One afternoon in January, while packing up the last of the Christmas stockings and twinkle lights, I listened to a radio segment about how Moscow only had six minutes of sunlight for the entire month of December, the least amount of light for that city in recorded history. The announcer asked if those six minutes were all at once and the reporter responded: “Oh, it was painfully meted out over a number of days. You could enjoy just every thirty seconds or so as it came by.”
I shook my head. Only six minutes of sunlight for an entire month? I may live in the freezing Midwest, but at least we get blue skies with our negative thirty degrees wind-chill.
But the idea of catching a glimpse of light in several-second intervals—that resonates on a different level. The last few years have felt like one long, gray December after decades of summer; the unknowing, the disillusionment, the fallout after Josh’s loss of faith has obscured any certainty that God is there, or cares. Yet I can’t deny that there have also been moments when rays break through, the occasional burst of light to remind me that, indeed, the sun is still there. That I can trust in a God who loves us both deeply no matter what Josh believes.
The older I get, the more Moscow seems like a metaphor for the spiritual life. Mother Teresa famously experienced crippling spiritual drought for years of her ministry; most religious people, if they’re honest, will confess to times of great distance from God’s presence. For whatever reason, faith can become more distant as we travel through life, encountering disappointment and twisty turns. We live in a Moscow world, and we’re all looking for the light.
Like many of my generation, I haven’t felt particularly rooted in one Christian tradition. I was baptized Presbyterian and was raised mainline Protestant, yet I was “saved” at a Billy Graham crusade and went to Bible camp every summer. I spent four years at evangelical colleges and attended a charismatic Anglican church, where I learned about both liturgy and how to raise my hands during a worship song. After graduation, Josh and I bounced from an Episcopal church to Jubilee Partners, finally landing in a small, service-oriented Mennonite congregation where I stayed for seven years. The congregation rented space in a historic Lutheran building near the children’s hospital, and we loved that we could walk to church each Sunday. It was the last church Josh and I attended together as Christians.
When its lease expired and the little Mennonite church started looking for a new building to rent outside Minneapolis, I started looking for a church to attend in the city. Josh wasn’t a Christian at this point, and it was my first time going “church shopping” alone. I checked out the one with an emphasis on racial reconciliation, the emergent one with a circular couch floor plan and art on every wall, the reverent Episcopal one that allowed me to slip in and out unnoticed. All of these churches were fine, but I quietly balked at all the new faces, the unfamiliar songs and nursery workers, the loneliness of visiting a place without my husband at my side. It seemed like too much work to start over, to introduce myself to strangers as Stina, who goes to church with her two children while her husband stays at home.
Around the time Josh and I first met Sister Theresa at Saint John’s Abbey, I started regularly attending Calvary. When it came to church, I was only looking for a few things: some people I already knew, a great youth education program, racial and economic diversity, and a commitment to Minneapolis. Calvary checked all those boxes. It’s a unique place full of saxophones and fiery preaching and a real mix of theological views. The church has been around since the late 1800s and uses its gorgeous stained-glass windows and vaulted ceilings well, hosting everything from theatrical performances to farmers’ markets to art galleries to an affordable neighborhood preschool. And it had a solid church nursery to back me up. If I was going to solo parent two young kids on Sunday mornings, that was a nonnegotiable.
In early January at Calvary, the pastor was on vacation, so a member of the church shared his testimony in lieu of the sermon. He told his personal story of growing up evangelical, of living in a black-and-white theology, of getting married and starting a family and working for a nonprofit dedicated to creating affordable housing in the city. But then he hit a wall in his early 30s; the religion that had shaped his life thus far was no longer working when he was faced with suffering.
God felt far away, he said. This early midlife crisis sent him in a downward spiral and searching for a way to rejuvenate his faith in God. He found meaning in reading Franciscan priest Richard Rohr (who my friends and I jokingly call the white Christian man whisperer). Through Rohr, he was introduced to Ignatian spirituality, which is still firmly Christian but holds a more expansive theology than most conservative evangelicals do. With Ignatian spiritual principles, he was able to pray again. I resonated with his testimony because it has been my story too.
But all of the spiritual sampling within the Christian tradition I have done in my life—grabbing some Mennonite simplicity here, sprinkling in some centering prayer there, attending Mass at the Visitation Monastery—gives me pause. Instead of digging deep into one tradition, getting down far enough to strike the water of abundant life, I have turned to a new community to start the dig all over again. I worry that the shallow soil is easier to cultivate, even if I know there will be rocks and compacted soil and maybe some buried skeletons along the way.
And now I was doing it again—attending a new church and starting a year-long spiritual formation program to become a Visitation Companion. I was chasing after the phrase “spiritual singleness,” trying to find a new paradigm for understanding my faith after Josh’s deconversion. Would my commitments survive the inevitable struggle to come?
For some millennials like me, especially those teetering into the post-Christian camp, delving into other Christian traditions becomes a Hail Mary (no pun intended) in an effort to hold on to faith before it dissolves completely. We are open to attending a variety of church services, exploring older Christian traditions, and drawing on spiritual practices that have been around for millennia. Like the new monastics, we are turning to faith practices that have stood the test of time, yearning for stability in a world that feels chaotic. The regularity of the liturgy is a comfort in an age when nondenominational churches seem untethered by any sense of history. Many are open to reading about the saints, dabbling with different liturgies, and looking for God in new ways. Or, as it were, old ways.
Denominational wandering is not unusual for modern Christians, nor do I think it’s necessarily a bad thing. For millennials, the schisms over finer theological points, such as child versus adult baptism or what happens at Communion, matter less than the authenticity of the congregation and its activity on issues of social importance: racial justice, environmental activism, inclusion of LGTBQ people, and the like. Fewer and fewer of us are centered in just one denomination. We are spiritual explorers, looking for new ways to find God. And when the church shows its ugly underbelly, many of my generation are looking for God outside institutional religion’s walls.
Postmodernism offered us a worldview with everything seen in shades of gray; we are in search of a faith that gives space for mystery, for nuance, and for evidence that God is active in the world. We want to see people walking the walk—giving away their money, advocating for low-wage workers, sheltering undocumented immigrants. I see that authenticity in how Calvary feeds homeless people every Sunday after church for a drop-in meal. I see it in the commitment the nuns have made to being good neighbors in North Minneapolis.
I may be chasing the light by attending prayer at a Catholic monastery, but I don’t think God minds. God knows we need a blast of sunshine, even for just a few seconds.