Love Without Borders
Chapter Fourteen
The crack is no longer hairline. I need to say that clearly, because clarity is the only currency I have ever trusted, and I will not debase it now, not even to protect myself. The crack in the wall I built, the wall that has been the architecture of my selfhood for nine years, the wall made of fury and justified refusal and the hard-won certainty that the god of New Covenant Fellowship is the god of all churches and all pulpits and all fingers pressing into the shoulders of children who asked the wrong question, that wall has a crack in it the width of my hand. I can feel air moving through it. The air is warm.
I do not want it to be warm. I want it to be cold, because cold I can work with. Cold confirms the diagnosis. Cold says: yes, you were right all along, the god behind the grey is the god behind the cinderblock building, the god of the searchlight and the ledger, the god whose love was a forecast and whose mercy was the temporary absence of the storm. Cold would close the crack. Cold would send me back to the familiar shelter of my rage, which has held me upright for nearly a decade, which has been the spine of the woman I became after the girl I was got broken by the people who were supposed to keep her whole.
The air through the crack is warm, and the warmth has no conditions attached to it, and the absence of conditions is the thing I cannot reconcile with any god I have ever known.
I have been testing it. I want this on the record, too, because the record matters, because the god of my childhood kept a meticulous record, and the keeping was the weapon, and if this god keeps a record too then let him note that I did not come to this place of uncertainty through weakness or sentiment or the slow erosion of will by suffering. I came here through evidence. I came here because the data no longer supports the model, and I am, if nothing else, honest about the data.
The first test was the simplest. I turned toward the nearness again, the way I turned before, the quarter-rotation that cost me so much the first time, and I waited for the searchlight. The searchlight is the thing I know. The searchlight is the signature, the proof of identity, the single consistent quality of every encounter I have ever had with the divine attention. Pastor Keith described it in his sermons: the eye of God sweeping the earth, finding every corner, illuminating every hidden thing, burning the darkness out of the heart the way a surgeon burns out a tumor, and the burning was necessary, and the necessity was the love, and the love was the burning, and if you could not tell the difference between love and burning then the fault was in you, not in the fire.
I turned. I waited. The searchlight did not come.
What came instead was the thing I have been calling, for lack of a better word, attention. Not the attention of a searchlight. The attention of a face. I cannot see a face. There is nothing to see in the grey, no form, no feature, no body standing at the edge of my awareness with an expression I could read and categorize and defend against. But the attention has the quality of a face, the way a voice heard through a wall has the quality of a face: you cannot see the mouth moving but you know there is a mouth, you know there is a person, you know the words are coming from somewhere specific and alive and directed at you in particular.
The attention was directed at me. All of me. Not the sins of me, not the failures of me, not the catalog of infractions that Pastor Keith’s god would have opened to the most damning page. All of me, the whole document, the fury and the wound and the girl at the center who is neither furious nor wounded but merely hurt, merely a child who was hurt by the adults she trusted, and the attention sat with the whole document and did not edit it.
This is the part that dislocates me. The god of New Covenant Fellowship always edited. The god of New Covenant Fellowship read the document of your life with a red pen in his hand, and the marks were everywhere, and the marks were corrections, and the corrections were not suggestions but demands, and the demands were not negotiable, and the failure to comply with the demands was evidence of the very sickness the demands were meant to treat, and the circularity of this was invisible to everyone inside the system and obvious to everyone outside it, and I have been outside it for nine years, and the view from outside has been the clearest view I have ever had of anything.
The attention in the grey does not edit. The attention reads the whole document, front to back, every page, and does not pick up the pen. And the not-picking-up-the-pen is so disorienting, so fundamentally unlike anything I have been conditioned to expect from divine attention, that I find myself, absurdly, provokingly, wanting to hand it the pen. Wanting to say: Here. Here are the pages you should mark. Here is the doubt that Linda said was the devil’s foothold. Here is the fury that Pastor Keith said was proof of a rebellious heart. Here is the walking-away, the nine-year refusal, the turning-my-back-on-the-light-in-the-dying. Mark it. Correct it. Do the thing you do.
The attention does not take the pen. The attention simply continues to read.
The second test was harder. I did it because the first test proved nothing, because patience can be a strategy, because the gentleness of a predator before the strike is still gentleness, technically, in the same way that the silence before a verdict is still silence. I needed to push further. I needed to find the edge, the boundary, the place where the mask slips and the real face shows itself, because every system has a trigger, and I know the triggers of the divine system, because the divine system was the weather in my childhood home, and I spent eighteen years learning to read the barometric pressure.
The trigger, in the system I grew up in, was defiance. Not doubt; doubt was merely the symptom, the early warning sign, the cough before the pneumonia. Defiance was the disease itself. Defiance was the thing that made the god of Pastor Keith’s eyes narrow and his voice drop and his hands tighten on the lectern until his knuckles went white. You could doubt quietly and survive, the way a person survives a low-grade fever, diminished but functional, still able to sit in the pew and sing the hymn and bow the head at the appointed moment. But if you raised the doubt above a whisper, if you turned the doubt outward and aimed it at the structure itself, at the system, at the god whose name was printed on the building, then the immune response activated, and the immune response was total, and the immune response was what happened to Elise’s eyes, the installed blankness, the removal of the friend.
I was defiant. In the grey, facing the nearness with the full width of the crack between us, I was deliberately, consciously, architecturally defiant. I gathered the fury like kindling and I lit it and I threw it at the nearness with everything I had.
