One night when I was riding my bike home from class I could suddenly feel for the first time what it would be like to be Godless. Just suddenly, in that random moment. My body, my heart—they felt it. I could sense the emptiness, the space it left in my world. I could see the blankness of it. A life without God. For the first time, it felt completely possible and not altogether terrible.
I had not been able to imagine that before. Maybe I thought I had. Maybe I had considered my brief periods of doubt equivalent to not believing at all, but they weren’t. Not really. What I felt that night in Oxford, and subsequent nights, was real. And it was strikingly dark.
I’ve been so naive, I thought.
For as many wine and cheese nights as there were—or nights when the questions didn’t stop and the Godlessness felt all too possible—for as many nights like that as there were, there were days with Jisu.
Whenever I met up with Jisu, I felt myself relax again the way I did the very first time we met. It was as if I had been holding my breath, holding it all in, and then suddenly sitting on a couch beside my friend with a mug of something warm in my hand, I could let it seep out. The breath. The truth of who I was. I could put aside the running dialogue in my head (God is a comforting thought for me. It is nice to believe in him. It does make me feel better. Is that all it is for me? Maybe that’s all it is for me…) and not worry so much.
It’s not that Jisu and I had deep conversations about apologetics or that we read the Bible together or prayed. We didn’t do those things. We were just friends who hung out and talked like normal people, but something about his presence, something about his nearness brought the exact amount of encouragement I needed at that exact time.
When I couldn’t, I knew Jisu talked to God. I didn’t know this because he told me. I knew because in Jisu’s spirit was a quietness and a steadiness. He was made up of something solid and possessed a firmness in his faith that I wanted and that I leaned on, whether I knew I was leaning on it or not.
Until I arrived in Oxford, I had taken pride in a very individual and personal, somewhat private, faith. I had quiet times. I had good prayer times with my Jesus, and I hadn’t relied much on others when it came to spiritual growth and understanding. I liked being by myself. I liked reading my Bible alone and learning things that I could tell others later. I liked coming to conclusions on my own. My faith became private to the point that anyone else coming along to “help” me would have felt like an interruption. I didn’t need them. I had God. And God and I had had a good thing going since I was about fourteen years old. That’s when I read through the Gospels for the first time and felt forever changed. Others need not mess that up.
I wonder if a part of my individualism came from my place in the church community, my role as the preacher’s daughter. In the church of my childhood, and still today, there is a prayer time at the end of the service. Several members of the congregation, called “prayer partners,” line the front of the auditorium, and the rest of the congregation is invited to come forward for prayer. No one told me I shouldn’t go forward, but I didn’t think I was allowed to. I never even considered it. Not once. What would people think if I, Andrea Lucado, went forward for prayer? They would think I needed help. They would think my prayer life was not strong enough on its own. They would think something was wrong with me or my family. I saved the prayer partners for those who were brave enough to be prayed over in public, and I kept my prayers, issues, problems, and concerns private. No one taught me to do this. It was just one of those lessons I had told myself over time—that as a member of my family, not only did I need to have my life together on the outside, but I needed to have my spiritual life together also. What was on the outside needed to match the inside. Going forward for prayer meant I needed a mediator between me and God. It meant that I, on my own, was not strong enough to talk to him myself. And that weakness, no matter how real and true it was, was not a side of me I was willing to show others. Not yet and not there, in my home church.
In Oxford, I maintained my private faith the best I knew how. I read my Bible, as was my morning habit. I did a Beth Moore Bible study. I journaled. I did the tasks, the writing, and the studying. The things I had been doing faithfully since I was fourteen years old. I could read, write, study. Those actions were not the obstacle for me there. It was the conversation part that was hard. In Oxford, my conversations with God were quieter. They felt strange, almost awkward, as if the God I was trying to talk to in England was not the same God I had always talked to back home in Texas. Our talks often felt one-sided. When I prayed, I hit dead ends. Was God disappearing as I began to imagine and understand life without him? Was I making him disappear? And if he was disappearing, how could I talk to a disappearing someone?
Maybe this is why I talked to Jisu more than I talked to God that year. Because at some point, your morning quiet times are finally so quiet they only echo your own voice back to you. “Anyone out there? Anyone out there? Anyone?” What you want instead, what you need, isn’t God, but someone, a physical real-person someone, to show you the way. You want to talk to someone who you know is talking to God, even if you can’t or just don’t want to.
The people who talk to God can do a lot for you and for your faith if you let them. I once heard author and pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber speak. During the question and answer session at the end, a guy stood up and said, “I had faith and it was strong, but now I’m doubting. I feel weak in my faith. What should I do?”
Bolz-Weber’s suggestion? “You can take a break now. Let someone else on the pew be strong for you.”
I like this idea of giving each other permission to take a break from trying and let the others on the pew be strong for us for a little while. As you boomerang from one dead end to another, the stronger ones take you by your shoulders. Right where you are, facing that dark stone wall, they place their hands on you and gently turn you around to point you toward something bright, toward something true. I have a name for these people who are nice enough to take me by my shoulders and point me in the direction I should go. I call them my “front lights,” and I’ll tell you why.
