I wrote this as a paper for my theology and the christian life class on my christology. But I wrote it as my story and this blog is a place for my story.
Beyond Parchment Skies
I was first encountered by God when I was four, wearing fuzzy purple pajamas, and counting stars while on a park path to a pond. It’s one of my very first memories: standing in the middle of a forest trail at night with adults chatting behind me and looking up at the stars. I had from my youngest days a great and incomparable love for the night sky. I believed in the stars perhaps more than I believed in the world I could touch and play with. So there I was, four years old in purple pajamas looking straight up at the dark stretching sky and wondering how the stars found their place in the vast sea of dark nothing. My young mind, wild with imagination and freedom to believe, thought that maybe they were halos that angels had misplaced, or perhaps someone decided to make an extravagant connect-the-dot puzzle in the sky for everyone to enjoy, and that if I could only draw the lines correctly, maybe I’d find out the reasons why.
At four, I had no idea who that Someone might have been, but I knew that there was something more, something even bigger than my beloved universe itself, something that placed me here and the stars there. Throughout my childhood, I pined for the universe. When other children were firefighters and doctors and actresses in play-time dress-up, I was always already in space, always the astronaut. I lost myself in dreams about spacecrafts and exploration of the edges of the universe. When I was ten I was told by my impatient 5th grade teacher that I would never be an astronaut because of my severe hearing loss. In between one recess and another, I had lost my entire identity. I only began to find myself again, a year later, within the stanzas of poems about philosophy and space and time and beauty of the inexplicable.
I had always loved reading as a child, to dive into books and live within their walls. I looked and still look to books to provide a door into a world that I can belong in, a world where I can lose my reality and perhaps even my life . I have always felt that authors had a sense of knowing beyond the regular person and quite honestly I believed many fictional tales were only called stories or myths because the writer thought no one else would understand. I longed to understand, and I believed these authors and poets might know of the something, the someone, I had been seeking since I was four and looking beyond the stars.
I don’t believe I ever actually opened a Bible before the age of thirteen. I had been to Mass with family friends and with my very Catholic, very Polish grandma a few times, but those were hours of boredom punctuated by lots of standing and monotone mumbling words I had not learned . One Sunday morning in Fresno, California, my grandma took me to her church, the church my father had been raised in. Being eight-years old, I spent a great deal of time observing and playing with what I later found out to be the kneelers, wondering why the benches weren’t padded but these miniature benches were. It was only when the Eucharist was being served that I both learned what these shrunken benches were used for and saw the crucifix for the first time. My grandma made me kneel on the slat of wood in front of us, that, for all their padding, were terribly painful and I looked up at stage for the first time.
Above a draped table where someone’s father was standing looking sad and muttering to himself over a wine glass, there was a huge terrifying man made of bronze whose body was somehow attached to two crossed pieces of metal that were supposed to look like wood. One of my friends had broken his arm earlier that year, and I saw it when they carried him off the playground. When Quinn returned to school in a cool colored cast, I decided that I wanted to break my arm someday. But this terrifying man before me looked like every bone in his body had been twisted and bent, and all I could think of was not how cool Quinn had looked with his cast, but how he had screamed when he first fell off the monkey bars. I was terrified of this man and the pain that it meant. I decided that I never wanted to break my arm, or be put on any kind of cross whether it was metal or wood. A few months later I did break my arm, the day before Christmas, and while waiting in the ER with my father I remembered this terrible man and decided in this moment of pain and frustration that I hated him.
It was in the same year that I had been told I’d never be an astronaut that I decided, one Sunday morning, to go to church. By age ten, I had been to Mass a number of times, but the incense made me choke and I always avoided the gaze of the horrible man that I hated who hung from the ceiling. My parents worshipped a god of work, mowing the lawn and washing the car and doing dishes on the one day my father had off every few weeks and had no time for things like church or social functions . So I got up and decided to walk to Messiah Lutheran church, just down the street, where I had gone to preschool many years before. I wandered through these big heavy doors that as a two-year-old I was forbidden to touch. The first Sunday I went to church there I was thankful to find them open, more so I didn’t have to touch the doors and break the rules than because I wanted to go inside.
The Lutheran church was dark with tired looking colored glass windows. It smelled like the library and was full of old people who didn’t shush me but smiled. And the pews didn’t have kneelers at all. The third Sunday I was there, an older man came and sat down next to me. As I was an outsider , I felt I was only to sit on the farthest side of the pews, so I squirmed, in my typical ten-year-old way, farther towards the edge, thinking I had accidentally taken his seat. He smiled and asked me my name. But I knew he was breaking the rules because church was a place to be very quiet. I looked up surprised and then realized that the whole of the church was staring at this man and me. I told him my name quietly and when he asked how old I was I just stuck out all my fingers. I didn’t understand why he was making a fool out of me. He then asked if I’d like to go up front to the stage, and I shook my head furiously while looking down at my scuffed up brown sandals. He asked quietly, “Why not, child?”
Later it was revealed that this old man was the pastor of the church, which was the same thing as a priest (who, I had discovered, were actually not anyone’s father). I stayed at Messiah Lutheran for a little less than a year, more for the goldfish and juice on Sunday school and beautiful music that no one expected I already knew than for any other more honorable reason, and I left because the church, my mother said, was “dying.” I remember nothing of the lessons, and only of a pastor who wanted to know my name. And I wouldn’t again return to a church until I was thirteen and desperate for a meaning and a purpose and the Someone who put the stars in the sky and hungry for more than just juice and crackers. In the meantime, I was a writer and a reader, and my praise songs were my poems and my prayers were found in pages of Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Dickenson and Frost . I grew to know a God that Frost wrote of in his poem God’s Garden: “Look upward to the glitter/ Of stars in God’s clear skies/ Their ways are pure and harmless/
And will not lead astray/ Bid aid your erring footsteps/
To keep the narrow way.” Where Moltmann uses Dostoyevsky’s character Ivan Karamazov to illustrate the impact of theology with a removed or denied God, I instead was gleaning my theology and my knowledge of God from the characters I read .
