Love Without Borders
Chapter Ten
The fury has not dimmed. I want that recorded. If there is a ledger here, if this grey country keeps accounts the way the god of my childhood kept accounts, let it note this: the fury is intact. It burns the way it burned the day I walked out of New Covenant Fellowship for the last time, the way it burned every day of the nine years after, the way it burned in the wreck and in the dying and in the moment when the light came for me and I turned my back on it with the full force of a woman who knows exactly what God is and will not be fooled again.
I am not confused. I want that recorded too. The others may be confused. Quinn is probably running, because Quinn is always running, and Micah is probably sitting very still with his arms folded and his argument polished and his grief tucked behind his reason like a knife in a sheath. The strangers from the other cars are here too, I think, somewhere in this formless country, but I did not know them in life and I do not know them now. I know myself, and I am not confused.
I know where I am. I know who put me here. And I know, with the bright, clean certainty of someone whose entire adult life has been an act of informed refusal, that the presence at the edge of this place is the same presence I was warned about every Sunday of my childhood, the same presence whose representatives laid hands on my shoulders and prayed the doubt out of me in a fellowship hall that smelled of coffee and carpet cleaner, the same presence that Pastor Keith invoked when he wanted a fifteen-year-old girl to stop asking questions.
I know You.
The words do not leave my mouth. They do not need to. The grey is the kind of place where thoughts have weight, where the inside and the outside are closer together than they were in the living world, and I can feel the words move through me like heat through a wire, direct and conducted and aimed at the nearness that has been sitting at the edge of my awareness since I woke here. The nearness that does not approach and does not retreat. The nearness that simply is, the way gravity is, the way pressure is, the way the weight of water is when you are standing at the bottom of something deep.
I know what You are. I have known what You are since I was fifteen years old and Linda, Pastor Keith’s wife, looked at me with the expression of a woman watching a dog bite a guest, and said, in the gentlest possible voice, that the heart that questions God’s judgment has already begun to turn from Him. I have known what You are since the following Sunday, when Pastor Keith preached for seventy-five minutes on the sin of doubt and looked at me seven times, seven, I counted, seven laser strikes from the pulpit to the third row, and each one landed like a brand on the same patch of skin. I have known what You are since three women from the prayer team stood around me in the fellowship hall and pressed their fingers into my shoulders and prayed the wrongness out of me, as if a question were a demon and a girl who asked it were possessed.
That is the god I know. That is the god I fled. And the god I fled is the god who is here, in this grey, because there is only one god, one presence, one force behind the searchlight and the gavel and the pointed finger, and I will not pretend, in death, to have forgotten what I learned in life.
The grey does not answer. The nearness does not answer. The silence in this place is total, not the silence of emptiness but the silence of something that is choosing not to speak, and the choosing enrages me more than speech would, because it is a tactic I recognize. Pastor Keith did this too. He would ask a question from the pulpit and then wait, wait with his hands on the edges of the lectern and his eyes on the congregation, wait while the silence thickened and the room grew smaller and the question hung in the air like a hook, and the silence was never patience. The silence was power. The silence said: I have all day. I have all eternity. I can wait longer than you can.
I sit in the grey and I feel the nearness wait, and I wait too, and the waiting is a war, and I have been fighting this war for nine years, and I have not lost yet.
Time passes. Or does not pass. The grey gives no indication. There is no light to shift, no temperature to change, no shadow to lengthen or shorten. I am sitting, or standing, or occupying space in whatever way a body without a body occupies space in a country without geography, and the fury is a companion, the only reliable one I have ever had, the furnace at the center of me that has kept me warm when everything else went cold.
The church went cold first. I want to tell the story in order, because the order matters, because the god I am refusing is the god of a specific history, and the history is not abstract. It happened to me. It happened in a cinderblock building on a road I will not name, in a town I will not name, under fluorescent lights that turned everyone the color of old paper, and it happened to a girl who believed, genuinely believed, for fifteen years of her life, that the people in that room loved her and that the god they served was good.
I believed. This is the part that the fury protects. This is the coal at the center of the fire, the thing that makes the burning something more than temper, something more than personality, something that has earned the right to call itself a wound. I believed. I sat in those pews and sang those songs and memorized those verses and prayed those prayers, and I meant every word, and the meaning was not performance. I was a child who took God at His word, because the adults around me told me His word was trustworthy, and I trusted the adults, because I was a child, and trusting adults is what children do.
My mother. Her name was Jean. Is Jean. She is presumably still alive somewhere in the world I left, in the house on the street I will not name, with her Bible on the nightstand and her daily devotional bookmarked and her hair pulled back in the same severe ponytail she has worn to church every Sunday since before I was born. My mother loved God the way a person loves the thing that frightens them most: totally, breathlessly, with a devotion that was indistinguishable from fear. She knelt beside her bed every morning at five-thirty and prayed for forty-five minutes, and I know the duration because I timed it once, lying awake in the next room, listening to her murmur through the wall, and the murmuring had a quality I did not understand until years later. It was the sound of appeasement. The sound of a woman checking in with the power that governed her life, confirming that she was still obedient, still compliant, still small enough to fit inside the space the power had allocated for her.
