Laura Ferris
Oh God, where are you now?
On a white board in the Calvin room, where FoCUS was meeting while the choir practiced for First Pres’s Tenebrae service, our pastor wrote the word DOUBTS.
“What are the doubts that we have?” he asked the group, after we had discussed the passage for the evening, about Jesus calming the Sea of Galilee in the middle of a great storm.
I glanced around the room, and raised one hand resolutely. There had been something on my mind for quite some time, a way Christians speak of God that bothers me. “Yes?” he asked.
“I doubt,” I began, “that what I experience emotionally as God or what I interpret to be God at work in the world is actually God. Not just me and how I want to see things.”
“I see,” he said, “um, but how can we narrow this down to…”
“Knowing God’s will?” I suggested, although that wasn’t quite what I had meant.
He turned to the board and wrote, Does Laura understand God?
The room was filled with soft laughter; my mouth twitched in embarrassment, and I turned bright red: at being singled out; at the naked self-assertion implicit in the question, the utter hubris of it. The use of my name and how little it had to do with the living, breathing body my name usually signifies, used in service to some idea that I just knew was not-me.
Does Laura understand God? I stared at the words on the board as the pastor continued to brainstorm. Who is Laura?
Everyone’s questions, he noted, were on the theological side. “What are some more mundane doubts that we have?” he asked.
Gamely, I raised a hand, and stated what I thought was the most obvious and universal answer to this question: “I doubt whether people actually care.”
Without a word he turned to the board and wrote, BOYFRIEND. I winced, lips whitening, then started laughing with the rest to hide my embarrassment. Again, I had said something I thought to be of concern to most people: again, it was turned back, specifically and publicly, to - well, not me, but to the idea of me.
“That’s right,” he said, “does my boyfriend care? Do my friends? My parents? My professors?”
Does Laura understand God? Does her boyfriend care? I had become abstract. These aren’t difficult questions in the abstract, I thought. The answer is no. Of course not. No one understands God fully. And her boyfriend doesn’t care, as evidenced by the fact that she does not have one. No. And then we sang, all together, Sufjan Steven’s “Oh God Where Are You Now (In Pickerel Lake? Pigeon? Marquette? Mackinaw?)”:
Oh God, where are you now?
Oh Lord, say somehow
The devil is hard on my face again
The world is a hundred to one again
Would the righteous still remain?
Would my body stay the same?
(No no no no no no no no no. I don’t understand. He doesn’t care.)
It hits me now that perhaps my experience being an object of public satire makes sense: I hadn’t honestly shared my doubts. And even if I had, there was nothing to stop the pastor from turning my feelings of insecurity into an accessible abstraction that stripped them of their visceral honesty. So I had shared my pre-spun “certainties,” masquerading them as doubts, because I wanted people to wake up and taste the “truth” of no: those idealistic, superstitious young people. No wonder they laughed.
I’d been trying to be a little less of sap recently, and I think I’m doing a bit too well creating another role for myself that doesn’t quite fit. It’s the grim bit of Holy Week, so I guess I’ve been experiencing myself as a little more cynical than usual. I find it interesting that one of the central rites of the Christian religion revolves around remembering a meal between friends one night that ended with the most infamous betrayal in western history. I find it interesting that Jesus knew he was going to be betrayed too, which, for all my forecasting, I never really know for sure. Jesus didn’t seem cynical though. Considering the horrors to come, he was downright classy, real about it, and resilient.
As I think about the beautiful symbol Christ created for us at the Last Supper, an open table for all mankind, a covenant binding us in eternal intimacy to the Son of God, it strikes me that my capacity for certainty and cynicism exists in a direct proportion to my capacity for hope and idealism, and may in fact be the same thing. There’s a wistful, visionary quality to both the positive and negative projections of reality that we impose upon the overstimulating chaos of information that bombards us every day. A feeling of longing prompts a vision of something beyond what we actually see: a bleak and embittered one when we are hurt and a winged and colorful one when we are loved: our doubts about the essential character of life are all mundane. And they can change day to day, as you remember a friend’s betrayal a month ago or as you enjoy the kind words of a friend today, as a boy rudely shoves past you on your way to class or as another boy smiles at you on your way back. How fragile we are. How doubtful. How incredibly, ludicrously obstinate.
“Doubting is a good thing,” our pastor ended the sermon. “But what we have to ask is where our confidence lies. Where do we ultimately come down? Who do we trust? Our boyfriend? Ourselves? God?”
If I’m honest, I’m not sure I really know yet, but I want to.
God dies tomorrow. Oh God, where are you now?
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