rendezvous (a reflection on the past ten years)

you have found me in instagram accounts
empty apartments and 80s Hits playlists
the usual suspects: the ocean at night
international flights and friends’ laughter
but also my flimsy immune system 
the little heater and the color sienna
you have hunted me, if I can put it that way,
hounded me haunted me hollowed me out
when I let you—and more miraculously
when I don’t—and as you purge me of me
like a pumpkin of seeds, a sanctified scraping,
you have hallowed me too

so when I say you came as a baby
slimy and squalling and bawling
and I can’t quite believe my own words
I remember that open window at midnight
when I thought you’d turned your back
only it was your hand lifting me up
it took me years to see but finally
I can trace the ribbon of moonlight
my fleeing fearing feet were following 
all along, the path I didn't know was leading 
to my homecoming, our rendezvous

I was confirmed in the Anglican Church of North America a few weeks ago.

That statement still makes me feel a little strange. There's that non-denom upbringing that wriggles with discomfort at the word “confirmation” (it’s so—gasp—Catholic). There's this little voice in my head that says, you're just doing this because it's a fad. Because it makes you feel good or cool or sophisticated or safe. There’s this sense that I should have felt more before it or during it or after it. Felt more what, you ask? I don’t know. More something.

My pastor talked a lot about how the gift of confirmation is an intentional request for more of the Spirit. He said that you might feel something when the bishop lays his hands on you, or you might not, because the moment matters, but it is also just the first moment of many more in which the Spirit will be working and moving. I kind of clung to the latter idea, the idea that it's just page one of the story, no pressure for some mountaintop experience. Maybe that was wrong or foolish. Maybe I was walling myself off from the Spirit moving, clinging to a semblance of control. I don’t know.

But I do know I had this sense—no Jacob’s dream of ladders to heaven, no thigh-breaking wrestling at midnight, but a mustard seed of a sense—that this was the next step for God and me and this pledge I made to him in response to the one he made to me before the foundations of the world… In less flowery language, it felt like an act of obedience, even if I couldn’t fully rationalize it.

And there were reasons: Chiefly, I want to pursue more theological education, and I want to do it from a grounded place, with a tradition as my guardrails. I want roots from which to build a wide and gracious canopy, a trellis to steady this vine of questions and discovery. Being confirmed in a tradition I have come to deeply love and appreciate (without thinking it is the only right one) seemed like a good way to do that.

So I knelt down at the front of our church with fifteen other people, mostly young adults like me, all from various other denominational upbringings, and I felt the bishop’s hands around my head like a crown and he called me sister and asked God to defend me and “daily increase your Holy Spirit more and more until she comes into the fullness of your everlasting kingdom.”

I had no piercing revelation, I felt no different, and I was honestly relieved. Anything close to the charismatic scares me, which is certainly an area I need to grow in. I want to keep God bottled up in my head, where I (think I) can control him. Which is why I need that prayer: increase your Holy Spirit in me more and more…

But there was one thing that happened that, now that I think about it, was a revelation. It’s what made me think of this poem.

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First, rewind to about ten years ago. I’m in high school. I’m the picture-perfect youth group good girl: I steer clear of drama and have smart answers to Sunday School questions and teach VBS lessons on mission trips.

I am also suffocated, spinning apart inside. I am Sisyphus (I am also a dramatic teenager) under this unbearable weight of what I think it means to be a Christian.

It's hard to articulate even now what I was so troubled by. I just remember sitting in church on Sundays and looking around me at everybody in their pews, listening attentively to the sermon and singing hymns with earnest faces (no hand-raising in the churches we attended), and wondering if this Christian thing was hard for anyone else. I clung to sins that I couldn’t bear to tell anyone else about, and I went through brutal cycles of not caring about what I did and then self-flagellating like a medieval monk, trying to prove my repentance in some perverse effort to earn grace.

Deep down in some cavern of my heart I wouldn’t dare explore, a voice whispered, Maybe you aren’t a Christian anymore. Maybe you never were. Maybe there’s something fundamentally broken in you that’s worse than other people, and you’ll just never be able to do this. Every Sunday on which we had Communion, I’d lie awake in the early morning, wondering if this would be the day God struck me dead for pretending I was his follower when really I was at best a sad failure and at worse a brazen fraud.

