SOMETHING BETTER

I was making stabs at what was beginning to resemble a lifestyle. In it, I found myself jogging along the river in the evenings or taking the T into Boston to meet Conrad, who was still a fellow at Mass General, for dinner. Some nights, my best friend and I ignored our course work and sat instead in the open-air patio of Au Bon Pain, drinking coffee and discussing our friendship, which we had come to call our “relationship,” proud of the gravitas such a word seemed to impart. I’d also found the thing that would constitute my first real breach of my mother’s trust, and sure enough, it was a boy.

I hadn’t been looking for him. After the end of the affair with my teacher (which, because it was chaste, probably didn’t count as a full breach), I’d thought it might make sense to take some time off from even thinking about love, let alone falling into it. It wasn’t hard. There was so much else to command my attention: the difficulty of my classes (German social theory during the fin-de-siècle; a seminar on the bildungsroman; an expository writing class on the writers from the American South; French) or the distance that seemed to exist between me and so many of the other students there, students who, from what I could discern, were exponentially better at the things I always thought I’d been so good at. But then the boy was there, announcing his interest—a thing that had only happened once and only then with a man I could never really have, never even let myself really try to have—and once that happened, it was as though a part of my brain (a part located equally in the head and in the body) wouldn’t relent. I thought about the boy liking me, and I thought about all the reasons why I liked the boy liking me, and why I liked him regardless of his liking me, though it was his liking that had certainly set the whole series of events into motion. I also thought about how infinitely better it would be to love a boy my own age, a boy without a wife, without the need for strange meetings and secret letters. I thought about it for a while, with my head and with the part of the brain that did not reside in my head, and I liked the way such thinking made me feel.

It happened slowly. At first, we just had meals together in the Freshman Union; then there were weekend outings, usually in groups; and then eventually we ran out of ways of skirting around what we wanted from one another. Like most things of such a nature, it started with a kiss, which led to other kisses, and then, over time, those same two parts of my mind began to come up with more interesting feats to attempt. Because everything was equally new to both of us, the boy—my first boyfriend—and me, it all seemed harmless. More than harmless, it felt natural and therefore innocent. Or natural and therefore inevitable. I wasn’t quite sure how to consider it, but I was eager to find out.

Back when the school year first started, I’d signed on to take part in a Bible study run by other first-year students on campus. I suppose I’d wanted to know if there was a way to make good on my parents’ concern for my spiritual well-being by seeking out my own version of the faith I’d grown up in. I didn’t know what I wanted to discover, but I hoped it wouldn’t sound like the sermons I’d gotten used to hearing back home at First Baptist, the ones with their tendency to wheel back toward a predictable enough moral before I’d really gotten the chance to consider anything. It struck me as odd that while so much of the Bible was the story of radical disruption—tragedy, miracles, near-impossible leaps of faith—in church, there was always such a rush to get to the moral, the message, the Good News. We never lingered long enough upon what such extremes of despair or grace or believing would have felt like from the inside. We never tried to understand why those people would have struggled, never drew them close enough to ourselves and our own desires and flaws to love the parts of them that were likely to be most like us. How could the God they submitted to feel sufficiently real if we didn’t first allow the Bible’s human characters to come to life, if we didn’t come to recognize and understand all that was wrong with them before God showed them His grace? Those questions struck me as important because I thought I had begun to live as an adult, an adult with regret and disappointment behind her—and more than that, there was the stark reality of a parent’s illness to consider. I thought my life had gone from being a child’s life to a woman’s life, and so I wanted to know what the women and men I’d only ever thought of as symbols might have thought and done and weighed in their hearts or minds against the promises of God. What would salvation have cost them? What, if I were to take it on the terms upon which it seemed to be offered, would it cost me?

For one of the first study sessions, I volunteered my dorm room, a two-bedroom arrangement I shared with two other girls, Noelle and Vivian. We had a flimsy foam couch in the common room that unfolded into a guest mattress. Our three desks faced three different walls upon which hung impressionist reproductions we were only allowed to affix in place with poster gum (on cold days, the posters would start to come unstuck and curl up at the edges). Noelle’s desk was littered with empty Diet Snapple bottles. Vivian’s was ordered and tidy, and her belongings in neat stacks gave off the impression of being costly, probably because she’d told me about the $10,000 allowance wired into her bank account every few months. On the day of the Bible study, I made a space on my own desk for a plate of Oreo cookies and a two-liter bottle of soda. It was the best show of hospitality I could afford with barely a three-figure balance in the bank.

