faith – Little Stories

I will appeal to this

October 22, 2019October 22, 2019 Abby2 Comments

Processed with VSCO with c1 preset — I love fall in our neighborhood.

In my youth, I read the Bible every day. I was particularly fanatical about it in my early teens, pushing myself deeper into study and memorization. I wanted to know more about the Bible than anyone else, as far as it was within my (overinflated sense of) power. I wrote about scripture every morning, memorized the book of Ephesians and much of 1 Corinthians 15, and ultimately had read through the whole Bible three times by the time I turned 18.

I mention this not to brag but to confess. This obsession with the Bible shape-shifted into a dark, unhealthy thing in my young life. My fanaticism broke something in me. The Book was the method through which, I believed, God would grant me favor and a better standing in the heavenly brackets. (Clearly, I was not absorbing some crucial elements of the good news from those books at the end, the ones with the red parts.) And yet this did not happen. All of this intense Bible reading did not improve my character. I was still as horrible as I’d always been, but now, I was self-righteous about it. Worn out from the posturing and performance, by the time I’d graduated college, I was ready to walk away from the faith of my youth for good.

As it happens, I didn’t walk away, which is another story entirely, but I did stop reading the Bible. My reconfiguration of faith made reading the Bible — an act that was once so vital, so critical to my daily functioning — difficult, even distasteful. For the past eight years, I haven’t been able to read the Bible on a regular basis, as much as I’ve tried. I bought new translations, handsomely bound pocket editions, concordances, gigantic ones with commentary. I told myself I’d start memorizing scripture again; I’d read through books during Lent; we’d study the Bible together before dinner. None of it appealed to me (and none of it worked or lasted). It’s not that I wasn’t reading; I was still reading 100 or more books a year. But none of them were the Bible.

I’m still unsure how to fully explain this lapse in Bible reading, but what I do know is that this eight-year break has been restorative. This is a weird thing to say, and my inner evangelical recoils with shame. (To admit such a thing — that not reading the Bible has seemed good for me — verges on serious blasphemy in the circles of my youth.) But it has been. I have been able to enjoy scripture with some distance from it, hearing it every Sunday at church, but I have not buried myself in it; I have not approximated that personal, daily closeness that I once had.

Still, these many years later, I have missed that fervent reader I once knew. Over the past year, I have felt I’m in a healthier, safer place (thanks to the grace of our church, chipping away at my grotesque heart for nearly a decade now), and I have wondered how I could start reading the Bible again. What would it take?

Having a baby, apparently, was what it took. For the past month, in the early hours of the morning, I have read the Bible while nursing Moses. I read it on my phone, needing a free hand to baby-wrangle, which is a new (and not entirely awesome) experience for me. (I’m using the ESV app, which is super-glitchy and full of glaring UX flaws, but it has one of the least gross text interfaces I found.) But it has been working. I have been, to my outrageous surprise, sticking with it.

Leading thoughts thus far? It’s good to be back. And it was right to be away.

I have realized that the Book is still so much with me (and always has been). Even though I clearly didn’t learn much and did not become a better person, all of those years spent reading the Bible shaped my brain and memory. I can still recall scripture easily and with joy. My purity of heart remains Level: Garbage Dump/100% Unrepentant Sinner, but I can remember a weird quantity of the early prophets and the Pauline epistles.

And yet there is still much that surprises me. This is the dual-sided nature of returning to the Bible: I remember so much, and I remember so little.

Specifically, while nursing Moses at 4 in the morning, I was floored by this exchange from Psalm 77, which struck me as just the thing.

I consider the days of old,
the years long ago.
I said, “Let me remember my song in the night;
let me meditate in my heart.”
Then my spirit made a diligent search:
“Will the Lord spurn forever,
and never again be favorable?
Has his steadfast love forever ceased?
Are his promises at an end for all time?
Has God forgotten to be gracious?
Has he in anger shut up his compassion?”

I’d forgotten about how delightful that experience is, when reading scripture, when you stumble on just the thing — the small word, the errant phrase that is precisely what you needed. This is the pleasure of such a vast, beautiful Book: It lives alongside you.

I read this and actually said aloud, astonished, “Has God forgotten to be gracious?” Moses paused and looked up at me and grinned.

In all of these long years away, I had forgotten many things. The remembering has brought a rush of pleasure and contemplation. Returning, now, has felt like the right thing, considering the days of old, the years long ago.

. . .

It’s super-lame when parents say, “This is such a fun age,” but good grief, this IS such a fun age! Moses is five months old now and narrowly holding onto his title as World’s Best Baby. (Woke up at 3:30 in the morning chirping like a pterodactyl, not sleepy at all! Sleep is silly!)

