When we need everyone at the table

Imagine you are part of a movement to dismantle mass incarceration, in part through changing the prison-industrial system by which profits are made when more people are in jail. Imagine that representatives of this very prison-industrial system seek to join your cause. Will you let them stay?

Imagine you are part a community which wants to build supportive relationships across divisions of race and class. You want everybody to have a place in your community, a place to share their experiences and feelings. Imagine someone comes into your space spouting divisions of race and class. Will you let them stay?

*

About 10 folks in my organization, as a creative protest measure, bought one share each in the largest for-profit prison company in the US. Being shareholders, they attend the shareholder meeting every year to advocate for better ways, different profit incentives, various reforms. There may not be any visible results yet, but they are witnessing to a different way.

Meanwhile, some of the board members of the prison company have taken an interest in the efforts of my organization, the way they seek to support folks coming home from prison. They have taken an interest in our support groups, and our house for guys who've been recently incarcerated, and the jobs and education programs to which we are connected. They have given donations. They have come to visit. One may speak at our fundraiser.

The director of our organization acknowledged the dissonance. "Yes, it's goofy," she said. "It's an uncomfortable reality. When they first started giving us money, we weren't sure what to do. But then we thought if we didn't want to accept dirty money, whose money could we accept?

"Besides," she added, "we believe we need everyone at the table."

Yes. We can only break down systems of injustice if everyone is on board. Everyone. And that means that we have to be willing to engage with folks who disagree with us, who threaten our cause, with whom our relationship is complicated or goofy.

Because it's relationships and transformed hearts that we're after--not just new laws that leave old walls and divisions in place.

*

Photo by Jim Champion

In my internship, we have meetings called "Freedom Circles," which are dangerous things. Like an AA meeting or a summer camp sharing circle, the meetings start off with this week's leader reading or reflecting on a particular topic, and then there are 45 minutes before us in which anyone may speak. Which is the beauty, and the danger.

Because everyone is welcome at the table, and everyone has a voice.

Last week "everyone" included someone who was frustrated, someone who was angry, someone who was lonely, someone who felt wronged by the group. There we were, all of us broken together in the room, and the time was open before us, free for the seizing.

Several people shared, some speaking with candor and honesty, some with anger and walls, some with repetitive phrases that made me wonder whether this meeting had a point. There are days where the sharing is deep and succinct and profound, where someone gives us a window into her past, where someone acknowledges the pain he has caused others, where someone makes a new connection about her feelings of abandonment that have led to addiction, where someone admits he doesn't know how to fix his relationship.

This was not that day. A few folks shared. They mostly talked too long. They mostly exuded frustration and anger. After each person, we chorused "Thanks for sharing," even though saying it felt a bit disingenuous. After one angry outburst, I noticed sidelong glances and folks uncomfortably shifting in their seats.

The leader took it all in stride. Later, he would tell me, "that meeting went exactly how it was supposed to go." He proceeded with the meeting, explaining that we were all about to share the ritual of communion. He broke half of a hamburger bun and held up a punch cup half full of grape juice, then began passing them around the room, even as some of the other members of the circle continued looking around, unsettled, uncertain. I noticed a certain tension in my chest.

After a hesitating start, a woman offered the cup to her neighbor, saying, "This cup was given so that you may know that even though you are broken, you are not beyond God's love." Just as the reality of those words began to flood into all of us, the leader had begun singing. "Bind us together, Lord, bind us together with cords that cannot be broken...bind us together in love." A few of us joined in, and as we sang and shared and ate, something happened.

My breathing slowed and I turned just in time to see a man who had earlier been shaking his head at his neighbor in disgust and frustration, offering to him the bread and the cup. This was, for both of them, their first time sharing communion in our group. "The body of Christ and the blood of Christ, given for you," the man said as his neighbor took a piece. The neighbor then turned to me. I knew he was angry at me for an earlier miscommunication. But he pushed the cup to me and said simply, "The body and blood of Christ."

"Amen."

I thought how neither of us deserved this moment. None of us deserved to be at this table.

The leader closed in prayer, and people began filing out. I stood to talk to my neighbor, apologizing for hurting him. He accepted my apology. By this time the rest of the folks had left, and I wondered if some of them had been put off by the halting meeting.

I hope not.

Because to dismantle mass incarceration, we need everyone at the table. To build true community, we need to welcome everyone to the table, broken people included. And as Jesus reminded me that night, communion is holy because it reminds us that we are all sitting at a table only by mercy--you, and me, and the one with the angry outburst, and the one with only frustration in her heart, and whoever else walks in the door tomorrow.

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.

I want so many things.

