Four Christmases

At my Minnesota college, the biggest event of the year was neither homecoming football nor even graduation. It was Christmas Festival, a four-day musical celebration during which ten thousand people descended upon campus to wear Norwegian sweaters, to eat lutefisk  and lefse in the cafeteria and listen to the spectacle put on by St. Olaf College’s five auditioned choirs and its orchestra. That is (in part) why I chose to study there, to immerse myself year after year in perfectly blended anthems to baby Jesus.

I did not know that each November, five rehearsals per week would spin lyrics and melodies into my bones, and that those songs, like a scale, would measure out for me the contents of my heart. Christmas has a funny way of making us aware.

*

My first year, I signed up to give the devotional before our first concert. I signed up because I thought I was spiritually deep and had so much to say and not because I love speaking. That afternoon I ripped up paper after tear-stained paper trying to figure out what to say to 100 of my peers who were cooler than I.

So I showed up with scribbled notes and told the choir that our music, which was about Light and Grace being born within us, had something to teach us about grace. We didn’t have to be perfect. We just had to be present and recognize the holy before us.

My words were ahead of my heart. The whole concert through, my mind babbled. I thought I had worried too much what others would think of my talk; I thought about how it sounded; I thought about my brother and godparents visiting and how I could get my work done in time to go out to dinner with them after the last concert; I thought about how I was not really thinking about Jesus, how I was unrelentingly focused on myself, how therefore I was not good enough for this beauty and this moment and this Savior.

Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, I sang at the end of each night. I was unsettled.

*

I was a sophomore, and something was shifting in me. I was hurting. I had become entangled in painful new experiences. I didn’t know how to make sense of people, or myself. I was tired. The worst of “faith crisis” was yet to come, but the wondering and wandering were beginning.

O why should I wander an alien from thee, or cry in the desert thy face to see?

My comfort and joy my soul’s delight—O Jesus my savior, my song in the night.

I sang the words over and over, harder and harder each time, trying to mean them, trying will Jesus to comfort me. What reached back to me was silence.

In the middle of our Saturday night performance, I thought, How absurd we are, singing to this baby who was born 2000 years ago, calling him God. It seemed absurd in the way that if you look at the letter “h” long enough, you no longer recognize its shape or connections or meaning. It becomes only a collection black lines constructed haphazardly on a page.

Were the rocky friendships and faltering prayers just haphazard elements of my life now? Or was there a pattern? Stay with us, Lord Jesus, stay with us; it soon is evening and night is falling, we sang. I wondered if I believed this, or only hoped for it. I wondered if there was a difference.

*

Junior year: I was broken and small and lonely and full of an overwhelming sense of loss. For two weeks now I had been crying daily. I had ended a relationship that was good and affirming and simply not right. The innocent faith of my childhood was gone, being replaced with something that was still growing, still feeble, still slow. I had lost even my sense of myself.

I had not, however, lost God. I could not quite name it, but I had not lost my belovedness, nor my chance for a dazzling new beginning. Along with my sadness, there was in those nights an almost imperceptible sense of possibility. God so loved the world, we sang, and the conductor told us that the whole song was in the word “so.”

In just a few weeks I would travel to East Africa, and I would love its people and its land and its language and its version of me. I would meet, in great humility and sadness, some wonderful friends and my future husband and a sense of the miraculous that would pull me back to a lasting kind of joy. My friends back in Minnesota would chart their own new paths, some joyful, some more painful than ever before. In all of this, we would be so loved.

*

In every Christmas Festival, there is a magical moment—the choir has taken our places in a great circle around the audience. We are ready to sing our first two songs in the round before processing to the stage. The lights dim to black; the conductor raises his arm; there is a split-second of darkness, silence; the room is pregnant. Then the first lovely aching note of the strings is played, and perhaps a chime is struck, and we have begun.

What I don’t realize until much later is that we hold that empty moment in a tiny cavern inside us and we carry it with us for the rest of the night and it is the hope and expectation from which all our music springs.

*

We were seniors now, and we could scarcely believe it, in the way that twenty-two year olds think time goes by so fast. Before our final performance, Sunday evening, the other senior girls droned on about how they would be sobbing when it was all over, how their voices would crack and they would not be able to sing the last chorus. I, ever slow to process, was sure I would not cry.

After the last cutoff, the audience stood in ovation and I looked out over that crowd one final time. That’s when I spotted the woman, with newly graying hair and a wrinkle or two and a Norwegian sweater like everyone else. Her eyes were shiny with tears and she just kept clapping and clapping, and I could feel the depth of what this music meant to her. Perhaps she had once sung on this stage; perhaps she had been divorced or lost a job or her mother had cancer; perhaps her daughter, who had never quite found a niche in high school, was singing in the front row of the freshman choir; perhaps she hadn’t really heard, for a very long time, that God dwells among us in love.

For the first time in four years of singing, I imagined the life of the audience along with my own. I noticed that we were all there, together, wondering and worrying and over-analyzing and zoning out and then suddenly being caught up all together in the beauty of it—inexplicable, unreasonable, hard-to-believe but absolutely-rock-bottom-still-there. 

The palpable sense of God's love surrounded us all. Tears were streaming down my face.

Full-circle cynic

Photo by Joka Okada

It was February in Minnesota when I first sat in the front row of his "Hebrew Bible" class and pulled out my notebook and an NRSV Study Bible. I was bright-eyed and open-hearted, ready to be struck with glory, ready to be changed. The summer before, I'd slowly and painstakingly read through the first five books of the Old Testament--the Torah--and I'd been amazed by the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Now I was about to learn all the hidden and glorious messages of God within these texts.