Processed with VSCO with c1 preset

My Bright Abyss

June 13, 2013 Abby2 Comments

My Bright Abyss, the latest book from poet Christian Wiman, came to me at the right moment; it was one of those inspired books that reaches you in this unexpected, perfect place.

My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer — My Bright Abyss, by Christian Wiman

Lately, I have been feeling lonely in my faith. The old structures of belief that I once clung to have crumbled, noiselessly and painlessly, but I still miss them. I want to return to the simpler days of my childhood and youth, the time of legalistic, black-and-white belief; it was easier back there. I was comfortable pretending I had all of the answers.

I used to be wrapped up in a lot of theological minutiae. But I am not concerned about these things anymore:

Heaven (and who is going there)
Hell
Factual inaccuracies in the Bible
Predestination
The End Times

And this shift in belief, Wiman writes, is natural:

In fact, there is no way to “return to the faith of your childhood,” not really, unless you’ve just woken up from a decades-long and absolutely literal coma. Faith is not some half-remembered country into which you come like a long-exiled king, dispensing the old wisdom, casting out the radical, insurrectionist aspects of yourself by which you’d been betrayed. No. Life is not an error, even when it is. That is to say, whatever faith you emerge with at the end of your life is going to be not simply affected by that life but intimately dependent upon it, for faith in God is, in the deepest sense, faith in life–which means that even the staunchest life of faith is a life of great change. It follows that if you believe at fifty what you believed at fifteen, then you have not lived–or have denied the reality of your life.

I feel very unburdened by this. Acknowledging that I don’t worry about these subjects anymore has been so freeing to me. I don’t have to have a stance on heaven or predestination; I don’t have to determine (with outrageous arrogance, I might add) whether someone is “saved” or not. My lack of concern over these issues does not affect my relationship with people or with Jesus. Rather, I feel so much happier about being a Christian than I did six or seven years ago. Many of you may disagree with this laissez faire attitude toward certain elements of doctrine; that’s OK. I’m just finally willing to admit that I don’t know everything and that I don’t need to know everything.

As Wiman writes:

The minute any human or human institution arrogates to itself a singular knowledge of God, there comes into that knowledge a kind of strychnine pride, and it is as if the most animated and vital creature were instantaneously transformed into a corpse. Any belief that does not recognize and adapt to its own erosions rots from within. Only when doctrine itself is understood to be provisional does doctrine begin to take on a more than provisional significance. Truth inheres not in doctrine itself, but in the spirit with which it is engaged, for the spirit of God is always seeking and creating new forms.

So, God has not changed; I have changed, and with that, my views on the essentials truths of my faith have changed. Christian Wiman reminded me that this is OK, and that I can find peace here, in this new and unfamiliar landscape of personal belief.

The book draws its title from a few lines of poetry by Wiman, which have struck me as the precise rendering of all that I have been feeling and wrestling with over the past year.

My God my bright abyss

into which all my longing will not go

once more I come to the edge of all I know

and believing nothing believe in this.

Buy My Bright Abyss on Amazon.
Two poems by Wiman.
New Yorker review of My Bright Abyss.

Small Wire

March 28, 2013 Abby1 Comment

SMALL WIRE
Anne Sexton

My faith
is a great weight
hung on a small wire,
as doth the spider
hang her baby on a thin web,
as doth the vine,
twiggy and wooden,
hold up grapes
like eyeballs,
as many angels
dance on the head of a pin.

God does not need
too much wire to keep Him there,
just a thin vein,
with blood pushing back and forth in it,
and some love.
As it has been said:
Love and a cough
cannot be concealed.
Even a small cough.
Even a small love.
So if you have only a thin wire,
God does not mind.
He will enter your hands
as easily as ten cents used to
bring forth a Coke.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

This is a funny and strange poem, but I will always recall these lines: “So if you have only a thin wire,/God does not mind.”

(And isn’t that photo by Grace wonderful? Taken somewhere in New Zealand, I think.)

Headed to my parents’ house this weekend for a family reunion, to celebrate Easter, my birthday, and the fact that Laszlo went on trial with an adopter this weekend!

Why I don’t write much about my faith

March 13, 2013 Abby1 Comment

Here’s the thing.

I used to write more about Christianity on this blog and on my previous blogs. I think my mom wishes I wrote more about it (and less about women’s rights in the context of the church, probably). I understand where she’s coming from. You write about what you care about, so if I’m not writing about God, it may lead one to the conclusion that I don’t care much about God.

This is not true. I’ve just made the decision not to write much about Christianity in this space. Here are a few reasons why.

