a story for Sunday

'A story for Sunday' was born out of this small idea that our stories can be used to challenge each other in our differences, to encourage understanding and acceptance of those things that make us unique.

Maybe you're divorced or maybe you're homeless. Maybe your brother or your sister is at war. Maybe you feel misunderstood. Maybe you struggle with addiction or depression or pride. Maybe your political beliefs or religious beliefs don't fit in with anyone around you. Maybe you just want to stand on your soapbox and yell all the things that no one else will say.

That's what Sundays are for.

Sundays are for storytelling.

Kendall's story:

Many Sundays, sometimes Saturday evenings, my husband Jason and I make the two and a half hour drive from our home in Connecticut to Watertown, Massachusetts. We spend a few hours in the Boston area, and turn around again to head home. When people ask why we make this drive sometimes leaving at unholy hours of the morning to make the journey, I usually just say our church is there. This prompts the usual question “isn’t there a church closer to your home you could attend?” Of course, the answer is yes, but for 6 years Jason and I have chosen to maintain our ties to the Church of the Good Shepherd. Those ties and that community are central in my life; they are life sustaining. What makes the community of this particular parish so compelling? It is a cherished example of what it means to be living as a beloved community.

The Church of the Good Shepherd is a very small Episcopal parish that sits on the corner of a busy street. It is an unassuming building that one could easily drive by day after day without any awareness of what is taking place inside the walls. Like many churches, Good Shepherd lives into the gospel tradition of visiting the sick, the prisoner, the widow and the orphan. What makes this parish a bit different, however, is not only that it visits those who are unable to come to the table for communion with us, but it also invites those among us who are so often excluded from community into communion as full participants of Christ’s family. It is a parish that embraces each person who crosses the church threshold as they are, and the embrace is genuine and without exception. The embrace is celebrated.

Good Shepherd is a parish composed of professors, people with physical impairments, people with intellectual impairments, graduate students, Episcopal seminary students, dentists, lawyers, teachers, people with psychiatric impairments, authors, and some who have had struggles few of us can imagine. It is a community that welcomes the LGBTQ community without reservation and with great celebration. It is a community of love. We are a ragtag bunch in many ways, and it is for that reason that Jason and I keep going back. It is for me a place where I have been welcomed as I am – not the best of me, but the least of me. And I too have been celebrated and embraced without reservation.

Much of my life, for reasons hidden from casual observation, I have been an outsider. As an adolescent, young adult, and a not so young adult, I have known exclusion and derision in ways that are difficult to bring into words. I have lived a significant portion of my life in institutional settings. Even in those programs that were not residential, I have felt the impact of institutional attitudes and presuppositions bearing down and limiting the possibilities of what I was told my life could be. With all evidence to the contrary, I nonetheless believed the loudest voices that said “people like me” don’t finish school. We don’t hold jobs. We don’t have relationships. I am a patient after all, and I am not the kind of patient that gets better – or so I was told. Good Shepherd didn’t care. They didn’t even ask. I'm not sure they even noticed. They did not pick me up; it did not seem to occur to them that I needed to be picked up. They simply embraced me. Their warm ethic of hospitality welcomed me, and for one of the first times in my life, I found there was no role to play. There was no reason to believe I was sick, no expectation to be fulfilled. In the parish I found I could come as I am whoever that might be.  I came whole with my vulnerabilities and my strengths, and that wholeness has been sustained. There has been no need to be other than I am. Through Good Shepherd I have been loved, and in that love I have grown.

But there is even more to the parish than our insular holy love for one another. It is a parish that works hard to reach out to the community. It is a community that reaches out for justice – social justice, restorative justice, Christ’s justice. We may not always know what that means or exactly how to do it, but we try. It is a parish that loves God, loves Christ, and seeks everywhere it is possible, to embrace rather than to exclude. We are a parish that has its foibles, tensions, challenges to be sure. Not all is peace and understanding. But it is a prayerful parish. It is a parish of strong example, and as I continue to live in this world and am continually confronted with such a very different way of seeing than the way in which I believe Christ leads us, my husband and I make the journey every week we can so we can to be reminded of how to live into our faith in a world that so often presses us to do otherwise. It is not a perfect parish, but it is a loving parish. It is a parish that works each moment to build and live the beloved community to which the Gospel calls us.

I have to say, one of my favorite things about coming to NYU might just be the opportunity of meeting Kendall. She is radiant and wise and carries with her a beautiful story. I'm hoping that one day she'll come back and tell us more-- her story will change everything you think you know; It will tear down your walls and wreck all the stereotypes you didn't even know you held. She brings a unique spirit to the field of social work, having been on the other side of it all, and I have learned so much from her. 

I cling to Kendall's story in a weird way, because she has found hope when everyone told her there was none. She found community that didn't try to 'fix' her.. simply because they don't see anything that needs 'fixing'. She has found a beloved community where she is celebrated. One where she is free to love, and to serve, and to be. How rare and how beautiful.