Dear Tab Family,
What a joy and a blessing to have Reverend Naomi Washington-Leapheart join us this past Sunday. I was struck by the invitation to us all to “tend to the wellbeing of our faith” while we listened to the sermon, and the stark truth that yes– some of us are tired of the cost of discipleship.
I am often tired. As someone with chronic pain, I don’t go a day without fatigue. Lately, I’ve been especially tired. If I’m being honest, I’m tired of bouncing around, place to place and workplace to workplace. Prior to thinking seriously about answering my call to ministry, I moved over a dozen times in less than ten years. I have spent this time trying as hard as I can, to put down roots somewhere. To feel at home someplace. To find a place to lay my head and rest for a moment.
And what a gift, for Rev Naomi to bring attention to another truth: that Jesus was homeless. That Jesus did not have a physical home base to rest. I find myself, having spent my entire career thus far, putting up with being driven to overwork, over-produce, over-extend, and push myself beyond my own natural capacity to labor for institutions that name me replaceable, to give grace endlessly to the people that populate positions of power at those institutions when they make excuses for each other, and attempt to gaslight and explain away the insidious ways they exploit my labor, and steal my time.
That will happen, though, when I forget this one simple truth I have been letting rattle around in my soul since Fall 2020, and that I received again in the sermon this past Sunday: my home is inside of my own body. I am never outside of my home because I carry it in me. I carry home everywhere I go, because my home is the divinity God placed in me the moment She breathed life into these very bones of mine.
I have a divine right to work from home. Try as it may, the antichrist that is a society built upon the exploitation of our labor, the violence enacted on our bodies and our spirits, the evil that is capitalism will not make itself a bed in my home, and it cannot stop me from demanding rest. It cannot rip me from my own body. And everytime it tries, I can return to the promise of my baptism, and the promise that there is always more life. There is always more life.
And I guess if I wanted to give it all up, submit my resignation to the vocation of justice-seeking and grace-giving and repair God calls me to, I could. I could hang up my hat and punch out and instead give myself fully to the institutions that insist I am not allowed to rest, that insist I am nothing beyond the labor they can squeeze from me, that insist I have no home outside of what I can produce for them.
But then I wouldn’t get to be at home here, at Tab, with all of you. I wouldn’t be able to rest and rejuvenate with you all whom I love so deeply, you all who have given me grace, and allowed me to live more fully into the home of my own body.
Let’s take a breath together, and reflect on these words from Rev. Naomi:
“I demand the time, Jesus, to do something about the domestic wreckage that following Jesus has brought to my life. I demand the right to love myself and my people, without being impugned for doing so. I demand the both/and, to work fully for God during the day, and binge-watch Jeopardy with my wife every night. I demand to work from home.” – Rev Naomi Washington-Leapheart
Today, I invite you to check out The Nap Ministry, and explore rest as a divine right and a form of resistance:
WordPress: https://thenapministry.wordpress.com/
Twitter: @TheNapMinistry
I also invite you to listen to The Grateful Dead’s cover of “I Bid You Goodnight.” As a child of two Deadheads, this was one of the songs my parents would sing to me before bed, and the Dead would often close shows with this song during the late 60s and early 70s. They revived it again toward the end of Jerry Garcia’s life, starting around 1989. This version is from a show in October of 1989 in Virginia. Listen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8gNgiCWlYg&ab_channel=LoloYodel
In grace,
Taylor M. Silvestri (They/them)