Love at the Speed of Email

by Lisa McKay

  The rapture would probably occur within the next five years or so, these people generally posited, and on that wonderful day Jesus would float down from the clouds to the great and glorious sound of angelic trumpets and all the true Christians would rise up to greet him in a midair reunion.

  There were other theories about the rapture. Lots of other theories.

  I think the main point of all this rapture talk was to impel us to convince all our friends of their need to be saved before the imminent arrival of the big day with its attendant and eternal separation of the sheep and the goats. But I didn’t have many friends to preach to at eleven. I just had plenty of time to research the rapture the way I researched most other things in life, by reading novels.

  Long before the popular Left Behind series, there were a slew of other stories about the end times, most of which I ferreted out and devoured. In retrospect, I doubt that this was entirely healthy fuel for an already-feverish imagination. I spent far too much time wondering what would happen to me if the rapture occurred while I was changing clothes or, horrors, sitting on the toilet. Would I be sucked into the sky naked? On at least one occasion I got out of the shower to the sound of silence, a palpable atmospheric emptiness that triggered a sudden and visceral certainty that I was completely alone in the house and probably in the world. Had everyone I knew and loved gone off to meet Jesus without me?

  When Mum and Dad sat us down one day when I was twelve and asked us what we thought of moving to Africa, I figured that if Jesus were coming back within the next five years anyway, Africa was as good a place as any to go and have an adventure in the meantime.

  Which took me to church in Zimbabwe.

  Harare, Zimbabwe

  Church in Zimbabwe was long. Looooong. During the first couple of years we were there, I had limited patience for the sermons that often went for an hour without any chain saw-based entertainment at all. Mum played music for the service and Dad taught one of the adult Sunday school classes. That meant that we were at church on Sundays from eight in the morning until almost one in the afternoon.

  Looooong.

  By sixteen, however, I wasn’t going to church just on Sunday mornings. I was also heading back there voluntarily on Sunday nights for the evening service.

  Part of me would like to be able to claim that this newfound interest in all things church was solely the result of an inner awakening to the sacred, a deep personal spiritual fervor.

  It wasn’t.

  Not unless a budding teenage awareness of the divine mystery posed by the opposite sex counts as spiritual fervor.

  Yes. Boys. The youth group went out for coffee after the evening service. This was a big deal. I went to an all-girls school, and opportunities for hanging out with boys were limited. Church was the center of my social life, and the friends I made there, the first real friends I’d ever had, introduced me to all sorts of things, including how to drive a car, ride a motorcycle, and drink vodka.

  But my friends in Zimbabwe served as guides for much more than the odd and relatively tame foray into the adventures of vodka and lemonade. They also taught me how to dance and to laugh, and just as the concept of friendship came alive for me during that time, so did the concept of God. However mixed my motivations for embracing church, I eventually found more than boys there.

  The pastor at our church in Harare was a man named Peter Griffith. A decade before I walked into his church, Peter had been living with his family and thirteen others at Elim Mission in the north of the country. In 1978, during the civil war that transformed Rhodesia into Zimbabwe, guerrillas armed with machetes crossed the border with Mozambique, entered the mission compound, and murdered everyone there: nine adults and four children, including a three-week-old baby. Peter and his family survived only because they were in England at the time.

  The Griffith family returned to Africa, where Peter accepted a senior position in the education department of the newly formed Zimbabwean government. In a society collectively wounded by years of fighting – trying to find a way out of the devastation and plagued by ongoing controversy about how to see justice done – Peter consistently maintained that forgiveness was the right path to healing.

  Shortly after becoming senior pastor of a church in Harare, this public mantra was put to the test. A decade after the massacre, the youngest member of the party that had attacked Elim Mission sought Peter out and confessed his role in the killings. He’d been fourteen at the time, a youth fighting under the name “War Devil,” and he’d risen to become the youngest platoon leader of the insurgency. Shortly after the war, this young man said, he’d seen a vision of the hand of God coming in judgment against him. It must have been some vision – he’d become a Christian on the spot, left the militia, and enrolled in Bible College.

  In addition to his forgiveness, Peter offered this man a job as the guard and groundskeeper for our church.

  This story didn’t seem so extraordinary to me the first time I heard it. The war had been over for only eight years. The scars and the stories were numerous and still fresh – more than one of my friends had lost their fathers in the fighting. But over time that story started to sink in. It came to symbolize some of the strength and optimism that marked the Zimbabwe I knew and loved during the four years we lived there. Against the dark backdrop of injustice and violence, with storm clouds of coming hardship still distant on the horizon, it lit up the present with hope.

  I could not have put it like this then. Then, I was only starting to discern what faith meant to me. Then, the question for me wasn’t whether God existed. As a teen, the existence of God was as self-evident to me as the need to breathe to live; my struggles with this foundation would come later. Instead, what was at stake was more the basic orientation and flavor of my faith.

  Did I, could I, and would I believe in a God who loves us and intends good and right despite what I knew of all the wrongs – from meanness to murder – that people are capable of?