You did this. You let them do this. You sat in that building every Sunday and You watched Pastor Keith use Your name to frighten children into compliance and You did nothing. You watched Linda tell a fifteen-year-old girl that her questions were a door for the devil and You did nothing. You watched three women press their fingers into my shoulders and pray the wrong out of me and You did nothing. You were there. You are always there, aren’t You? The omnipresent, omnipotent, omni-everything God who sees every sparrow fall and counts every hair on every head and still, somehow, in all that cosmic attentiveness, cannot be bothered to stop a small-town pastor from turning children into products.
I threw this. All of it. I shaped it with care and I aimed it and I let it go the way you let go of a stone you have been gripping so long the muscles have cramped around it. And I waited for the reaction I knew was coming, because defiance always produces a reaction, and the reaction is always the same: the god tightens, the god leans in, the god becomes the thing he always was beneath the patience, which is a power that will not be questioned.
The nearness received the defiance the way a lake receives a stone. The surface broke. The stone went down. And then the surface closed, smooth and patient and unbroken, and the nearness was still there, and the nearness had not tightened, and the nearness had not leaned in, and the quality of the nearness had not changed by a single degree, and the not-changing was the most terrifying response I have ever received from anything I have identified as God.
Because the god I know would have reacted. The god of my data set, the god compiled from eighteen years of observation in a cinderblock building and a household where love was a forecast and my worth was measured in the distance between my hemline and my knee, that god had a nervous system, and the nervous system was responsive, and the responses were predictable, and the predictability was, in its own terrible way, a kind of safety. I knew the system. I knew what triggered the punishment. I knew how to read the weather. And reading the weather was a form of control, the only form available to a child inside a machine, and the control was all I had.
The nearness has no weather. The nearness does not fluctuate. I throw defiance and the temperature does not drop. I throw fury and the pressure does not rise. I throw the most provocative, most blasphemous, most deliberately god-antagonizing content of my heart at this presence, and the presence absorbs it the way the grey absorbs everything, without resistance, without recoil, without the faintest tremor of the divine displeasure that should be, according to every model I have ever been given, the automatic and irrevocable consequence of a creature daring to speak this way to her creator.
The absence of recoil is not what I expected. The absence of recoil breaks the model. And the model is all I have.
There was a Wednesday, in the winter of the year I turned sixteen, when I tested the system at New Covenant Fellowship. I need to tell this story because the telling is the third test, or the preparation for it, or the thing that makes the third test possible, and because the story has been sitting in the grey beside me for what feels like a long time now, patient and unbidden, rising the way all memories rise in this place: slowly, from somewhere below the surface I thought I controlled.
The youth group met on Wednesday evenings in the fellowship hall, which was the same room where the prayer team had pressed their fingers into my shoulders, the same room that smelled of carpet cleaner and burnt coffee and the particular atmospheric pressure of managed love. By the winter of my sixteenth year I had been marked for six months. Elise had not spoken to me in six months. The other girls in the youth group had recalibrated their orbits around the new gravitational field, which was the field generated by my marking, and the orbits took them away from me with the smooth, unhurried precision of objects responding to a force they did not need to understand to obey.
I was alone in the room in the way that a person can be alone in a crowd: surrounded, technically accompanied, and completely untouched. I sat in my chair at the edge of the semicircle and I watched the others interact with the ease of people who have not been flagged, and I felt the old heat in my chest, the heat that was not yet fury, not yet the clean, purposeful burn that would carry me out the door two years later, but a rawer thing, a less refined compound of hurt and bewilderment and the particular, excruciating injustice of being punished for a question.
The youth pastor was a man named Greg. Not Pastor Keith, who handled the adults. Greg was younger, softer, the kind of man who wore sandals to church and played acoustic guitar and spoke about God as though God were a friend, an approachable, reasonable, coffee-shop deity who wanted nothing more than a relationship, the word they used constantly, relationship, as if the word were not doing the work of hiding the machinery behind it. Greg had a beard and a gentle voice and a gift for the particular kind of warmth that makes teenagers feel seen without actually seeing them, the warmth of a spotlight that lights the surface and leaves the interior untouched.
That Wednesday, Greg taught on forgiveness. I remember the lesson because the lesson was the trigger, the moment the system showed me its logic with a clarity I had not previously been able to achieve. He was talking about the requirement to forgive, the commandment, the non-negotiable demand of the faith that you release your anger at anyone who has wronged you, because God has forgiven you, and therefore you must forgive others, and the therefore was a steel cable, and the cable ran from God’s forgiveness to your obligation, and the obligation was not a suggestion but a condition, and the condition was that your own forgiveness was contingent on your willingness to extend it, and the willingness was not optional, and the failure to be willing was itself a sin, and the sin required forgiveness, and the forgiveness required willingness, and the loop closed around you like a snare.
I raised my hand. I remember the weight of the raising, the effort it took to push my arm above my head in a room that had been engineered, over the course of six months, to make the raising of my hand feel like the pulling of a trigger. Greg looked at me with the expression of a man who has been briefed, the careful, prepared warmth of someone who knows which student is the flagged one and has been coached on how to handle her without escalation.
“What if the person who hurt you is still hurting you?” I asked. “What if the thing you’re supposed to forgive is still happening?”