At around seven o’clock, after dinner was over, my roommates cleared out and three other first-year students arrived: a midwestern black kid named Glenn with glasses and a toothy, smiling mouth; an Asian girl I recognized from one of the other floors of my dorm; and a plump, dark-haired white guy I’d met at one of the social gatherings held during prefrosh week. If they had met ahead of time to discuss a plan for how things ought to proceed, I wasn’t aware. But soon enough, the white guy was leading us in prayer the way it had been done by so many others in the past, asking for guidance, soliciting God’s mercy on behalf of our fellow students who were as yet “unsaved.” It reminded me of High Life, the Christian youth group I’d longed to be a more central part of back in high school, and I felt similarly skeptical that such young people could be so settled in the terms of their faith. The sight of us going through the familiar motions as if by rote put me in mind of what I least liked about church. An anxious, irrepressible agitation rose up and wrapped itself around me.

“May I say something?” I interrupted.

After a brief pause, which I took to mean yes, I launched into a rapid-fire declaration of what was sitting on my chest. “I really want to get to a place where we can stop asking all the same old familiar questions about the Bible, questions we’ve been taught to answer in the same way every time. I want to figure out if there are other ways of seeing what it means to be a Christian. Questions like, what kinds of conflicts did the disciples feel when Jesus told them to spread the word, and what about all the different views of who Christ was? Maybe there’s something in all of this that nobody’s named before, something…,” and there I faltered, not knowing exactly where all of my blather was leading. “Something better.”

Silence.

“Don’t you think that together we might be able to figure out a better way of hearing all of these familiar Bible verses? Don’t you want to find a new language for interpreting God’s will and all His rules?” I was carried away on the gust of urgency I imagined the original disciples must have had way back when.

The voices out in the hallway sounded happy. A group of kids was taking a study break. Inside, an icy divide had opened up between my guests and me, and I saw how foolish I looked in their eyes. I thought I had meant what I’d said, but it was hard to tell through the embarrassment. Was I so naive as to believe in my desire to have the cake (security as to my spiritual well-being) and eat it, too (sleep with boys, acquaint myself with the many enticements of the secular world)? Hadn’t I grown up hearing that God’s charge to His servants was to be in the world without being of it?

The echo of my words and the disapproval of the three young Christians that lingered in its wake seemed to be telling me I wanted two things that weren’t compatible. I had been operating under the assumption that college was a place for unraveling conundrums, but none of the others seemed willing to offer me a hand. They’d eaten a few of the cookies and drunk some of the Coke, but we weren’t communing. So I made a hasty decision. Before they were even out my door, I washed my hands of the Bible-study kids. If God is and was and always will be, I assured myself, then it wouldn’t be a terrible idea to save Him for later.

After that first humiliation, I bumped into Glenn, the black kid in the group, just a couple of times. On both occasions, it was early morning and I was on my way back to my dorm room after a night spent with my boyfriend across the Yard, what my friends and I laughed about together as the Walk of Shame. The air always felt wet and dim in those early morning hours before the sun was high enough in the sky and before most of my classmates had dragged themselves from bed. That early in the day, not yet fed or caffeinated and still a bit groggy from the night before, I felt as though I were merely a game piece being moved across a board. In such a state, Glenn’s very presence was like a reprimand, not just from God but from my parents. A reprimand for quitting the Bible study, for abandoning the habit of going to church, for taking advantage of this luxurious and expensive education (the fifth my parents had saved and budgeted and paid for) to forget where I came from and run stark wild. I didn’t see Glenn much more after that, but I thought of him and what he represented one morning when, awakened by the campus church bells, I noticed that a packet of condoms had been tossed onto the eaves outside my window.

—

One winter Sunday in my second semester, on a whim, I decided to try again to see if there might be a place in my new life, even just a few hours every few weeks, for God. Perhaps I thought that if I did a better job of it than I had before, I might find a version of Him that was better suited to my dilemma. I was certainly tired of telling my mother no each time she asked if I was going to church. My mother, thinking only of my well-being, refusing to dwell overmuch on, or talk at length about, her own still not-fully-out-of-the-woods bill of health. I thought of her and the Jesuses she loved. The one tender and lamblike who loves the little children, as well as the fierce protector, the vanquisher of fear and sin, the one who stands at our sides like a bodyguard. I thought of how much it meant to her that I not only continue to believe in Him (I did, actually; it would have been an act of deliberate and concerted will to scour that deep-seated belief from my mind and my heart) but that I honor Him with my words and my actions. They profess that they know God; but in works they deny Him.

It’s funny. I never once worried that God would abandon me. I trusted that God understood what it meant to be eighteen years old and awake to the miracle of independence. I trusted that God could see my heart, and I took Him at His word: I will never leave thee nor forsake thee. My recurring spiritual worry had little to do with God or Jesus, two interchangeable versions of the same largeness. It had everything to do with my mother and wanting her not to fret as she’d fretted, all the way up until they were finally married, over Michael and Kathleen. Was my mother’s worry rooted exclusively in what God thought, or might there have been some room within it for her own pride? For needing her friends to see that she had succeeded in instilling in us the proper values and the proper degree of devotion, for the urge to be the one among her peers who had gotten everything right. Raise up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it. And how much did her worry have to do with compliance? With wanting to ensure that she had done right by us and in so doing done right by the God who had promised to love and keep us, but also—as we full well knew—to judge each and every one of us according to our works?

