Sojourn to Christian Faith
Essay Written for United Church of Christ on “Sojourn of your Christian Faith”
Indigenous children will hear from their community an important truth in their childhood – a truth that is believed to be embodied as they come from the womb: you are born with all you will need for your entire lifetime. From the moment of birth, it is the responsibility of the village elders to remind and retell this truth to the future generation…all the wisdom you will encounter is known to you already (Trauma Stewardship).
When creator took the dirt of their creation to make the adamah, I think of this indigenous truth…God created in us all the wisdom will need for our lifetime. The truth of our Imago Dei in God’s image is within us. It is a knowing that is unexplainable from words and yet we try. The desire to be known and stay in knowing with God drives, I think, our pursuit of God.
I was raised in a small rural farming town where every mainline church wrapped the downtown square. My father and mother are both educators and musically inclined. From an early age my awe at the universe around me would often come out in the forms of creativity or the desire to run barefoot through the plains of my dad’s friend’s farmland. There, on red clay hills, I would find indigenous pottery of the Seminole and Creek communities and a few fields over I would find pioneer settlements artifacts. My curiosity for their survival and why we tell stories the way we do about humanity started on this farmland standing on that red clay.
Both my parents were southern Baptists and so that made me one in their eyes. I was in church as young as I can remember asking a lot of questions about humanity, difference, why white people couldn’t hang out with black people, God, faith, Jesus and how to love people well. And, I was often, the odd number out on these types of questions. I found solace in the Good Samaritan parable and Jesus who gave refuge to all. Sometimes asking hard questions wasn’t popular but needed.
My southern Baptist upbringing would tout Easter as our high point and I would always leave wondering about Good Friday and the Saturday before. “What did God feel” - was often my wonderment as a child. I never questioned inside my personhood that God wasn’t real. I just knew. It is the Imago Dei; the wisdom we are born with that provided that comfort.
In first grade I remember waiting in the water fountain line during a break. And two classmates, as children do, randomly asked out loud if I thought God was real. And I remember my response clear as a day, “Yes.” They quickly shoveled and said, but “how do you know?” I replied while starring at the water fountain quite thirsty at this point. “Because I just do. It’s in us you know…a feeling. Like the stars are in the sky and we just know kind of feeling.” That was my first baptism of faith. Standing in the water fountain line thirsty for nourishment eager to push past my classmates I said, “yes.” And I have been saying yes to that truth ever since.
I began to pursue that yes to God is real and love is for all of us call in high school as an active member of my youth group. When the Baptist youth group wouldn’t affirm a female (I identified as female at the time, I now identify as non-binary) leading, I went the Methodist church across the street. When the high school morning bible study needed leaders, I said yes. I attended every mission trip and fell more in love with sharing the gospel. I was in every sense on fire for Jesus.
What I knew to be true at this point of my life was that God was real, Christ lived, died, and was resurrected and would come again. But I had yet to experience the why Christianity? I had yet to experience the moment of resurrection that brings the trinitarian Christian life I live into harmony.
Remember how I shared the indigenous teaching of memory and wisdom within our embodied self? Well, there was a piece of my personhood that had yet to be embodied and that was my sexuality and gender. This was the full circle moment back to the water fountain.
“You can’t be queer and Christian” was the water fountain conversation emerging and this time the knowing needed to be found. I needed to sit in the holiness of Saturday before Easter. I needed to view death differently as the blessing of this cycle of enteral life. I needed to be in Jesus’ sandals. I needed to lean further into who Jesus was, is, and will be. I needed to create liminal space; wider space - as far as the east and west space – separate myself from patriarchy and hierarchy to see God anew. To know the deeper depths of my make up…to source the why I would feel God say, “but you are loved” and the push to not only drink from the fountain but offer it to others as Christ did.
My queerness brought me to the table for the first time fully embodied and suddenly the red clay wilderness grew into commitment to justice, mercy, humility and love. Jesus became a brown Palestine Jew, the outcast became the center, and the gospel lit ablaze. Christianity saved my life and calls me inward and outward to walk Jericho with those in need for the rest of my life. I can answer that call now fully embodied as God’s image knowing that God is real, the Holy Spirit guides us in joy and wisdom, and Christ is with us.
And so, I believe in the divine dance of our faith, in Christ’s ministry which embraces the poor, captive, marginalized, forgotten, and other, the meal of which we come to the table for all, the hope from God for our humanity, and in God as incarnate who meets us in creation where we are for the quotidian moments at water foundation stations throughout our lives to remind us of our call and our purpose. Christianity lives; this faith lives in my body, my spirit and my mind.