FADE OUT
It was all adding up. We were both moving to the South. We had found each other in Oxford, of all places. The timing of it was like a fairy tale. But the audience knows that when things are going really well, they are going too well. Meeting Biceps felt like a wonderful and miraculous stroke of fate, with a hint of impending disaster. I knew that although we were in the same place physically, we weren’t really in the same place…spiritually. The whole Jesus thing. The whole liberal thing, and the fact I still wasn’t sure what that meant. These were things I knew I needed to consider, and I would, but not yet. Not in Oxford, our not real place.
One night, Biceps made me dinner at his house. After we ate, we sat on his couch and began our second bottle of wine for the evening.
“Let me try to understand this,” I said. “You came to Oxford to get your master’s in religious studies, and then you started questioning exactly what you were studying?”
“That’s the gist, yeah.”
“But, I don’t get it. I mean, you were in all the apologetics classes. You studied the Word, and your professors convinced you to not believe?”
“I didn’t really take apologetics classes. I did take classes about the origin of the Bible though. People, men, regular old men, decided what went into that book. They had agendas, just like people in politics have agendas when they pass or don’t pass a law. It was all just pieced together. The whole thing. The whole book our Sunday school teachers told us we should base our entire lives on.”
I took two sips of wine and pulled one leg under the other, facing him.
“That would mess me up. To learn all that stuff. I guess I would rather not know?”
“Really? But how can you follow something if you don’t understand it or know where it all comes from? You don’t seem like the type of girl who wants to be spoon-fed religion.”
“I don’t. I…I’m not. But…wait, I have more questions for you.”
Biceps laughed. He was really enjoying this.
“You claim to follow Jesus, but you don’t believe what Scripture says about him, that he was the Son of God—”
“Wait, wait, wait. I didn’t say that exactly. I’m not sure about what Scripture says about him. I’m not sure he was the Son of God, and I’m not sure we can be sure, based on what we have in front of us. And I think I’ve finally come to a place in my life where I’m okay with not being sure. I’m okay with not knowing.”
“ ‘Okay with not being sure,’ ” I repeated slowly. “I’m not sure I’m okay with that.”
“Yeah.” Biceps smiled. “I can see that.”
I sighed. “Let’s talk about something else.”
“No, I love talking about this stuff. I want to know what you think.”
Biceps put his wine glass down and looked directly at me. He had blue eyes and blond hair and the straightest, whitest teeth I had ever seen. In my opinion, he could have been a model, and the intensity of his attention, his eyes on me, his body pointed toward mine, sometimes made me forget what he said. Sometimes it made the words coming out of his mouth evaporate into inaudible sounds, like someone had just put my life on mute.
I thought he was too good looking for me. I thought he needed someone prettier or more petite or more blond than I was, someone who was not wearing the same old Converse tennis shoes she wore every other day. But here we were, together, sitting on his couch, and I was the one he was looking at.
After a second I came to.
“What I think about what?” I asked.
“Everything. Scripture, Jesus. What has it been like to be a Christian from Texas in a place like Oxford?”
“Well, it’s been good and hard and weird and a lot of things.”
“Great, tell me about it.”
“Okay…It’s been hard spiritually because I’ve doubted, like seriously, for the first time, doubted what I believe about God and Christianity and stuff.”
“Yeah? Keep going.”
I took another sip of wine.
“So, when I got here, I realized so much of what I believe I only believed because it was what I was taught. Being here, in this other country where so many smart people are just sort of running around everywhere, I realized they weren’t raised like I was. And I wondered if I would have turned out like them if I hadn’t been raised in Texas, by Christian parents, in a Christian home.”
“Yes. Exactly. I know how you feel. Okay, keep going.”
“Keep going?”
“Yeah. Just talk.”
No one had ever told me to do that before. Just talk. I had done a lot of listening in my life. A lot of sitting back, watching, observing. Going away and journaling my thoughts on pages no one would ever see or read. I hadn’t done much of my own talking. Maybe because I didn’t feel like it was safe to. I had thoughts, lots of thoughts, but I couldn’t say them out loud to just anybody. Biceps was beginning to feel safe for out-loud talking. He didn’t seem to fear what I had to say. Sometimes, when I talked out loud with good church people about my doubts or when I asked them questions about the Bible, I felt them hold my words at bay. They didn’t let them in and think about them and mull them over. Some of them even seemed afraid.
I remember having a conversation with a guy I had recently met. He was a Christian and really smart, so I assumed it was safe for me to bring up some questions I had about certain passages in Scripture. I had been wrestling with what the Bible said about a certain topic. Christians seemed split on the issue too, so I did a little research. I read arguments from both sides, and I prayed about it. As I was explaining my processing and my wrestling to this guy, he interrupted me.
“Wait,” he said. “Don’t tell me you even considered believing those passages in Scripture weren’t true or relevant.”
“Uh, well, yeah I guess I did, sorta—”
“Wow, Andrea. I mean, I’m a sinner. I know what it’s like to be in the depth and pit of sin, but if I ever got to the point where I was questioning the very Word of God, well, that would be a dark place to be. I would doubt what sort of God I professed to believe in, in the first place. I would doubt if I believed in the Christian God at all.”
