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Give Me the Answerless

May 21, 2012 in Personal Essay, Words with 29 Comments

“Meister Eckhart…says…’God becomes and God unbecomes,’ or translated it means that God is only our name for it and the closer we get to it the more it ceases to be God. So then you are on a real safari with the wildness and danger and otherness of God.”

-From a Krista Tippett interview with John O’Donohue

Give up the world; give up self; finally, give up God…

Keep this and only this:
what your heart beats loudly for
what feels heavy and full in your gut.

Instructions, a poem by Sheri Hostetler

“The mystical experience of the ‘dark night of the soul,’ when old convictions and conformities dissolve into nothingness and we are called to stand naked to the terror of the unknown…When we seek to engage in debate about the ways of God, the way of unknowing reminds us of the grace of silence, of questions over answers.”

- Giving Up a Too-Small God, Christine Valters Paintner

“All ends I’ve chased after have come up empty one after the other…for all my obedience to God, effort to do the right thing and be the good person – I’ve just become the world’s doormat and neglected resident…I’ve tried to follow so much wisdom, advice and guidance that I have no convictions in my center anymore.”

- From the private journals of a dear soul-friend

“The stars, the moon, they have all been blown out

You left me in the dark

No dawn, no day, I’m always in this twilight

In the shadow of your heart”

- Cosmic Love, Florence and The Machine

We look to the ones with answers. We say, “Ah, now they are truly onto something.” We flock to their formulas and their models and their successes as if it’s the great blue Paul Bunyan ox, Babe, who has graciously promised to shoulder our problems and give us a ride, wee, wee, wee, all the way home.

But I say if you want to really be blown away watch the ones for whom the answers no longer work. The messy ones who make the emperor blush because they won’t stop screaming out, “I can see every inch of your naked flesh and I know the clothes you claim to be wearing aren’t adding a single bit of warmth to your body when a storm blows in.” Watch the ones whose only option left is to lean into the questions. The ones who are uninhibited by the unknown because they’ve jumped into that gaping hole and found themselves, by grace, unswallowable. Watch the ones who willingly stand with Feist and say, “I feel it all” even when it scares the shit out of them.

It’s not brave to have answers.

It’s brave to watch them get erased, obliterated, rubbed out with a half-chewed cheap eraser on the end of a #2 pencil, the kind that leaves black nasty smudges in the wake of that math formula that should have contained, as promised, a solvable response on the right side of that equals sign.

I don’t want the hero for which everything works out in the end. Give me the hero for which nothing ever resolves and the game plan is constantly shifting and the only certainty is the uncertain. Give me the heroine that let’s herself break so the light can get in and the soul can spill out and the ego dies away because she can’t possibly ever know a solution to this glorious obsession we call life.

Give me a hero who eats mystery for breakfast and mana for dessert and sips on hot vulnerability and fills his pockets with a gold that burns to ashes anytime he tries to cash it in as proof that he’s arrived. Give me the heroine for whom the rules are always changing, who takes the status quo that is consistently thrust upon her and absentmindedly stuffs it under her mattress, making her restless bones ache each night like the princess with her pea.

Give me the hero who has chased down every mapped road known to humanity and still hasn’t found what he’s looking for and yet doesn’t feel the need to apologize for his empty-handedness. The hero who says, like my neighbor that drives a red Mustang and counts smashed beer cans and works out everyday because it makes him happy, “I’m just gonna do me. I don’t care what anyone else thinks, I’ve gotta do me.”

Give me the heroine who burns from within with an un-snuffable pilot flame, one that has run out of soul’s to blame, including her own AND some human-smiting divinity, and has traded guilt and shame and bitterness and despair in for the fierce quest to be the sole one in charge of making something of her life. Even if that something is wallpapered in flaking black velvet question marks.

You can keep your answers, and your picket fences and your packaged boxes of pre-fabricated fantasies of a grope-able comfort. You can keep your padded cells. I want the mess that’s out there blowing in the wind, riding on feathers, climbing up trees, pulsing with tides that could just as soon drown you. Wild. Free. Heroic. Unpromised. Mysterious. Seducing. Just. Out. Of. Reach.

Give me the answerless. There-in lies my paradoxical hope.

Earthworms, Knee-Jerk Reactions & My Messy Truth

November 20, 2011 in Personal Narrative, Words with 22 Comments

“You have permission to like something you previously disliked.
You have permission to hold both sides of a contradiction as equally true.”

- Roots of She, Yes, You May

“I don’t think I’m tangible to myself. I mean, I think one thing today and I think another thing tomorrow. I change during the course of a day. I wake and I’m one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain I’m somebody else. I don’t know who I am most of the time. It doesn’t even matter to me.”