I knew, of course, about tough questions and challenging passages. I knew about critical scholarship. I knew that somewhere deep in my gut there lived nascent questions and doubts. I'd seen those questions before: in prior religion classes, in the emotional bruises of deep and intense friendships, in the experience of engaging a foreign culture.

But I was hopeful. I'd just spent four weeks in Bangladesh, and I had written in my final paper that love was the answer to poverty. Jesus was the answer to all sorrow. I walked by faith, and some things were still simple.

*

My professor, who was popular with students, cracked sarcastic jokes about fundamentalists, and I sometimes wondered if I was included in his classification. He assigned a text called The Secular Bible and spent the first few weeks not delving into the mysteries of the text but rather making us very comfortable with words like "legend," "saga," "myth."

Only I wasn't comfortable. I believed the Bible was True--by which I meant science, I meant history in the modern sense, I meant it had been recorded without error from the mouth of God. If the myths were borrowed from other cultures, if the geography didn't line up, if there was no Adam and Eve...if some of it wasn't true, how could any of it be true? How could Jesus be true? How could the life I'd built be relevant?

There was no one to pat my back and tell me it was okay, that story was the vehicle of theology in the ancient world, that there are still so many incredible and unique and maybe even miraculous distinctions about the Judeo-Christian tradition, about the way it's been passed down.

There was no one. Only my professor, who called me a Bible-thumper, who answered my earnest questions in his office hours with academic explanations and justifications when what I needed were pastoral affirmations.

And so after six weeks in the class, I bailed. I bailed not to run away from the evidence; in fact I knew I'd never be able to ignore it again. I bailed because it was too much, too fast, too heavy, and my mind and heart were being crushed. I bailed because I needed silence in order to hear the whispers of God. I bailed because I couldn't bear to lose my faith. (And you can pick up the rest of that story here.)

*

Eight years later, as I prepared to start seminary at Duke, there was a tiny piece of me that wondered if I'd have to go through it all again. I had learned to reconcile my questions and still my heart. I had learned that scholarship is not contrary to God but a means of honoring God. I had learned that science and archaeology and faith don't have to be at odds, that God can transcend some of the imperfect ways God's word has been communicated. But had I only reconciled these things because I wasn't facing the questions directly every day?

Meanwhile, my politics and theology had evolved (left, I suppose I must say, though I am wary to identify with any ideology).

I was internally clear that these shifts were good shifts, shifts made in pursuit of truth, in pursuit of Christ.

I also saw how they correlated with increased skepticism of religious language, increased internal resistance to some Biblical interpretation, increased walls of defense. Maybe I was afraid of judgment from those who still held the beliefs I'd left behind. Maybe I was sometimes afraid of my own thoughts.

I didn't like the ways I had become jaded and cynical, defensive of my beliefs, skeptical about the work of the Spirit.

*

In the first week at Duke, the trees behind the chapel windows formed the most sacred kind of stained glass; the bread of the Communion brought together the many as One; songs were offered by broken, beautiful voices.

I walked into my Old Testament class. I was somehow again open-hearted, which was in itself a miracle.

This time, my open heart was met with a beautiful fullness.

Because the lecture that day was about a Creation story sprung from the spirits of an exiled people affirming their God.

The lecture shimmered with art, and faith, and authenticity. The lecture fully engaged history and archaeology and literary genre and found in the scripture something good and beautiful, something redemptive, something far richer than the simple reading I gave it at twenty. The lecture took into account patriarchy and ecological destruction and all of the evil that may come of power and was not glossing over the objections and yet still finding something in the story worth remembering, worth thanking God for.

I wanted to cry, for my twenty-year-old self, for her questions restored and recast in a beautiful framework.

And it goes on like this, day after day. My cynical nature has met its match. Every question, every doubt, every troubling implication is anticipated. Every day now, I walk out of my Old Testament class with a heart that is aching for the terrifying goodness of God.

Note: Since some people have asked, my professor is Ellen Davis. And I highly recommend every book she has ever written. Particularly lovely and accessible is Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament.

Minarets, mercy, and me

We arrived in Bangladesh early in the morning, while it was still dark. We walked out of the airport into impossibly thick, hazy air; we hopped into taxis whose drivers we could not understand, en route to a hotel we didnʼt know how to find; as first light broke we breathed in burning trash and listened as the call to prayer rang out in the streets.

I was nineteen, and it was intoxicatingly beautiful and frightening and new, all at once.

Photo by Carleton Browne

My knowledge of Islam was minimal. I had been taught in Sunday school and at camp and wherever else it came up that Christianity was unique in this: it is a religion of grace and mercy. We are a people who believe in a forgiving God; we do not earn God’s love or salvation by our own merit but receive it by grace. Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, Humanism—all of these religions attempt to curry favor with God or earn paradise by human deeds.

For a while I bought the argument, which was supposed to be a kind of assurance, showing that our religion was unique among all global religions and that therefore its story held some extra weight. For mercy in time of failure, Christianity was the only place to turn.

*

Two weeks in, we girls were sitting in our translator Jamila’s room, discussing poverty or henna or peanut butter, I don’t remember. The muezzin’s voice rang out, and Jamila turned to us. “Will you mind if I pray?” We shook our heads and quietly chatted on as she insisted we did not need to leave.

