“I don’t know if you’re a person of faith, but. . .” her voice trailed off, the insinuation hanging heavy between us. My coworker, who had only known me for four months and mostly over zoom, was reaching for the best tool in her bag of comforts to offer me.
“In a way, yes,” I answered.
“Well I believe that things happen for a reason, and. . .” she went on, but I was already gone.
A person of faith. If only she knew. . .
Scene One:
I am five years old. I am sitting on our back step, shucking corn into a paper bag on a hot summer night. I say, “Mom, I have a question, and I want you to tell me the truth. Really tell me the truth ok? Don’t lie.”
“Okay.”
“Who is really the good one - god or the devil?”
“Honey, god of course.”
“But how do you know?” I demanded.
“I have faith,” she answered.
She doesn’t know, I realized. She doesn’t know for sure.
Does anyone?
Scene Two:
I sit on a worn-out couch in the basement of the leaders of the faith-based group I attended during my freshman year at Penn State - the Navigators. Two bright-faced, well-meaning middle-aged folks from the midwest sit eagerly before me, ready to take on my crisis of faith.
“But how do you know?” I asked, just like I had asked my mother so many years ago.
“You don’t,” they said. “That’s what faith is for.”
“Really? That’s all you’re going to say to explain away the multitudes of questions and inconsistencies and mysteries that is life and religion? Have faith?
“But what about where we came from? And where we’re going when we die? And why we’re all here? And what kind of god would create beings with the ability to ask these questions but not the ability to know the answers for sure? What kind of twisted torture is that?”
They had no good answers for me. No one ever did.
Scene Three:
I stood at the doorway of our shared apartment on the fifth floor of some beige student housing in downtown State College, PA. It was my junior year at Penn State. All four of my female, Christian roommates stood huddled at the door, winter coats buttoned up, Bibles in hand, ready to head out to our weekly Friday night meeting of the Navigators. We planned our whole lives around the Navs’ schedule. This group was our anchor. Our identity. I had never missed a meeting.
“Yeah guys, I’m not going to. . . like. . . go tonight,” I said slowly.
“Why not? Are you sick?” one of them asked.
“No. I feel fine. And actually, I’m not going to go anymore. You know, like ever.”
Stunned silence.
“What’s going on, Melanie?” one of them asked, fear creeping up into her voice. It felt like I had just made a choice that disrupted the matrix. This was not how it was supposed to go.
“Nothing,” I replied, my voice slowly getting stronger. “I feel really good actually. It’s just not for me anymore.”
“What’s not for you anymore? Navs?” another one asked.
“No, like, you know, god.”
“God is not for you,” she repeated. “God.”
“Yeah, I think that I’m not going to be a Christian anymore. Or like, pray or read the Bible. Ever. I’m done.”
They looked at me with saucers in their eyes and mumbled things like, “Ok, have a good night” and “Do you want us to call you if we go to the diner after?”
I politely declined, telling them that I wanted time alone. As soon as they left, I went into my shared bedroom and quietly moved my Bible from my bedside table to the bottom of my bottom drawer. It felt like the most independent thing I had ever done in my life. And that’s where it stayed. Forever.
Scene Four:
“But what is the point? Why are we all here?” I lamented to my mom friends, glasses of wine in hand, as we sat on my back porch in central California under the bistro lights that my husband had just hung the week before.
My two kids slept silently in their beds while I enjoyed a “girls night,” which consisted of sharing deeply about our lives, then pulling tarot cards and culling nuggets of wisdom before closing out the night by 9pm to return to our partners and responsibilities.
I had successfully left the religion in which I was raised and then hopped through one existential crisis after the other like a mental health minefield for most of my 20’s and 30’s, stopping off at such exciting sights as Taoism, Buddhism, Quakerism, and Atheism, and now here I sat facing my 40’s like the edge of a cliff, and I was asking the same questions again.
Why are we here?
Where did we come from?
Where are we going?
What is the point of it all?
Sometimes depression colors these questions a dark grey, and they feel so heavy that I feel I will surely die under their weight.
Sometimes they are colored rainbow instead, influenced more by fascination and curiosity than doom and despair.
But no matter what color they are, the questions persist, as do the lack of tidy answers.
“You know,” one of my wise mom friends offers, “You might have more access to answers and help than you think. I know you don’t have the big patriarchal evangelical god in the sky anymore (and who wants him anyway?), but you are not alone. You are not disconnected. Where else does your help come from?”
A Bible verse bubbled up from deep in my memory. . . I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. . .
“The hills” I answered. “The earth, I mean.”
She nodded. “And?”
“The spirit world?”
She nodded again.
“The ancestors. The plant medicine. My sisters. Source.”
“Yes girl yes!” another friend snapped with one hand while holding her wine in the other. “You’re getting it.”
I smiled on the outside, and part of me felt a renewed desire to lean into the many supports that I mentioned. They could be so easy to forget when I get stuck in the dark place. My sisters were right, those were all great options. I made a renewed commitment right then and there to utilize my many resources from above and below.
But I also knew the second half of that Bible verse. . .
My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth. . .
There it was again. The Lord. God. The big one. Who or what was this being? The Pennsylvania Christians of my childhood called it God and assumed it was male and literally created the knowable universe.
The California “spiritualists” (for lack of a better word) of my adulthood call it things like “Source” and “Great Spirit” and usually refer to it with either female or gender-neutral pronouns. They don’t believe in a literal creation, but more of an unfolding of collective energy.
But does one of them have to be wrong for one of them to be right? I don’t think so. I think that, at this juncture of my life, I have space for all of it.
Because no matter what you and I think we know, or what we call who we pray to, the truth is that at the end of the day, none of us knows for sure. It all takes faith.
So am I a person of faith?
Why, yes. Yes I am.
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