The Questioning

One of the most often quoted verses in the Bible appears in Psalms 119: “Thy Word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.” The idea here is that God’s Word would be able to illuminate a follower’s choices and directions in life, helping to bring such a person into the “light” of God’s Truth.

This verse assures us that God’s Word won’t steer us wrong, so it becomes vitally important to read, study, memorize, and try to grapple with the complexities found on those crisp, gilded pages.

I have read the Bible straight through at least six times in my life. This does not include all of the many sermons I have listened to over my life, the devotionals of which I have been a part, or the little “Daily Bread” booklets that we used to read each morning at the breakfast table when I was a child. In short, I have spent a lot of time in the company of God’s Word.

This makes me no expert, though, and the more I engage with it lately, the less certain I am of the interpretations with which I was raised.

I was speaking with a minister lately who seemed to admit that the Bible and its interpretations can take many directions sometimes. He told me what he believed certain verses were saying, but it was always couched with the statement, “I believe.” In other words, he could only speak to me out of what he felt the Bible was saying—a subjective, ultimately, perspective.

I was in search of Truth. The minister and I had many email exchanges, which prompted me to say at one point:

You ask: “What do you feel is right? What do you sense God telling you?” This is a catch-22, it seems, as you mentioned, right? Overall, I do feel right in my relationship with God. But, am I only deluding myself? Where is my objective correlative, if that cannot be God’s Living Word?

As I stated in a previous email and as you stated again—how are we ever to be certain that what we feel is God’s direction and not Satan’s temptation? When our prayers seem answered, is it truly God? If, even as born-again Christians, who pray and seek God’s truth, we can still be “deceived” by errant “voices,” then it seems like the deck is stacked against us. We can never truly be certain that what we feel and experience is from God.

The minister offered me no reply on this point. So, it seems, we have to go back to the Bible for proof of what God is trying to say to us.

Okay.

Another minister I spoke with told me about bibliolotry—that means turning the Bible itself into a kind of idol. So, maybe the Bible cannot always have certain answers we seek. After all, there have been hundreds, thousands of translations, various interpretations, historic understandings that have condoned such things as slavery, etc.

The Bible, this minister said, has been used by each culture and era to justify its own belief systems of the day. As such, it can be and has been dreadfully misused.

The first minister, when asked about the social question of marriage equality, told me that God made male and female to come together and form a perfect union, a new creation, two halves who unify to become a “complete” whole.

I found this so very interesting because the Bible also tells of King David whose love for Jonathan (Saul’s son) was so profound and powerful, he is prompted to declare:

“I grieve for you, Jonathan my brother; you were very dear to me. Your love for me was wonderful, more wonderful than that of women.”

Some people say these two men were friends, close friends; others claim they were even lovers. One thing is absolutely clear, David, who was married with many wives and concubines, finds his most “perfect” love with Jonathan. Shouldn’t that not be? If a man and a woman marry and this has been God’s grand design since back in Eden, then shouldn’t that be the most profound form of love a human being can experience?

Let’s also talk about divorce. One thing that is condemned in the Bible, very clearly, is adultery—in fact, it even scores a place in the Ten Commandments. When he is tested by some religious leaders of the day about divorce, Jesus says that people shouldn’t do it unless there has been an instance of adultery. And, if a person marries someone who is divorced, then adultery has been committed.

Adulterers, we are told by Paul, will not gain entry into Heaven:

“Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.”

So, why aren’t there cries for a divorce amendment?

One of my friends who studies Judaism says that questioning is an important aspect of understanding a given text. And, this is what we did in my many, many literature classes. Perhaps it is through our questioning that Truth actually emerges.

I believe that God is omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent. We have been given a collection of writings by various men written thousands of years ago—an ancient text now. Not impossible to accept from a timeless God. What are a thousand years to Him, though it means, often, quite a bit to us.

The mere fact that we still read the Bible and practice Christianity seems a clear indication of something worthy of notice and understanding.

But, here is what it all feels like in summary: The Bible can be misused and twisted, almost always filtered through our own culturally limited lenses. We can pray but have no guarantee that our answers are truly from God. We clearly cannot trust our own feelings, since we are “of the flesh” and swayed by the temptations of sin.