My father. His name was Carl. Quieter than my mother. Harder. He did not pray out loud. He read his Bible at the kitchen table with a highlighter and a notebook, marking passages and cross-referencing them with the seriousness of a lawyer building a case, and the case was always the same: that God’s standards were absolute and unchanging and that the job of a man was to hold his household to those standards, and if the household faltered, the man was accountable, and if the man was accountable, the household would know it. My father did not raise his voice. He did not need to. His silence was louder than shouting, a silence that filled the room the way the grey fills this place, total and pressurized and carrying, in its stillness, the clear implication that something was being measured and found short.
Between the two of them I grew up in a house where God was the weather. He was not a person to be met. He was a condition to be monitored. You checked the forecast every morning, and if the forecast was good, meaning if you had read your Bible and said your prayers and kept your skirt below your knees and your thoughts above your waist, you might get a clear day. But the forecast was never reliable. The weather could turn. A careless word, a wrong look, a question asked at the wrong time in the wrong room, and the sky would darken, and my mother’s lips would thin, and my father’s silence would deepen, and the storm was not thunder and lightning but something colder: the withdrawal of approval, which was the only currency the house traded in, and the withdrawal was the punishment, and the punishment was the point.
New Covenant Fellowship was the weather writ large. A hundred and forty people huddled under the same forecast, monitoring the same sky, adjusting their behavior to the same barometric pressure. Pastor Keith stood at the front of the room and read the weather, and the congregation listened, and the listening was not the listening of people seeking comfort or wisdom or the presence of something holy. It was the listening of people who needed to know which way the wind was blowing so they could lean the right direction and stay upright.
I have thought about this, in the years since I left. I have thought about it with the particular, grinding attention of a woman trying to understand how a wound was inflicted so she can guard the scar. And what I have concluded is this: the god of New Covenant Fellowship was not a god at all. He was a system. A system of surveillance and control that called itself love and meant obedience, that called itself grace and meant compliance, that called itself mercy and meant the temporary suspension of the punishment you had coming. The god of New Covenant Fellowship was the god of or else. Love me, or else. Obey me, or else. Do not question, do not doubt, do not look too closely at the seams of this machine, because if you look you will see the gears, and the gears are not gears of love but gears of power, and the power is not held for your benefit but for its own, and the people who operate the machine will tell you the machine is God and the operating is worship and the power is grace, and if you believe them you are safe, and if you do not you are cast out, and the casting-out is permanent, and the permanence is the final proof of the machine’s divinity, because what but God could throw you away forever?
This is the god I fled. This is the god I expect to meet in the grey, because if there is a god, and the evidence of this place suggests there might be, then this is the only god I have data for. The god of the gavel. The god of the searchlight. The god who sends a light at the moment of dying that is warm and kind and gentle, and the warmth is bait, and the kindness is a trap, and the gentleness is the silk that lines the jaw of the thing that swallows you.
Any minute now, the mask will drop. Any minute now the nearness at the edge of this grey will reveal itself as what it truly is: the surveillance, the judgment, the ledger opened to the page with my name on it, the long accounting of every sin I have committed and every duty I have failed and every question I should not have asked. Any minute now the tenderness will end and the god I recognize will step forward, and I will be ready, because I have spent nine years training for exactly this, the moment when the god shows his true face, and the true face is the face of the thing that hurt me.
I wait for it. I brace for it. I hold my fury like a weapon, bright and honed and aimed at the place where the mask will crack.
The mask does not crack. The nearness remains. The silence holds.
I wait longer.
There was a girl named Elise. She was two years older than me, a senior when I was a sophomore, the pastor’s niece by marriage, and she had red hair and a gap between her front teeth and a laugh that could fill the fellowship hall like water filling a glass, and I loved her the way girls love each other at fourteen, fiercely and without boundary, with the whole weight of a heart that has not yet learned what the word conditional means.
Elise and I sat together in the youth group. We passed notes during the sermons, small folded squares of paper with drawings and inside jokes, and we hid them under the hymnals and collected them afterward, and the collecting was a ritual, a private ceremony of belonging that had nothing to do with the ceremony happening from the stage and everything to do with the particular, essential work of being known by someone who finds the knowing delightful rather than damning.
After the Wednesday night incident, the night I asked about the babies, the night Linda told me that doubt was the door through which the devil entered, Elise stopped sitting next to me. Not suddenly. Not dramatically. She did not make an announcement or leave a note or explain. She simply appeared on the other side of the room at the next youth group meeting, and when I caught her eye she looked away, not with cruelty but with something worse: with the careful, practiced blankness of a person who has been told to maintain distance, and the telling has been done by someone whose authority she cannot question.
I walked up to her after the meeting. I remember the lights, the fluorescent wash that made everything look clinical, and the sound of the adults in the next room clearing away the coffee and the folding chairs, and the smell, the perpetual New Covenant Fellowship smell of carpet cleaner and burnt coffee and something else, something I have never been able to name but which I associate now with the particular atmosphere of a place where love is managed.
“Hey,” I said.
Elise looked at me. Her face was a thing I had loved for two years, the freckles across the bridge of her nose, the gap-toothed smile that she deployed without vanity, the green eyes that had the quality of attention that is rare in teenagers, the quality of actually seeing the person they are looking at. She looked at me with those eyes and the eyes were empty, and the emptiness was not natural. It was installed. Someone had gone in and removed the warmth and replaced it with compliance.
“Hey,” she said back. Nothing else. No note passed. No joke shared. The gap between us, which had been two seats and a hymnal, was now the width of the room, and the room was not wide but the distance was, because the distance was theological. I had been marked. I was the girl who doubted, and doubt was contagious, and Elise had been inoculated.
