nobodysgod

April 4

Nobodys God

Faith is still much on my mind. Partly because over the past few days I’ve had the privilege to hear a few people who are not believers speak up about their non-belief. I say "privilege" because to my mind it’s a gift when anyone shares anything that personal. I happen to feel a connection to the non-believers I know, because I remember myself as a non-believer. Many memories get gauzy over time, but for me that one hasn’t. After I came to believe, I vowed not to forget what I thought and felt before that. What I was like.

I’m reminded that when I was a faculty wife, a truly charming young man named Bobby was very surprised to discover I’d never smoked pot. Indeed, my not having tried marijuana baffled him. It didn’t fit his image of me. He never said, but I think he liked my general openness. In any case, every couple of weeks he’d turn up at my kitchen door to offer me increasingly fancy pot. By then of course I had to say no, even if I’d wanted to try it. One day about three months into this dance of ours, he showed up to tell me he would no longer be trying to turn me on. How could I not ask why? Because, he said, I figured out, you’d be exactly the same. He had this triumphant grin on his face, having solved the mystery. I count "you’d be exactly the same" the best compliment I got during my year and seven months in Hamilton, New York.

I still never have tried pot. Would I be the same? I’ll never know. I do know that when faith came to me, when God entered my life–and stayed–I did stay pretty much the same. I found God challenging rather than comforting. And having faith freed me to do good things that had beforehand seemed potentially embarrassing or otherwise risky. But otherwise, I was the same Toby.

Now, four decades later, I still find faith to be a challenge. And to bolster my courage. It’s still not a comfort, or only very very rarely. And it is definitely not easy: not easy to explain; not easy to surrender to; not easy to live with, day by day.

Even four decades ago, when my faith was brand shining new, I sensed that. And wrote:

On the Nature of Faith

Have faith.
Have half of this peach.
Have fun at the beach.
Have faith.

Poor as those four lines are as verse, I stand by them.