When The Center Does Not Hold
Thomas's fraughtness with faith has always felt more real to me than a hundred Simon Peters and their zealous try-hard, pick-me, walk on water confidence.
In the fall of 2013, I visited what would become my favorite place on earth for the first time.
I moved to Texas three autumns earlier with the dogs of unbelief yipping at my heels, and there was a place and a people there who offered a seeming relief to my persistent doubt. God, it seemed, could be encapsulated, theologized, understood, and defended. The gospel, it seemed, was a simple matter of math: We, sinners; God, angry; the cross, a bridge; Jesus, the cosmic sacrifice. All of it equaling eternal union with a God who forgave Jesus in lieu of forgiving dirty, sinful, wormy us. I woke up to this gospel and it enlivened me, for a while.
But Texas threatened to suffocate me in its dusty earth, spun up by constant highway construction and little rain. I hated it there from my first breath of Texas air until my last. Sometimes in the armpit of summer, I would echo the Israelites forty year wander: why did you bring us here to die? Except I knew if I hadn’t gone there at all, it was my faith that would have died.
Instead my faith floated and floundered and sometimes flew. My love for Texas, though, never grew, not even by a little.
In the fall of 2013, I was in the middle of a broken engagement that wasn’t entirely broken except that I’d given the ring back the week before, ostensibly to be resized or cleaned or something, except that I knew I’d never put it on my finger again. I was thick with grief and indecision and would be for another four months. But a writer’s group I was a part of was holding their annual writer’s retreat and I’d been signed up to go.
I drove through the kind of blinding rain that in the north is normal but in middle Texas is deadly, the kind that causes flash floods and terrible mudslides. I drove six hours from Dallas to the sort of places with thousand acre ranches and ten foot fences and speed-limits east coasters can only dream of. My tires were near bald and I probably should have slowed down but I drove through tears and the sounds of Bebo Norman, who had always been my breakup buddy. I arrived near evening to the top of the canyon.
I did not know what was waiting for me next.
