It was pretty perfect. It always is.
But on Saturday afternoon, as I checked my phone between seeing a beautiful film called "Driveways" (about unlikely friendships) and a devastating film called "XY Chelsea" (about the trans heroine who exposed U.S. war crimes), I read something that was impossible.
I read that Rachel Held Evans had died.
Rachel was 37. She was what some have called an "exvangelical," someone who came to understand that some essential tenets of the church that gave birth to her faith in Jesus Christ were actually harmful, human-made vehicles keeping some in the position of power and others in oppression.She left. She grieved. She found faith-in-community anew. She wrote about it, and in doing so, she became a fresh, intelligent, and compassionate voice for those who were learning a new way to follow Jesus.
My first encounter with Rachel's writing was "Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church." It's a memoir chronicling her faith journey through childhood and young adulthood, and her disillusionment with a church that seemed more concerned with law and exclusion and building maintenance than love and feeding Christ's sheep and healing the world. But it also reveals the core of what kept drawing her back: Jesus. Something precious she found in the scriptures. And, structured as the book is around both the two great sacraments (Baptism and Communion) and the additional traditional five markers of the life of faith (Confirmation, Reconciliation, Marriage, Orders/ Ordination, and the Sacrament of the Sick), her crisp and beautiful theological language revels in the power of a life formed by faith.
I wanted more. So I went back to an earlier book "A Year of Biblical Womanhood: How A Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband Master." At the link, you'll find this description:
Strong-willed and independent, Rachel Held Evans couldn't sew a button on a blouse before she embarked on a radical life experiment--a year of biblical womanhood. Intrigued by the traditionalist resurgence that led many of her friends to abandon their careers to assume traditional gender roles in the home, Evans decides to try it for herself, vowing to take all of the Bible's instructions for women as literally as possible for a year.
Pursuing a different virtue each month, Evans learns the hard way that her quest for biblical womanhood requires more than a "gentle and quiet spirit" (1 Peter 3:4). It means growing out her hair, making her own clothes, covering her head, obeying her husband, rising before dawn, abstaining from gossip, remaining silent in church, and even camping out in the front yard during her period.
Rachel was trying to prove a point, and man o man, did she ever. She confirmed what she'd suspected, that despite the claims of some that they prioritize scripture above all, evangelical notions of Christian womanhood are, in fact, choosy about which behaviors they require, and--surprise!-- they all involve keeping women in submissive and subservient roles.
Near the end of "Biblical Womanhood," Rachel writes about searching the scriptures:
If you are looking for verses with which to support slavery, you will find them.
If you are looking for verses with which to abolish slavery, you will find them.
If you are looking for verses with which to oppress women, you will find them.
If you are looking for for verses with which to liberate or honor women, you will find them.
If you are looking for reasons to wage war, you will find them.
If you are looking for reasons to promote peace, you will find them.
If you are looking for an out-dated, irrelevant ancient text, you will find it.
If you are looking for truth, believe me, you will find it.
This is why there are times when the most instructive question to bring to the text is not "what does it say?", but "what am I looking for?"
I suspect Jesus knew this when he said,
"Ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened."
If you want to do violence in this world, you will always find the weapons.
If you want to heal, you will always find the balm.
Rachel lived a life of faith and intellectual and theological inquiry, and that life was cut short by a disastrous convergence of illness and allergic reaction. Her husband Dan, her two children (ages 3 and 1), her entire family, and a community of like-minded Christians (and even some who were not like-minded) are grieving. Her compassionate, articulate voice encouraged countless "wanderers" from the church-folds of their childhood to find a faith they could live with integrity.
And she did it all as one soaked in the fruits of the Spirit-- love, joy, peace; patience, kindness, generosity; faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
I have been home from my trip for a little less than a day, and I am still as heartsick as when I was crying in the Regal Battery Park lobby.
This is not possible. I don't know how to reckon with it. All I can do is turn to my own faith in the God who brings life from death.
Each morning of the Easter season I have said this prayer from the PCUSA Book of Common Worship, a prayer of thanksgiving for baptism. Today I share it in the hope and wonder of the faith we proclaim... in hope that, for any who might, like me, be reeling with loss, it offers some slight balm for the soul... and in the hope expressed by Rachel in her most recent book, "Inspired":
"The story is not over."
O Lord our God, we give you thanks
for the new life you raise up in us
through the mystery of our baptism--
the sorrow of the heavy cross,
the surprise of the empty tomb,
the love that death could not destroy.
By the power of your Holy Spirit
poured out upon us in baptism,
fill us with the joy of your resurrection,
so that we may be a living sign
of your new heaven and new earth
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
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