She rolled out a mat and knelt, her forehead pressed to the ground; then she up on her heels; she knelt again, prostrated again; up and down as she spoke under her breath. The late afternoon sun snuck through the window slats and bathed her shalwar kameez in gold. It was like a dance.

I saw in her prayer something that went beyond duty and ritual, touched love. I saw in her prayer belief in a God of mercy.

Every evening, after our research in the village, we sat around a coffee table on the humid second floor of the hostel and pretended to have wise observations on village poverty and community development. Dawoud spoke as a professor, not as a person of faith, but it was so evident how his faith informed his view of development. How his compassion for the poor, for the women, for the sick came from the compassion of God.

I woke up morning after morning to the muezzin’s call and couldn’t shake the feeling: Islam too was a faith of mercy, compassion, grace.

*

In the Qu’ran, the most commonly used names for God are “The Compassionate” and “The Merciful.” Muhammad is reported to have said, “Not one of you will enter paradise by your deeds alone…not even me, unless God covers me with his grace and mercy.”

It’s possible that exposure to this side of Islam was one more chink in the wall of my childhood faith that was to crumble around me later that year. I can’t say it was a conscious part of my doubts and questions; I also can’t say it was irrelevant to see another religion so reverently and lovingly practiced.

There was really only one brick that couldn’t be torn down, for me, that stood through my questions, stood past the sense of loss, stood past the many discarded apologetics. That cornerstone was Jesus—his life and death and resurrection.

Maybe Jesus is enough. Rather than try to justify my faith because it is unique, or insist on it because it is tolerant, or prove it against other worldviews, maybe it is enough simply to say I still believe in the compelling God revealed in Jesus—a God who loves and loves to the point of death, a God who seeks downward mobility, a God whose power is in vulnerability, whose life is through death, whose character is paradox and beauty and justice and transformation and solidarity and joy.

Though I found beauty in the practices of my Muslim friends—though I have found logic in the approaches of my agnostic friends—though I have begun to envy the rich rituals of Judaism—though I have been challenged by the ideas of Native American spirituality—I will forever belong to Christianity for one reason: Jesus.

Mix CDs and mustard seeds

Photo by Linda Tanner

It was six a.m., and I was driving to Duke Divinity School for orientation.

I was thinking of a recent faith conversation with my brother. I did not articulate my point of view clearly, and I was wondering—if I can’t speak definitive answers about theology, do I have any gifts at all for ministry? Has my vision has become too vague?

Naturally, these thoughts led me to the recurring whisper in the back of my head, that little voice which says, do you really believe any of this at all? If you are so scattered, so vulnerable sometimes, so unwilling to prove anything concrete—can you truly be a shepherd for other believers?

I am not ready to become a pastor, I was thinking. I have squandered this wilderness time in Cherokee. I have not prayed enough. I have become more cynical, sometimes snarky. Seven years after the “doubt crisis,” I am still an intermittent doubter—sometimes of God and sometimes of myself.

Besides, I thought, I know that I am good at teaching. Why change careers now? Teaching GED classes matters. It is meaningful. For the most part, it is safe.

My mix CD changed to an old Nickel Creek tune.

Can I be used to help others find truth if I’m scared I’ll find proof that it’s a lie?

Can I be led down a trail dropping breadcrumbs that prove I’m not ready to die?

Please give me time to decipher the signs

Please forgive me for time that I’ve wasted

I’m a doubting Thomas

I’ll take your promise

Though I know nothing’s safe

Oh me of little faith

When the song was finished, and my tears, I pressed repeat. I pressed repeat about eighty times, singing along as a plea, as a prayer, until I arrived at Duke.

*

Imagine, for a moment: this is how it has been for you and doubts.

You have a question and you climb down a rabbit hole to follow it to its depths, because if you don’t you will always wonder, you will always worry. And when you follow it down, you find the hole does not go on forever; there is something solid below, something to stand on. You stand on it.

But you don’t live into these questions every day; you can’t spend all your days chasing shadows and digging holes. So most of the time when the shadows cross, you watch them go. They are mostly shadows you’ve already followed all the way down.

You are going on your memory, and like all memories it is hard to retain the certainty of that feeling. You did find solid ground that day when you reached the bottom, you are certain…right?

The thought of starting seminary this fall terrifies you, because you know you will be diving down into some of the holes again, and it is possible they are deeper than you have yet known.

*

I arrived at campus, still a little weepy, humble.

But as soon as it had begun I could sense that they were going to remind me why I was here.

They said remember that you are loved deeply and gifted uniquely by God.

They said remember that the church does not exist for its own sake; it needs to serve and love the world; it is the body of Christ on earth and it must sometimes learn to die so that it may come to life again.

They said remember that the kingdom of God is about all of us—poor and rich, privileged and unprivileged, powers and marginalized, believers and doubters, black and white—seeing each other as children of God, seeing each other as both gifted and broken. It is about all of us, giving and receiving and sharing together.

I remembered. I remembered that this is good news, particularly for the poor and broken. I remembered that the kingdom of God has grabbed me and continues to grab me, that this is why I believe in spite of my doubts, that I can be healed from my loneliness and my numbness and my fears, that I am not in this for a stable job but for a vision and a sacrifice and a resurrection. I remembered that joy is a fruit of the spirit.

I drove back thirty-six hours after arriving, my heart hurting from the good news and the good people and the good God. I felt crushed, wrecked for my status quo, and certain that this place will continue to draw me forth and form me. It was not the first time I have departed that place in tears of longing and belonging.

