Love at the Speed of Email (15 page)

I didn’t care – a luxury, I know, I could indulge only because
I was a child of relative privilege and the personal impact of all of this was
minimal. I always had plenty to eat and clothes to wear. I had friends I loved.
I was excelling at school. For the first time in my life, I didn’t feel like an
outsider. As far as I was concerned, I had adopted Zimbabwe as home.

As far as my parents were concerned, it would be much wiser
for me to come back to the states for the last year and a half of high school
and then move to Australia, my
real
home, to attend university.

When we left Harare I carried with me many unshed tears, a
wristwatch that would remain stubbornly set on Zimbabwean time for the next
year and a half, and my faith, the seeds of which had only really started to
flower under a fierce African sun.

Sydney,
Australia

How exactly did this faith, awakened primarily by stories of
grace, become quite so rigid and rule-bound during the next chapter of my life?

My sister’s dodgy counselor would probably suggest that I
had been abused and was seeking to exert some control over an uncertain world.
A decent counselor might wonder whether being uprooted from the first place I’d
ever loved as home caused me to cling more tightly to spiritual anchors that
promised solace and permanence. A developmental psychologist with an interest
in religion would shrug and say a legalistic brand of belief is a perfectly
normal stage of spiritual development.

Whatever the reason, I became that person you want to hire
as a baby-sitter for your kids. I brought my Bible with me and read it after
the kids were in bed instead of watching cable TV. The summer after I graduated
from high school I went on a ten-week mission trip to a remote island in the
Philippines. I memorized the entire book of Philippians, then the book of
James, then Ephesians. Throughout university I went to church on Sunday nights
and did most of the other things that my Anglican dormitory insisted
should
be done by good Christians. I
went to Bible study and evangelism training. I met weekly with my Bible-study
leader or (after I became a leader) with those in my group. I went to lunchtime
lectures on campus. I practically earned another degree in biblical studies.

Though I did all this, a lot of it never felt as if it fit
me quite right.

In evangelism training I repeatedly ducked the assignment to
approach people sitting around during lunch and ask them whether, if they died
the next day, they could be
sure
they
were going to heaven.
 
I found myself in
a real bind over this. I
did
believe
that Jesus was the truth, the life, and the way to freedom, yet I could never
quite reconcile that with my certainty that it was rude and annoying to
interrupt people enjoying a peaceful lunch and accost them with questions about
their eternal destiny.

“It is more important for people to think about these
questions than have a peaceful lunch,” my Bible-study leader insisted.

“But when people do it to me, all I want to do is tell them
to piss off,” I said. “I really don’t think it’s the best way to get the
message across.”
 

I was as comfortable in a bar or on the dance floor as I was
in church, sometimes more so. I held my own Bible-study groups on the beach and
occasionally we
never even opened the
Bible
. I complained that my church in Sydney was high on head knowledge and
low on joy. More than once certain Bible-study leaders accused me of having a
bad attitude and of not respecting them.

They were largely right. But it was hard to be entirely
penitent when it was the same leader who had answered a “what role should women
play in church leadership?” question by advising us that women were not
permitted to teach men.

“This means,”
he
said, “that if a
man has a question in Bible study and a woman knows the answer, she shouldn’t
say anything, because that would be teaching.”

I’m leaving out all the good stuff, of course. Most of the
people in church leadership would not have given this answer. Many cared deeply
for others and wrestled bravely with tough questions. Some of the friends I
made during this time remain among my most treasured today.
 

So I do not count the hours I spent in church wasted, but I
can still blush when I remember how rigid and simplistic my faith was. For even
as a pseudo-rebel within that conservative system, I had internalized a formula
of faith that went something like this:

1.Believe
ye first all the right
things.

2.Don’t
do the wrong things (date
non-Christians, have sex before marriage, drink too much, etc.).

3.Then
, I believed, the kingdom of
God would be added unto you and
life
would make sense
.

In the end it was probably these last four words that I had
attached to my tripartite salvation equation that eventually caused me to
question everything else.

South
Bend, USA

I was twenty-six and at Notre Dame studying international
peace when the wheels really fell off the train, for it was at Notre Dame that
I first fell in love.

I’d dated more than a handful of guys before this, but I’d
always been skeptical of that phrase
falling
in love
. Love wasn’t something you fell into, I thought smugly. It was something
you worked to create together bit by bit. It was a decision, not just a
feeling. And it was more of a campfire than a lightning bolt.

Yes, well, that might all still be good theory and maybe
even good practice, but it went right out the window the first time I saw
Brian.

Brian lived across the hall from me. He was six feet tall,
sandy-haired, and green-eyed. He’d worked as a conflict-resolution trainer in
Bosnia, a peace analyst in Rwanda, and an Armani model in Italy. Like me, he’d
been born overseas and grown up in multiple countries. Unlike me, he was an
atheist. And I was drawn to him with an illogical, stubborn, single-mindedness
from the moment we met – the proverbial moth to a dangerously charismatic
flame.

We sparked right from the start. I saw in him a fellow
third-culture kid, still struggling to work out some sense of belonging yet
relishing the relational “diplomatic immunity” of his outsider status; someone
driven to seek raw intensity both professionally and personally by demons he
couldn’t fully name.

I was a paradox to him, a kindred spirit who inexplicably
believed in God. He both respected me and was infuriated by me.
 

“How
can
you?” he
interrogated me frequently and heatedly. “How
can
you still believe that the Bible is the
truth
? The sheer arrogance of that! And how
can
you believe in a loving God after everything you’ve seen?
After Bosnia?
And Indonesia?
And Rwanda, for God’s sake?
How
can
you, when you are as smart as you are? It makes me seriously
doubt your intellect in every other domain.”