I went home that night and sat on my bed and felt the first fracture, the hairline crack that would widen over the next three years into the break that sent me out the door. Not the fury yet. The fury came later, when the crack was wide enough to see through. What I felt that night was something smaller and more precise: betrayal. Not by Elise. Elise was a child doing what a child is told to do by adults who control the weather. The betrayal was by the system that could reach into a friendship and remove the friend, the system that could take the one good thing I had in that building and pull it out like a tooth, cleanly, leaving a hole that would never fill.
The system was God. Or God was the system. Or the system claimed to be God and no one in the building corrected the claim, and the not-correcting was the same as confirming, and the confirming was the same as worship, and the worship was a closed loop, a circle of power dressed in the language of love, and I was fifteen and standing outside the circle, and the circle was where Elise was, and Elise would not look at me.
I carry this. Here, in the grey, I carry it. I carry Elise’s face and the empty eyes and the installed blankness and the folded notes we never passed again. I carry the gap-toothed smile I saw from across the room for the remaining two years of her time at New Covenant Fellowship, a smile I was no longer permitted to receive, a smile aimed at other girls who had not asked the wrong question at the wrong time, and the aiming was precise, the way everything at New Covenant was precise, because the god of that place was a god of precision, a god who drew lines and enforced them and called the enforcement love and the lines mercy and the precision justice.
This is what the nearness in the grey will do. This is what is coming. The nearness will draw a line and I will be on the wrong side of it, because I have always been on the wrong side, and the wrong side is where the doubters go, and I am a doubter, and the doubt is not a phase or a weakness or a demon at the door. The doubt is the most honest thing about me. The doubt is the sound of a fifteen-year-old girl refusing to accept that a good god would let babies burn forever, and the refusal is the sanest thing she ever did, and I will stand by it here, in the grey, in the country of the judged, and I will hold it like a lantern, because the doubt is light, the only light I trust, and it shows me exactly what the god behind the nearness is: the god of the searchlight, the god of the gavel, the god who removes your friends when you ask the wrong question.
Any minute now.
I wait for the searchlight to find me. I feel the nearness at the edge. I brace.
The nearness does nothing. It holds its position at the periphery, neither advancing nor retreating, and its quality, if a quality can be felt through whatever medium the grey is made of, its quality is not surveillance. Its quality is not the beam of a searchlight sweeping for targets. Its quality is something I refuse to name, because naming it would require using a word I have locked away, a word the church stole from me and weaponized and deployed against me so many times that it tastes, now, like metal in my mouth, like the tang of blood where the fury meets the root of the wound.
The word is love, and the nearness has the quality of it, and I do not believe it, and I will not believe it, because I have felt this trick before.
The last Sunday before I left, the Sunday before my eighteenth birthday, Pastor Keith preached on the prodigal son. I remember this sermon more clearly than any of the hundreds that preceded it, not because it was better or worse but because it was the one that finished the work the others had started, the one that took the crack and widened it into a door I could walk through.
The prodigal son. I knew the story. Every child at New Covenant knew the story. A boy takes his inheritance, wastes it in reckless living, hits bottom, comes crawling back to his father, and the father welcomes him home. A story about grace, supposedly. A story about unconditional love, the preachers said, the father running to meet the son on the road, the ring and the robe and the feast, the arms open, the past forgiven.
But Pastor Keith did not preach the story that way. Pastor Keith preached the version that lives behind the version, the one the Sunday school teachers did not give you, the one that starts with the same words but ends in a different room. In Pastor Keith’s version, the point of the story was not the father’s love. The point was the son’s degradation. The son had to eat with the pigs. The son had to lose everything. The son had to be reduced, stripped, humiliated, broken down to the raw material of a human being who has nothing left and nowhere to go, and only then, only after the total demolition of the son’s pride and dignity and selfhood, did the father open his arms. The arms were not open before. The arms opened when the breaking was complete.
I sat in the third row and listened to Pastor Keith describe the breaking with relish. Not cruelty, not exactly, not in the way a cruel person would describe cruelty. With satisfaction. With the deep, theological satisfaction of a man who believes that suffering is the curriculum and God is the teacher and the lesson is always the same: you are not enough, you have never been enough, and the sooner you accept your insufficiency and crawl back to the source of all sufficiency, the sooner the pain will stop. And the pain will stop. The pain always stops, in Pastor Keith’s theology. But it stops on God’s terms, and God’s terms are total surrender, and total surrender means the end of the self as a self, and what rises from the wreckage is not you but a version of you that has been edited by the divine hand, cleaned up, corrected, brought into compliance with the standards of the house, which are absolute and non-negotiable and backed by the only authority that matters.
I listened to this and I felt the door open. Not a conversion. Not a revelation in the direction the church would have wanted. The opposite. The door opened onto a view so clear and so cold that it stole my breath: the god of Pastor Keith was a god who required your destruction as the price of his affection. The arms of the father were not open to the son. The arms of the father were open to the wreckage of the son, the stripped and starving and pig-stinking husk who had nothing left to resist with. And the embrace, when it came, was not love but ownership. The father took back what was his. The son was property. The homecoming was repossession.
I walked out of that sermon and I have never walked back in. Not to New Covenant. Not to any church. Not to any room where a man stands at a podium and tells a story about a father and a son and calls the story love when the story is control.
