Lifting up singleness and found family

Podcaster MaryB. Safrit is a recent guest on the ‘A Matter of Faith’ podcast

by Mike Ferguson | Presbyterian News Service

MaryB. Safrit

LOUISVILLE — MaryB. Safrit, a communicator, creator, coach and the host of the Found Family podcast, did the hosts of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” a favor in a broadcast aired earlier this month, appearing as the guests of Simon Doong and the Rev. Lee Catoe on an episode of “A Matter of Faith” called “Knowing Ourselves (and Singleness).” Listen to their 67-minute conversation here.

“It’s exciting to have a fellow podcaster with us,” Catoe told Safrit. “It’s always good to connect with someone who does something similar.”

The hosts posed this question to Safrit: “Let’s talk about everyone’s favorite subject: ourselves! How does knowing and understanding ourselves impact the kinds of friendships we make and the community that we seek, both inside and outside the church?”

“When I think about the church and my relationships with people at church, it’s had a huge impact on me since I moved to New York,” Safrit said. An admitted “recovering people-pleaser,” Safrit said if “I see myself as this irreparably damaged person, of course I’m going to show up in my relationships with a posture that’s not very empowered. Therefore, I will accept all sorts of nonsense from other people because I don’t think I deserve better.”

Safrit “turned a corner through therapy and empowering relationships,” realizing, “I can say no and it’s not the end of the world. I have created a found family that has been able to see me through some challenging times and transitions, including coming out and my professional journey as a creative entrepreneur that’s a roller-coaster all the time.”

For Safrit, family “has always been a pretty expansive term. It’s really about a prioritization of relationships.”

“What are the relationships I feel most seen in, where I feel like I am able to be myself and feel known?” Safrit said. “There’s that reciprocity there. Who do I want to give my time and energy to, and is that energy coming back to me? It’s a finite group of people who I have either explicitly or implicitly committed to really showing up for, and they’ve done the same for me.” Some have been friends since college; others are “here in the city” who have “walked through a lot with me. There’s a sense of emotional safety and psychological safety, and a sense of commitment.”

“When we talk about ‘found family,’ it’s not found by biology or a legal agreement,” such as marriage, Safrit said. “It’s something we can define for ourselves based on our values and what works for us. It’s something I’ve learned a lot about since joining the queer community for sure. There’s such a rich history of chosen family and found family in the queer community.”

Safrit spent about five years podcasting and writing on singleness in the church. Recently, “I’ve branched out more on inclusion” since coming out. A queer woman might wonder what the first visit to a church might be like “if I walk in with my girlfriend” or “what’s going to happen if I bring my trans friend here?”

In addition, some churches “don’t know how to celebrate single people. It’s not a disease or a problem,” Safrit said. “They are human beings looking for a community who have a lot to contribute to the community.”

“Church is not supposed to be a place where hierarchy exists,” Safrit said. “What if we did the Jesus-y thing and flipped the tables and said, ‘These people who don’t have social privilege or power — what is the goodness of the gospel in those people’s lives? How can we showcase them, so we know God better? To me, it’s a missed opportunity in a lot of churches.”

There’s a difference between “interacting with a big group of people, which is what the church can be, and our found family, our people we have deep relationships with or are cultivating deep relationships with,” Safrit said.

Safrit once shared a long-prayed-for item with a found family member, despondent over having prayed for this for so long with no apparent answer.

“That was met with, ‘hey, maybe that doesn’t need to be your job right now,’” Safrit said. “Maybe we, your people, can pray for you, and also the Holy Spirit can pray on your behalf. To be met with that response … was huge for me. We don’t owe our most innermost feelings and thoughts to a random person who hasn’t taken the time to get to know us, even if they’re in church leadership. You do not owe them your whole story. I feel strongly about those boundaries.”

“A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” with the Rev. Lee Catoe and Simon Doong drops each Thursday.

Doong told Safrit he’d never thought about being single as a lower rung in institutions including the church, where invariably “there will be questions about ‘are you on dating apps?’ or ‘are you seeing anybody?’ People don’t need to be asking those questions. It implies there is a direction your life should be headed. I applaud you for bringing this up,” Doong told Safrit.

During podcasts, Safrit enjoys discussing “the specific value that single people bring to the church outside their usefulness or marriageability. What I noticed when I got into the singleness conversation was that there are lots of folks focusing on getting single people unsingle and a lot about getting singles content, which in a lot of ways means getting them to stop complaining. ‘Be quiet and do your service and be faithful. Go over there and stop bothering us,’” was the message single people often received.

“I was more interested in, if our goodness and identity isn’t contingent on our relationship status, what is the inherent goodness that God has for people who are single?” Safrit said. “Who are we leaving out when we relegate [leadership] to this tiny corner of how singles can be useful to the church, and how they can get unsingle. There is so much we are missing.”

The church ought to be the place “where we are all equal co-heirs with Christ,” Safrit said. “Is this a place where we are caring for widows and orphans, the barren and imprisoned, or is it a place where we get to perform our spiritual righteousness? I don’t know of too many people talking about singleness from that angle.”

As Catoe pointed out, the Jesus Christians worship is someone who was a young single person, a Palestinian Jew “who reformed how family is.”

Safrit called that “a more expansive view of family that Christ modeled for us in a compelling and beautiful way. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be married, but the issue comes when we expect the nuclear family to be the model of relational goodness.”

“It’s great to be married, but don’t make marriage this insular, inward-facing thing, because that’s not going to be good for anybody,” Safrit said. “No matter who we are or where we’re coming from or how we love, we all have something to contribute to each other and this bigger body.”

New episodes of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” drop every Thursday. Watch previous editions here.