A Wide Welcome

Reflections on Emily Dickinson and Matthew 7:1 

A great hope fell

You heard no noise

The ruin was within.

                                 Emily Dickinson

Mae was born in Scotland to a single mother almost 100 year ago. Because of the circumstances of her birth, she was deemed beyond the God’s good graces, born from sin and without hope. She was denied the sacrament of baptism in the Church of Scotland. Her mother, in response to her perceived misfortune, left Mae to be raised by her grandparents. For many years, Mae thought her grandparents were her birth parents. Her mother eventually fell in love again and married this time. She raised a new family, one that never included Mae. Mae never met her biological father, never had a genuine, mother-daughter relationship with her birth-mother and never joined a church, even in her adult life, because she was too ashamed to admit that she had never been baptized as a child. The truth of her birth and its consequences haunted Mae her entire life. She was 86 years old before she revealed this shame to her own daughter and granddaughter.

Judge tenderly of me.

                                 Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson was baptized. The famed nineteenth century poet was raised within the framework of New England Congregationalism at a time when faith was being challenged and stretched by the likes of Darwin. With her family, she attended church regularly and participated in daily, family, devotional gatherings as a child. She was a student of the bible. She was spiritual, but she was not narrow.  She was intelligent, but not rote. At the age of 16, Emily entered the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, a prestigious academic institution. She studied a broad range of subjects from science to Latin, algebra to philosophy. She excelled academically, but it was her moral and religious constitution that was called into question when the school’s principal, Mary Lyon, came to the conclusion that Emily was a no hoper.  Emily refused to profess her faith publically at a school revival. According to principal Lyon, there were three types of student at Mount Holyoke. There were those who professed their faith publically and narrowly, those who hoped to one day profess publically and those, like Emily, who had no hope of making a public and dogmatic profession. Whose to say for sure what the consequence of such a label was for a young Miss Dickinson, but as an adult, Emily never chose to formally join a church. 

“Judge not, that ye may not be judged.”

                                           Matthew 7:1 (KJV)

We need not look back to the time of Jesus, or nineteenth century New England or even early twentieth century Scotland to find the human finger of judgment scarring the hearts of its victims. We know all too well its destructive power, the way human judgment seeks so narrowly to define who is in and who is out. And when our judgments presume to speak on behalf of God, the damage extends both ways. Our victims are prone to losing hope in God’s unqualified love and we, as a consequence of our own bad behavior, lose all hope of seeing the image of God, the beauty of the divine, in every human heart. The finger that we point, points back to us. The good news is that God is not defined nor limited by our human judgments. Grace and welcome extend in all directions and reach us in ways untold.

Baptize before without a choice,

But this time consciously, of grace

                                                                                 from Love’s Baptism by Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson found the divine apart from the church, grace found her in the beauty of the world seen outside her window. And what of Mae? She died at the age of 92 having never felt the welcome of a Christian congregation. Still, she was by all accounts a woman of deep faith. Her family sought to give her in death what she was denied in life, an official Christian welcome. They wanted for Mae a Christian burial, officiated by a Presbyterian pastor. I was that pastor. As we gathered at her graveside for prayers and words of comfort, a gentle rain began to fall covering her casket with streaks of holy tears.  All gathered understood that this was a baptism of welcome, an extension of divine healing, a lifelong shame dissolved and grace upon grace extended.  

What the church gets wrong, what humans twist and mangle, God heals and sets to right.  No human being can restrict God's wide welcome.  Thanks be to God!