The room went quiet. Not the quiet of thought. The quiet of a system recognizing an input it has been programmed to intercept. I watched the girls in the semicircle exchange glances, the quick, lateral movement of eyes that communicates status and risk without words, the glance that says she’s doing it again and means we should not be seen agreeing with her.
Greg smiled. The smile was the tool, the instrument, the first response in the protocol. “That’s a great question, Naomi,” he said, and the naming was the second tool, the personalization that makes the management feel like engagement. “And the answer is that forgiveness isn’t about the other person. Forgiveness is about your heart. It’s about releasing the anger so that God can do His work in you. Whether the other person changes or not, the work God wants to do is in your heart.”
I heard this. I heard it the way a person hears a lock click shut. The work God wants to do is in your heart. Not in the heart of the person who is hurting you. Not in the system that allows the hurting. Not in the structure that has marked you and removed your friend and engineered your isolation and called the engineering love. The work is in you. The problem is in you. The anger is the disease, not the thing the anger is responding to, and the cure is to let go of the anger, and the letting-go is the healing, and the healing is the product, and the product is a version of you with the edges sanded off, the questions carved out, the fury extinguished, and the extinguishing is called peace.
“So I’m supposed to forgive them while they’re still doing it,” I said. Not a question. A statement. A mirror held up to the logic so that the logic could see its own face.
Greg’s smile did not flicker. The smile was professional-grade. “Jesus forgave from the cross, Naomi. While they were still nailing Him to it. That’s the standard.”
I did not answer. I sat in my chair at the edge of the semicircle and I felt the steel cable tighten and I understood, with a clarity that was almost physical, almost a sensation in my body, the shape of the trap. The trap was that the system could hurt you and then require you to forgive the hurting, and the requirement was enforced by the system itself, and the refusal to forgive was evidence of the spiritual disease the system had diagnosed in you, and the diagnosis justified the hurting, and the hurting justified the diagnosis, and the circle was perfect, seamless, self-sustaining, and inescapable from the inside.
From the inside. I was still inside. But I could see the edge. I could see the place where the inside ended and the outside began, and the outside was cold and unlit and populated by no one I knew, and the cost of crossing into it would be everything, because everything I had was on the inside: my mother, my father, the room, the people, the god, the language, the entire framework of meaning that had held me since birth. To cross to the outside was to give up the framework, and the framework was the only floor I had ever stood on, and the floor was a lie, but it was my lie, and the lie held weight, and I did not know if I could stand without it.
I left two years later. I stood without it. The standing cost me everything the framework had promised to provide: belonging, certainty, the assurance that I was known and loved by a power greater than myself. I traded all of it for the fury, and the fury was enough, and the fury has been enough for nine years.
But.
I am sitting in the grey, and the nearness is not the system. And the nearness has been patient through my defiance in a way that the system never was. And Greg’s answer about forgiveness, which I have held in my chest like a splinter for twelve years, sits differently here, in the company of an attention that does not edit and a patience that does not punish and a warmth that has not, in all the unmeasured time I have spent in this place, asked me to forgive anyone.
The nearness has not asked me to forgive. This fact is so strange, so contrary to every script I have ever been given about God, that I have been circling it the way a person circles a trap, looking for the spring, looking for the wire, looking for the mechanism that will close when the weight of my attention lands on it. The god of my experience required forgiveness as the price of his attention. You forgave, and then God drew near. You released your anger, and then God released his blessing. The transaction was explicit and non-negotiable: your forgiveness for his love, your compliance for his presence, your surrender for his peace. It was an economy, clean and balanced and utterly transactional, and the transaction was called grace, and grace was free, supposedly, except that it cost you everything you had, which was your right to be angry at the things that hurt you.
The nearness in the grey has not asked for this transaction. The nearness has drawn close, or remained close, or been close all along in a way I am only now beginning to perceive, and the closeness has not been conditioned on my surrender of the fury. The fury is intact. I have not forgiven anyone. I have not released my anger. I have not complied, not yielded, not bent a single joint in the direction of the small, humiliating genuflection the system requires. And the nearness is still here. And the nearness is still warm. And the warmth has not been withdrawn.
I do not know what to do with a god who does not withdraw his warmth when you refuse to give him what he wants.
The third test. I have been circling it. I have been avoiding it the way I avoid all the things that frighten me, which is to say intellectually, at a distance, with the careful, controlled approach of a woman who has learned to dissect her fear before she feels it, because feeling it first is dangerous, and danger is the weather, and the weather, in my experience, kills.
The third test is not defiance. Defiance failed. The nearness did not react. The third test is not provocation. Provocation failed. The nearness absorbed the provocation the way the lake absorbed the stone, and the surface closed, and the patience continued, and the god I expected did not show his face.
The third test is vulnerability. And I am afraid of it the way I have not been afraid of anything since I stood at the edge of the youth group semicircle and felt the system recognize my input and prepare its response.
Vulnerability was the weapon they used most effectively. Not the searchlight, which was brute force. Not the ledger, which was systematic. Vulnerability was the surgical instrument, the scalpel the system deployed when the blunt tools failed, the invitation to open yourself so that the opening could be used against you. Share your heart, they said. Be honest before God. Let Him see the real you. And the honesty was received, and the receiving felt like safety, and the safety lasted exactly as long as the honesty confirmed the diagnosis the system had already made, and the moment the honesty deviated, the moment the real you turned out to be a girl who had questions the system could not answer, the vulnerability was no longer a gift. The vulnerability was evidence. The vulnerability was entered into the record, and the record was used, and the using was the betrayal, and the betrayal was the wound that went deepest.
