The other day my mother was going through some difficulties at work. She asked me to pray for her before I left the house-I cringed inside. An ugly feeling of shame and disgust. I could not pray-but I think even worse, I did not want to pray-to utter God’s name out loud, acknowledge we need him and seal it with an Amen. Instead I gave her some sound logical advice, and when she received it and seemed more at peace, I changed the subject and ignored her plea. I left the house ashamed and terrified at the realization of what I had become.
It comes to this. I have been scared to know God and to let others know him. I recently read my past journals and could not recognize the voice. While my handwriting was as sloppy as ever, names and events are familiar memories, I cannot empathize with the commentary between the lines. There is pain in the entries but they are peppered with this undying love the writer has for a God who has her whole heart. Even now I am afraid to write to him, of him, lest I become what I have trained myself to hate.
I have hated Christians. I hate their vocab, their stories, their formulas, their so-called miracles, their joy, constant optimism, their do-gooding that makes me feel selfish, and their prayers that seem so empty to my faithless ears. I don’t know how I have grown to hate these that look and talk so much as I used to. Maybe it is because I am afraid to be associated with what society does not understand, maybe I am afraid of sounding stupid, maybe being close to so much good I fear inadequacy, maybe it is because I lost my first love because he could not respect my faith. And while I still hold dear a few friends of the faith-friends I love, respect and rely on-this general malcontent for Christians has led me down a terrifying path in my journey. The fog has lifted and I see my hate, I see where it has led me and I find myself in a pathless plain with no markers to guide me.
My hate began with a cry for justice. I wanted to see wrongs undone, the sick made whole, politics incorruptible, misinterpretations cleared up and Christians to come out of isolation. As I lost faith in truth I lost hope in all faith and my cry for justice became an angry growl as my idealism was met with the grayness of reality. Cynicism and apathy soon became my safety. I turned so slowly away from God, faith, spirituality I had no idea I was gone.
I see clearly what I have become. Strong-minded, intelligent and clever. I see myself as a woman capable of living with out a God, and this was the most terrifying thing of all. because it is the most foreign. In my former writing I could not breath with out my faith. My faith brought me through loneliness and healing of a deep sickness of an eating disorder. My faith showed me the necessity of kindness over hatred, service over selfishness, and most importantly enabled me to look into the heart of humanity and see the individuals’ plight for love. This compassion for the human plight could ultimately have been my weakness.
But slowly the sun is rising on my path and with it comes tools for the direction onward, it is loyalty that has kept me clinging to a sliver of faith and reminds me of the hope that grace, love and kindness is the message of God. I am sorry for judging, sorry to all I have lied to, to those in my faith that I judge my enemies, family and friends. I thought cynicism would make my heart stronger, but instead I have a heart too weak to love.
Frederich Buechner writes that, “faith is the assurance that the best and holiest dream is true after all” I like that “…after all” as though any us could barely believe it in the first place. It is this small faith that keeps me loyal to such a foolish idea in the midst of our gray world.
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