  It was in Zimbabwe that I really answered yes to that question for the first time.

  That yes wasn’t a sudden and inexplicable inner flood of divinely inspired certainty. It was a cumulative yes, born from the intersection of multiple tributaries feeding into my life. It came from discovering the sweetness and security of friendship love for the first time. From thousands of small positive triumphs by others – smiles, joy, kindness – in defiance of pain or need. From slowly, so slowly, waking up to right and wrong. From the stories I read in the Bible and lived by those like Peter Griffiths. Stories that called me toward higher ground.

  I was baptized at sixteen, just months before we left. I had known from the first that we would be staying in Zimbabwe for only four years. What I hadn’t expected was that by the time we had to leave I would feel that I belonged in Africa. In the months leading up to that final farewell I begged my parents to leave me behind in Harare.

  I could live with my best friend, Angie, for the next two years, I argued, and finish high school with my friends. I would come to visit my family twice a year. Clearly it was a sensible plan.

  Angie’s parents, I do believe, would have gone for it. Mine didn’t. Even then the writing was on the wall for Zimbabwe. The last year we were there, there was a drought. Food was scarcer on the shelves, and butter, meat, and even toilet paper were rationed in stores. At times we had electricity for only five or six hours a day, and on those evenings I studied by candlelight. Inflation and the HIV infection rate in the country had started an upward spiral.

  I didn’t care – a luxury, I know, I could indulge only because I was a child of relative privilege and the personal impact of all of this was minimal. I always had plenty to eat and clothes to wear. I had friends I loved. I was excelling at school. For the first time in my life, I didn’t feel like an outsider. As far as I was concerned, I had adopted Zimbabwe as home.

  As far as my parents were concerned, it would be much wiser for me to come back to the states for the last year and a half of high
school and then move to Australia, my real home, to attend university.

  When we left Harare I carried with me many unshed tears, a wristwatch that would remain stubbornly set on Zimbabwean time for the next year and a half, and my faith, the seeds of which had only really started to flower under a fierce African sun.

  Sydney, Australia

  How exactly did this faith, awakened primarily by stories of grace, become quite so rigid and rule-bound during the next chapter of my life?

  My sister’s dodgy counselor would probably suggest that I had been abused and was seeking to exert some control over an uncertain world. A decent counselor might wonder whether being uprooted from the first place I’d ever loved as home caused me to cling more tightly to spiritual anchors that promised solace and permanence. A developmental psychologist with an interest in religion would shrug and say a legalistic brand of belief is a perfectly normal stage of spiritual development.

  Whatever the reason, I became that person you want to hire as a baby-sitter for your kids. I brought my Bible with me and read it after the kids were in bed instead of watching cable TV. The summer after I graduated from high school I went on a ten-week mission trip to a remote island in the Philippines. I memorized the entire book of Philippians, then the book of James, then Ephesians. Throughout university I went to church on Sunday nights and did most of the other things that my Anglican dormitory insisted should be done by good Christians. I went to Bible study and evangelism training. I met weekly with my Bible-study leader or (after I became a leader) with those in my group. I went to lunchtime lectures on campus. I practically earned another degree in biblical studies.

  Though I did all this, a lot of it never felt as if it fit me quite right.

  In evangelism training I repeatedly ducked the assignment to approach people sitting around during lunch and ask them whether, if they died the next day, they could be sure they were going to heaven. I found myself in a real bind over this. I did believe that Jesus was the truth, the life, and the way to freedom, yet I could never quite reconcile that with my certainty that it was rude and annoying to interrupt people enjoying a peaceful lunch and accost them with questions about their eternal destiny.

  “It is more important for people to think about these questions than have a peaceful lunch,” my Bible-study leader insisted.

  “But when people do it to me, all I want to do is tell them to piss off,” I said. “I really don’t think it’s the best way to get the message across.”

  I was as comfortable in a bar or on the dance floor as I was in church, sometimes more so. I held my own Bible-study groups on the beach and occasionally we never even opened the Bible. I complained that my church in Sydney was high on head knowledge and low on joy. More than once certain Bible-study leaders accused me of having a bad attitude and of not respecting them.

  They were largely right. But it was hard to be entirely penitent when it was the same leader who had answered a “what role should women play in church leadership?” question by advising us that women were not permitted to teach men.

  “This means,” he said, “that if a man has a question in Bible study and a woman knows the answer, she shouldn’t say anything, because that would be teaching.”

  I’m leaving out all the good stuff, of course. Most of the people in church leadership would not have given this answer. Many cared deeply for others and wrestled bravely with tough questions. Some of the friends I made during this time remain among my most treasured today.

  So I do not count the hours I spent in church wasted, but I can still blush when I remember how rigid and simplistic my faith was. For even as a pseudo-rebel within that conservative system, I had internalized a formula of faith that went something like this:

  1.Believe ye first all the right things.

  2.Don’t do the wrong things (date non-Christians, have sex before marriage, drink too much, etc.).

  3.Then, I believed, the kingdom of God would be added unto you and life would make sense.