I want so many things.

Why do I want so many things?

I love people. I want to listen to them, cry with them, teach them, inspire them to be the selves they were created to be. I want to feed them and free them from prison and sing with them and help them find wholeness. I want to love them, to love them in North Carolina and Maryland and Minnesota and Gaza and Bangladesh and Tanzania. I want to reconcile us all with each other—the women and men, the liberal and conservative, the rich and poor, the young and old, the black and white and native and Latino and Asian and Arab and Jewish and everyone in between.

I love the arts. I want to write beauty and vulnerability and redemption. I want to sing with the spirit, to play the melodies and harmonies of hope.

I love this earth, this creation. I want to run and hike and swim and climb. I want to learn and teach us all to eat the fruit of the land rather than the factory, to find goodness and simplicity in the everyday processes of growing and eating and coming and going and waking and sleeping.

I love the church: its babies and nonagenarians, its liturgy and communion and song and scripture, its touchy-feely sharing and tearful prayers and most of all the God who is creating and recreating us all. I want to see the church willing to die and come alive anew.

I want so many things.

I cannot have or do all. This life, this in-breaking kingdom of God is too rich for me to drink it all in. And if I am to give myself fully to this world, I will have to choose: between the piano and the garden or between Maryland and Tanzania or between the incarcerated and the nonagenarians.

What I mean is that I have this one fleeting chance, as we all do, to run at the world holding all the love I can.

And when I choose where, specifically, to run, I will choose also where not to run. I will lose pieces. I will let go of the other dream, the other country, the other song. I will release them into the air and pray one day they come back and find me further on the journey.

I suppose in all truth, it is a good problem to have: the desire to love and create and heal more than is humanly possible. A heart too full to narrow itself to one passion.

The fullness in this heart, though—I just want to bring it to the right place.

I want so many things.

Poetry, song, and the language of faith

Photo by saffroncisco

When I started asking big questions in college, when I started drowning in my own thoughts and fears and the simultaneous existential crises of my friends, I could not turn to theologians or philosophers or scientists or even pastors for respite. I see now as I look back that even when my mind was rebelling, questioning, unsettling, I had a truer kind of knowing in poetry, music, and art.

During that time of my life, and many times since, the book I have continued to return to is a lovely little reflection on faith and art: Walking on Water by Madeleine L’Engle, who writes about “probable impossibilities,” about naming and being named, about vulnerability and faithful doubt. Her approach of honest questioning, coupled with the openness to receive and affirm it all, has stayed with me.

“I have been asked if my Christianity affects my stories,” L’Engle writes in Walking on Water, “and surely it is the other way around; my stories affect my faith, restore me, shake me by the scruff of the neck, and pull this straying sinner back into an awed faith.”

My stories, yes. And the stories and poems of others. My faith has been formed and re-formed and renewed in the poetry of songs and hymns and liturgy.

So at a time faithful people are abuzz with what kind of programs and churches and relationships and opportunities and strategies are the best for helping the young and the old cultivate their faiths, I want to offer simply this: let us not forget the arts.

I sang in my mom’s church choir when I was old enough to talk. And little by little, as I grew, I noticed the words in the songs. I began to cut out pieces of the church bulletin that held prayers or liturgy or music I liked. I taped them in a little pink journal. I began to close my eyes during the songs we sang, to sense the wonder of Christmas, the agony of the passion story, the joy of Easter.

The poetry of sacred music was not restricted to church, because God cannot be restricted. I found God everywhere good music and good poetry were offered.

In high school, we sang secular music, sure. We also sang gospel: The storm is passing over, hallelu. We sang Mozart: Hail true body, born of the virgin Mary, who truly suffered and sacrificed on the cross for humanity. We sang poetry, scripture, psalms, laments.

There were songs that touched my heart more deeply than any sermon. The idea of listening for God’s guidance first struck me when I was ten and sang, Do you know your shepherd’s voice?

I experienced the power of nonviolence and justice during a high school choral tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr.: The world is sick with war. When I lost my voice in eleventh grade, I leaned into Jesus: if my joys and comforts die, I know Truth is living.

I felt peace in the midst of newness in my first college choir rehearsal when we sang the twenty-third Psalm, and I meant it wholeheartedly when I sang in sophomore year of college, the time of my doubt, why should I wander an alien from Thee?

And years later, I still feel shivers of truth and beauty every time I sing certain hymns.

So I think what I want to say is simply that I am grateful: to the poets, the liturgists, the composers; to the music teachers, conductors, and mothers; and to a creative God, for the ways in which art can invigorate us, pull us back to amazement, for the ways in which we, as artists, are made co-creators with God and dreamers in an unfulfilled world.

