Passing

Oh, to grace how great a debtor/daily I’m constrained to be.

My tourism among the Christians has become problematic, even as it becomes more joyful because I wonder if I can continue to borrow their language without coming clean about just how metaphorical it is.

Story has always been the sheet I lay over what is most essentially true to reveal its shape and presence. Narrative and parable like leaves shifting on a branch prove the invisible, ineffable wind of the unsayable thing that requires faith.

And this dialect of thirst, of joy, grace and redemption feels good against the back of my throat. God is a hard syllable, too, that fills up in the throbbing unsaid iamb of my experience. But I am uncomfortable wondering what they'd feel if they knew what I believe is that their story is as good as any other.

Haven’t I been lost, and found? Sightless and seeing? Wretched? Safe if not so much saved? Can’t I just twist their god like a paper napkin and insert him in the space where my gratitude goes? Can gratitude happen without an entity to be grateful to? Because I am grateful. I’ve woken from a deep sleep just now at 1 AM  to find that thankfulness blossoming in my sternum, the way it often does when I wake up in the morning and realize how things are for me now.

That gratitude wants to sing, and not alone. It wants to pray. It’s cozy in their story of Christ striving, crucified, and sure, why not, resurrected. How much literal belief is the price of admission? Because I think I’m going to be found out if this goes on any longer.

For testimony group, we are asked this week to think of a time when we looked for god and couldn’t find “him.” (Even the pronoun bothers me less than it should.)

The only time I ever lost my faith, such as it is, was six months into marriage and done with myself, bent sideways on my own destruction, and too what-felt-like cowardly to carry it out. It seemed like I was always on my bike at that time, but not getting anywhere. Like months and months were just somehow spent at one particular point on the Walnut Street Bridge. Pedaling carelessly, swerving, hoping to slam hard into some easier end. An at least thin layer of alcohol was between me and the world for about a year. That was a faithless time, which made me feel hollow and without a heart or reason, and that was because I was bottom out  betrayed by my own story-- the one madness made.

I lost my faith when god stopped talking to me, how god used to-- particularly in fits of maina where god pulsed through my blood and whispered “do it” like a friend you later regret. When god quit acting like I was a vital player in god’s very universe. When it was no longer logical to believe that god had my back and would lay a banquet for me in the presence of my enemies, and when it seemed instead that god did not much care what happened to me or much worse, cared what happened to me the same amount that god cared what happened to anyone else.

Hadn’t god charged me as I knelt weeping in the pew of the chapel at All Souls in New York in October of 2001? Hadn’t god made clear that he depended on me to fix that broken world? And when the work of ending discrimination and poverty and injustice at home proved to be slow and muddling work, hadn’t god relocated me to China? Didn’t god command me in the rice-wine-fuled misery of that dirty, grotesque place to feed the hungry from the tables of the rich, and didn’t I do it like the twenty year old barefoot junior messiah I was? Hadn’t I done as god commanded? After all this good service, how had god left me on the Walnut Street Bridge, peddling pointlessly at a very low gear and getting nowhere?

God and I had had these moments before. When god discouraged me from drowning myself in the bathtub in Canada. When I lay down in Wynten Way at 1 AM and dared god to manifest as a truck and god refused. When I leaned over the creaking ancient Chinese chain link bridge at the concrete bank of Dong Ting Lake and god sent a peasant farmer to pull me from the edge. These were the good stories I knew god to be the author of. The ones where god let me know how important I was.

But the pedaling? The muddling lack of clarity about who was playing the lead and whom the universe would bend for and who it had the care to punish? The story was too slapdash for authorship. That was where my faith wavered.

The thing about it is, though, that it always comes back transfigured. It resurrects. And every time it resurrects, it simplifies.

The god of my childhood was children’s Bible god, although when I was ready He winked from behind His beard to let me in on the secret that He identified as female. Then when I was craziest, in my early twenties, god relocated to my mind where he’d command me wildly with manic whims and tests of faith. He'd hold my head under the water, just like Jesus does to the disciple who says “savior, more than anything else I desire your presence.” And god’d laugh like the dangerous friend god was and drag me by the hair out of some churning salty ocean of depression and say “what did you desire more than anything else down in there? Was it my presence or air?” 

How could you lose faith in Someone so viscerally present?

When I felt forsaken in China, god departed my mind and left me to my own devices. I was mad, Gethsemane mad in the dirt garden at Jiaoshixincun, until I saw it for what it was. God trusted me enough to take care of myself now. Like a parent.

So I did take care of myself, body if not soul, and it seemed like it was working out. I dutifully called god on the major holidays and tried to act the way god had taught me to, if sometimes I fell short. And then god did what felt like a Job job on me in Philadelphia and left me spinning out on the dark grid of the city.

But even that faithlessness didn’t take. And god, aging I guess, has moved back in. God stays largely out of my brain and has lodged in my bones and rarely speaks except to say “slow down.” My gratitude for this lodger and for that wise advice is warm in my marrow.

But honestly, this is not the god of Abraham, except in the way it is. And it is not the one god and-no-others-before-me except in the way that it is. This god does not reign in some plottable paradise beyond the clouds, for sure. This god did not impregnate the virgin Mary and make himself manifest in her only son except in the way god does this with every baby ever done. This god did not walk the earth as Jesus Christ except in the way that he walked the earth as Mohammed and King and Anne Hutchinson and Lucretia Mott and my mom and my coworker I hate. Jesus the son did not die and resurrect and ascend into heaven except in the way that all of us do, all the time. Which is to say, metaphorically.

And I do not know if this would be enough for the Christians if they knew.

The thing is, I do believe. I do. I believe a thing that can be said their way as well as any other. Their way better in the songs I love about Amazing Grace and the Font of Every Blessing, and in the beatitudes. But maybe it’s not fair to take their literal truth and make it my metaphor. Or rather, of course it is, but maybe it’s not fair not to let them know just what I mean.

Because although I love to sing with them and speak with them and pray with them and shake their hands and say “peace of Christ be with you,” I can’t quite call myself a Christian. Not in all fairness. Not when I think one story is as good as the next. That, as Forrest Church said, "in the cathedral of the world there is one light but many windows". It’s a good window, but I can’t say it’s the light.