Dear Faith-Shifter (Epistolary Wednesday)

Dear Faith-Shifter,

You hold such a tender place in my heart, you who once felt that everything was sure, you who once felt certain of God and religion, of church and ritual and the blackness and whiteness of rightness and wrongness, goodness and badness. I shifted many years ago and continue to shift—not away from God—but away from some of the certainties of my youth, away from the coded language of a larger religious identity that was shared by a group of people I love to this day. I shifted because too many things felt wrong about our Way of Being. And so much of that Way hung on me like an ill-fitting garment; and, there was too much jargon that those outside our tribe could not understand.

I will always love the Church (of course I love it—I’m one of its pastors); I will always love the way the Spirit has of speaking and moving and wooing us. I will love the Bible, its complexity and mysteriousness and truths-held-in-tension-ness.  But when we love so deeply, Faith Shifter, and are simultaneously so at odds with pieces of the tradition of our forefathers, or at odds with the ways the timeless has been trapped in the temporal, with the distorted expressions of the Love of God, and when we’re in search of some fresh way to express faith, questions, and mystery--it can lead us to loneliness. We belong and we don’t belong. We believe and we don’t believe (certain things). We wonder when no one else wonders. And we wonder if we are the only ones observing as if through a window the party we've long been invited to attend.

I was reminded in my reading this week of how, when we shift, the increased distance we feel from those who were once (or still are) our tribe often extends to a loneliness toward God. When we shift, it may seem that God shifts too. I have felt a distance, yes, over many years and winters and questions, that perhaps stemmed from the belief that Once We Lose Our Faith in God or God’s Church or God's Church's Answers, then so has God in us. But, if I could, I would spare you the necessity of this Distance, dear one. To assert that God has lost his love or faith in us is to assert that God is as splintered and confused and fragmented as my own (in seasons) battered heart. I have come to find out, after and even in the shifting, that God wasn’t far, not even as far as the snowflakes drifting three inches from my December window. No, he was on the inside of the pane, in my breath blown upon it, in the lungs that exhaled all my questions.




***Heather Weber is the author of Dear Boy,: An Epistolary Memoir

"Dear Boy, is a brilliant and unusual memoir of distance and absence--the absence of a beloved brother from his sister's life and the absence of healthy mothering that, over the years, drove brother and sister apart. Weber deftly shifts point of view so that, piece by piece, readers gather the sum of confusion and loss. Yet there is so much love and forgiveness in the narrator that, in a way, each character is redeemed. I'm moved by this life, this telling of it." --Fleda Brown, author of Driving with Dvorak.

Dear Pastor's Kid, (Epistolary Wednesday)

Dear Pastor’s Kid,

You’ve heard the stories about Jesus and Abraham since you were in diapers. You know that God is Good and Jesus Loves You because The Bible Tells You So. You’ve sung the Sunday school songs, performed in the Christmas programs, and just because you’re you, have corrected the theology of the younger ones who wanted to know if angels and Santa were in cahoots, if the Easter Bunny was as real as Jesus. Also, you take science seriously; you wrestled with creation theory, held intelligent conversations about how the theories of evolution and God-as-Orignator might somehow fit together like a puzzle, and not be at odds as so many people seem to think they are.

And you know so much about the Bible—names, spouses, plot twists, dates—that I’m surprised to hear you casually recounting the stories. You don’t know it all (how could you; how could anyone?), but I’m sort of impressed. You’re invested, in other words, in figuring this whole God-and-the-Bible thing out.

But, you’re also worn out on God Stuff.

When I suggest reading the Bible out loud to you and your sister, or when there’s some new thing for kids at church who are your age, you'll sigh and say, “Do we have to? I already know everything there is to know about this stuff.” And sometimes, when you come home from youth group, or you hear about a church event other kids are going to, you sigh and say, “I’m just gonna feel guilty because they’ll tell me I should be telling people about Jesus. And I just don’t want to.” And not wanting to makes you feel like a very bad person.

I will commiserate with you because--listen--the last thing I want for you (or anyone who loves Jesus) is to feel like you have to perform for Him. It's not what anyone has meant to convey to you, but somehow the message has gotten scrambled over all these years.

Here's the problem I've started to clarify: So much knowledge about God, so much immersion in “church” and the Bible to the exclusion of knowing God with your heart just as much, is counterintuitive if not downright damaging. All of those facts and figures and names and verses could trick one into thinking that they have this God-thing all figured out, that this mass of information is all there is to gain. 

That kind of knowledge is dangerous, love, because like a vaccine, it so easily inoculates us against the most important things--it works against our Searching, against our Hunger and Finding Out With Our Hearts and our Souls who God really is. Those things, dear one, are what I most want you to inherit--not the satisfaction of memorizing verses and references, not a sense that you have "arrived" in church-land culture.

If taking back some of the Vacation Bible Schools, some of the forced Sunday school attendance when you were just not "into it" meant opening up your curiosity and encouraging your questions, I might do it. And even though it's not my first choice, that is why I'm letting you go to the junior high dance and giggle in a corner with your two girlfriends rather than make you go to the church youth conference. Maybe--and this is my prayer--your spiritual hunger will grow best in an echo-y gymnasium full of shy seventh graders. Maybe you will search for God right alongside bowls of Chex mix, cups of fruit punch, and Pharrell Williams through the sound system.

***Heather Weber is the author of Dear Boy,: An Epistolary Memoir.

"Dear Boy, is a brilliant and unusual memoir of distance and absence--the absence of a beloved brother from his sister's life and the absence of healthy mothering that, over the years, drove brother and sister apart. Weber deftly shifts point of view so that, piece by piece, readers gather the sum of confusion and loss. Yet there is so much love and forgiveness in the narrator that, in a way, each character is redeemed. I'm moved by this life, this telling of it." --Fleda Brown, author of Driving with Dvorak.