- Bob Dylan

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.–’Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’–Is it so bad then to be misunderstood?”

-Self Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson

We were walking down the sidewalk of a quaint little harbor town in Georgia. I was aware that this sort of scenario very well might never repeat itself. What with my mom and my dad and me together, just the three of us. And I was taking deliberately slow steps to soak it all in, to feel the oddness of being without my children, without my sister, without my husband, with solely my mom and my dad, my two life-givers. I stopped every few steps to snap photographic memories, while my dad made funny remarks like,

“What are you taking a picture of now, the sewer grate?”

“It has a cool design to it. Leave me alone.”

The banter was warm and lovely, as was the sun burning off the morning fog, and the ships docked along the short piers.

Passing a large church property, enclosed by a white wooden picket fence, I was moved by the crosses that popped up through the thick green leaves, lining the top of the fence solemnly. I paused to photograph. And then I contemplated:

What am I doing? Isn’t this the symbol of my religion, my religion that is giving me a fit lately. My religion that leaves me baffled and bewildered.

Ah yes, I told myself, it is. But equally it is a religion that leaves me marveled and moved. So what am I to make of the strange dichotomy?

I felt squishy. Like if pressed I would smear like an earthworm in the hands of toddler who grips the slimy body a little too hard against the concrete.

I was standing there with my parents, my parents who have both shared and lived such a full faith. Truly I am aware that sometimes, many times, I do believe just as fully as their little 6th grade girl who got baptized on Easter. I am a Christian, I say, without apology.

But other times, I can’t look upon the religion without the knee-jerk reaction of turning away. These are the times I interact with Christianity and I feel shallow, superficial, empty waves of nothingness wash along my sandy, stripped beaches, and I have this innate desire to flee or to lash out. Something of God gets sorely lost in translation. Who are you Christians? I say, with accusation.

Maybe I am the earthworm. The wriggly mess of a body with no distinct form. I wonder if it would be better to be severed and to be two entirely different earthworms, than to be one unified confusion. But I think Paul would have me remain one earthworm warring within.

I feel blessed on the days when I can look without turning away. When my faith comes back to me through secret messages that sneak incognito across enemy lines before my brain has translated the hidden code or my eyes have distinguished the disguise. I hear Sandy Sasso say, “Don’t let your tradition be refined by people who may have ruined it for you.” I know that, like it or not, Christianity is my mother tongue.

Usually I can’t stomach Christian songs, but on occasion the lyrics strike a nerve and attach a harness to pull me out of myself and drop me into a momentary land of clarity and peace. These are some of those words I’ve collected:

“This is my prayer in the desert
And all that’s within me feels dry”

“You’ve rolled back the curtains from our eyes. Now we can see you.”

“You are true, you are true, even in my wandering. You are more, you are more, than my words will ever say.”

“You illuminate the open air

I am silently catching every glimmer I can

Cause i know that when the lightning hits

I’ll be standing here breathless in the wake of each glimpse”

Usually I can’t read the Bible, but on occasion a friend will extend to me verses, and somehow I can see them through their lenses, instead of my convoluted bottle-thick ones:

Like my friend sharing Acts 2 and Acts 4 with me and my instant revelation that I am at home in a church, but it is not a building, it is made up of artists who see the world as I do.

Usually I can’t read Christian books, but there are the occasional touches with greats who weave words into poetry and make me feel not quite so odd in my searching:

One Thousand Gifts

Thoughts In Solitude

The Shack

Usually I can’t hear the gospel without zoning-out, because I have heard it so many times. It sounds empty and hollow and memorized, but it is helpful seeing it through the eyes of a twirling child on tip-toe, who turns to me in awe and says with Shirley Temple-like wide eyes:

“Look there is a big giant cross because Jesus had to die. They hurt him. And oh it is sad, it is sad. But then it is happy because he did not stay dead. And he is alive now. We get to be alive now.”

The extent of this crazy vacillating occurred to me one day as I read something that said Jesus was praying for me, on my behalf. Something resounded in me upon seeing those words, like a gong that vibrated my insides, a head-to-toe soul-scan that left no nerve untouched and yet nothing flinched. Not a single knee-jerk desire to turn away!

I can’t tell anyone this, I thought. How can I admit that I am comforted by the thought of Jesus praying for me, when I am the very same person who did an entire mind-map of all my problems with Jesus? How do I balance on one foot and then the other so seamlessly? And yet, AND YET…

“If the truth is worth telling, it is worth making a fool of yourself to tell.”

- Frederick Buechner

“ . . . good writing is about telling the truth.”