And now I am here. In the grey. In the country of the prodigal, the outer darkness where the ones who refuse to crawl are sent to learn their lesson, and the lesson is the same one it has always been: you are not enough, you have never been enough, and the arms will open only when you are broken enough to fit through them.
I know this script. I know every line. I know the arc and the climax and the resolution, and the resolution is my annihilation, the dismantling of the self I have built in the nine years since I walked away, the self that is made of fury and clarity and the hard-won conviction that I am allowed to be angry at a god who hurt me, and the dismantling will be dressed in the language of grace, and the grace will smell like carpet cleaner and burnt coffee, and the arms at the end will be the arms of a power that does not want me but wants my compliance, and the compliance will be called faith, and the faith will be called freedom, and the freedom will be the most elegant cage ever built.
I will not crawl.
The grey receives this declaration without comment. The nearness at the edge does not react. And the silence, the god’s silence, the old weapon, the power move of the deity who can afford to wait, the silence settles around me like dust in an empty room, and I sit in it and I burn, and the burning is mine, and the burning is clean, and the burning is the only warmth I will accept in this cold place.
The waiting goes on. I lose track. There is nothing to track by. I have tried to measure the time in breaths, but the breaths are not breaths; they are habits of a body I may no longer have, repetitions of a pattern that persists the way a phantom limb persists, twitching in air. I have tried to measure it in thoughts, but the thoughts loop and repeat and double back on themselves, and the doubling is deliberate, I am certain of this, the doubling is the grey’s way of keeping me off balance, keeping me inside the same small room of my own consciousness without the door or window that a new thought would provide.
Here is what the waiting does: it gives me nothing to fight.
I need something to fight. The fury is a blade, but a blade needs a surface to cut, and the grey provides no surface. It is not hostile. It is not cruel. It does not punish and it does not threaten and it does not produce the gavel I have been bracing for since I opened my eyes in this place. It simply continues, featureless and patient, and the patience is the thing I cannot work with, because patience is what the god of Pastor Keith never had. The god of Pastor Keith was impatient. The god of Pastor Keith had a schedule. The schedule included a list of offenses and a timetable for correction and a clear, unmistakable mechanism for the delivery of consequences, and the mechanism was reliable, which meant it was predictable, which meant I could see it coming, which meant I could brace for it, and the bracing was a form of control, and control was the only freedom I had inside the system.
Here there is no mechanism. Here there are no consequences being delivered. Here there is only the grey and the silence and the nearness, and the nearness is doing the one thing I cannot defend against: it is being gentle.
I noticed it first as an absence. An absence of pressure. The god of my experience was a god who pressed. He pressed you toward confession, toward compliance, toward the small, humiliating gestures of submission that the system required: the bowed head, the closed eyes, the raised hand that meant you accepted your failure and were ready to be corrected. The pressing was constant. It was atmospheric. You could feel it the moment you walked into the cinderblock building, the way the air changed, the way the room itself seemed to lean inward, as though the walls were listening and the ceiling was measuring and the fluorescent lights were recording, and the recording was permanent, and the permanence was the point.
The nearness in the grey does not press. It is there. It is unmistakably there, a presence so real that I can feel it the way I used to feel the sun on my face through a car window, warm and directional and coming from somewhere specific. But it does not lean. It does not close. It does not advance on me with the steady, implacable tread of an authority that has decided the time for patience is over and the time for correction has come. It simply remains, at the distance I chose when I turned away, at the exact radius my refusal set, and it stays there, and the staying is not the staying of a predator circling its prey. The staying has a different quality, a quality I keep flinching from the way you flinch from a hand raised near a bruise, not because the hand is striking but because the bruise remembers, and the memory is faster than the eye.
I know this trick. I have to know this trick, because if it is not a trick then I do not know what it is, and not knowing is a door, and behind the door is a room I will not enter, and the room is the room where the question lives, the question I have been refusing to ask for nine years, which is: what if the god they taught me was not God?
I will not ask it. The asking would be capitulation. The asking would be the first step in the crawling, the first joint to bend in the long prostration that ends with my face on the floor and my hands open and my self, my hard-built, fury-forged, clarity-hewn self, dissolved into the formless material of the repentant, and the repentant are not people. The repentant are products. The repentant are what happens when the machine processes a human being and spits out the compliant version, sanded smooth, edges removed, the doubt carved out like a tumor, and the scar where the doubt was is called faith, and the faith is the machine’s logo, stamped on the finished product, indicating that quality control has been completed and the unit is ready for deployment.
I will not be a unit. I will not be deployed. I will sit here in the grey with my fury and my clarity and the wound I will not apologize for, and I will wait for the god I know to show himself, because he will, eventually. He always does. The gentleness is a phase. The patience is a tactic. Underneath the silk is the steel, and the steel is the truth, and the truth is that God, if God exists, is the kind of power that requires your breaking before it will give you its love.
The nearness remains gentle. The minutes pass, or the hours, or the ages. The steel does not appear.
This is the trick. This is surely the trick. The delay is the cruelty. The withholding of the gavel is itself the gavel, wielded in a new and subtler way, because what is more punishing than being made to wait for punishment? What breaks a person more effectively than the long, drawn-out anticipation of the blow, the interminable approach of the thing they fear, stretched and stretched and stretched until the fear itself becomes the breaking?