When I played the Nickel Creek one last time as I drove over the last mountain back home, I heard it differently.

Oh me of little faith. Perhaps a little is enough. Jesus said that faith the size of a mustard seed can move mountains. He said, a mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it is planted in the ground, it grows and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and all the birds of the air nest in it.

I am embarking on a good and beautiful journey. I am ready to plant my small, sometimes-wavering, vulnerable seed of faith in the soil. I am ready for the Spirit, and the risen Christ, and my new community, to make it grow into a tree where birds will sing. 

When words build walls

Photo by The Delicious Life

We are sitting in a diner, the twilight sun of a beautiful day shining across our plates as we talk, as we catch up. I am telling her about my current quest to discern where I will fit as a pastor—in which brand of church. I smile and stutter quickly past the main options, knowing all of them will be more liberal than the churches in which she finds herself at home.

She was my Christian buddy at public high school. In between the singing in choir and eating chocolate and walking to the creek to test the water for our science project, I would cling to her and ask, “what have you been reading about in the Bible lately?” and “can you pray for me?”

Now, as we are sitting eating spinach salads and basking in this first warm spring day, I notice that I feel self-conscious about my career path and my church journey. She hasn't said anything to suggest judgment, but even still, I worry that somehow the new trajectory makes me less Christian in her eyes.

In order to justify myself, I resort awkwardly to the old language. “I’m sure God will lead me to the right place,” I say, though the truth is I feel more vulnerable than sure, and I can’t wrap it up so neatly, and I’m not sure these days how exactly providence does its work.

*

In certain company, I have started to feel defensive about my faith. I feel the need to throw in phrases like, “praying about it” and “God is calling me”—whether or not I’m praying about it, whether it’s God’s voice or my best approximation that I am pursuing.

I’m not sure when it started, but I think it has to do with two litmus-test items in conservative Christianity. I am a woman who decided to become a pastor. And, worse, I came out as a supporter of gay marriage. By simply being who I believe I am called to be, I worry that I have become controversial, maybe heretical to them. They are my friends. I still look up to them in so many ways. They aren't stereotypes (unloving w/ heads in the sand), just as I am not a stereotype (unwilling to take the Bible seriously or sacrifice for faith). I want to stay connected, keep the conversation going. So I feel the need to show them that my faith is still vibrant, real, spirit-filled.

I suspect it is mostly in my perception. There really is no need to be defensive, to throw in the language I usually don’t use anymore because I have become more careful about words and their theological implications. Maybe it is really I who judge myself: I think of how me of five years ago would have looked at me now and wondered about her devotion. Or maybe I am afraid that if I no longer speak my friends’ language, or what I think is their language, we will no longer understand each other. Maybe I am grasping at straws because if I have come to this, there are definitely some ways in which we no longer understand each other, or no longer give each other the chance to sit down late at night and explain where our paths have taken us.

I worry that if I have to prove myself still Christian enough to use those words, maybe I am insecure about something deeper, about my own connection to the source and the ways in which it has become difficult to pray, difficult to hear God’s voice. Maybe that difficulty exists because I am in some kind of wilderness, or because by my pride I have put a wall there, or because I am not trying hard enough, or simply because I am in a spiritual middle where some forms and rituals have to die in order to spring forth again in new life.

I am tempted to end this post by some beautiful description of a transcendent experience in which I show that I am still Christian enough, in which I make you see that I am deeply connected to God, that I am in fact actually more Christian than I was when I used all the lingo without second thought.

But that is not true. We’re on a journey. You, me, the feminists and the LGBT advocates, the ones who have strong convictions against women pastors and the ones who have strong convictions against gay marriage, the ones who believe in hell, the ones who don’t, the ones who don’t know, the ones who are hurting and lonely, the ones who feel like they can touch God when they pray, the ones whose faith is simple and unassuming and matter-of fact. All of us. I have been in different places on this journey, forward and backward and sideways, and I am here now, and maybe we are in the same place or maybe we are in different places, but we are together on this journey. And God is still working, molding us.

So today, it turns out, is really about confession. 

I have not been completely honest. I sometimes use words as walls. I am sorry. 

As our paths diverge and twist and then meet again, I want to give you myself as I am: plain clothes and plain words, weaknesses and deep convictions and wobbly steps towards a kingdom. I hope you will understand and love me that way. I want to share this journey with you, to see you and understand you and love you, just as you are.

A journey, part 5: Jesus in Africa

This is part 5 of a story in five parts. Catch up here:
Part 1: Waiting for a sign
Part 2: A sinking feeling
Part 3: April showers
Part 4: Whispers and campfires

January of my junior year, I boarded a plane with thirteen other students bound for East Africa for five months. On the plane, I sat next to another student, John, who I’d met the day before. He was confident, friendly, attractive.

The first week in Tanzania, we sat through orientations, braved local minibuses, and went to a church together. I learned that his parents had been missionaries in Kenya. He read the Bible on the roof of the hostel in the mornings and spoke naturally about his faith. He took homeless people out to lunch and winced at stories of aggressive missionaries in Africa. He seemed the kind of strong, intelligent, and compassionate believer I needed in my life.

At night in the hostel, while the others watched a movie, John and I sat on the roof to catch the breeze.

We’d known each other less than a week. How did it even come up?

“You’ve been reading the Bible in the mornings?” he asked.

“Yeah. The book of Job.”

“Not the easiest book to get through.”

“I read Jeremiah last summer,” I said. “That was rough.”

