How What Threw Me Has Wound Up Affirming Me

When I was a kid, I thought my Dad was a Christian. I mean, it wasn’t my fault I was clueless about his agnosticism: he led my parents’ freakin Sunday School class at our Christian church. He appeared by all measures to be all in. Apparently, my parents at the onset of their marriage had hashed out a deal that my dad would be closeted about his lukewarm feelings towards Jesus’s presumed divinity with us kids and loyal to the church my mother was deeply devoted to. All she really asked was for him to show up. But, the perpetual joiner, he couldn’t help himself but to go and be involved.

Even though I didn’t find out about his agnosticism until my early teen years, I credit my dad for his authenticity with the Christian church itself. I think most of the adults, including the pastor, he was upfront with took great comfort in hearing his refreshingly raw honesty: Dad didn’t know about Jesus’s Christ-ness and he wasn’t afraid to admit it.

But when I learned, I wasn’t comforted. 

I was straight-up confused.

How could he go each week? How could he fake it? How could I have shared a house for a baker’s dozen number of years with someone who didn’t share this BIG thing with rest of us (and not know it).

There are two things, in long conversations I remember having late into the night during those years while in the house and a few back for college breaks after I left it, I remember penetrating my thought process at the time the most. Hell, they’ve penetrated it ever since.

#1) Dad used this word often, when I asked how he could be SO Christian and yet not one: 

TRAPPINGS.

He said that he chose to be part of a faith community because he stood for the same things it stood for: the values, the focus on contributing to common good, the priority to care for our community/world in a collective way. But that he would not assume the title, because he could not subscribe to all the “trappings.” 

Trappings.

It made me think he was worried about getting “caught.” Like Christians were out to get him.

(P.S. Lots of Christian ARE out to get people. Thankfully, we didn’t surround ourselves with those).

But it wasn’t his control or independence he was afraid to lose… it wasn’t that he was reticent to belong to something, get swept away by something… it wasn’t that he was too stubborn (although, it’s only fair to note that he most definitely was). He wasn’t avoiding Christianity to make a statement, to be different.

All of these seemed to me to be likely reasons for my dad to have chosen heathen-ship.

Here’s what it really was: doctrine and theological belief – at least in the Christian culture I was raised in – was as necessary to the decision to be a Christian as eating no meat is to the decision to be a vegetarian. And so… if Dad couldn’t look in the mirror and say that he had accepted Jesus as his personal Lord and Savior, then he couldn’t say he was a Christian.

And, to him, all that doctrinal jargon was fluff. Unnecessary. Getting in the way. Man made. 

Trapping.

Like there is this artificial shroud of thick, foggy air wisping around Jesus that we people made ourselves and bore into existence between us and him, and that as a result we have to penetrate through all this dense religiosity to get to who he actually is, and that the thicker and more oppressive and less see-through the fog of religiosity gets, the higher Jesus gets elevated into something he’s not.

Dad was saying that it wasn’t himself he was worried would get trapped.

It’s Jesus.

And we did it to him. 

And then, #2) “Have you ever thought of this, Tricia: How would your life, my life, anyone’s life be different if Jesus hadn’t come along?” 

Trishie may not have gotten much sleep that night.

Or the next.

I felt stumped. And it made me mad that, as a person who took her faith so seriously, I didn’t have some semblance of confidence about how the world as a whole would be different were it not for Jesus.

The best I could come up with was kinda canned and chinsy, “Then we wouldn’t be saved?”

To be fair to myself, it was sorta a stupid question… if we are using Christian speak and operating within the Christian framework then it’s obvious that God would have fulfilled his prophesy somehow, if not by the guy from Nazareth. My answer shoulda been, “If Jesus didn’t exist with the whole virgin birth thing and cross thing and stone-rolled-away thing, then it woulda been Fred (with a cloud elevator entrance, then golden dagger death, then mystical pigeon rebirth) or Gina (by way of a clamshell reveal, then circle of fire exit, then invisible mermaid appearance). 

I mean: WHO CARES. 

And that’s just it. That’s JUST what I think Dad was getting at – whether he meant to or not. (Perhaps a more accurate statement is that it’s what I’M getting at these some-many years later as a result of Dad’s provocation):

It’s not the package that matters.

I choose the package of Jesus, because It’s the best-known manifestation of the God I have come to know.

Would I have known this God without the package of Jesus? I say yes. I find my God everywhere.
But at some point ya gotta hitch your wagon to something concrete. And Jesus, I argue, is the most concrete package that demonstrates, incarnates if you will, the God I know… the God with whom not many were familiar at the time.

