Two days after Easter, new snow fell overnight. Outside my window I saw a parent and child walking to the bus stop, their boots trudging through fresh snow, their faces bent downward. Snow in April isn’t unusual in Minnesota, though this year the steady cold temperatures were chillier than average. Last spring, the winter had slipped away so gradually that I hardly noticed it. It was just the beginning of the Easter season, but winter was not letting go.
It started as a cold rain. I was walking in my neighborhood and asking God for strength to relinquish Josh and his faith journey all over again. I prayed for our marriage, for greater faith in God’s goodness, for trust that God was even listening as I plodded along. Maybe God would speak back, but all I could hear were the sounds of my feet on pavement, my feet crackling on thin sheets of ice.
When I looked up, the world had suddenly gone white. Earlier, the weather report had said “snow-rain mix.” The temperature must have just dipped from 33 to 32 degrees, the necessary condition for rain to become snow.
The sky was now thick with white clumping flakes, like in the movies when kids have pillow fights at slumber parties and the air fills with floating feathers. An instant transformation—gray rain into a world of white. When I got home, I stood inside by the big picture window and watched it coming down in earnest: flakes darting and swirling, then disappearing as they hit the warm ground. When it snows in April, you know it won’t stick around for long.
All it took for that change, from liquid to solid, was the air temperature—an invisible change suddenly made visible.
When does doubt turn to unbelief? What is the temperature at which any certainty melts away? Can I still be a Christian if my faith is a wintry mix, one that fluctuates between rain and sleet and snow?
I once believed that a steady, certain faith in God and the Nicene Creed and the Bible was an absolute requirement for being a Christian. But in my own faith journey, the temperature keeps fluctuating and I can’t seem to control the weather. I just keep walking and talking to God, keep taking the next set of steps, keep dressing for whatever the weather.
Saint Francis de Sales, patron saint of writers that he is, uses the metaphor of spiritual weather as well. Weather fluctuations are to be expected and sometimes, Francis writes, we can’t always identify a cause for them. Some days we are full of joy but, he warns, “the fine, pleasant weather will not always last.” Often, it’s followed by a state that feels like “barren, sterile desert where there is no path or road to God.” In this case, Francis suggests that you “not be too eager to be released from this state of dryness but rather wait calmly until God himself relieves it. . . . At all costs, let us never lose courage in time of aridity but wait patiently.”
I suspect that waiting for God, even with all my uncertainties, looks like showing up in what Saint Francis calls “the sauce of life”—the immutable, unchanging realities of my day to day. I am a mother and a wife and a writer. I have a job and a family and a mortgage. I am choosing to stay married to someone who doesn’t believe in God, and he is choosing to stay married to me.
What separates my faith from Josh’s, even as my own belief fluctuates depending on the day? Why do I keep walking (albeit badly) in the rituals and rhythms of Christian practice: the Sunday services, praying the Psalms with the nuns, taking Communion at church?
The evangelical tradition in which our faith was formed always hammered down the importance of right belief. All it took to be a Christian was believing that Jesus was the Son of God, that he died on the cross for our sins, and that we must accept him into our hearts to achieve eternal life. Having all the right answers seemed so simple.
Is it any surprise that many former evangelicals, who took this emphasis of right belief so seriously, eventually walk away when their doubts begin to feel overwhelming? Look, they might say. The temperature changed. It’s not snowing anymore. It’s rain. Might as well call it what it is.
I suspect that most people don’t experience their faith as fixed, that conversion and deconversion binaries are more fluid than we sometimes admit. Being part of any religion is less about how we feel or what we believe at any given instant, which changes moment by moment, and more about our commitment to wrestle with our faith. But what made me hold onto God when Josh let go? Was it grace? Free will? Predestination? Was I called and Josh not called? Was his baptism erased?
Recently Josh told me that leaving Christianity is one of the things he feels most proud of in his life. He stopped pretending he still believed in God. He stopped pretending he still saw snow.
“It’s hard to hear you talk about being proud of something that has hurt me,” I told him while we stood in the kitchen.
“You know I didn’t mean it like that,” he said. “It’s just that I finally broke free of something that wasn’t good for me anymore.”
I nodded. I sighed. “I know. I know.” When Josh described to me what his faith had been like when he was a Christian, he spoke about fear—fear of never pleasing God, fear of never being good enough. It made it hard for him to experience God’s love. I told him I wasn’t sure if I believed in the God he described, either.
But I can’t stop thinking about Josh taking Communion. It was the first time we have shared that practice in over four years. I wrote an email to Pastor Jeff yesterday, thanking him for his Easter sermon and remarking that the extended winter weather felt like Holy Saturday all over again. There are zero chances of spring not coming, at least eventually, and yet for how long will we wait? This April is not meeting my expectations for green grass, new life, and fresh growth.
It’s not unlike the experience after a religious high—a week at Bible camp, an experience of God at the top of a mountain—and the inevitable, subsequent letdown. Okay, Christ has risen from the dead. So what? Okay, Easter is over—but nothing is different. So Josh took Communion—but he still doesn’t believe in God. Winter is still holding on, and I see no visible signs that anything has changed.
Holy Saturday isn’t just a day we remember once a year but the name of a real emotional state for those of us who are waiting for the kingdom of God, for any sign that God cares and is present and wants to fulfill all those covenantal promises.
Easter Sunday came and went, but the real work is loving the world as it actually is. As Saint Francis writes, we are not to “waste our energy hankering after a different sort of life but get on with our own.”