“So you didn’t sin before you were married then?” Lois asked, her bluntness pushing at the subject that was really of interest to her.
“Cliff and I were virgins when we got married.”
There it was, the benchmark of a young adult’s walk with the Lord: that you had pledged to keep sex until you were married and could give it as an unblemished gift to your husband or wife. Virginity was where the purity and wholeness of our soul was crystallized, safely out of the way, between our legs, where it wouldn’t be disturbed or disturb anyone else until The Right Time.
At camp when I was seventeen an American preacher man had called all the single people up to the front of the Severn Barn where he led us in a prayer to commit to staying celibate until our wedding night. After we’d prayed this promise he told us to open our eyes and look around and see who was available. “Take a look! You want to get married? Well look at all these other singles with a heart after God like your own.” Maybe that bit of the scenario had gone down better in the States, because in a crowd of Brits the invitation to look around at who was available made us take an awkward sidelong glance and then drop our reddened faces downwards hoping for the spectacle to be over soon.
It didn’t surprise me that this was Janet’s answer: that her interpretation of the word sin merely equated with sex; we each knew that the only sin that really counted was sexual. But I thought then about my attempt to get Rich to think I was holy. What about that kind of sin? The things that we do to portray ourselves as something we’re not. I remembered Sara’s words to me weeks before: that not going to bed with a man was the quickest way to get him up the aisle. Her eyes had twinkled with knowing power as she let me into the secret. But when I’d asked her if she was more concerned with just getting a man up the aisle than being with the right man at the altar, she’d shrugged me off. “Of course it will be the right man.”
Where were all the sermons teaching us how to speak the truth in relationships instead of hiding behind phrases about it “being right” or “not God’s will”? Where was the rigorous teaching helping us to see better when a partner is manipulating you … or when we were manipulating them? The great intricacies of emotional and spiritual ties that lace their way through our encounters with each other, even when we weren’t physically touching, were never talked about. They weren’t acknowledged, because apparently those places weren’t where sin took root. So we were never taught how to get to know someone and work out whether marriage was a good idea. As long as you could make it to your wedding day, virginity intact, then you were whole and pure and blessed.
“So was it wonderful?” Lois asked, slightly dreamily.
“It really isn’t like the films, girls.” Janet’s jaw jutted forward as she shut her mouth and looked at each of us, making sure we were absorbing the gravity of this news.
“The next morning I went to the loo and there was a rush of blood … just a great rush.”
“Eurgh!”
“Owwwww.”
I put my hands up to my face, as uncomfortable with being told this information as I was with the information itself.
“Seriously?”
“Absolutely, it was quite painful. I came down to breakfast unable to walk properly. So there were a few sympathetic smiles from other women at the hotel.”
Her moral exposition ceased for a moment. She took a few mouthfuls of curry, watching with satisfaction as we absorbed these fearful sexual realities.
“But why do women have one night stands then?” Grace puzzled, “I mean if it’s so painful …”
“Eugh! I know …”
“That’s awful, there’s no way I’m going to have sex before I get married. No way!”
Janet let the buzz of concern and anxiety anchor us firmly on the side of abstinence before announcing that she needed to go and see to pudding. We sat there grimacing before Sara tried to smooth things over, “At least when we get married we’ll be with someone we love. We don’t really need to be worried when it’s the man God has chosen for us to marry.”
There it was again, the salve that we applied to every problem: if it’s the right person, the person God’s chosen, then everything will be OK.
I wondered if Rich was The Right Person for me. I leaned over my shoulder to look back into the sitting room at what the rest of them were doing. Tucking into puddings, Rich and his brother were engrossed in conversation with Cliff, no doubt talking about strategies and leadership opportunities and all the other manly stuff that they got to do. At least I would have a chance to talk to him later if we went for a walk, or afterwards at the youth workers’ meeting.
17
At Home in a Stable
The church ran training for people who wanted to become street youth pastors and I had volunteered enthusiastically – even before I knew that Rich was involved. On Friday and Saturday evenings teams would go out into the small towns where little was going on for teenagers, and provide a safe presence in streets and parks decorated by used syringes and strewn bottles. I was partnered with Geoff, a retired man of fathomless patience and gentleness, and an easy readiness to laugh. Out on the streets we strolled our route and chatted to the kids we met, who were happy to have some attention, an audience who might care what destruction they were prepared to kick up.
Joe was one of the young people we met and, at seventeen, was one of the oldest teens we met on our evening rounds of the park, the cemetery, the churchyard and the car park outside the newsagent. He was a punk, his hair brightly dyed a different colour each week, and had clear blue eyes that spun round and round from all the speed he was taking. Joe was the eldest of three children and, having encountered the reckless mischief of his young brother and sister, seemed to be a gentler soul. Yet his relationship with his parents had broken down and now he was squatting or bunking down in stables, eating barely anything, except ice-cream.
Geoff and I began to look forward to seeing Joe and spending some of the evening with him and his friends, Leon and James. They wanted to know why we bothered spending our Friday and Saturday nights in this amble around the town, and their scoffing laughter at our reasons belied their relief at being taken seriously by some adults.