I recognize this. I am certain I recognize this. My father did this. My father would know that I had done something, some small infraction that the household rules classified as sin, and he would not address it immediately. He would wait. He would eat his dinner and read his Bible and highlight his passages and go through his evening as if nothing had changed, and the nothing-changing was the punishment, because I knew he knew, and he knew I knew he knew, and the knowing was a wire strung between us, humming, and the hum grew louder with every hour he did not speak, until the not-speaking became the loudest sound in the house, and when the speaking finally came, at bedtime, at the door of my room, quiet and precise, the speaking was almost a relief, because at least the waiting was over.
This is what the nearness is doing. This is the long not-speaking. This is the divine version of my father at the dinner table, eating in silence, letting the dread do the work. And I will not let it work. I will not give the dread the satisfaction of building to its intended crescendo, because I see through it, because I have lived through it, because the girl who sat at that table and vibrated with the anticipation of the reckoning is not the woman sitting in this grey. The woman in this grey has nine years of fury and a wall between herself and the weapon, and the wall is made of the purest material available, which is the knowledge that she does not deserve this.
I did not deserve it then. I was a child who asked a question. I did not deserve the searchlight and the prayer team and the removal of my friend and the three years of watching the room rearrange itself around my exile. I did not deserve to grow up in a house where God was the weather and love was a forecast and my worth was measured in the distance between my hemline and my knee. And I do not deserve this now, whatever this is, this grey and this silence and this waiting for a blow that will not fall.
The blow will fall. I am sure of this. I am almost sure of this.
I sit in the grey and I hold my fury and I wait.
There is a memory that surfaces now, uninvited, the way memories surface in this place: rising through the grey like a bubble through oil, slow and viscous and impossible to push back down. I try. The trying is a reflex, the old muscle of suppression that I developed in the pews, the ability to shove a feeling below the waterline before it can break the surface and become visible. But the grey does not cooperate. The grey holds the memory up to me with the passive insistence of deep water, and the memory is this:
I am twelve. I am sitting in the sanctuary on a Sunday morning, and the service has not started yet, and the room is filling with the sounds of a congregation assembling: hymnals being pulled from the racks on the backs of the pews, coats being removed, children being shushed, the low, familiar hum of adults greeting each other with the careful warmth that church people extend to each other, the warmth that says we are family and means we are under the same surveillance.
But I do not feel the surveillance. I am twelve, and the surveillance has not yet found me, and the pew is warm, and my mother is beside me, and her hand is on my leg, and the hand, at twelve, is not a warning but a comfort, a small pressure that says I am here and means it simply, without the theological apparatus that will later make every touch a message and every message a correction. The hand is just a hand. My mother is just my mother. The room is just a room.
And I feel something. I feel it the way I used to feel things before the church taught me that feeling was dangerous, before the machine took my capacity for sensation and routed it through the filter of doctrine, so that every feeling had to be checked against the approved list and either validated or flagged for removal. I feel something warm in the room. Not the heating system, which is always turned up too high. Something else. Something that seems to come from everywhere at once, from the light through the windows and the sound of the hymnal pages turning and the smell of my mother’s hairspray and the old wood of the pew beneath my palms, a warmth that has a quality of attention to it, as though the room itself is paying attention to me, not in the way the searchlight will later pay attention, not as surveillance, but as something gentler, something that sees me and finds the seeing good.
I remember this. I remember the twelve-year-old girl in the pew who felt something warm in a room full of people and did not yet know enough to be afraid of it. She sat there with her mother’s hand on her leg and the hymnal open on her lap and the room humming around her, and the warmth came, and the warmth was good, and she did not analyze it or question it or hold it up to the approved list. She simply felt it, the way an animal feels the sun, with its whole body, without commentary.
The memory surfaces in the grey and I shove it down and it comes back up. I shove it down again and it returns again, patient, buoyant, refusing to stay submerged. And the twelve-year-old girl in the memory looks at me from the pew with an expression I do not want to see, because the expression is the one thing the fury cannot burn: it is the face of a child who has not yet been hurt by the thing she loves, and the face asks a question the fury has no answer for.
What if the warmth in the room was real?
I refuse the question. I refuse it the way I have refused everything the church offered me for nine years, with my whole weight pressing down on the word no. Because if the warmth was real, if the thing the twelve-year-old felt in the pew was a genuine presence and not a manufactured atmosphere, then the church did not give it to me. The church was the room the warmth happened to be in, not the source of the warmth, and the destruction the church wrought was not the withdrawal of the warmth but the misrepresentation of it, the dressing of it in the clothing of surveillance and control, the kidnapping of a genuine thing and the replacement of it with a counterfeit that wore the same face and spoke the same language and demanded, instead of offered, and punished, instead of waited, and the twelve-year-old girl could not tell the difference because she was twelve and she trusted the adults and the adults lied.
No. I shut this down. The twelve-year-old is not evidence. The twelve-year-old is a sentimentality, a soft spot in the armor, a vulnerability the nearness is probing the way a tongue probes a loose tooth, looking for the weakness, looking for the place where the structure gives. This is what the god does. This is the other trick, the one that comes before the gavel: the softening. The god sends a memory of kindness, a moment when the cruelty was in abeyance and the room was warm and the child felt safe, and the memory is meant to undermine the fury, meant to whisper but it was not all bad, was it, it was not all cruelty, there were good days too, days when the sun came through the windows and the hymns were beautiful and you felt something real, and the whispering is the most dangerous weapon in the arsenal because it is true. It was not all bad. There were good days. The hymns were sometimes beautiful. And the beauty was the bait, and the bait was on the hook, and the hook was in the mouth of the god who used beauty to lure a child close enough to brand.
