During the Atheist Society meeting, I thought a lot about my potential involvement with the group. Should I come again? Should I be a member? Would people be friends with me here? Would I come with the intent to evangelize? Would it be wrong if I did? Would it be wrong if I didn’t? In that room I felt the need to be accepted by those around me. The same need I felt in any other room of people I also felt here with those I had considered to be the most opposite of me. Perhaps I even felt it more strongly with the society of atheist people. I wanted them to see me beyond my religion, yet I knew that at my core I was my religion.
My religion. What did it look like to them? Maybe they considered it something you grow out of. Maybe they, like Ben, thought Christianity is the result of passionate, emotionally stimulating conferences that have little or nothing to do with actual life, that will fade once you get home and go to church and see only dead souls in alive bodies sitting on the pews. And that, like Ben, after a couple of years, you close the cover to the piano one last time and walk out the door.
The church of my teen years looked nothing like the church of Ben’s teen years. Mine was a gym-turned-auditorium with room for eighteen hundred people. Golf carts carried people from their parking spaces to the building’s doors. Hundreds of others my age were there sharing what I believe, trying to be good, then messing up on Saturday nights and trying to be good again until we finally started to get it—that it actually has nothing to do with doing or good.
I rode in my mom’s car every Sunday morning, fighting with my sisters about who was wearing my sweater without asking me first and begging my mom to let me wear my favorite brown lipstick. Donut glaze still sticking to my fingers, I dialed my friends’ numbers to make sure they were saving me a seat in the back, with our other friends. I stayed after service until the lights were turned out. And when I got bored, I looked for my parents and my sisters to find out where we were going to lunch and how soon we could leave. We all did it. Everyone significant in my teen years went to church, either with me to mine or with their families to theirs. Either way, family and friends were there.
How different this must have been for my kind friend Ben. He grew up in a city north of Oxford, where he attended a small church. The church looked like what you might think a church would look like in the English countryside. Small, stone, and old with weathered gravestones in the yard. He told me he had become a Christian at a camp. He went home thrilled with this new discovery of Jesus. He began to attend the old stone church. He played the piano during service. He attended for as long as he could but found few others there who were like him. Most were older, much older, and seemed to attend only because it was what they did more than because it was what they believed.
I wonder if Ben arrived at church alone and left alone. I wonder if it took a long time or any time at all for the high of the camp to wear off and the reality of religion in an English village to set in. I wonder what it was he needed that he lacked. Was it more faith, or was it more faithful people around him? I wonder if the preacher at his church asked Ben any questions. If he or she tried to get to know him. If anyone there cared about who he was, or if they simply liked his piano playing. I wonder if anyone knew his name.
I wonder what it was like for him that day, the day he closed the piano and walked out the wooden church doors for the last time.
I volunteered at a Christian summer camp right after college. I remember one night a camper approached one of the other counselors, very concerned for his girlfriend.
“Sally lost her faith,” he said. Shaking his head, distraught.
“What? She lost her faith?” the counselor asked.
“Yeah. It’s just, it’s gone. She doesn’t believe anymore.”
On the final night, the emotional skit night that gets kids all revved up and even more emotional than their teenage selves already are, that same guy approached the counselor again, excited this time.
“Sally got her faith back!”
“What?” the counselor asked.
“Her faith! It’s back!”
If Sally’s boyfriend had only known Ben, someone who actually did manage to “lose his faith,” the story would have been problematic for him, as it was for me.
At Christian summer camp what you hear most are accounts of teenagers who become Christians at a camp just like the one you are at, teenagers whose lives are changed from drinking and drugs to Jesus. Now, here they are, preaching at camp. You hear about the success stories. You don’t hear about the tragic ones as often, the failures. The kids who had a moment and accepted Christ and then went home and felt alone and couldn’t help but feel betrayed.
I didn’t want that to be Ben’s story. We don’t want that to be anyone’s story. It means that we failed. It means that we’re not foolproof in this conversion thing. And I think right now I’m supposed to blame Ben and say it was him. He was the one who never believed in the first place. But the problem with that is, I know Ben. Well, I knew Ben, and he was smart and he was not gullible and he was not the type to be swept up into something if he hadn’t thoughtfully considered it first. He was not Sally, feeding off the drama of Christian church camp. For him, believing in Christ was as conscious and well-thought-out a decision as un-believing in Christ was later.
The arguments we have about these “faith failures” hold up only until you are friends with said faith failures. It’s easy to say things are one way or another until you become friends with someone who is not one way or another, but rather somewhere in between. The labels we like to slap on people from a distance begin to peel off as we get closer to them.
It was interesting though. Ben didn’t have the bitter edge I thought he should have. Christianity had failed him. We Christians had tricked him into believing something that wasn’t true, and then we weren’t even nice enough to convince him, this eighteen-year-old kid, to stick around. Even though I represented and championed this establishment he had walked away from, Ben was a good and consistent friend for me in Oxford. Whenever we met up in the cafeteria for coffee before class, he always wanted to discuss my latest blog post. He was the most avid reader of my blog, aside from my parents, and his enthusiasm encouraged me to keep writing. It was Ben who introduced me one morning to the British breakfast delicacy of beans on toast. We suffered through Shakespeare lectures together. We sat at the Oxford library side by side. I worked on papers for class while he edited his novel. We had conversations over wine and cheese about religion and lots of other things. And, of course, we boasted for weeks about winning the quiz at the Oxford Atheist Society.