Where can we find truth?

In the end, I believe we find truth in the questioning. We are thinking creatures, who should use the intellect we have been given, and that means asking hard questions and avoiding the pat, simplistic answers that, oftentimes, cannot be fully supported by logic.

Questioning is necessary. We ask our parents questions, seek guidance and counsel from those around us when it comes to decisions about what car to buy, how to finance a house, what electric company to use—so, why shouldn’t we question our God?

If God is a living God and the Bible is the “Living Word,” then it is with real, day-to-day questions that truth can be found.

A Dedication

Eyes say more than all the words our tongues could twist free from our minds.

So much is said in her eyes—cornflower blue with gold accents near the pupil. Eyes, they say, are windows to the soul. If this is true, her soul can be as tranquil as a sea on a windless day, or as brooding as clouds congregating in storm. Yet, those wide eyes often belie that firm brow that overhangs them and speaks of a soul that loves, wants for protection, has a yearning to connect.

And, those eyes of hers can sparkle with the mischief of the Irish and harden with German resolve; emotions are never far from those cornflower blue eyes, which are her perfect canvas for the artistry of her thoughts.

She is the realized dream of hundreds of years of men and women from unforgiving climes, who forged lives out of the cold, jagged rock, whose hands bore calluses, whose own eyes stared into steely skies, emerald grasses, and stubbornly greeted each morning with which Life challenged them.

Her forebearers shouldered the burden of survival—all for the sake of a baby girl born one hot July day.

What brought those people together? God, Fate, purpose, love, lust, need? Whatever warmed those many cold nights, when clothes were shed, and skin heated skin—these people joined themselves, tangled bloodlines and genetics. Were their paths always meant to cross? Was this new millennium always meant to own a strong young woman with cornflower blue eyes and an inner fire ignited in one charged moment by ancients in distance lands?

She sings Irish ballads, devotes herself to acknowledging those relatives without whom she would not exist. In her truck, windows rolled down, winds whipping, she speeds down country roads proudly rambling to those Irish brogues lost in song.

She is a caretaker of her ancestors’ memory, scraping moss out of the grooves of their names and dates, raking back the tall grass—much like the people who woke up and sweated to feed their families, whose lives she protects from being forever forgotten, she battles with Nature to preserve the proof of their existence. Future generations owe a debt to this warrior preserver.

She is a caregiver to the ones she loves. She drives hours after a long day of work to comfort fears. She offers her strong hand to be clasped, held, clutched. She is never in doubt of her own sense of responsibility. When she tells you that she loves you, you get a sense of the bedrock truth beneath those words. No words are spoken that do not have deep meaning—those cornflower blue eyes reveal the earnestness and commitment.

What causes two disparate paths to cross? What draws two bloodlines mingled for thousands of years together suddenly? Perhaps it is a Topographer sketching our bloodlines like roads on a map—directing one path to merge into another path.

Our paths have finally crossed. I am thankful to those hundreds of people whose destiny she embodies, for without their desire and will, I would’ve been left to wander without a hand to hold or a heart to touch.

Three Days in the Belly

The other day I was thinking about the Biblical figure of Jonah.

Many people know the story—Jonah and the whale. Of course, in the Bible, it is a big fish.

This is a point I made in Sunday school once, and it irritated my teacher. I said—quite rightly, I feel—that if the Bible is God’s word and God created the animals, then we can safely assume that God would know the difference between a whale (warm-blood mammal) and a big fish (cold-blooded). My teacher was not impressed, and frankly, neither was I. It was only a matter of time before I lost interest in Sunday school. A small point with big implications.

The story of Jonah, though, is that he was told by God to go to Nineveh and warn them that if they did not change their ways, then God was going to destroy them.

But, Jonah wasn’t particularly bright, it seems, as he decided to “flee from the presence of the LORD” and go to Tarshish. He boarded a ship at Joppa and off they sailed for Tarshish. This resulted in a storm that God brewed up to stop him.

The men on board the ship were afraid that they were all going to die, so they went and found Jonah who was sleeping below deck. They were angry that he could sleep during a storm. Finally, they all cast lots to see who was causing the raging tempest. Of course, the lot fell on Jonah.

