[Note from Michael: This content is pretty suspect. It was turned down for publication as an article about a hundred times, so I think I'm missing the point pretty badly. Still, it was an honest exercise in trying to understand my newfound faith, so I'm keeping it.]Despite this, a string of vivid memories punctuate my first year of faith. I knelt on the darkened steps of an old church and asked the God I felt but couldn’t understand to save the life of a young girl I knew only by name. I was baptized in an early-September river, with hungry salmon fry darting around my knees. My wife and I flew to the equator with our anxious 11-year-old son and our blithe 2-year-old daughter, to meet our new 12-year-old daughter and bring her home.
I’m surprised, though, by how this first year of faith is better defined by questions than moments. “Can faith find me through my doubts?” “What sort of Christian shall I be?” An even greater surprise is that the answers, when they finally came, appeared in a pair of family movies playing quietly in the background of my life.
...
2004 was a year of tumult. I closed my fourth decade, which I expected, and I entered my third year as co-founder of a struggling startup. My two kids each grew another year older, which I also expected. What I didn’t expect was that Joie would cautiously bring home the idea of adopting another child. What I never imagined was that this idea would attach itself to an insistent, growing longing for meaning I’d been experiencing but had so far been unable to give a name to.
I’d never been a Christian, or wanted to be. Maybe this was due to one grandfather’s sad insistence that I was going to Hell because I didn’t believe, or it may simply have been a product of the life I grew up in: we were honest and I think we were caring, we had principles and we had a social conscience, but we never went to church.
In school I studied biology and evolutionary theory, and saw the latter as an elegant explanation for the profundity and beauty of life. I read Stephen J Gould and argued with biblical literalists. I felt a great truth in Plato’s concept of The Good, and inherently sensed a presence I’d later identify with Paul Tillich’s great “ground of being,” but these concepts had no real names and I didn’t serve them.
Long before Joie became my wife we had an impromptu first date at the zoo, and at a display full of elephant bones I made a vague comment about their evolution. Joie sniffed at the word in what I thought was a typically dismissive Christian fashion, and I thought, “This will never work.” But by 2004 we’d been married for 15 years.
The thought of adopting pulled at me with a gravity I couldn’t understand. It seemed totally ludicrous, this idea of bringing another child into a mildly dysfunctional home with a toddler and an almost-adolescent-former-only child. Perhaps the reason I didn’t immediately set the idea adrift was that my career seemed a bit ludicrous, and our financial situation, with Joie staying home for Georgia’s first several years, seemed ludicrous as well. Ludicrous had become the norm.
Yet it was all suddenly bigger than me. Joie had a few Christian CDs that I generally skipped when the car’s player came to them. I stopped skipping these discs, and on one sun-shining Sunday I listened with something other than my ears. As we drove about on errands I took one song’s statement as a question, and heard myself asking, “Holy… Holy… Are you Lord God, Almighty?”
The rearranged words fell on me with unexpected weight. This was my voice, timidly asking God if He was real, if I could call Him by name.
Friends introduced us to a family who were adopting from China, to talk about agencies and processes. We edged closer to the reality of our new child and I grew to know the other expecting father, who was the pastor of local church. Three of us—the first friend, the pastor, and myself—met at a pub to talk about children, the nature of God, and faith.
I learned that there were few Christian doctrines I could accept comfortably. I still couldn’t accept the bible as a collection of facts. I struggled with the package of substitution and atonement, and wondered how to reconcile it with the God of forgiveness and self-giving love I saw reflected in Jesus of Nazareth. I began to think of God as Abba, but wrestled with many of the foundations of Christian theology: the divinity of Jesus; Jesus as God’s only begotten son; redemption through Christ alone.
We attended services in the pastor’s church but stayed on the edge, even as I prayed that God might help me dismantle the walls I erected between myself and the rest of the congregation. Joie filled out a million adoption forms, and I wondered how we would pay for it all on an already floundering budget. We settled on a country, Colombia, and on an age, between six and nine, to fit between our other two children.
By late summer life had become even more complicated. The adoption process had become real, and we learned of an orphan in the far south of Colombia named Kaelly. She was not between the ages of six and nine: she was a year older than our son Braden to the day. But we read a line in her bio that said, “She got off to a rough start in life and will need a family who can help her deal with some of those issues,” and saw it as a forceful reminder of why we were doing what we were doing. At the same time my new boss demanded that I move from Portland, where we’d founded the company, to his office in Seattle. Alternatively, I could consider a “dramatically reduced role” in the business.
The path to faith became no clearer. I read dozens of books, from Christian history and exegesis to theology, but I struggled with my doubts. I felt unable move forward in my faith until I knew the answers to my seemingly unanswerable questions.