Dear Anonymous Facebooker, (Epistolary Wednesday, August 27) #tbw

On Wednesdays, I write letters. (And this one's a throwback to my original post in 2012.)

Dear Anonymous Facebooker,

I saw your post today. The one about believing in Jesus Christ and challenging other believers to put the same post on their wall. You said Jesus said he would deny us in front of God, if we deny him in front of our “peers.” It’s a simple test, you said. If you are not afraid, then re-post.

You probably don’t know this—probably you had no desire to have this effect on me--but your post makes me want to do the opposite. Because it inspires guilt and fear in me, a lover of Jesus who gets by in the world because of and out of the conversations I have with him daily: the questions and answers and simple moments of divine presence felt. Yet, Jesus never told me—he didn’t, I promise—to copy and paste your status update on my Facebook page. And I wonder at the audacity of a mere human trying to boil down a relationship with divinity (and everyone’s afterlife statuses-to-be) to whether one hits cntrol-c followed by cntrl-v on a keyboard. It seems so black and white. So cut and dried. So harsh, really. Do this, or else. Or else—what? Damnation? Eternal Punishment? Separation from God for eternity?

I don't believe in this kind of God. The kind that is upstairs devising tests by which he can damn us all quickly. Hey—using Facebook for the job is so efficient. All he has to do is count.

Do you remember that Peter denied Christ three times--and yet. Peter was also martyred for his love for Christ, crucified upside down. Because of love. For Christ.

Anonymous Facebooker, I want to introduce you to Wiggle Room. If you peer into the economy of Christ’s kingdom, I believe you’ll find an X factor,  so that a man like Peter, who denied him three times, and then testified for Christ, died for the sake of that testimony, is welcomed by Christ—not denied by him. The X factor: can we call it Grace? Grace that doesn’t damn us to hell the second, the moment, we speak or don’t speak, act or don’t act, repost your silly status on our FB page or not.  Because there are a hundred times a week I speak or don’t, act or don’t, and yet I know this Grace that looks at the whole picture of my heart, Grace that gives me an opportunity to be in process, to make mistakes and recover, to arrive at my own understanding and final revelation of divinity or not divinity in my life.

Maybe I don't sound very gracious toward you. I'm sorry. I need to take deep breaths and back away slowly when I see status updates like these. I have to write an entry like this over the span of a week because I'm working on telling the truth as I see it with love.

And here's my bottom line: God’s not riding Zuckerberg’s coattails..  

Dear Duggars, (Epistolary Wednesday)

On Wednesdays, I'm writing letters...

Dear Jim Bob and Michelle,

I’ve only seen about 30 highly produced and edited documentaries about your lives and the lives of your 19 children, but from the looks of it, you seem like real nice folks. I heard about y’all way back when little Josie was born and in the hospital but I had no desire to go acquaint myself with “that 19 Kids family.” Can I be embarrassingly honest? I judged you before I met you. Any couple that willingly has that many kids is just crazy/uber-religious/non-relatable/extremist/judgmental/you-name-it, right? Well, forgive me, my brother and my sister. 

I watched your show (five years after I first heard of you), and you surprised me because you’re different than what I expected. Michelle, where did you get that voice? The one that drips maple syrup and sunshine while your sticky children are climbing all over your wedding vow renewal dress? The voice you use to describe sharing one bathroom with 50 other people at your friends’ (the Bates) home? The voice you use to read to public school children while wearing baby Jordyn Grace on a nursing pillow, locked and loaded under a blanket?

And Jim Bob, while I just don’t process life in terms as simply as you seem to (and boy, do I sometimes wish I did), the truth is you’re just nice to people who aren’t like you, to women who wear pants and to the men who love them, for example. And that shows goodness, Jim Bob, it really does, because you're a man with great convictions who also doesn't push others to share them.

The clincher for me, JB and Michelle, is that when producers ask why you do this or that, your answers aren’t always the ones I’d expect about, for example, how covered up your daughters and sons should be. I don’t hear a trace of women’s-bodies-are-evil rhetoric despite the “Wholesome Swimwear” and the skirts-below-the-knee. No. What I hear is Michelle saying how much they like to keep attention on the “whole person” and not just body parts. Come again? That sounds exactly like something I’d say to my daughters (although I do let them wear pants). And what a positive message for pretty much every woman and girl (under the age of--I don’t know—100??) that's inundated with images of TV and internet booty shakers.

But let me still be honest: not everything you and your kids say resonates with me. I know you say you want them to "make their own decisions" and "set their own guidelines," but the next sound bite is your daughter parroting you while describing her values for courtship, marriage and hand-holding. Once in a while, I’d like to see a Duggar kid question authority—not because they’re rebellious, but just because they’re thinking for themselves.

Yet, watching your show makes me wonder for a moment if thinking for oneself is overrated. The thing is: these kids seem so genuine, and so content with the influence of all that "authority" in their lives. (Ignorance is bliss?) And for that, I have to admit, JB and M, that I am just the teensiest bit jealous of you and the fam. Your lives contain that much chaos, that many groceries and doctor appointments and diapers to change, and yet you seem so chill and so happy.  Is it the nursing hormones, Michelle?  Jim—is it the gallons of aerosol hairspray inhaled every day? Or something more? I dunno.

Some days, I just want to have what you're having and call it good. But then I remember you don't dance or wear pants or give "full" hugs or listen to/sing anything other than pre-1950s church hymns, and I think, I'll stick with what I've got, even though my kids question about 95% of what I say and my 9-year-old isn't convinced there's a thing wrong with holding hands with a boy at her age, God help me. But I'm sticking with this, my own, experiment for now. I'll keep you posted on how they all turn out.