As my readership has gradually expanded beyond my blood relatives, I am not writing to a homogenous Christian audience anymore.
Expressing opinions about God is a sure-fire way to attract conflict. I am really, really weary of people arguing about Christianity on the Internet. I’d prefer that that didn’t happen here, as much as it lies within my control.
I’d rather have an in-person conversation with you about God than read comments about my poorly expressed beliefs on my blog.

Rest assured, I am not done with Jesus. I still talk about and to him on a regular basis. I’d just prefer not to do it here. That’s all.

What you do not know

September 28, 2012January 24, 2013 Abby3 Comments

[Faith] is not a conviction based on rational analysis. It is not the fruit of scientific evidence. You can only believe what you do not know. As soon as you know it, you no longer believe it, at least not in the same way as you know it.

— New Seeds of Contemplation, Thomas Merton

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

This is what faith is.

Thoughts, at the close of this very, very busy week:

Daniel and Lauren Goans are such beautiful and consistently intentional people. They are also, of all the couples I have met, two people who are utterly meant to be together. God made them for each other, in that classical Plato’s other-half kind of way. They couldn’t possibly be married to anyone else.
The thought of welcoming a new coworker to our small, close-knit department feels akin to welcoming a new family member. Feelings of anxiety and trepidation are dredged up.
Jill Stein for president! According to I Side With, I agree with this crazy lady on 97% of the issues (and with Romney on approximately 0% of major things). What is a thinking person to do, in a two-party republic?
Every time I’ve made up my mind never to read any more British literature, because it is so tired and predictable and snobby, a specter of Virginia Woolf floats in front of my mind and I back away from that proclamation.
Kelsey and Alex are getting married in 15 days!

Treasure hidden in a field

July 26, 2011December 8, 2015 Abby1 Comment

On Sunday, our rector talked about the passage in Matthew in which Jesus provides a litany of parables to explain the kingdom of heaven. It’s a mysterious series of similes and they don’t exactly line up at first glance. Even if you do know what the “kingdom of heaven” actually means (I’m not sure I do), it’s still mystifying as to how it could be a mustard seed AND a fishing net AND a pearl of great price AND a treasure buried in a field.

The kingdom of heaven can be many things at once, I suppose. It can be deceptively small. It can have a wide reach. It can be what you sell everything for. And it can be hidden.

The hiddenness of God and the kingdom of heaven particularly struck me. Why would God hide? When I feel far away from God, is it because the kingdom of heaven is hidden or because I’m not looking hard enough? I don’t know. I wish I did.

One of the main lines that I remember from Paul’s sermon was about our interaction with the divine. “Trust is often the most difficult thing,” he said. “It is often more difficult than faith and belief.”

Maybe that’s what I’ve been missing lately. I’ve been trying to amp up faith and belief, but maybe it’s the trust that’s really absent.

The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. Matthew 13:44

I knew I was not magnificent

July 12, 2011January 25, 2013 Abby3 Comments

A hillside — Source: Flickr user lovebrowne

Part I. On Not Writing about Jesus

When I was a young blogger, I wrote more freely about my faith. At that time, I assumed that all of my readers were also like-minded Christians. This was a fair assumption, since I think my mom, my grandparents, and my sisters were my only readers. But over the past two years or so, I’ve more or less stopped writing about my faith and I regret that. The gospel is important to me, but you’d never get that impression by reading this blog. I write about all of the other things that are important to me–Guion, friends, family, books, dogs–but not about Jesus.

Why not?

Here’s my best guess as to why I stopped doing this. I have followed the tendency of many bloggers to whitewash my life. The one thing you learn about blogging for a few years is that you can’t express an opinion about anything without offending someone. Because of this, I have tried to avoid topics that are inherently personal and offensive, like religion and politics. While most casual readers could probably divine my political leanings (it is evident that I am not a Sarah Palin or FOX news fan), it would be trickier to actually figure out what I believe about God.

Lately, I’ve tended to keep my thoughts about God closer to my chest. I have many friends who are not Christians. I am hesitant to write about my many religiously oriented thoughts and concerns for fear of alienating people. Even I don’t like to read long-winded and highly emotional posts about religion. It’s not often enjoyable and it is often hard to relate to; faith is, by definition, such an intensely personal thing. Even more than puppies and books. It’s generally more enjoyable to read a post about someone’s kitchen makeover than it is to read a post about their internal turmoil over transubstantiation. Intensely personal things are not always blog (aka, The Entire Internet Can Read This) material.