The yellow blanket [at Little Did She Know]

Today I am over at Cara Strickland’s blog. Cara is an amazing gal, a kind soul, and a beautiful writer, and I’ve enjoyed getting to know her a little over the past few months. She had the brilliant idea to start a series called De(tales), in which the intricate details of a memory become a springboard for reflection or metaphor or simply the telling of a story.

For the series, I wrote about a little yellow blanket and a lifelong friendship. Here’s how it starts:

I am reluctant to rise so early, but I am so excited for fellowship that I agree. Antonia and I hear a tapping on our dorm-room door around seven, and one of us scrambles over to unlock it for Leanne. The October Minnesota mornings have turned crisp and cool, and I am stumbling out of my bed, not yet dressed, so Antonia grabs the faded yellow blanket from her bed and we sit in a circle on the carpet and cover our legs. Dear God, thank you for this beautiful morning, someone croaks, and we have begun.

The yellow blanket becomes our companion, our touchstone for seven a.m. prayer. In between closing our eyes, we stare down at the swirly white-flowered pattern woven into the fabric, and we hold onto it like a piece of solid ground in this new place far away from home, this vortex of new experiences and new ideas snaking around us. The blanket is cotton, warm enough for winter but light enough for spring, always covering our bare legs. We let it bind us together, hoping it can cover our broken pieces and keep us from hurting each other…

Click here to read the rest over at Little Did She Know.

Life her own way

The first tears I shed after John proposed to me came about an hour later, as we started to dream of our wedding day, at the thought that Grandma wouldn’t be there. I had so wanted her to be there for that shining moment, to hold my hand for a photo, to give me a kiss as I waited to walk down the aisle, to make a wisecrack about our awkward first dance, to enjoy the company.

Better than her being there, though, were all the jokes and glances and secrets and dessert we shared over the years.

Better still was the impact of her life on mine, and that in the end we both knew how very much we loved each other.

*

Grandma’s life story is one of quietly defying conventions, and succeeding at almost everything by her wit and grace. She grew up in the Midwest during the twenties and the Great Depression. She was a precocious child and her mother was ready to get her out of the house, so she was sent to school a year early. She skipped another grade later and graduated from high school before her sixteenth birthday.

Apparently her only options in college (as a woman) were to study Home Economics or Sciences. Like my mother and me, she was really more of an arts-and-humanities kind of gal, but there was no way she was going to college for Home Ec, so bacteriology it was.

I will say that if she had majored in Home Ec, she would have completely dominated it, as she had the magic touch in home décor and in the kitchen. Her homemade spaghetti sauce was our Christmas Eve staple, and her Easter dinners of roast beef and twice-baked potatoes and jello were always flavorful and served in china and crystal. When I was a child, I admit that an overnight at Grandma’s excited me as much for the twenty-one types of cereal I would get to pick from as for the perfectly-timed dinners, but gradually I began to see the virtues of her more refined recipes. Now, I wish I had spent more time as an apprentice in her kitchen.

After college, Grandma moved to Washington and worked at NIH for several years before starting a family.  She met my grandpa through his sister, who was a friend in the local alumni sorority group, but the story goes that she continued dating other men until the day he asked her to marry him. When he asked, she said yes, and then added, “But I’m still planning to go on this date I have planned for Saturday.”

They must have worked through that, because they were happily and lovingly married for 49 years until he died in 1997.

Later on, when her kids were grown, she got a real estate license and worked thirty years as an agent, helping each person she worked with find a good home, insisting that all people, regardless of race or background, should be able to buy a home in a decent neighborhood, treating all her clients with thoughtfulness and care. She never retired. She sold her last house at age 86, two years before she died.

*

These are the outlines of her life, the facts that make it in an overview, a humorous summary. But there is so much more nuance inside the lines. Some of the details, the depths, the fullness of her person, I discovered in her dying, and in her death.

Grandma carried her sharp wit, intelligence and competence with her even into her final weeks, when her body was beginning to go, racked with pneumonia and too weak to walk without assistance. Even then, when she wasn’t loopy on meds or low on oxygen from the pneumonia, her mind was with us 100%, and for that I will be forever grateful.

For ten months, she was in and out of hospitals and rehab and then home with my mom or my uncle until she fell or caught pneumonia again. I knew it was a gift when I went to visit her every week, when I lay next to her in a hospital bed watching Jeopardy or took her outside for a walk, when she asked me to share my latest thoughts on career and life plans and then listened intently and thoughtfully as I spit out confused thoughts on jobs and relationships. I knew it was a gift that last Saturday we spent in the bright living room at my mother’s house, plunking out favorites from the Presbyterian hymnal and flipping through a book of Chopin preludes.