-Anne Lamott

All I have is my truth. Right Anne? Right Frederick? And I have to listen to that truth. And I have to speak that truth, right Teresa? Not bury it deep within the mud of my kind, the earthworms. Open the floodgates. Pour out the puddles. Flush me out of my hiding place. These splashes are reminiscent of 6th grade baptismal waters, and I’m coming clean.

There is no self-love like the self-love of letting yourself speak what you must.

So on one day I find myself the enemy of Christians and on another day I find myself the enemy of those who are not Christians? So be it. I am a messy earthworm warring within, and all I have is my truth. And my truth contradicts. And my truth changes its mind. And my truth does not fit the business model. And my truth is making me sorely misunderstood. But Anne, but Frederick, but Teresa, it is still my truth isn’t it? And though it is painstakingly difficult to live it, it is incredibly easy to write it out. just. as. it. is. Perhaps it’s the only piece of my journalism degree still intact: Report just the facts ma’m.

The fact is I am in need of prayer, and I can think of no one greater to pray for me than the very Jesus who baffles me. I don’t know why, but I will not argue with my truth of the moment.

“So, pray that God will come find me, would you, Jesus? And pray that I will be able to stomach my own wishy-washy wanderings from knee-jerks flinches to vulnerable embraces. And pray that the truth, my truth, won’t embarrass me to the point of silencing this artist. And pray that I can have a few kindred friends on both sides of this Christian/not-a-Christian coin that I keep tossing.

“And pray that when I pluck off the last petal of my daisy it’ll be when I’m whispering the words ‘He loves me.’ Pray Jesus, pray hard.”

Twirling Through A Thunderstorm

September 22, 2011 in Personal Narrative, Words with 35 Comments

“Faith is the aftermath of God.”

- Peter Rollins

I woke up with a horrible dream this morning at 2:30 AM. Wide-awake I walked downstairs, poured myself a glass of cold water and sat drinking it with wide blinking eyes. What if all my worst dreams did come true? What if it is all meaningless? What if the good I believe in doesn’t exist? What if it’s just a figment of my imagination?

Then I made a choice. I put down my glass of water. I recanted the dream. I chose the fury of life, or it chose me and I surrendered, or both. (One can never be too sure about these sorts of things.)

I opened my back door, and I ran through a thunderstorm. I mean literally, just now, at 3:30 in the morning. Well, actually I kind of twirled my way through it, spinning with arms outstretched to the sky, my head up to the blackness so the rain could fall on my face and wash down through the cracks of my dreads, touching my scalp and soaking my insides.

I felt the thunder, and I couldn’t be sure if it was rumbling inside my chest or outside my body. I watched as the lightening lit up our backyard with a blue tint. I told myself I needed to run to touch the back fence. And I plodded my bare spinning feet through the soggy grass on to where the patches of grass ran thin until there was nothing left of grass at all, but just red slimy mud soaking between my toes. I took in little gasps of air as the cold rain dropped big splotches onto my skin. And I breathed in deep through my nose, those smells that only rain and twilight can bring, a rare concoction, perhaps the elixir to my preceding panic.

If you read my blog or you follow my twitter or facebook or tumblr feeds, it is of no surprise to you that I’m dealing with a bit of a crisis of a faith. (Side note – I always use the words “a bit” to subtle the blow for something of which I’m not sure how people will react.) Last October I knew I was losing me, and I went on a journey of sorts into the dark place to find where I had gone. I found myself drawing near to God and a few close friends and asking some very hard questions that rocked my beliefs as I had once known them. This of course turned into me writing a book, a book where I thrashed about with God and tried to talk myself through accepting my mess.

A few weeks ago, I met my book agent, Greg, and his wife for the first time in person. And as Greg and I sat for a few minutes in a crooked table in the Starbucks of a Barnes and Noble, I became face to face with reality. “This could happen quickly,” he said, about my book getting picked up by a publisher once he started the pitching process. “Are you ready for this?”

“Yes, I am totally ready for this.” I answered, and then I added, “I mean, to be honest, I’m scared out of my mind, but I’m ready.”

As we chit-chatted a little further about my book he asked me a pretty bold question, “What do you do with Jesus? Where does he fit in your story?”

The book certainly addresses this, but as I came face-to-face with that question in person, I found myself floundering.

I know all the right answers. I know who he is supposed to be to me. But who is he really? Who is he now, now that I’ve been going through this crisis of faith?

I fumbled and bumbled my way through an answer for him, an answer that would somehow make both of us happy, all the while realizing how stupid I sounded.

I heard Jesus in my head, asking me, “Yes, who do you say I am?”