Yes, Ben was a good friend, but he puzzled me. I could not figure out where he fit. I had my categories of people and where they are in their walks of faith, and he was not defined by any of those. He had gone rogue. He had created his own path away from mine.
Ben was a Christian anomaly, a creature with no name.
I didn’t understand. Who could learn the teachings of Christ and not hold fast to them? Who sees this thing, the Cross, where all your bad and dirty, disgusting, terrible and shameful parts have gone to die so that you rise up from being flat on your face a completely new person—who experiences that and says, “No, no thank you”? How does it not stick, take hold, transform? What goes wrong? What synapse forgets to send the message of eternity and wholeness and purity, justification, redemption? Where is the link that went missing?
What happened to Ben? What happens to so many others? The ones who felt the warmth of light but said they prefer the cold of darkness. That they prefer it to sunlight.
I wish I could tell you, but I don’t know. I have no theological response for you. All I know from Ben and his story is that people are more complicated than we want them to be. No one can ever live up to the names we give them.
Other people are not us. They did not go to church each Sunday in a gym-turned-auditorium with room for eighteen hundred. They didn’t all have friends to call to make sure they were saving them seats. Each person we know
has gotten to where he or she is via a different route than our own. The people who raised them, the things they saw, the lessons they learned, they are different from our experiences. And while we cannot expect everyone to get into our heads and understand us, we can try to get out of our own, at least for a minute or two, and understand others. It’s not easy. It takes practice, time, and concentration. It does not come naturally for us, we quick-to-categorize-and-slow-to-understand types. But I think if we knew and believed in the complicated layering that is each and every one of us, more Christians would befriend atheists, and more atheists would befriend Christians. More “others” would befriend their own “others,” in all categories.
Today, I think I do understand Ben a little better than I did then. I get the appeal of darkness. I have lived entire days, weeks, and months choosing it over light. I get not being a fan of sunlight. I get that. But somewhere along the way, light took up residence in me. It said, “I’m here and I’m not going anywhere, no matter how many times you shove me down and choose something less, something cold, something devoid.” It has been persistent with me, and I’m not sure why, but I’m grateful it has.
As we are prone to do with things we don’t understand or are afraid of or that threaten what we know to be true, slowly I began to let go of Ben. I released him without knowing. When the weather stopped being freezing cold and I was feeling more settled into Oxford and its rhythm, I stopped calling Ben as much, and then when classes were over, I stopped seeing him altogether. The unsolvable puzzle. The uncategorizable. The unbeliever. The “un” to all of my “how it should be.”
One of the last times I saw Ben, he was leaving the library. I saw him clearly, but he couldn’t see me. He was several yards away and walking in the other direction. I should have said “hi” or “hey” or “wait up” or something, but I couldn’t. I didn’t go after him. I let him walk away, and I stood still and watched.
The only thing I knew to do with Ben was nothing at all.
5
The Faith of Our Fathers
Beliefs, convictions, morals. They are ice cubes in our hands. If we hold them too tightly, if we bury them in our palms and wrap our fingers around them, they melt. We think we’re protecting them, but we’re not. We melt them with our ignorance and refusal to see both sides of an argument. We melt them ourselves and can’t blame an unhappy circumstance or a friend who was a bad influence when we look down and our hands are dripping.
I held many ice cubes when I arrived in Oxford, and it took no time at all for them to melt away. Another country, another culture, new friends with unfamiliar beliefs and morals—they were warm breath blown on my precious truths and how-it-should-be’s.
One night when Oxford was still new, I went to a housewarming party for an acquaintance from church. There I met a guy who was in Oxford to study apologetics for the year. I cornered him. In the living room for several minutes, maybe an hour, I drilled this guy about why I should believe what I believed. At the time I had become very preoccupied with this question: Would I still be a Christian if I had not been raised in a Christian home?
“What I’m struggling with,” I said to the guy, “is that no one at my school is a Christian. Or it feels that way. My friend Ben, who I meet up with for coffee before class, asked me all these questions about being a Christian, and he seemed so interested, and then he said that he had converted to Christianity at sixteen and two years later renounced his faith. How does that happen? And his arguments? They make sense. And I don’t like that. I don’t have anything smart to say back. Everyone here is smart, and they know all these things and have read all these books, and I’m over here like, ‘Hey guys. My dad’s a preacher, and I’m a Christian, but now that you’re asking, I’m not really sure why, and I’m not really sure if I would be a Christian today if I hadn’t been raised as one—’ ”
“So,” my new friend kindly interrupted, “I can see that you have a few questions about…things. Why don’t you come with me to one of my lectures this week?”