Grandma was a devout Presbyterian, one of the founding members of her church. After she died, my mother found a document she had written for church, describing her faith. In lovely prose, she wrote of her almost constant conversation with God throughout every day, and of the peace her faith had given her when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in her fifties.

The perpetual spiritual awareness was a part of her life she hadn’t talked about much. And yet I had always known by the way she lived.

We gathered for her funeral and the sympathy cards poured in, and one cousin wrote, The summer I spent at Aunt Ariel’s house is the summer I learned about acceptance. Others remembered her frequently opening her home for dinner parties or bridge games. My mom recalled her love of hosting foreign exchange students.

I thought of the way she was always reaching out to people—her interest in the life story of her Latina cleaning lady or the new Ethiopian woman at church; her insistence that we walk around the nursing home with the apple pie I had just brought, giving pieces to her new friends; her mission to get me to play the piano in the nursing home dining room—though she could barely hear by then—because she knew it would please old Mr. Baer, who never smiled.

I know that she made me feel adored, with her valentines and attendance at all my concerts and chats over coffee. She didn’t always have to say it—like her faith it was bubbling up under the surface in the way she looked at me and pried about my love interests and begrudged me to spoon feed her at the end when she wasn’t eating. I always knew that I was one of her most special people.

And she will always be one of mine.

This post is a part of my Women’s History Month project, “Honoring Women’s Stories.” You can read more about the project and see other women’s stories here.

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.

Further resources on homosexuality and the Bible

This post is a follow-up to part 1 and part 2 of a series I wrote about some lovely people in my life. Here are some places to start for understanding the perspective that gay marriage is blessed by God and by the Bible. I am not really writing this to start a debate. I don't expect everyone to agree. I just provide these resources in case you are interested in how I came to this belief.

It’s hard to change what you’ve always thought. I can’t say there’s any magical argument or perspective that settles it once and for all. It starts with reading the Bible, and not just reading it, but critically and contextually and honestly. And as objectively as possible, but I think if we are honest, all of us read into the text a little of what we bring with us. We are meant to, because it’s a living word that interacts with and becomes real in the context of our experiences.

There are a couple people who helped me think through this logically Biblical support for gay marriage. One of them is Justin Lee, the founder and president of the Gay Christian Network, which does a great job of being accessible to people with various opinions on same-sex marriage. The best is to read Justin’s book, but he has also written about his view here, and if you’re more of an audio-visual person, I love this video (see minutes 37 through 46).

I also found helpful two articles (here and here) by Richard Beck, which helped give some context to the text of Romans chapter 1, which is the main New Testament text that is used to support the traditional view that homosexuality is not acceptable to God.

Gay marriage is a tricky one. As more churches have come to affirm women as leaders and ministers, they have the positive biblical examples of Deborah, Anna, Phoebe, Priscilla. There are no positive examples of same-sex marriage relationships in the pages of scripture.

But there is this:

That Jesus loved the people the religious hierarchy regards with disdain.

That we are to let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for he who loves his neighbor fulfills the law. The commandments “Do not commit adultery,” “Do not murder,” “Do not steal,” “Do not covet,” and whatever other commandment there may be, are summed up in this one rule: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” (Romans 13:8).

That by their fruit you will recognize them...every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. (Matthew 7:16-17).

That we are ministers of a new covenant not of the letter but of the Spirit, for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life (2 Corinthians 3:6).

That if we are going to take risks in life and faith, they should be risks we take for love and compassion.

____

I would love to hear your thoughts. Please keep comments charitable.

Coming out, part 1: The summer of '08

This post is dedicated to the brave and wonderful people who allowed me to include their stories as a part of mine. I write this in hopes that this piece of my journey will help to break down walls rather than create new ones.

Sex was a concept I picked it up slowly in elementary school, starting with the words my friends used, the movies I saw unwittingly at sleepovers of more worldly-wise friends, and the giggles whenever our fifth grade teacher said “do it.” It was in the same way that I picked up “gay”—first the language only, from my friends, usually used as a derogatory term for the boys who pierced their right ear or the girls whose hand-me-down clothes were a few styles too old. Then, slowly, that it had something to do with girls kissing girls or boys kissing boys.

My parents cornered me in about fifth grade, on a car ride home, and started telling me about menstruation and the reproductive system. When we arrived home they were just getting to the juicy part and were going to show me some diagrams in a book, so I excused myself to use the bathroom. I emerged and my mom yelled down the hall, “Don’t you want to know how the egg gets fertilized?” Embarrassed, I told them I was too busy arranging my Celine Dion and Backstreet Boys cassette tapes.

