A few words by way of introduction
I have been trying to find the thread of my story, which is, at its core, the story of my relationship with God, for at least 15 years.
In about 2013, I completed a draft manuscript of a memoir called Holy Mysteries which I started for my thesis for a Master of Christian Studies at Regent College—some of you may have read it! My literary agent passed around a book proposal, and we got polite rejections from several Christian publishers. It was structured around the seven sacraments as laid out in the prayers of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. Loren Wilkinson, my advisor at Regent, said with kindness, “I don’t quite get what you’re trying to do here.” There were glimmers, but something core to the story was undeveloped. I couldn’t yet find words for it.
The manuscript was also too complicated. It skipped back and forth between several timelines and used many long prayers that even my own eyes tended to gloss over. So I restructured it. Chopped it into little bits and rearranged it. Had my close friends read it. Workshopped it at two Collegeville Institute sessions with brilliant writers. I wrote and re-wrote over 100,000 words! (Memoirs are typically only 70,000.) But the feedback was the same: this is intriguing, but it isn’t quite a book.
I did what we do in life. I moved on. I shelved the whole thing and proposed my book Attend: Forty Soul Stretches Toward God, which I wrote in four months. It came out in 2017 and went on to moderate success.
Then, this spring, Jemar Tisby wrote on his substack about new research on a movement called Christian Nationalism. As I read down the list of characteristics and followed his link to an article by Andrew Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry, I thought: O my God, I wrote a whole book about this! I just didn’t have a name for it!
This summer, then, I’ve been revisiting the manuscript. Well, mostly I’m starting from scratch, but dropping in bits that I already wrote.
I still don’t think this manuscript is “publishable.” It’s, shall we say, unconventional. (If you are the publishing type: feel free to contradict me here.)
But maybe you will like it. Maybe you didn’t know you needed it. I didn’t.
Confessions: a spiritual autobiography
Sing Holy Spirit. Open my lips to speak your praise. They are dry and cracked, parched and still. My vocal chords are become a whistling desert, A coast without a sea, a world without poetry. For twenty years I have struggled to tell my story, To form out of the chaos of daily life a narrative, To discover: who is the hero? What is overcome? When was I saved? What am I saved from? Rain down, O Three-in-One. And raise a sea. Make mud of my dry ashes and dust. Let glory Weigh like a storm cloud heavy on an infinite Horizon across a dark, primordial sky. O Spirit, hover over the churning waters of chaos, Spread your wings across the darkened skies of my imagination Soar and spiral on the buffeting winds of this storm, Brood over the bent world, breathe, and let there be life. O Creator, speak. Fill the world with light, Separate, give boundaries to day and night, Sky, sea, and land. Fill my world with goodness: Green, wriggling, growing, warm, soft and good for food. O Christ, second Adam, made like us from clay to know both love and betrayal, show me the way to a world without end. You who sought me, Bought me: lead me out. Let me see what you see. Let me speak what you speak.
Lord Jesus, I have a confession to make.
For the past several years, there is one thought that sneaks up on me regularly and fills me with a kind of blank surprise, a speechless wonder:
I am still a Christian.
This thought will break like a wave in the middle of a deep conversation with a good friend, or while introducing myself to someone new after church, or after a long day of teaching. I have to brace myself and catch my breath.
Or, at other times, like a slow drip of water in a leaf, the realization accumulates until the weight of just one more drop causes it to tip, then it breaks down on me with a rush of pure sensation—suddenly I am cold, wet, stunned and incredulous.
I am still a Christian.
How is it that I am still a Christian?
The odd thing is, if a person met me going through my normal days and weeks and years as a teacher in a classical Christian school, or as the priest’s wife and Bible Studies coordinator at an Anglican Church, as a spiritual writer, or even as a mother on the playground, she would, most likely, assume that I was a Christian, that had been a Christian for all eternity, that I never had a day of doubt in my whole #blessed life. Yet in the deepest part of myself I am completely flummoxed that I, of all people, could still believe.
This amazes me: I can barely comprehend it. How is it that I, who waver and question so many things, who have spent years and years studying history, gender, race, and theology, who know so many good people who have left the faith behind, who know about the dirt swept under the rug in church, who in these uncertain times can’t even decide with confidence where to buy a toothbrush or what to make for dinner, how can I say it with any assurance?
I am still a Christian.
You know me. You knit my inmost parts while I was still in my mother’s womb. You know that I was born into a Christian family way down by the border between Texas and Mexico at the beginning of 1983. The Air Force moved us to Southwest Oklahoma where I was raised a Christian at the local First Baptist Church. I grew up a God-and-Country Southern Baptist, and I decided to follow You myself at a very young age. I was baptized as soon as they let me, couldn’t even touch the bottom of the tank. I prayed for my salvation again and again when terrifying thunderstorms passed over our home, when the darkness seemed to crawl at night, and when certain tent rally preachers really brought down the fire. I rededicated my life as a young teen at camp, then as my family moved to Indiana and we all voted to attend an Independent Baptist Church, I started to travel on missions trips to run camps, build houses, and hand out religious tracts. I sang all the songs with my eyes closed. I even learned to play them on my guitar. You were there.
O God, as a child growing up in church, I had several imaginations about what it meant to be a Christian. They didn’t always make sense together, but each was so viscerally real that they never really bumped up against one another. Each functioned in their own compartmentalized way.
One image I carried, Almighty Father, was that Christianity was a straight and narrow path. A certain set of beliefs were the boundary edges of that path. If I could check off all the boxes, then I was safely on the path. To the left of the path was a swamp crawling with evil creatures and muddy bogs that would quickly suck me in. To the right of the path were burning pits of fire. Straight up hell. Eternal conscious torture. Sometimes the path got so narrow it felt like a balancing beam. But if I strayed from the list, well…
In this vision You, Lord, were absent. I put one foot in front of the other. Dotted every i, crossed every t. Checked every box. I lived in terror. One wrong step meant eternal, spiritual death.
I don’t live in that terror anymore. The narrow path You describe is something else entirely. A different vision won out.
Just when I was stepping out on my own for the first time, several things happened all at once. Just one or two of them and maybe things wouldn’t have turned out the same way, but as it was the solid ground of certain truth disappeared from under my feet. I stepped outside some of the boundaries of that old imagination and… I did not die. In fact, O God, You were there. There I found a warmth of love and right-relatedness I did not know could exist.
It still completely amazes me.
This, I suppose, is where the really interesting story begins. And when I try to tell it, it keeps coming out askew. So I pray with the saints through the ages:
O Lord, open thou my lips And my mouth shall show forth thy praise. O God make speed to save me, O Lord make haste to help me.
all text and images are original. colors enhanced in google photo.
all opinions are my own and do not reflect the official positions of any organizations that I work for or am affiliated with.
I love these lines: “ Rain down, O Three-in-One. And raise a sea.
Make mud of my dry ashes and dust.”
Thank you.