Introduction.............................................................ix Section I: Meeting God 1. The Faith of a Child..................................................3 2. Empty Spaces in the Ash...............................................11 3. An Exodus.............................................................21 4. Hope..................................................................29 5. Entering the Fortress.................................................37 6. On Being Cleaned......................................................45 Section II: Struggling 7. The Eyes of Faith.....................................................53 8. Down by the Riverside.................................................57 9. The Treasures of Darkness, Part 1.....................................65 10. The Treasures of Darkness, Part 2....................................73 11. Stairs...............................................................79 12. On Responding to Pain................................................87 13. Servanthood..........................................................97 14. Remorse..............................................................103 15. Intercessory Prayer..................................................111 16. Rethinking Our Miracles: Some Thoughts on Doubt......................123 17. Joseph's Dreams......................................................131 18. The Book and the Cup.................................................139 Section III: Progress 19. Blind Driver.........................................................145 20. Seeing by Faith......................................................157 21. My Naomi.............................................................161 22. Erasure..............................................................171 23. On Moving Mountains..................................................181 24. Learning How to Honor................................................187 25. In Memory of Him.....................................................199 26. Fantasia on Children, Critical Thinking, and Sex.....................211 27. Love and Fairness....................................................223 Section IV: Rest 28. The Water Jar........................................................235 29. On Barns.............................................................241 30. Letting the Master Sleep.............................................247 31. On Returning the First Essays of the Semester........................251 32. Students in the Garden...............................................257 33. At the Mountain......................................................265 About the Author.........................................................267 Acknowledgments..........................................................269
Unlike most of the people I go to church with these days, I wasn't always much of a believer. Although as a child I attended church weekly and did believe in God, I never heard of concepts like having a "personal relationship" with Christ or just giving my troubles to Jesus. My relationship with Jesus Christ was, at best, respectful but remote, like my relationships with relatives I knew only from my parents' stories. As I was growing up, my troubles took me not into the arms of God but ever further from the faith of my childhood, and I spent a big part of my adult life unable to believe at all.
I grew up one of six kids in a Catholic family. I was baptized not long after I was born, and we attended church every Sunday, where I listened to three readings from the Bible weekly: one from Psalms, one from the Epistles, and one from the Gospels. I made my first communion when I was six or seven. At twelve I was confirmed in my faith by reciting my baptismal vows and adding the name of a saint to my other names.
Polycarp. I had to fight the nuns and get permission from our Monsignor to use a male name. I chose Polycarp, I explained to Msgr. Dziodosz, not just because his feast day was my birthday but because I liked his story in our family's Little Pictorial Lives of Saints. Faced with martyrdom unless he cursed Christ, Polycarp replied, "Eighty-six years I have served Him, and He never did me wrong; how can I blaspheme my King and Saviour?" In my child's mind, Polycarp was saying, "Well, I've followed God for so long that it hardly seems worthwhile to change now." The strange pragmatism of this statement of faith struck me as funny.
My family ate fish sticks on Fridays when I was young, and we carried in our station wagon a cross-shaped wooden box that twisted open to reveal a bottle of holy water, a white silk stole, and a rolled up sheet of paper with instructions on how to perform an emergency baptism. Sometimes, when my parents drove us places, I fantasized about coming upon an accident and watching my father crouch beside a dying person to read the words on the paper, getting spots of blood on the stole.
This was in the sixties, before the modernizations of the Second Vatican Council had really sunk in. In those days, my sisters and I wore organdy dresses poufed out with stiff slips to church and lace caps bobby-pinned to the tops of our heads. My older sister Sharon told funny stories about the nuns at a parochial school she had attended for awhile when I was just little. I coveted a soft focus painting of Jesus praying that night on Gethsemane that Sharon had above her bed-the sky the inkiest midnight blue above what I thought of as the cheery lights of Bethlehem twinkling below.
My dad told stories, too. Of stealing the communion wine in his altar boy days. Of a gigantic nun who punished him by lifting him off the ground by that especially tender hair that grows at the temple. Of his uncles shouting, "Jaysus, Mary, and Joseph." Of snow and knickerbockers and growing up in Brooklyn, which were all part of my Catholic heritage, as it seemed to me.
On Christmas Eve some years, my parents took us to midnight Mass. Imagine it. You're six or seven or eight years old and have never stayed up past nine o'clock, not for any reason, and certainly not on Christmas Eve, that night of nights when presents appear out of nowhere and the air itself quivers with carols. You were so excited when they put you to bed that you couldn't sleep for a long time, but now, seconds later it seems, your parents get you and your siblings up out of the warm covers and thrust you into your church clothes. Nobody talks much. It is the middle of the middle of the night, and the world is darker and quieter than it has ever been in your remembrance. And then you're riding in the back of the station wagon, and then you're in the cold church, waiting.
Your mother or father gives your siblings and you each a little candle from a box at the end of the pew. It has a paper apron around it that your mother whispers is there to protect your hand from drips of wax. And then the lights go out, and the whole church is dark except for a leafy crèche at the altar: a Hawaiian-looking house surrounded by palm fronds. And you sit in the dark, waiting.
Soon there is a shuffling noise from behind, and you crane around to see. First, some altar boys appear, some of them only your age or younger, carrying gigantic candles on poles. Then, behind them, the priests, swinging censors wafting the exotic smoke of frankincense and myrrh. It is a fabulous smell that collects in your nose and sinks to your lowest places and stays there. Days later your closet will smell of that night.
