There is a statue in my grandparents’ living room and I wonder about it. It’s Mary Baker Eddy, except it’s not—but thinking it is is enough to send me searching. I go to Sun Dances and to Sunday school and to astrologers. I start reading Flannery O’Connor from a big cloth book my grandmother gives me. I pore over the pages of Linda Goodman’s Love Signs. My brother goes crazy and my family fractures and goes silent, and there is no recourse. I move far, far away, and I find myself in churches in borrowed sanctuaries and high school basements, and I listen to a lot of men talking about what God is saying when He says “do my will,” or when Jesus says it, and Jesus is God, but also Jesus is Jesus, we don’t know, but we pretend to understand. I listen to the ecstatic sermons of Aimee Semple McPherson and fantasize about “going native” like Dennis Covington did while writing Salvation on Sand Mountain. I visit Lily Dale down the street from the Fox sisters’ home and try to speak to the dead, and I go to the Salt Lake City temple grounds to see if anyone is talking about Eliza Snow and the Mother in Heaven, and they are not. I get older and go further, and my family’s sadness starts to wear on me like an old boot gone soft in the tongue. Somewhere in Rhode Island, I try to figure out what my aunt has been running from all these years, and all of these people silent on the issue of the afterlife, though at least half of us got here because of those wild Mennonites running from pitchforks to baptismal fonts, who survived with a modicum of continuity only because the women cooked porridge and made their children read the Bible. I am surrounded by Irish Catholic in-laws who are loudly principled, but anything goes—do drugs in their Westchester backyards when you’re seventeen or twenty-seven, and they’ll still take you back, and they won’t talk about it. It’s not really until I start teaching that I realize how white my spiritual gaze has been. There’s poet Claudia Rankine’s open question in The Guardian to Jonathan Franzen, which is more generally directed at white people willing to face the answers: “What choices have you made in your life to keep yourself segregated?” The day I go to the mill where Sojourner Truth first got her powers after she’d said Fuck all y’all to literally everyone who had ever done her wrong, my grandmother dies. I sit in a small studio overlooking Edna St. Vincent Millay’s wild meadows. “You had to go, though,” my grandmother had said to me, cryptically, one night after I’d left the Pacific Northwest with no plan to return. My heart is so heavy—everyone’s dying, or on the verge of dying, for a whole year: parents and grandparents, and my own family more remote than ever, and war rages on in the Middle East, more refugees than ever. America elects a fascist. I hop on a train hoping for clarity, and for three days I watch the country go by and by, having seen it now back and forth so many times, and I feel loss. I convalesce in a rented room in New Orleans, and I kiss Marie Laveau’s grave. In the news that week, Miss Cleo dies. I find myself at a Voudou ceremony in a plywood temple I’ve ridden to on a bicycle, dressed all in red from scraps I could find at Restoration Thrift (“All Things Made New”). And during the ceremony led by Sallie Ann Glassman, who is white and from Ukrainian Jewish stock settled in Maine long ago, I see that it is actually a lot like the Sun Dance, the yuwipi, the sweat lodge, from all those years ago. When I return to New York, I take myself to a church called New Day Methodist, an interracial, inter-class, boundary-crossing, social-justice ministry in the Bronx, a site of resistance. And for the first time ever, without feeling compromised, I think: Here is an approximation of what Jesus might have meant. (I also think of Marx saying, “I am not a Marxist.”) A genderqueer person gives a guest sermon: “The gospel does not guarantee that love will protect us,” they say. “It is, rather, up to us to protect love.” I have just been to the chapel where the suffragists stated their resolutions and opened the operating line to God for women—well, some women—because of course on the drive back home we remember that within a few short years the suffragists and the abolitionists had split, and an angry Susan B. wrote racist diatribes, and the whole project went silent for a hundred years. The truth shifts. The end is always the beginning. Will you ever make it home? You feel a breeze pass your cheek and it means nothing, or it means something for a moment, and then just the faint glimmer of grace, like a rotten peach on the sidewalk, beseeching—Whatta you gonna do with me now? This is a living document. The statue of a pioneer wife comes to life in Angels in America when Mary-Louise Parker asks how can people change. “Well,” the statue says, “it has something to do with God, so it’s not very nice.” It never is. Try asking a woman.