He admitted that it was his fault for going to Tarshish instead of Nineveh, and he told them to toss him overboard. They refused. Jonah insisted. Off he was thrown.

To save him, God caused a big fish to swallow him and hold him in its stomach for three days and three nights. In the guts of the fish, Jonah prayed to God, and God spared him. Eventually, the fish “vomited out Jonah upon dry land.”

In Sunday school, often, this is where the story ends. Jonah disobeyed. God punished him but spared him from dying by providing a big fish to swallow him up and protect him from the depths of the sea.

Clearly, this was a fish large enough that he could breathe for three days and three nights. It makes you wonder what such an experience must be like. Very moist, I suppose.

But there is much more to the story.

When Jonah finally recovers from his big fish ordeal, he ventures off to Tarshish—like he was supposed to—and warns them that if they don’t change their ways, then God will destroy them in forty days.

Immediately, the people repent. They turn from their “evil ways,” wear sackcloth, and cry out to God.

Is Jonah happy? Does he share in this miracle? Is he elated to see people turning to his God at such a dire hour?

No, he’s pissed.

He goes and sits down and prays for God to take his life.

God allows a plant to grow up and shade Jonah from the sun. Then, God allows a worm to kill the plant. Then, he creates a hot, sunny day and scorching wind to beat down on Jonah’s uncovered head.

What does Jonah want? To die again.

God says, “Are you mad about the plant dying?”

Jonah replies, “I am greatly angry, even unto death.”

So, God says, “'Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow, which came up in a night, and perished in a night; and should not I have pity on Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand, and also much cattle?”

This is where the book of Jonah ends, on God putting Jonah in his place.

Jonah reminds me of some Christian people these days. They sit around in insular lives—homeschooled children (or children in private Christian schools), church two to three times a week, completely shut down from people who do not agree with them. They look at people who are “sinners” living their untouched lives, and they can’t wait to “go home.” They say the world is “screwy” and “nothing is as it should be.”

And there they sit, like Jonah, in their living rooms each night, arms crossed, pronouncing judgment, complaining, essentially just waiting to die, only associating with other Christians, criticizing everything, angry that God has not “punished” the world yet.

I have received emails telling me I am an abomination and that I am distracted by smoke from the “pit of hell” because of the way I live my life. I am judged by people who lament the world and cannot wait to “die” and be in Heaven.

These people are like Jonah.

We never find out if Jonah learns how to be happy and not desire the suffering of other people—even those who have “sinned” and turned from God.

A few nights in the belly of a big fish didn’t change him. Having God speak directly to him didn’t change him.

It makes you wonder what people need to go through in order to learn compassion and to actually listen to what God is saying.

Just An Average Girl

In Creative Writing classes, I was always taught that you should never write stories that began with: “Bob was just a typical guy,” or “It was an ordinary day.” We claim that such beginnings “bore” the reader from the very first line. If the day is “ordinary,” then why tell the tale? If Bob is “typical,” then why do we want to read about him? And, yet, my own personal story would begin no differently:

Sarah White is a typical Midwestern girl. She stands 5’6” tall with brown hair and brown eyes, right-handed, a size 10 (on most days), 8 ½ foot size, makes a middle-class wage, speaks with a Northwest Ohio “accent”—which is considered to be “no accent”—the one that broadcasters are taught to use in school. She tries not to lie, steal, cheat, kill (a hard one when driving around Chicago). She shows compassion when appropriate, leading a “laid back” life, not bothering to “fret” about most things. Life has a way of sorting things out, if a person is patient and slow to anger. A Protestant raised with a Puritan work ethic (hard work, limited spending), she possesses a last name that is as bland and ordinary as her complexion.

Sarah White is profoundly average. She is “the girl next door.” Her parents are still married. They live on the same street where she grew up, in the same house where her father carried her mother over the threshold. Her parents had two children: a boy and a girl. Growing up, Sarah owned hamsters, fish, a poodle named P.J. and then a cat named George. On Saturday nights, her parents made them watch the Lawrence Welk show. They would pop popcorn and watch The Waltons, MASH, Little House on the Prairie—she still recalls the cartoon Puff the Magic Dragon with a smile. Sarah owns Star Wars figures, grew up with a mad crush on all of the heroes—Luke, Leia, and Han. She played with Barbies, skinned her knees while roller skating on the uneven sidewalks, learned to ride her bicycle on humid summer nights after supper.