I know this. I carry this. And yet I am sitting in the grey with the crack in my wall and the warm air moving through it, and the thought that is forming in me, the thought I do not want and did not invite and cannot seem to suppress, is this: what if I let the nearness see the thing I have been protecting?
Not the fury. The nearness has seen the fury. I threw the fury at it and it received the fury without flinching and the non-flinching is what started the crack in the first place. Not the defiance. The nearness has seen the defiance and absorbed it and remained unchanged.
The thing I have been protecting is underneath the fury and underneath the defiance, in the basement of the building I constructed when I walked out of New Covenant Fellowship for the last time, in the room I do not enter, the room where the twelve-year-old girl is still sitting in the pew with her mother’s hand on her leg, feeling the warmth in the room, the warmth that had no conditions attached to it, the warmth that was there before anyone told her the warmth was a weapon.
The girl is the vulnerability. The girl is the real me, the one the system asked to see and then used against herself. And the nearness, the pursuing, patient, terrifyingly un-Pastor-Keith-like nearness, is pressing against the wall of the room where the girl sits, not breaking through, not forcing entry, but pressing with a quality that feels, from this side of the wall, less like pressure and more like a hand laid flat against the stone, waiting to be let in.
I do not let it in. I am not ready. I may never be ready. But the fact that I am considering it, the fact that the thought has formed and I have not immediately crushed it, the fact that I am sitting with the possibility the way Micah would sit with an argument he disagrees with, holding it at arm’s length, examining it, looking for the flaw before he discards it, the sitting-with is itself a fracture in the structure, a crack in a deeper wall than the one I built of fury, a crack in the wall I built of self-preservation, which is the oldest wall, the first wall, the wall that went up when Elise’s eyes went blank and the system showed me that openness was not safe and would never be safe and that the only reliable defense against a god who weaponizes vulnerability is to never be vulnerable again.
The nearness waits. I do not open. The grey holds us both in the long, unmeasured patience of a place where time has no edges, and I sit with the thought I will not act on, and the thought sits with me, and the sitting is a kind of companionship I did not expect to find here.
Something is changing in the grey. I noticed it a while ago, or what passes for a while in a place without clocks. A thinning. A subtraction of something I did not know was there until it began to go. The air, if the grey has air, feels different. Lighter. Emptier. As though a weight has been removed from the room, not my weight, not the weight of my own presence, but a weight nearby, a companion mass I had been aware of only as background, the way you are aware of the hum of a refrigerator until the compressor clicks off and the sudden silence tells you what you were hearing all along.
Someone is gone.
I do not know who. I do not know how. The grey does not announce departures. There is no door I can hear open and close, no footstep receding, no voice calling goodbye from a hallway. There is only the thinning, the sense that the country I am in has one fewer occupant than it did before, and the thinning has a quality to it that is not loss, exactly, not the cold subtraction of death, which I know, which I remember, which is the last thing I felt in the world before the world went grey. The thinning has a quality of completion. As if the weight that was here is not gone but arrived. As if the departure is not an ending but the other thing, the thing I have no word for because the only words I have for it are the words the church gave me and the church’s words are damaged goods.
Reed. It might be Reed. One of the strangers from the other cars, the man who seemed, in the brief chaos of our collective waking, to be the kind of person who keeps the inventory and manages the room and cannot tolerate a problem he has not solved. I remember him assessing the grey the way a contractor assesses a water-damaged ceiling, clinically, with the practiced calm of competence, looking for the structural issue, looking for the fix. If the thinning is Reed, then the fix was not what he expected, and the departure was not a solution but a surrender, and the surrender took him somewhere the grey is not.
I should feel nothing about this. I barely knew him. I do not know him. We shared a wreck and a dying and a waking, and the sharing does not constitute a relationship, and the absence of a near-stranger should not register in the ledger of my attention.
But it does. It registers the way a change in barometric pressure registers: not as information but as sensation, a shift in the quality of the air, a reorganization of the space I occupy. The grey is emptier. The nearness at the edge of the grey is, proportionally, closer. Not because it has moved. Because the distance between us has fewer obstructions. There were five of us here, five refusals, five turned backs, and the five backs formed a kind of buffer, a collective resistance that, while it did not diminish the nearness, gave me company in the refusing. I was not the only one saying no. I was one of five, and the five were a proof, a small, democratic proof that refusal was a viable option, that the system could be resisted by more than one person, that the god behind the nearness was not so irresistible as to overwhelm every dissent.
Now there are four. Or fewer. The thinning may have taken more than one. And the democracy of refusal is smaller, and the smallness makes the nearness feel larger, or nearer, or more insistent, not because it has changed but because there is less between me and it, and the less is a loss I did not anticipate.
I try to find the fury again, the clean, purposeful, load-bearing fury that has been the spine of my refusal since I was eighteen years old. I reach for it the way you reach for a tool you have used so many times the handle has worn to the shape of your hand. The fury should be here. The fury has always been here. The fury is the one thing I have never lost, not in the leaving, not in the years of living without the framework, not in the wreck and the dying and the light I turned away from and the grey I woke into.
The fury is here. But it is tired.