My god of literature was a beloved but tattered thing, a magical god who could not at times get out of his own way. When I heard god was to be described as a father, my frail and clumsy god became an aloof genius, a volatile god who had many faces and never came home until after dark and who loved good wine and martinis. I didn’t understand how this god was the one who made my universe, but I still believed that these writers had to have the answer to my questions.
I had stumbled into church again in the middle of my junior high years through an invitation to a youth group in a church just across the street from Messiah Lutheran. After going to the group, called Edge, I began to go to Sunday school. I’d like to say it was for my desire to be taught about the ways of this God that they prayed to, or because my heart was a parched and tired desert ready for the Word of God to come down and flood it with His love. While all those things were true, I came, solely and unwaveringly, for the chocolate glazed donuts. At my new church, High Street Community, there weren’t any signs of death; in fact there was no crucifix at all. High above the stage was a simple cross, empty and unthreatening, which I simply vowed to ignore. At High Street there were two services, one with traditional music and hymns that had always seemed to sing of the One I was looking for, and one service with music that blared and warbled and sang repetitively with a small vocabulary of adjectives. I, having only a background in Catholic processional and Lutheran melodies, chose the first service. I happened to also be the only one there under the age of fifty. My heart clamored to the hymns, one in particular that went, “the love of God is greater far, than tongue or pen can ever tell; it goes beyond the highest star, and reaches to the lowest hell.”
I knew these hymns were singing of the Somebody I had been looking for! But how was I to know this God, this Him they sang of, this Lover? I was both self-reliant and timid and I knew it was wrong to ask questions in church because you are always ‘shushed’. But I hoped I would get to know more about this God who was becoming my single passion. In church I heard stories of this amazing man Jesus and what he taught about this God. I believed Jesus was my one way to know about this God, but I rejected everything that talked about Jesus as the same man on the cross in my father’s childhood church. How could it be that a man like this be killed? I was angry, although I did not know who I was angry at, because if Jesus had been able to stay alive, he could have taught us so much more. I thought it senseless, brutal, and shameful. When I learned that this man was not just a man, but God incarnate, I grew angrier . How could we have killed God? But I still could not ask these questions aloud. When they taught us that He had to die in order to cleanse the world of the sin, my heart cried out, “Why couldn’t you have just killed one of us, killed me, instead?!” When my youth pastor spoke of how they spit on Him, ripped His back with a whip, and nailed Him to the cross and left Him to die, I remembered my childhood hatred and disgust, and I felt like somehow I had killed Him, that His blood was on my hands .
But I believed He is the Son of God, and that He died on the cross, and rose again three days later so I was baptized on Easter Sunday, my freshman year of high school, all the while believing my name should be in place of Pontius Pilate in the Nicene Creed . I had finally found the God of the universe, but He had come with so much more than an explanation of the stars . He came with love and forgiveness and grace. He had come to save us, and my mind, so apt to explore the universe, could not understand. My question had shifted from “what is this Someone who created all this?”, to “What is man, that thou art mindful of Him?” . I could not understand, and thus could not accept that “he wants in face to be man’s partner, his almighty and compassionate Saviour” or why “he determines to love him, to be his God, his Lord, his compassionate Preserver and Saviour to eternal life” . All I could accept that I was utterly unworthy and had no place approaching Jesus Christ, and my childhood absolute fear of this man, this God, still dominated my thoughts about Him.
In order to continue as a Christian, I regarded Jesus as somewhat of a side note. Like the simple empty cross hanging above the stage of my church, I could ignore him if I didn’t think about His death. I hated Good Friday, not because of my younger zealous belief at some great injustice being done in the death of God, but rather because I had to be reminded of the crucified Christ, and had to be reminded of His Love and His grace, both of which I knew I did not deserve. I thrived in the Old Testament, with the stories of a just God punishing and promising, creating and recreating, in the poetry of the Psalms that cried out to their Maker and declared their sinfulness and guilt and sorrow. I heard the Scripture that the only way to the Father was through the Son, so I was an acquaintance to the Son of God, keeping Him at a safe distance. I continued to read literature that showed me understandable Christs; characters such as Jim Casey in Grapes of Wrath and Sofya Marmeladov in Crime and Punishment began to work in my heart. But my hands were still bloodied, and I begged God to know how to wash them. For three years, I heard in some deep secret place in my being, “Approach the cross and look Me in the eyes and know that you are loved and you are forgiven.” I refused. I was still the young girl looking down at her scuffed brown sandals, sitting alone in church, and I was still being asked, “Why not, child?”
I was sitting in the darkened room of Upper Turner Campus Center in the quiet after Liturgical Chapel, a soft hymn playing around me. The words, “the guilty pair, bowed down with care, God gave His Son to win; His erring child He reconciled, and pardoned from her sin” would not leave me alone. On the stage, a massive rough cross stood, and my soul trembled as my eyes were assaulted with my first memories of the crucifix: Jesus Christ, Son of God, Son of Man , was hanging there, as real as the stars that hang in my beloved night sky and I knew He loved me and my hands were no longer the only thing drenched by His blood, but that “nothing good have I/ where-by Thy grace to claim/ I’ll wash my garments white/ in the blood of Calvary’s Lamb.” And for the first time I knew that it was true, I was loved and I was forgiven and that “could we with ink the ocean fill, and were the skies of parchment made, were every stalk on earth a quill, and every man a scribe by trade;
To write the love of God above would drain the ocean dry; Nor could the scroll contain the whole, though stretched from sky to sky.”
