The Grace of Discomfort

From the series: Making Space at the Table: The Slow, Holy Work

“Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.”
—Galatians 6:2 (NIV)

There’s a strange assumption many of us inherit from church life—sometimes unspoken, sometimes explicit: that belonging should feel seamless. That when a church is doing inclusion “right,” everyone will feel immediately at ease.

But the Gospel does not promise comfort. It promises communion.

And communion—real, Eucharistic communion—is not a curated atmosphere of harmony. It is a table where difference sits side by side. It is the clink of cups in unfamiliar hands. It is irritation and wonder, awkwardness and beauty, held together by grace.

The slow, holy work of making space at the table will not always feel good. And that is not a sign of failure. It is a sign that something real is happening.

Because inclusion is not just about who we invite in. It is about how we allow their presence to change us.

When a grieving person joins our community, we are invited to move more slowly. When an autistic child joins our worship, we are invited to loosen our tight grip on structure. When an asylum seeker joins our Bible study, we are invited to reconsider our language, our assumptions, our sense of control.

None of these invitations are easy. They disrupt our equilibrium. They surface our unspoken norms. They reveal the quiet rituals we have mistaken for gospel truth.

And yet this is the grace of discomfort: it shakes loose what we thought was necessary, so we can see what is holy.

In Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes that “the person who loves their dream of community will destroy community, but the person who loves those around them will create community.”¹ Inclusion requires exactly that shift—from idea to encounter. From aesthetics to presence. From a clean table to a shared, sometimes sticky, sometimes broken, meal.

But here’s the hard part: encounter always costs something.

It costs the time it takes to really listen.
It costs the ego we must release when our assumptions are challenged.
It costs the pride we carry in our tradition, when someone names the ways it has wounded them.
It costs the rhythm we prefer, the silence we crave, the music we love—because we are not the only ones here anymore.

This doesn’t mean surrendering everything. But it does mean surrendering the illusion that community can exist without mutual sacrifice.

Theologian Emilie Townes writes about “dangerous memory”—the kind of memory that confronts and unsettles us, forcing us to reckon with the past before we can build a future.² Every diverse community carries within it dangerous memories. The church has harmed. The church has excluded. The church has, again and again, preferred sameness to solidarity.

To acknowledge this is not to despair. It is to prepare the soil for resurrection.

And resurrection, in the Christian story, never comes without a cross.

In Benedictine life, we speak of conversion of life—an ongoing openness to being shaped, re-formed, and drawn deeper into Christ. Discomfort is part of that conversion. It is the chisel that breaks our old certainties open. It is the holy friction of transformation.

Sometimes, inclusion hurts.

Not because we are doing it wrong, but because it is real.

The Church is not a social club. It is not a theatre of likemindedness. It is a body—fractured, healed, held together by grace. And bodies are messy. They sweat. They ache. They move awkwardly. But they are alive.

To truly make space at the table, we must stop confusing comfort with belonging. Comfort can be exclusion dressed up in courtesy. Belonging asks more of us.

It asks us to stay at the table when we’d rather walk away.
It asks us to let go of the fantasy of “ideal worship” or “ideal community.”
It asks us to allow ourselves to be changed—slowly, painfully, beautifully—by those we might never have chosen.

Because God chooses them.

And in that choice is our salvation.

The Eucharist does not promise tidy fellowship. It promises brokenness shared, burdens lifted, and a grace that comes not in the absence of tension, but in its faithful holding.

So let us not panic when discomfort arrives.

Let us not try to manage it out of existence. Let us not medicate it with empty platitudes or silence it with speed. Let us sit with it, listen to it, learn from it.

Because that awkward feeling? That moment when you don’t know what to say, or how to act, or whether you belong anymore?

That might just be the sound of the Spirit moving the furniture.
Making space.
Re-setting the table.
Drawing us closer to Christ.

A Note on My Name

From now on, I’ll be writing as Br. Andrew-Thomas.

This name has been with me in prayer for a long time. When I shared it with my Abbot, he told me it had been on his heart too.

I’ve kept Thomas, which carries my questions and faith. And now I carry Andrew too—the first-called, the quiet companion, and the male counterpart to Margaret, whose spirit of grace and faithfulness remains with me.

It’s a name I’m growing into—more fully myself, and more fully the one God is calling me to be.

This name feels like home.

Deo gratias.

References

1. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, Harper & Row, 1954.

2. Emilie M. Townes, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.