Not that you would have ever known this from the way I acted, of course—my wise-for-her-years reputation was too precious to lose and I wasn’t brave enough for big “bad” sins anyway. But inside I felt more chasms shuddering open every day. I took notes madly during youth group retreats, hoping they would cure this sickness in me that I couldn’t even describe.

That was the worst part: there was shame around sins and attitudes I could name, but there was this deeper sense of wrong-ness, of failure, that I couldn’t put words to. I just felt like everyone else had figured out the secret code that allowed you to level up as a Christian, and even though I could talk the talk, one day my worthless and evil walk would be exposed before everyone. And I was exhausted. The crippling and incessant shame coupled with bouts of agonized self-deprecation were unsustainable.

I would say things about my “faith” and everything inside me would wince and curl up because what if I didn’t actually have any? What if everyone knew what was going on inside me? When would the day of reckoning come?

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My senior year of high school I began experiencing strange pain that started as a Crossfit injury in one arm. It spread to both arms, neck, shoulders, upper back. I barely graduated and then, instead of going to college like I’d always dreamed (nerd alert), I put my life on hold. Or rather, it got put on hold. I felt like I had no agency, like the story of my life was being ripped from my hands and thrown into hurricane-force winds.

For two years, I lived at home, worked part-time cashiering jobs, visited countless doctors, and screamed at God.

And things between God and me, they shifted. Not in any revival-service, heavens-parted, Paul-on-the-road way. This is also hard to put into words. I recently reread my journals from those years, trying to pinpoint the moment of revelation. All I see are seeds, fragments, shaky lamplights.

There was a sermon series on Job and a book about grace. There were conversations with my parents and long walks alone. There were Twenty One Pilot’s “Car Radio” and Andrew Peterson’s “Always Good.” There were Hosea 11 and Isaiah 43 and all the other passages of Scripture I memorized because it was one of the only activities I could do to engage my mind but not my hands. There were audiobooks and recordings of Yankees games and the roses in our patio, none of which seem explicitly spiritual but which, looking back, were places God was meeting me.

Hence rendezvous.

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The lines at the end of the poem reference a moment that encapsulates my journey with God during that time: “I remember that open window at midnight / when I thought you’d turned your back / only it was your hand lifting me up / it took me years to see…”

It was during my first gap year, I think, another night of pain. I couldn't sleep and I finally decided, with great reluctance and simmering anger, to pray. If He wouldn’t let me sleep, fine, I’d talk to Him. I knew it’s probably what He wanted, the Great Joy-Crusher and Sorrow-Bringer.

So I sat up, and at that very moment when I had screwed my will to talk to the person I was angriest at, a giant bug flew through my open, un-screened window. (We were living in Germany, and Germans do not believe in screens.) It was huge and furry and it flew right at my mouth. I can still feel its wings and legs on my lips. I hate bugs.

It felt like the ultimate insult, a huge middle finger from God. I was about to pray to Him, for Pete’s sake, and then He sent that? Or at least, depending on your theology, allowed it? Does He want people to love Him?

I ran out of my room and huddled on the couch and didn’t sleep the rest of the night—and neither did I pray. I was too angry.

I didn’t see then that that moment too was a rendezvous with God.

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This is far too small a space, and I far too young a thinker, to unravel how God interacts with human pain and suffering. I can’t engage with those theological tangles in this post. All I will say now is my story: Pain brought me to Him.

As I wrote in another reflection on this:

Pain and unexpected circumstances have transformed the facts in my head and the messages in my mouth into the beliefs of my heart. My heart is a cliff high above the waves of doctrine and truths I profess to believe, and only a storm can raise them to reach its heights.

Only the slow, monotonous pounding of the waves will make the water seep in.

Must it always be this way? Is my pain my fault—if I only could have scraped together enough faith, I wouldn’t have had to learn the hard way?

No. I think God could have brought me back to Himself in any number of ways. I think He let some of my choices and some of the brokenness of the world react like chemicals to create this particular compound because He gives us free will and He follows the rules of the world He made. But He also loves me and will not let go of His own and so there is never a reality where I do not return to His arms.