“So you gonna keep doing this then? This street work?” Leon asked, laughing as he caught Joe’s eye.
“Yes, as long as there are kids out here running around drinking and taking drugs we will”, Geoff replied.
“What about in the winter?”
“Well we’ll probably open up the church and provide a place for you to come and keep warm and have some hot drinks”, I reassured.
“Ahhh, I’ll probably get struck down if I go in your church …” Joe smiled, plunging his hands into the pockets of his trousers. He looked down at his feet and rocked back on his heels.
“Joe, I’ll bring the hot chocolate out to you if you’re that scared!”
“You never know what’s gonna happen if you step on God’s turf.” Leon shook his head, his smile broadening across his face while his lips pursed the remaining stub of his smoldering roll-up.
“I think you’d find there was a very warm welcome if you ever decided to come to church.”
And of course they would have done. That was what we were praying for. Every Friday and Saturday as we met in the church to commit the coming evening into God’s hands, naming each young person before Him, asking for His protection and blessing upon them. Going out to them was just part of the whole picture. We would go out and let them know that they mattered; but it was extending an invitation to them to join us in church that completed the circle.
“And Lord, we just pray for your blessing upon each of those young people we meet tonight … fill us with your Holy Spirit that your light would shine upon them and reveal your love to each of them.”
“We pray for you to open up opportunities for good conversations and give us your wisdom as we respond to their questions and searching …”
“Yes Lord, bless them and bring th
em to know your love for them and to receive you in their hearts.”
One by one we sought to put into words what we longed for God to do. We wanted His blessing, we wanted the revelation of His love, and we wanted to see the transformation of lives, we wanted spiritual revival. And in each of our minds we held a picture of what that would look like. It had already begun: the arrival of young men like Pete and Matthew who had started regularly attending church and open home lunches. The hardships with which life had punched them were evident in physical flares of anger, or in the curses tattooed across hand and neck, in the prayer ministry they sought from their male mentors and their spats of anger when the possibility of a trustworthy father figure became too frightening. Over the months we had seen these men commit their lives to God, and swear words give way to hallelujahs as they became Christians, like us.
That’s what revival meant: church services overflowing. People praising, praying, being healed. Prayer ministry where people fell down, slain in the Spirit, overpowered by the presence of God so that they could no longer stand up. Lives less ordinary, supernaturally altered. Of course it was what I wanted too, the touch of God filling the craterous space that my nursing career had left. Week after week, with eyes squeezed shut, the familiar prayers rained down over me, delivered by the voices of conviction belonging to the men at the front.
I, too, knew how to string the right buzzwords together to make prayers like that. My conversations with Christians were mingled with bilingual fluency, incorporating clichés about faith and reaching easy conclusions about the sovereignty of God’s control in all situations. Talk of God’s love spilt easily into my prayers and chatter. And yet the anxious knot tugged in my stomach and unsettled my worship. I heard myself spouting words of adoration towards God but they seemed to do nothing more than hang like fridge magnets, suspended silently, going nowhere. Whichever way I rearranged them they stayed before me, empty of meaning. In the happy-clappy bubble of this church I had willingly regurgitated countless prayers and praises, putting myself out there as the woman of God I had been brought up to be. Now the words were beginning to stick in my mouth.
When Justin exhorted us to all stand up and shout our praises to God simultaneously, I tried and failed, too distracted by the bellowing prayers of those around me to conjure up any authentic praise of my own. The torrential jargon of our worship and our conversations began to seem like whitewash over life and I wanted to scratch away at it, to look and examine what truth lay beneath it.
I wanted to chip away at all the assumptions about our lives as Christians, and as men and women of God. Why was it that God only seemed to show up powerfully in our charismatic evangelical churches? We were so hung up on the signs of the Spirit that we remained blind to the reality of God’s flourishing in other traditions. We discredited Roman Catholic and Anglican churches as merely religious: places of empty ritual where churchgoers weren’t on fire for God. We didn’t even discuss the possibility that the energy of God pulsed through the entire world, flourishing in all the dark places we called secular. Where was our recognition and delight in God’s aliveness beyond our own careful constructions of the holy? And so we denied the reach of the very God we claimed to want to know so deeply.
I wanted to question these men who decreed from the pulpit and these women who coaxed us through their ladies’ Bible studies. Why does simply being a man legitimate you as a preacher? Why does gentleness legitimate you as a woman of God? Why am I too afraid to ask these questions for fear of being seen as difficult and unruly, instead of teachable and gentle? And how is it that being a woman who bears God’s image has been derailed and reduced to impersonating the maternal aspirations and dress sense of middle-class women in church?
18
Fish Out of Water
According to an urban parable I once heard these ways of thinking, these views that we hold, can be like the water in which a fish swims. If anybody ever asked us what the water was like we wouldn’t know what they were talking about. A fish doesn’t see the water it’s swimming in; it lives and breathes it. Like fish, we swim around in all sorts of murkiness, circling through the same old patterns of thinking, relishing prejudices that are so familiar to us we no longer see what a comfort they’ve become, recycling behaviours that are so rehearsed we barely hear ourselves saying the lines any more. We can live and move and have our being in these things and never properly see or hear them.