I know this. I have argued this with Micah, on the couch at 412 Garfield Street, in the late hours when the house was quiet and Quinn was asleep and the two of us sat with our respective wounds open on the coffee table like files we were cross-referencing. Micah’s wound was clean: a dead sister, an unanswered prayer, a god who failed to perform. My wound was messier. My wound was a god who performed exactly as designed and the design was cruelty. Micah did not try to fix my wound. He listened to it. He held it with the careful attention of a man who handles other people’s arguments for a living and knows better than to edit what is not his to edit. And he said one thing, once, that I have not been able to put down, the way you cannot put down a stone that has been placed in your pocket by someone you trust: What if the god you are angry at is not the god who is there? What if they built you the wrong god, and the real one is someone you have never actually met?
I told him that was the most dangerous sentence a person could say to someone like me. I told him that the distinction between the wrong god and the real god is the trapdoor through which every person who has ever left a toxic church is lured back in. The new church is different. The new pastor is kind. The new theology has softer edges and better music and the coffee is organic and the pews have cushions and the god, the new god, the rebranded god, is not the god of your father’s church but a friendlier model, updated for the times, and the friendliness is real, until it is not, and the friendliness stops being real at exactly the moment you need it most, at the moment you falter or doubt or ask the question that the friendly god is not equipped to answer, and the friendly god becomes the old god, and the cushions come off the pews, and the organic coffee turns to ash in your mouth, and you are fifteen again, standing in the fellowship hall with hands on your shoulders, and the machine has processed you again, and the scar is deeper because this time you went in with your guard down.
Micah heard this. Micah nodded. Micah did not push. This is what I love about Micah: his restraint, his willingness to let an argument stand without trying to defeat it, his respect for the wound even when he sees, as I suspect he sees, that the wound may be distorting the view.
But I am in the grey now, and Micah is not here, and the memory of his question sits in my pocket like the stone he placed there, and the nearness at the edge of the grey has the quality of the warmth the twelve-year-old felt in the pew, and the quality does not match the god I am bracing for, and the not-matching is doing something to the architecture of my fury that I do not like.
The fury is a building. I built it beam by beam, over nine years, with the materials the church gave me: the searchlight, the gavel, the pointed finger, the installed blankness in Elise’s eyes, the prayer team’s fingers on my shoulders, the prodigal son reduced to wreckage before the father would open his arms. These are the bricks. These are load-bearing. Remove one and the structure might hold. Remove enough and it will not.
The nearness is not removing bricks. The nearness is not doing anything. That is the problem. The nearness is simply being, and the being has a quality that does not match the bricks, and the not-matching is a crack, and I can feel the crack, and I patch it with fury, and the fury holds.
But the twelve-year-old is still in the pew. And the warmth in the room is still warm. And the question Micah asked on the couch at 412 Garfield Street is still in my pocket, and the pocket is deeper than it was, and the stone is heavier, and the grey, the endless, measureless, patient grey, gives me nothing to fight and nowhere to run and all the time in the world to sit with the things I have spent nine years refusing to sit with.
I do something reckless. I do it because the waiting has gone on long enough that the waiting itself has become a kind of pain, and pain makes me stupid, and stupid makes me brave, which is a word I use loosely because what I am about to do is not brave so much as it is the desperate flailing of a woman who needs the fight to start so she can stop anticipating it.
I turn toward the nearness.
Not fully. Not the way you turn toward a person in a room, with your whole body, face open, eyes meeting. I turn the way a person turns toward a sound they have been pretending not to hear, a quarter-rotation, a shift of attention more than a movement of limbs, a crack in the wall of my refusal that lets a sliver of awareness through. I do not look. I do not open. I simply stop, for a moment, the active work of keeping my back to it, and I allow the nearness to register.
It registers.
I had expected, in the turning, to feel the weight of it. The weight of God. The weight of the divine attention that Pastor Keith described in his sermons as a searchlight sweeping the earth, finding every hidden sin, every covered shame, every darkness tucked into the corners of a heart that thinks it can hide. I had expected the exposure, the stripping, the sensation of being X-rayed by a power whose interest in me is prosecutorial. I had braced for it. The fury was ready. The argument was loaded and aimed: You. You did this to me. Through your people, through your church, through the system that bore your name, you did this. Come at me. Show me the ledger. Read me the charges. I am ready. I have been ready for nine years.
What I feel is not a searchlight.
What I feel is difficult to describe, because the language I have for divine attention is the language of surveillance, and what I am feeling is not surveillance but its opposite, or not its opposite, something stranger than an opposite, something that uses the same mechanism, the same total awareness, the same complete and thoroughgoing knowledge of who I am and what I carry and where it hurts, but deploys the awareness differently, the way two musicians can play the same notes and produce entirely different music.
The nearness knows me. This is the first thing. It knows me the way the light in the dying knew me, all the way to the bottom, to the root of the fury and the root of the wound and the small, curled girl at the center of both who is neither furious nor wounded but simply hurt, simply a child who was hurt by the people who were supposed to protect her from hurt. The nearness sees that girl. And the seeing is not the seeing of the searchlight. The searchlight found what was wrong and held it up for everyone to witness. The nearness finds what is broken and does not hold it up. The nearness sits with it. The nearness remains in the room with the broken thing and does not flinch and does not leave and does not produce a sermon about how the breaking was the fault of the broken.
