The Story I Want to Believe

 "One word, Ma'am," [Puddleglum] said… "One word. All you've been saying is quite right, I shouldn't wonder… So I won't deny any of what you said. But there's one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things— trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one…. That's why I'm going to stand by the play-world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia…. We're leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland."

In C.S. Lewis's book The Silver Chair, two children, a young prince, and a marshwiggle (a chronically melancholy humanoid person) named Puddleglum get caught in a dark underground kingdom ruled by an evil queen. They want to return to their lives aboveground, but the queen casts a spell to try to convince them that the "Overland" isn't real at all— the underground kingdom is the only reality. And they begin to believe her, until Puddleglum breaks the spell with his outburst, which is one of my favorite moments in the entire Chronicles of Narnia series.

So what if the Overland isn't real? Puddleglum asks. So what? He wants to believe in stars. He wants to believe in trees. He wants to believe in the country of Narnia that he loves, and the Divine ruler of Narnia, Aslan. So what if it's all a made-up story? He wants it to be true, and so he's going to act that way. He's going to spend his life in service of this story, even if it's made up.

So what does this have to do with me?

I grew up surrounded by a frenzy of authors and theologians and pastors and evangelists constantly assuring me that Christianity was logical. That it was reasonable. That it was, in fact, foolproof. Anyone who didn't believe in Christianity was obviously not a logical person, because there was watertight evidence that the (Evangelical-interpreted) Bible was the absolute truth. (In fact, C.S. Lewis's reluctant conversion was often heralded as an example of how intellectual people can't resist the clear evidence for faith). 

Although my family didn't place as much emphasis on apologetics as many at that time, I still absorbed many of the concepts, and learned how to defend everything from six-day creationism to the resurrection of Christ. But through it all, I didn't realize I was internalizing a much deeper and more problematic series of ideas:

I began to believe that you must constantly and rigorously put your religion through the wringer of intellect to make sure that you weren't being led astray by your sinful, sinful emotions.

I began to internalize the idea that a religion based on desires or emotions or love was not a religion worth having.

I completely— and unconsciously— absorbed the idea that the heart was "fallen," but the mind was not.

I unwittingly believed that God had to answer to my intellect, or God was not worth worshipping.

Then came deconstruction.

It was a long process, of course, this picking apart of my theology, this dismantling of internal systems built on fear and anger and exclusion. It's an ongoing process. It often feels lonely. But it was much, much worse when I was deconstructing using these unspoken rules.

I put my theology through the wringer of intellect, and found it wanting in countless ways. I found new ways of seeing things, and read arguments that felt crushing in their finality. I read articles and books by people who poked holes in all the arguments that had felt so watertight, and I began to see what a house of cards so many of them were.

And although I didn't consciously think this, I felt an underlying current of dread: This was it. If the logical arguments didn't make sense, it meant I had to lose my religion. It meant that God wasn't real. It meant that I had to give up Jesus.

Do you have any idea how terrifying that was?

This God, this Jesus, who had held my hand through my life, the one I'd experienced in a visceral way since a very young age, who I had walked beside me and danced with me and taken interest in every detail of my life and showed me downy woodpeckers in the trees and purple starfish in the tidepools— this God could not stand up to the logic I was exploring.

I hated it. I hated this feeling. But when I saw the cracks in the evangelical way of reading and interpreting the Bible, I couldn't patch it back together again. And so, for a while, I felt really lost.

I do believe, became my prayer, a plea rather than a statement. Help me overcome my unbelief.

Somewhere along the way, I stumbled upon a set of authors who had asked the same questions… but didn't play by the unconscious rules I had made up. So what if this or that or the other wasn't "literal"? So what if people had interpreted it this way? So what if there was a huge diversity of perspectives about this across two millennia of Church history? Weren't we the people who were supposed to wrestle with God?

I found people engaging with the Bible even though they didn't believe it was God's cohesive handwritten letter to be picked apart with intellect, because they loved the story it was telling. I found people who loved Jesus even though they didn't approach Him in the way I was used to, and people who worshipped God in the midst of the chaos because of their desire to do so. I found people who said that God made your heart and your soul and your emotions as well as your brain, and that all were valuable ways of meeting God.

And, eventually, I realized that it was enough to follow God because I wanted to.

It was enough to hear the stories about the Overworld and believe them to be true.

It was enough to let my desire, not my intellect, lead me into deeper faith. 

As Amy Peterson describes so beautifully in her book Where Goodness Still Grows: 

"Eventually I realized my belief in God depended on my belief that I was real and that I could trust my senses and my brain to apprehend reality and make sense of it. My belief that I was real and could trust my observations depended on my belief in a God who made humans with such capabilities. And so the logic went in circles. There was no way to get outside of the spiral to some ultimate reality, some absolute, undeniable truth. To know anything, I would have to begin by believing something, something ultimately unprovable outside of the system it created. 

"…[A mentor gave me advice that] allowed me to search for truth as a whole person, with a body, mind, heart, and soul, rather than just as a brain. He told me to let my doubts seek answers not just in logic or an external authority, but in my desire. I doubted that God was real; but I didn't want to live without God. A life without God was not, for me, one that was livable— it would lead me to despair. And so my desire led me to belief."

This isn't to say that reason or intellect have no value (believe me, I don't read books with titles like Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology for the emotions), but that they must be in balance. Emotion, empathy, connection, and love are guides, too. The brain and the heart and the soul and the body all work together.

And so this year at Christmas I approach the story of the Incarnation with new eyes. In the back of my head is buzzing all the intellectual arguments: the way the "virgin's journey" (a literary device that stands in contrast to the "hero's journey") centers Mary in the narrative as a protagonist ushering in a new world, the cultural context that suggests that Jesus wasn't born in a stable but in a peasant's house surrounded by loving women, the ways that Matthew's and Luke's accounts of the story emphasize different literary themes they want to set forth. But at the front is the heart of the story: the story of a God who came to show that we were not alone. A God embodied. A God with a heart and emotions and empathy and desire. A God who showed what it means to exist in the middle of suffering and poverty. A God who came, as Mary said, to cast down the mighty and fill the hungry with good things. A God who came to wake us up and help us see the Imago Dei in each of us.

It's a story I want to believe in. 

And so I will.

And so I do.

Merry Christmas.

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