Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint

by Nadia Bolz-Weber

In a way, I need a God who is bigger and more nimble and mysterious than what I could understand and contrive. Otherwise it can feel like I am worshipping nothing more than my own ability to understand the divine.

“You just have to find a higher power you can do business with,” Margery suggested one morning when I admitted that I hated Christianity. “This isn’t about religion, honey.” For her, God was the key to staying sober. Her relationship to God wasn’t doctrinal. It was functional. “Just stop thinking about it so damned much. When you get up in the morning ask God to help keep you sober, and before you go to sleep thank him.”

The Bible had been the weapon of choice in the spiritual gladiatorial arena of my youth. I knew how, wielded with intent and precision, the Bible can cut deeply, while the one holding it can claim with impunity that “this is from God.” Apparently if God wrote the Bible (a preposterous idea), then any verse used to exclude, shame, harm, or injure another person is not only done in the name of God, but also out of love and concern for the other person. I had been that person on several occasions, lying spiritually bleeding on the ground, while the nice, well-meaning, and concerned Christians stood above me and smiled in condescension, so pleased with themselves that they had “spoken the truth in love.”

slightly loosen those muscles in my chest that knot up from the fear and pressure of just being human.

But it turns out, I hadn’t actually escaped the sorting system. I had just changed the labels.

God’s grace is a gift that is freely given to us. We don’t earn a thing when it comes to God’s love, and we only try to live in response to the gift. No one is climbing the spiritual ladder. We don’t continually improve until we are so spiritual we no longer need God. We die and are made new, but that’s different from spiritual self-improvement. We are simultaneously sinner and saint, 100 percent of both, all the time. The Bible is not God. The Bible is simply the cradle that holds Christ. Anything in the Bible that does not hold up to the Gospel of Jesus Christ simply does not have the same authority. The movement in our relationship to God is always from God to us. Always. We can’t, through our piety or goodness, move closer to God. God is always coming near to us. Most especially in the Eucharist and in the stranger.

It’s God saying, “I love the world too much to let your sin define you and be the final word. I am a God who makes all things new.”

“Nadia, the thing that sucks is that every time we draw a line between us and others, Jesus is always on the other side of it.” Damn.

“Man, good for you. I wish I could pull that off.”

She looked at my badge and said, “Your job is to be aware of God’s presence in the room while we do our jobs.”

We want to go to God for answers, but sometimes what we get is God’s presence.

I had words on paper, but they were stupid.

This desire to learn what the faith is from those who have lived it in the face of being told they are not welcome or worthy is far more than “inclusion.” Actually, inclusion isn’t the right word at all, because it sounds like in our niceness and virtue we are allowing “them” to join “us”—like we are judging another group of people to be worthy of inclusion in a tent that we don’t own. I realized in that coffee shop that I need the equivalent of the Ethiopian eunuch to show me the faith. I continually need the stranger, the foreigner, the “other” to show me water in the desert. I need to hear, “here is water in the desert, so what is to keep me, the eunuch, from being baptized?” Or me the queer or me the intersex or me the illiterate or me the neurotic or me the overeducated or me the founder of Focus on the Family.

One, you are a beautiful child of God. Two, I think that maybe you and I are desperate enough to hear the Gospel that we can even hear it from each other.”

Here’s the thing: Chris doesn’t agree with me or the more-liberal-than-thou group about the issues of GLBTQ inclusion in the church. But the one phone call I got in the middle of being attacked by my own tribe was from someone who is on the other side of the issue entirely. But he knew what it felt like for your own people to turn on you and he knew it felt like shit. Chris said that he loved me and would pray for me. His enemy.

Believer

This is our God. Not a distant judge nor a sadist, but a God who weeps. A God who suffers, not only for us, but with us. Nowhere is the presence of God amidst suffering more salient than on the cross. Therefore what can I do but confess that this is not a God who causes suffering. This is a God who bears suffering. I need to believe that God does not initiate suffering; God transforms it.

As the great American writer Flannery O’Connor said, “Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.”

What happened on 9/11 was not OK. That’s why I need to forgive. Because I can’t be bound to that kind of evil. Lest it infect the evil in my own heart and metastasize it.

It’s like saying, “You only exist when I recognize you.”