a sea of glass

In recent years, I’ve decided that a faith that comes easily to you isn’t worth keeping. If I told you that I was born into a strong Evangelical Christian home to two loving parents, who had both been born into strong Christian two-parent households, you may think my faith came easily to me. And maybe it did. My very name, Elijah, means “YAHWEH is my God.” Even my birth certificate contains a proclamation of faith.

This faith and this family was a happy one, for the most part. The Earth I was born into was created in 6 24-hour days, carefully documented in the first paragraphs of the Bible. This book, I was told, was God’s love letter to me, the only source of truth, the literal Word of God written through the personalities of several inspired authors. “The B-I-B-L-E, yes that’s the book for me!” I sang in preschool. I began helping with Cubbies, a weekly preschool program at our church, when I was in seventh grade. “I stand on the word, the word of God, the B-I-B-L-E. BIBLE!” I would sing along with the preschoolers. Years later I was the song leader at my grandparents’ church’s Vacation Bible School. The material that year was from Answers in Genesis, an organization that strongly asserts a literal understanding of the Bible, particularly the first 11 chapters of Genesis. “The Bible says it, that settles it. Simple as that!” I sang in front of 30 children under the age of 12. But at 19, that claim didn’t seem so simple.

The VBS at my grandparents’ church was an annual tradition, a time my cousins and I got to spend a week together without our parents around. It’s my cousin Sam—an only child—Trent and Brianna—brother and sister—and my little sister and me. When we weren’t at VBS we focused our time on an assortment of games and adventures. Our grandparents built their house on a large property in the country that’s surrounded by a line of trees and filled with a large pond amidst rolling wheat fields, a small paradise as idyllic as our view of the world. We ran for long hours under the hot sun around the pond, darting in and out of the trees and around our grandpa’s plots of corns and beans. We looked up from the deck or from blankets or from the paddleboat many nights at the expanse of stars that crowded into our sky to show off for us. Various forms of wildlife were hidden in the pond and in the hills and grasses in and around my grandparents’ farm. The pond teamed with catfish and ducks, and we would swim and fish and imitate the duck’s calls from the small dock. During the day we would stop in hushed awe whenever we spotted a deer, trying to keep our presence unknown. At night we could hear coyotes howling, close enough to excite us but not to scare us. And of course at the center of all of this was our grandpa and grandma, both strong and wise and wonderful in their own ways. It’s easy to be there and understand why God called his creation good.

Our questions and our explorations had always either been of fantasy or within this set reality, a reality that itself remained unquestioned. That is, until Answers in Genesis. “Do you guys really think it happened like this?” someone said. I don’t know who the instigator was, but all it took was one question for this program that was meant to breed certainty to begin breeding discussions of doubt. “Do you really think the Earth is 6000 years old?” “Do you really think dinosaurs lived alongside humans?” “Do you really think all of these scientists are wrong?”

"The Great Unknown" from The End by Lemony Snicket, drawn by Brett Helquist

“The Great Unknown” is personified, somewhat, in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events into a large question-mark-shaped sea creature that in The End approaches a group of characters. “In an instant they were gone,” we are told, “either swallowed up or rescued by that mysterious thing.” That’s how that week feels in my memory. Although each of us had been on individual journeys of deconstruction before that point, it was the first time any of us voiced our questions. And, no less, they were voiced in the very center of our young universe. The four of us and our universe suddenly felt much older than before we’d ever thought to question its age. “In an instant” that universe was gone, “either swallowed up or rescued by that mysterious thing,” and it felt like we went with it.

As a 13-year-old immersed in the all-encompassing world of Evangelicalism for Teens!™, my sister was too young for this odd week of too many Questions in Genesis and not enough Answers to have a lasting effect. But the rest of us were disconnected enough from that culture and had already questioned enough for this week to pull us further down a slippery slope with few footholds. The four of us have since been on our own journeys of losing and, every once in a while, finding our faith. These journeys are separate but similar, intersecting for holidays and our annual summer Cousin Week, which no longer includes VBS. Our time together is now spent on these big questions. We stopped talking about our fantasies that year. Learning and unlearning reality has proven to be enough.

In the creation myth of Genesis, the water on the Earth is separated from a layer of water in the sky by something called “the firmament,” an invisible dome placed high above the Earth. Many literal Biblical creationists believe the firmament broke during the Flood, providing the excess of water that covered the Earth in a drowning only Noah and those in his ark could survive. I was held under my own firmament of sorts, a carefully-constructed systematic theology meant to protect me from the chaos outside.

