An Open Letter from Wife to Mistress Church

               The day of Thanksgiving upon which I became engaged, I could not have imagined that my marital commitment would require sharing the love of my life with hundreds of people and their extended families. I have arguably loved only one man in my life, in a sexual and relationally committed way. Perhaps that weakens my realism about human love, imagined in idealism of spirit. The love of my life is also my first love, one with a radicalized bent for loyalty and singularity of focus upon me. We were chosen well for one another, as I struggle to trust within embodied love. It was therefore a surprise to both of us that for the last ten years, our marriage commitment has required me to share him, has required a silent and silencing allowance of a mistress. So I write an open letter from wife to mistress, Everywhere Presbyterian Church.

               I became aware of you in this light only slowly and in particular events. The cover that work affords. The evening meetings. The emotional demands and delights spent in ways that did not involve me…not only did not involve me, but required my absence. Functioned better for him and for you without me. The interruption of vacations with calls, allowable even on our supposedly private time. The entrance of your presence in our bedroom, our most intimate of time and space. Though do not misunderstand: my beloved and I discussed you, your needs, your communal neuroses constantly. It is not as if this unbidden presence were secret in any way. We continued to enact and live into the love given us; but I eventually realized you had become the dominant force within a year of our life here. Even when my own body and sexual identity were exploited for amusement and the sake of ignorance, your power and primacy were irrefutable. How does a woman persuade against the holiness, importance, and demands of Mistress Church? She claims to have direct and exclusive line to God, after all. The best strategy is to know when you’ve been beat and listen for what you can learn, listen for redemption of the mess we humans make of covenantal love.

Because redemption does happen. Spirit takes what you do, what we least value, even what we are most ashamed of and enlivens it for holy purpose and absolute delight. Even as my anger is palpable, aimed at what I feel deeply as your intimate intrusion and some kind of betrayal, I also know this covenantal chaos and multiplicity to be the root of my own body’s healing, the seed of stability in my life of companionships, the invitation to an expressive theological delight able to companion my own suffering and that of others. This moral outrage has given me my life’s blood, my life’s work. Who I am today—a lavishly loved woman able to consciously enjoy multiple covenantal intimacies of Spirit—is a direct result of your presence, your intrusion and neediness, in the life of me and my beloved. So, go figure. Spirit’s life-giving force takes the ugly ways human treat one another and redeems them, turns them into seeds of new life previously inconceivable.

So am I thankful on this anniversary day of celebration and recognition? I am thankful for the fruits of the Spirit made flesh in these years—nothing more, nothing less. As Brother Paul has professed, “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” I am thankful for the love that my husband enjoys in his day-to-day ministries in your midst. In the Bible study group on Wednesday mornings where he gets to share his love of Scripture, his passion for God’s people. I am thankful for the moments of joy this path has enabled within him—usually times away from the church, when he is reminded of Whose he is and the beauty of his own Archimidean point on the unchangeable rocks of Grand Marais, Minnesota. I am thankful for the peace of mind he receives when offering his many gifts of competent leadership, liturgical passion, political precision and more.  I have seen patience and kindness grow within him, as he faces those completely other from himself. I have always known his generosity and faithfulness, his gentleness of spirit. Even when he is angry, perhaps most when he is angry. And I am thankful for how his preaching voice has developed, his vision for God’s work in today’s changing times is growing, the many ways in which his self-control has shepherded his own growth, our own. Because you see, he and I are of one flesh, as created in God’s way with us before we ever arrived here.

And my own relationship with you, Mistress Church? You have forced the death of my own idealism about congregational life. I no longer believe that congregational life is the root of revelation(s) through Scripture for a life of discipleship, though I know that one can be a disciple underneath and hidden from or within a congregational community. What this little death (J) means for my own offerings to God toward a theological nurture of God’s people, I am continuing to learn with each new companion of Spirit I meet. I am overwhelmingly thankful for those who have guided my steps, who have carried my spirit during this period of learnings, who continue to live in covenant with me toward larger redemptive pursuits to come. And I love fiercely the one I have been given to love, whom I lose and find over and over again, for the very rest of my life. Our beloved Brian.