Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story
At nineteen, I was practically Christian. No sex, no drugs, a lot of desperate hopes that didn’t seem so different from prayers: to be normal, to be smart—above all, to be good. I owned multiple translations of the Bible.
In reality, I wasn’t religious; I was just afraid. I’d seen friends get drunk or fall in love, and their altered states made me all the more careful about maintaining the stasis of my own. I skipped parties. I did my homework. (The Bibles were assigned reading.) As soon as a boy I liked liked me back—never mind, no, I didn’t. “Goodness” was a vague idea in my head—no one had ever told me precisely what it meant—so I made up the rules and granted myself the satisfaction of never breaking them.
My devotion to routine worked. I always got the best grades, always got home safe. People no longer bothered having crushes on me. But a changeless life is a small one, and, even as my fears shrank my sense of self, or perhaps precisely because they did, I was more aware than ever of the vast dimensions of the rest of the world. I chose to do without the expansive bliss of getting high or making out, yet still longed for that heady rush of understanding: there’s something out there bigger than you.
This, of course, is where the most important part of religion—God himself—might have come in handy. The catch was that no one I knew believed in him. They were all secular, intellectual, proudly lapsed, supposedly élite. My great-grandfather had been a failed minister who taught swim classes at the Y.M.C.A. because he couldn’t find a church; within a few generations, it seemed few in the family even looked for one to join. Sometimes my parents played religious music on the living-room stereo—Bach, Handel—but only to appreciate the art. On the fancy college campus where I lived, we didn’t read the sacred texts, we analyzed them. I had bought my Bibles for a notoriously difficult class, taught by a distinguished and austere scholar. When exam season arrived, I headed to the library with dread. My best friend had recently started dating someone, so I went by myself, the heavy translations weighing down my backpack. Everyone else I knew was at something called a foam party, where they danced under piles of airy white suds.
The studying paid off, but then the satisfaction wore off. I was still afraid and I was still alone. Also, my back hurt. And so, although I didn’t believe in God, secretly I wanted to. Like a professor, he was always giving tests, and his actually mattered. I envied the stakes of these ancient reckonings. Nothing that happened to me had Biblical proportions. No floods, all foam. I’d never even been kissed.
People with vague longings like mine are often called seekers. They want to find things: purpose, meaning, truth. Finding, in my own brief life, had mostly looked like striving. Empowering, sure, but predictable, solitary. What I really wanted was to be found. That summer, in what seemed to me like a miracle, I sort of was. I’d just moved out of my stately, anonymous dorm and into a run-down house a few blocks away. There were seven or eight other occupants, and the rooms were filled with the belongings of many more, a sedimentary record of all the students who’d come before us. The result was a huge mess, but also a current of excitement: here was a place for excavation—for revelation.
And already I had the sense of things being unearthed, or at least dislodged. When the living room filled up with strangers, I surprised myself by sticking around, then by accepting a glass of whiskey. Even when I was sober, everything seemed new. A boy who lived on the first floor was a friend, but he’d been abroad for a semester; something about him had changed. A boy who lived on the second floor was an acquaintance, but he was more handsome than I remembered. My own room was in the attic, tiny and often stiflingly hot, and I started sleeping naked. It felt strange and unsettling at first, and then it felt like nothing at all.
The house was on the edge of campus, which made it seem like it was on the edge of what was often referred to as “the real world.” One afternoon, I returned home to find a man who had just crossed from our world into the next—that is, a recent graduate—sitting in the kitchen using the Wi-Fi. He’d lived upstairs until a few months earlier, and he still had the password. This wasn’t so strange: the house was too disorganized to be a co-op in practice, but it was communal in theory. Then he told me that he was a missionary. That was strange. He didn’t look the part: no tie, no pamphlets. He had a scruffy beard and cutoff jeans and, just weeks earlier, he’d been sitting in the same library as the rest of us, a massive Gothic building designed to look like a cathedral. But here he was, talking about Jesus. He’d started going to a local church out of curiosity, even though he was against most organized religion, which he said reinforced in-group and out-group distinctions. He’d initially been most impressed by Jesus in an abstract, political sense: he was an exemplary community organizer. But what God meant to him now was deeply, intimately personal. He talked to Jesus every day, and Jesus talked back.
“Talk” really was the right word: these conversations were profoundly casual, or casually profound. Sure, they talked about sin and salvation, but also about books, romance, the drama of sharing a kitchen with seven other people. No problem, according to the missionary, was too mundane to also be divine. Jesus was always there to listen. More than that, actually: he was always there to love.
None of us in the house would have invoked a lofty word like “love” to describe what was circulating among us that summer. “Feelings” was the imprecise term of choice; if you were especially bold, you might admit that you had them for someone, mere possession an event in its own right. One evening, in the little attic room, the boy from the first floor had done just that. To me! My first reaction was disbelief. My second was disappointment. I was pretty sure my own feelings were for the boy on the second floor.
This was a little awkward, a little painful—but normal college stuff. (Even normal middle-school stuff, I realized with embarrassment.) And yet these common acts of possession were transfigured by all the talk of God. The missionary kept coming around, and, in his totalizing faith, I saw what it might really mean to let my feelings take hold. To be possessed.
I should note that most of the occupants of the house ignored the missionary. He was nuts, he was annoying—wasn’t it time for him to get his own Wi-Fi? I was the one, sometimes accompanied by the first-floor boy or the second-floor boy, who sat in the cluttered kitchen and asked him questions. They were big, almost ridiculous questions. Nothing like the ones I carefully rehearsed before speaking aloud in seminar. What was Jesus like? What had he said lately? Sometimes I’d laugh at my own questions, and the missionary would gamely laugh, too, which reassured me; if he knew how crazy all this sounded, then he might in fact be totally sane.