I feel this the way you feel a muscle that has been held tense too long, the way a clenched jaw aches when you finally notice you have been clenching, the way a person who has been carrying a heavy object for so long that the carrying has become transparent to them suddenly becomes aware of the weight. The fury is heavy. The fury has always been heavy, but in the living world there were things to set it down on, surfaces and shelves, distractions and occupations and the daily business of being a person in a body in a world with groceries to buy and rent to pay and Micah’s couch to sit on and Quinn’s music to argue about. The living provided scaffolding for the fury, external structures that bore some of the weight, and the weight was manageable because it was distributed.
In the grey there is no scaffolding. In the grey there is only me and the fury and the nearness, and the fury is all mine to carry, and the carrying has gone on long enough that the carrying itself has become a form of pain, and the pain is new, or the awareness of it is new, and the awareness is unwelcome because the awareness is another crack, a crack not in the wall but in the floor, the floor I am standing on, the floor that is made of the conviction that the fury is good and right and necessary and that the carrying is a price worth paying for the protection it provides.
The fury protects me. I need to say this. I need to defend the fury, because the fury has been my defender for nine years and it deserves a defense of its own. The fury is the thing that got me out of the building. The fury is the thing that held me upright when the framework collapsed. The fury is the thing that sits between me and the wound, a wall of fire between the present and the past, and the fire keeps the past at a distance, and the distance is my safety, and the safety is my life. Without the fury I am a twenty-seven-year-old woman sitting in the grey with nothing between her and the memory of a fifteen-year-old girl getting the vulnerability prayed out of her by three women who believed they were saving her soul.
Without the fury I am the girl.
I have not been the girl in nine years. The girl is the thing the fury replaced. The fury rose in the space where the girl used to be, the space where the hurt lived before the hurt got hot enough to catch fire, and the fire burned the hurt into something harder, something useful, something that could be wielded rather than merely suffered, and the wielding was the transformation, the alchemy that turned a wounded child into a functioning adult, and the functioning has been my proudest achievement, and the achievement is a building, and the building is on fire, and the fire is the building, and I am the fire, and the fire is getting tired.
The nearness at the edge of the grey is patient with the tiredness. The nearness does not press harder because the fury is weakening. The nearness does not advance on the crack the way a predator advances on an injured animal, sensing the vulnerability, smelling the blood. The nearness does the thing it has done since the beginning, the thing that started the crack, the thing that has been the most effective weapon against the wall I built, more effective than any searchlight or ledger or pointed finger or seventy-five-minute sermon on the sin of doubt.
The nearness simply remains.
And the remaining, the steady, unfluctuating, un-Pastor-Keith-like remaining, is doing what the fury cannot prevent, which is this: it is making me grieve.
The grief comes the way the memory of the twelve-year-old came: rising through the grey like a bubble through oil, slow and impossible to push back down. I try. I push. The grief does not cooperate. The grief is not the fury. The fury was mine; I built it, I shaped it, I lit the match and I tended the fire and I chose which direction it burned. The grief is not mine in the same way. The grief is something that was always there, beneath the fury, behind the wall, in the room where the girl sits in the pew, and the fury was the lid I put on it, and the lid is lifting, and the lifting is not something I am doing. The lifting is something the grey is doing, or the nearness is doing, or the unmeasured time is doing, the way water does the work of erosion without effort, without intention, simply by remaining, simply by being present, simply by moving against the surface with the patient, relentless insistence of a force that has nowhere else to be and nothing else to do.
I grieve.
The word is inadequate but the word is all I have, and I use it the way I use all words, carefully, with full knowledge of its insufficiency, and I say: I grieve. I grieve the girl. I grieve the twelve-year-old in the pew who felt the warmth in the room and did not know enough to be afraid of it. I grieve the fourteen-year-old who loved Elise with the whole weight of a heart that had not yet been taught that love comes with conditions. I grieve the fifteen-year-old who asked about the babies and got the devil diagnosed into her. I grieve the sixteen-year-old who sat at the edge of the semicircle and watched the system process her, efficiently, without malice, the way a machine processes raw material, and emerged with the fury where the trust used to be.
I grieve the loss of a thing I do not have a name for. Not faith. The faith was the machine’s product, and the product was defective, and the loss of a defective product is not a loss but a correction. What I grieve is the thing the faith was supposed to be, the thing the twelve-year-old felt before the machine got its hands on her, the warmth in the room that had no conditions, the attention that saw her and found the seeing good. I grieve the possibility that the warmth was real and the machine stole it and repackaged it and sold it back to me as something I had to earn, and the earning was compliance, and the compliance was the price, and the price was everything, and I paid it for fifteen years before I understood that the thing I was buying was not what I was promised.
The grief sits in the grey beside me and the grief is heavier than the fury. The fury was clean. The fury was directional. The fury had an object and a cause and a clear, specific target, which was the god of New Covenant Fellowship and every church like it and every person who has ever stood behind a pulpit and used the name of love to do the work of control. The grief has no target. The grief is not angry at anyone. The grief is just sad, just the flat, heavy, shapeless sadness of a woman who lost something when she was twelve and has spent fifteen years pretending the loss was a victory and is now, in the grey, in the silence, in the company of a nearness that will not behave like the god she lost, unable to pretend anymore.
The pretending is over. The pretending ended somewhere between the first test and the third, between the moment I turned toward the nearness and found no searchlight and the moment I felt the fury get tired and the grief start to rise. The pretending was the performance, the daily act of being a woman whose leaving was a triumph and whose fury was a strength and whose nine years of refusal were nine years of freedom, and the performance was convincing, and Micah believed it, and Quinn believed it, and I believed it, most days, the way you believe the floor beneath your feet is solid because the alternative is a fall you are not prepared to take.
