Out of Sorts: Making Peace with an Evolving Faith

by Sarah Bessey

Mary Oliver wrote that at some point in your life, you determine to save the only life you can save—your own.

Perhaps Jesus was a bit too wild for the Church. It was easier to expound on Paul’s letters, for instance. Ah, Paul, here was a finely tuned mind, a man of practicalities. Jesus probably didn’t know that we had bills to pay, budgets to meet, programs to run, bylaws to discuss, deacons to nominate, culture to influence, public-opinion battles to wage, doctrine to parse, lines to draw in the sand to mark who was in and who was out.

He wasn’t the property of any one religion or denomination or belief system, or of a governmental system or a financial system or a lifestyle. He was bigger, wilder, and more wonderful than all of that. And it made me feel angry to realize it.

Our Jesus showed us and taught us that God is not keeping score, not how we keep score, and that He lavishes His riches equally on everyone who shows up.

I stand in the front row of the church—a few dozen of us in a community center—clapping along to the repetitive and simple praise choruses about the exodus of Israel and the blood of Jesus with repeated proclamations of hosanna. The horse and the rider are thrown into the sea! Three tambourines in a small room make quite a racket. The ladies wave banners, the children dance. I am overly earnest even for a kid. I throw my skinny child arms into the sky and sing loudly: As the deer panteth for the water, so my soul longeth after you. Later: I am standing in a gigantic stadium, thousands of people around me. The music is loud, the performance dazzling. Church shouldn’t be boring! we declare. We sing songs of the victorious, the conquering. I feel like crying, feel like jumping, like running. I feel alive, every cell thrumming with passion. Look at us, so young and beautiful and blind, testifying to love in three-part harmony. We are self-declared world changers. The devil better watch out. Later: The liturgy of the charismatic evangelicals is empty to me. Dead religion perhaps. Every prayer begins with Father, we just . . . And I find myself admitting, Father, I just can’t hear you here anymore. Maybe I never did. Later: The preacher stands up on the stage in his designer suit and declares “Money cometh!” to a congregation of poor students. The seeds of skepticism and disillusion I carefully keep hidden grow long tendrils around my faith. I am sick to death of prosperity teac...

When something ends, it’s worthwhile to notice its passing, to sit in the space and look at the pieces before you head out.

Sometimes we have to cut away the old for the new to grow. We are a resurrection people, darling. God can take our death and ugliness and bitterness, our hurt and our wounds, and make something beautiful and redemptive. For you. In you. With you.

My husband and I were both burned out and broken, but we somehow went in different directions. These were the years of disunity between us, particularly around church. I railed against institutions and organizations, wouldn’t darken the door of a “real” church, became fluent in faultfinding and cynicism, and the word orthodoxy made my left eye twitch. But he tacked hard the other way, steering toward seminary, conservative denominations, structures, authorities, a longing for accountability after the Wild West, Lone Ranger atmosphere of our lawless charismatic church past. I couldn’t go to church without anxiety, and he couldn’t fathom walking away from the work he had prepared his entire life to do. Many of our friends and acquaintances saw my wonderings and wanderings as a liability to my husband’s calling. They felt bad for him; I was holding him back. Why couldn’t I fall in line? I knew this and I felt bad for him too. And those on “my side” couldn’t understand why he was going back into the old ways of titles and traditions when God was moving as a fresh wind, beyond boundaries and walls and institutions. But we were moving toward each other, as if in an ellipse. We started at the same point and then swung wide out and apart from each other before skating toward each other again. It took a while. He moved, and I moved, and God was moving. Today, we stand together, all these years later, in harmony and in step, in agreement, oneness, even in the places where we disagre...

I go to church. Yes, the actual small-c, pay-your-tithe, teach-Sunday-school plain old church. I’m a church lady. God restored me to church or church to me, I’m not sure which. Probably it’s a bit of both. I still have a lot of questions. I still get the hives when I see big churches with big splashy programs, or any mention of a building project. Talk of business plans and marketing, gimmicks and light shows make my eyes cross. Sometimes I still go to a church and feel like running, pell-mell, tumble-bumble, into the fresh air. I still love to skip Sundays just to stay home, and I don’t feel guilty one little bit.

I hate conflict. I am a conflict avoider. I tend to confuse the absence of conflict with peace. But now I’ve learned that peacemaking often involves a bit of healthy conflict: we’re not called to be peacekeepers but peacemakers. A while ago, I was a pretty terrible friend to someone I love very much. When I was finally called out for it, I was defensive, and an argument ensued. I reacted like a wounded animal when I was the one who had wounded my friend: it was my fault. Perhaps that’s why I freaked out so thoroughly; I felt guilty and knew my friend was right. The snot was flying and nearly an hour later, I was repenting and sobbing with remorse. My friend and I followed the argument all the way down to redemption and forgiveness, and we emerged battle-worn and exhausted—and reconciled. It was a holy moment in our friendship. Real life is the undignified life, and it is the classroom for holiness. If you can’t find God while you’re changing diapers or serving food or hanging out with your friends, you won’t find God at the worship service or the spiritual retreat or the regimented daily quiet time or the mission field. If you can’t embrace healthy conflict, you’ll never have a truly honest friendship.

My faith tradition is what Barbara Brown Taylor would call “the solar Christians.”1 Our faith and our answers exist primarily in the narrative of victory, simplicity, and certainty—in the bright light of day. But there has always been a lunar soul within me—I think there is in most of us—and in my tradition, our sadness, our loss, even our loneliness, is often unacknowledged.

One day while he was refinishing a dresser in our garage, I said to him, “You know, it seems like doing this kind of stuff is for you what writing is for me. You do it for free, just for the love of it.” I went on to comment on how he learned everything he could about building and creating, how he did it well—not because someone was grading him or evaluating him, but because he loved to see work done well. “You should have been a carpenter. I think you missed the boat with the whole pastoring thing,” I teased. But as most spouses know, sometimes a casual comment takes root in our minds and refuses to let go. Later that night, he wondered aloud why nobody in his church or his Christian school or community ever said something like that to him. After all, he’s always been like this—always loved having a project, always loved using his hands and his mind together, loved to create, to bring order out of chaos, bring function and beauty to the world. “Why did no one ever once even suggest to me that I could be a carpenter or a home builder to the glory of God?” he mused. Answer: They didn’t know you could be. We all thought that the height of success was full-time vocational ministry. There was no room in the narrative for a smart, driven, charismatic young man with a clear heart for God to even consider something other than ministry. Of course you’ll be in ministry. Of course.

“If the sacred-secular distinction fades and we grant that all truth is ultimately God’s truth, then intellectual work can be God’s work as much as preaching the gospel, feeding the hungry, or healing the sick. It too is a sacred task.”