let the words fall out

I first heard about this book around a table with five girls I didn't know, nibbling on cheese and drinking wine and listening to my beautifully eccentric friend, Carolyn, read quotes she had jotted down on notecards. She had collected the quotes over the previous couple months - mostly from books she had been reading that she found insightful. They were a starting point for conversation, and she called our time that night Curiosity Club. As we read the notecards aloud and shared bits of our stories, I listened to the questions that have been burdening me over the last two years be asked back to me five times, in five different voices. Questions about why church doesn't seem as relevant anymore, when it used to be the one place that felt like home. Questions about where women belong in the workplace and church as gifted leaders, teachers, and thinkers. Questions about how Christian communities can still be unwelcoming to our gay and lesbian friends while claiming the gospel. Questions about how our parents’ generation can feel so sure about certain parts of scripture when we see so many blatant inconsistencies. And questions about our deep longing for the Church to admit that we really don't have anything but the basics figured out.

And then the inevitable fear, what do these questions say about my belief in God?

I heard about Rachel Held Evans that night, and I went home and ordered Evolving in Monkeytown because Rachel sounded a lot like me. As I read, I came across a statement that I wish we'd had that night. "When we know how to make a distinction between our ideas about God and God himself, our faith remains safe when one of those ideas is seriously challenged."

At some some point in the last 25 years, there was a reaction against mystery in our understanding of God. Christians felt like they had to scientifically prove the existence of God or else he'd cease to be relevant. But I think, in doing so, we lost so much of Him. We made him so solid that we forgot about his tears and his poetry, his creativity and mischievousness, his humor, and his frustration over our stubborn willfulness to figure everything out. I think there is a lot more mystery to God than we allow. For me, it is without mystery that He ceases to be relevant, not science.

I grew up in a family of ideas. I'm realizing now that most of my peers did too. As Rachel puts it, we had all the answers before we even had the questions. In some ways this has been crippling and has made me angry. But it has also given me the courage to uncover what I believe about everything. It's like when you tell a kid not to do something and out of curiosity he/she does the exact opposite. We don't react well when we are told what not to think - especially when we are not given a full reason as to why. It makes us wonder what else is out there. With all our questions pre-answered, our parents created the perfect environment to yield a generation of reckless thinkers. And now we are asking a lot of questions that aren't safe to mention in church. But the problem is...when they aren't received well or taken seriously we aren't willing to stick around just because we “should.”

I'd venture to say that my peers and I have witnessed far more pain and horror in this world than any generation before us. Definitely not firsthand, but due to the technology in the world we are aware of evils and catastrophes in real time, and have unlimited access to the ones of the past. They are evils we can't reverse or heal, no matter how many years or dollars we pour into the broken-down places. We are a generation of thinkers, and we are also a generation devoted to causes. We won't sit by and watch the terror in this world without the freedom to ask hard questions. But that doesn't mean that we need the answers. We more-so need our questions validated - simply by the fact that they are heard and that they are truly and deeply understood.

I visited the Grand Canyon last week and I didn't care to figure it out. It could be hundreds-of-millions of years old or not. I don't really care. Either way, God was there then and He is here now.

We left our first meeting of Curiosity Club agreeing that our questions didn't say anything about belief or disbelief.  We decided they we're human and that God is a beautiful mystery and that the issues we raised make Jesus angry and confused too. What I hope I remember is that the questions don't have to shake everything I've ever known. It is more likely that I am simply trying to uncover what I thought I knew and believed all along. And that really, I'm not losing my faith in God himself, I'm simplifying my faith down into what God originally intended.

Good lord, I hope so.