No. This is the trick. This is the softening. This is the silk before the jaw. I know this. I know this. I have felt warmth before and the warmth was not what it pretended to be, and I will not be taken in, not again, not by a gentleness that has no track record, not by a patience that could be a trap, not by a knowing that feels like care when every knowing I have ever experienced in the presence of God has been the prelude to punishment.
I turn back. I slam the wall shut. I face the grey and I breathe, or do the thing that passes for breathing in this place, and the fury rises, the good and righteous fury that has carried me through every church I have not entered and every prayer I have not said and every moment of weakness when the twelve-year-old in the pew tugged at the hem of my resolve and whispered but what if and I told her to be quiet, told her she does not get a vote, told her that the warmth she remembers is the warmth of a trap that closed on us both.
But the feeling lingers. The way a scent lingers after the source has been removed, the way the impression of a hand lingers on skin after the hand has been lifted. The nearness, in the moment I allowed it to register, left something on me. Not a mark. Not a stain. Not the brand of the searchlight finding its target. Something lighter. Something that sits on the surface of my awareness the way dew sits on grass, present and cool and so insubstantial that a single movement would scatter it, and I do not move, and the not-moving is not a decision but a failure of will, a moment when the machinery of refusal skips a beat and the beat it skips is the beat that would have wiped the dew away.
The feeling is not surveillance. The feeling is not judgment. The feeling, and I choke on this, I physically choke on this, the feeling is sorrow.
Not my sorrow. The sorrow of the nearness. A sorrow for me, as if the thing at the edge of the grey has been sitting with the story of New Covenant Fellowship and the story has cost it something, as if the searchlight and the gavel and the prayer team’s fingers and the installed blankness in Elise’s eyes are not items on a ledger but injuries to something that cares about the one who was injured. The sorrow has the texture of a parent who arrives too late to prevent the harm and sits beside the child in the hospital and does not say this was your fault or this is for your own good or the person who hurt you was acting on my behalf. The sorrow simply sits. The sorrow simply stays. The sorrow regards the damage with a quality of attention that has nothing in common with Pastor Keith’s attention, because Pastor Keith’s attention was the attention of a man who had decided before he looked what he would find, and this attention has decided nothing. This attention is open. This attention is grieving.
No.
I say it in the grey, out loud, or as close to out loud as this place allows. No. I say it the way I said it in the fellowship hall when the hands pressed into my shoulders and the voices above me begged God to fix the girl who was not broken until they broke her. I say it the way I said it in the pew when Pastor Keith’s eyes found me for the seventh time and the searchlight burned. I say it the way I said it in the dying, when the light came warm and gentle and I knew, I knew, that the warmth was the first movement of the jaw that would close.
No. You do not get to grieve for me. You do not get to sit beside me with the expression of a parent who arrived too late, because You were not late. You were there. You were there when Pastor Keith stood at the front of the room and used Your name like a cudgel. You were there when Linda told a fifteen-year-old girl that her questions were the devil’s foothold. You were there when three women pressed their fingers into my shoulders and prayed the doubt out of me as though doubt were a disease and faith were the antibiotic and the treatment required no consent. You were there. You watched. You allowed. You did nothing.
The nearness receives this the way the grey receives everything: without argument. It does not defend itself. It does not explain. It does not produce the apologetic framework, the God works in mysterious ways and all things work together for good and the other phrases the church deployed when its cruelty was questioned, the theological band-aids placed over the wounds the theology itself had opened. The nearness says nothing. The nearness holds its position at the edge and remains, and the remaining is so steady, so absolutely without fluctuation, that it begins to feel less like patience and more like something else, something I do not have a category for, something that looks, from the corner of my eye, like the way Micah sat beside Quinn on the couch after the Walmart parking lot and did not say a word and did not ask a question and simply stayed, simply remained, simply occupied the space next to a broken person without requiring the broken person to explain or apologize or perform the gestures of recovery.
Micah’s staying was not a trick. Micah’s staying was the real thing, the genuine article, the kind of presence that asks nothing and offers nothing except itself, and the offering was enough, and Quinn ate her toast and watched her penguins and the staying held her, and the holding was not the holding of the fellowship hall, where hands pressed and voices demanded and the god behind the hands was a god who held you the way a vice holds a board: to keep you still while the cutting was done.
The nearness in the grey has the quality of Micah on the couch. And this is the thing I cannot work with. This is the crack that is no longer hairline, the fissure that is spreading through the foundation of my fury in a direction I cannot control. Because the god I built my wall against would not stay the way Micah stayed. The god of New Covenant Fellowship would have started talking by now. He would have produced the sermon, the diagnosis, the seventy-five-minute exegesis of my failure and his remedy. He would have leaned in with the particular, suffocating urgency of a power that needs you to acknowledge its authority before it will acknowledge your pain. He would have, by now, in the long stretch of unmeasured time that has passed since I turned my back, done something.
This nearness has done nothing. This nearness has simply stayed.
And the staying is not a weapon I know how to fight.
