It’s strange how one sentence can trigger a flood of memories.
Do you believe in God?
I’m reading Pádraig Ó Tuama’s collection of poetry called Kitchen Hymns and he has a series of poems that are titled or start with “Do you believe in God?” Each poem is his attempt at an answer.
Which makes me think of being in college and the Columbine shooting happening, how in the aftermath there were all of these stories about the shooters asking Cassie Bernall that question and when she answered in the affirmative they shot and killed her.
I remember Rachel Scott’s father coming to speak at our national youth conference and talking about her journals; her visions of her death.
These deaths were used as a rallying cry. I remember the furor of adults asking us if we were ready to be martyrs. Of feeling convinced that was where our country was heading; the hunting of good Christian evangelicals. I remember sermons hinged on the question “If it became illegal to be a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?”
Do you believe in God?
I think of the spoken word poem* that says “Yes, I do believe in God; and no, this isn’t Columbine, I’m not answering with my life on the line but when a student asked me this question, “do you believe in God?,” after an hour-long trans 101 lesson, she was looking for a life line. ‘Cause her whole lifetime, she believed in water into wine, dying for your sins and walking on liquid; and here I was, taking Adam’s rib and turning it into something she had to question.”
In my Christian summer camp we played a game in the darkness called “The persecuted church” where counselors were hunting us and we had to keep ourselves safe. We run through the woods, hiding wherever we can. Screams and laughter echo through the night. I am reminded of this game after a friend texts me asking if I had seen the second season of “Shiny Happy People”: “Are you in this?” She is horrified by the stories. I watch the trailer and think “Yeah, that all seems about right. This tracks with what I remember.”
I forget sometimes that other people didn’t grow up with this level of fear. It seemed the adults in our lives wanted us to be afraid. To continually be on edge. To be ready to fight. To be ready to die.
Do you believe in God?
“Sometimes when people say ‘I don’t believe in God’ I ask them to tell me about the God they don’t believe in and I tell them I don’t believe in that God either.” (This statement has become such a cliche I can’t even track down who originally said it) Obfuscation so no one has to own up to the harm done in the church’s name.
It was at least a decade later that I found out no one asked Cassie Bernall if she believed in God before she was killed.** The martyrdom we were trained to expect was a figment of imagination (generous interpretation) or intentional misrepresentation (honest interpretation).
It took time to acknowledge that the threat I faced wasn’t becoming a victim of the persecuted church, it was becoming a perpetrator.
And I have been both. Victim and perpetrator. Using the Bible to wound and being wounded by it.
Do you believe in God?
The still is silent, but for me it’s always part of the question.
I work through fragments of memory. Sifting and sorting.
Do I believe in God?
Somehow, after all of this, I answer yes, but. Yes. But. Yes, I believe in God. But it looks nothing like it used to.
My answer now is not about certainty or assurances of life after death. It’s an embrace of the mystery. An acknowledgement of something bigger than myself.
It’s expansive love. It’s belovedness. It’s community. It’s the space between. The liminal.
It’s the questions.
Do you believe in God?