Girls in Church

I was drinking wine with Malika’s mother one night this week,
and revealed that my parents were Missionaries in my youth,
and she half choked, and I said, come on, didn’t you know my family
is Christian? And she said, I know you go to church, and told me that Malika’s
nanny used to take her to church and then, improbably, asked if I
would take Malika to church, and I said, if she likes, and she said
she believes
nothing
but she wants Malika to have an open mind,
and I said she’d be the only little black girl in an ocean of
white folk,
and her mother said, well, this is Scotland, and besides,
haven’t you been the only white girl sometimes,
did that hurt you? And I said no,
and her mother said to Malika, curled up on my lap,
some people believe in God and some people don’t
and I don’t but Lisa is going to take you to church like
your nanny used to and some people say God is a He
and some a She, and Malika said
God is a He.
And her mother and I both looked askance and asked how she knew
and she said
God told me.

So tomorrow I’m taking Malika to church, which I am a little uneasy about.
What if the other children treat her like an exotic flower?
Shades of my youth, visiting America, Sunday School rooms full of strange
children with stupid questions about Africa, until I got tired of explaining and
would say yes, I had my own camel, and yes, we all knew Tarzan, and no, we often didn’t have enough food.
There’s nothing like lying in Sunday School to confuse your sense of spirituality.

I have other concerns.
How am I going to explain theology to a 6 year old if she asks?
I’m far too ecumenical for this.
What if she converts?
I know, I know, I sound like the Worst Christian Ever.

My brother Jeff has suggested that I blame my evangelical childhood for
everything,
but he’s wrong.
I’m not saying that I didn’t have my angry phase in college,
largely based on a sense of injustice of the Why Did No One Ever Tell Me Any of This? variety, but that’s largely sorted.

I recall, several Christmases ago,
various Adkins, my brother Mike and I, on the old airstrip in Kijabe, drinking wine,
(does everything wonderful happen over wine?)
establishing, once and for all,
that our somewhat restricted childhood on a mission station hadn’t done us any harm,
had in fact served us well,
but just didn’t fit anymore.

The thing is, it never fit for me, not in terms of spirituality—
spiritual personality, if you will, spiritual style, the way one best communes with God.
The public-ness of the evangelical tradition was a bad fit—
I still remember the keen dread of the last night of Spiritual Emphasis Week,
when the microphone was open for all our peers
to go to the front of the auditorium,
climb the stairs,
confess their sins and recommit their lives to Christ.
No one got saved, we were all saved already,
and those of us who weren’t were sitting in the back
living their own lives.
It wasn’t just the torment of the emotional pressure on my young soul
to enact out such public ritual,
though I never budged from my seat;
it was the horror of watching others do it, of having to listen to them
unburden their souls.
It always felt
too personal,
like having intimate matters forced upon you.
Plus, as far as I was concerned, they were always the most pious of students anyway,
confessing petty sins,
like walking past a piece of rubbish,
which apparently Christ would have never done.
Those were the early days of the What Would Jesus Do? bracelets,
a question I found
confusing.
I mean really, how would you know?
It struck me then, and strikes me still,
that if Jesus had been on his way down to the bier of the son
of the widow from Nain,
that he would have walked past all kinds of rubbish
straight to her side.
But I diverge.
Is public-ness a bad thing?
Am I suggesting that religion should be private? Secret?
No, I am not. I think what did me no favours as a child was that all this public talk
assumed or prescribed that we all felt and operated the same way inside ourselves, because we believed the same things.
And that is my main issue with the Christianity of my boarding school.
And it stems from years of listening to talk about how I should be feeling,
trying to have those right feelings, or manufacture those right feelings, and experiencing the unease of not having them—
asking myself, over and over, does Jesus not talk to me or make me have a glow of inner joy or put a song in my heart
because I am doing something wrong?
And not wanting to be found out, the good Christian who was dead inside.
Only I wasn’t dead inside. Ever. God was always there, and I was always there, loving each other. I just hadn’t yet found what made the shoots of my spirit unfurl and grow.

So I swung pretty far the other way on the pendulum of Christianity
when the choice arose, to the Anglican Communion with its love of liturgy,
to various communities committed to social justice and acts of mercy,
to worlds where no one prescribes how you worship and how you feel.

It was such a relief, that permission to fall silent.
And some days I think that this is why people take vows of silence and mystics like Julian of Norwich commit themselves to live in one room for the rest of their lives and only talk to people through a wee window--
so they can concentrate on listening to the voice of God,
however that voice comes to them.

So evangelidzo, to testify, about my faith,
is not something which comes easily to me.
It never has, and it probably never will.
But I am taking Malika to church,
and we will see what else God has to say to her.