Somebody That I Used to Know

chats with my former self

At the end of my book, Native, I write a little note to the reader, reminding all of us that we are capable of changing:

“As I write, you are getting the Kaitlin of her thirtieth year of life, the one who has only learned as much as she can by this point. By this time next year, she will know new things, and those things will shape her. She will have found better ways to express love, better language to fight hate, and will have learned more from the books that have yet to be written by others in the world doing extraordinary work.”

This spirit of change and transformation is what brings me to this new Liminality Journal series called Somebody That I Used to Know (cue the Gotye song here).

Pretty soon, I’ll be closing the blog portion of my website, and honestly, it brings tears to my eyes as I type this— not because the blog posts are really that good, because they’re really not—but because this blog is where I began writing after I became a mother. In my early days of writing, I gathered my books and laptop at a coffee shop, drinking a vanilla latte and trying to find out who or what God might be in and around me.

It was such a holy space, and it really helped me birth my first book, Glory Happening. It helped me find the courage to tell stories—in fact, I named the blog Stories to honor that. It helped me find myself.

So, for the next little while, I am going to do something that might seem a bit strange: in order to protect and re-imagine some of those first blog posts, I’m going to interact with my past self, with the mid-20s Kaitlin who wrote about Jesus and God and magic in her own way. I am going to chat with her, question her, pull her toward myself, embracing transformation as I have lived it.

I hope you enjoy this series, and I hope it teaches you a few things:

1. I hope it teaches you to embrace your past self, too. We are all different in some ways; we have grown and shifted, used new language, unlearned things. We can still love our past selves for who they were. We must in order to heal.

2. I hope it reminds you that our humanness matters, and words matter. I will be challenging my own thoughts here, and I hope you challenge yours, too. We have so much to learn—together.

3. I hope that you go back and revisit old blog posts or journal entries that you’ve written and have honest conversations with yourself about where you were and where you are today.

So here’s how this will work— the entire blog post will be shared here, and my new commentary and additions to the piece will be typed in bold to show my present voice interacting with the past words.

So now, onto the first piece.

Deconstructing Ideas of White, American Worship Music:

I've been tired during church lately. I was tired when I went to church. I was tired all the time, and furious, too, because the white supremacy was seeping through the walls and no one was doing anything to stop it. I’d come home shaking, wondering what I should be doing differently, until it finally occurred to me that I wasn’t the one doing something wrong—the church was, and I didn’t have to keep forcing myself to try to fix it by attending every week, emailing the pastors about things that the church should care about, and attempting to create community and kinship where there was none.

If you're someone attempting to deconstruct or decolonize your faith like I am, you might feel it, too. And I know it’s hard, so hard that even now, many of us have left church spaces we once called home. We are finding home in ourselves, in the world we were told was pagan and sinful. We are still finding God.

As a Potawatomi woman, I found myself going over every word of every song, every word of every sermon, asking if those words are inclusive of my own culture within the views of the American church. And more often than not, they weren’t. I was an outsider in the kinds of spaces I’d grown up in, and the words to the worship songs suddenly felt suffocating, colonizing, cruel.

But so many of us, we show up at church, asking all the questions, making all the critiques we can, because these things matter.

And many of us end up leaving exhausted because the church has not yet understood that Jesus really was a poor, brown carpenter and still has something to say to us today. I'm exhausted that I don't yet understand that in my own skin. I remember the Sunday morning, sitting in our church, when it hit me that Jesus isn’t white, like really settled into my reality, and suddenly, I realized that I’d been duped—that we’d been duped by this white American faith that was never really about kindness or love. It was about colonization, erasure, and pain in the name of an empirical god.

And we end up leaving exhausted because we have to hold our own culture's truths and tensions with the “gospel” and also hold all these cultural, racial, belief-based tensions with one another. The complexity of all of this can be exhausting, but when we show up to a church that, on top of this, expects and encourages us to assimilate into whiteness, the conversations aren’t even possible.

As a worship leader, I used to pay attention to the room during worship.

I listen to the voices in unison.

I wonder where people are coming from when they sing words like, "The Lord is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and rich in love." I was asked recently what I feel toward worship music now, and I shared that I barely listen to it anymore. I can barely stomach the words of songs like come just as you are when I know that what is typically wanted from us is our whiteness, our obedience, the sacrifice of ourselves for this version of sacredness that is anything but sacred. Too many people are pushed to the margins (or fully out) of the church for me to believe that what we’ve been doing for centuries is really working. So as I hold this space, I also acknowledge how I was complicit in the colonization of church spaces, of worship songs and ideas that did not hold space for others to show up fully as they were. I hold that tension every day, too.

