of my queer life and religious life feels less and less desirable or even available to me at the moment of writing, I am not trying to claim that I am among the most directly or severely affected by the church’s marginalization. This is patently not the case, and I’d be remiss not to acknowledge the myriad people – clergy and ordinary congregants alike – facing varying intersectional oppressions and bearing any number of wounds from Christianity who continue to do vital, community-sustaining, often thankless work within it. I’m instead trying to give shape and space to a feeling borne out of my particular experience and the rhythms of my own everyday life that I’ve nevertheless heard echoed in conversations with friends, that at points overlaps complexly with my own systemic position in relation to the church but at others exists quite separately from it. 

(Exhaustion can also come from occupying the role of exceptional example, of realizing just how easy it would be to sit back and play along, because aspects of my life and outward presentation could at times be read or misread as conforming to models of gay faithfulness that the church privileges at the expense of others. Exhaustion can be the result of failing to tend to long-held desires, needs, curiosities, or dissatisfactions in order to maintain that image of faithfulness and the relative institutional comfort that comes with it.) 

II 

Just before his arrest, Jesus’s disciples accompany him to Gethsemane, where he asks them to stay awake with him while he prays. Three times he comes back to them and finds them sleeping, and he chides Peter, saying, ‘So, could you not stay awake with me one hour? Stay awake and pray that you may not come into the time of trial; the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak’ (Matthew 26:40-41, NRSVUE). 

Hearing this story as a child and teenager, I was always told that the disciples fall asleep because they are lazy, or because their devotion wavers (in Matthew’s gospel, this scene occurs right after Peter swears he will not fall away or deny Jesus, and right before he inevitably does, also three times). I’m partial to Dorothy L. Sayers’ rendering of this scene in The Man Born to Be King (1943), her cycle of gospel radio dramas for the BBC, in which the disciples drift off not out of inconstancy, but out of exhaustion from anticipatory grief. (A moment in this adaptation that has haunted me since I first read the script is when John, the beloved disciple, cries out to his brother, ‘James, hold me tight – I'm frightened of the dark – ’.)¹ Straining to rouse himself when Jesus returns to them the first time, Peter shamefacedly says, ‘Dear Lord, forgive us …. I think we had wept ourselves to sleep.’2  

Exhaustion from bearing witness to the unthinkable, from experiencing a shattering of one’s reality (‘As though [Jesus’ prayers] would break through the barriers of time and space,’ John exclaims. ‘Peter! is the earth going? Is the vision here?’),3 from facing an uncertain future. ‘God help you, my poor boys,’ Jesus shakes his head, seeing them asleep a third time. ‘What use to wake you again?’4 

III 

It would almost be easier if something earth-shattering had happened, if there were a single, clear-cut reason why my church attendance has dropped off the edge of a cliff over the past couple of years. I’ve had my own personal grievances and misgivings accumulate over time, which would do no one any good to publicly recount here, but no big inciting incident. For years, church was the primary container of my social and relational life, my main point of connection to community – including queer community – until, gradually, or suddenly, it wasn’t. 

The pandemic was an obvious factor, with the loss of a sense of coherent community, the disruption of sacramental rites, and the way it made time both expand and fold in on itself in ways that led to fatigue. About a month and a half into the first lockdown in Scotland, I stopped watching the video services that my church at the time was releasing; watching priests consume the consecrated elements of the Eucharist when the rest of us couldn’t was too painful. (The spirit is willing, but the flesh cannot be shared.) I kept contributing to the production of those services by writing and recording video of myself leading intercessory prayers, but in lockdown conditions that eroded the boundaries between life and work, preparing these recordings of what had previously held a strong devotional significance to me quickly began to feel like another facet of work. 

I tried as much as I could to get myself to church once places of worship were allowed to open again with restrictions; the first time I received the Eucharist in person post-lockdown, I cried. But mostly, I felt numbed to the liturgy in a way that I hadn’t been before – something had changed. (The flesh is willing, but the spirit is weak.) 

