companionable way of being was seeded in my life when I, a theological professor and preacher’s wife, was manhandled at an after-church coffee hour. I marvel at this today, how significantly this brief, painful event instigated so much that I now cherish in my life. I have made a lot of lemonade with this lemon. Propelled away from the pain, I landed in a nonlinear, spiral path of awakening, self-discovery, and forgiveness. I came to know the gifts that find you in exile, if you learn how to look for them. Even when the pain of departure overwhelms everything you thought you knew, wondrous light, love, and levity can await you too.
The story can be told in a sentence and a poem. A longtime class clown and devout elder of my husband’s church, “Jim,” ass-slapped me twice at coffee hour.
“We have pound-cake to tempt you,”
he said to her in the Ann Taylor suit.
“Vanilla for this side,” slapping her ass.
“Chocolate for that one.” Ass-slapped again.
He looked around the church for others
to join the fun. Only a young girl across
the table stared back at him. She vanished
in place, there but not there. A hole where
a heart had been. The other shell of a woman?
She walked out alone. Her husband, the pastor,
was everywhere, so nowhere. Wounded too,
though absent. Pain for the journey had come.
These lines—three stanzas about two jarring slaps—arose years ago as poetic truth-telling for me, struggling to know how to respond gracefully, strategically, and faithfully to an embarrassing violation of my own bodyspace in the environment of my husband’s job, part of our economic livelihood and perceived sacred calling. For years, we kept quiet about any of it, amidst the familiar setting of a traditional church coffee hour where good-hearted people gather with one another each week to listen to one another’s lives. The images could bring a whiff of the Three Stooges or a bit of slapstick Charlie Chaplin, if the intersection of a woman’s body and old-boy religion weren’t still so tender. For five years, the places of home, church, and work could not hold this splinter of the flesh, this all too familiar story of a woman handled, humiliated, and silenced. It still reigns in me to downplay its significance, say it didn’t matter, when it does, it did. Within two years, I rarely visited my husband’s congregation, finding sanctuary and deepening faith practice with a local Tibetan Buddhist sangha closer to our home.
I’m not the first woman nor the last who has such a story of body handling and dissociation, holding it quiet for years. No spaces or shapes of community life had been available to me to become conscious that such an event mattered enough to merit anger aloud. I hear worse stories every time deeply reflective women gather together, conscious about their own well-being in the world. These stories need telling, for however long women and men need to awaken to the fact that they matter. But for five years, my husband and I, my immediate family, my church community absented ourselves from the knowledge that I and my experience as a woman could matter more than keeping the peace with a pound-cake perpetrator of old-boy civic religion.
Two marriages received scars here while home stretched painfully across church and work. For mine, my husband was secretly outraged, holding the toxicity deep within himself without my knowledge for nearly four years. As pastors, we both felt he was disempowered to respond without destabilizing his new role in ministry, which neither of us desired. We therefore both abandoned our experiences. While my Buddhist practice deepened and I served various congregations in adult education and pulpit supply, “church” became an empty space of formality and civic rite for me, weighted to irrelevance in its need for palatable public truth. Simultaneously, a spiritual friendship began in my life, moving my life into congregational exile, with salve beyond ecclesial norms. Companionships outside the structures of church began to hold the healing in a way the ecclesial structures were unable. Strangely liberated, then, I did become free to move outward—even as far as the Tibetan center—to find new sacred relationships outside of all my own traditioned shapes of community.
After those five years, as I found my way into circle-way communities of practice, as I was held by spiritual friends deeply rooted in their own wisdom traditions, way did open to tell gently the truth of my experience. The Wednesday of Holy Week, my husband-the-pastor and I visited “Jim” and his wife, in their living room. I brought a box of poundcake with the request that he receive it from me, that they listen while I told the story that had instigated a painful but now beautiful exile from congregational settings. I think each of us in the room, except Jim perhaps, finally saw the collision of small-town culture, urban professionalism in a woman, and unfortunate happenstance. He denied it. His wife cried. The pastor prayed for healing afterwards, and Easter Sunday beckoned to us all. As was my habit on those “nonnegotiable Sundays” I had to be there, I arrived late. This time, I noticed an open seat right next to Jim and his wife. I smiled, feeling tender but also open. I sat down next to them, and when it was time for communion, we walked up to the sacrament together, the frail and reconciled human beings that we were. Jim and his wife then became two of my favorite people in the church, as the theological reality about which I teach and in which I serve had been lived and shared by the four of us.
So, far from just the familiar story of a woman wounded by an unthinking man in a religious tradition, this event became seed of my own exile, an awakening to an undesired but unavoidable invitation outward into other communities, other practices. I found myself on a deepening path of darkness and light within which the Sacred could arise anew between those willing to journey together beyond familiar shapes of home, work, and church/tradition. New friends pushed me into a holy meander . . . into Tibetan Buddhist practices, Jewish hospitality and observance, Muslim salat, coffee cups with atheists, practices with earth-centered and woman-centric communities. We journey-folks are many now, immersed in companionable practices and circle learnings, finding one another along the way, learning together how to hold the “too muchness” of injuries of tribalism with compassion, integrity, and humility. This splinter of the flesh, goading me outward, slowly became a story of commitment to the way and shape that can hold dark and light long enough for a journey of healing, abundance, and reconciliation to be borne: a circle.
Pain hurts, but it need not become (or remain) suffering. Salve comes when you seek it, whether you’re aware of seeking or not. Rooted within my own tradition, I’d even say salvation comes as suffering softens the heart, opens it for healing, and, when way opens, wholeness is found. There is no excuse for the behavior named in this church coffee hour, man to woman, but there is (now) seasoned empathy and self-compassion, which extends then to compassion for Jim too. We are sparks of the divine and shells of fearful division. Separate from one another, we injure one another, sometimes with intention, often without. Opened to wisdom, stumbling toward interdependence, we glimpse a better way. The pain of this event pushed me into exile. Deep inner work and gracious companionship from outside allowed me freedom to see, to be seen, to tell the truth, and to forgive. Grounding in exile.
How might your life have been different . . .
if your place in the world felt safe, regardless of who you are,
you knew you belonged, assured, just as you are . . .
if public and private truths stood next to one another,
honoring the gifts of each?
if injury did not hide in shame but was offered
for the purification and transfiguration of each,
if
