Non-Christian Christian
By: Laura Jill Stephens
Tags: Identity, Church, Christianity, Religion, Spirituality

Spring is fully upon us now, and my window view shifts with the movement of small, green and fandango pink trees teased by the wind. The blossoming into life outside still doesn’t quite resonate with the sense of my inner world, which feels wounded, limping, like an injured animal not certain of the safety of her surroundings.

The events of this past year — a breakup, job loss and rejections, leaving my dream life in Colorado and moving back into my parents’ Kansas home as a thirty-three year old adult — sunk me into a brutal winter that has yet to lift. I’m still emotionally raw and exposed.

Unlike me, other humans thrust themselves into the warm sunshine, rev their engines on the highway, and bump loudly throbbing music on the side streets. My world is still quiet like snow-covered ground, and contentedness is found in nearly undetectable footfalls on a shaded deer trail through the trees.

The Bradford Pears are throwing their petals to the wind today. Crab-apples burst pink teardrops, unveiling white and the scent of fruit promises. Violently blooming fuchsia red-bud trees shout and twist and holler at me like a curvaceous dancer tossing her gleaming black hair and voluptuous hips, inviting me to dance.

It feels almost cruel, nearly a mockery — I, the tattered prairie wild rose, barely clinging to the earth, hanging onto a few weather-torn petals. She, the vivacious hibiscus, skirts twirling in unending, energetic fervor.

I am limping along, but to my surprise, my attendance at my local Episcopal church has put some pep back in my step. I feel in my element a bit, having recently assisted in the Universal Christ Retreat — a web-streamed offering of the Center for Action and Contemplation’s Universal Christ Conference, which was held in light of Father Richard Rohr’s newest book, “The Universal Christ”.

Being a newly devoted contemplative myself, I was able to share my experience with contemplative practices. I could hold space for others to explore box-opening concepts as eloquently introduced as only Father Rohr could do for the seasoned children of a 2,000-year-old Christianity (which now tastes stale in the mouths of so many of us after two millennia of misinterpreting Jesus and the Jewish scriptures).

Though I find my current home and community, and some sense of purpose in my church, Christianity remains a difficulty for me every day. I find myself caught between two opposing energies. On the one hand, this church is the only — I repeat, the only — place I’ve ever found true community.

Even if it be poorly done community (which, it hasn’t been yet, but inevitably will be at some point, because…Newsflash!…we are human). In this case, my church, and especially certain people within her body, have shown me a well-supported community I’ve longed for and never before experienced.

On the other hand, I cringe at much of the liturgy (which I long to take my scissors to in true Ben Franklin style), and I hardly believe in a god as the God I associate with the one imposed by centuries-long misrepresentation upon Christianity.

More than that, I feel wounded by the church, as so many of us do, and much of scripture now stings with the same sharpness as when supposed followers-of-Jesus used it in the past to nail me with shame, accusation, and condemnation.

I feel stuck. Not stuck in the way that you can’t move in any direction, because I feel movement — I feel I am exactly where I’m meant to be at this time in my life. I feel anxious and triggered by some of my past experiences within the church. Maybe that’s where the sense of “stuckness” comes from.

I feel I am meant to be here, so here I remain until I sense the doors opening into something new; and, simultaneously, I feel a strong pull toward something more transcendent that is not yet here, something that Christianity cannot reach as long as it remains within the confines of its ages-old way of liturgizing and interpreting Jesus and the text.

Beyond that, the church is comfortable to me on some level, even with all the discomfort it causes in cognitive dissonance. It is familiar, and Jesus has nearly always been a part of my life. I love the people. I love the music and the liturgy, frustrating though it may often feel to me.

Many of the stories I grew up hearing from both the Old and New Testaments have helped me navigate life’s difficult terrain at times, and I often find solace in them when life is just plain shit. I love church! And…I can’t stand much of Christianity.