“How so?” John had a casual, inviting manner. The sky was clear.

“God is pretty wrathful,” I said. “I wasn’t sure if I believed in him for a while.”

I smacked a mosquito on my leg. God, please don’t let me get malaria. Had I said too much? I barely knew him.

“Me neither,” he said. “My faith really took a beating last year.”

Really? Him too?

We slid easily into the stories: I had to write a paper about Nietzsche. I had to break off a relationship.  I stayed up late talking to my roommate about big questions. Somehow every time we answered each other, “Me too.”

In between classes at the university and volunteering in Dar es Salaam, John and I studied on the roof of the Swahili building. He read me a passage from St. Thomas Aquinas. I asked him more about his doubts. We sat in silence, alternating between Swahili flash cards and prayer journals. Hoping, both, to experience God again.

In the afternoons I went running with another American student, Emily. It was too hot and dusty to last longer than twenty minutes. We stretched afterwards, outside her host mom’s apartment.

“Sometime,” she said, “I want to talk to you and John more about your faith. You guys have something that seems genuine.”

Together, Emily and I read part of the gospel of Mark, the earliest account of Jesus’ life. I discovered again, with her, that Jesus was brilliant. It was refreshing, to hear from someone on the outside that belief could be worthwhile.

This is what it means to say Tanzania. Freedom from college Bible studies where I felt I had to fit a mold. The colors of the fabric they waved in the churches. That John had doubted too. Leaving behind the friends who had unknowingly hurt me by caring not enough, or too much. That Emily saw something real in my faith.

God was coming alive again.

In April, John and I traveled to northwestern Tanzania, and on Easter morning we woke to stand under an acacia tree. The Maasai people trickled in and joined us, their plaid shukas tied across their bodies, white and colored beads dangling from the egg-sized holes in their ears. We gathered to celebrate the victory of Jesus over death.

By 10:30 a.m., they began to sing, nasal and high, and the music encircled me like a wind. The joy of the Lord was in their voices. They sang out under an acacia tree, the rolling highlands of the Maasai steppe all around: “Etupiwuo Yesu!” Jesus has risen from the dead! I watched them jumping and joined in, pushing myself as high as I could, making up my own syllables to the verses I didn’t understand in their tribal language rather than remain silent in this assembly of saints. Gazing at the rolling green hills and blue sky around me, I felt as though joy and earth and God’s spirit building up in me would burst out of me, into the mountains.

This is how we know that he lives in us: we know it by the Spirit he gave us.

During the service, we went down to the river and eleven-year-old Sipironi was baptized. That evening over a plate of roasted goat, I heard Sipironi’s story. A year earlier, crippled by a sudden sickness and unable to eat, he’d been sent from hospital to hospital without diagnosis, a medical mystery. One morning the missionaries left him in the house to run errands. When they came back in the afternoon, he was walking. “Jesus told me to stand up,” he said.

The sky that night was big enough to hold the impossibility of it all. The stars were so many I fell to the ground in awe. Biting ants crawled into my pants and John stood laughing as I wiggled around, yelping and brushing them off my waist and dancing back to the porch for safety.

Etupiwuo Yesu! Jesus is risen.

A journey, part 4: Whispers and campfires

This is part 4 of a story in five parts. Catch up here:
Part 1: Waiting for a sign
Part 2: A sinking feeling
Part 3: April showers

Photo by Doug Beckers

Quemahoning was the kind of camp Professor Stansell might have mocked as too evangelical. It was here at age ten my counselor told me I better say an official prayer to “accept Jesus” into my heart to be sure I was going to heaven. It was here at age fifteen I experienced a community of high-schoolers who weren’t afraid to lie under the stars and ask big questions of God and of themselves.

My first week back, I took twelve-year-old Bailey to play ping-pong. I asked about her family. When she didn’t say much, I launched into the easy diatribe I thought I was supposed to share: “God loves you so much; there is nothing you can do to separate yourself from that love.” The words, like a dented ping-pong ball, didn’t bounce. They landed flat at my feet and I saw that I still didn’t believe them.

I picked my way that summer through the ponderous book of Jeremiah—full of prophecies of sin and destruction—holding my grudge against God for being confusing and wrathful (if he was even real). I woke in the mornings and stared at the sun coming up over the lake. I asked God, why?

One evening, all the counselors huddled in Ellen’s apartment. Someone spoke about how Jesus died for our sins on the cross, how all our failures are accounted for. This is the core tenet of Christianity and the emotional heartbeat of evangelicalism. Many of the counselors cried tears of release and joy. I sat unmoved, bored.

The next afternoon, Ellen caught my arm as the campers rushed off to activities. “How are you doing?” We sat on the benches by the lake. For the first time, I let myself be angry. I thought of sitting alone in my room in in the spring, wishing someone would stop by.  “I don’t feel like a sinner!” I told Ellen. “I don’t feel like I’ve done anything wrong that Jesus has to die for. I just feel broken.”

Ellen reached for my hand and waited a long time as we watched the leaves quiver against the still water. Finally she spoke. “That lack of love you feel,” she began, “that is sin. Christ bore that pain, too.”

*

Trying a different approach, I shared the story of my difficult year with 14-year-old girls around a campfire on our overnight biking trip. “God is big enough to handle questions,” I concluded unconvincingly, pausing to blow on the coals of the campfire and down another roasted marshmallow. “Don’t pretend you don’t have any.”