One cold and dark night in Oxford, I was the victim of a theft.
To ride a bike legally in Oxford, you are required to have a headlight and a taillight. Or as we called them there, front lights and back lights. These lights were hot commodities for thieves, who I suppose sold them or added them to some strange Ariel-esque collection of worthless trinkets in their cupboards. To keep the thieves away, it was important to own detachable lights so that whenever you left your bike, you could take your lights with you and then reattach them when you returned. It sounds like a lot of effort to go through, but it was one of those things that everybody did, so I did it too.
One night, when out at a pub, I forgot to take my lights inside, and I didn’t remember them until we were walking out to leave.
“My lights!” I yelled. “I forgot to take them off. Do you think someone stole them?” I ran to where I had parked my bike. The lights were still there. Still attached, in the same place I had left them.
“No one stole my lights!” I exclaimed.
“Oh, that’s a relief,” my friend said. I got on my bike and flipped on my lights. Nothing happened. I tried again. On. Off. On. Nothing.
“Did it burn out?” I asked.
“Must need new batteries.”
“Hmm…” I opened the battery compartment and inside I found only one battery where there should have been two.
My lights had not been stolen, but someone, apparently in desperate need of a single AA battery, had swiped one from my front light.
“Someone stole a single battery from me?” I looked at my friend in disgust.
It would have been better if they had taken the entire thing. Instead, they took the time to remove my light, open the compartment, take one battery out, and then reattach my light. It felt weird, and intrusive. Like someone had dug through my underwear drawer and then put it all back. I
felt violated. I felt annoyed.
“Who would do that?” I asked rhetorically.
“I don’t know; that is really odd. I guess you’ll just have to buy some new batteries.”
My friend was clearly not as bothered as I was.
“No,” I said, shocked at her suggestion. “He should pay for it. The thief should pay.” Though I didn’t see it, I’m sure my friend rolled her eyes as she rode away.
I remained defiant about the battery for weeks. Refusing to buy a new pack, and simply forgetting to buy them each time I went to the store. Mechanically I would reach down to flip my front light on, forgetting it needed a battery, and then I’d remember. Each time I did this I got angrier at the mysterious battery thief. It was an unhealthy cycle that had a simple solution, but I chose to keep it complicated.
My front light being out bugged Jisu. He didn’t think it was safe for me to ride without it, so for a few weeks, he always rode in front of me at night.
“I’ll be your front light,” he told me.
“Oh, I’ll be fine. I don’t need one.”
“Andrea, it’s illegal not to have one, and you won’t be able to see.” He was right, so for a few weeks, I surrendered. Any time we were out somewhere together at night, he would ride in front of me. It was uncomfortable at first. Independence isn’t just an issue I have with my faith. I felt bad that he would go out of his way just to ride his bike in front of me until I got home or that he would wait until I was ready to leave just so I could have a light to guide me. But after a while, I got used to it. I even liked it.
One night when I was leaving Jisu’s house, he loaned me his headlamp to be my front light. He put it on me, stretching it over my wool beanie, and standing very close to me. I made my old arguments.
“I’ll be fine. I don’t need it this time. Really. Is it even legally considered a front light if it’s attached to my head?” He ignored me and smiled, tightening and adjusting until it felt just right.
“I feel ridiculous. Do I look ridiculous?” He didn’t answer and despite my self-consciousness, I didn’t take it off. He was probably wondering why this American girl couldn’t just buy some batteries already, but even if he was thinking that, he didn’t say it out loud. He didn’t make me feel guilty or ridiculous. He simply gave me his headlamp.
Jisu even texted me before class one night, “Do you need me to come get you after class tonight? To be your front light?”
My school sat at the top of Headington Hill, and Headington Hill was admittedly steep, not a hill you would want to attempt in the dark. Of course picking me up after class meant riding up Headington Hill, which was about a mile long. This didn’t deter Jisu from offering.
I don’t think my French cycling buddy, Gabriel, would have offered to pick me up from class at the top of Headington Hill. Jisu was a far superior riding buddy.
Jisu, my front light.
I think if the sun suddenly shut off and you took an aerial shot from space of a crowded street anywhere in the world, you would see a mix of front lights and the people who follow them. The ones holding the front light saying, “Hey, I’ve been there. I’ve done that. Follow me.” And you would see the followers, the ones following the light carriers, holding the hand of the friend in front who waits patiently and faithfully.
Even when it looks like it, even when it feels like it, no one is really doing this faith thing alone. No one can do it alone. We simply wouldn’t be able to find our way. Not without our front lights; not without being a front light for someone else.
Around the time of that other journal entry, I also wrote this: “It’s the faith of other people that is keeping mine alive right now.” I thought it was wrong for me to confess to this and write this, even to my own journal. But really, I was onto something.