“That’s a bit rich, coming from someone who’s been taking
editing advice from me all year,” I’d shoot back, trying not to let him see how
his words had wounded and rattled me anew.

Other people had questioned my faith, of course, but never
someone who seemed to have a personal and vested interest in dismantling my
beliefs bit by bit.
Never someone who made me so angry that I
lost my temper and screamed at him, and swore.
Never someone I provoked
to such fury that he threw things and slammed doors. Never someone who made me
want, more than I’d ever wanted anything else, to drag him to the nearest altar
or the nearest bed – it didn’t really matter much which.

For the first time in my life, I couldn’t will my emotions
to fall in line with my beliefs, and prayer to a god who seemed utterly silent
changed my desires not one single bit. I continued to love and want Brian all
year despite knowing that any marriage would almost certainly end in disaster
and despite a parade of short-term interests in his life.

It was me he always came back to, me he talked to.

“They have his body for a while,” I reasoned. “I always have
his unguarded honesty.”

It was enough. It had to be.

Much more than fighting Brian that year, I fought myself –
an internal war waged against feelings I “fell” into and felt helpless to
resist. I battled to make sense of it all, and to keep my distance.

I mostly lost.

It was simultaneously an exhilarating and excruciating year,
and by the end of it I felt dismantled from the inside out. During this year
that I attended one of the most celebrated bastions of Catholicism in the
country and lived within sight of the golden dome that crowned the basilica, my
surety in the existence of God as a foundational force granting shape, meaning,
and color to life dissolved.

By the time I left Notre Dame and headed for Los Angeles I
wondered whether everything that I’d been taught to believe and that I’d
thought I understood held even the echo of truth.
Whether all
those Sunday-school rules were just acting as mental and emotional blinkers
that I had, in large part, dutifully accepted.
Whether there was value
in abstinence of any sort in life.
 
And,
of course, one that had troubled me for a good sight longer than just that
year: how a loving, good, omnipotent God could possibly stand to hold back and
watch the bad unfurl alongside the good in the wilderness of freedom and
choice.

33,000
feet

More than four years later, on a flight to Vancouver, the
seat-belt sign dinged off. I stood up to retrieve my laptop from the overhead
bin and opened up a Word document.
 

How to explain all of this to Mike?

“I’ve told you that I came close to walking away from faith
altogether,” I started. “Perhaps a truer way of putting it would be that I came
close to dying in my tracks faith-wise. What I came up against while working in
prison didn't do
it,
and neither did the suffering I
saw around the world. The tipping point for me came when I went to Notre Dame
and fell in love with a playboy of an atheist who hated the fact that I was a
Christian.

“I spun out emotionally and spiritually that year.

“I didn’t do any of those things (pray, read the Bible, go
to church) that I'd been bought up to believe were, if not the things that got
me to heaven, at least the hallmarks of a healthy, vibrant faith. More than
anything, I wanted to take a long sabbatical from being a ‘good Christian’ and
do whatever the hell I wanted with my body and my life and my decisions about
right and wrong.

“You know that foggy gray that descends sometimes? That
stuck around in the core part of me for a very long time.

“But even when I was just keeping the rules for the sake of
it, even when all the genuine feeling had gone out of it and I was most
agonized in my doubts, I wanted there to be a god out there who loves us. I
didn't want to walk away, but I did feel like I was deeply mired in some sort
of enduring spiritual depression that probably accomplished much the same ends
as walking away defiantly would have.”

I stopped typing and stared out of the window beside me at
the view, thinking of this time in my life and other questions Mike had asked
me.

What had I done when my faith turned to aspartame?

I had moved to L.A. and almost crumbled under the solitary
weight of loneliness during my first four months there.

I had started to drink. I was no stranger to alcohol – in
Australia, drinking is right up there with mocking on the unofficial “national
sports” list. But during this time I crossed a line that I had never crossed
before. I started drinking alone, and then I started doing that most nights.
Sometimes I drank myself to sleep on the couch, waking up to terrible headaches
and empty bottles.

I had put up profiles on dating websites, looking to finally
leave behind the pain of an unrequited and impossible love.

I had reveled in the nourishing warmth of Jason’s affection
when it was lavished on me. I let him hold me too tightly, too close, because I
got something out of it, too.

I had seen the salvation of understanding in the words of a
stranger in Afghanistan and then chased him down across borders.
 

I had hardly stood still for a single second.

Out the window of the plane, the early-morning sun was
gilding the clouds below with a fresh golden pink. It was doubtless cloudy on
the ground, and still raining, but it was celestial up at thirty-three thousand
feet.
  

The seat-belt sign came back on and a voice above my head
warned me that we were about to start our descent. It was time to shut down all
electronics.

I looked down at my letter to Mike and added one more line
before turning off the computer.

“I don't feel like that way (spiritually depressed) anymore
– most of the time, anyway.”

Los
Angeles, USA

Some pivots are sudden, born of formative instants. Others
are long, slow arcs. With these, the change in direction becomes clear only
when you check your rearview mirror or raise your eyes to see a different vista
stretching out in front of you.

This is the sort of gradual pivot that has unfolded in my
life since the end of my relationship with Jason. I look back at that time now
with the same odd hybrid of recognition and puzzled wonder that ambushes me
whenever I see photographs of myself in high school staring down from the walls
of my parents’ house. In those photos my face is unlined and softly rounded. I
want to reach into those images and pinch my own cheeks.