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

by Nadia Bolz-Weber

I have learned something by belonging to two polar-opposite communities—Albion Babylon and the Church of Christ—and I wanted them to hear me: This community will disappoint them. It’s a matter of when, not if. We will let them down or I’ll say something stupid and hurt their feelings. I then invite them on this side of their inevitable disappointment to decide if they’ll stick around after it happens. If they choose to leave when we don’t meet their expectations, they won’t get to see how the grace of God can come in and fill the holes left by our community’s failure, and that’s just too beautiful and too real to miss.

every time we draw a line between us and others, Jesus is always on the other side of it.”

The truth does crush us, but the instant it crushes us, it somehow puts us back together into something honest. It’s death and resurrection every time it happens.

the disfiguring emotional process we politely call grief

sometimes the best thing we can do for each other is talk honestly about being wrong.

God, please help me not be an asshole, is about as common a prayer as I pray in my life.

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.

inevitably, when I can’t harm the people who harmed me, I just end up harming the people who love me. So maybe retaliation or holding on to anger about the harm done to me doesn’t actually combat evil. Maybe it feeds it.

What if forgiveness, rather than being a pansy way of saying it’s OK, is actually a way of wielding bolt cutters and snapping the chain that links us?

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

when God comes to me in the form of a friend who will be just enough of an asshole to tell me the truth, then it really is as if my heart had been ripped out of my chest and replaced with something warm and beating.

every single time I die to something—my notions of my own specialness, my plans and desires for something to be a very particular way—every single time I fight it and yet every single time I discover more life and more freedom than if I had gotten what I wanted.

Ugh, Jesus. He always seems to be showing up when I want him to politely just keep out of my business. Once again, my friend Sara is right: The Boyfriend was all up in my shit. It’s the worst.

Not the repentance of red-faced street-corner preachers waving REPENT! signs. No, that kind of repentance always sounded to me like Stop being bad—start being good or God is going to be an angry punishing bastard to you. This feels like more of a human threat than anything else. It never works on me. Who wants their spiritual arm twisted until they cry uncle? It’s bullying. I mean, fear and threat can create change in behavior. No question about it. But it doesn’t really change my thinking. Threats don’t change my heart and they don’t move me from “fuck you” to something less assholey in short order.

Repentance in Greek means something much closer to “thinking differently afterward” than it does “changing your cheating ways.”

He could be lying about everything, but that’s true of everybody.

What Mary would do is show up and remind us that despite the violence and fear, it’s still always worth it to love God and to love people. And always, always, it is worth it to sing alleluia in defiance of the devil, who surely hates the sound of it.

To sing to God amidst sorrow is to defiantly proclaim, like Mary Magdalene did to the apostles, and like my friend Don did at Dylan Klebold’s funeral, that death is not the final word. To defiantly say, once again, that a light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot, will not, shall not overcome it. And so, evil be damned, because even as we go to the grave, still we make our song alleluia. Alleluia. Alleluia.