The conversation returned to beef stew and farts. As the girls trickled off to their tents, I stayed to watch the fire die down. I shone my flashlight around the campsite to make sure all the food was put away. One girl continued sitting at the fire, staring at the coals.

I looked at her. “Not tired?” I asked.

She shook her head.

I poked at the coals again, and sat down to stare at them with her. It’s a good pastime.

“How can you believe in God,” she asked me, “when you aren’t sure he’s really there?”

I was suddenly acutely aware of my the pace of my heartbeat. This was important. Without knowing it, I had been waiting for a camper to ask me this question all summer.

“I want to believe,” she said, “but I don’t know if I do. And I could just say all that stuff is true, but maybe I wouldn’t mean it.”

I stabbed at the coals. I felt the pain still raw inside me. It hurts to want faith and not have it. To feel that a personal, loving God is both the most beautiful and preposterous of notions.

“Have you read the gospels?” I asked. She shook her head. “What I’ve found,” I said, “is that Jesus is a genius. Someone I want to follow. There’s something real in those stories.”

But it was only people who wrote the Bible. When I pray it feels empty. My life isn’t exactly the best right now. I want to be independent.

Her objections were mine. As I listened to her, I was listening to myself. “I don’t think it’s something anyone can figure out for you,” I finally copped out. “We all have to find God on our own.”

My heart hurt when I said goodbye to her a few days later.

That summer, it was 14-year-olds who reminded me that honest seekers yearn for God. It was music and campfires and whispers by the lake that reminded me there is a world apart from academic criticism. That honesty and vulnerability can be met with love.

By August, I could look out over the lake and see beauty. I could fall asleep content at the community of lovely people around me. I could pray quietly, thank you.

“This is how we know that he lives in us,” the apostle John writes. “We know it by the Spirit he gave us.”

My favorite part of the story happened in the beautiful land of Tanzania in East Africa.  Read about this in the final installment, Part 5.

A journey, part 3: April showers

This is part 3 of a story in five parts. Catch up here:
Part 1: Waiting for a sign
Part 2: A sinking feeling

I resolved that nothing was more important than my inquiry into the reality of Christianity. I was going to dig deep.

After some internal debate, I went to the registrar on the last drop/add day and dropped Professor Stansell’s Old Testament class. I’d never quit anything before and feared I was copping out to avoid challenges. But when I went by his office to ask him to sign my drop/add slip and said goodbye, I felt free to pursue the questions in my own way, on my own timeline.

I walked across the prairie with my boyfriend and told him I needed a lot of space. We decided to take a break. For me this was going to be a solitary journey.

I e-mailed the mentors of my childhood. I checked out of the library a stack of books on theology and faith I couldn’t carry. I drilled my roommate with questions she couldn’t answer.

My father typed up a summary of his own winding path to God, and sent it to me by e-mail. It comforted me for a moment, but I woke up the next morning afraid that I, as my father, would have to stray for years, to let go of God completely for a season, in order to truly return.

I canceled my spring break plans and went home to Maryland. I lay on the couch all week, discovering my mom’s 1960s folk LPs and sleeping. I didn’t visit my friends.

Natasha, my old youth minister, called and told me to come over.

When I walked in, we didn’t sit down, just stood in the foyer. “What’s up?” she asked.

“Well I guess I still believe in God.” I hung on the railing, not wanting to look in her eyes, yet wanting desperately for her to know my pain. I rambled about the latest fears.

“You are hearing a lot of voices, Katie,” she told me. “Mostly voices that are telling you God is distant. Give yourself time to hear the voices that speak for God, too.”

“I can’t run away from it,” I told her.

“You don’t have to run,” she said. “Don’t be afraid. Just listen.”

While I was home, my mother took me to the National Zoo. We walked around in chilly April air and saw the sea otters playing, carefree on their stone waterslides. We stood in line to see the new baby panda, black and white and fuzzy. At the elephant house, the zookeepers were giving the elephant a bath. I fell in love with the elephant as he gently stretched his trunk into a perfect loop and stuffed a tree in his mouth. How beautiful the giant grey folds in his skin, the slow, deliberate swinging of his trunk and tilting of his head.

As I watched him, I thought, yes, he evolved through natural selection, and I thought, yes, he was created by God.

*

Back in Minnesota, I went to church on Good Friday, wary of hearing canned statements about Jesus dying on the cross. I was broken. Why should I ask for pardon and atonement?

I sat in the hard wooden pew while a short pastor told a different Good Friday story. He spoke of a group of people who gave their whole lives to their friend, because they believed in him. One day they turned around and saw him stabbed and hanging on a tree to die. From the tree, they heard their friend cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

These words hit me anew. Was the Christian story from its beginning a story of doubt? Was even Jesus himself not immune to it?

I stayed up all night that night, sitting in the lounge with my roommate and another friend, nothing important to say, just that we didn’t want to turn out the light. Something in me began to open. In recounting her own journey, Simone Weil writes in Waiting for God:

If still persevering in our love, we fall to the point where the soul cannot keep back the cry ‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’, if we remain at this point without ceasing to love, we end by touching something…that is the central essence, necessary and pure, something not of the senses, common to joy and sorrow: the very love of God.

Was it possible that in stripping away everything, I would still find something left?

On Easter, two days later, I heard of quiet, fearful women unable to find Jesus’ body; whispers that something strange and frightening and wonderful was happening. A story I couldn’t touch. I liked it.