And as I am analyzing these things and trying to worship through my own experiences, which means I find God in the world around me everyday, in my interactions with others, with the earth, and not in any institutional church, I come back to this idea of nakedness and the goodness of the earth, who always accepts my own body, and every body, as a connection to herself, as kin.

Theresa ofAvila says it like this:

You find God in yourself and yourself in God.

To know the true mirror image of God is to know ourselves fully, as we are fully known.

And that means that while we stay tethered to and learn from and engage with our cultural lenses, we also zoom into our souls, into that naked place, to that deepest part of who we are to embrace Mystery, without analyzing any of it.

We embrace Mystery without analyzing any of it. The reality is, many of us have left the worship spaces we once knew in order to fully experience that Mystery.

This means that we even have to allow ourselves to step out of the mindset that worship should look, feel and seem a certain way.

To embrace Mystery is to recognize that worship is something fully beyond us that we step into and participate in, and not just in a church building full of people.

One of the most worshipful experiences I had recently was while I was staying at an AirBNB in the Blue Ridge mountains. I took an early evening walk, mittens on and a cup of coffee in my hand. As I turned the corner, I watched  a family of deer run across the street and up into the woods on the other side. Before they disappeared, one of them stopped, turned around, and stared at me for a few seconds.

Sometimes worship happens as a rootedness that we do not expect or even think we deserve. I truly believe that this space of curiosity, magic, and humble childlikeness is where that worship happens, where we simply experience the sacred and are forever changed because of it.

The mirror image of myself in that deer was a moment to recognize my own sense of belonging in this world. In the space, beyond my culture, beyond the fact that I am a Potawatomi woman, that I am a mother and wife and former worship leader and writer and friend, I was simply one soul looking at the soul of another creature.

We were simply acknowledging one another, and in that, acknowledging Mystery, without analyzing any of it.

This makes me think of this poem from my book, Native:

I am often in my own way. Instead of experiencing the Universe,
I write about experiencing the Universe,
while at that very moment, the wind had
holy secrets to tell me.

So we erase the lines that make rules to tell us when and how to worship. We expand our thinking outside the walls of the church and realize that "occasionally it is not the open air or the church that we desire, but both,” as Celtic author John Phillip Newell writes.

And this is difficult when you're on church staff, when you're trying to figure out how to run a church with various cultures, to honor diversity, to honor the life of Jesus. I get that. I was a part-time worship leader a few years ago, struggling to hold my own identity in check to fit the mold of the job I’d finally obtained. I ended up leaving the space, a space that became unsafe for me as an Indigenous woman, as a worship leader trying not to compartmentalize myself. And I had to ask: if I didn’t fully belong, who else wasn’t fully belonging either?

But leading others in worship means we lead them out of themselves, and we also lead them out of the mindset that worship must look the way the American church thinks it should look. The realities of COVID have made this all so much harder, and yet, so much more important, that we hold one another in solidarity and love as we navigate this.

And soon we find that deconstructing our worship patterns is actually a return back to that nakedness, to that mirror image between us and God, between us and the world, between my own culture and yours.

And then we find that worship has done its work, because the glory of God happens when this created world is fully alive to beauty, to love, to all of those things that we have such a hard time finding because we are so constantly trying to analyze the questions and critiques as they come to us every week in church.

Because of and despite our questions and critiques, the Mystery is still there, still engaging, still asking us to look and respond, to be present with every aspect of ourselves, to the honor and glory of God.

Iw, Amen.

As someone who no longer attends church or is connected to any denomination, I admit that the idea of “worship” still seems to fall within institutional walls in a lot of ways. If you are still part of the church, I pray your journey is one of sacred resistance, where you find love and are loved. If you too have left the church, I pray you find spaces that hold all of you, that welcome and remind you of all that Sacredness is and isn’t around you.

Perhaps today, I use words like “ceremony” or “ritual” as a way to interact with the Divine/God/Mystery/Creator, and acknowledge that for me, it hasn’t taken away from my own experiences with that sacredness.

Indeed, our spirits are capable of such expansion, such fullness, such humility, to journey this earth and wonder what worship even is, what ceremony and art and love mean to us. The fact that we even get to ask those questions is such a gift, isn’t it?

May we journey, acknowledging that gift and who we have been along the way.

Friends, I hope you’re enjoying this new series so far!

For paid subscribers, I’ve currently got a separate series of Casual Blessings that will hit your inbox regularly once you sign up as a paid subscriber! I am so glad you’r here and hope you’ll join us for more moments of leaning into the sacred together.