Sunlight Good Friday

There was a house I lived in once in which the master bedroom sat at such an angle that I could lay in the bed in that bedroom throughout the entire day and watch the sunlight filtered through the horizontal blinds that covered the single window slowly crawl up the wall adjacent to the dining room.  I remember photographing it with my phone thinking that I didn’t want to forget about the days that I would spend watching the sunlight crawl up and down the wall. I was chained to that bed in a sense. I was depressed and lain out and ostracized by my mental illness. I think I emailed those photos to myself.

I sit now not in a bedroom, but in a playroom in which I have lain upon the floor a thin full-sized mattress. This is the small bit of space in this house that I allow myself to think of as my own space. I’m not sure if it actually is, however, because in this upside-down space individuals cannot agree on reality. We cannot agree on the same reality as I sit upon this mattress with my lap covered in an unfurled sleeping bag and an uncased lumpy body pillow propping up the laptop I am typing into. As I sit upon this mattress that I once laid my toddler sons to nap on, sang to them, prayed with and for them upon. This mattress that they once shared with their baby sister when I slept them all in the same room at another house that was a duplex that now sits two states away, so that the children (and I) could have a play room.

I never finished putting the clean sheets upon this mattress in my maybe own space from the last time I washed them. I stopped cleaning this play room when I arrived at the point of vacuuming. It seems that was the end of the line for my self-drive at the time.

So, the linens and the raggedy comforter, the very first comforter I purchased of my own free will over seven years ago, sit piled up unfolded on top of the toy chest a second cousin handed down to the children. My sons still sleep upon the bed frames that match the chest. Each one has placed their bed against a far side of their bedroom, and they’ve shared space in the dresser for over four years now. They use a drum stick that was given to their father by an old church friend to prop their door closed at night and when they want some privacy because it won’t stay shut on its own.

I remember that it is Good Friday. It is the day that Jesus, supposedly, was beaten and led to the cross to be hung like a villain of the state and as a common criminal or thief. I had fooled myself into thinking that I would make it to the Good Friday Eucharist service that my new church is holding tonight. Instead I sit here on my bare island of a mattress alone. I tell myself that it is because the children aren’t home and aren’t available to go with me that I am choosing to stay home and be alone on my imagined piece of property. I don’t want to show up to a service alone what is really think it is.

There is no agreement on reality when the mystery of faith is used as a weapon. There is no power in faith when it is a black and white dogma to condemn.

There was a time when I worked myself ragged to round up my tiny children to numerous services a week. We attended a tiny church that sat innocently in an inconspicuous strip mall. I met Jesus and fell in love with Him there. I found community as a troubled teen in a youth group culture that was alien to me before a teenage boyfriend and his family invited me to a couple of services. I wanted the healed heart and community and cleanliness the pastor called holiness desperately. Everything inside me was broken, it felt like. I was spiraling into some dark things that I didn’t want to find out too much about. I was in pain from abandonment and dysfunction and I wanted the healing that this Good Doctor preached to me had to offer. I remember raising my hand as well as walking down the church aisle a couple of times just to make sure that the saving really took. To make sure that I was really and truly sealed with the blessing of the Holy Spirit.

I was held up as a trophy for a while. I was doted upon by staff and leadership as a shining testimony of the power of conversion by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

But I digress.

It’s Good Friday and the churched world around me is celebrating the Sunday that’s gonna happen in two days. They are getting pumped up for Resurrection Sunday and I am sitting in a play room with one window looking out at the roof that covers my sons room and one of the branches of a huge oak tree that lives in the front yard of this house. I can see a sliver of the baby blue sky, but I can tell by how dark it is getting in this room, how the daylight isn’t as powerful, that the sun is starting to fall.

I realize that I didn’t nap today.

That churched world is out there celebrating. They are using this day to reflect on their sins and the things that they need to maybe nail onto the cross and allow Jesus to take care of. They are thinking of the hope that will be witnessed when the tomb is found empty and Jesus’ body gone. They are looking forward to fresh starts and reflection and renewal.

My daughters left the light on in their bedroom, the doorway of which I can see from the place I sit upon my mattress on the floor. They chose to go with their father to celebrate this Holy Day. They have gone with him to partake in this celebration. Earlier, my youngest daughter begged me to go with them to her father’s church function.

There was a time when her father and I were equals in our zeal for a faith that we shared. It was the single cord of a thing that was intended to be triune and permanent. When I realized that the deity that held me intimately in times of deepest distress and the God that was being presented by these churches I was attending, from the perspective of the Bible College that I graduated from, and from the life lived by the father of my children, the love of my life and rock of a woman best friend, that God that they preached and worshiped and adored and prayed to…That was not the same healing and extravagant love that I experienced when I was broken down by everything that should be a comfort in one’s life. When I was broken down beyond recognition and I was acting the part of all aspects of life, when my honest questions and struggles and reality was not lining up with the reality that was being presented to me in black and white. When all of these things happened there was a collapse of all things. There was no foundation. There was no blue sky to smile back at me. There was no help.

When you present a problem that differs from the norms of a social group, that doesn’t bother the group so much as opens your eyes up to the limitations of that group. There were limitations to their tolerance of honesty. There were limitations to their tolerance of questioning. There were limitations to their ability to handle situations that presented problems. There were limitations to their ability to handle problem people.

More often than not, it seems to be convenient for groups to place anomalies of their norms outside of themselves and set them there to be dealt with by some other person from some other group.

Upon the cross that Jesus was hung there were no limitations to the amount of sneering and mockery that was made of the Holy life that He lived. There was no end to the spectacle it created. He was, after all, led as a lamb to the slaughter.

I remember that I am held. I am held in the hands of a God who held me in my shameful nakedness. I am loved with the strength that powered the Resurrection. I think about the strength that He has shown throughout these twenty years that I’ve waked with Him. It occurs to me that I’m once again like that sixteen-year-old child that innocuously walked into the unlimited mystery of unceasing mercy when I walked into that strip mall church.

In my brokenness and in this version of reality, I am held, still, as the pearl of great price. In my brokenness and inability to accept the inconsistencies I reject and oppose and protest, yes, even in this outside place, I am not beyond the reach of that savage death of the Lamb.

Luna, my chocolate brown mutt lays on the bed I found in the As-Is section of our city’s new Ikea. She’s most at home with me. She knows me as her person.

There was a CD I had once, given to me by an old church and Bible College friend. On that CD was a song in which the singer (Ramsie Schiek, I think) compared herself to a dog on a porch begging the house owner to let her in.

I find that metaphor fits me perfectly.

I will stay on the outside with the riff raff and the “others” and the misfits until He calls me home. I will settle into His extravagant love for me once again and accept that He still calls me His own.

It is Good Friday and my children are at a church function with their father and I just didn’t have the courage to worship in community without them.