I was stunned. I didn’t know what to say. I walked away from that conversation not only still doubting that particular passage of Scripture but also doubting myself and my legitimacy as a Christian.
Biceps could not have been more the opposite of this guy and the others who fear the doubter. He did not hold my words at bay. He did not suggest I needed prayer. He did not suggest that I was in the darkest place a Christian could ever be and I should probably be questioning everything at this point. Instead, he listened to me. He looked at me. He said without actually saying it that I could say all the things that were in my head, and he would not feel afraid. With him, and with very few others I’ve come across in life, I felt safe in the sphere of “just talk.”
So I told him all about the friends I’d met in my classes at Brookes. I told him how their depth had surprised me. How their capacity to love was so strong. I told him how I had seen how they loved their significant others and their friends and their families, with a fierce type of love, a trustworthy type. And I told him that I wondered if atheists and agnostics were better at loving people than Christians were because love here on earth was all they had. The people around them were it, their entire world. Maybe they felt an urgency to love that those who believe in and are counting on the afterlife do not.
Biceps sat there and listened to me and nodded. I couldn’t believe I was telling him all this, but I kept going. I wanted to keep going.
“So these people weren’t raised as Christians, but I was. And I was thinking about that, and how I don’t think I would be a Christian if I had been raised in England. There’s no way. There’s just no way. I mean, look at me. Two weeks into this place and I was saying, ‘I don’t even know if I believe in God anymore.’ But…”
“But?”
“Well, I had this thought the o
ther day.”
“What thought?”
“Maybe God knew that about me.”
“Knew what?”
“That I shouldn’t grow up in England. That I needed my parents and their faith and the faith of those around me because it would have been too hard for me here.”
Biceps nodded his head but didn’t say anything.
“Maybe I wasn’t ready for England until now, now that I’m older.”
He laughed.
“Okay, maybe I’m not twenty-seven like you, but I’m not seventeen anymore.”
“No, I know. I know what you mean. Continue.”
“I was going to.”
Biceps tilted his head, surprised by my snark. He swept one hand out with a “by all means” gesture. I cleared my throat.
“If God created me, he created me with a questioning and curious mind. He knew a place like Oxford would be hard for me. I couldn’t have believed in my faith without the support of my family and friends and people around me. But now, well, Jesus is in me. I don’t think there’s anything I can do about that. I think he’s just there. And I wasn’t sure at first when I got here, but I’ve heard him. I’ve seen him work. I’ve seen him at my church and in my own heart. In big and little things. I get why you’re not a Christian anymore—”
“Hey—”
“Okay, sorry. Why you’re not a ‘conservative’ Christian anymore, or whatever. But that’s not me. At least, I don’t think it is. And maybe it is just comforting to believe, and maybe I need to study more, but…I don’t know. Maybe I don’t.”
“Hmm, yeah. Maybe you don’t. Maybe I shouldn’t have. But it’s too late now.”
We sat quietly for a while. I wondered if it was too late. I wondered if I was being naive in my faith. I wondered how much power we have over our own beliefs and over our own disbeliefs in the end. I wondered how deep biblical study can create people like John Lennox and people like Biceps at the same time.
“I still love God,” Biceps said finally. “I know that sounds strange, but I do. I talk to him. I’ve been talking to him more these days.”
“I know you love him. I can tell you do. And I’m glad you still talk to him.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, it’s getting late,” Biceps said.
“Oh, you’re right, it is. I’m sorry.”
“What are you sorry for?”
“I…I don’t know. Talking too much?”
Biceps smiled.
“You didn’t talk too much. Come on, I’ll walk you home.”
FADE IN:
NIGHT. IN FRONT OF ANDREA’S HOUSE ON DONNINGTON BRIDGE
The night is cold and you can see Andrea’s and Biceps’s breath as they say good night. He kisses her on the cheek. Andrea doesn’t move. Biceps jumps on his bike and is off before she can say anything.
Port Meadow was glowing. Port Meadow is always glowing, but especially that day, the day Biceps and I rode our bikes through it under the sun, when we knew it would rain soon but not just yet. The ground was preparing to receive it, and the blades of grass seemed to be growing, craning their necks back and opening their tiny mouths.
Port Meadow is an actual meadow, like the ones they write about in children’s stories with bunnies. The meadow, by law, can never be developed, and this has been the law since the land was gifted to Oxford by Alfred the Great in the tenth century.
The meadow is big, so so big, and very flat with mounds of grass and bumpy, muddy trails over here and over there. Oversized blackberry bushes line the east side of it, and as you trek farther west, depending on how far you are willing to walk, you might run into the smallest and most charming abandoned church you’ve ever seen. The Thames is nearby at all times, but at some point it disappears and then reappears when you get close to a pub called The Trout Inn, our destination that afternoon.
