I
grew up Catholic.
I
was baptized, confirmed and educated in the Church, but I learned what it meant
to be Christian mostly by example.
When I was a child, my father resettled refugees for the YMCA, and then worked
for many years as Vice President of Catholic Charities in the Houston-Galveston
diocese, and my mother taught science at a troubled, inner-city high
school. We often had 3 or 4
people living with us while they were transitioning from one country to another,
and my parents also welcomed several foster children and exchange students into
our modest home.
We
were not a typical “parish” family—I was only required to attend CCE classes until
I was confirmed, and even then, my parents did not require regular attendance
at mass. However, somehow my
brother and I still intuited that we were to act within the walls of our home
and in the larger world as loving followers of Christ’s example. We were not told this in any explicit
way; rather, we witnessed it. Both
of us can recite the Corporeal Works of Mercy faster than we can the Nicene
Creed.
In
this way, Catholicism for me became a familial, cultural, and private aspect of
my identity, a thing I was born into, a thing I could no more choose than I
could my hair color or height or Southern accent. I never felt the need to proclaim it or restore it in
public—it was as deeply hidden and powerful in me as my chromosomes.
I
did not recognize my Catholic upbringing as an influence on my behavior or my
writing until recently. In 2007, a
man I loved asked me to marry him, and I said yes. He was raised in the Baptist and then Presbyterian
traditions and after our engagement began to push me about my spiritual
life. At the same time, I was
experiencing a crisis in my writing life.
I spent three years in an MFA program swinging back and forth between writing
fiction and nonfiction, having much difficulty discerning between the two and
convinced one—fiction—was the higher form. This crisis grew out of an earlier one. When I decided to dedicate my energy
and time toward writing by leaving my job at a human rights non-profit organization,
I suffered a crisis of conscience.
After all, I had been heavily schooled in the idea of vocation and
service—how could my writing serve the world in any real way?
What
saved me was my teaching obligation.
Teaching was certainly a form of service, as I knew from watching my
mother. I still believe that
teaching is sacramental in that it is a kind of “anointment”—teachers anoint
their students with knowledge and thought. And teaching, of course, is a kind of communion, the
classroom a sacred space.
But
at that time, as my fiancée began to push harder—our disagreements as political
as they were religious—I found solace in reading and writing the personal
essay. As a friend of mine once
described it to me, the personal essay is a space for provisional truth. That is, the essayist never reaches her
destination but is ever-arriving. The personal essay, then, becomes a space for
deep contemplation, a tool for the vital attempt we all make to transform the
private and personal into meaning.
The essay form offered me a way to voice what I like to refer to as my
“intellectual faith”, or what Marilynne Robinson refers to as “faithful doubt.”
In my romantic relationship an expression of doubt was a touchstone of failure
and in my academic community of writers an expression of sincere Christian
struggle was laughable. This
paradox often left me feeling bound and voiceless. The personal essay unshackled me.
I
began to study and be moved by writers like St. Augustine, Robert Coles, SimoneWeil, Thomas Merton, Marilynne Robinson, and Andre Dubus. Formative books for me during this time
were Dubus’ “Mediations from a Movable Chair” and Coles’ “The Harvard Diaries”
as well as his biographies of Weil and Dorothy Day and his writings on the
relationship between story-telling and moral imagination in children. One
particular passage of Coles’ rang true to me. He writes:
…in
the lecture halls and seminar rooms of our colleges and universities, where
relativism and deconstructionist criticism make a mockery of any person’s
struggle to find a faith that persuades, convinces, and even a mockery of the
attempts that particular novelists, or poets or short story writers have made
to find meaning in life, and render it through words, through images, through
narration that bespeaks of, well, the utter essence of their humanity: we are
the creature of language, and through it a moral awareness that gives us a sense
of the ought, and naught.
For
one thing, I felt protective of my fiancée. His increasingly traditional and conservative religious
practice and beliefs left him susceptible to ridicule by my university
colleagues and contemporaries. In
my soul, I agreed with them. But I
also knew from my experience as an undergraduate student in the Northeast that
liberals and academics, many of my closest friends, could be some of the most
intolerant people on the planet. I
did not want to be intolerant—what kind of liberal would that make me? How could that kind of intolerance
inspire people to change?
