It’s a funny memory in our family: the four of us were sitting down for dinner a few of years ago. Food was on plates and the meal had begun, and all of a sudden there was a rare lull in the conversation. And our 6-year-old son, out of nowhere, said: “So, are we going to talk about it?” Curious what he meant, I responded, “Talk about what?” And he responded, calmly: “The elephant in the room.”
My wife half choked on her food and I spit my drink across the table, and we stared at each other, wondering what in the world he was talking about about.
Thankfully, it turned out that he was just quoting a movie — “Incredibles 2” by Pixar—and so we laughed and life went on. But it was a humorous reminder of how uncomfortable some topics can be that you don’t want to talk about at the dinner table.
By definition, there is a reticence to talk about the proverbial elephant in the room. The phrase evidently comes to us from an early 19th-century fable called “The Inquisitive Man” by Ivan Krylov and means a significant, embarrassing or controversial topic that everyone seems to know about but no one wants to mention because it makes us squirm in our seats.
Communities of faith often find that there are “elephants” that they would prefer to avoid talking about, too: doubt, hypocrisy, sex and sexuality, race, gender, interfaith relations, mental health and so forth. For various reasons, these topics can feel deeply uncomfortable and “off limits” in spiritual communities. Oftentimes our tendency is just to stick our collective heads in the sand and pretend that these things don’t exist. The problem with avoiding these conversations, however, is that this runs the risk of creating an environment where people feel isolated, ashamed and disconnected from the very community where they should feel most at home. How many church members do you think sit in worship services each week and wonder, “Am I the only one who has doubts about all of this?” How often have people thought, “They’ll accept me here as long as they don’t find out about such-and-such?”
And yet I believe deeply that we should be able to be whole people in our faith communities and spiritual lives. We should not have to ignore reality or hide aspects of who we are at the door. If no where else in our lives, spiritual communities should be the place where we can be our true selves. In this spirit, and in an effort to give permission to bring some of these conversations to light, our church has recently begun a sermon series titled “The Elephant in the Church,” in which we are tackling some of these topics head on.
A couple of weeks ago, for example, I stood in the pulpit and talked about how I wrestle with the notion of hell and eternal damnation. It’s funny to say, but “hell” is a word that I have rarely said from the pulpit. And so it is indeed one of our “elephants.” In my sermon I shared different traditional views of “hell” from church history as a way to break the ice and give permission for our church members and guests to wrestle with their own beliefs about it. My hunch is that a lot of us have doubts about aspects of our religious traditions, but we don’t often feel safe to talk about it. And so the goal is to talk about these things in a public way, as a way of encouraging honest and compassionate dialogue.
For me as pastor, it requires stepping into a vulnerable space. It’s not easy to talk carefully and respectfully from the pulpit about some of these topics. My congregation has quickly learned that I blush easily! But it feels worth it, because when we address some of these topics, we acknowledge that our faith is lived out in the real world and in real lives, with all of their challenges and complexities. We don’t stop being who we are when we walk through the doors of a church, synagogue or mosque. Nor do we stop being spiritual people when we leave those same doors.
Shame thrives in secrecy, but faith communities should be places where we can grapple with the actual problems and struggles that real people face. As pastor, my deepest hope is that people can talk to me about mental health challenges, difficulties in their marriages or whatever life brings their way. Part of what it means to be people of faith and to be on a spiritual journey means being willing to step into uncomfortable spaces, to have uncomfortable conversations and to hold space for different ideas that we aren’t used to hearing.
Moreover, we find that these spaces of discomfort, these liminal spaces, are where change and growth happens. And ultimately, they are where we encounter God. Time and time again in Scripture, people of faith meet God in the wilderness, on boat rides on choppy seas and on stormy mountaintops. It’s not the comfortable spaces where we deepen in our faith. It’s not when we insulate ourselves and avoid the hard stuff.
At it’s core, spirituality is about connection and relationship: with God, with each other and with our true selves. For these relationships to be authentic, life-giving and transformative, we must be willing to acknowledge and engage the full spectrum of human experience. That means creating space to talk about the uncomfortable, messy and complex aspects of life as much as we celebrate the joyous and uplifting ones. My hope is that, by giving permission to talk about the real stuff of life, we’ll find that our faith communities become more inclusive and understanding, where everyone feels that they can be seen, heard and valued, and where everyone finds a space of true belonging.
The Rev. Dr. Art Wright is the senior pastor of Williamsburg Baptist Church.