The crack is in the wall and I can feel it and I cannot close it, and the fury rises to the task of closing it and the fury, for the first time in nine years, is not equal to the task. Not because the fury has weakened. Not because the wall has thinned. Because the crack is made of the wrong material. The crack is not an attack. The crack is not the gavel or the searchlight or the pointed finger or any of the instruments the fury was forged to resist. The crack is a quality of attention that is so unlike the attention I was given by the god of my childhood that I cannot fit both attentions into the same framework, and the inability to fit them together is the crack, and the crack is widening, and the widening is not being done to me by the nearness. The widening is being done by the comparison itself, by the simple, merciless geometry of two things that do not match being held up next to each other.
The god of Pastor Keith would have spoken by now. The nearness has not spoken.
The god of Pastor Keith would have pressed. The nearness does not press.
The god of Pastor Keith would have required my degradation as the price of his attention. The nearness is giving me its attention without requiring anything at all.
The god of Pastor Keith would have withdrawn when I raged. I raged. The nearness did not withdraw.
The god of Pastor Keith was a god who left the room when you disobeyed. I have disobeyed with every fiber of my being, and the nearness has not left the room.
These are facts. I deal in facts the way Micah deals in facts, with the cold, editorial eye of a person who respects evidence even when the evidence is inconvenient. And the evidence is this: the nearness in the grey is not behaving like the god I know. The nearness is not doing the things the god of my experience did. The nearness is not punishing, not pressing, not requiring, not withdrawing, not shaming, not surveilling, not producing the ledger, not reading the charges, not pointing the finger, not sweeping the searchlight, not doing any of the things that defined the god of New Covenant Fellowship, the god of my mother’s kneeling and my father’s silence and Pastor Keith’s pulpit and Linda’s gentle, devastating loading of the gun.
The nearness is doing something else. Something I do not have a name for. Something that I have felt, in lesser forms, in rooms that were not churches, from people who were not gods, from Micah on the couch and Quinn leaning her chin on my headrest and the particular, unearned, undeserved, unaccountable fact that two broken people found me and lived beside me and did not require me to be fixed before they would share a kitchen with me.
If the nearness is what it seems to be, then one of two things is true. Either the god of New Covenant Fellowship was not God, was a counterfeit, a projection, a system of control wearing a mask of divinity, and the real God, the actual one, is something I have never met and cannot predict and have been arming myself against in error for nine years. Or the gentleness is a trap, and the trap is simply more patient and more sophisticated than any trap I have encountered before, and the cruelty is coming, and the delay is part of the design, and I need to hold the wall and hold the fury and wait for the mask to drop.
I do not know which is true. The not-knowing is the worst pain I have felt since I opened my eyes in this place, worse than the grey itself, worse than the absence of time and ground and sky, because the not-knowing means I am standing at a fork in the road of my entire identity, and one path leads to the discovery that my fury has been aimed at the wrong target for nine years and the other path leads to the confirmation that my fury was right all along, and both paths cost me everything, and I cannot take both, and I cannot stand still, and the grey does not help, and the nearness does not help, and the fury, the beautiful, clean, load-bearing fury that has held me upright since I was eighteen years old, does not help, because the fury was built for one enemy and the enemy that is here may not be the enemy at all.
I sit in the grey. The nearness remains. The crack in the wall is wider than it was. The twelve-year-old girl is still in the pew, still feeling the warmth she felt before anyone told her the warmth was a weapon, and the girl’s face is the face I do not want to see because the face is open and the openness is the thing that got us hurt and the hurt is the reason for the wall and the wall has a crack in it and the crack is the width of a question I have not yet asked and may not ask and cannot stop hearing.
What if the god I fled is not the God who is here?
I do not answer the question. I do not have to answer the question. The question can sit in the grey alongside me and the nearness and the fury and the crack and the twelve-year-old and the memory of Elise’s empty eyes and the memory of Pastor Keith’s seven looks and the memory of my mother’s hand on my leg before the hand became a warning. The question can sit. Questions have always been dangerous to me, and this question is the most dangerous of all, because it is the one the church never let me ask and the one I never let myself ask after the church lost the right to tell me what to ask, and the not-asking was my last defense, and the defense is compromised, and the nearness, the terrible, gentle, un-Pastor-Keith-like nearness, is the reason.
I am still furious. I need this on the record. I am still braced and still armed and still carrying, in the center of my chest, the bright hot coal of a woman who was wounded by the people who claimed to speak for God and who has never received a satisfactory explanation for why God let them. The fury is intact. The fury burns.
But the wall has a crack. And the crack is the width of a tenderness I was not prepared for. And the tenderness is not going away. And I am sitting in the grey, in the silence, in the long unmeasured waiting, with my back to something that does not behave like the god I trained myself to fight, and the not-behaving is the most disorienting thing about this place, more disorienting than the absence of ground or sky or time, because the absence of ground I can handle and the absence of sky I can handle and the absence of time is merely strange, but the absence of the cruelty I expected is something else entirely.
The absence of the cruelty is a presence.
And the presence is patient.
And the patience is not a weapon.
And I do not know what to do with a God whose patience is not a weapon, because every god I have ever met has weaponized his patience, and this one will not, and the will not is the crack, and the crack is the question, and the question is sitting in the grey beside me, not pressing, not insisting, just present, the way the nearness is present, and I cannot answer it, and I cannot make it leave, and I cannot close the wall around it, and the fury burns, and the tenderness remains, and the grey holds us both, and the long waiting goes on.