THE SPACE BETWEEN

For most of my life, I have been a member of a church. It was a given. But about a dozen years ago, when the Episcopal congregation I called home, had an acrimonious split over issues of homosexuality and scriptural authority, I took a hiatus from church. Fellow churchgoers, who judged one another mercilessly, making piety a competition and community too often a place where I felt the least safe, had spiritually injured me so many times over the years. What started as a temporary sabbatical from, in a sense, the Sabbath, lasted until…last month. I didn’t intend for that to happen, but it did. Personal spiritual trauma combined with my given vocation — as a religion reporter I went to church for a living — made it difficult for me to turn off my inner critic whenever I visited a new church, searching for a home but never finding it.

Perhaps the most extraordinary product of our virtual church is that it has led my husband and me back to a physical church. Jen, one of the women on the thread who lives a few suburbs away from us, is in love with her church. She speaks about it with such fondness and gratitude, recounting interactions with fellow congregants and sharing the beauty of the pastor’s gentle, grace-filled ministry, that over time I became curious. Interestingly (God does have a tremendous sense of humor), hers is an Episcopal congregation that had endured a painful split a few years back over homosexuality and scriptural authority. After months of hearing about her spiritual home, I wanted to see what Jen was talking about for myself, setting aside my fears of getting hurt for the chance to once again embrace a local church home.

In October, my husband and I celebrated our 11th wedding anniversary with Jen and her husband, David. We spent the night at their house and the next morning joined them and their four children for church. It just so happened the service we attended was a healing service, where any and all were invited to approach the altar for prayer. Surprising no one more than myself, I got up from the pew in the back of the sanctuary and walked up the aisle. When the priest approached me, asking what she could pray for, all I could articulate was, “So much. I’m just really broken.” She placed her hands on my head and prayed for God to heal me in whatever ways I needed to be made whole. I got up from my knees, feeling somehow lighter and full of joy. Walking back to my seat, I caught Jen’s eye. She was crying. That I couldn’t have seen online, but I know deep in my soul that without Facebook, I would never have seen those tears in person. Such amazing grace.

As I understand it, grace is a gift. It’s something we can’t earn or lose. We can’t do anything to make us more or less worthy of God’s greatest gift to us. Grace is startling, wild, surprising, and life changing. A few years back, I had a conversation with the author Anne Lamott, who in books such as Traveling Mercies and Grace (Eventually) has spoken so eloquently about the experience of God’s audacious, unearnable gift. I asked her if she thought we could be grace for one another. “I think we can hold space for one another,” Annie told me. Without my knowing it, Jen and David and no doubt the rest of the thread, had been holding space for me until I was ready to move into it.

In an introduction to theater class my freshman year at Wheaton, I read a book by John V. Taylor called The Go-Between God. In it, Taylor argues that the Spirit of God can be experienced as much between people as in them. Perhaps the Spirit of God abides as well in the electrons that float through space when we email each other, blog, or post to Facebook. Computers and the Internet may be the media, but the connectivity is altogether spiritual. Looking at it from that perspective, logging on takes on a new, profound meaning.

After all, there is no distance in the Spirit. And even cyberspace can be a sacred space.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. What have your own experiences been in connecting with faith online, whether in a discussion group, web site, searching for information, online prayer chain, or in personal email exchanges with friends or acquaintances?

2. How do you see God using the Internet to make connections between people that might not otherwise be made in this global village where we now all live?

3. How can you foster or encourage the positive uses of the Internet without giving the impression that it’s okay to blindly consume the Internet and other digital media?

4. Cathleen Falsani states that the community that emerged from her thread “happened organically, not by design.” Is it possible for churches to engage or facilitate virtual community without negating its organic nature? Why or why not?

5. How can “virtual church” enhance “actual church” without replacing it? What opportunities for grace are present in online connections that would be beneficial to members of a local congregation?

6. Does your church have a Facebook group? Should it? Why or why not?

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