Which is to say:
a) He is loving (not judgmental)
b) He is peaceful (not violent)
c) He is forgiving (not vengeful)
d) He is humble (not boastful)
e) He works for the poor (not the powerful)
f) He relies on Bigger Understanding (not human understanding)
g) He is accessible to everyone (not just some)
h) He provides a spirit of calm (not fear)
i) He is personal and experience-able (not distant and unavailable)
j) He says we are fully worthy (not 99% or ¾ or ½ or UN)

And lastly:
k) He makes my life simultaneously harder and better

I don’t hide the fact that I get super reflective at Easter-time and Christmas-time about this Jesus guy. I turn him over and around and upside down in my head. Hope he doesn’t get dizzy. I know the process for me is dizzying. 

I guess I just wanna be pretty darn sure He’s the guy for me.

This Christmas season, I turn to my dad for that answer…

..whose surprising admittance to me that he was not a Christian has turned out to be a powerful clarity-maker:

I choose Jesus for the same reasons Dad wasn’t so sure:

#1) I follow the Jesus who is untrapped by our human bells and whistles.
#2) I follow the Jesus who is a concrete package to make better known the God in my heart.

Turns out, that man I shared a house with the first half of my life and I had a lot more in common than we realized. 

(Except the stubborn part… I completely and wholly refuse to believe that I am ever stubborn...like, ever.)

I found an outfit I never wanna take off

It was in 2007 that I took off my cross necklace for awhile. At that point, I had been feeling unsettled about my status as a Christian off and on for a solid few years and had committed some serious energy to discerning whether I was one any longer.

It felt weird to go through this, let me tell you. "Christian" was like fifth on my list of identifiers as a person. Woman. Mother. Wife. Runner. Christian.

It also felt weird to have been raised happily in the church  (Sunday Schooled, Baptized, Church Camped, Youth Grouped), to have gone to church by choice all through college, to have worked in a church out of college, to have become all grown up and join as tithing members with my husband to a church congregation and to yet nonetheless wrestle so.

I was not wrestling with God (loved Her!). I was not wrestling with Jesus (loved Him!). I was not wrestling with life (loved It!). I was not wrestling with church (loved Church people!). You see, I hadn't been burnt by any of the distinct entities that made up my faith life. I was simply wrestling with the broad definition of "Christianity."

My goals during this process were two-fold: #1) To determine the definition of "Christian." #2) To determine if I was one. My thinking was that if I couldn't faithfully believe/follow/make sense of  50% or more of my findings from #1), then I probably wasn't one. And, yes, I am aware that 50% is failing, so I was being generous.

It took about six months to determine the outcome.

I flunked.

I decided I had been wearing the Christian costume long past it fitting properly. And taking it off without an alternate costume meant I was religiously naked. Didn't even have the jewelry of my cross necklace. Damn. Naked.

But then, about a year and a million books and conversations later, something fantastic happened.

I realized that I was both terribly wrong and pinpointedly right. I was right that the old Christian costume was indeed too small, too itchy, and too clostriphobic. I was wrong that that meant I needed to let go of Christianity altogether.

There was a whole new costume, a Christian one too, awaiting me. Who knew! This new one is all roomy and down-filled and allows for all my appendages to bend and stretch every which way. Best of all, it grows with me. I won't need to swap it out for another ever again!

Step One: Put cross back on. (Then silently beg for passers-by to ask about my new costume, cuz this beauty of a cross means something quite different than it did to me a year ago)

Step Two: Spend some serious time breathing in this new identity as a Christian. This meant keeping a serious spiritual eye out for old trappings and keeping my personal communication with God consistent, frequent, and pure. Yes, and also giving myself time... it takes time for the full adoption of a new way of looking at things.

Step Three: Be relentlessly choosy about our church home (Which, as timing and relocating would happen, was poignant)

This is exactly what I did. And now, so many years later, I'm still growing into my costume. While my jewelry and church home choices  are secure, I work on Step Two ongoingly. And, truth be told, I also still silently beg strangers to ask me about my faith. I keep thinking that if folks knew what I have found to be true of God and of Christianity 2.0 since my 2007 crisis of faith, they'd be lining up to get charms, tattoos, pendants, and hair cuts in the shape of a cross. Or a heart, maybe. Or a peace-sign. All three would work great, too.

So, I'll save the lists of my definitions (both old one and new one) for a different post. I'm sure you'll be holding your breath, so as a teaser, here is a teensy description of the identity of my new costume: It is one that sort of giggles at definitions and prefers poems and parables and paradoxes to legal documents. It's one that nudges me closer and closer to the behaviors of Jesus, which is to say a pure and real love for people, especially the ones who the world deems furthest from the bull's eye. It takes you as you are, questions and doubts and worries and fear-filled and prideful and imperfect and all. And it privately snickers at those taking themselves too seriously. And it grieves when it sees fake preside over real. And it wants all of you. All of you. And all of me. And I'd want it no other way.