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.”**

___________________________

*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.”

A Certain Kind of Christian (Part One)

            No one in my family thinks I’m a Christian, and I’m trying to not care anymore.

            It took me a long time to come to a place where I thought it might be okay to not care, but that’s the best thing about being in your (late) thirties…you begin to care a lot less about what other people think of you.  To make sense of all this, and how I finally came to accept myself as a Christian, I have to go way back to the beginning, when I was a little child.

            I was raised by well-meaning, loving parents in a well-meaning loving church. A Holiness church, which is a sect of Pentecostalism, but part of no organized body.  Because there is no true umbrella group like the United Methodist Church or the Southern Baptist Convention, every Holiness church has it own doctrines, but the main thing that makes a Holiness church is a belief in the gifts of the spirit, which includes speaking in tongues and prophecy.  Since all Holiness churches are so different, I won’t attempt to talk about any of them except the one I grew up in.

            At the Lily Holiness Church I felt completely loved and surrounded by good people.  Lots of them were family, and the ones who weren’t felt like family.  We did everything together:  we loaded into the church van and headed off to Mammoth Cave, singing all the way (“I’ve got joy joy joy, down in my heart! Where? Down in my heart! Where? O, down in my heart!”), writing shoe polish messages on the windows:  Honk If You Love Jesus, Praise the Lord!, John 3:16; Wednesdays were Gospel Night at Finley’s Roller Rink, so we would all put on our Holy Rollers t-shirts and go skating together (the deejay played music by the McKamey’s and The Singing Cooke Family); we ate together at Homecoming, Pastor Appreciation Day (the pastor got a brand new suit from Dawahare’s department store every year and a cake shaped like the Bible), Old Fashioned Day (when everyone dressed up like characters on “Little House on the Prairie”), and any other chance we got.  In short, we were our own culture, so that I grew up identifying as part of three very distinct cultures:  Southern, Appalachian, and Holiness.  Each of these cultures provided their own beauties, joys, comforts, and complexities. 

            We went to church all the time.  I’m talking three or four times a week.  Sometimes more.  My mother was a singer—“as good as Loretta Lynn,” everyone said, in awe of her not only for her singing but for her sacrifice of not going off to Nashville to become a country star so she could stay at home and sing for God—and that meant we went to church even more than the normal Holiness family.  When we weren’t at regular church meetings, we were at tent revivals, camp meetings, brush arbors (these were my favorites because the stage and “altar“ were made of felled trees and branches that had been dragged from the woods, an old tradition dating back to the 1700s when people didn’t have churches), nursing homes, radio stations, or funerals.  I believe that one of the main reasons I’m a writer is because I went to church so much, and the only permissible thing to take with me was a little notebook (which everyone called a “tablet” back then, a word I still love) and pencil.

            So I wrote all the time.  I wrote character studies of the people at church:

            Ray-Harm Couch is built like a pencil and has a head like a car battery.

            Bernice Conley moves like a flower floating on the river and has eyes that are all kindness. 

            Fannie Sizemore is as warm and smushy as a half-baked biscuit and always smells like honeysuckle.

            I wrote short stories and novellas and recorded entire conversations that I eavesdropped before the church service started:

Joette Lewis:  How’s Nellie doing, Helen?

Helen:  Oh, honey, she hain’t no good.  She hates it so bad that she can’t make it to the church-house no more, and don’t know what to do since they took Jimmy Swaggart off the television. 

Joette:  I know it, I hate that over him a sight.

Helen:  I don’t know which depressed her the most, her hip being broke or Jimmy Swaggart getting caught with that old hooker.

            I still write to music, and I think that’s because I learned to write while at church, listening to all those songs.  At our church, and most Holiness churches, the majority of the service was the singing.  A regular service lasted at least two hours (usually longer) and 90 minutes of that was the music. 

            It fills me with nostalgia and a bit of remorse to recall all those mornings of Sunday School, all those evenings of Bible School.  The church basement always smelled of chalk and grape Kool-Aid.  The old women all hugged me close to them, the men shook my hand like I was a man, then tousled my hair like I was a child.  Sometimes I would love them all so much I couldn’t stand it.  I knew every book of the Bible, in order, and could recite them like a poem:  “Matthew, Mark, Luke, John…”  There were always offerings of peppermints, and Juicy Fruit, and Fruit Stripe.  When someone would start to speak in tongues, my pencil stopped moving and I sat still, in reverence, as the strange, beautiful rhythms of the foreign-sounding words rang out over the church.  “Om, shah-die!  Om, shad-da-da-da-die!”  The words were beautiful.  They were music.  They were holy. 