Sarah White is extraordinarily ordinary. She grew up knowing both sets of her grandparents, who all lived in her same small town. She even knew her great-grandmothers—two feisty women who did not “go gentle into that good night.” Her Grandmother White’s mother traveled the country until the very end of her life. Her Grandfather White’s mother, who had been divorced from her husband for decades and had not remarried, was a firm and fiercely independent New England woman.

With her ethnicity from England, Scotland, and Ireland, Sarah descends from a stock of people who forged the New World, fought in the Revolutionary War, and settled down to the expected lives of work and longing.

In the end, Sarah White is like anyone else. She doesn’t believe that people are like snowflakes—each unique. She cries and smiles and dreams and bleeds like every other human being on the planet, just as strong and just as fragile. She can become lost in a crowd and many people have told her that she “reminds them of someone else.” Strangers already feel like they know her. Perhaps they do.

Maybe that’s the difference between life and a story—in stories, we try to create quirky people to make them seem “real,” but truth be told, our lives are mirrors of other lives that have come before us and that will echo after us. Maybe we should celebrate the comfort inherent in that instead of trying to make ourselves and our stories into something more than they truly are. I am you and you are me and we all share these pronouns in some form or another.

Even in our stories, we seem to be thirsting for “sameness.” As the movie Shadowlands says, “We read to know we’re not alone.” Even in the exotic, we search for the familiar and that is what makes the connection electric. You are not me but like me and sometimes you are me—when trying to express your individuality in words but you cannot without me.

Sarah White is just an average girl with plenty of stories to tell but none as powerful as the "ordinary" one she is living.

At the Midterm

The other day someone said the phrase I keep hearing repeated more and more—“you’re middle-aged.”

At 34, I suppose a case could be argued. The grey hairs glint in the light. Extra weight clings tenaciously to my tummy. I see lines and wrinkles where the skin was once soft and smooth. My body shows the effects of aging—a process millions of people throughout thousands of years have tried to tame. In the end, we always come to our end: wrinkled and worn.

In academia, at the halfway point, we give grades, midterms, sometimes evaluations to see how the students are progressing. I am having my students answer questions about if they feel their writing has improved, what changes would they like to make, what do they feel they have learned that they didn’t know before.

And, this made me start to think about being middle-aged.

What have I learned so far? What changes would I make? How have I improved?

Strangely, I don’t know that I have improved. Changed, definitely. I wonder if our progression through life can be quantified in terms of reaching some “better” level. Maybe we just get older. We accumulate more experiences, knowledge, etc, but am I “better” than I was when I was younger?

As I get older, I am becoming much more fascinated by Time. Probably because half of my life has been lived. Or, should I say that I have lived half of the average lifespan of a human being? I don’t know what my lifespan will be. Maybe only a day more, maybe 70 years more.

One of my professors told us once that he believed in the existence of souls because there always seems to be a fundamental part of us that does not change. He said that in his being was an essential core that did not feel much different than he did at seventeen. He was probably in his 50s. I remember sitting in my desk mulling over this notion. I already believed in a soul, but I considered his argument.

I suppose that I am still me. I don’t know if I am Sarah per se. Sarah is a name that my parents selected. I could just as easily be Mary, or Jane, or…Jack? I recognize a certain element of myself that seems unchanging, perhaps spurned on by memory and consciousness. But, is the soul really so steadfast?

Time, aging seem to make you even more aware of the various layers involved with being human—memories from twenty years ago that feel like just yesterday, aches seem more nagging on long walks—the body weakens, the mind remembers, our “souls” retain ourselves? Perhaps.

Just last night, it occurred to me that it had been fifteen years since my brother died. I was nineteen at the time. Something about that profound passage of Time struck me. I have lived almost as much life as I had on St. Patrick’s Day 1994. I admit, these last fifteen years have gone much more quickly than those first nineteen. As you age, Time seems to be on a mad dash towards that final finish line.

So, the question remains: what have I learned at the Midterm? I have learned that I am less certain about some things in my life than I was. I am also much less flexible. I will have a confrontation with someone if I feel that I am not being heard or respected. I have learned that these might not necessarily be changes for the “better.”

