No Admittance

I wonder. In my experience of church, it seems to be of tremendous importance to keep "evil" cleanly out. It is as if church is a sanitary place that must not be contaminated. In my tradition, much prayer, fasting, warfare is vested in protecting its boundaries from evil. Anointing oil is splashed around by the gallon, as if some spiritual citronella.

I do believe this is much of why the things I experienced happened. It wasn't so much personal against me, Erin, but rather personal against the ways in which it was perceived I might contaminate the pristine environment where everyone else was living. I had spiritual germs that might infect the -- err-- hive.

Maybe, probably, it is a collective delusion, this presumed sterility. I have seen every kind of sin perpetrated by those who claim to be properly cleansed -- for all fall short. However, that doesn't preclude the fact that people will fight tooth and nail, even to the point of spiritually maiming -- dismembering, as it were -- others in order to protect this imagined sterility.

There is massive effort expended in the church preventing dirty, ugly, smelly sin from entering it's gates. Anyone who gives off the vaguest emanation of sin is either quickly assimilated and whitewashed, or, if they don't come sufficiently clean or are unwilling to submit themselves, they are goners. Sometimes they are literally *asked* to leave, othertimes they are excommunicated by the medieval practice of shunning.

In my case, I was infected with something everyone feared immensely...and I was treated (as were all those involved) as if I had a spiritual plague, highly contagious and deadly to the point of needing to burn the bodies. Is this really still the dark ages? Do we truly believe the power of evil every has a single toehold over the power of the One who is Good? Do we believe sin is contagious? Because it seems, after careful observation, that far too much effort is expended in preventing those who might not be so easily disinfected from entering the church at all.

Like an obsessive-compulsive who requires you to be swept with a wisk broom before entering their home, or like the decontamination showers given to those who handle plutonium, the church is insistent on attempting to preserve an antiseptic environment at the expense of those who need it's healing properties most.

The church locks it's spiritual doors against an invisible enemy, an enemy that if the claims of Christ are true, isn't any kind of enemy at all. Those who truly need to find Jesus' lovingkindness are prevented from receiving it. Those who already belong but fail to maintain the sinless standard are treated similarly.

For we would never want a sinner to actually set foot in a church; what they have might be catching. Cough, cough.