Toward a More Curious Faith
The river rose yesterday in less than an hour, lifting from shallow glass with a barely detectable current to rushing over our dock poles, curbing debris into our cove, whitecaps by afternoon. We pull on our boots and raincoats and drive to the falls a few miles upriver, where they lift the dam on the water a few times in the spring before the regular summer releases. We hike and pause, hike and pause. It is so green, so brown, so rushing, so earthy. The composted dirt thick with pine needles, moss carpets curved over fallen trees. A few months ago Nate wrote a poem called the Ecology of Tolerance (one of my favorites of his) and I can’t help but think of the cathedral of nature, man’s first sanctuary, the grace of this space.
When we were forced to dream, less than a year into our marriage, of the place we wanted to grow old since the place we’d planned on growing old was no longer habitable for us, we gave a weighted value to six things. In no order with no pertinent value to you they were: four seasons, near to nature, dechurched or post-Christian, a university town, ability to find and keep employment, and access to airports/trains. We knew we could find a community anywhere and join a church, even if it didn’t tick all our boxes (do they ever?), and put down roots. But these were the values we wanted to invest in for life. It took us several moves across several states, and several fits and starts, but we have landed in a place where almost all those values weigh with equality.
We thought, too, the community would come easily, but moving cross-country during a pandemic, especially one as politically fraught as this one in a year as politically fraught as this one, has meant the community isn’t what we thought and, yet, somehow is better than we thought. What I mean by that is it is slower than we thought. It is having to be built from the ground up, layered over, like compost, with rubbish and rejects and reforms. I don’t mean the people are rubbish and rejects and reforms, just that our ideals are or have been shown to be, and that many of us find ourselves not where we thought we would be right now. It is having to be built without the cliques that exists already or the habits of community we come into. For us, it is tabula rasa, a blank slate.
A few years ago I would have judged me, but life has not been kind to me in the past few years and so I have learned to be kind to me, and to others, far more than I used to be. Tolerance—even for our own selves—is built by keeping company with those like we used to be and those like we would like to be and not thinking too highly of who we are right now. It is the space to rise and fall, layer and build, the welcome of a river’s edges, the roll of a fallen log, the carpet of pine needles beneath our feet. It the understanding that we are one ripple in a rising river, here now and gone in seconds.
I have fewer sacred cows these days, fewer buttons to push, fewer one-issue ideals, and am slower to make anything a “gospel issue” (mostly because everything is). But my faith is deeper than it ever has been before, even as a chronic doubter I can say that with confidence. There is an unshakeableness to my faith and belief in what actually matters to God (Namely faith, hope, and love. The greatest of these, as we know, is love.).
I am less interested in commentary on much of anything unless it’s the words of Jesus himself, or the Spirit through him. I eat the word of God more than podcasts and articles and pundits. I am more interested in what the birds are saying about God, from the river willows in front of our house and in the geese flying in vees above me. I am interested in what the spring green buds on the lilacs are saying about creation and what the earthworm is thinking. I’m frustrated as hell about the sugar ants crawling along the edge of my counters, but I’m also interested in what they’re doing there to begin with and impressed with their invincibility. I’m curious about the curves of the river and the depths of it and what was manmade and what was made by the hand of God. I’m curious about why some people don’t want me in their life and why I don’t want some people in mine. I’m wondering about how the church has changed over centuries and the canon of Scripture and what is manmade and what is made by God. And still my faith in the unseeable God grows because I see him here, too. I see him in what he has made and what he loves and what he is redeeming even now.
PS. My friend Aarik Danielsen and I are beginning a project called The Blackbird Letters, wherein we write letters to one another over the next several months and share them with you. In the theme of Wallace Steven’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, we will be looking at 13 ways we think about writing. You can read Aarik’s inaugural post here, and look for my response next week right here on Sayable.