What surprised me most was that I wasn’t alone in feeling this way, and even though I attended a church led by openly queer clergy, the people who shared my feelings were overwhelmingly other queer people. Eventually, whenever I encountered someone I knew from church, one of us would bring up the question: ‘So, have you managed to get to church much?’ And the inevitable answer: ‘Not really … you?’ One friend I ran into at work between teaching classes said, ‘By the way, [partner] and I have stopped going on Sundays. I don’t think it’s the same, do you?’ The most surprising moment of all was when my mom, to whom I hadn’t yet mentioned my uneasiness and who had been following my church’s virtual services, texted me out of the blue to say, ‘Are things okay at church?’ Eventually, I gradually phased out my volunteer responsibilities and then just quietly stopped going altogether. 

All my pent-up misgivings came out into the open while spending a weekend with a friend and mentor whom I had met through church but who had since moved further up north, away from the city. I was helping her make tea and coffee for breakfast in the kitchen, watching birds and red squirrels squabble over the bird feeder outside the cottage she shares with her partner, when the topic of conversation turned to religious practice. ‘Something changed about my faith in lockdown,’ she said, ‘like there’s something that used to be there that's just gone now.’ I nodded, and began, haltingly and ineloquently, to tell her all the small frustrations that had piled up and become big concerns, and when I finished she simply said, in a quiet, sympathetic voice, ‘God, no wonder you’re feeling abandoned. No wonder you’re fed up.’ 

IV 

Part of this, I have to admit, could be a ‘me’ problem. Once, almost ten years ago, I was joking with a friend who was discerning a vocation to the priesthood about how, stereotypically, almost everyone who grows up with clergy as parents either remains hyper-devoted to Christianity or goes completely off the deep end, and here I was caught somewhere in the middle. ‘Nah, you’re definitely one of the slutty ones,’ he quipped. 

When your dad is one of the ministers for a large Baptist congregation in a tiny Southern town in the U.S., church becomes synonymous with obligation, with keeping up appearances, with being seen in the right place at the right times and behaving in the right ways. At least, it did for me. As a child I remember the interminable period after services aimlessly pacing about the church corridors with my brother and the other ministers’ kids while our parents spoke to congregants. I remember the marathon of every Sunday: two morning services, Sunday school in between, lunch at home or with the other ministers’ families, youth choir at 5 p.m., youth group at 6, home at 8:30. I remember being made aware, from a relatively young age, that anything I did either during or outside of church would, to other adults, reflect back on my parents and by extension my dad’s suitability as a minister – was in fact being monitored by those adults and would eventually get back to my parents. In my early twenties, whenever I was back in South Carolina, I remember scoping out our local Ingles supermarket while grocery shopping with my mom to make sure no one we knew from church was there so that we could buy a bottle of wine without courting scandal. 

If, like me, you happen to be neurodivergent and less quick to pick up on social cues and expectations, and if, like me, you also begin in your teenage years to experience desires and feelings that would be disastrous to make known, even to yourself, you become hyper-conscious of being scrutinized by members of your church community in any public space. The repercussions of this experience in my adult life have been hard to shake: it affects the way I approach colleagues and line managers at work, the way I perceive interactions with friends, the standards to which I hold myself in most everyday situations. At least once a week my husband catches me behaving as though I’m under surveillance by some nebulous authority that I can’t name. 

(‘I think,’ my grandfather, a retired Southern Baptist minister, once told me, ‘that every minister should have license once a month or so to go out in a boat, drive it to the middle of a lake, and curse a blue streak at the top of their lungs where no one can hear them.’) 

Once, in the middle of the final evening worship service of a summer youth retreat – the kind of service that usually involves lots of crying and raised hands and earnest confessions and singing at the top of your lungs – my brother fell asleep. He must have been about twelve, which would make me fifteen; the early mornings and late nights had just caught up with him. (The spirit is willing, but the flesh has its limits.) Some of our peers looked askance – could he not stay awake this one hour? (Or two? Or however long?) As adolescents my brother and I had a difficult relationship that was mostly my fault, but in that moment I felt the impulse to defend him. During the same service, I had, if not a crisis of faith, at least a crisis of practice. As my girlfriend at the time (I know) wept to the worship band playing ‘Jesus Paid It All’, as I belted out the chorus with my hands in the air, something at the back of my mind said, Who am I doing this for?  

This is the question I keep coming back to: who have I been trying to please by maintaining my faith? Is it God, or someone else? Whose faith have I been practicing? What have I been trying to prove by occupying the role of the gay Christian, of maintaining – even subconsciously, even as I’ve professed not to be concerned with such things – a certain, minimally deviant appearance of what that looks like? Is doing church preventing me from being Christ’s body in the world? 