I always say that “life is the journey, not the destination.” Aging has taught me, though, that while I still enjoy a good amble, the time is coming to walk with a bit more purpose.

Specters

I do not believe in ghosts. The dead are dead.

Death does not make a soul suddenly omnipresent. None of those who have passed on are looking at me as I go about my daily life.

How would they see me anyway? Is there a giant screen television in Heaven (or Hell) tuned to the 24 hour Alive Network? If there was, I doubt enough of the billions of dead would all agree to watch the Sarah Channel for more than a minute while flipping through to something much more entertaining.

The truth of it is: I am here; they are not. Where they are, I will not venture to say. I know what I believe, but no one has sent me any postcards from the Great Beyond, so I will humbly stay silent on the subject.

But, I do know that when the clock gongs midnight in the blackest hour of the night, no tortured souls are treading my floorboards or lurking in my closet, or roaming and moaning with the torment of eternal restlessness. If we cannot see our own souls while we’re alive, why would they become visible once we’re dead?

Ghost stories are romantic, though. Enough of my family heritage hails from New England, where specters are part of the lore and fabric, that I still enjoy the chills of believing the undead walk. In New England, where everything quivers with such rich history, it is hard not to hear the whispers of our predecessors in the rustling of the tall evergreens.

I have seen the church box where George Washington once sat, stared into a bust made from Benjamin Franklin’s death mask, touched my fingertips to the splintered boards of a covered bridge just a few miles down the road from Norman Rockwell’s house.

Ironically, it’s the “thingy-ness” of artifacts that make us almost believe in ghosts. We touch what someone else years before touched. We see the threadbare flag that a nameless woman spent nights hunched over, her nimble fingers sewing the fabric together for the sake of her new country.

I see her stitching; I feel her fingertips.

These objects make these people step out of our imaginations.

One historic figure who marched out of the stiff pages of history to stare at me was Abraham Lincoln.

The first time I read a biography of Abraham Lincoln I was in elementary school. I’m not sure which grade, but I remember that it was a picture book with black and white sketches of the president from gawky boyhood to his time as a lawyer to his time as president. I was fascinated by this story of a self-made man—reading borrowed books by the hearth, chilling in the cold of a log cabin, developing his famed reputation for honesty. I read this book in early 80’s, so there was much emphasis on Lincoln’s virtues of lifelong learning, integrity, and hard work. While the book attempted to humanize him, true to the era in which it was written, he was also lionized and mythologized.

I felt Lincoln’s ghost twice.

The first time I was standing in Henry Ford Museum. Memories are never accurate records of what “happened,” but they almost always capture the way certain moments felt. Perhaps, that is why they tend to skew the actual events. How else do you capture the complexity of emotion?

It felt like I was standing in the middle of an open hall with nothing but this glass display case. Inside the case was a rocking chair. The red velvet fabric, frayed and stained, chilled me. This was the chair where Lincoln laughed at Our American Cousin before Booth’s bullet lodged into his brain, and the icon slumped—only a man after all.

I was told that the crimson stain on the back of the chair was Lincoln’s blood. Other sources now say that it was likely hair oil. Either way, the stain was human residue, the mark that a flesh and blood person had used it. Staring into that glass case, at that stain—which at the time, I believed was his blood—I could feel Lincoln in the most tangible way.

The second time I shivered at his ghost was years later while touring Hildene in Manchester, Vermont. This is where Abraham Lincoln's only living son resided. I have family in New England, near Robert Todd Lincoln’s mansion. It is a palace with an impressive Observatory on the edge of a mountain and sprawling gardens and meadows.

In one of the bedrooms—I think—was a dressing mirror. In my memory, it was oval. I am not sure how long. The object itself eludes me. But, I remember the tour guides words.

He said, “This is a mirror that hung in the White House cloak room. Abraham Lincoln might’ve looked in it to check his top hat before making his way to Ford’s Theatre that fateful night.”

I saw him. I saw him in ghastly black and white, overhanging brow, bushy beard, a face all crags and lines. His reflection still seemed to haunt that polished glass. In that mirror, Abraham Lincoln last saw himself alive. The thought of it sent shivers down my spine--the chilly brush of a ghost's passing?--and, yet, the Emancipation Proclamation giant seemed never more real and human.