A depiction of the firmament

Ta Nehisi Coates writes that all of this chaos, “the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.” Coates is of course talking about racism, an evil that I am not a target of, but the hatred of my queer sexuality brought a different form of violence upon my body. Queer theorist Elizabeth Grosz asserts that “the body is what it is capable of doing,” and while I don’t agree with that fully, I think I do believe that the body cannot be split from the things it does and desires to do that are life-giving. You cannot exist fully, in the open, without shame, before a god that tells you your sexuality is beyond redemption. “It is this split,” Grosz writes, “between what one is and what one does that produces the very possibility of a notion like ‘the closet.’” The firmament was my closet, keeping my sexual orientation pushed out of everyone’s view, including (as much as possible) my own.

The VBS that year had been only one occurrence among many that chipped away at the firmament until it broke and water and shards rained down and cut me to my core. My closet, my safe-haven, the gilded cage I called home was transformed from a still peace lingering above me to a crashing force coursing through me. I was unprotected, but instead of feeling hit by reality, I felt hit by the lack of it. The weight of nothing weighed down from above and within me, the dome compressed into a singularity at my center, and I was slowly sucked inward. As the pieces of my faux heaven were crunched together with the pieces of my avoided self, the only reality that formed was that of a sexuality and thus a body and personhood that were unwelcome in throneroom of God. I hadn’t done anything, but the distinction between being queer and acting on my queerness was evidently arbitrary. “Guilt was not my problem as I felt it,” writes Lewis Smeades. “What I felt most was a glob of unworthiness that I could not tie down to any concrete sins I was guilty of. What I needed more than a pardon was a sense that God accepted me, owned me, held me, affirmed me, and would never let me go.”

That summer in 2012 began a two-year dance with darkness. I no longer knew if God existed, or who he was if he did exist. I had feared Hell before, but the fear became ubiquitous to the point of tedium, the adrenaline of terror replaced with hopelessness and impatience for the day my inevitable eternal fate would arrive. The motivation I’d had for school the year before was slowly drained down the rabbit hole inside of me to a land of wonders I no longer had access to. The “once saved always saved” theology of my upbringing all at once seemed patently false.

“Is everything okay?” a professor asked me the spring semester of my junior year of college, a year and a half after Answers in Genesis. I was close to my lowest point. “I’m worried because of your grade on the midterm”—I’d been aware that my emptiness had affected my grades—“but I’ve also just been worried by how you’ve been acting. You seem distracted, like your mind is somewhere else.” I didn’t realize that not only my academic performance had changed, but also my demeanor.

How could I answer her question? I didn’t know how to say that my mind wasn’t on school because it was on thoughts of eternal damnation, or that I was mourning a being I wasn’t sure I existed, or that the only important things I thought I ever knew had been taken away, leaving nothing in return. The foundation of my soul had disintegrated to dust. But as these things go, I simply replied, “I’m fine.”

Looking back depression is an obvious word, but it wasn’t one I thought made sense for me. I equated depression with sadness, and I was not so much sad as hollow. Even my moments of laughter rang into a void that erased their meaning. But when the word was given to me by a counselor a couple of months later, it was more freeing than accusing. I watched a TED talk by Andrew Solomon on depression shortly after and it all clicked. “The opposite of depression is not happiness,” he told me, “but vitality.” More than happiness, I had lost my vitality in the face of the muchness of the nothingness of our existence and the muchness of the queerness of my own.

What I have learned is that the greatest beauty and greatest tragedy of the Christian faith is that God somehow entered into this chaos, this muchness, all of which fell “with great violence, upon the body” of the crucified Christ. In the midst of his torture, Jesus cried out: “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” If he spoke English, he would have said something like “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” If he spoke Hawaiian Pidgin, he would have said something like “My God, my God, how come you go way an leave me ova hea?”

“Hey dude!” I was sitting in a circle with other junior highers from my church youth group in a homeless ministry in the inner city of Chicago. The woman in charge was recalling the prayer of someone who had come for a meal. I was struck by the use of such a casual title as “dude” for God. Are you allowed to say that?! seventh-grade me thought. The prayer continued to strike me in its informality: “This sucks!”

The book of Revelations describes a “sea of glass” in the heavenly throneroom. I’ve been told this is meant to represent the peace that comes in the presence of God, peace enough to make a raging sea as still as a pane of glass. And that’s probably what John meant. But I read that and see a sea of glass that’s been shattered, a sea as tumultuous as any, each swirling particle of water replaced with a shard of the world we once thought we knew. And this is the water we’re told we must walk on to get to the throne of God.