V 

The spirit is willing but the flesh of Christ is not bound by an institution of this world. The spirit sees the ways the flesh of my queer siblings is policed, scrutinized, and constrained in public space, including in the liberal church. The spirit doesn’t give a fuck what you think about my flesh and what I do with it and with whom and what that means for my spirit. The spirit notices when the church’s acceptance of us is achieved by maintaining silence around our flesh and what we do with it and with whom, and has concerns. The spirit is unwilling to wait for years of bureaucratic processes, rhetorical hedging, and snappily-titled initiatives to determine under which circumstances, according to which abstract theological justifications, our flesh is not an abomination. The spirit would like to remind you that the flesh of queers who aren’t interested in marriage or ordination or monogamy or vanilla sex or, hell, church is also made in the image of God and beloved by God. The spirit is willing for the flesh to seek where its limited time and energy can be of use elsewhere. Both the spirit and the flesh would often like to spend Sunday mornings in bed with my husband, an agnostic atheist who doesn’t go to church, and rest. Even God rested on the seventh day of creation. 

VI 

Before Gethsemane, Jesus shares a meal with his disciples and asks them to partake of his body and blood in the form of broken bread and wine, in what the church now recognizes as the institution of the Eucharist. Linn Marie Tonstad cites the theological significance of this feast as a prefiguration of the Second Coming of Christ, in which ‘we will be reunited with him in the eucharistic feast-without-sacrifice in the kingdom’.5 Yet Tonstad also cautions against viewing the sacrament of the Eucharist as automatically able to instate good relations and perfect community on its own, as if by partaking of the body and blood we could simply leap outside the material conditions of the present world. Rather, the Eucharist articulates hope for the grace and abundance of Christ in the midst of the failure of human relations, systems, and institutions, including the church:

‘The sacramentality of the church is first and foremost a negative sacramentality, figuring the uncontrollability (and free gift-giving) of the other Christ […] in its free distribution of the sign of what it neither is nor has: the body of Christ, and by extension, the goods that body symbolizes and grants.’6

The church does not own the body of Christ; the church proliferates the sign of the body of Christ, which it does not own, and in doing so attests to its own failure; the failure of the church is fulfilled by the grace of Christ who exceeds the church’s limits and multiplies itself in the goods of the eucharistic feast and the bodies of all who partake. 

(A common refrain in Southern Protestantism whenever people leave a church community: ‘We just don’t feel like we’re being fed in this congregation.’ I have complicated feelings about the gulf between what this vocabulary purports to describe, and the specific situations in which I heard it used growing up.) 

I think a lot about kitchen tables as potentially sacramental sites. One of the things I cherish most about my queer friendships is the way we cook for each other and share meals together, when we can. Maybe it’s the Southerner in me; I come from a culture and family of people who love via food. Has there been a death or a crisis? Here, I’ve made a casserole. Tired, broke, or fed up? Come over for dinner. A holiday or celebration? I’ll roast a chicken. Recovering from an operation? Here’s a couple nights’ worth of vegetarian curry. Don’t worry about the Tupperware.  

I’m wary of lapsing into utopian hyperbole here; this isn’t an ideal I maintain consistently at all times. Nor do I or anyone in my community have any more claim to the material and spiritual goods offered by the body of Christ than the church does. But reorienting my thinking around sacramentality around kitchen tables has enriched the way I understand hope in the numinous in the midst of the mundane and imperfect patterns of everyday life.  

The kitchen table is a site of both work and rest; it is where people gather for reprieve from exhaustion and the presence of each other’s company; it is where we can voice fears and frustrations and hopes for a better world, and it can be a starting point for bringing that world about. It is also, sometimes, a site of conflict, and challenge, of difficult words spoken, and the grace that can (God willing) come after. While shaped indelibly by the finitude and chaos of everyday life, communal eating and drinking signifies more than the moment in time in which it occurs. It is where our exhaustion finds shelter in the presence of others, and offers a glimpse of the not-yet-realized abolition of borders – political, social, cultural, ideological – that contribute to it, and the abundance that – we hope against all hope – may take its place.