The priests wear white vestments and Christmas-colored stoles, and the Monsignor has on his magenta hat with the pompom, and they all look old fashioned, somehow, like Santa Clauses from an ancient book. Then your father or your mother lights your candle and your sisters' and brothers' candles, and then the whole church is filled with the glow and smell of candles burning, and everyone sits in the unfamiliar light and the silence and waits. Finally, the priest starts the mass, and you sing carols, and everyone files past the crèche for communion.
At that time, I knew this about God: He was real. Although he lived in heaven, he was everywhere too. He knew me and heard me and could see me every moment of the day. He could see into my very thoughts. He had a son who was born in a Hawaiian-looking house surrounded by farm animals and shepherds and his mother and father. The son was real, too. Even though he was later killed on a cross, he came alive again and then went to heaven, where he still is, and he knew me just as his father did. And because of this, the ghost of him lived in me, and someday I would die and go to heaven where God and Jesus were and live there with them forever.
My faith as a child was, in other words, not much different from my evangelical Christian faith now. I believed in God and in his son, in his son's death and resurrection, and in my own resulting salvation from death. I wasn't very clear on the idea of sin, it's true, but I knew God loved me enough to forgive me and others for whatever we did wrong. I believed in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. I believed in eternal life.
In the intervening years, as an atheist, I married a Christian, and he told me that this faith of my Catholic childhood was enough for him, even though I had abandoned it-or, as I felt, it had abandoned me. My childhood faith was enough, in fact, for God himself, this silly little man who married me told me. "Once saved, always saved," he said-which, he explained to me, meant it wasn't possible to lose true faith in God. It was a new concept for me. But I knew he was wrong. The faint glimmer of the faith I had once had was not enough to fill me with the light of genuine belief. That much I knew. And without faith, I was not saved. I was not a Catholic. Not a Christian. Not going to heaven or anywhere else when I died, no matter what anyone told me. And there was nothing I could do about it.
Faith, I somehow intuited, must come from outside of me. It must come from God himself, if it was true at all. And it didn't come, so it must not be true. That was my atheism.
Now, though, looking back, I wonder if my husband was right. Perhaps, even as a child, I did believe enough to be clutched back to the bosom of God had I lain me down to sleep one night and died. Perhaps, if I had died some more realistic death-from a disease like the one that killed my mother or in an accident-perhaps even in those later years when I no longer felt loved or heard or even noticed by God, when my prayers disappeared into the black vacuum of night and I knew no one was listening, perhaps even then I would have survived death because of the almost forgotten faith of my childhood.
But for years, my husband's trite assurance that I believed, no matter what I thought, amused me. I knew what I knew. Or what I didn't know. And even years later, when I became a believer again, it seemed to be not from sin that I was saved but from that black night of my inability to believe. Not from hell and death but from the conviction that, contrary to what I believed as a child, I was not seen and known and heard when I prayed, I was not loved by God.
My years of atheism have made such an impression on me-the hope I hid from my friends, the longing for something beyond what I saw around me, my complete inability to pray-that I often forget about the faith of my childhood. And it may be merely a vestige of that child's worldview, made up of presents and nighttime ceremonies and the familiar Christmas decorations we took out of dusty boxes every year and arranged on the mantle, but the crux of Christianity for me has never been the cross. Not then, not now. Instead, it is God's first response to our hope and longing and frustrating blindness: the birth of his own son in our world. What matters most to me is that God had that son to begin with. And that he has other sons and daughters like me that he loves and doesn't want to be parted from. That he loves his children as I love my own daughters, only more so, with a hot, knowing, parental love that says, "Be who you are, but love me back. Only love me back."
I wear a certain necklace a lot, a silver baby on a chain. People I know at school and church and sometimes even strangers come up to me and ask me what it means.
"Are you showing that you're against abortion?" they ask me.
So I explain that no, it's not an aborted baby but a baby Jesus. I prefer wearing the baby Jesus to wearing a cross, I tell them.
If it's around Christmastime, they usually nod approvingly, but if it's Easter-time, I usually have to say a bit more. Actually, the baby is really a Mardi Gras king-cake baby that I bought in New Orleans, a detail which could complicate my explanation somewhat because of the natural association of Mardi Gras with Lent and thus Easter, but I don't ever try to explain any of that.
Sometimes I consider this exchange an important opportunity to correct the macabre habit my fellow evangelicals have of bringing the crucifixion into every discussion of who God is, even discussions of the birth of Jesus. At my church's Christmas sing-along, someone invariably requests "Up from the Grave He Arose" or "I Am Redeemed by the Blood of the Lamb!" Wearing a baby on a chain is my attempt to get them see the ghoulishness of such thinking.
But the bigger ministry of my little necklace is to myself. Hanging from that chain is not the baby Jesus at all but me, one of God's daughters. A cherished daughter who once knew him a long time ago and, without thinking about it much, simply loved him back, as children do. A wayward daughter to whom he revealed himself almost from her birth but who nevertheless ran from him and refused to love him back, despite the almost constant evidences of his enduring love and protection. I am, mysteriously, God's own baby girl. One of many children whom the Father sent his Son into our burning world to carry home to him.
One year during midnight Mass, when the dark was suddenly lit up with candles and we were waiting in the blaze for the mass to begin, my baby brother Tim yelled into the holy silence, "And now everybody sing `Happy Birthday' to me!!"
The silence deepened for a second or two with my family's embarrassment, then Msgr. Dziodosz boomed from the altar his deep laughter. Exactly like Santa Claus. And then everyone else laughed too.
Relevant and cited scriptural passages: Luke 2:1-20. Other references: John Gilmary Shea. Little Pictorial Lives of Saints. 1878.
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Excerpted from Confessions of an AMATEUR BELIEVER by PATTY KIRK Copyright © 2007 by Patty Kirk. Excerpted by permission.
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