Josh and I never joined an intentional community for the long haul, but we did start a nuclear family: two little kids, a mortgage, a cat. We comanaged our finances; we did the grocery shopping, cooking, school drop-offs, and cleaning. We held house meetings and made chore charts and took turns picking nostalgic favorites for movie nights.
A marriage, a family, is an intentional community too, of course, but unlike Jubilee Partners or a monastery, our family didn’t have a rule of life, especially after Josh deconverted. We were making it up as we went along. The Kielsmeier-Cook family culture was a mishmash of agnosticism and Christianity and middle-class American values. We were mostly winging it.
I wish I could say that Josh and I have the interfaith family rituals thing down, but we don’t. We’ve tried. Well, I’ve tried—I am not always sure whether he’s really interested, or just going along because it’s important to me.
Shortly after I met the nuns, as December came around, I began to scroll past photos of candles being lit by cheerful children and family devotionals for sale on social media. In a last-minute panic, I picked up a cheap package of four green votive candles from Aldi. I downloaded “A Simple Advent Guide” for kids from the internet and informed my family that we would start our own nightly Scripture readings and light candles before diner. Like I said, we were winging it.
“Okay, everyone,” I said, the PDF of the Advent guide pulled up on my computer, the laptop resting on my knees. The table was set, a plate piled with chicken quesadillas at the center next to a lonely bowl of cherry tomatoes. Four green candles were there, wicks white and waxy. Eliza was in the living room, looking at a picture book about dragons who eat tacos; beside her Rowan was carefully drawing in his PJ Masks coloring book. Josh was in the bathroom.
“Everyone,” I said again, calling to them, trying to draw them to me, like a beacon to a fleet of wayward ships. “Come to the table. It’s time for our Advent readings.”
Eliza poked her head up, like a turtle from its shell, and said, “What?”
I repeated myself now for the third time. Josh walked into the room.
“Ready?” I said to him.
“Sure,” he said, then gently prodded our son to put away his coloring book. Rowan squawked and gripped the crayons in his fists.
“Mom,” Eliza said, walking over to the table and picking up a candle. “What are these for? Can I light one?”
I assured her she could once everyone was ready and once they were seated. I took the electric lighter, the kind with a long stem, and showed my daughter how to set the wick on fire. She delighted at this new power, at watching something catch flame.
With everyone ready, I launched into a short explanation of Advent: how we light candles and wait during the month of December to prepare ourselves for the One who will be born. I scrolled through “A Simple Advent Guide” and read the opening Psalm, this one from Psalm 146. The psalm is about the triumph of the godly and those who place their hope in God.
The next step in our Advent celebration was a question we were all supposed to answer: Where did I see God today?
Eliza asked, “What does that mean? I never see God, or Jesus,” and I tried to explain that “seeing” God is about looking for moments in our day when we feel most alive, most at peace. That God made us to live abundantly, so when life is abundant God is there.
Rowan was about to turn three and didn’t quite understand the assignment, so he said: “I see God in church!” even though it was a Thursday. As we went around the table, Eliza talked about seeing God when a friend shared her snack at school. Josh said that he saw God in the wind today, the way it whipped through the barren tree branches and sent leaves scattering. I smiled.
“How about you?” Josh asked me. “I see God here,” I said, looking him in the eyes. His smile matched mine, a mirror across the dining room table, and we held our gaze until Rowan picked up a quesadilla and started to tear off pieces of the flour tortilla and throw them in the air, and Eliza reached over to the lit candle and dragged it close to her plate.
“Wait! We’re not done!” I said, pushing the candle away and taking the quesadilla from Rowan’s hand.
The next step in “A Simple Advent Guide” was to listen to a song. I clicked on the link and “Praise to the Lord” by Sara Groves opened in Spotify. I turned up the volume on the laptop at the opening bars of piano and strumming guitar. Sara Groves’s sweet voice sang out the words to the old hymn and we listened together:
All that has life and breath, come now with praises
before Him
Let the Amen sound from His people again
Gladly forever adore Him.
The song was only three minutes long, but it dragged on. The kids wiggled but I could tell they were listening, and Josh was too.
I only rarely played Christian music in the house, and when I did it was of the folk acoustic variety. Playing Advent music was laying claim to the airspace in our agnostic-Christian home, but in that particular moment it felt okay. Was it okay because Josh saw God in the wind today? Maybe. I knew he was uncomfortable on some level, but tonight he was playing along. He was listening to the hymn and sharing from his heart and for once, I was grateful I dragged us all into Advent.
