I’m finally getting a chance to delve into Jesus Girls: True Tales of Growing Up Female & Evangelical. Though I’ve been part of this project forever, I hadn’t really had or made time to read the other essays. On Sunday, I had the chance to meet contributor Nicole Sheets for coffee and read her wonderful piece, “Keep the Feast,” in which she writes, in part, about church:
“The readings are lengthy and somehow distant, these same stories that have been with me from the faintest pinprick of memory. They’re sort of God’s greatest hits, a litany of his most shining moments of beauty and deliverance.”
I love the wording of that, and project onto it my desire for more than the greatest hits, or at least a new way of hearing them. In regard to the latter, I’m enjoying Debbie Blue’s From Stone to Living Word. Blue has got some great, unorthodox, funny, surprising takes on some of the stories that can feel so worn out. My inner fundie theologian freaks out at some of the things she dares to write, but that’s part of what I need right now in terms of owning my faith as an adult.
This morning I read Paula Carter’s JG contribution, “Open the Doors and See All the People.” Oh, man. She writes about church splits, clergy affairs, congregational meetings that turn into fights, and how around adolescence (when she was trying to be the good kind of person Sunday school was teaching her to be) she
“…began to recognize the gap between what people were asking of me and what they were able to do themselves. The adults around me were only human…trying to make it through, searching for the right path, wanting to be good people, wanting me to have a happy life, scared of pain and sin, scared of themselves and me and our shared humanity.” Later: “I worry that people who grow up in the church learn to deny their own humanity.”
Scared of themselves and me and our shared humanity. I mean, that’s human behavior at, let’s say, not its best, in a nutshell, right there. She goes on to write more about how she thinks as an adult, and says: “It is hard for me even now to reconcile the expectations of church and the reality of being alive.” Me, too. While part of me knows that most of those expectations—or at least the interpretations of them—are add-ons, burdens God never meant for us to carry, it is hard to find the peaceful place (as Nicole put it over coffee) where you can just let those expectations skim over you. I love how Paula puts what she does now: “I try just to be me, to be real, to experience my humanity with God as a witness.”
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