Peace be with you!

This week I am delighted to share with you a letter from our student intern Jayden. We are so blessed to have them learning with us for this next school year. 

Yours in Christ, Rev Michiko

 

Dear Glen Morris United Church, 

My name is Jayden Jones (they/them or he/him pronouns). I am a Candidate for Ministry with the United Church, and a second year Masters of Divinity student at Emmanuel College of Victoria University in the University of Toronto. Part of this middle year of my seminary education means that I get to work with a church over the course of the year. I am blessed that the Reverend Michiko Bown-Kai agreed to be my mentor in this. This past summer I got to meet several of you when I led worship one Sunday and shared in a meal in fellowship afterwards and I cannot begin to express how excited I am to be working with your community.

As a child who, for better or worse, had an incredibly meticulous and at times inflexible personality, the rules of the church I grew up in seemed like a Godsend (pun not wholly intended). Anything that was not clear from the text was explained in the Catechism. It gave me an illusion of safety that I had lacked in many areas of my life as a child and desperately craved, and in many ways it became my armor from the world. That was until, of course, I found myself at odds with my understanding of these rules in such a way that no amount of prayer, faith or dedication helped. 

I feel like we, as Christians, all suffer from this fixation on the rules, regardless of tradition to some degree. Even when we are trying to challenge what we know in our hearts are unfair and exclusionary rules. Within our rule seeking is our longing for stability in a constantly changing world.

I see that in our wider culture as well – the heartbreak surrounding the passing of Queen Elizabeth II is tied to us knowing that it marks the end of an era, and with endings come uncertainties of the future. This uncertainty creates anxiety and we can sometimes respond by being more meticulous and rigid, making categories between us and others.  

I have seen ongoing discussions regarding the former Queen’s role in colonialism silenced under claims of it being inappropriate. That the death of a monarch is not the time to speak of the pain that monarchy has brought. A lot of this objection is coded in the language of respect: don't speak ill of the dead, we are told. Is that the right way though? Should the truth of the living who are suffering be rendered silent for the sake of the dead? Can the loved ones of the deceased speak of their loss while those who were harmed speak of their pain? I am reminded of Reverend Michiko’s reflection last week about how we can and often should hold competing and at times conflicting truths simultaneously.

Queen Elizabeth was a groundbreaking monarch and she upheld a system that has harmed many. Our faith has brought people into community with us and shunned them. Jesus is both human and God. The Bible is both Divinely inspired and humanly flawed. My Seminary education often means I find myself wrestling with these matters.

What I had thought at first would give me closed answers often brings me more questions, a testament to the fact that even I am not immune to giving into the desire of finding some sort of one size fits all rules to live our life. In doing so, I may have found a sense of security and safety, but at what price? Who was harmed along the way so I could feel safe? I have been grappling with those questions more than ever, especially as a person who had experienced trauma in my youth, and as the saying goes, hurt people hurt others.

I am reminded of how in Genesis our Creator declares all to be good. That there is no concept of bad in the garden until the fruit of the tree is eaten. Then and only then do we see what was once unified pulled apart and segregated into binaries. Everyday in seminary as I find myself with more questions than answers, I sometimes wonder if this is the original sin: our need for stability in the rules that draw lines between us. It is the brokenness that prevents us from seeing what God did, that all of creation was truly good. 

May the peace of Christ be with you, as you, like Jesus, question the rules of our time that draws lines between you and your siblings in Christ. 

May you recognize those moments when you choose stability and the illusion of safety over our shared humanity.

 

Jayden