While all this was happening, life moved on. Georgia turned two, and like every two-year-old became impossibly attached to her favorite movies, asking to see them over and over again. On a hot August day I walked through the family room to see her perched cross-legged on the couch, fixated on the TV. “What are you watching?”
Without looking up she tilted her little blond head and said, “Nemo.” We’d had Pixar’s Finding Nemo for a few months and she was hooked.
“Can I watch too?”
So I sat with my daughter and watched Finding Nemo for about the fiftieth time, and as Marlin and Dory searched for the lost little clownfish I tried to put aside other thoughts. The scene opened where Marlin and Dory find themselves inside the whale…
Dory frolics in the waves that roil and wash through the whale’s massive mouth, as Marlin bangs furiously against the sheets of baleen locking them in. Great, shuddering tremors rock the two, and the water falls away as the whale swallows. His tongue tilts them into the air, and they cling to each other over an endlessly dark gullet. The whale’s calls reverberate, and Dory listens intently. She assures Marlin that everything will be all right, but Marlin refuses to believe her. Another series of deep rumbles from the whale, and Dory obeys what seems to be his command: she loosens her grip and starts to fall. Marlin catches her in a panic, and they swing suspended over what can only be certain death.
Dory’s face is serene, unconcerned. The whale rumbles again, and she calls up to Marlin who desperately grips her fin in his. “He says, ‘It’s time to let go.’” She blinks up at him. “Everything’s gonna be all right.”
Marlin is incredulous. Fear and loss transform his face. “How do you know? How do you know something bad isn’t gonna happen?
Dory stops for a moment and looks up at Marlin. “I don’t.”
And she lets go. She tumbles down into the whale’s gullet, and Marlin is alone. We see a lifetime of emotions cross Marlin’s face, and his dawning realization that he’ll never find his son unless he surrenders and falls. Even as doubt grips him, he has to let go and fall.
I sat stunned. Georgia giggled, and I marveled at the suddenness and unexpectedness of grace.
In Dynamics of Faith Tillich wrote, “Serious doubt is a confirmation of faith.” But I hadn’t really understood until Marlin showed me. Faith was not the cessation of doubt. Doubt was simply an affirmation of the seriousness of faith’s demands. It was surrendering to the whale to discover the son. I sent an email to my pastor friend, and two weeks later I was baptized in that early-September river. Full of uncertainty, but moving forward in my faith.
Out of the blue an old acquaintance suggested a job change that might keep me from moving to
Seattle in the midst of our adoption, and I took it. We wrote to the children’s welfare office for Colombia and formally asked for permission to adopt Kaelly, and they said yes.
We took part in the church’s Small Group program, and they prayed with us as we prepared to add an older child with an unknown past to our small family. I still winced self-consciously when I prayed in public, but if I was going to ask God to break down the barriers I’d erected around my heart I thought perhaps I should meet him half way.
In January, Joie and I stood in bemused wonder under an equatorial sun and watched our three children play in a hotel swimming pool.
The year of tumult passed into another one. We had very little equilibrium. We were like passengers on a ship that had veered to avoid an iceberg, and then lost their course and balance in doing it. Braden struggled to understand the rewoven fabric of our family, even as he struggled with the pain and confusion of being twelve. Kaelly struggled to learn a new language and a new way of life. We wrestled with her mistrust and her loneliness. We began to understand that her scars ran deep, and felt pitifully unprepared to help her heal them. In the pub where I first pondered faith I confessed to my friends that adopting a soon-to-be thirteen-year-old seemed in retrospect either terribly naïve or terribly arrogant, and that I was lost.
I struggled to find my place, at my new work and in my new church. I read more than ever, gravitating to Micah and Amos and those Old Testament prophets who seemed closest to discerning the essence of God’s will. I read modern interpretations of their messages in the books of Marcus Borg, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and others, and became convinced that God’s will was far simpler than the doctrines we used to elaborate on it: Take care of one another.
In August we had a number of guest speakers at church, and one of them I knew well: Jim was the leader of our Small Group, a former pastor well-versed in the traditional Christian thoughts and patterns of speech that made me uneasy. I saw him as a model of the conservative far right, but a good man passionate about his faith. He’d prayed with us for guidance in our adoption process, and we’d shared some beers together on a Sunday afternoon.
To anyone with experience in Christian fundamentalism his message would offer no surprises. It was a sermon my grandfather could have given. Like all postmodern churches we had multimedia effects attending the message, and Jim presented us with slides that showed how the majority of Christians believed the bible to be the infallible word of God, Renaissance-era paintings of souls being tortured in hell, and side-by-side portraits of Charles Manson and Mother Theresa, with the suggestion that those who fell short of the latter in their quest for sinlessness were no different than the former in the eyes of God. He finished with the statement that an unmoved God would reject us all at the gates of Heaven unless Jesus claimed us as one of His.
