A matter of faith

He'd just finished the semester at the Southern Baptist seminary, but he hadn't started preaching yet. He was 8 years older than her, one year older than her brother, and he'd always been so earnest, so gentle, that when she was a child she'd thought he was very smart; he had seemed like a college professor when he was still a teenager.

She only came back to Kentucky once a year around Christmas, so she hadn't seen him since she graduated high school five years ago. Hadn't seen a lot of people from the church, people she'd grown up surrounded by, the one place where no one made fun of her, where the grown-ups doted on her because she could memorize bible verses and then tell you what they meant. The church was home back then, back when she'd believed that she believed in God because she desperately needed to believe, needed there to be some kind power behind everything, some outside meaning underneath all of it, conducting the world like a painful symphony that would someday, someday have a happy ending, even if that day was after she died. It had been four years now since she had broken away from religion, but she still ached for it, for that sureness that there was a higher purpose and that pain was not in vain. She envied the people she'd grown up with, but atheism was as much a matter of faith as belief had been.

Not many people at this New Year's Eve gathering asked her about her faith. It probably didn't occur to them that the devout 10-year-old would have grown into a heathen. But he did ask; not if she went to church, but where? Did they have Southern Baptists in Boston? Yes, but she'd stopped going to church. He frowned, puzzled. "But surely you still believe." She thought, yes, I believe in many things: my friends, music, love; we differ on this one thing is all. She just said, "After a fashion." It wasn't enough of an explanation for him, and he pressed, and she knew he didn't want the answer she'd give, so she softened it.

"I'm a Christian Atheist." He opened his mouth, but nothing came out. She'd known it would break his brain, and there was a certain glee she wasn't proud of, but she realized she'd said it because she truly wanted to explain, wanted him to understand. He wouldn't understand, she knew, but she could still explain, could still try.

"I don't believe in God, so I don't believe Jesus was his son. As to whether the version of Jesus in the Bible is real, whether the historical Jesus actually said all the things that the writers of the Gospels said he said, I don't know." He opened his mouth again to break in, but again no sound came out, and she gentled her voice further. "But even if the Jesus in the Bible is just a fictional character, that Jesus is still an incredible role model. He helps the poor, he's kind to outcasts, he forgives horrible wrongs, he loves everyone. I try to live up to that example. I try to treat others the way the Jesus in the Bible would have treated them. I don't always succeed, but no one does."

His eyes were bright but clouded, like someone with a fever. Confusion, urgency, fear. Sadness. "But that's not enough," he said. "That doesn't earn you a place in heaven."

"Why not?"

"Because. Because you must believe, that Jesus is the Son of God and he died for your sins and was resurrected."

"I can't. I can't will myself to believe that any more than you can will yourself to believe in Zeus and Athena. If your God exists, he created me without the capacity to believe in him. So why would he condemn me for something I have no control over?"

"I don't believe you lack that capacity. You just need to find it within you."

"Well, that's another thing I lack the capacity to believe."


[The prompt for the piece: each workshopper wrote down a noun and a verb on a card, and the next workshopper was supposed to use those two words in three sentences in their piece.  My words were "She" and "Broke."