The second time around, I decided that reaching out to God should be simpler, a matter of going to Sunday service at the campus church and just seeing what happened. I woke before the Sunday bells, and daylight flooded my room like an affirmation. It was a sunny, crisp winter morning, the sky an exquisite blue, dappled with clouds that could have been cut from a child’s drawing. There was a woodsmoke smell on the air and a bite to the way it came up against my bare face. It was the kind of winter morning that a Californian like me could revel in, something beautiful and bracing, proof that the seasons were real, designed not just to be enjoyed but endured. I walked across the Yard thinking how funny it was to be doing by choice what I’d just months ago given myself permission to view as the distant past, my life B.C., Before College. Campus and community members filed into the stately brick church—stately but quiet; not proud of itself, but certain beneath its gleaming white steeple that stood taller than the tallest trees. My heart accelerated to a canter in anticipation of the perspective that might help me to resolve this bundle of jangled ideas I guess I’d have to call my spiritual dilemma.

I entered through the wide-open doors, saying hello to all the faces, shaking hands, feeling the ebullience of participation. I walked down the aisle toward a middle pew on the right. Along the way, I was handed an Order of Worship booklet emblazoned with the university’s crimson seal. Compared with what I was used to back home, everything felt so elegant, so tasteful and discreet. Even the paper—dense card stock—was several steps up from what was used at First Baptist.

I sat nervously until the congregation was signaled to stand; then I stood. A few minutes later, we all took our seats again. It happened more than once while a chamber music ensemble played, and then we joined together to sing “Holy, Holy, Holy.” I felt like a guest at an expensive restaurant, excited and suddenly, for no good reason, self-conscious. I’d done this a thousand times over through eighteen years of Sundays. I’d risen and sat, sung and listened, bowed my head and whispered affirmation on cue my entire life, never once concerned about getting anything wrong. (Well—I’d visited a Catholic church once or twice with friends, and felt nervous then, but that was different. The Catholics, according to my parents, were too caught up in ritual; they didn’t know how to come to God without the assistance of a priest. There was nothing too important to worry over where the Mass was concerned because, at least according to my parents’ logic, in comparison with a Catholic, I was the more spiritually evolved.)

I looked up at the fine architecture, the high-paned windows and the Corinthian columns. The pews were pristine white with mahogany trim and looked as though they had been carved, one by one, by some master artisan. At First Baptist, the pews were rustic oak upholstered with orange burlap, as if we were all congregated in somebody’s 1970s recreation room. Sitting in Harvard’s Memorial Church, I felt what I felt in so many of Harvard’s various places: like a person of privilege, of “good breeding”—or rather, like someone pretending to be. Once I was settled in enough to forget all of these thoughts, what I heard more than anything else was what wasn’t there: the absent voices of the two elderly sisters ever present at First Baptist, the ones whose singing always scraped to the tippy-top of their register and screeched through to the end of every hymn like roller skates with metal wheels.

At First Baptist, everything was familiar, a simple dance that had worn grooves into the floorboards, but this new series of movements was almost Byzantine. I followed the other churchgoers as best I could, keeping quiet during the responses and at the tail end of the Lord’s Prayer, since I wasn’t sure which closing was preferred. There was something in Latin, the language that always reached me like a reprimand of my public school education, a reminder that I had not been born into the kind of advantage that so many of my peers had, a reminder that no matter how smart I was or how apt I had become at utilizing the opportunities I’d been given (yes, Mr. Catania, I would by then have been willing to concede that a great many opportunities were given as much as earned), it was luck above all else that had landed me there.

When the sermon finally began, I was hopeful that some part of the message would signal our proximity to what I’d been craving, something other than run-of-the-mill religion with its white-bearded (and, unless I was trying very hard to see him as otherwise, white) God and His threats of punishment. Something that didn’t seem designed to lure me in with promises of simplifying my existence when what I favored, I told myself, was complexity. Something I wouldn’t feel compelled to apologize for or outright hide. Something that might bridge the divide between the God people always described and the one I thought I knew or wanted to know.

The reverend was black, like Pastor Gainey at First Baptist. His wasn’t the earthy hardscrabble blackness of Alabama or even Chicago. It was aristocratic. Like that of the free blacks living in antebellum America, certain of whom also happened to be slave owners. He was daintily refined. His voice was slow and melodic. There was an elegant cadence by which his words arrived—a few at a time and then a pause, a few more and again a pause—as if he were leading us along a trail dotted with petits fours. He made a point about how God was much more interesting than the Bible makes Him out to be. Yes, I thought, yes, this is why I’ve come. And about how the Gospel was an admonition to a fearless kind of submission, an invitation to a new kind of freedom. At that glimmer of paradox, a bolt of excitement flashed through my mind. What if, sitting there just then, I found myself truly caught up in belief? How would it feel inside a future like that?