            But by the time I was sixteen, I started to notice things in the church that bothered me. 

            I hated it when the preacher would talk about the way women were inferior, referring to the verse I Corinthians 11:3 that reads “But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God.”  What I hated even more was the way the women in the audience would agree, nodding their heads and calling out “Amen, brother!”  I hated that my mother agreed with this, and lived by it.  Even as a teenager I had some inkling, I think, that I might someday have daughters, and that I wouldn’t want them to think this way.  I thought to myself how this verse had probably been used over the centuries to victimize women, to make them feel worthless.  It didn’t feel right.

            I hated it when the preacher would say things like “Now I don’t know about you, hah, but I don’t serve no Buddha, hah, I don’t serve no Allah, hah, I don’ t serve no Mohammad, hah! I serve Jesus Christ Almighty and that’s all, hah, ‘cause them other ones, hah, don’t matter now, childurn, hah!  They hain’t God!”  For those of you who don’t know, the “hah” in there is a kind of rhythm marker, or a part of the call and response method that allows the audience to know when to give feedback, and a way for the preacher to catch his breath since this kind of preaching is a real workout, used by many Holiness preachers.  I had never met anyone who wasn’t at least Protestant, but I still didn’t like the notion of discounting every other religion in the world when it was clear that the preacher didn’t know a thing about those religions. 

            I hated it when the preacher would talk about homosexuals and lump them in with pedophiles, murderers, blasphemers, and idolaters.  I didn’t completely understand it then, but I knew enough to know that there was a big huge difference between being gay and being those other things, namely that those other things were evil and being gay was not.  And I really didn’t like it when I once heard a Holiness preacher (not ours, a visiting evangelist) say that “all the queers should be rounded up, put on an island, and taught the Word of God” until they changed their ways.  No use in even mentioning all the dinner conversation where some member of the church would take this a step further and say the queers should be rounded up and killed.

            I especially hated it when getting an education was ridiculed by the preacher, saying things like “Now I hain’t been, hah, off to no big fancy college, hah, and learned no big bunch of theology, hah!  Because I don’t need to, hah!  Because I’m washed in the blood of the Lamb, hah, and that’s all the education I need, hah!”  I had dreamed of getting a good education, of being the first person in my family to graduate college, but when I saw them all sitting there shaking their hands in the air to show their approval and calling out “Amen!” and “Hallelujar!” it made me want to throw up, and it also made me realize that even though they claimed to want me to go off to college, too, they would never think of it in the same way.  That it would, in fact, someday become a division between us. 

            These are only the top things that bothered me.  I won’t go into the rest, but suffice it to say that I left the church because of this line of talking and thinking.  I left, and I wandered alone in the wilderness for years and years.  For decades. 

            I tried being wild for awhile.  I had been taught that if I wasn’t a perfect Christian who went to church every time the door was cracked and avoided all sins that I would burn in hell forever and ever.  This led me to believe that I might as well try everything.  My nature wouldn’t allow me to try quite everything, but I did go too far.  I drank too much.  I lived for honkytonk weekends. (to be continued…Part Two will be posted July 5)

I’m writing this from the Gathering of Writers at Greenbo State Park in Greenbo, Kentucky.  We’re staying in the Jesse Stuart Lodge.  Stuart is one of Kentucky’s most beloved writers, and was definitely one of its most popular (very few writers get a hotel named after them in America, much less in Kentucky). At the height of his popularity he even appeared on the national television show “This Is Your Life.”  He is the author of many beautiful books including TREES OF HEAVEN and DAUGHTER OF THE LEGEND.  The Gathering is aptly named because it’s a gathering of really great people who have all come together to trade stories, songs, and good spirits.  Greenbo is a beautiful place of lush mountains and good trees (all trees are good, of course, but some are better than others–more powerful than others) and this is a good place to be with good people.