This nightly rhythm continued most nights of the week leading up to Christmas. Just before supper we gathered around our antique wooden table, the one with tiny crumbs lodged into the crack along the center. We sat and the kids took turns lighting candles, and I read Scriptures. We listened to music—to hymns, Zechariah’s song, songs about how all will be well, about how God remembers his eternal covenant despite all the evidence to the contrary. About God’s mercy shining brighter than the sun.
And as I looked around me at my family’s shining faces, at the flicker of candlelight, as I heard the guitar and words of peace, of joy, of hope drifting from the tiny computer speakers, I sensed God with us.
Many of my friends have gone through deconstruction of their faith—some have stopped going to church entirely, others only on occasion. And I get it, I really do. Why keep showing up when sleeping in on Sundays is so much more enjoyable? Why cajole the kids out of their pajamas, rush through the breakfast dishes, and venture out into the snow and slush, instead of letting the children play with Legos and letting yourself read a magazine or call your sister or bake zucchini bread?
Maybe it’s my stubborn streak, or maybe it’s the Holy Spirit, I can’t really tell, but I think knowing that this is my mantle, my responsibility to either raise these kids with religion or not—it has made me march those kids into the car, to scrape the windshield, to brave the snowy highways most Sundays. It’s a reflex. After all, if I don’t take my kids to church, they don’t go. If I don’t read the Jesus Storybook Bible to them, they won’t learn about Jesus feeding the five thousand or King David’s Psalms or about how Lazarus got up and walked.
Despite my doubts about God, despite the ways I have watched my certainties unravel like a slowly pulling thread, I still attend Sunday services most weeks. I wonder sometimes whether, if Josh had been less resolute about denying faith, I would have just drifted away from religious practices like the rest of them. Some days I wonder whether, without the holy fear of my kids growing up not knowing God’s great love for them, not knowing any kind of tradition or community, I would have gradually stopped participating in a faith community.
“Where did you see God today?” the Advent guide had us ask, and it’s a question I’ve been asking myself too. If God is love, then seeing God is a lot like seeing love. And love assumes the best in others—it looks at my agnostic, disbelieving husband with the clear-eyed, unconditional belief that he is doing the best he can. That he is at the particular part of his journey where he needs to be; that, as Sister Theresa said a few months ago at Saint John’s Abbey, God is walking with us regardless of what particulars we believe at any given moment, and life is long. Who knows where, exactly, we will end up?
But then one night we read from Psalm 32, and I choked out the last few verses of the Scripture reading: “Therefore, let all the godly pray to you while there is still time, that they may not drown in the floodwaters of judgment.” I said the words, shifted in my seat, thankful my kids were too young to ask me who, exactly, will drown in the floodwaters. Josh didn’t say anything after the verses were read, just folded his arms, and I rushed on to the next part.
“Where did you see God today?” I asked. Rowan repeated his usual response: “I saw God in church!” and Eliza said that today she wasn’t sure.
“I’m not sure God was there today,” she said. “I mean, I can’t see him. I don’t know where the love was strong.”
I told her that’s okay. I told her that sometimes I don’t feel God’s love either.
“Just because you don’t feel it,” I said, “doesn’t mean it’s not there.”
I felt Josh’s eyes on me, but he didn’t say anything. When it was his turn, he said he didn’t feel like participating tonight.
I pushed onward, ready to wrap up this family ritual, ready to return to safer waters. “Okay, well, I feel God’s love here now, in this room,” I said, repeating myself, but I was lying. I felt like a fraud. Then I turned on the music, and the chords were in the same key as every cheesy worship song from the Christian radio station I heard growing up, and I wanted to just slam down the computer lid right then and there, cutting off the music, aborting this moment that just wouldn’t happen the way I wanted it to. Still, I was grimly determined to keep going, so we listened to the first verse until even I couldn’t stand it anymore, then I clicked the Stop button and carried the computer back to my desk.
After dinner we put the kids to bed, and I stayed up late cleaning the kitchen while Josh read in the other room. I listened to a podcast so I didn’t have to face my thoughts. When it was late I walked past the table on my way to bed and remembered the failure of that evening.
This year, Advent feels like pain, like absence, like wanting to know God’s great love and coming up empty. It feels a lot like waiting in the dark.