Ghosts are not souls wandering among us, tormented, seeking some sort of eternal sleep; ghosts are when our minds recognize the humanness of the past—the human residue of the footprints and top hats, mirrors and rocking chairs of those who have tread this earth before us.

If I sit where George Washington sat, then, if only for a moment, I can see what he might’ve seen, hear what he might’ve heard, feel what he might’ve felt. History and the past can sleep then, for we have seen them and heard them—appropriately haunted by them.

I touch my fingertips to this keyboard. Maybe years from now, a woman will touch her fingertips to this keyboard and know what it meant to be a woman in her mid-30s at the turn of the millennium.

The ghost of my touch will touch her, and together, we will merge in our understanding of what it means to be alive.

On The Coldest Night of the Year

Outside my window, tonight, heaps of crumbly snow stand like arctic Easter Island statues: stout, sturdy, with mysteriously stoic expressions in the hollows and shadows of hardened snowflakes.

They are buffers against the usual night noises—cars rushing down side streets, sirens, horns, the whirling of people hurrying their lives away. These snow creatures pout in the icy winds that sway the cars in the parking lot.

The snow drifted against my patio doors reminds me of January of 1978. There was one of the worst blizzards in Northwest Ohio that year. Our electricity did not work at our house. We put blankets over a car table, used flashlights to illuminate our faces, and huddled together against the bitter cold house. I was three years old; my brother must’ve been eight. My parents were younger than I am now.

I remember that our neighbors let us stay over one night. It must’ve been much too cold for us to snuggle together in bed. I cannot imagine my father agreeing to such a generous proposal unless my mother shamed him into it, or it was just too darn cold to be proud.

During the day, we built snow forts with several different interior rooms. I crawled and giggled my way throughout one “snow house,” visiting each room as my snowpants swished and mittens dampened. The enjoyment was short-lived. My mother banned us from playing in it too much lest it should collapse on one of us. Still, as I sit here, the corners of my lips curl into a smile. The size of that snow fort still tickles me.

One of my other favorite memories is about as simple as they come. It probably explains why on days like yesterday and today—heavy snowfall, knee-deep snow, stinging cold air—all I want to do is go out into it. Not in a car per se but definitely by foot. It is one of my favorite times to go for a walk.

I’m almost positive the memory I am about to describe happened during the aftermath of the Blizzard of ’78. I think what prompted the occasion was the need for some sort of supplies—something my father must not have had at the hardware store where he worked.

My father, for whatever reason, said he was going to walk to the K-mart store. As an adult thinking back, I suppose the distance isn’t more than two miles or so, but it seemed like the other side of town when I was little. Being a daddy’s girl, I’m sure I begged to go. We both bundled ourselves with scarves, hats, gloves, coats, and snowpants (at least for me), and off we set.

I always say that “my people” were pilgrims. I come from “pioneer stock.” My family claims Peregrine White—the first pilgrim child born in the New World.

My people were restless. My people were not afraid to pick up and start over in a new land. My people craved adventure, rejected the stagnation of a “comfortable life.” They had a thirst for fortune. They were hearty with an emotional and mental toughness that I cannot fathom. It must’ve felt like packing up and moving to the moon.

And, so, in the spirit of “our people,” my father and I set off on our journey to K-mart in the snow.

I don’t remember being at K-mart, but I remember that journey…

After a while, probably on the way back, my father carried me part of the way.

When we returned home, I felt like I had accomplished something so momentous. I had gone with my father to K-mart on foot.

I love to walk. Sometimes, I will start walking without any clear destination in mind. I’ll stroll down side streets just to see where I will end up and what I might find.

Tonight, I feel the restless call of this night. When I think of my life until this point, I feel the stirring of “my people” woven into the genetic tapestry I recognize in the mirror. I have moved eight times in the last eight years: nomadic, transient, at times so exhausting.

It is the coldest night of year tonight. Only my heater crackling and floorboards snapping can be heard.

The night’s darkness brings a sting, and I sit here, lost in the revelry of childhood memories and the future daydream of a time when I can rest calmly on a snowy day.