It was just one sermon, but it struck me at a time of great vulnerability in my faith. I drove home feeling empty and sad. Jim’s image of a God of judgment and indifference was not the image of God that my heart was nurturing. It wasn’t Jesus’ Abba. It bothered me that no one else in the church seemed disturbed by this message, and I remember thinking, “This is not my God. This is not my church.”
The next weekend—a year after my baptism—we went away for a vacation. We took Georgia’s new Pixar favorite with us, The Incredibles, a story of former superheroes trying to find equilibrium in a world that doesn’t want superheroes anymore.
In one scene early in the movie Helen Parr waits up at night, to confront her husband’s rescue of civilians trapped in a burning building and his inability to let go of the past: “Look, I performed a public service. You act like that’s a bad thing.”
“It is a bad thing, Bob. Uprooting our family—again—so you can relive the glory days is a very bad thing!”
Bob grows tense: “Reliving the glory days is better than acting like they didn’t happen.”
“Yes, they happened. But this—our family—is what’s happening now, Bob. And you’re missing this. I can’t believe you don’t want to go to your own son’s graduation...”
“It’s not a graduation. He is moving from the fourth grade to the fifth grade.”
“It’s a ceremony!”
“It’s psychotic! They keep creating new ways to celebrate mediocrity. But if someone is genuinely exceptional then they—“
“This is not about you, Bob. This is about Dash.”
“You want to do something for Dash? Then let him actually compete. Let him go out for sports!”
“I will not be made the enemy here. You know why we can’t do that!”
“BECAUSE HE’D BE GREAT!”
Helen’s torso rises up in tension and anger and she bends forward with every word: “This is
NOT…ABOUT… YOU!”
This scene struck me with such force I had to go outside and walk in the cool, high desert night. I knew Helen Parr wasn’t talking about my struggles or my life, but her words fell cleanly into the gap I’d been trying to bridge: It wasn’t about me.
It wasn’t about my salvation, or the salvation of any one individual. A quietly dawning conviction told me we were all to be “saved,” in the end, for salvation was not likely to be a one-way trip to heaven at all. Salvation may in fact be the reality of God’s presence flooding into our current existence, overtaking us, and even the Charles Mansons of the world would partake in that salvation.
Alone in the night, under the glow of countless stars, it seemed that salvation must be the longing and goal of all the cosmos, with no one left behind. I wasn’t sure how or why, but felt that salvation couldn’t be a finish line crossed only by the few.
Our part in the grand mystery, it seemed to me, was to help set the table for the feast. Helen Parr reminds us of this when she implores us to be present, here.
What matters is that we never stop trying to bring about the kingdom, here. The defining action of the Christian life is to take care of one another, here. The traditional interpretation of heaven could become a trap that allows us to overlook suffering, here. Concern over our own salvation could turn us all into Bob Parr, longing for what has been or what will be, but ignoring “now” as a trial to be endured. Salvation, I began to see, could only be fully realized when we all experienced it together.
Later that week I found a counter to Jim’s sermon in Brennan Manning’s The Ragamuffin Gospel when I read, “No greater sinners exist than those so-called Christians who disfigure the face of God, mutilate the gospel of grace, and intimidate others through fear. They corrupt the essential nature of Christianity.”
I wanted to tear out this page and shake it at Jim in a rage. But I didn’t.
I’ve since realized that it’s not my job to bring Jim to a gentler view of Christianity. It’s my job to worship with him and understand the fears and longing that fire his beliefs. It’s my job to love him unconditionally and find the common ground we share in Christ. It’s my job to determine what kind of Christian I will be, and to ground that faith in hope rather than fear.
I’ve read that psychologist Carl Jung had a sign in his office that said, “Bidden or not bidden, God is present.” This is a powerful notion for me, reminding me that He will be here whether we give ourselves to Him or not. I suspect grace works this same way, because I look back on a first year of faith challenged by doubt and confusion and see that grace appeared in the form of unexpected life preservers.
In Marlin’s concerned brows I learned that doubt was essential to my faith, and that surrendering in spite of it could be my most profound expression of hope. Amidst confusion over how to express this faith, Helen Parr reminded me that it would never be solely about me, but about what I can do for others and what we can do together.
I doubt that the writers and technicians behind Pixar’s films have any view of their work as vessels set out to buoy the faith of struggling Christians. But God works with what he has at hand. In as much as His spirit permeates and binds our existence, maybe these artists can’t help but let some of His desire find expression in their work.
And now I’m a sophomore Christian. Sophomores think they know everything, so I have to remind myself that there’s more to learn than I can imagine. I need to keep my eyes open for unbidden messages of grace.
[This post was originally published in September 2005. MT]
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