“Seriously? Am I allowed? I would love to,” I said as if I were talking to the cool girl at school who had just invited me to her birthday party.
“Yeah, sure. You can come. I have one this Thursday morning at nine.”
“Oh, I will be there! Thank you so much. That’s exactly what I need—an apologetics lecture. I’ll learn everything I need to know. Thank you, really. I can’t wait.”
“Yeah, me either.” He smiled, backing away. “See you Thursday.”
The lecturer that Thursday turned out to be John Lennox, one of the most renowned apologists in the world. At Oxford Oxford, he was a math professor, but he also lectured at the Oxford Center for Christian Apologetics, where my friend from the party was studying. The class was held in the basement of an old building that looked like a big house across the street from University Parks in north Oxford. I had to walk downstairs to find the classroom. That’s all it was. A small room with a few rows of desks and windows up high near the ceiling—an unassuming venue for someone of Lennox’s caliber.
I spotted my friend from the party sitting at a desk in the middle of the room.
“Hey!” he said waving me over. “I saved this desk for you.”
“Thanks,” I said, still a little breathless from my bike ride over. I looked around. “Are you sure it’s okay I’m here?”
“Yeah, yeah. Sure. I told Professor Lennox you were coming. He’s fine with guests.”
“Oh, okay. Well, good. I brought things to take notes.” I laid out my pens and opened my notebook. I was prepared to write down everything this man had to say. I was prepared to learn all about why I was a Christian and how to defend my faith.
Lennox walked into the room, and everyone quieted down. He was bald on top with dark eyebrows. His dress was casual, and nothing about his appearance was overly intimidating. He didn’t seem to notice an outsider in his class, and he made pleasantries with the students in the front row. I sat poised, pen in hand. Brain ready to absorb. He began.
During the hour, Lennox homed in on one takeaway point: we can indeed prove the existence of God using science. We do not need to step away from academics for a moment in order to find him. He can be proven using the same knowledge that disproves him every day. That’s all I remember. Today that is all that is left from the lecture given by this famous apologist. It was the closest I will probably ever be to someone of his academic stature. I don’t know where that notebook is in which I was so furiously taking notes. I don’t remember why we can prove God’s existence with science. I don’t remember which part of science he used that day to prove it. Or maybe he used an equation? What I do remember is walking away from that classroom confident that someone much smarter than I am felt certain we could prove God’s existence and that we had. What helped me that day, more than the details of the lecture, was a man who had gone before, who had asked these same questions and had somehow logically found the answers. And this confidence that lay in someone else’s confidence comforted me greatly.
Well before the Lennox lecture, the first man who gave me this type of confidence in my faith was my father. My dad. My first pastor. “He has the gift of faith,” my mom always says. It’s true. His beliefs are steady, and I realize now how much hope my father’s faith gave me in those young, formative years.
As a little girl I used to study my dad’s hands during church before he got up to speak. I would run my finger along his calluses and comment on how dry his skin was. His hands felt enormous compared to mine, wrinkled, strong. Ugly, really. Compared to my mom’s delicate hands, which I also loved to study, my dad’s hands were not pretty. Yet looking at them, holding them, studying them—it comforted me. It comforts me now to even think about them, and that they probably look the same. Perhaps there are more calluses and wrinkles. I know they are still dry.
When I was young, his hands could have swallowed mine in a fist, and I imagined my whole body could have been held tightly in them, protect
ed. When I didn’t understand how God could hold the whole world in his hands, I understood how my father could hold me in his. His hands were big enough and strong enough. I understood that.
Our childish theologies are formed by pictures of our fathers, whether our fathers are present or not, kind or not. My father was comforting. This is why my faith grew so dependent on my dad’s. Not because he stood at the pulpit each day, but because I would stare at his hands and examine them before he did.
John Lennox is a brilliant man who helped me and, I’m sure, the others who took his class, but my confidence in my father’s faith is different; it’s sturdier. I rely on it more often than the Lennox arguments I vaguely remember, and I wonder, Is this okay? To rely so much on my father’s, my pastor’s, faith? Is it okay to be a Christian because I was raised in a Christian home?
I once overheard a friend in Oxford say, “It’s a form of child abuse for parents to force their own religious beliefs on their children.” This was so shocking to me. I had always been grateful to have been brought up by Christian parents. I had not felt abused because we read the storybook Bible at night and listened to Adventures in Odyssey on cassette tape. I felt loved because of these things. I can see how someone who has not experienced the hope of the gospel might feel teaching Christian faith to children is imposing, maybe even harmful, but if you believe Jesus saves you, wouldn’t it be wrong to not share that with your children?
Saying I’m a Christian because my father is a Christian was no argument for my atheist and agnostic friends in class, yet it was the argument I had those months in Oxford, maybe that entire year. It is the argument I have at times today when I feel God more closely and more intimately and I have a harder time disbelieving him than believing. Is it a weakness? To rely on the faith of those who have gone before us, to rely on the faith of our fathers? If you are like me, does it make us weak?
English Lessons Page 6