The floor was the fury. The fury was the floor. And the floor is cracking, and the grief is what lives beneath it, and the grief is rising, and I am sitting in the grey with the grief in my lap like a child I did not know I was carrying, and the child is the twelve-year-old, and the twelve-year-old is still in the pew, and her mother’s hand is still on her leg, and the warmth in the room is still warm, and the warmth is the thing I lost, and the loss is what I am grieving, and the grieving is the most honest thing I have done since I walked out of that cinderblock building and called the walking freedom.
It was freedom. I will not take that back. The walking-away was the right thing. The walking-away saved my life, or saved the part of my life that mattered, which was the part that could still ask questions, the part that could still think for itself, the part that had not been sanded smooth and stamped with the machine’s logo. The walking-away was necessary and right and I will defend it to whatever judgment the grey is leading me toward.
But the walking-away took something with it. The walking-away took the twelve-year-old. The walking-away took the warmth. The walking-away took the possibility that there was something real in the room that Sunday morning when I was twelve and the hymn books were opening and the light came through the windows and I felt, for the last uncomplicated moment of my childhood, that I was known and that the knowing was good. The walking-away was a severing, and the severing was necessary, and the thing that was severed included not only the machine but the thing the machine had been built on top of, and the thing the machine had been built on top of might have been real, and the might-have-been-real is the thing I am grieving.
The nearness at the edge of the grey receives the grief the way it received the fury: without comment, without correction, without the production of a lesson or a sermon or a framework that would make the grief mean something other than what it means. The grief means I lost something. The nearness does not tell me what I lost. The nearness does not interpret the loss. The nearness simply sits with the grieving the way Micah sat with Quinn on the couch after the parking lot, not fixing, not explaining, just present, just staying, just occupying the space next to a person who is in pain and not requiring the person in pain to perform the gestures of recovery.
The staying is the same. The quality of the staying is the same. And the sameness is the crack, widening, widening, and I cannot close it because the thing that would close it is the fury, and the fury is tired, and the grief has replaced it, and the grief does not close cracks. The grief opens them.
Two things I can see from here, from the broken floor of the grey, from the place where the fury ran out and the grief came in. Two steps that stand between me and the thing the nearness seems to be offering, whatever that thing is. I can see them the way you see mountain passes from a valley: clearly, from a distance, with full knowledge that the distance is not the difficulty. The difficulty is the climbing.
The first step is to let the nearness be real. To let the tenderness be real. To accept, as a working hypothesis, that the god who is here in the grey is not the god of New Covenant Fellowship but someone else entirely, someone the church did not describe and could not contain and may have been actively obscuring, the way a painted board nailed over a window obscures the light behind it. The twelve-year-old in the pew felt the light. The machine nailed the board. And the question I have been refusing to ask for nine years, the question Micah placed in my pocket like a stone on the couch at 412 Garfield Street, the question that has been gaining weight in the grey with every hour the nearness fails to produce the gavel, is this: what if the board is not the window? What if the people who painted the board and called it God were wrong, not about the existence of something behind it, but about what the something was? What if the god I fled was a fabrication, a projection, a small and terrible idol assembled from the fears and needs of frightened people in a cinderblock building, and the real God, the one the twelve-year-old touched for a moment before the machine intercepted the signal, is the one who has been sitting at the edge of this grey for what feels like forever, patient and warm and refusing to produce the gavel?
This step would cost me the fury. The fury is aimed at God. If the god I am furious at is not the God who is here, then the fury has been aimed at the wrong target, and the nine years of burning have been nine years of burning the wrong house, and the wrong-house-burning does not invalidate the fury, because the fury was a response to a real wound, but it redirects it. If the god I fled was not God but a counterfeit, then the fury belongs not to the divine but to the human, not to the One behind the nearness but to the ones who built the machine, to Pastor Keith and Linda and Greg and my mother’s kneeling and my father’s silence and the whole congregation of a hundred and forty people who let a system of control call itself God and did not correct the naming.
The fury, redirected, would still be fury. But it would be fury at people, not at the divine. And fury at people is a thing that can be, eventually, in theory, at some cost I am not yet willing to calculate, released.
Which brings me to the second step, and the second step is harder, and the second step is the one that makes me want to close the crack and rebuild the wall and return to the clean, load-bearing fury that does not require me to do the one thing I have sworn never to do.
The second step is forgiveness.
Not forgiveness as the system defined it. Not the steel cable running from God’s ledger to my obligation, the transactional forgiveness that Greg described in the fellowship hall, the forced release of anger as the price of God’s continued attention. Not the forgiveness that says the wound was your fault for being wounded, that the pain is the disease and the forgiveness is the cure and the cure requires you to pretend the wound was smaller than it was. Not that forgiveness. That forgiveness was another instrument of the machine, and the machine can keep it.
But there is another forgiveness, a forgiveness I have watched from the outside, from the safe distance of a woman who has not been required to practice it. I have seen it in Micah, who carries his dead sister everywhere and has not forgiven God for taking her (because Micah does not believe there is a God to forgive) but who has, in some quiet way I do not fully understand, released his parents from the weight of their prayers. He does not blame them for praying. He does not blame them for believing. He carries the dead sister and the unanswered prayers and the grief that will not close, and he does not turn the grief into a weapon aimed at the two people who were most wounded by the same loss. This is something Micah does that I have never been able to do, and the inability is the lock on the door of the room where the twelve-year-old sits, and the lock is not made of fury. The lock is made of the belief that forgiving the people who hurt me would be the same as saying the hurting was acceptable.