Among other things, God had been talking about me. He’d told the missionary to hang around the house, to answer my questions, to be my friend. This shouldn’t really have come as a surprise: isn’t this every missionary’s script? And though I didn’t really believe these conversations had taken place, at least not the way the missionary described them, as if Jesus had called him up out of the blue, I liked hearing about them. How many college kids, effortlessly cool or studiously ironic or just painfully self-conscious, will define the mystery of intimacy so baldly: to say that they feel drawn, as if by some otherworldly force, to be around you; to admit that they have things they are burning to tell you, to make you understand?
Which all makes it sound like the true love story here is going to be between me and the missionary. But what was perhaps most alluring about him was the way he believed that all this—our talk, our feelings—was not about anything so small and pitiful as two college kids with crushes. While I was avoiding the boy on the first floor and hovering around the boy on the second floor, not saying much to either, my conversations with the missionary gave me a way to say things I wouldn’t—possibly couldn’t—have otherwise. They had all the specificity of gossiping with a friend (Jesus called him on the phone!) and all the grandiosity of lecturing from a professor (the missionary, too, knew how to close-read the Bible). One afternoon, he told me that, in some sense, God was chasing each of us, trying to bring us into his fold. At church, they went so far as to say that God was jealous for our love, jealous of all the other fleeting objects of our devotion. This was a surprising inversion. Weren’t we the seekers? (Not to mention the coveters.) The missionary shrugged. Couldn’t it be both? In all our conversations, I took care never to sound as zealous as he did, but even in my skepticism there was a thrill to talking in this register. To speak of doubt, after all, was also to speak of desire. If God wanted me, did I simply have to want him back?
On the longest day of the year, I invited myself to a solstice celebration with the second-floor boy. Even I couldn’t have convinced myself it was a date; there were as many people piled in the back of his Jeep as could fit. In a stranger’s back yard, we arranged ourselves in a circle of more strangers—middle-aged hippies, goth teens, barefoot kids—and sang odes to the Earth in various discordant keys. A bouquet of dried sage was lit on fire and passed around the circle. When it was my turn, I stood with my arms stretched out like wings while a woman I’d never met traced the outline of my body with a thin stream of smoke. I closed my eyes, willing myself to be transported. When I opened them, the woman was staring me straight in the face. Embarrassed, I looked away. The ride back was quieter than the ride there. The Jeep smelled like our bodies, like dirt and sweat and smoke.
That weekend, we threw a party at the house. A boring party, by comparison: barbecue, beers, familiar faces. Except that everything seemed a little unfamiliar now, unsteadied by all those big questions, all those intense feelings. The possibility that God existed still seemed unreachable to me, but all the reaching made possibility itself—that there was more to life than I knew, that there was more to my life than I believed—an almost tangible presence. The embers in the grill glowed orange, the fireflies flashed on and off.
I sat across from the missionary, pretending to drink a beer. I was new to beer, and it still tasted bad to me, the way it tastes to children. The second-floor boy was there, too, our shoulders touching. The missionary was talking about love again. The most important thing about God, he told us, was that he loved you unconditionally. For some reason, this startled me. It almost angered me. Who, I asked the missionary, taking a fake sip from the beer bottle, would actually want to be loved like that? All-encompassing, all-permitting love sounded indiscriminate. And what were we doing here—at our fancy school, in our charmed lives—if not learning to discriminate, to value things in and for their particulars?
I don’t remember how the missionary answered my question. Later that night, I kissed the second-floor boy in a dark room cluttered with other people’s belongings. At the exact moment it happened—had anything more dramatic ever happened?—the first-floor boy walked in. I felt at once ecstatic and guilt-stricken. The best version of myself and the worst. Totally transformed, terribly the same.
Later that summer, the second-floor boy moved out of the house and into the real world. I never saw him again. I saw the missionary, but less and less. The first-floor boy also made himself scarce, skipping house meals, taking long walks. We had a few more parties, the light fading a little earlier each time. Beer started tasting normal—good.
In the fall, I found my first boyfriend. In a matter of months, I became a person who said “love” a dozen times a day: a greeting, a farewell, a text message with an object and no subject. “Love you.” It wasn’t until the dead of winter that I went to the missionary’s church for the first time. If you’d asked me why I was there, I would probably have given the old, familiar reason: homework. I was taking a writing class and I thought I might write about the church. My boyfriend, the grandson of a priest, said he liked the idea.
Is there any love as conditional as first love? Deep down, we all know there will be a second. I was in the process of discovering these conditions: the rules my boyfriend and I made up as we went along, the consequences we inflicted on each other. And yet, of course, we told each other it would last forever. We might even have believed it.
Faith in unconditional love can seem like the bliss of ignorance—a comforting story to tell ourselves. But I’m not sure that’s right. What the missionary understood, I think, is that this sort of love is in fact the most fearsome kind. If God loves you whether you’re in or out, good or bad, can you be sure he’s really there? The question is not only for the religious. Can we be sure of each other? Can we be sure of ourselves?
That morning in church was one of those winter days that is both blindingly bright and punishingly cold. I brought a notebook, as proof that I was just there to observe. I opened up the Bible. At the front of the room, someone played a keyboard that had been made to sound like an organ. I sat in the last row, with a view of the backs of everyone’s heads, so it was only at the very end of the service, as the congregants stood up and turned to leave, that I saw the boy from the first floor. His head was slightly bowed and I almost didn’t recognize him. When I did, I probably gasped.
I watched him walk out into the winter morning, sun streaming through the door, lighting up the dust in the air. I looked down at my notebook, where the page in front of me was still perfectly blank. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
