My first college was Sue Bennett Methodist, and every week we had to attend convocation. Sue Bennett was a strict school: to visit the dorm room of the opposite sex your door had to remain open at all times and you had to always have at least one foot on the floor (to keep you from stretching out on a bed). But I loved that instead of convocation being a fire and brimstone sermon it was a time of learning. We weren’t being yelled at about going to hell; we were being told revolutionary things (to my mind): that God was love, that a true Christian works for others, that all beliefs should be respected instead of negated, that the Golden Rule was the best road to take. I also loved my theology classes, where I learned about the Council of Nicaea and the Dead Sea Scrolls (opening me up to further research that would eventually lead me to such important texts as the Gospels of Q and Thomas, and Thomas Jefferson’s Bible). I learned that Christianity had a history and that it was more about being a good person than it was about excluding others, which had been the main thing I had been taught in my childhood church.
Around this same time I was reading a book that would become one of the most important religious-or spiritual-texts that I have ever laid my hands upon: The Color Purple by Alice Walker. This book helped shape me into the Christian that I am today. It is revolutionary and breathtaking and enlightening. I’ll never forget reading this line in Walker’s book: ”I think it pisses God off if we walk by the color purple in a field and don’t notice it. ” The very notion of putting the words “God” and “pisses” in the same sentence seemed shocking to me. In the church I was raised in, such a thing would have been trumpeted as blasphemy. But to me it made perfect sense, and it was the perfect combination of words. To my new mind, the way I had been raised might piss God off, too. Because I had been taught to fear and hate instead of to embrace and love. Then there was this passage from The Color Purple:
“Tell the truth, have you ever found God in a church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show. Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not find God.”
I thought about all the good people I had gone to church with as a child, and how I had known them to be filled with God. He showed up right in their eyes, in their hands, in their voices. But something about the church stamped God out of them, caused them to lose that upon entering the church. They brought God in with them but left with a little bit less of God than they had come with.
Since then I have found God in many works of fiction and poetry, either because the book was so good that it seemed to be holy or because it taught me something new about what I believed in, in my own concept of God. I’m thinking of books like A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving, Bucolics by Maurice Manning (every single poem is a beautiful, incredible prayer), The Collected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead (my favorite line: “For me writing has always felt like praying…you feel as if someone is there.”) and Home (the whole book is a lesson in how to be a good person, how to live by the Golden Rule) and Housekeeping, about the way being weird is a kind of Godliness all its own. There is Abide With Me, by Elizabeth Strout, which is a beautiful look at the complexities of being a believer. There’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, both by Thomas Hardy, who was most likely an atheist but nonetheless understood the church and God better than most any writer I know of; both of these books are mediations on how the organized church sometimes keeps us from being the best person we can be. There are the works of Denise Giardina and Wendell Berry’s Sabbath poems (I hope you have time to read just this one…then go buy them all). And I was educated spiritually by every single thing ever written by Mary Oliver, particularly “Wild Geese,” a poem that changed my life. Two passages in particular moved me and caused me to think about my own ideas of faith differently. First there is this: “You do not have to walk on your knees/for a hundred miles through the desert repenting./ You only have to let the soft animal of your body/ love what it loves.”
This line of thinking was in complete opposition to what I had been taught as a child. But this made sense to me. I think there is more to it than that, of course…you have to do more than love what you love. But what Oliver is saying is that we don’t have to punish ourselves to be children of God. We can still be human and be Believers. She closes the poem with these lines: “Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,/the world offers itself to your imagination,/calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–/over and over announcing your place/in the family of things.”
Here were verses of kindness and compassion. These were words I had been waiting to hear for a long time, and they spoke loudly to me. This section of poetry, more than anything else in my adult life, assured me that I was worthy, that even though I had human thoughts-and acted on them-that I was a child of God, too. These words welcomed me into a family I could understand, and that understood me.
There were other (nonfiction) books that helped me on my religious/spiritual journey: The Life of Moses by Gregory of Nyssa (which I was later fortunate enough to write the introduction for when HarperCollins released a new edition), Grace Eventually and Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott, Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller, and, most recently, An American Gospel by Erik Reece, a lyrical and important book about faith and doubt that I have recommended to everyone I know. Right now, every morning I get up and read a page from Around the Year With Emmett Fox, a daily meditation book of collected readings by Fox, a pastor whose sermons reached millions of people in the 1930s and ’40s. There are so many other books that have allowed me to know God better, and don’t even get me started on the music that did that for me (that’s for another post sometime).
In my adulthood I am still looking for a good church to attend. Where I live, many of them are the same, and even the more liberal ones still preach that “guns and gays” doctrine that I cannot agree with. This is not to say that there aren’t good churches around here-there are a handful-but I’m still looking for the one where I can be of the most service. I remain on that quest, but in the meantime I already have a church of my own. I have learned to surround myself with good books, good people, and good music. “I have my books and my poetry to protect me,” just like Simon and Garfunkel did.