I cannot say the hurting was acceptable. The hurting was not acceptable. The hurting was wrong. Pastor Keith was wrong. Linda was wrong. Greg was wrong. My mother, who knelt beside her bed every morning in the posture of a woman appeasing a power she feared, was wrong about the nature of the power she feared. My father, who read his Bible with a highlighter and enforced the standards of the house with the steady, pressurized silence of a man for whom love and measurement were the same operation, was wrong about the standards. The three women who pressed their fingers into my shoulders and prayed the doubt out of me were wrong about the doubt. The whole system was wrong, and the wrongness was real, and the damage was real, and the twelve-year-old who lost the warmth in the room because the system intercepted the signal and replaced it with a counterfeit was really, truly, specifically harmed by specific people who should not have done what they did.
But.
There is a but, and the but is the nearness, and the nearness is the thing that makes the but possible, because the nearness has done the one thing no one in the system ever did: it has sat with me in the damage without requiring me to deny it. The nearness has not said the wound was my fault. The nearness has not said the wound was small. The nearness has not said the wound was necessary or educational or a chapter in the curriculum of a god who teaches through suffering. The nearness has simply remained in the presence of the wound, the way you remain in the presence of a person who is bleeding, not because you caused the bleeding but because the bleeding person should not be alone.
If the nearness is real, if the god behind it is not the god of the machine, then something terrible and freeing is true: the people who hurt me were not carrying out God’s orders. They were doing something else, something human and frightened and wrong, and the god they claimed to represent was not the god who authorized the hurting but the god who sat in the room while the hurting happened and grieved it. The sorrow I felt when I first turned toward the nearness, the sorrow for me, not at me, the sorrow that had the texture of a parent arriving too late, that sorrow would mean that God was not the perpetrator but the one who watched the perpetration and wept.
This is the second step. To release the people. Not to say they were right. Not to say the hurting was acceptable. Not to rebuild the wall and return to the building and sit in the pew and sing the hymn and pretend the system was healthy. To release them the way you release a weight you have been carrying not because you want to but because the carrying is killing you. To set down the fury at the human beings who built the machine, the specific, named, particular human beings who took a real warmth and turned it into a weapon, and to set the fury down not because they deserve the setting-down but because the carrying is a fire, and the fire has kept me warm, and the warmth has also been a burning, and the burning has been consuming me from the inside for nine years, and I am tired.
I can see this step. I can see it clearly. I can see the pass in the mountain from the valley, and the pass is forgiveness, and the climbing would cost me the fury, and the fury is the last structural support of the identity I built when I walked out of that building, and the identity is the only self I have, and the self is on fire, and the fire is the self.
I am not ready to climb. I am sitting in the valley with the grief and the crack and the nearness, and the nearness is waiting, and the waiting is not impatient, and the not-impatient-waiting is the thing that makes the climbing thinkable, because the climbing is only thinkable if the destination is safe, and the destination is only safe if the god at the top of the pass is not the god of the machine, and the god at the top of the pass has spent the entire unmeasured duration of my time in this grey proving, by patience, by remaining, by refusing to produce the gavel or the searchlight or the ledger, that he is not the god of the machine.
He. The pronoun slips. I notice it. I notice that I am using a pronoun for the nearness, a personal pronoun, the pronoun of a being, not a force, not a system, not a weather pattern, not a barometric pressure reading, but a person, and the personhood is the edge of belief, and I am standing at the edge, and the edge is the crack, and the crack is the width of a question I have not yet answered and cannot stop hearing.
What if the god I fled is not the God who is here?
The question sits in the grey the way it sat in my pocket on the couch at 412 Garfield, the stone Micah placed there, heavy and smooth and impossible to lose. But the question is different now. On the couch it was hypothetical, a philosopher’s exercise, the kind of thought experiment Micah excels at, the elegant reframing that costs nothing because it is conducted at a safe distance from the thing being reframed. In the grey, in the company of the nearness, in the aftermath of the grief and the failure of the fury and the thinning of the country around me, the question is not hypothetical. The question is operational. The question is the door, and the door is open, and through the door I can see a room I have never been in, and the room is lit, and the light in the room is the same light the twelve-year-old felt in the pew, the same warmth, the same unconditioned attention, the same being-known-and-found-good that was the last good thing the machine let me have before the machine took it away and replaced it with the counterfeit.
The room is lit. The door is open. And I am standing at the threshold, and the word threshold makes me flinch because I have been at a threshold before, in the dying, when the light came, and the light was warm, and I turned away because I was certain the warmth was the bait and the god behind the warmth was the god of the machine. I turned away. I said no. And the no was right, or the no felt right, or the no was the only response the fury had available, because the fury was forged to fight the god of the machine, and the fury could not, in the moment of the dying, distinguish between the god of the machine and the god who was actually there.
What if the god who was actually there was not the god of the machine? What if the light I turned away from was the light the twelve-year-old felt? What if the warmth was real, and I refused real warmth because I had been hurt by counterfeit warmth, and the refusal was understandable, and the refusal was tragic, and the tragedy is that the wound the church gave me was a wound that made the real God unrecognizable to me?
