God became man, so that man might become God. —St. Athanasius

What you find-ah / What you feel now / What you know-a / To be real —Cheryl Lynn

God is at home. It is we who have gone out for a walk. —Meister Eckhart

 

How do you talk about God to people who don’t believe that he even exists?

The strategies of argument, of theodicy, would seem to have worn thin at this cultural juncture. The old C.S. Lewis argument about Jesus having to be a liar, a lunatic, or who he said he was rings fairly hollow in a world where everyone seems to have gone mad.

I am not much given to arguing, anyhow. I am grown weary by the low metaphysical ceilings of my Christian brothers and sisters, both conservatives and liberals: the punishing and endless quests toward notions of purity (on the Right) and social justice (on the Left)—as though these mediated theologies were nothing more than elaborated means of sorting and exclusion.

Which is not to say that I do not believe that we are somehow excused from repenting of Structural Sins, or that I think the country is just fine the way it is. But too often, there is plenty of posturing and in-group signaling—even around such fun Christian buzz-phrases as the recently popular avowal that “We are all broken.”

And yet I find God unexpectedly breaks through, nonetheless. Here, offered for your consideration, are three (true) stories, encounters (for who else are the members of God’s body, but us, even when we don’t yet know it?):

1) My friend and former work colleague is a grandmother, African-American, Baptist. For years, as a volunteer, she has run the scholarship fund for young people at her African-American church.

The Sunday morning after the Emmanuel AME shootings in Charleston, my friend walked into the sanctuary after her Sunday school class and experienced a shock of recognition: Sitting in the pew was another former colleague of ours that she had not seen in a while, a white woman who did not attend the church, but who just thought, at that time of racial tension, that it was right to show up, be there, and sit as an act of reparation.

2) Among my neighborhood friends whose social lives have, like ours, periodically clustered around the local Catholic church and its school, was a couple who were about the best conversationalists ever at the January Casino Night: the wife, a straightforward auburn-haired Brooklynite from a big Irish Catholic family (think Alice McDermott, but funny), and her far older husband, a soft-spoken Midwesterner with an oblique humor about a painful upbringing and with memories of Vietnam that he shared with me once, over a beer, in the basement parish hall.

They had been together for a decade and a half when they adopted two children from Ethiopia, a brother and sister. Their faces shone with unexpected surprise at the riches that had arrived in their arms—and the father, with great seriousness, enrolled his son in the scouts’ den my husband and I led, making it clear that he wanted his son to try the tasks and skills that he himself had learned, like the knot-tying.

Then the father became sick, and sicker still, before getting better. And then, unexpectedly and swiftly, he died. The whole community came to the parish for the funeral and shared an afternoon drink at a party afterward that was both bright and sad at once. We are still mourning him, amidst the joy that his wife and children continue to bring to us.

There was still the matter of the son, whose hair needed cutting—and suddenly there stood up another neighbor of ours, the African-American husband in an interracial couple, who guided the boy to the barber shop, and thus to the whole world it entails in black culture. Who, for the space of an afternoon, became the surrogate father.

That kind man’s name is Joseph.

3)      My brother said to me once that he felt like the Kristen Wiig character in the movie Bridesmaids—the one who could never get it right, the one for whom plans and good intentions kept going awry.

After my mother had disappeared decisively into her Alzheimer’s, when the final moving-out phase of my mother’s house had fallen to him, he was left in charge of a modest, almost-empty fifties house, its emptiness even more plain with his footsteps on bare linoleum echoing against pine-paneled walls.

There was still my father’s safe: a heavy steel console, old-school, with walls a third of a foot thick—the kind of thing that might have fallen on the Road Runner’s head in a Looney Tunes cartoon. It was filled with silver dollars and old legal documents and had literally been built behind the wall of the closet in the room that my brothers had shared. My brother had been on the verge of leaving it behind for whomever would buy the house.

Are you sure you want to do that? a good friend of his said. It was your father’s safe.

Yes, my brother said to him. It will be impossible to get it out. Might as well forget it.

Oh, come on now, the friend insisted. It’s worth a try. The following weekend, at a family reunion, this friend enlisted the help of a handful of cousins to attempt to get the safe out.

They struggled, at first, one time and another, to pull the safe out of its odd horizontal positioning in the bedroom closet. There was some question whether they would have to cut into the wall to get the safe free. And then at last, they managed to motion it out just so, and the weight of memory and decades came forth—our father, no less, returned to my brother, given back.

Tell me that there is no God in those stories.