Exiled and Unwelcome

An Advent Blessing for Those Who No Longer Belong

It is the first Sunday of Advent (and my birthday). Coincidence? I think not.

I wrote these words one year ago as I grieved the raw ache of losing my former church community, a place where my scarred heart had rested, served and called home for the last 4 1/2 years. (If you want to know how deeply my heart loved this church and that pastor, read my poem “The Wolf”). After a large scale elder-and-staff-led deception was uncovered by an outside party, my world inverted. The people I had considered friends and mentors had been using my creative gifts to cover up a massive systemic breach of trust, in effect, to groom the congregation into drowsy compliance so that when the inevitable news of the truth hit them, it wouldn’t register as a shock.

Thank God I have experienced more than one raging narcissist in my lifetime, and more than a little spiritual abuse, because while I was kept carefully in the dark as I poured my soul into doing free work for the church I loved, from the first whiff I got of the real story, I knew I smelled s***.

I asked questions, got curious, sought out respected elders to gauge their thoughts. Their robotic, hyper-spiritualized, weird responses floored me, and the fact that I was curious and critical of the leaders of the church system shocked them. Seemingly overnight, my belonging within that community was no more.

Two months after I lost my church, I lost my grandfather.

One month after I lost my grandfather, I suddenly lost my mother.

In the depths of raging grief I found myself deserted by former friends, colleagues and acquaintances - uninvited to parties, subtly dropped from creative planning committees, blocked on the church Facebook page. This was the price of integrity.

So, if you have been betrayed by a community you cared for, consider this a love letter from a kindred spirit in the wilderness. We may both be stumbling through rocky terrain in the bitter cold, but we are not alone. This is my call out to you in the dark, hoping that you’ll call back.

A Blessing for Those Who’ve Lost Belonging

If you, like me, have found yourself unwelcome at Advent in your place of former belonging —know that the womb is only a temporary home. Even a nourishing home can kill us when we grow beyond its bounds.

If you find yourself without a place of rest and larger community this Advent—you follow in the footsteps of a baby Savior who had to only straw to sleep on and animals for company.

When you are on the outside of belonging, you realize that the church at Christmas time looks a lot like the inns of Bethlehem—full of people too preoccupied to notice the needy and vulnerable at their gate.

If you have known loneliness and loss this Advent season, you are not alone.

If your griefs have smashed like waves on the hull of the ship of your faith—your tears have not fallen unseen.

If you have been displaced, dishonored, conveniently disappeared by those you cared for—know that your inherent worth does not diminish because it has been drowned out by busyness, shame and chronic avoidance.

If you have been strangered, widowed, or orphaned by a community you loved—you are still made for and deserving of Shalom.

If you, truth-teller, find yourself unwelcome this Advent in the place of your former belonging, perhaps it is because you resemble too much our Savior’s pregnant, unwed, light-bearing mother. Instead of the burden you carry being recognized as holy and purifying, you have been seen and labeled an inconvenience, a problem, a liability. I wonder if the light inside you shines too bright for the sanctuary of the comfortable. Instead of being welcomed to a seat of honor, you, like Mary, have been left in the dark outside the gate—somebody else’s problem.

Know, dear one, that your dignity is irreversible; a golden thread tying your soul to flesh. You are uniquely glorious; a prism reflecting the Most High and the star-shine that led the Magi to him. You are a story of wordless beauty. You are a gift of priceless worth.

For those abandoned, those disappeared, those erased by the violence of stony silence - your cries out against the injustice you’ve suffered are vital signs of health; proof of newborn life. Your tears show that you feel—that you are real. Belonging in the bosom of mother-God does not rely on membership to a community that assesses your worth based on the amount of time/money/gifts/loyalty you pay in to human empire. Belonging is an embodied experience of the truth - that you have always had a home in the heart of the Most High.

Paradoxically, Advent is the place where those without belonging are met by a Savior who comes to Earth as unwelcome as they are. Even in our earthly exile, even in our loss of hope, even when our light has been extinguished by the communities we’ve been pushed from—the embers we bear within are fanned into flame by an exiled, revolutionary King who comes to set the earth ablaze with his holy, strange and inconvenient fire. His presence—Emmanuel: God with us—encircles us, warms us from within, and reminds us who we really are.

Your loneliness is not a brand of shame, but a mark of integrity. If you have been pushed from belonging by those too cowardly to face the impact of their harm, know that, like the Wise Men, you too have left a toxic throne room to follow the star.

With love,

Kate