Later, when they were out, I snuck the book from their room and devoured it. I learned in depth about sex, masturbation, pornography, and homosexuality, those fascinatingly forbidden topics. I still remember the wording: “When a man and a woman are married, they go somewhere by themselves and start kissing and hugging…” After reading it, I went to bury my face in my teddy bear.

From the book, from church, from my community, I drew the implicit assumption that it was only between a married man and a woman that sex should occur. Implicit is what it always was; for me there was never an angry sermon about gays destroying the culture. At summer camp in high school, we had long and deep discussions about sex and dating and relationships, which did not mention but certainly assumed that everyone was straight. We now know from Facebook this was not true.

I realized my uncle was gay when I was 13, in a sudden burst of insight. My uncle's partner (his "friend" I thought) mentioned in a card that they were taking a trip for their anniversary. This was my first encounter with real live gay people. By the time I got to high school, my straight assumptions were entrenched enough that I was scared of the high school gay club, LeTsGaB. Honestly, it was less repulsion and condescension than it was discomfort. I was nerdy, quiet, and decidedly evangelical, and the gay club seemed to represent a loud and proud discussion of sexuality I was not ready to have at all. My church had never told me to hate gays, but it had certainly never told me to love them.

So in college, I made mostly evangelical friends, steered clear of yet another gay club, and mostly tried to ignore the idea. Until senior year.

*

In 2008, three women came out to me.

Kate was a college friend. One night she asked me if we could talk. She told me she felt terrible for not being honest. I had asked what she was doing over the weekend, and she said she had a training for work. Another day, she told me she was going into the city to meet some friends from her trip abroad. She was tired of lying to me. The truth was, she was bi, and dating a woman for the first time. She wanted to be out, but she was scared to tell some of our other friends for fear of judgment.

I tried to listen compassionately. I told her nothing changed about how I felt about her. But I felt it would be dishonest if I didn’t share my perspective. I asked her if she had a sense about how this new revelation about her sexuality fit with her faith. She said she felt pretty good about it. I mumbled something about how I still wasn’t sure whether or not it was okay to be gay. I told her that I wanted to be supportive, but I was trying to figure out where I stood.

We graduated a couple months later. I’ve seen her only twice since then.

A couple weeks later I arrived at my fourth and final summer as a counselor at a Christian camp. The whispered conversations of pain and trust and Jesus seem even more beautiful five years later. The last two weeks, Lana and I were counselors for Cabin 12, the oldest girls in camp. It was the clearest night of the summer and Lana and I took the girls up to the soccer field to gaze into the soul of the universe. I asked everyone to share about their relationship with God over the past year. Each girl told a story, but Emily didn’t want to talk.

“You don’t have to share,” we said, “but this is a safe place.”

She waffled. “I really don’t have anything to share.”

“Emily, it’s okay, you can say it.” One of the girls encouraged her, and she continued.

“I mean, I can’t have a relationship with God.”

I was not the only one on the field to jump in immediately. “What do you mean? Everyone can have a relationship with God!”

She took a deep breath. “I mean, I’m gay.”

That was not the explanation I was expecting, and I was silenced momentarily. The stars were bright with beauty. The other sixteen-year-old girls began to respond with acceptance and love. I was proud of them. I think Emily felt free.

When we returned to the cabin, Lana and I met on the porch, as we did every night. There were tears in her eyes as we prayed for the girls.

I sat on Emily’s bunk and we whispered into the night. She told me when she first knew, though in a way she had always known. She told me about coming out to her mom and sister, but not her dad who would be furious. She told me it was hard coming out to her girlfriends, because some of them started acting weird, like they were afraid she would be attracted to them.

I prayed for the Spirit to give me the right words, and the words that came were of God’s unconditional love.

I woke the next morning and I knew clearly that my role was simply to show grace. To let her see she could reconnect with God. To emphasize that the central message of our faith is God’s surprising, consuming, boundary-breaking love.

Lana and I went out to the porch for our morning prayer. “I knew exactly what Emily was going to say as soon as she started,” said Lana. “I knew because I’ve been there, in that exact conversation. I’ve said those exact words.” She was quiet for a while as I took in what she was saying. “And the hardest thing is that no one knows. I couldn’t work here if they knew. And I can’t talk with Emily about it because I signed a statement of beliefs.”

This time I just listened.

When it was time to pray, I prayed, thank you God for your great love, greater than our love.

 ____

Part 2 is up! I would love to hear your thoughts. Please keep comments charitable.