Most of my friends are those who actively try to practice the Golden Rule every single day of their lives. Some of them are able to make this happen while also attending an organized church, synagogue or mosque. Others make the woods their congregations. But all of us are believers united when we are together, and our belief, our faith, is made stronger by relying on one another, by the understanding we have with one another that we can be who we are, that we are all children of God, that we should not judge one another but should love one another. Together we all believe that the main thing that should never be tolerated is intolerance in its many forms.
Let me tell you about the most beautiful church service I ever attended: one Sunday morning I awoke at the house of one of my dearest friends. I had stayed there along with several other friends, which included our host’s sister. We were on a little mountain farm, tucked away in a corner of Eastern Kentucky where the mountains are still miraculously pristine, where the water is still relatively clean. I awoke and found an empty house on a broiling July morning. I went to every room, calling for them, my created family. And then, I heard singing, way down by the creek. I went outside to a blinding-white light filled with birdcall and that low murmur of singing over the ridge. I found them: the two sisters picking blackberries and singing hymns while the rest of my friends hovered nearby, somewhat mesmerized.
God was there, and I have never forgotten it. It was church.
And tithing? Well, there are many, many ways to tithe besides giving to your church. You can give of yourself even more than you can give of your billfold. It’s important to remember that while many churches do good, important work, there are all kinds of organizations that are doing that. Some of my favorite charities include the Hindman Settlement School, the Christian Appalachian Project, and I Love Mountains, among others. And I don’t mention those groups just to encourage you to send them money, but also to encourage you to send them help. Sometimes groups like that appreciate someone calling to ask how they can help just as much as they appreciate a donation.
I identify as a Christian, but sometimes when I say that people have a particular notion about me. They think I am a fundamentalist, or a charismatic, or a Bible Beater, or any number of things. Here it is, simply: I believe in the teachings of Christ, I believe Christ’s words are good ones to follow. They are often the most overlooked words in the Bible…in the Holiness church, for example, verses from the Old Testament that are in direct opposition to Christ’s words are held up as being the rules to live by. But I haven’t found any of Christ’s teachings to be in opposition to what I think of as living the best way I can, and living by the Golden Rule.
After many many years, I’ve decided that the best way for me to live religiously and spiritually is to live by the Golden Rule, to try to work for others, to try to give to others, to be good to others. One of my favorite verses is Galatians 6:9: “Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.” This is what I try to think of every morning when my feet hit the floor. I think about the bright possibility of a new day and how I can be of service. Not because I want to reap that harvest the verse speaks of, but because I think that’s why we’re here: to be good to one another, to help one another, to work hard and laugh much, to love and love and love.
But because I think that drinking a glass of wine or a beer won’t send me to hell, because I think that cursing is merely rude (when done in public) but not sinful, because I accept that other religions are just as vital and important as Christianity, because I refuse to teach my daughters that a woman is inferior to a man, because I believe that we ought to protect the environment instead of just letting it all get destroyed simply because Christ might be coming back any day now, because I don’t condemn people based on whom they love or how they love them, because I don’t go around saying Jesus this and Jesus that every other breath…because of all these things and many others, my family still does not accept me as a Christian. While those people believe that they must live as examples of Christ by telling everyone they know about Jesus, I believe that the better way to live as an example is to be good to others instead of judging them.
But what is important is that I accept myself as a Christian, as a believer, as a person of faith. Although I was raised to believe that this meant I had to do it in a very public way, I choose to worship in a private way, except when it comes to my writing, which is where I figure out what I am thinking and believing. So my religiosity and spirituality shows up a lot there. The only way I ever came to accept myself-as a Christian and as a person, period-was through writing, which I too have always thought of as being like prayer. It has always made me feel as if someone is there.
When I started out writing this essay I said that I was trying to not care anymore what my family thought of my religion. Let’s put an emphasis on the word try. Because the fact is that I do still care when people don’t think of me as a Christian, or as a Believer. Because that’s part of whom I am. Because I want desperately to understand all of the people I love, and vice-versa. I suppose that part of the journey, however, is accepting that sometimes we can’t all understand each other, but that we can all love each other anyway. I’m still trying. And with prayers-mine and yours-eventually, I’ll get there. I would love to have a church to go to on Sunday mornings, a congregation to add to my created family.
The important thing, however, is that the God I know is bigger than a church. The God I know is one who needs a forest to roam around in, one who lives in the leaves and the creeks and in the faces of everyone I know. The Christ I know is like the Christ in Harriette Arnow’s The Dollmaker, one for whom she is trying to find a face when she is carving Him out of a block of cherry wood. “Why, some of my neighbors down there in the alley-they would have done,” she realizes.* My faith grows because of my doubt. And even though many people I know-especially my family-believe that there is only one road to God, I know that there are many. I take two of my favorite prayers from the amazing Anne Lamott, who says that the best two prayers in the world are “Please, please, please,” and “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” It doesn’t get much better than that. But I also take another one of my favorite prayers from A Prayer for Owen Meany, one that I will paraphrase here, in closing:
“O God-please keep coming back to me! I shall keep asking You.”**
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*I have slightly altered Arnow’s original dialogue for clarity’s sake. The original text is written in dialect: “Why, some a my neighbors down there in th alley-they would ha done.”
**Irving’s final line in A Prayer for Owen Meany is actually “O God-please give him back! I shall keep asking You.”