I could’ve had this pain even if I hadn’t struggled with my faith. Or He could’ve miraculously healed me, and that could’ve been the catalyst of my return to assurance of salvation. There are so many ways this story could have gone.

The story that did happen is one where a bug flew into my window at midnight and it made me feel betrayed by God and that anger eventually brought me to Him, not farther away, because I couldn’t contain it anymore and I had to confront Him, had to come to Him, speak to Him, touch Him.

When you wrestle with someone, you are very close to them. It’s intimate. There was no room for my shame when we were that close. I had lived in fear of His hands being harsh but when I finally let myself feel His touch, it was gentle. But I never would have come close enough were it not for the bug and the pain and the anger.

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All this brings me to a couple Sundays ago. I’m sitting on the pew, waiting to be confirmed, when I have a minor epiphany: I’m not afraid of this.

Oh, I’m fretting over how to explain this decision to myself and others and over-analyzing my motives, but I’m not afraid like I was ten years ago, trembling before every Communion service. I may wonder whether this tradition or this ritual is right, but I don’t wonder about the confession I’m about to make before my church and the world and all the hosts of heaven: I am His, and He is mine.

Ten years ago I couldn’t have said that without internal reservation. I would’ve wanted to throw up. I would’ve immediately heard a chorus of condemnation in my head. Not anymore.

I still struggle to see God as kind. I still struggle with self-saving guilt. I still struggle with most of those temptations that brought me so much shame. But I know the difference now between condemnation and conviction. I know what it is to yell at God and hear my voice echoed back in love. I know what it is to rest in His holding of me, not my failing grasp on Him.

It’s been enough years that I take this blessed assurance for granted. But to be reminded of it right before my confirmation—that was revelation enough. I didn’t look but maybe hovering above me…tongues of flame.

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And so this poem: an example of the ways He met me last year, the bridges upon which my faith is built, a faith I once had panic attacks over whether I still had at all. This is the greatest thing about our God, to me: He meets us. Again and again, He meets us, in miracles and mundanity, in burning bushes and dry rivers and peasant babies and poisoned snakes and bleeding women and whiskey priests.

I know rendezvous usually refers to an agreed-upon meeting, set up by both parties ahead of time. But this is poetry and I like subverting the meaning, just as God subverted the covenant way back with Abram, to highlight the beauty of the way God meets us. He does not force Himself on us. But He does not wait for us to get good sleep and put on our makeup and arrange our schedules either. He shows up when we don’t expect Him, when we don’t look good or feel good, when we thought we were abandoned by everyone.

This is our great hope: anywhere, at any minute, might be the rendezvous He has set with us. In any place, any mental state, He can show up. Every moment is an invitation to be with Him.

This is a longer post than normal but the poem, the confirmation, it all came together and I felt it was time to share these stories. If you’ve made it this far, wow. Thank you. I’m honored.

My hope is that this can be some encouragement to anyone who has or is going through similar things. I wish I could’ve heard from other Christians about their wrestles with God and faith when I was struggling. You are not alone. We are all trying to figure it out. God is with us. He is with you and for you. And it can get better.

I would love to know: what’s on your list of unexpected ways God has met you?

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In Other Words…

Goodreads reviews:

Hope Was Here by Joan Bauer (3 stars) | Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi (4 stars)

Other:

I’m very excited to share that I had an article published about a month ago in Reactor mag (formerly Tor.com)! I began following Reactor because of Brandon Sanderson and fun fantasy/sci-fi news but they also share some wonderful, thoughtful articles (like this one on mediation, artifice, and silence in recent films).

I was so honored that they published my essay “What Station Eleven and All the Light We Cannot See Reveal About Art and Loneliness.”

Two of my favorite stories, two themes I’ve thought a lot about, a magazine I really admire—it’s such a gift. If you wade through the whole thing, please tell me what you think! It’s a conversation I think worth having, how we consume art alone so often these days but how art can also hold the key to bringing us into community, and the difference between serendipitous, physical community versus curated, online community.

keep staying awake,

Aberdeen