Have you ever been affirmed?
Held up in wide open, agape, all-out, all-in, expressive love?
Been greeted with joy, delight and blessing?
Or, (in a Christian context), has anyone ever been Christ for you? Celebrated your presence, offered assurance that you are, in fact and in deed, a love-offering, a child of God?
Last weekend, in Prince George, the United Church of Canada gathered as Pacific Mountain Region to embrace our status as a Regional Council that affirms. That aspires to celebrate all who come as God’s beloved creation.
It’s a long-running aspiration. Affirming, in our context, comes out of a time when we did not, as a church, affirm everyone. Oh we might ‘love the sinner’ but sometimes that love was overwhelmed and subsumed by our hatred for ‘the sin’. So much overtaken that we barred from our doors anyone and everyone who did not represent, in our minds, a correct and proper relationship with rules and regulations we’d decided made them fit for fellowship within our sacred halls.
Over our brief, 97-year history we’ve gradually opened our doors, reluctantly allowing that women could preach and lead our faith communities, that the children of single moms could be baptized at ‘our’ founts, that Indigenous folk might meet the Creator in a variety of ways, that those who do not identify as Hetero or Cis might lead us in worship and shepherd us in ministry. It’s been a long road and we continue to learn as we walk it.
“Isn’t welcome enough?”
“Why is this all about ‘them’?”
“Don’t all people matter? Why are we ‘targeting’ a few?”
Gradually we’ve come to realize that when one is part of a tradition and a history that has enthusiastically participated in deep trauma, providing theological arguments in support of patriarchy, racism and homophobia. One must do more than nod an assent at a neighbour seeking a seat in an adjoining pew. That it is not enough to simply repent of past judgments, woundings, ostracisms, cultural genocides and quietly approved assaults (whether social, psychological, verbal or physical). One must reach out, uphold, bring love, share joy, and otherwise affirm, in every possible way, the light of the Creator permeating the one who was, formerly, ‘other’.
Gradually our church is moving, in a glacial, amoebic-like way, into becoming. Metamorphosing from larvae to butterfly, from nymph to dragonfly. As church generally mirrors society, so too are we all shifting from judgmental hypocrisy to elemental empathy. From fear of the ‘not me’ to embracing the familiar that exists within and among each part of creation.
It’s a bit risky, a tad scary, actually. To stand before all the world in one’s own created skin. To hope for acceptance and yearn for love. To wish for affirmation. To spread one’s self a rainbow in the aftermath of storm.
It is nothing more or less than any of us wish for. To be seen in the eyes of neighbours and community as we are known in the heart of God. To be companioned in the walk of life as we are joined on the Way with Christ. To be held in the abiding spirit of love, incarnated in the relations around us. To be affirmed.
How, I wonder, shall we come to know we are affirmed? How shall our relations know of our constant affirmations for them? What might we do in token of our love? Besides rainbow flags and crosswalks. How then, shall we love?
Keith Simmonds is in ministry at Duncan United Church, where folk are engaged in seeking justice, loving kindness and walking humbly with the Creator. He blogs at faithfulwitness.xyz
You can read more articles on our interfaith blog, Spiritually Speaking, HERE: https://www.timescolonist.com/blogs/spiritually-speaking
* This article was published in the print edition of the Times Colonist on Saturday, June 18th 2022
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