Still,
a fierce loyalty to my family’s variety of Catholicism made it impossible to
abide my fiancée's shifting beliefs about homosexuality and abortion. My own relationship to God, while
cultivated and real was less literal than his, and occasionally his language
and the language of his church alarmed me. We both worried about raising children together. Most of all, both of us wanted to be
loved for who we were and not in spite of it. Our friends and family members, at best, were good
skeptics. Every day we endeavored
to avoid name-calling and blaming, to praise each other's sincere efforts, and to
hold each other accountable for our actions and beliefs so that we could live
together peacefully. At that time
the country was in the thick of the 2008 election season; the political and
religious climate heightened our awareness of discrepancies in our worldviews. I was all in for Obama. To my dismay, my fiancée was not. In many ways we became a microscopic
reflection of the painful reconciliation required at much higher levels in the nation.
In
the end, while the nation found the common ground to say, “We can,” my fiancée
and I failed to say, “We do.” I
left him. In one of the saddest
and more pathetic moments of our demise, I cried and screamed at him, “I don’t want
to marry a Republican,” and he whispered back, “I know you don’t.” At that point neither of us could tell
the difference between “Republican” and “Christian” and “conservative” much
like the rest of the country. I
threw myself into writing essays in the wake of our dissolved engagement. While my pain was personal and private
and real, in my writing I did not want so much to vent or confess as to relate
and work through what I recognized as an essentially American story—a Red State
story, a Christian story. I also
began to see my nonfiction writing as a form of service and vocation that
harkened back to my spiritual upbringing.
I recognized what I thought of as a failure of liberal Christians in the
face of rising Christian fundamentalism.
We had lost our voice, or at least our willingness to use it. The ascension
of fundamentalism and its hold on vulnerable young people like my ex-fiancée was,
as Marilynne Robinson writes, “the fault of the liberals in large part, because
they have neglected their own tradition, or have abandoned it in fear that
distinctiveness might scuttle ecumenism.”
I
think what I have been trying to achieve in all my essays is a return to the
beautiful “story” of Jesus, because as I writer I know the metaphor moves
people, the symbol. This is
because when an artist uses a metaphor she is reaching toward something
God-like that is unreachable. The
metaphor is the artist’s confession: the best I can do is approximate. There is no symbol, no representation
that will suffice, there will never be a symbol that will suffice, and so those
symbols must be graceful, thoughtful, and sacred. I think the writers of the
Gospels instruct us to read their words metaphorically, and encourage us to use
our own metaphors. Each book of
the New Testament is replete with similes, sentences that begin, “God’s Kingdom
is like…” or “God’s love is like…” We cannot know God, we see, as Peter reminds
us, “through a glass darkly”. Our
imagination brings us closer to God—to be a Christian (or religious in any way
at all) is to have a wealth of imagination. St. Paul says in is a hard life, Kierkegaard says it is a
foolish life precisely because it requires a faith in the improvable thing. (I cribbed that line from my father.)
It
is not important that I write my life from a doubtless and fixed place, and
therefore reduce God to a concept that fits neatly into my narrow vision, and
then live a rigid life according to that vision. No, what is important is that I seek in the direction to
which those symbols point—that I look unflinchingly toward redemption, forgiveness, and hope
even when I suspect these things might elude me in my work and in my life. The artist’s job is to open new avenues
of hope, widen the space for definition and representation, and welcome others into
grace.
Or,
as Thomas Merton advises in his New Seeds
of Contemplation, “Let no one hope to find in contemplation an escape from
conflict, from anguish, or from doubt.”
I
will always be “catholic.” But when
I go to church now, I attend the Episcopal church—close enough to Catholic that
I feel comfortable (I don’t want my grandmother rolling over in her grave), but
the Episcopalians have demonstrated great foresight by moving with the tide
of history in terms of gender and sexuality issues. I am most recently inspired by the writings of Henri Nouwen,
Alain de Botton, Rebecca Solnit, and Bishop John Shelby Spong. My (new) fiancée finds the ritual and serenity of the Episcopal Church
inspiring, having grown up, like my first fiancée, in more spartan
churches. We live inside our
doubts; they form the walls of our home and church. Inside these walls we observe our own unique
brand of shared faith. We will
both vote for Obama in large part because his story more closely resembles our own faith
story.
Architects
build skyscrapers to withstand wind load by making them bendable at the top,
much like nature’s trees. A tall
building’s ability to lean in strong wind protects it from falling. I think the long tradition of
intellectual debate, contemplation, and personal writing in more progressive
Christian sects—as in Judaism and other faiths—acts in a similar manner. Moreover, this tradition matters a
great deal in a culture where ego-driven confession is sold on television and
in bestselling books as entertainment and our politicians and religious leaders
engage in nuanced debate less and less frequently. Our doubts and fears,
thoughtfully considered and expressed, are the wind-bearing architecture of a
kind God, given to us so that we may bolster ourselves and construct meaningful
lives.
Amen.
