Someone recently asked to read my testimony of faith—how I came to believe in God. It was a question so abrupt and far from my mind that I was left a little speechless. I finally admitted, frankly, that I don’t think I have one. At least not one that’s current or a whole lot relevant.
Luckily, I haven’t had to write my testimony of faith for the last couple of years, but I think about it every day. For a while I have wanted to start over and write a new testimony, or maybe I wanted to expand on the one I already had, from years ago. On the one hand, I am brand new, recreating my faith from the ashes of the flames that burned me down. But on the other hand, I can’t erase the past. I am ever evolving from what I used to be. But I am still me. I am still the same girl who looked through a mirror dimly. Today I see even more dimly, I just see differently.
The last words of my testimony of faith that I wrote five years ago, in the first few weeks of seminary, were this: “In my soul I know that God is love, God is good, and I am supposed to be here, keeping on along this path and seeing where it leads.” I still believe that to be true. Much of that testimony of faith feels immature now, but the underlying driving force of wonder persists. I am still the me who’s wandering, questioning, seeking, eyes wide open to the big bright world beyond my little world. The name of this blog site that I’ve had for over five years bears witness to this self: “though she be little—my search for Truth in an ambiguous world.”
Everyone says that you deconstruct your faith in seminary and it’s tumultuous and heartbreaking. But I had a blast in seminary. New concepts and wrenches were thrown at me left and right, and I took them all in thrilling stride, reveling in the expansiveness of the study of theology, thinking I had steered clear of heartbreak and loss. I thought my evolution into enlightenment was smooth as butter. It wasn’t until months after I graduated seminary that I started to lose my bearings.
I started to notice it on Sunday mornings, as I sang professionally in the choir of an Episcopalian church, the denomination I had come to love for its rich liturgy filled with luscious texts, pointed symbols, and straightforward theology of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But the faith creed that I treasured so much started to feel wrong on my lips. I didn’t know the One God, the Father Almighty anymore. In seminary I talked the talk, acknowledging that God is neither male nor female, but I didn’t believe it in my body. I didn’t start to believe it until I was thrust back out into the world to make sense of it, through the lens of a “lay person.” Knowing what I know now, I couldn’t proclaim these creeds and declarations as truth anymore, because truth had crumbled before my eyes, and I discovered that nothing was certain. A hole was left in my soul where the god of my childhood dissipated into a dream. It was like learning that Santa Claus isn’t real. I felt hoodwinked, hurt, and grieving the loss of my childhood security blanket.
I discovered that I had hid myself from the male god of my childhood. I didn’t want him to see all my vulnerable insides. I was embarrassed, ashamed of my womanhood that this god could not possibly understand. I did not trust this male god. I lied to him to protect myself. This god was a failsafe in times of deep shame, to keep me from being fully myself in the world. So I dispelled this god from my heart. What was left but me and my spiraling thoughts? With no god, I was listless, a stranger walking across a disjointed world that made no sense. This was a very lonely place to be. It still is. Yet I longed for connectedness. I longed for the real presence of a higher Being moving in my soul. One that I believed in, one that I loved and knew loved me.
The ground beneath my self-proclaimed Christian identity grew shakier with each passing, lonely day. With my community of seminarians spread to the winds post-graduation, I didn’t know if I was alone in my grief, or if they struggled too. With the deconstruction of the disciplinarian, male god deep in my embodiment came the questioning of Jesus himself and his proclaimed divinity. As I substituted “he” with “she” over and over again, trying to undo the narrative in my head, my heart felt like it might explode with logical inconsistencies, realizing that this story of God made man was never logical to begin with. What does the masculinity of this god incarnate tell me about the nature of God? Does it mean something? Or does it mean nothing at all? Could I still call myself a Christian if I didn’t believe that Jesus was God? Could I just settle for hoping that the second coming of Christ would be in the form of a woman? By one-to-one Christian theology, I figured I was not a Christian anymore. This brought me immense grief, but I figured I had no choice. I was hanging on by a withering vine.
Recently I was talking to a New Testament scholar, and I tentatively voiced to her my dilemma. Can one believe that Jesus was merely an elevated prophet and still call themselves a Christian? I was expecting her to say, “technically, no.” But she said something that changed the game for me. She said, if I want to be a Christian, then I am. So, the question is, do I want to be a Christian? The withering vine that I had been hanging onto, as another brilliant scholar told me, is Jesus himself. I’m still holding on to Jesus, whatever that looks like, and that tells me that I’m not done with Christianity just yet. The naïve faith of my childhood taught me a duality that said it’s either Christianity or *not* Christianity; you can’t ascribe to both, because anything that’s not Christianity must be at odds with it. Well, maybe that’s a kind of thinking that limits our understanding and experience of God. Maybe I want to be Christian, and so much more. Maybe I want to follow the teachings of Jesus at the same time as I recognize the many manifestations of the same God in our world’s religions.
If I don’t believe much else that is said in my Episcopal worship services, I still believe in the power of the incarnation. Faithfully, I take the Eucharist every Sunday with a sound body and mind. I ingest the real presence of God into my being to remind myself that God was here and is still here. God is alive in me. As conflicted as I am about the divinity of Jesus, I deeply believe that the notion of God choosing to be present as one of us—and therefore, all of us—is the most powerful thing one could say about God. This is the unique concept that Christianity has to offer the world. The God that truly knows our pain, grief, loss, joy, hope, and love, is the God that makes me fall to my knees in wonder and awe. That is the God that makes me feel connected to the earth, to the universe beyond this earth, and to a realm beyond my comprehension. That God shows me that my purpose is to be here, to be present in the world’s suffering and joy as God has been.
So that is where my testimony of faith picks up. I’m still keeping on along this path—although it has veered into unknown territory—and seeing where it leads. The faith of my childhood is far from null—it made me who I am today. But it is time that I turn it into something new. I’m trying to figure out who God is to me. I want to build a trusting, loving relationship with that God. I want to pray to and give thanks to that God for all the beautiful things in this world. I look around at creation—the wind, the trees, the running water, the stars, the birds in flight—and I imagine God moving through earth, breathing life into each rustling leaf. I look around at my fellow human beings of all kinds and wonder what it was like for God to fashion and shape that person to be unique and loved. This is all in the spirit of being here, being present in each moment, as God has been present as someone like me. I propel myself into the next phase of my journey at the crossroad where the previous phase ended—with the final words of my testimony from a time past: “In my soul I know that God is love, God is good, and I am supposed to be here, keeping on along this path and seeing where it leads.”