In my last months attending First Baptist, I’d used most Sunday sermons as a time to settle into thoughts I never had sufficient privacy to mull over at home. Those times, too, I’d find my imagination racing toward a future, building a model of what my life might look like in five, ten, twenty years. I’d imagine the city where I’d have settled and the home I’d come back to at night. (I’d pieced its various rooms together from my mother’s Spiegel catalogs and the advertising inserts in the Sunday paper. Sheets and towels, rugs and candles, dishes and plush couches and ottomans that added up to something sumptuous and mature.) I’d imagine walking through each of my rooms, feeling the beautiful objects collected and arranged for my own comfort. Always there was a faceless man just a room away, reading on the couch or taking a shower, cooking us pasta, filling glasses of wine, and like the couples in all the catalogs and magazines, the ones whose happiness and chemistry seem to be held in place by all the carefully chosen furnishings, that man and I would end up sitting cross-legged on the floor, laughing, leaning against one another with the effortless ease one takes as shorthand for true intimacy.

At first, I forgot to notice how tenuous my grasp upon the minister’s voice had become. Already, without sensing it happening, I’d taken two, five, fifty steps into my ready-made future, that momentous day’s sermon now nothing more than a cadence, traffic outside a city window. How warm, the room I’d built in my mind. So habitable and real it caused my breathing to quicken. Using my own recent sexual experiences as a template, I made my way toward the part in my fantasy where the man and I led one another to the big paisley bed heaped with pillows.

The minister and all the other churchgoers were by then tiny specks out on the horizon, sailing happily on the current of his homily, and I was left behind wandering circles in my mind.

From as far back as I could remember, I’d taken it as a matter of course that the death of my body would mark the beginning of something else. Sometimes, I tried to work it out in my head like a riddle: I am not a soul, but I possess one. When I die, I will become what I possess…But then the noise of this world always rushed back in to convince me of the here and now that required my attention, my eager participation. And just like that, the soul would vanish. That portentous Sunday was no exception, though when you believe in the soul, the idea of it never stays gone for very long.

When I was three and riding back from a doctor’s appointment, I looked up at my mother, with the sun on her face and the calm certainty she seemed to move and live within, and said, “Mommy, I want Jesus to come into my heart.” It was the received language of the Sunday school classes I had grown used to attending week after week, but what I took it to mean was this: I feel filled with love. I’m not afraid. I want a name for what this means. I need something to call it. I didn’t think to wonder if I was speaking in metaphors. My mother pulled over and let me say a prayer, and whatever it was felt real, as if she and I really were in the presence of a third being who had agreed never to lose track of us. Maybe we made it ourselves, but when I was by myself, it was still there. It was like being assured I was part of a story that, no matter what else, would never cease to keep me in its sights.

It would have been nice not to have had to care about anything other than the private certainty that God belonged to me. It would have been nice not to have had to worry about whether my believing was visible to others. But there were lots of things it would have been nice to have that I didn’t. I was reminded of that fact many times each day.

Left behind by the homily and miles away from the other churchgoers, whose minds, at least from where I sat, appeared to be actively trailing the minister’s words, hearing them and chuckling or murmuring, or merely nodding to themselves as the meaning sunk in, I realized I had no idea what the story was that I was a part of. I didn’t yet know what was important to me or what would remain important years down the line, after the thrill of experiencing these first freedoms, and the weight of living with what they brought, had passed. But I wanted to believe I was right when I told myself that the God I’d learned to believe in so long ago was still there, bigger and more real than I had imagined, and that He was long-suffering, abiding, that whatever He was would blaze bright and undeniably near when the thing that led me to Him was not obligation or fear. I had no idea what that thing would be. Illness? It had intensified my mother’s relationship with God but only slightly. Abject circumstances? It was hard for me to envision a scenario in which I would allow myself to hit bottom. I felt too cautious, too conscientious for that; such a descent would seem to require an act of concerted effort. Besides, no one in my family had ever hit bottom, and they’d probably see to it that I didn’t, either. Maybe, if a powerful relationship to God were to happen for me at all, it would happen the way so many of the things in the Bible happen: by means of some unforeseeable mystery, upon a day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of Heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone.

Stepping back out into the late-morning daylight, I was, if decidedly untransformed, nevertheless bathed in an earthly peace. The Yard brimmed with human traffic. The clouds maintained their distance, silent and luminous with their faraway, patient knowledge.