The Trout was busy. Most tables inside were taken, so we found two cushiony chairs in an interior room near the fireplace. We could hear the rain on the roof, the rain we had known was coming. It was hard, but it wouldn’t last long. Hard rain like that in England comes and goes before you have time to complain about it or bother to pull out an umbrella.
The Trout has been around since the seventeenth century, and it is the type of pub you imagine novels have been written in and where very important, slightly drunken conversations have probably taken place over the last several hundred years.
Like the night after dinner on his couch and like the very first night we met, my conversation with Biceps turned to faith quickly. This, I was learning, was his favorite topic.
Biceps sat on the edge of his seat with his elbows on his knees.
“So, Andrea, what are your pillars?”
“My pillars?”
“You know, what you believe. What holds up your faith. Your pillars.”
“Oh, my pillars…” I drew back in my chair and crossed my arms.
In my mind little scenes from the past year flickered on and off:
• riding my bike home late at night and feeling what it would be like to be God-less
• feeling that for the first time
• fasting during Lent and hating every second of it
• attempting to leave Oxford early, before I would have ever met Biceps
• Ben walking away from me at the library
• my little “conversation” with Thomas Cranmer
• sitting here with a “liberal” Christian while Jisu was who knows where
Could I really state my pillars now? In such a state? Was I the right person to be doing this? I wanted to invite someone else down to say them for me. Maybe I could get my dad on the phone and ask him, and he could say it. I could just stand there, and when he was done, I would point my thumb and say, “Yeah, what he said.” But Biceps didn’t want to know what my friends’ or family’s pillars were. He wanted to know mine. So, clumsily and with no eloquence at all, I began to recite my creed.
“Jesus is the Son of God…”
“Yeah, okay.”
“And he came here to die for us.”
“Mmhm.”
“Because of him, what he did on the cross, because of that, I will spend eternity with God. I don’t deserve to, but I will.”
Under Biceps’s watchful eye, I felt uncertain.
“You sure about all that?”
“Yeah, yeah I think I am. I have to be.”
“You don’t have to be.”
I didn’t want him to be right about that, but he was. I didn’t have to be sure, not right then.
I read something singer-songwriter Derek Webb wrote recently. He was confessing and apologizing for some mistakes he had made the previous year. I am sure there was nothing easy about writing it. I loved something he wrote at the end:
I’ve said recently that my songs feel like my personal liturgy, things that I don’t necessarily or always believe but I show up to recite again and again in hopes of believing them. If I’m honest, most of the time I don’t believe the words in my songs. I have a hard time believing in a God that could make, let alone love a man who could do such things. So, I’ll go on reciting and adding to my liturgy in hopes of believing the words, because I wish to. More than ever, I wish to.*
Maybe, sitting on a leather chair that afternoon in The Trout, I was not 100 percent all in and all certain about my “pillars,” but saying them aloud is something I’ve never forgotten. I was shaky and not confident. I was unnerved by the smart Oxford graduate across from me, but I said it, and sometimes saying it out loud is all we can do. Sometimes reciting the Creed we are uncertain about is what leads us to eventual certainty, or at least to a deeper assurance. This is why we write and sing hymns. This is why we read one book over and over and over again. Words—remembering them, saying them, and writing them—are foundational for us. Our words make up who we are. They are not only powerful; they are, I think, our only power.
Biceps had studied Scripture more than
I had. He had received his master’s in theology, and that was where he had begun to doubt the absolute of Scripture on a serious and deep level. Right in the middle of breathing it in, he saw the holes, the humanness of it. Things were left out. Groups of people—sinful, normal people—had decided what would go in. Jesus was a wonderful teacher, and the Bible a wonderful book, but is it alive? Is it more than moral teaching? Was Jesus more than a rabbi? These were questions Biceps no longer answered with an affirmative yes. He was a man who loved God a lot, I could tell. I didn’t doubt that. But his mind was fighting with his heart and with his past and the things he had been told to believe in. They didn’t fit in this country of England. So few beliefs, when they traverse an ocean, make the trip without minor damage.
I had, with great uncertainty, remembered my words. In the foreign land, I had remembered them. Across from this person, I was saying them, and though the doubt had been painful at times, the faith underneath was indeed proving more durable. Maybe I recited my words to Biceps that day, but I recited them for me.
Outside The Trout I could hear the river. It was slowing down as the rain let up. And I thought about how the river had witnessed many important events for me that year, and the thought comforted me greatly.
On our walk home, we talked about lighter things. Biceps asked me why I was still single and who I had dated in Oxford. No one, was the correct and truest answer, but I found myself telling him about Jisu. All about my good friend Jisu. I told him he was the closest I had come to dating anyone that year but in the end it just didn’t work out.
“Why not?” he asked. And just then on our Oxford movie set, it began to rain again.
FADE IN:
EXT. PORT MEADOW–DAY
Biceps and Andrea run their bikes under the nearest tree to protect themselves from the rain that is falling harder and harder.
BICEPS
Wow, it’s really coming down now!
ANDREA
I know. Ugh, Oxford. It’ll be over in a few minutes.
English Lessons Page 15