Sometimes faith comes very naturally, and sometimes everything we’ve ever believed is suddenly thrust under a microscope and we are forced to examine it. It’s okay to look. In fact, please look. Because if you don’t, what are you looking at instead?
I like what Oswald Chambers says about this: “Always make a practice to stir your own mind thoroughly to think through what you have easily believed. Your position is not really yours until you make it yours through suffering and study.”*
So suffer. Study. And find a front light.
I should have, but I didn’t take Jisu up on his offer to ride with me home from class. I rode down alone, hoping no one would catch me riding illegally, hoping there were no invisible potholes in my path, relying only on the sporadic puddles of yellow light projected by streetlamps, ignoring a little corner of my psyche and my heart that wished Jisu were riding ahead of me.
* * *
* Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest, ed. James Reimann (Grand Rapids: Discovery House, 1992), December 15.
4
The Atheist Society
Ben came to Christmas Eve service with me, so it was my turn to go to the weekly Atheist Society meeting with him. The Atheist Society was a group of Oxford students who gathered around their common disbelief in God. The society was mostly made up of Oxford Oxford students, but they accepted students like us, who went to Brookes. Ben was a member and attended faithfully, just as I attended St. Aldate’s. In 2009 the official name for this group was the Oxford Atheist Society, but in 2010 they merged with the Oxford Secular Society to form a group called Oxford Atheists, Secularists and Humanists. When we attended and when Ben was a member, it was just the good ole Atheist Society, so that is what I will call it.
When I met Ben in one of my classes at Brookes, I didn’t expect us to become friends. He was not like the guys I knew at school back home. He was a devout atheist. He was reserved, quiet, watchful, in a way that made me wonder what was going on in his head. He told me once that he wasn’t a big fan of daylight. Daylight in general, that is. Like, the sun. He didn’t really like the sun. This was during the height of the Twilight frenzy, so for a very brief second, I wondered if Ben was a vampire.
A lot about him was very mysterious to me. He was in the middle of writing a young adult novel about something that sounded smart. He didn’t feel the need to act cooler than he was, and he didn’t feel the need to turn in papers on time or worry about his grades. He was a trained pianist, and his side job that year was as a reader for a girl in our class who was blind. Each week he read aloud to her whatever required reading she had. Required reading for our course was a few hundred pages per week, so that sounded like the worst job in the world to me and, therefore, elevated Ben to saint status.
Right away Ben was kind to me. He laughed at my jokes that weren’t funny. He seemed genuinely interested in me, where I came from, what I was about. He invited me to meet up with him for coffee before class. He was the first person I met at school to whom I confided my faith. By the way he reacted, with a smile and genuine curiosity, I knew Ben was a safe person I could share with. I knew I could be myself around him.
In mid-December I invited several of my school friends to the St. Aldate’s Christmas Eve service. Ben was the only one who showed up. He wanted to hear the music.
“I hope you play ‘In the Bleak Midwinter,’ ” he told me. “That’s my favorite hymn.”
Of course it is, I thought.
I think church lived in a strange place in Ben’s heart, somewhere between love and disdain. He had played the piano for his church at home, a church he began to attend after he became a Christian at age sixteen and a church he quit attending after he decided he was no longer a Christian at age eighteen. I never knew the Christian version of Ben. I only ever knew the atheist version, but I think both are equally kind, open, listening, and accepting. And both would have spent hours a week reading to a blind student.
In the winter, in the dark, in our coats, Ben and I met up at a pub in the center of town for my first Atheist Society meeting. My attendance was comical, but only to me and Ben. The others had no idea who I was or how much I didn’t belong. I think that was the thing�
��no one didn’t belong at the Atheist Society meetings. They didn’t check names at the door or seem to really care if you were a true atheist or not. It was simply a social gathering, an opportunity for students to meet other students, like a Campus Crusade for Christ event or a Young Life event, only smaller and without music and religion. And instead of meeting in a classroom or a church, we were in a bar. We did, however, have games.
Upon arrival, we broke off into teams for an atheist-themed pub quiz. For one of the questions, we had to draw an imagined Darwinian species that might live one thousand years from now. We were to use our imaginations and give it a name, and then we would share it with the other groups. Ben and I basically drew a circle and then slapped on every animal appendage we could think of: fins, tails, hooves, claws, wings. Our poor, ugly, nameless Darwinian creature. We didn’t win that question, but somehow, even though we were a team of Brookes students and one of us was a Christian, we won the overall quiz. We laughed about our ironic victory all the way home.
The president of the society was a spunky auburn-haired girl who was in her final year at Oxford. She wore a denim skirt over leggings. The skirt was a size too tight for her, in my opinion, but I admired her confidence. I wondered about her as she got up to give announcements. I liked her. She was vibrant, a natural leader. I saw her once, weeks later, walking down a sidewalk when I was leaving a coffee shop. I almost ran her down to say hi. She seemed like the type who would have liked that, but I didn’t do it.
English Lessons Page 5