“Hey dude,” she recalled the second half of the prayer, “Thanks.”

What, though, is there to be thankful for? My cousin Sam wrote this for Thanksgiving this year: “I am loved, and I am loved above all else by a father who pours out mercy far greater than any torrential downpour” of water or shards “that I may have to endure. Ultimately, this entire symphony of highs and lows will mold together into one single drop. A drop that nourishes, a drop that heals.” Somehow Jesus let himself be severed from his Godship on the throne and instead walks on this sea of glass with us, walks over and through and within the broken firmament with us. “The Spirit that once hovered over the waters had inhabited them,” writes Rachel Held Evans, “Now every drop is holy.” Even as God leaves us “ova hea,” Jesus never does. The reality of his presence in this place promises the reality of his presence beyond this place, far beyond where any firmament could ever reach, and the joy we think we can only find in the muchness of that space can be found in the smallness of our inward temples. “If anyone is willing to enter into my private hell and stay there with me,” writes John J. McNeill, “then there are grounds for hope.”

"Encounter with Christ" by Newton D'souza

I found the Trinitarian God and the dying and rising Jesus not in churches but in the streets of Chicago, where I lived and worked and taught summer school the past two summers. I found him in the bodies of Michael Brown, Rekia Boyd, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice. I found him in America’s black and brown bodies and neighborhoods, crucified by Jim Crow’s grandchild, mass incarceration. “The crucifixion of Jesus by the Romans in Jerusalem and the lynching of blacks by whites in the United States are…amazingly similar,” James Cone tells us. “The lynching of black America is taking place in the criminal justice system.” I found him in their little resurrections, in their joy that acts as resistance to the chaos that lands on their bodies with much more violence than it does mine, in the collective resurrection taking place in this movement insisting that, despite the way of things, black lives matter.

I found him in my students, called disabled by a world that believes in the myth of able-bodiedness. I see him in their frustrations, in the truth that is maybe more evident to them that, as put by Nancy Eiesland, “ordinary lives incorporate contingency and disability” and that “disability does not mean incomplete and that difference is not dangerous.” I also found him in their little resurrections, their joys, their resistance, the moments their bodies do not only get “in the way of creativity” but rather become “a conduit for it.” I see the Trinity in their strong sense of individual personhood within a network of trusting interdependence. My sometimes difficult faith has been enhanced by their sometimes difficult lives. “Because a difficult life is more complicated than an easy one,” writes Nancy Mairs, “it offers opportunities for developing a greater range of response to experience: a true generosity of spirit.”

And I found him in queer communities, who live in their bodies with their sexualities before God without shame, as they did in Song of Songs, as Adam and Eve did in Eden before they tried to know good and evil, tempted by a desire to control this wide and varied world. I found him in their continual creation, their taking part in the divine work of deconstructing our superimpositions upon the world and building a growing a more beautiful one. I found him in their love, a communal love that spans borders, bleeding grace into every place and to every person that are told they are not worthy.

These people show me Jesus because, of course, Jesus is not an idea but a person. “While we attempt to figure things out…the truth shows up in the form of a person. While we are sifting through the shards of glass on the floor, Jesus is waiting patiently at the door.” When I first read this statement by John Wilkinson in the fall of 2013, I expected this person of Jesus to show up as some detached experience of feelings, or as a moment of clarity, as a sudden recreation of the firmament. But Jesus comes not to take us away from the reality of existence, but to be with us as we take part in deconstructing what destroys and building up this unpredictable phenomenon we call life. Once firmaments and closets are deconstructed and all of our hidden and queer bits of life are brought into the open and melded into a whole, the process of deconstruction and wholeness—death and resurrection—rolls on.

The view from the back of my grandparents' house

My cousins and I were together last week, having big conversations in our grandparents’ paradise that seems much smaller than it once did, much younger than it once did in comparison to the vast and ancient universe it sits within. It had become less of a paradise, too, somehow tainted by the sad things of the world we never imagined could creep in. Even as our questions floated around our heads and through the branches of our ailing family tree, we found the presence of the Trinitarian God in our solidarity through uncertainty, in this being together even when a world unprotected by firmaments threatens to tear us apart. A speaker I saw once whose name I don’t remember proclaimed that “the foundation of the Gospel is that God is a community.” And here, amid deconstruction and because of it, God is found.