So, I’m asking myself the question that perhaps hundreds and thousands of Christians and people raised in the church have asked themselves over the years, especially in recent generations: do I stay, or do I go? Is there a place for me here to continue to be the evolving, stretching, reaching-for-truth person I tend to be? Or, am I forcing this new body into old wine skins?

My answer is almost Taoist, which speaks even more to my conundrum. “There is no ‘should’, there is only ‘be’, and the way will make itself known as you continue to be.”

Even as I choose to stay, I continue to struggle internally with the main issue underlying all of my questioning: for the first time in my life (or maybe the second, the first having come after a religion course in undergrad responsible for my initial box-bursting experience), I’m not certain that the force so many of us have attributed to being the Source of life — God, the Creator, Spirit, etc. — is actually Love, as most religious and spiritual traditions, and even the New Age movement, teach.

Perhaps, I have been wounded by what was purported to be love too many times, and now I just can’t trust the word or what I understand in my finitude to be its nature.

I have always been a questioning, no-bullshit person, and if there is an intentional God, then I firmly believe there is good reason for me to be this way. My entire Christian background is laced with discomfort over the contradicting sentiments coming from our fraught religion, and my inquisitive nature has helped me move beyond elements of Western Christianity that I believe are extremely harmful to all in existence.

Nonetheless, this new struggle with my understanding of the Source has been nearly earth-shattering, which frankly is in keeping with the flavor of some of the events of the last year of my life, anyway. It all goes together, I’m sure.

For the first time, I am challenged with the seemingly plausible possibility that there is no God, no all-encompassing entity of unconditional love. Even to say those words is painful to me, but there it is.

My intellect is in disbelief. Though my emotional body wants there to be an eternal lover of my soul who longs for communion with me, my intellect contradicts it and suggests that the force that is Life begetting Life is actually quite indifferent. (Maybe, on some level, this intellectualizing is a defense mechanism.)

I can’t deny that there seems to be an intelligent orchestration of life. Maybe that’s what we’ve called “evolution”, and maybe evolution is what we’ve called “God”. But, is that intelligence also loving and personal? Jesus seemed to think so!

I’m inclined to want to believe him and many other spiritual traditions. Surely, they couldn’t have all been wrong about this “Love Source”, right? Maybe, this “Love” is not anything like love as we know it in our humanity. Maybe, I’ve just been trying to understand it with a mindset that is too narrow. What is this so-called divine love, really?

I want to explore this more in future, so I’ll end here…with yet more questions. (A friend told me today that in Buddhism, when a student finds that they are encountering far more questions than answers, instead of receiving answers from their teachers, they are told, “Oh, good! You’re on The Path.”)

Certainly, there are others like me out there. I hope? Are there other young adults who, like me, grapple with the desire for transcendent community — for community that seeks to heal itself and, in turn, heal the world — but can’t find that community anywhere in-or-outside of the PTSD-ridden world of Christianity?

Are there others out there who love their tradition but struggle daily with the narrow-sighted way of interpreting it? Are we meant to resurrect this religious tradition into a new life and a new life-giving tradition? Or, have the ruts of 2,000 years run too deep? Is there a place for one to remain in the church while simultaneously disagreeing with the liturgy and doubting the nature of the Source altogether?

It has never before been safe for me to remain within the Christian community while asking questions like these. A handful of times, I’ve been cast to the outskirts of the city and treated like I am evil, wrong, even dangerous (“belligerent” as one of my leaders so graciously put it) for having thoughts like these.

How, though, can anyone who is wounded and injured come to truly know the love of God if they are not allowed to be met “where they’re at”, as we say — if they’re cast out and abandoned by the very group who claims to be the Body of Christ, the very incarnation of that love?

If a Christian is one who is a follower of Jesus in their actions and moral ethic, then can a Christian be a Christian regardless of their intellectual status of belief?

I guess the question that sums it all up is this:

Can I be a non-Christian Christian?