I am standing at the edge of this thought and the edge is the edge of a cliff, and the cliff drops into a reorientation so total that I cannot see the bottom. If the god of the machine was not God, then my entire architecture of refusal has been built on a misidentification. The fury is real. The wound is real. The damage done to a girl in a cinderblock building under fluorescent lights by a system that called itself God is real and specific and unforgivable, or forgivable only at a cost I am not sure I can pay. But the target of the fury, the divine target, the cosmic addressee of nine years of blazing, righteous, load-bearing no, may not be the One I thought. The no may have been aimed at the painted board, and the painted board may have been nailed over the window by human hands, and behind the board, behind the board, all this time, the light may have been shining, patient and warm and waiting for someone to pull the nails.
I cannot pull the nails. Not yet. Not now. The nails are in too deep and the pulling would require tools I do not have, or tools I have not yet agreed to pick up, and the tools are forgiveness and the willingness to be wrong about the most foundational conviction of my adult life, which is the conviction that the god behind the cruelty is the God behind the universe, and the cruelty is the evidence, and the evidence is conclusive.
The evidence is no longer conclusive. The nearness has contaminated the data set. The nearness, by its patience, by its warmth, by its absolute refusal to behave like the god of the machine, has introduced a variable I cannot control for, and the variable is this: the possibility that tenderness is not a trap.
I want the tenderness to be real.
I want this so badly that the wanting frightens me more than the grey, more than the nearness, more than the prospect of the gavel that has not fallen and may never fall. I want the tenderness to be real the way the twelve-year-old in the pew wanted the warmth to be real, openly, hungrily, with the whole uncomplicated weight of a heart that has not yet learned what the word conditional means. I want it with the same part of me that reached for Elise across the fellowship hall, the part that trusted before the trust was weaponized, the part that believed before the belief was stolen and resold at the price of my questions. I want it with the part of me that the fury was supposed to replace but never fully did, because the fury could protect the wound but could not heal it, and the wound has been open for nine years, and the wound has been waiting, and the wound wants the tenderness the way a wound wants a hand that will not add to the damage.
I want it. And I am terrified that the wanting is the trap. That the wanting is the vulnerability the system always exploited, the soft spot the machine always found, the opening through which the scalpel entered. I am terrified that the wanting is the beginning of the crawling back, the first joint bending in the direction of the prostration, the first step in the long, humiliating journey back to the pew and the hymnal and the god who will, once the vulnerability has been offered, produce the gavel at last and bring it down.
The nearness waits. The nearness does not produce the gavel. The nearness has been waiting for what feels like longer than my entire life, and the gavel has not appeared, and the searchlight has not swept, and the ledger has not opened, and the conditions have not been stated, and the transaction has not been proposed, and the patience has not cracked, and the warmth has not been withdrawn, and the sorrow I felt when I turned toward the nearness is still there, the sorrow for me, the parental sorrow, the sorrow that says you were hurt and the hurting was wrong and I was there and I did not do the hurting and I grieve the hurting and I will not leave.
I sit at the edge of belief. The edge is a cliff and the cliff drops into a world where the god I fled is not the God who is here, and the world below the cliff is terrifying and maybe safe, and the maybe is the problem, because maybe is not certainty, and certainty is the only ground I have ever been able to stand on, and the ground I am standing on now is cracking, and the crack is the width of a tenderness I was not prepared for, and the tenderness is patient, and the patience is not a weapon, and I almost believe this.
Almost.
The word sits in the grey between me and the nearness like a coin on its edge, spinning, not yet fallen to one side or the other. Almost. I almost believe the tenderness is real. I almost believe the god of the machine was not God. I almost believe the twelve-year-old in the pew felt something genuine, something that was there before the system intercepted it, something that has been waiting behind the painted board for nine years, patient and warm and refusing to leave.
Almost is not yes. Almost is the edge. Almost is standing at the door of the lit room, seeing the light, feeling the warmth on my face, and not stepping through, because stepping through would require me to release the fury and grieve the loss and forgive the people and accept that the god behind the nearness is not the god I was given, and the acceptance would dismantle the architecture of my entire adult self, and the dismantling is a fall, and I do not know what is at the bottom.
The nearness remains. The grey holds. The crack in the wall is the width of a grief I can no longer contain, and the grief is honest, and the honesty is the most dangerous thing about it, because honesty was always the weapon the system used best, and the nearness is asking for honesty by not asking for anything, and the not-asking is more effective than any asking has ever been, and I am sitting at the edge of something, and the edge is the edge of belief, and I am afraid.
I am afraid the way a person is afraid who has been burned and is being shown a fire and is being told, by the quality of the warmth and not by any words, that this fire is different, that this fire does not burn to consume but to warm, that this fire is the fire the twelve-year-old sat beside in the pew before anyone told her fire was dangerous, and the telling was the real danger, and the fire was never the enemy, and the enemy was the person who stood between the child and the fire and said this will hurt you and then proved it by doing the hurting himself.
I am afraid. And I am almost. And the almost is more than I have been since I walked out of that building, because since I walked out I have been certain, and certain is easier than almost, and almost is the hardest place I have ever stood, because almost means the door is open and I can see the light and I have not yet decided whether the light will save me or destroy me, and the not-deciding is a kind of agony, and the agony is the agony of a woman who wants to come home and is terrified the home will turn out to be the same house she escaped from.
The nearness remains.
The warmth does not withdraw.
I sit at the edge, and the edge holds me, and the grey goes on.