I came across this quote from Walter Brueggemann a few days ago: "The world for which you have been so carefully prepared is being taken away from you, by the grace of God.”  It stopped me in my tracks.

When I was growing up, I spent many summers in my parents’ native South India.  In the mornings, I’d sit on the veranda of my grandparents’ house as clusters of little girls in blue jumpers, starched blouses, and stiff pigtails walked past me on their way to the village elementary school.  They’d stare – who’s that girl in the foreign clothes who doesn’t go to school? — and I’d stare right back — who are those girls with ribbons in their hair, swinging tiffin boxes in their arms?

The experience was disorienting.  Watching those girls was like gazing into a mirror that should have been.  The mirror that would have been, if my parents — by a series of circumstances so tenuous and random as to seem permanently reversible — hadn’t moved to America. 

Even now, years later, I experience the disorientation more often than I'd like to.  My world feels too thin — or I feel too thin in it — and I think: I should have been a village housewife, raising chickens, milking cows, and drawing water from a well.  I could have been a woman who doesn't think, speak, or write in English.  How is it that I wear jeans, not saris?  Sport highlights, not headscarves?  Why did I become this me, this American me? I could too easily have become another.

In some ways, of course, the world my immigrant parents “so carefully prepared” me for was the world of those beribboned schoolgirls.  America was alien territory when I was little, and in their fear, dislocation, and homesickness, my parents tried hard to reproduce the village they missed in the child they loved.  It was a project destined to fail, but that didn’t keep them from trying. 

Perhaps my upbringing explains why Brueggemann’s quote hit me so hard.  I know incoherence well – the incoherence of being groomed for a world I don’t actually inhabit.

What does any of this have to do with faith?  Well, I was groomed for a particular religious world, too.  Like many believers, I was carefully prepared for a specific expression of Christianity, a specific relationship to dogma, a specific experience of God. 

I was prepared to live in a world where the Bible is not only inerrant, but straightforwardly sufficient for my hardest questions.  I was groomed for a world in which God's activity is self-evident; direct and discernible answers to prayer are my spiritual birthright; and perpetual hope, fervor, certainty, and joy constitute the norms of the religious life.

"The world for which you have been so carefully prepared is being taken away from you."  Yes, I couldn't have stated it more succinctly.  In the world I inhabit these days, I am neither sure what the Bible is, nor capable any longer of finding black-and-white answers in its pages.  The God I perceive — when I perceive him at all — is more elusive than self-evident, and the agony of unanswered prayer has almost destroyed my faith.  While I've definitely known hope, fervor, certainty, and joy in my life, I've also known despair, apathy, doubt, and grief.  In recent years, I've known the latter more often than the former.

As heretical as it might sound, the world for which I was so carefully prepared is no longer available to me.  I'm not saying it doesn't exist.  I'm saying I don't exist in it.

"By the grace of God," Brueggemann claims.  It's by the grace of God that my world has been upended.  I don't disagree with that, but it's the long view.  It's the wisdom that comes in retrospect.  The problem is, I don't have the long view yet; I only have the now.  The raw experience itself. 

For me, the raw experience is searing.  It's a stripping away, a breaking down, a hollowing.  It feels like death — a slow, stubborn death with a timetable aggravatingly its own.  No matter how much my heart clamors for a quick resurrection, this death says, "No, not yet.  There's more."  More hollowing.  More stripping.  More fire.

Who knew that God would fight for something wholly other than my piety?  Who knew he'd insist on bare bones?

In her sermon collection, God in Pain, Barbara Brown Taylor argues that disillusionment is essential to the Christian life.  "Disillusionment is, literally, the loss of an illusion — about ourselves, about the world, about God — and while it is almost always a painful thing, it is never a bad thing, to lose the lies we have mistaken for the truth."

I agree, but I have questions.  To what end?  For what purpose?  Where will this "grace of God" (which feels so ungracious) lead?

Like many bicultural kids, I grew up wishing for a world spacious enough to accommodate all of me — the American me, the Indian me, the conflicted me.  As a child, I didn't have the language to express it, but what I hungered for was coherence.  I wanted my inner and my outer lives to align.

I'm not sure about this yet, but I'm starting to wonder if God wants coherence, too.  What if the religious world I was so carefully prepared for limits him as much as it limits me, and he longs for freedom as passionately as I do?  What if God has personal stakes in asking me to honor what is, rather than what piety keeps insisting should be?  Maybe he's asking for room — room to exist in my life in his full complexity. 

The irony is, this is the very thing I've wanted since I was a child.  To live an unfettered life.  To be transparent, to be authentic, to be seen and known for who I truly, wholly am.  Is it possible that God shares my hunger?  Is it possible that my core desire has been a magnet all these years, pulling me closer and closer to God's own heart? 

If yes, then Brueggemann is right, and I am surrounded by grace.  If yes, then this painful dismantling of my world is God's gift to both of us.  Why?  Because when it's over, I will finally be free to give God a tiny piece of his heart's desire.  I will finally inhabit a world spacious enough to welcome him as he is.

Image credit: (1) Wikipedia.org.