My son, age 8, had been begging to return to worship services for weeks. We hadn’t attended since Christmas Eve, and it was now mid-February. So I mustered up the most emotional and physical wherewithal that I could, sought out two compassionate women to flank us both to the right and the left in the pew, and walked my child into the sanctuary that cold, bright morning.
He immediately buried his face in my side. He stayed that way as we sat down. His head ended up in my lap, his hands remained over his ears. Eventually, he sank down to curl up in a ball on the floor.
My son is diagnosed autistic with profound sensory processing struggles. It had taken us a solid year of patient, gentle exposure to the rampantly echo-filled, bustling chamber to acclimate him to it enough to feel comfortable and calm. After which he had eagerly participated in the service, actively thrived there.
Six weeks out of that environment, he had lost all that resiliency.
I kept bending over him, trying to comforting him, asking him again and again, “Buddy, do you just want to go? We don’t have to stay here. There’s no reason we have to stay here. We can just go if you want.”
No, no, he said. He wanted to be there. He didn’t want to miss the service.
Until finally, about a third of the way into the sermon, he looked up at me. Full in the face. Round blue eyes.
“I think I do just want to go home.”
So we left.
We didn’t go straight home. I took him out for pizza and swallowed my tears when he wasn’t looking.
Halfway through a slice, he told me he felt better and was looking forward to trying again next week.
“That’s good,” I said around the lump in my throat that wasn’t pizza. “Maybe we can try again some time.” But my eyes couldn’t meet his.
We haven’t tried since. And this coming Sunday, it’ll be Easter.
He just asked me again when we could go back. He doesn’t want to miss the special Easter celebration.
The idea behind giving something up for Lent is that you release yourself from any dependency on something you love (often with good reason) so that the empty longing it leaves behind may be filled with the nearer awareness of and closer dependence on a providential sovereign being. God.
Typically, the thing you’ve given up has historically distracted you from fully appreciating God’s goodness toward you and provision of your needs.
It may even be something that has repeatedly harmed you in the past, but you keep returning to it in a toxic cycle.
The deprivation of Lent is a design for fulfillment through better things.
It is also a typical part of the proceedings to relax artificially induced restrictions upon the arrival of Easter. Chocolate, coffee, red meat, cannabis, sex, alcohol, doom scrolling, whatever—after 40 days, our imitation of Christ in the wilderness somehow results in our embracing both angels and devil once again.
Theoretically, our return to church this weekend after our accidentally adopted religious hiatus (because it was not fully conscious or intentional or even much of a choice until I was well into it) would follow.
But that isn’t always what happens at the end of Lent.
I hadn’t intended to be practically bedridden for weeks after Christmas.
The trauma sustained in my body after suffering silently for weeks upon months of abuse and neglect in a religious context finally broke free and ravaged my body. There were days and days where I couldn’t move, couldn’t even lie still, without agonizing in severe pain.
Let alone sit upright in a pew.
By the time I was even semi-functional, I realized we had been gone from the church for over a month, and only two people had noticed enough to drop a text about it.
Nothing from our “care” group.
No check in from the pastors—who, I later learned, weren’t sure what the heck to do with me and so just . . . ghosted me for six weeks. (They did eventually reinitiate contact, admit the fault, and apologize.)
And even the people who picked up on the fact we were missing didn’t really . . . have anything to say about it. No practical support to offer in my fight for justice against the elder who had abused me.
By early February, one lady in our small group noticed we hadn’t attended for months and brought us soup because I let folks know my family had caught a cold and we would miss group, again.
The small group leader finally sent me a text on Feb. 10. “Good morning, Stephanie. I’m praying for your family this morning. How are you doing?”
“We are getting over our colds. Other things are generally awful.” I was still waiting to hear a word from her or her husband, who was on the ruling elder session, regarding what they would do about my abuse at the hands of a fellow elder. Even just an offer to give me a hug and a chance to cry with a compassionate witness.
“That’s [sic] sounds so hard,” she wrote back. That was it.
An echo of what she’d responded in an email after I sent around my expository blog post about the abuse I had suffered to our care group:
“It was so hard to read about all of the pain and suffering you’ve experienced and are continuing to process. I feel much compassion for all you’ve been through. Sending love and support,” etc.
“Love and support” . . . without ever engaging me on the subject again. Despite my attempt to continue the conversation.
In fact, when I finally saw her in person for the first time in months at that Christmas Eve service . . .
I walked up to her, and she physically recoiled.
Her husband, at her side, smiled brightly, said hello, and immediately excused himself.
I tried to engage the woman—whom I considered a friend—in light, friendly conversation, but she rapidly shut down. Her responses were polite, but short. Empty. Tense.
It took me less than a minute to realize she really, really did not want to talk to me.
So I excused myself and rejoined my family.
And, as we left the church, I turned to see this woman eagerly, warmly engaged in conversation—with the wife of the man who had abused me. I saw the woman who had shrunk back from me leaning forward, eyes lit up, smile wide in confidence. Her presence exuding familiarity, comfort, and support.
None of which she had for me.
It’s not really a mystery to me why my body quit after that. The encounter was an apt microcosm of what my experience of church—many churches, cumulatively—had been for a long, long time. If anything, it’s a bit of a shocker that I survived those 40x40 days of deprivation, lack, and neglect within civilization that all precipitated this profound moment of . . . abandonment.
We can’t even begin to imagine Christ left to die in the wilderness, consigned to the torments of abject loneliness. Starvation. Demonic whispering.
That’s not how the story goes.
But Christ did.
It doesn’t take a great deal of even prophetic imagination for him to have seen just how the story would go. Later.
When he, too, would find himself abandoned in the thick of civilization.
The wilderness isn’t where we go to die.
It is where we go to lose the things we love and need so that we can find God. So that he can save us.
And even, sometimes, at the right moment, return to us the regular sorts of nourishment we are accustomed to.
There may even be angels, so we’re not without company.
I’m not opposed to finding myself in the company of saints again, ministers and messengers of divine care. In fact, I’ve eked out a few truly solid, committed, true companions and supports who also walk with Jesus . . . and I’ve discovered these incredibly deep, nourishing friendships wholly outside the confines of any particular place of worship.
Huh.
Lent is a time for giving up things that break us so that our needs can be rightfully, truly met, those maladjusted cracks tended to, bound and healed.
Who knows when or if I will take up regular church attendance again.
But I know that I will not present my children with a corrupt, toxic presentation of community, and call it good.
I know that I will seek for them to know God through the hearts and presences of those who love them consistently with actions, who sincerely want to get to know them and prove it by how they behave around us.
I know I will continue to encourage my son as he seeks to worship Jesus in spirit and in truth.
Not buildings and social functions.
Spirit and truth.