I began to amble back slowly. In quiet moments walking on the trails, a blooming pink bud reached a part deep inside me that still felt God. As I opened my Bible again, I skipped over certain books and stayed on the gospel accounts. When I accidentally opened to a confusing passage or heard a pastor say something contradictory, I felt my heart miss a beat. So I flipped back to the gospel of Mark, again and again, where the women wake up early on the first day of the week, go to weep over Jesus’ body and find an empty tomb, and don’t know what to think.

There are hiccups on every journey. I skipped a girls night with my friends one weekend, sat in my room feeling disconnected and misunderstood. I waded alone again into the library. Why should I put my heart through the dangerous business of hope once again? When I still had not answered the logical questions?

I called and told Ellen, the director of my Christian camp, that I would have to back out of my summer contract as a counselor. I couldn’t be a mentor of faith to teenage girls. She listened to my story and said, “Nonsense. We want you here.”

To read about that beautiful summer at camp, go to Part 4. 

A journey, part 2: A sinking feeling

This is part 2 of a story in five parts. Catch up here: Part 1: Waiting for a sign

Disclaimer: for the record, the college friends I mention are STILL some of my best friends, years later. So when I say I was lonely, I don't blame anyone. It was a confusing time, for all of us. We were all figuring things out, piece by piece.

At age twenty, sure I wanted to be the kind of Christian who lugged my Bible everywhere, hugged trees and denounced the Iraq war, I followed Jesus to Bangladesh for a month of studying rural poverty and development. I took with me a jar of peanut butter and a vague notion that this would be my training to save the world.

Upon arrival in Dhaka, while jet-lagged and drugged with the new scents and the thickness of the tropical air in January, I met Rumana. One of our student guides for the month, she translated the culture to us and painted our hands with henna in the evenings. At the hostel in the village, Rumana prayed five times a day. When she heard the call to prayer echoing from the minaret, she looked at all of the American girls huddled in a small room and asked gently, “Do you mind if I pray?” Then she bowed towards Mecca, her sari glimmering in the twilight.

In the evenings, the twelve of us Americans fumbled over our observations of village poverty and pretended we could figure out how one day, the women wouldn’t have to bathe and wash their saris in the polluted sludge. Our professor Haroun discussed pros and cons of micro-finance, the need for good governance, and the peace of the message of Islam.

The yellow mustard fields bloomed and the imam woke us every morning at 4:30, calling the faithful with an ancient song.

Photo by Abhijlt Kar Gupta

*

I returned to Minnesota, head full of unprocessed images on culture, religion, and poverty. Second semester began.

My religion class was called Old Testament/Hebrew Bible. Stansell, a professing liberal Christian, gave us a text called The Secular Bible and spent the first few weeks on Genesis—the creation story, the story of Adam and Eve, the stories of Noah and Abraham. He explained, with a little too much of a gleam in his eye, that Genesis was mostly legend. He compared it to contemporary Middle Eastern sagas. He claimed much of the Bible was more ideological treatise than history.

I stayed after class and asked why we were spending so much time drilling into our heads the idea of legend. “I want to get to the text and the meaning of the text,” I said. He told me he wanted to challenge my critical framework.

After a couple weeks, he announced that we were going to begin to delve into the prophetic books of the Old Testament. “Now let’s find this story about when Isaiah was visited by angels…” He thumbed around for thirty seconds. “Where is it now…”

“I think it’s Isaiah 6,” I said quietly. I happened to have read it the day before.

“Aha! A Bible thumper!” he said in the same half-mocking tone he used when he talked about Fundamentalists and Creationists. “Now, the book of Isaiah actually represents two separate prophetic traditions…”

Stansell’s teaching was well-researched and clear, if his tone was a little biting. The more I read, the more evidence slowly piled up on the side of his interpretation. Meanwhile, in another class, Darwin was making a pretty brilliant case for evolution, and Freud explained that Christianity was wish fulfillment, the ego’s hope of something bigger than itself. Until now, I’d thought I could gracefully tread along the balance of intelligence and faith, obedience and compassion. But was that wishful thinking? Did believing in the Bible mean I had to reject science? Accept holy war and genocide in the name of God?

Most of the kids in the class were either non-religious or liberal Christians. They did not seem perturbed. But there was another girl in the class. With a smile on her face, she would raise her hand and give the evangelical pat answer to questions about the Bible. When asked about the three historical/archaeological theories of the Hebrew people establishing themselves in Caanan, she would simply say, “Moses led them out of Egypt and God cleared the way for them in the promised land.” I wanted to shake her. Was she dumb enough not to realize that these theories were contrary to everything she believed?

Now I know. Everyone’s brain works differently. Maybe she did not see these historical theories of the Bible as a threat to her faith; maybe she was able to hold it all in tension. Or maybe she was challenged, but was clinging to the familiar words and beliefs as a means of defense. All I know is at the time, she seemed to me an image of the unthinking, head-in-the-sand Christian I did not want to be.

*

“What if Genesis is myth?” I queried my evangelical Creationist boyfriend over coffee during a study break. “When did we start thinking it had to be literally true? Saint Augustine and C.S. Lewis didn’t think so.”

He was worried about me; his eyes shifted quickly, right and left.

“What if we’re actually missing out by believing that? It could be more real, more powerful, as a story,” I said.

“You write stories,” I accused.

“Why are we so scared to admit it could be a story?” I added.

He didn’t argue. He knew I was talking to myself.

*

As the questioning voices grew louder, I didn’t know how to be honest with my friends about what I was going through. They had problems and conflicts of their own, which sometimes seemed too much for me in my agony. They knew I had doubts, but they did not realize how I was suffering. They had their own existential questions to deal with.