I told Greg, “I hope I’m never asked to debate my theology.”

“Oh, I don’t know that you’ll have to do that, but what if you’re in a Barnes and Nobles like this doing a reading of your book and then you open it up for questions? Will you be able to handle answering people’s questions?

I sheepishly said, “Yes, If I’m allowed to just say ‘I don’t know’ when I don’t have an answer.”

“Yes, of course you can. You can always say, ‘I don’t know.’”

And that’s the point of my book really, I suppose. That in many ways this crisis has shown to me that I have so many unanswerable questions. That I can’t tie God up into a nice neat little gift with a bow on top. He’s beyond explanation, and yet I long to explain Him. He’s beyond knowing, and yet I long to know Him. He’s beyond comprehension, and yet I long to understand Him.

I love this quote from Thomas Merton,

“If I imagine You, I am mistaken. If I understand You, I am deluded. If I am conscious and certain I know You, I am crazy. The darkness is enough.”

The last two days I have returned to that darkness. Maybe it is because the book has been released into Greg’s hands to work his magic with publishers and I’m nervous that all of a sudden this means I have to have everything in my faith ironed out. Maybe it is because I have wrestled and brainstormed my way through this Jesus question, and feel like Jesus is refusing to leave me alone, walking behind me and whispering that probing question, “Who do you say I am?” Maybe it is because I’ve been reading about Mother Theresa’s own crisis of faith or listening to Peter Rollins speak of how we must set fire to our beliefs and then stay there to see what remains. (It’s one thing to set fire to something. It’s another thing to stick around and find the beauty in the ashes.) Maybe it is because I’ve been reading about a different sort of hell or because I’ve been reading through the Sermon on the Mount and feeling like all of those descriptions – poor in spirit, mourning, meek – describe me.

What I know is that this search to come up with answers has sapped my energy. I have been like a dead woman walking. Feeling numb at times. Crying and talking to myself (or God). Is this what it looks like to watch a person go mad, I’ve wondered? And I’ve felt angry. Angry that according to the Christianity I’ve known I’m supposed to figure God out and have the proper answers so as to assure some sort of salvation. But try as I might to do this right now all my questions keep leading to more questions.

Truthfully, I don’t want answers. I know answers. I’ve got some memorized. They are just words. Just regurgitation.

C.S. Lewis in his book A Grief Observed says,

“Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.”

So yes, I don’t want religious consolation answers, but I do want life. Oh, how I want life. I want to be tapped into the Source of life. It doesn’t have to be life that is always happy and peaceful and mess-free, but it does have to be life that is worth engaging.

And since I do need some sort of consolation that I can engage life, even when my religion isn’t working, I came to a conclusion yesterday. I am choosing to believe in a God that meets me where I’m at when I can’t quite get to Him. A God that comes for me. That makes a way. That when He sees a willing but confused heart, He brings the narrow path to me. He assures me my feet are already on it. He showers love and grace with cold, plummeting drops, and they sink into the cracks of my dreads, touching my scalp and soaking my insides.

Because if I can’t believe in that, I have no more hope. I have nothing left to give. I can’t force my way out of this dark place I am in. The answers that used to work just plain don’t anymore.

My imagination. The creative spirit. The artist. This is the name I felt God reminded me of back in December when I couldn’t seem to carry the title Christian anymore. When my religion was falling apart and failing to do for me what it had always done. Perhaps it is my imagination, my creating, my art, that carries my faith.

I believe not because I have seen clearly, but because it’s dark, and I want so badly to survive and feel the chords within my soul that I haven’t played yet. I have more notes to explore. I believe being an artist is heroic, but there is no need for heroism if there is never any danger. There is no need for a heroine if there are never dark nights of the soul.

What if Someone really did give us the creative power to create beauty from ashes? What if we have to give ourselves permission to believe that so that we can truly live free?

I have no idea why I was able to twirl in the darkness of a thunderstorm today when I was walking through the valley of the shadow of death yesterday. Are we really always just one step away from You, God? Why is it sometimes so hard to see You? To Feel You? To know?

The comforting phrase I shared with Greg that day as we discussed my book, “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know,” has become a sort of mantra to me. I don’t know why death and then sudden life. But I’m going to make something of it. I’m going to read into it with beautiful imagery and metaphor and mystery because that’s what artists do. I’ve got canvases prepped, ready to catch whatever comes out from this.

I’m going to believe, while I feel that I can, in the transforming power of the Muse within who found me worthy of one more chance. I’m going to imagine it is because Someone met me where I was at and made a way. I’m going to believe this is an invitation to live amongst the ashes in the Shadowlands and redefine home.

I feel as though I am back from the dead.