However. All of this to say: I think there are appropriate and considerate ways to write about one’s faith on the Interwebs. I am going to try to do this with more frequency, but I think I’ll also spend some time studying good examples. Mrs. Pinckney and Betsey come to mind as people I know who blog gracefully and fluidly about the intersection between Jesus and life. I hold them up as valuable examples.

So, here’s a short attempt:

Part II. I Knew I Was Not Magnificent

No one enjoys receiving criticism. But when you don’t hear it for a while, you start to think that you’re pretty awesome. Boy, there’s nothing wrong with me! I am the best.

If we’re lucky, however, we have people in our lives who are able and willing to tell us that this is not the case. After a few months of believing that I was super, I’ve received a lot of criticism from important people in my life over the past few weeks. As these people pointed out, I am grumpy, judgmental, and anxious. I am an energetic young curmudgeon most of the time. I am fundamentally cynical about most things. I am an obsessive planner because I tend to expect worst possible outcomes and because I thrive on a high degree of responsibility.

As these people kindly pointed out, these aren’t the best personality traits. I had more or less forgotten about these unfortunate aspects of myself until I heard these reminders. To be pushed back to God, to a place of humility–it is a necessary chore. I think God speaks to us through other people sometimes. Often, through our closest friends and loved family–and sometimes, through a much-lauded hipster musician.

We were listening to Bon Iver’s new album on our drive to North Carolina this weekend. The gorgeous song “Holocene” came on and we talked briefly about the chorus.

we smoked the screen to make it what it was to be
now to know it in my memory:

… and at once I knew I was not magnificent
high above the highway aisle
(jagged vacancy, thick with ice)
I could see for miles, miles, miles…

“I knew I was not magnificent.” What a simple and perfect expression. It’s that place of humility that we all have to reach with ourselves at some point or another. Acknowledging that I am not magnificent was a surprisingly difficult thing to do. Difficult, but essential.

Thoughts on Gilead

May 6, 2011 Abby3 Comments

At its simplest, Gilead is an old man’s love letter to his young son. At its deepest, the novel is a moving and melodic elegy for the quiet night of the soul. It is sad. It is soft. I liked it a lot. I have a tendency to gravitate toward books heavy on the internal reflection (Woolf, Proust anyone?) and Marilynne Robinson certainly delivers in this respect.

The jacket for my copy describes the Reverend John Ames’s life as a “God-haunted existence.” I think this an apt phrase for the protagonist and narrator, who comes from a long line of fervent and religious men. He writes as a 77-year-old man to his very young son.

The letter hinges quite a bit on the fact that when one is old, one will still wrestle with one’s central beliefs–perhaps especially if one is a preacher. It was somehow relieving to me to read about this wise, old minister who still talked to God and still had lots of questions for him. For example, how does one really forgive someone? And must we? Always? Why is it that our defenses of our deepest held beliefs sound trite and foolish when explained to someone else who does not share them?

Robinson inhabits the voice of John Ames very convincingly, which is itself a great accomplishment, as she is neither male nor about to die nor a Congregationalist minister living in Iowa in the late 1950s. Some popular novelists bank on the trope of creating narrators who are thinly disguised versions of themselves (Gary Shteyngart, Junot Diaz, and Jonathan Safran Foer come to mind); Robinson shirks that easy way out and instead picks a character who is as unlike her as possible. And, boy, does she pull it off.

I think it helps that Robinson herself is a converted Congregationalist and has preached at her local church several times. Her knowledge of scripture and time-honored Protestant theological debacles is impressive. She knows enough about Protestant Christianity to sound like a very believable 77-year-old preacher. John Ames’s internal battles are still being waged and yet we trust and rely on him as our credible and wise narrator.

A large part of the novel, to me, is about the sadness of growing old. It’s sad for everyone, but especially for John Ames, who has a much younger wife and child. The intensity with which he watches them, strives to remember them is touching. Reading his long letter to his son made me want to take better care of my memory and my limited attempts to record the people who are dear to me. Thus motivated by John Ames, I started writing small vignettes and stories about my relatives. Some day, these little stories will be infinitely more valuable to me than they are now–and this is the truth at the heart of Gilead.

If he felt that love around

March 31, 2011 Abby1 Comment

“Oh,” the priest said, “that’s another thing altogether–God is love. I don’t say the heart doesn’t feel a taste of it, but what a taste. The smallest glass of love mixed with a pint pot of ditch-water. We wouldn’t recognize that love. It might even look like hate. It would be enough to scare us–God’s love. It set fire to a bush in the desert, didn’t it, and smashed open graves and set the dead walking in the dark. Oh, a man like me would run a mile to get away if he felt that love around.”

— The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene

Tag: faith