So I holed away in the library, reading The Secular Bible. I ate dinner alone in the cafeteria. I spent evenings analyzing Freud and Virginia Woolf in front of the computer screen, hoping with each footstep outside the door that someone would come in my room to ask how I was doing. My roommate sat at her desk wearing headphones as she wrote papers.

Woolf gave words to my experience: the estrangement of all human beings from each other and from reality. Where could a loving, or logical, God fit into this world of alienation and absurdity?

As I fell asleep some nights, throat would ache from holding back tears. This was more than “doubt” or “questioning my faith.” Those words are too small and mathematical. What was happening to me felt like an illness of the soul. Love, security, and meaning were being snatched away from me everywhere I turned.

One late night after another unfruitful talk with my boyfriend, I struggled to complete a short response paper on Nietzsche’s analysis of Christian faith. “Nietzsche is right; there is nothing rational in Christianity,” I finally wrote at two a.m. “Nevertheless, I will hold out for humble, sacrificial love, because it’s the only thing worth living for.”

I knew that I could not maintain this feeble grip much longer.

*

Thursday at Bible study, the speaker talked about dancing and laughing, leaving your sorrows, traveling light. We should be full of the joy of the Lord. We should drop all our sorrows and run full speed towards God, laughing all the way. We should stop being so boring and serious.

I sat still and did not smile at his jokes. My pack was full of books and questions and messy relationships. I left early, without talking to any of the smiling faces. I stopped at my friend Leanne’s room to say goodnight.

She was reading Nietzsche, but she stood up and gave me a hug.

I started to cry. “I’m so scared.”

“Scared of what, honey?” She held me close.

“That he’s not real,” I whispered, for the first time admitting it aloud.

She listened to me cry. “Even in my darkest moments, there has remained a core in me, deeper than emotion, that is faith.” She squeezed my hand. “God won’t leave you alone.”

She did not speak lightly. Her faith had been the only seed of hope to sustain her through the three years since her two sisters and brother were killed in a car accident.

Keep reading with Part 3.

A journey, part 1: Waiting for a sign

Over the next 5 days I will be posting this story in five parts: a journey of doubt, loneliness, and renewal in my college years. I may be more of an over-analyzer than most, but I don't think I'm the only one who has experienced this sort of thing. I hope you enjoy.

When I was seven, driving home from church with my mother, the thought first occurred to me that all my bedtime prayers for Uncle Rob and Grandma might be evaporating into space. I asked God to drop a slip of paper in my front yard confirming his existence.

Twelve years later, halfway through sophomore year at a Minnesota liberal arts college, I found myself running on wooded trails, letting my mind untangle philosophical theories and broken relationships and possible origins of the material world.  I saw a white sheet of paper tacked to a tree and hoped for a split-second it was my note.

Photo by Andy Arthur

*

I don’t remember exactly how it started, but I know how it felt.

Singing, in a choir of 500 at Christmastime in Minnesota—some of the most beautiful choral music in the world about the birth of Christ—and thinking, “This is a cult. This is absurd. We are singing to a baby and calling him God.”

Waking up in a tourist hotel at 4:30 a.m. in a strange land—Dhaka, Bangladesh. Remembering yesterday’s newspaper reports about extremists bombing tourist hotels, and praying the twenty-third Psalm, only to find no solid ground, no comfort for my fears.

Meeting Muhammad, Darwin, Marx, Descartes, and Virginia Woolf and finding them brilliant. My head spinning with theories, my stomach sinking as I heard scholars explain away morality, miracles, creation.

Waking up one more morning in a panic. I hadn’t slept the questions away.

Sitting in a room of laughing Christians, trying my best to move to the same worship music they did, to smile in the same passionate way they did, realizing I didn’t fit anymore.  

*

At first, as I felt questions rising within, I didn’t take them seriously. I mean really, I had always been one of the most Christian Christians I knew. My mom worked at the church, and I was born into the arms of church ladies. In first grade I wrote notes to all my friends: Dear Nicole, I hope you know that Jesus died to save you from your sins. Love, Katie. In sixth grade I started cutting out my favorite songs and prayers from church bulletins and pasting them in a journal. Ninth grade gave me my first major dose of failures, and I would fall asleep crying and listening to my Jesus music: “Who is this King of Glory who pursues me with his love?” In eleventh grade, all day I longed for 11 p.m., when I would slide under the covers to read the Bible and fill in the blanks of my Beth Moore devotional book.

I was earnest. But I was not sheltered. Even when I was young, I knew that there was a place for debate and disagreement within the church. Every Friday my parents took me to Amy’s house. Amy, who was two years older than me, turned activist in high school, and Fridays at her house turned into debate night. She introduced a topic, like capital punishment or evolution. I half-heartedly recited the conservative mantra of my Sunday School teacher, and she quoted Jesus. She gave me Dead Man Walking and quickly convinced me we should abolish the death penalty. She made me think about the poor and homeless. She told to master French (she would take care of Spanish) so that one day we could start an organization to help immigrants and refugees.

By the time I started college, I was planning to major in English and Environmental studies so I could work with a nonprofit to combat world hunger. I had read theology, apologetics, and most of the Bible. I had thought through everything, theological, social, and political. I was still in process, but I had a complex working set of beliefs centered on Jesus’ grace. I was ready to change the world.

So how could I be experiencing these kinds of fears and questions?

Want to keep reading? Part 2 is up.