[excerpts from the epic letter I wrote to my siblings last year.]
Lately I've been feeling like there are variations of me floating around the world: full disclosures, half-disclosures, illusions. The more I think of them the more internal strife I have over the fact that, if I am not actually revealing myself then people are not actually loving or knowing me. I think I have grown so accustomed to the tearing back and forth between identities and beliefs and the scatteredness of my life/travel that instead of being a wholly united person I am fragmented selves that exist for certain people. I don't like that feeling. Inside of me is in motion. Africa is like this huge inhale that I don't know how to explain... so I won't get to that yet.
There are so many things I am afraid to disclose to others because of how it would effect our relationship, but then these nagging unsync'd versions of myself feel disingenuous and unsettling. I need disclosure... let people add me to prayer lists, shake their heads, I am seeking the Uncreated One as best I can, I am excited by my questions, passionate about the God who chatters and who is mysterious and beyond my reach, who I adore and ignore and am haunted by. I am also terrified of rending relationships, of the way certain parts of my ever-evolving beliefs may threaten others, may be inexplicable and simply unsync-able with others' worldviews... others who are important to me. But, these questions have come from every way I have chased after Jesus, and I'm sure God is not surprised or threatened by them. I don't want to be labeled by them, or told I am "abandoning the values of my youth". I fear how others would take this list and paste it as a wall between us.
I feel the corners of my body cringe at certain language, at ways of knowing God and while I can recognize the experiences are so powerful and real for them, I am struggling to find new ways to connect to a God who feels so present and so elusive and compels me to seek. I know it will be threatening to some because I feel the inward threat that my own questions provide to my faith- somedays I feel I'm losing it, other days I feel like I am being tackled by the lion- seized by great affection. I have to push. Perhaps its my nature. I have to wonder. I have to search for response. Messy, inconsistent, wrong, limited.
I have to keep disclosing what I believe-in-progress so people can continue to know me. Not what O think is the version that compliments them but me with integrity to myself, to my search and understanding of life, with hopeful doubt and joyful attentiveness, and I want others to feel free to do the same, and to hear and hold inside me their narratives, their relation to everything around them. For all of us to occupy the territories of our faith/experience/journey. The problem is, I have swallowed myself so often among certain people that the paths forked so long ago without them knowing that the ground to cover has so much explanation... five years, sometimes more... that I think they will rightly be shocked to discover, I am not who they think. I do not think what they think.
So, disclosures I would like to make, that I'm afraid to make, that I don't know how to make...
1) I'm okay with the idea that the world evolved, God exhaling a conversation, an unfolding, surprising universe-- and there are things about the world and the nature of God that I think make sense of this, and the more I learn of science (and evolution) the more wondrous and compelling and insanely complicated and beautiful I imagine God.
2) I don't think the Bible is a period, the end of God speaking, or even full revelation. I think it is a dialogue, a living thing, a book of a long history of people grappling for language that describes God, for a vocabulary that syncs their life to what they feel (and I think it falls short and evolves too), I think it invites us into the conversation, trying to find words that throw a hook into the real, tangible nature of God. It's a living thing... a relation to Truth as a person, it means so very much. and I think there are things outside the bible that tell us just as much about God.
3) Maybe in mysterious ways God is bigger than Christianity and Jesus incarnates the Way in ways I don't fully understand... more than just the C.S Lewis Last Battle scene... "and you may have been right, but not to what you thought. not to what you think. you have been given questions to which you cannot be given answers. You will have to live them out- perhaps a little at a time." "and how long is this going to take?" ... "I don't know. As long as you live perhaps." "That could be a long time." "I will tell you a further mystery, he said, "it may take longer." (Jayber Crow) ... I really can't grasp on to evangelical language at the moment, it just doesn't connect me to God at all, actually it makes me feel a little nauseated. I can't help but pursuing my questions, and I don't really care if that makes people think I'm less close to God because they're wrong.
4) I believe hell is empty and somehow Jesus leads grace, mercy, and unconditional love to ultimate victory. Which doesn't mean it doesn't matter if we know this Uncreated One, it just means I don't think eternal punishment triumphs, because to me that is a victory for darkness not God. (See: Raising Abel, Love Wins, etc.)
5) I don't think homosexuality is a sin. And I will err on this side, because that's what I've come to and I'm part of the LGBT Safe Space club on my campus, and some of my closest friends are gay, and I support them.
6) I think Jesus was non-violent and presents an example of self-sacrifice. And I think non-violence is important and redemptive.
7) I'm not a political label. And I don't think either label matters as much as people. Because I think people are holy ground and we need to keep listening, and never stop asking questions or think that the labels mean much. I like a boy who isn't a christian and right now I'm okay with that because I understand the mystery of spirituality and needing to puzzle through it and that God is broader. That the narrow path might just be balancing on the spine of a mountain, or a winding river.
8) I voted for Obama and I still would (or maybe John Paul) but I don't think McCain was dumb or evil, there's so much space for the ways we construct the world around us, so much need to see those ways and live by conviction to what we value and believe in. To live with conviction and humility.
9) I don't think everything is pre-destined. I think God is our companion in this journey and He has a plan and things are happening, unfolding... or maybe it's somehow both (God's beyond me).
10) Sometimes I swear, and its cathartic.
...The more I speak the more I want to spend a year in silence, and I'm sure there's more things, but that's probably enough to raise hell. Tell me disclosures! Not even things you think people should know about you, things you'd like to speak without fear... (these are things I don't want to just nail like 95 thesis to a wall, but things I want to stop hiding, to allow to rise to the surface as they may. for the leaves to fall). We need to talk. We need to keep asking each other questions.
I love you guys. Love, your lovely black sheep.
