I tuck myself into the booth at a cafe that’s a block from my house. I’ve become obsessed with their cold brew, and however ironic it is that on my days off from my job making coffee I go to sit and read in a different coffee shop, I still do. Today’s book is Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint, by Nadia Bolz-Weber. I haven’t delved into spiritual memoir in quite some time. In fact, I’ve been avoiding it, just like I avoid the Bible. I can’t deal with someone telling me I’m doing it wrong, or that they’ve found the right way to do it, when I’m struggling in what feels like this never-ending wasteland of figuring out faith.
But Nadia has tattoos, she uses the f-word, and I follow her on Twitter, so I feel like if anyone has a shot of speaking things to my fragile spiritual life, this book would be it. Not that I’ve got my whole faith hinging on a book, but I’m in a place where I need to hear something. Anything at all, really. And I am entirely desperate for it to not be another condemning sermon on how depression is a sin.
Shortly into my reading, I come across this passage: The Bible is not God… Anything in the Bible that does not hold up to the gospel of Jesus Christ simply does not have the same authority.
My jaw drops, and I gasp out loud. “What. WHAT.” I’m talking to myself in a crowded cafe. If the multiple times I’ve dropped a chip down my shirt and fished it out in full view of the baristas haven’t convinced them I’m a little crazy, this will certainly do it.
I don’t even care, because my god, this is the most revolutionary thing I’ve seen. Anything in the Bible that does not hold up to the gospel of Jesus Christ does not have the same authority.
WHAT.
You mean all this time that I’ve been struggling, trying to figure out a way to reconcile all the horrible things the writers of the Bible had to say about me simply because I was born with the chromosome combination of a female with the quiet certainty of God’s love for me that I’ve felt since I was a child, you mean that I can look at it all in this light, I can turn it on its head, I can say, “Sorry, Paul, but your words just don’t matter as much to me as Jesus’ do.” I can be like, yo, I know you said in Timothy that you don’t permit a woman to speak in church, but JESUS never made that rule, so fuck off?
I mean, WHAT.
This might just change how I see the Bible. I’m still not ready to read it again, but if I am, one day, it’ll be with this in mind.
I don’t know why I’m thinking of her today. Perhaps it’s all the moms in the drive-thru where I hand out coffee, reminding me of how great she was with all of her kids. I left when the youngest was just a toddler, and I had a sudden pang when I thought about how those kids who I’d watched since they were babies were probably in elementary and junior high now. I wondered if, had I stayed, would I have been in their lives as they grew up like she was in mine.
When I walked away from my family, it also meant leaving church family. For those unfamiliar with church culture, it’s a large extended community that knows your business, and you know theirs, and while there were so many issues in the one I grew up in, an undercurrent of love and community anchored it. I am able to see past the condemning theology, the sexism and tightly confined women’s roles, and sometimes, the outright damage that community did to me – and I miss it. I miss knowing that the people I saw two and three times every week loved me and cared about me. I miss feeling like I mattered, like I was part of a big family that fought and bickered but also put food on my table when I had none, that gave me Christmas presents when we couldn’t afford new shoes. They listened to my heavy heart and, at times, held me while I cried. I sang beside them, ate with them, put on community events and went to conferences and camp with them. I was part of a them, and we cared for one another.
So that’s what I think of when I remember this woman. I remember driving her minivan with her three sleeping children in the backseat and feeling a little awed that she trusted me this much. I remember crying in her living room, awash in a fog of depression, at one of the lowest parts of my life. I remember the gift she brought to my high school graduation party and I remember picking up her kids from preschool.
I don’t know what she heard about me, when I left. But I know that leaving my parents meant leaving their church, because my dad was a pastor there, and no one would believe me, and so I cut myself off and tried my best to forget. I didn’t exactly go around asking for help, but after I was gone, she never reached out to ask why. Those ten years of my life in which she was a pivotal figure just…didn’t matter, anymore. Not when there was a pastor’s reputation on the line. And so she faded from my life, and I from hers, just like I did from every other family whose homes felt like an extension of my own. Multiple families who knew me, who I grew up with, and not a one asked me if the rumors were true, if I’d be home for Christmas. They receded into the back pews in whispers and dimming lights. I didn’t lose just one family – I lost two.
This experience has left me, at times, bitter, saddened, heartbroken, angry. But more than anything, it has left me with this question: If Jesus left for the one lost sheep, and the Church is supposed to embody him, how come no one came for me?
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I get home from work around eleven, the hour when the streets are finally cooling from the start of the summer heat. My car creaks into the driveway, older than me, tired from the two-hundred-thousand-plus miles on it. I climb out and perch on the trunk, leaning my body back along the rear window. The trees are tall in this yard, and they wave above me in the dim streetlight glow. Through the branches I can see more stars than I’m used to, away from the lights and the buzz of my hometown.
Before I know it, tears are leaking from the corners of my eyes as I whisper what I want and the things I’m afraid of to whoever is listening in the night. God, spirit, wind, whomever cares enough to hear. I tell the stars about my hurts, what cries out within me for fulfillment, my fear that I will not amount to much of anything. Water pools in my ears, sirens echo down the highway, but I whisper on into the night.
I don’t have the answers. I didn’t when I left, and I don’t now. I do know that church family has become something different and more variable for me, and takes place mostly online in my Twitter community, supplemented by the wisdom and love of my best friend’s large family. I know that after leaving, it felt like I would never find anything close to it again, but every year out I realize that I still have a place in the global church community, however shifting and undefinable it is. In this last year, I have been the recipient of so much financial help from that community that the tallied amount left me staggered earlier this week. I wouldn’t have been able to get through my surgery earlier this year, or finally get out of crushing credit card debt incurred while escaping, without the help of these people. I’ve often never met them but they have read my words and heard my story and loved me as one of their own. They are my new community, my new part of something bigger, and they have restored my hope for what a church could be.
I can’t go to a church service, and I’m afraid to ask anyone to pray for me, but I can do this. I can climb atop my car hood and tell secrets to the sky. My heart can burst and rebuild itself, over and over, making me stronger, making me weaker, making me both. The same hands, the same eyes, wiping tears away that have been swelling so for so long. And I’m only getting better at picking myself up, gathering my things, and going to bed, with hope for a better tomorrow. I’m only getting better at remembering that for as much as it hurts, it will always be bearable and I am steady on the way towards the bright and attainable happy I know exists, the one I left long ago searching for. I am on my way and I am walking into the sun and I will call you when I land there in the burning plains and my heart finds a home again.