  In the end it was probably these last four words that I had attached to my tripartite salvation equation that eventually caused me to question everything else.

  South Bend, USA

  I was twenty-six and at Notre Dame studying international peace when the wheels really fell off the train, for it was at Notre Dame that I first fell in love.

  I’d dated more than a handful of guys before this, but I’d always been skeptical of that phrase falling in love. Love wasn’t something you fell into, I thought smugly. It was something you worked to create together bit by bit. It was a decision, not just a feeling. And it was more of a campfire than a lightning bolt.

  Yes, well, that might all still be good theory and maybe even good practice, but it went right out the window the first time I saw Brian.

  Brian lived across the hall from me. He was six feet tall, sandy-haired, and green-eyed. He’d worked as a conflict-resolution trainer in Bosnia, a peace analyst in Rwanda, and an Armani model in Italy. Like me, he’d been born overseas and grown up in multiple countries. Unlike me, he was an atheist. And I was drawn to him with an illogical, stubborn, single-mindedness from the moment we met – the proverbial moth to a dangerously charismatic flame.

  We sparked right from the start. I saw in him a fellow third-culture kid, still struggling to work out some sense of belonging yet relishing the relational “diplomatic immunity” of his outsider status; someone driven to seek raw intensity both professionally and personally by demons he couldn’t fully name.

  I was a paradox to him, a kindred spirit who inexplicably believed in God. He both respected me and was infuriated by me.

  “How can you?” he interrogated me frequently and heatedly. “How can you still believe that the Bible is the truth? The sheer arrogance of that! And how can you believe in a loving God after everything you’ve seen? After Bosnia? And Indonesia? And Rwanda, for God’s sake? How can you, when you are as smart as you are? It makes me seriously doubt your intellect in every other domain.”

  “That’s a bit rich, coming from someone who’s been taking editing advice from me all year,” I’d shoot back, trying not to let him see how his words had wounded and rattled me anew.

  Other people had questioned my faith, of course, but never someone who seemed to have a personal and vested interest in dismantling my beliefs bit by bit. Never someone who made me so angry that I lost my temper and screamed at him, and swore. Never someone I provoked to such fury that he threw things and slammed doors. Never someone who made me want, more than I’d ever wanted anything else, to drag him to the nearest altar or the nearest bed – it didn’t really matter much which.

  For the first time in my life, I couldn’t will my emotions to fall in line with my beliefs, and prayer to a god who seemed utterly silent changed my desires not one single bit. I continued to love and want Brian all year despite knowing that any marriage would almost certainly end in disaster and despite a parade of short-term interests in his life.

  It was me he always came back to, me he talked to.

  “They have his body for a while,” I reasoned. “I always have his unguarded honesty.”

  It was enough. It had to be.

  Much more than fighting Brian that year, I fought myself – an internal war waged against feelings I “fell” into and felt helpless to resist. I battled to make sense of it all, and to keep my distance.

  I mostly lost.

  It was simultaneously an exhilarating and excruciating year, and by the end of it I felt dismantled from the inside out. During this year that I attended one of the most celebrated bastions of Catholicism in the country and lived within sight of the golden dome that crowned the basilica, my surety in the existence of God as a foundational force granting shape, meaning, and color to life dissolved.

  By the time I left Notre Dame and headed for Los Angeles I wondered whether everything that I’d been taught to believe and that I’d thought I understood held even the echo of truth. Whether all those Sunday-school
rules were just acting as mental and emotional blinkers that I had, in large part, dutifully accepted. Whether there was value in abstinence of any sort in life. And, of course, one that had troubled me for a good sight longer than just that year: how a loving, good, omnipotent God could possibly stand to hold back and watch the bad unfurl alongside the good in the wilderness of freedom and choice.

  33,000 feet

  More than four years later, on a flight to Vancouver, the seat-belt sign dinged off. I stood up to retrieve my laptop from the overhead bin and opened up a Word document.

  How to explain all of this to Mike?

  “I’ve told you that I came close to walking away from faith altogether,” I started. “Perhaps a truer way of putting it would be that I came close to dying in my tracks faith-wise. What I came up against while working in prison didn’t do it, and neither did the suffering I saw around the world. The tipping point for me came when I went to Notre Dame and fell in love with a playboy of an atheist who hated the fact that I was a Christian.

  “I spun out emotionally and spiritually that year.

  “I didn’t do any of those things (pray, read the Bible, go to church) that I’d been bought up to believe were, if not the things that got me to heaven, at least the hallmarks of a healthy, vibrant faith. More than anything, I wanted to take a long sabbatical from being a ‘good Christian’ and do whatever the hell I wanted with my body and my life and my decisions about right and wrong.

  “You know that foggy gray that descends sometimes? That stuck around in the core part of me for a very long time.

  “But even when I was just keeping the rules for the sake of it, even when all the genuine feeling had gone out of it and I was most agonized in my doubts, I wanted there to be a god out there who loves us. I didn’t want to walk away, but I did feel like I was deeply mired in some sort of enduring spiritual depression that probably accomplished much the same ends as walking away defiantly would have.”