“Still all this beauty bows my head down
And it also props me up.” —Reva Williams

Most of my Boston friends and I share similar religious backgrounds. To varying degrees, we each consider ourselves expatriates of a sort from mainline Evangelicalism. We were raised by parents who came into their own in the iconoclastic 1970s, when Contemporary Christian Music first exploded into Evangelical America, and Urbana and Campus Crusade and Youth for Christ became household names and Keith Green created New Wave ascetic communes in the suburbs.

At some point, we’ve all taught abstinence bible studies and given out tracts to poor people in Mexico. We’ve sung praise choruses and old hymns set to John Denver melodies. We’ve been catechized and have read Passion and Purity and later, Blue like Jazz. We’ve stayed up late having arguments about predestination and free will. We can distinguish between Calvin and Zwingli, Wesley and Moody. We all owned a few Michael W. Smith albums. We know what the phrase “crossover” means when applied to popular music. We can all explain a wordless bracelet.

We are expatriates because, though we know that world well and though we value the people who still inhabit it, we can no more return there wholly than Fitzgerald could have returned to America or Joyce to Ireland. Our reasons for this are as varied as we are, and I can only speak for myself.

I still believe very much in God. I still believe in the Devil. I still (probably, and this is a recent point of contention with my father) believe in a literal heaven and a literal hell. I’m not comfortable addressing God as “She.” I go to one of those “smells and bells” liturgical Episcopal churches every Sunday. I say my Morning and Evening prayers and Compline. I’m as uncomfortable with purely liberal theology as I am with most “emergent” churches.

But when I attend a service (15 to 20 minutes of music and prayer, 45 minute sermon) that fits well within the bounds of evangelical theology, I find myself getting really angry. I get angry either because I feel like people are being oversimplified to the point of anecdotal absurdity (my favorite convention of the bad PCA Presbyterian sermon being the “Straw Man Liberal”) or people are being emotionally manipulated (I have sometimes referred to the atmosphere of “contemporary worship” as emotional masturbation) or cliches are being done to death or systematic theology is being wielded as a stick to beat people with or I find I’m simply expected to content myself with being treated like an idiot.

Now, that’s a bit harsh, and I know many brilliant people who stay in evangelical churches and are very happy. I often wish I was one of those people. Right now, I’m just not.

It may be as simple as aesthetics. Or it may be as simple as this: I was an earnestly insecure and sensitive child, who left her teen years with a lot of bruises, and church has been an easy place to point the finger of blame. If I had to do over again, I’m not sure I would have chosen any differently. The thought of a childhood without God or church in it does sound very much like hell.

However my friends and I have arrived at our varied forms of religion, we have each other, and we have our own ritualized traditions. Every year we get together (the last two years in New Haven, CT) for Thanksgiving. We spend all day decorating the living room with candles and flowers and lovely plates. We set out an increasingly elaborate cheese plate around 4 pm. Dinner is fancy dress by candlelight, and we each of us prepare our standard dishes. Kim makes the turkey. Nathan makes the stuffing. I make mashed potatoes. Phil makes pecan pie. Midway through the dinner, we make our way around the table and each of us says what we are thankful for. We make toasts. We say prayers. This year, there were many grateful tears.

Just last weekend, I was able to see my friends Katie and Nathan again. They came down to lecture and perform at a cultural aymposium at the high school where I teach. When the symposium ended, we made our way down to New Orleans for a couple of days.

Sitting at the Ritz-Carlton over cocktails, we began to puzzle over why sitting there felt like an almost sacramental experience—the hushed candlelight, the barely illuminated chintz seating, the lovely china. While we shared a braised duck gumbo and munched on wasabi peas, we wondered why, having been raised by parents who tended to see these things as superfluous or pretentious at best and unchristian at worst, they seemed to be so important to us, why the lovely and the fine seem to have such redemptive significance.

I don’t know the answer. I don’t know why my first impulse upon entering the Ritz that night was to cry. I don’t know why I cry every time I take the Eucharist. I don’t know why I cry every time the piney Advent incense wafts across the stone floor of my church. I don’t know why the catalyst for my emotions seems always to be candlelight, barely flickering.

I return mentally to the Vacation Bible School of my youth—to the white and blue felt figure of Jesus, always smiling, on a board. There we sang, again and again, “This little light of mine / I’m going to let it shine.”

And so it goes. The Spirit passes over the evangelical and over those still wandering. The beauty of a still room buoys us. The little light we have flickers, sometimes blazes, on the horizon. And so it goes. And so we hope the light at last will guide us all home.