Only when something happens, something that grabs us and takes us out of our normality, can we see it for the first time. And then we have a chance to see that we can choose to inhale and feed off different things. But mostly we don’t freely reject our obsolete ways and thinking; to do so would feel almost deathly. These attitudes and patterns have to be prised from our clutches so that there is distance enough to observe them, so we can see that we are not those things and that we can approach life differently. Usually it’s through something unpleasant, something we name as suffering. But without it we tend not to discover that the things we thought were holding us and protecting us were actually things that were keeping us small and stunted and hidden; like my misshapen beliefs about God.
Operating in a subculture where I expected to see signs and wonders meant that, if I wasn’t experiencing any of the supernatural action, I would be reduced to the role of onlooker: a mere spectator, watching God’s favour poured out upon others while I remained unchosen. So I couldn’t let my zeal wane, I just kept praising. And now I was tired. My uplifted arms seemed to do little more than uphold the image of me as holy, prayerful, good. If that was the deal I had going on with the Almighty I was ready to bow out. It wasn’t enough any longer to expend my energy proving to myself and others it was true. I wanted to live truthfully.
Unfearfully. Messily if I had to.
I knew I was outgrowing it; these superficial confines of our kind of Christianity. The language we used, the clothes we wore, the roles we could play; I no longer wanted to squeeze myself into their narrow parameters.
But it was during a sermon that Cliff preached that I suddenly saw, like a fish being held above the water, what beliefs I’d been swimming in. He was preaching about the return of the prodigal son and he roved about with the microphone making eye contact with us as he spoke about the Lost out there beyond the church who needed to be invited in to meet Jesus.
“They are the ones who need to come home and it’s clear to us as a leadership team, and many of you too, that God is moving here among us; preparing us to welcome them home to the Father. It has already begun … and people, we need to be ready, prepared to show them this love of God that they so badly need.”
I looked down at my Bible resting on my lap. I followed the story, it was titled ‘The Lost Son’ in my Bible. But as I read on I got to the bit about the elder son: the son who had never been bad and run away from home, the son who had not demanded and then squandered his inheritance. The son who had worked hard to be good and everything he ought to be. The son who in sinking disappointment and seething resentment turns on his father and asks, “Where’s the party and fatted calf in my honour?”
There I was on the page. I had been watching for years as the Lost were returned and restored, celebrated and loved, and all the time I hadn’t been able to understand why I couldn’t speak of God’s love in the way that these prodigals could. Fast-tracked through a childhood of systematic indoctrination at camps and house parties and seminars and Sunday school, the moment of being filled with wonder at God’s love had passed too quickly. Once we’d made our prayers of commitment we were moved on to new levels: learning the scriptures, evangelizing, upholding morality, learning to portray ourselves as a particular brand of Christian. Surrounded by our Christian role models, we were shaped into their mould; we imitated goodness, and came to believe we had a monopoly on it.
We listened to the good news about the Father who received back his prodigal younger son with great rejoicing. But for us who had been brought up to be elder brothers
, it seemed as though they – the love, the fatted calf, the warm welcome – didn’t belong to us. I didn’t believe in that Father God because I’d not encountered that God; I’d never wandered off and wound up eating pigs’ leftovers and then returned to find that incredible home-coming.
My need to be good really came down to the terror of needing forgiveness. I was an elder brother working so hard not to give God something to hold over me. And now I was stuck, clutching onto the false self I’d been manufacturing all these years. Too tired to hold on any longer, I wondered what would happen when it all fell to pieces.
19
Napkins, Nails and Piercings
It’s great when churches welcome the lost into its services, but it’s the exclusivity of the after-show party which becomes the test of authentic acceptance. When homes, Sunday lunches and parties open up for outsiders to cross the threshold and become insiders. Laura and Matthew were the first to banish any question of whether the love for newcomers was authentic. She, the petite, middle-class flute teacher from Berkshire, and he, the protective giant by her side, scarred and limping with wounds carried over from a previous life; they were inseparable. I didn’t want to taint their happiness with nosy questions about whether they were together romantically and I hoped nobody else did either. That kind of interference, especially from church leaders, could tear at a friendship like impatient fingers pulling at the closed petals of a rosebud, demanding to know what it will look like and be. So I watched them, secretly triumphant that their togetherness bore witness to something genuine happening to us at church. It wasn’t all about the Christians benevolently giving and the poor and vulnerable gladly receiving. We could be vulnerable too – God might be changing the elder brothers as much as the prodigals.
When Joe began turning up to church more frequently on Sunday mornings it was probably because of the free cups of tea, or shelter from the rain, more than the sermons. It didn’t matter why; everyone smiled at us sitting together and celebrated his progress. There he was, the latest prodigal to return. As Geoff and I spent more time with him and the others on Friday and Saturday evenings it became easier to talk without the forced mantle of holiness I felt compelled to display at church. I liked them and would have been happy just to chat with them. But they knew that we were there to evangelize and so they asked searching questions without any prompt from me.
A Lot Like Eve Page 11