Jesus Girls 8 comments

By Laura Bramon Good

I stopped trying—and failing—to read the Bible every single day sometime in my twenty-seventh year. It was autumn, damp, cool, and cloud-webbed, and I remember the sense that a great tree in my heart was slowly rocking at its roots, dislodging from the dirt to which it had hewn.

It was a very silent time; I did not know who to tell or how to say that I had chosen this particular exile. Somehow, the very act of saying it out loud—confessing it with my mouth and believing it with my heart—was too final a severance and too deep a concession to the habits of home.

It is amusing that among women born and bred in Evangelical America, so many exiles happen in this silent, polite way. When I say that it is amusing, I am tapping that word carefully, choosing it for its power to express both affection and concern. It is amusing that we ease our way between faith and doubt and bear such fear of admitting it to one another—or, if we swing with the pendulum, fall into communities where confessions of faith are as taboo as confessions of doubt once were.

I saw myself in the silences chronicled in Jesus Girls, an anthology of “true tales of growing up female and evangelical” edited by Hannah Faith Notess. There is the silence felt by the woman who savored the anonymity of standing in a new church where she was known to no one; the silence of the young missionary who experienced a furtive sense of kinship with the Islamic worshipers at a floating mosque in India; even the silence or the woman who recalls choking politely on a tea biscuit while doing a Bible study about the book Lady In Waiting.

While contemporary culture seems to hold that vocal dissent is the most valid initiation into (and proof of) adulthood, we often ease our way into our voices—if we ever find them at all.

Does silence win us anything beyond a martyr’s crown or a quiverfull of the skeptic’s punch lines? It’s a question I have often considered in observing my own life and the lives of my sisters and close friends, and the first and last essays of Jesus Girls seem to speak most directly to it.

In Sara Zarr’s tale of the dissolution of her 1970s California Jesus Freak faith and Jessie van Eerden’s rumination on worship-words, silence is in the warp and weft of hope, introspection, violation. It is less a state of shame that sets up an exclamation of judgment and more a deceptive passivity, a meditative middle-world each woman travels on her way to expression. It is a silence that seems closer to the kind suggested by another wayside Jesus Girl, Simone Weil, who dreamt of a “freedom of expression...characterized not so much by freedom as by an attentive silence in which the faint and inept cry can make itself heard.”

I think that kind of silence is what I was searching the autumn that I put away my Bible—or, more accurately, put away a particular kind of shame and tried to sense, instead, what hunger it might be masking.

At its strongest, Jesus Girls taps into this desire, understanding that for the women brought up in Evangelical America, the strongest testimonies are not nurtured in either inept concessions or shrewish rejections, but in the stretches of silence where questions, faith, hope, and humility best incubate.