Tired of Dishonesty?

Become an Outlaw Christian

When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket; and Jacob's hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, "Let me go, for the day is breaking" But Jacob said, "I will not let you go, unless you bless me"

–GENESIS 32:25–26

My mother was my best friend, until the day she forgot who I was. On that day, my own mom looked at me with kind eyes and asked, "Who are you? Are you my mom?" For the next sixteen years, early-onset Alzheimer's made sure my mother had no idea who anyone was, let alone me. On most days, this made me feel like one of the outcasts in ancient India whom the gods required to crawl backward out of the room, broom in hand, sweeping away her own footprints behind her. Parts of myself began to disappear, destined for the dust heap.

Watching the person I loved best in the world die made me realize that nearly everything I as a Christian had ever learned about suffering and evil was a crock, with a lot of pious clichés about "God's plan" and "God needing another angel" thrown in. I wrestled with this conclusion for years, but in the end it won out. All the so-called answers that I had been taught about suffering and sacrifice and salvation, when replayed in my sleepless head after a day of changing my mom's Depends, stung like a splash of bleach in my eyes. Words that once consoled made God feel further away than ever. I found myself asking, "Why didn't anyone ever tell me this is what life and love really feel like?" To make matters worse, all my family members splintered in their grief, and no one ever really talked about how much it hurt to lose my mother. Not talking about the hard stuff was nothing new, though. In the house where I grew up, pain was an invisible queen whom our silence kept on the throne. Fortunately, in the home where I live now, she no longer reigns.

When I was younger, before my mom got sick, I was completely in love with God. If you had known me then, you would have guessed I would grow up to be a religion professor. I often daydreamed about how it would be when I'd next see God's face, because I never doubted there would be a next time. I looked forward to it the way later in life I would look forward to seeing the person I was in love with, with cartwheels in my chest. I did not understand yet that my privilege was what made loving God feel so easy and natural, the same way red raspberries follow white blossoms on the summer vine. My vines had not yet suffered disease or drought, and I had not yet learned to pay attention to the vines of those persons who had suffered all that and more. As it turned out, my friends and their survivor-vines with their impossible fruit had everything to teach me. This book exists because of them.

As I became an adult who lived eyes-wide-open to the suffering of others, my love for God evolved. The way I grew to love God came to feel a lot like the way I felt back in high school when I fell in love with one of my best friends. He did not love me back, not "that way," he claimed as he broke the news that night in his Honda Civic and I hid my wet eyes behind my hands. From that day on, my best friend, though I still loved him with all of my heart, was a constant disappointment. Even looking at him hurt. His presence stung of loneliness, though of course his absence was even worse. I was a disappointment to him too, no doubt, because though he loved me, he recognized that in my eyes his love did not go far enough. Time with him was something I desperately longed for, but when I got it, my joy was so mixed up with longing that I felt like I was at the beach — my favorite place — but was being forced to eat sand. If you have ever loved someone who did not love you back, you know exactly what I mean. Everyone can connect to a story of unrequited love. But the weird thing is that no one ever wants to talk openly about the fact that for big chunks of our lives, millions of us feel this way about God.

In my journey toward becoming a more authentic person, I came to realize I was not like most other religious folks I knew. For one, I never outgrew the longing to talk about the stuff that hurts us most. I came to believe all of this secret keeping and soul hiding was, in the words of my hip nephew, cray-cray (read: crazy). For another, I had more in common with my atheist friends than with many of my Christian ones, though I myself was a Christian and not an atheist. I remember in college discovering the atheist whom Christians love to hate, the "God is dead" philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. I stumbled upon a sentence that made me stop short in which Nietzsche argued that although Christians want to claim Christ redeemed the world, a simple glance at the world and all its death headlines should be enough to tell us that Christ could only be said to have failed.

I stared at those words for a long time, hating how much they wrapped words around an unnamed fear that surfaced in my gut whenever I watched cable news or listened to my high school friend Mary Beth explain that she put a deadbolt on her bedroom door to stop her brother from "messing with" her. I began to suspect that perhaps Nietzsche, whom most forget was the son of a Lutheran pastor, was an atheist because he was as disappointed by God as I was sometimes. We both were confused by what looked like unkept promises. Secretly, part of me admired and was fascinated by Nietzsche's audacious authenticity, though I almost never admitted this to any of my conservative Christian friends and family, let alone to myself.

Unlike some of the atheists I knew, however, I didn't want to let go of God or my faith. Okay, that's not totally true. Some days I did want to throw God out like a used sweater that no longer fit, was irretrievably retro, and had holes in the elbows and stains down the front. But this sweater somehow kept reappearing in my closet, messing with my style. I couldn't ever completely break up with and let go of God even when I wanted to, or maybe closer to the truth, God wouldn't let me go or break up with me. For whatever reason, unlike my atheist friends, I wanted God back. Some of the Christians I knew admitted to sometimes feeling far from God like I did, but they had been taught to fear talking about it. Unlike them, I didn't want to accept God under the usual laws of dishonesty, silence, intimidation, and fear. About the time my mom was diagnosed with her illness, I decided to go to graduate school in religion. I wanted to become a theologian and a professor of religion in order to reclaim what I had lost as best I could.

And so, today, I am a Christian, but a strange one — one who sometimes finds herself closer kin to Buddhists, atheists, and agnostics than...