Over the years one of the things I’ve loved the most about my faith has been the turning of the liturgical year. In my old church I was the one that decorated for every holiday. On Easter draping the large cross behind the pulpit with rich and lavish purple cloth I’d ironed smooth. With preparing a bouquet of beautiful artificial flowers I’d hand painted the details on and arranged artful. Even after I’d stopped attending that church and shuffled along to the Methodist church I still loved the turning of the church seasons. Even if I no longer decorated the church.

Spring arriving along side Easter felt so right. As the world woke up from the long slumber of winter, so did new life appear at the end of Holy Week. The Ash Wednesday service, Good Friday and the build up to Easter sunrise service. A richness and flow to the year, and a turning toward a new year lived in the light of Christ.

During those years I embraced my own Holy Week tradition of reading and praying through the New Testament passages dealing with this time in the life of Jesus. Those years of reading, reflection and prayer added to my joy in the season, that and the Ukrainian Easter eggs I did yearly.

Even my own deconstruction/reconstruction experience didn’t impact what I did and believed during Holy Week for the first ten years of my escape from toxic high demand religious community. But something did. I’ve now be pushed beyond the enclosure like a single black sheep, and stopped cold from Holy Week and celebrating other holidays. Why? The perfidy and exclusionary policies of another set of non denominational churches here in Costa Rica.

There are a mere three English-speaking churches here. Not a one affiliated more than very loosely with a denomination. You would have thought I’d have learned the lesson the hard way that to attend a making it up as we go along non denomination church was a dangerous place. Apparently I’m simply just not that smart.

What’s the issue now keeping me from attending one of the three churches here? It started with a little dog dander, from an un-groomed fuzzy dog. One day I was at the church worship team rehearsal, and one of the others brought their dog. Before I knew what was happening I started wheezing, turned white enough to alert the pastor and was bodily hauled off the platform to furiously dope with all of my asthma meds.

Now I’d popped minor allergies to fuzzy dog fur for years, knowing that to go play with and pet my friend Joanie’s dog Summa I would need to take a few Benadryl first, and to scrub my hands like I was surgeon after unless I fancied a skin rash or swollen eye.

This reaction was new, but after the pastor made sure I got home in one piece since I was too sick to drive the pastor did a radical love thing for me. He banned dogs from inside of the church building. I never expected him to do that, but it turned out to be what I needed.

Fast-forward twenty four months, to a pile of very wealthy church members deciding they hated this pastor, mostly because he would not allow them to do the things they wanted. Instead dear Lyle did what any good pastor that understands that the tent needs to be big enough for everyone does. He didn’t allow anything too terribly radical, or outside the main stream. Wanting sermons promising hell fire and damnation? Nope. Wanting to go on racist rants, or demanding the bashing of this or that group of folks with a different life? Nope. Wanting to insist on home schooling only, even as a church member owned and operated a lovely private school? Nope. Lyle did the responsible reasonable thing and the wealthy elders board ousted him from the church he built, that he owned the building. Kicked to the curb like someone’s prom date who wouldn’t put out at the end of the night.

We were greatly disturbed when all this went down. Lyle was humble, he was kind, he was someone with a real servant heart. He was also very well educated with a divinity degree from Princeton. But Lyle left, and the board huffed they’d just hire someone else. That didn’t happen. Here we are two years later and they still do not have a pastor, scrambling to figure out what to do with no worship team and no pastor.

Just like a certain ex president one of the things they did first was undo many of Lyle’s rules. They embraced every toxic nutbar conspiracy theory about Covid, turned firmly anti vaccination, anti anything not homeschooling, and anti medicine and doctors. If all of that wasn’t enough to get me, mast cell me struggling to breathe me, to leave. it was what they did next that crystallized it. They decided to overturn Lyle’s rule banning dogs from the sanctuary.

The first time it happened post-Lyle a visiting lady showed up with her American Standard Poodle. I didn’t even see the dog. One minute I’m on the platform rehearsing, the next I cannot breathe and I’m running for the door clutching my purse full of medicines. I did see the dog as I was leaving.

Outside I’m doping furiously, stopping just short of using my Epipen. Husband saw me rush for the door, but was busy with his ministry. While I’m shaking, guzzling down pills and using my portable nebulizer a lady I don’t much like, that led the lynch mob removing Lyle, pops out to ask me why I’m outside. I explain that basically that dogs equal no bueno for me. She tells me then I can simply watch the service from outside the building. I tell her that is so not acceptable, that I have a disability accommodation letter as well. Stalemate.

This happens two more times. I am told yet again I can just watch through the window, in the heat of the day in Costa Rica, but the dog stays. The dog owner has told the church board that her beloved pet is an Emotional Support Animal, or an ESA. They refuse to honor my very real health issue for a nebulous and not entirely legal ESA. Both the lady and myself depart from this church. I hear she’s outraged they even questioned her about her dog. Me and my husband? Well it’s pretty obvious I cannot stay in a place that decides my needs are trumped by an animal. I need to be able to breathe.

We visit another church. This church is filled with fire and brimstone teaching about how we are all incredibly shitty and flawed folks going straight to hell unless we conform to their version of faith. Nope. Even more toxic than most. Too bad because I liked the pastor and his wife, and there were other refugees from the first church there that I adored.

Church number three, billing themselves as ‘that revival mega church in the jungle’ Talk to the pastor about the dog situation, he swears he’ll ban them from the service because why are people bringing their dogs to church after all? Turns out not to quite be true, not his self-penned ridiculous description, what the pastor promised about dogs. The church plays thirty year old worship music. They seemed to embrace the worst aspects of the Toronto Revival and other places. The pastor was folksy, relatable, but his sermons were a hot mess. Turns out he has no real pastoral education, and this church, like the other two, is non denominational.

The first week I attended he offered up a pallid request for people to stop bringing their dogs. No one paid him any mind, he never spoke of it again. After a few more asthma attacks over the fuzzy haired ones with the certain dander I was out of there, just done with them all.

So now I stay home. My husband goes to church, while I read my Bible, listen to worship music and pray on my own. I’m still angry over how the churches here have treated my health concerns but not unsurprising. Since I started my YouTube channel and started speaking of the issues of disability and the world and the church I’ve heard many other sad variations of my story. A church member with a special need followed by clergy that told them they could ‘just watch from outside’.

You know who also was on the outside looking in many times in his life? Jesus. I have to think that this is the savior that knows how we who are marginalized by the church feel, that loves us and accepts us just as we are. He would never tell someone in a wheelchair trying to surmount the issue of stairs to just ‘deal with it’ A man riding into town so humbly on a donkey would accept a freak like me and all the others who need help to be there.

I miss church most especially now, in this time of the year. The feeling of reverence, of the sacred and holy. But I know that church isn’t the focus, it’s not even “Biblical”. All I need is accessible any time, any place, any how without the need for accommodations or clueless folks.

Two years since I attended Holy Week in a church. I felt rather grumpy about this earlier but now I’m looking forward to the same reverence and sacredness here where I am.