Maybe It's About the Journey

I used to think we had so much in common in our pre-courtship days, in the days when we still wrote letters to one another from across state lines, in the days when we still had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. My now husband, Jeremy, spoke of God in mystical terms, in experiential terms, in philosophical terms. I looked at him from across various café tables, dreamy-eyed and transfixed. Mom told me that if I asked most Americans if they were Christians, they would say yes because Christianity has permeated our culture because of our country’s beginnings.

“Christian ideas are part of America,” she’d say, “but it doesn’t mean that most Americans are Christians, even if they think that they are.”

I often wondered how it was that people could not be who they genuinely thought they were. So I’d try to discover if Jeremy was a Christian by asking him everything but asking him directly. I’d ask what he thought of certain Bible passages, what he thought of God. He’d give me circular arguments and ultimately turn my questions back on me. I’d begrudgingly give him my answers (usually backed up by scripture passages and my interpretation of them) though all I wanted were his answers. Finally, in one of my last letters to him, I’d had enough of his question dodging.

“Philosophy is all well and good,“ I wrote, “but at some point you must establish what you believe. Tell me, what is the Trinity?”

He wrote me something of a formal essay back, giving me a squeaky-clean definition of the widely accepted doctrine of the Trinity. I should have been happy. I should have been thrilled. I at last had an answer that I could measure according to my Bible! But there was only one problem: his answer had no soul. His answer was nothing more than dead words scribbled on a page, lifeless and void of humanity. But to be fair, my question was too. I wanted to pinpoint his personal theology and all he wanted was to dialogue about it. I cared about correct answers. He cared about the journey.

Knowing Jeremy threw a wrench in the framework that I used to describe myself as a Christian. If I hadn't fell in love with him I could have forgotten our conversations all together. I could have passed him off as some sort of heretic, some ignorant heathen that I used to know, but it didn’t work out that way.

Maybe it was because I wanted so badly to justify my relationship with him that I embarked on my journey to find a different kind of truth. I wasn’t supposed to have a relationship with him after all. I was Fundamentalist. He was Episcopal. I was conservative. He was a liberal. I was anti-philosophy. He was a philosopher. I was left-brained. He was an artist. I was a Christian. He was a seeker of God. The Bible spoke against relationships with men like these. Or so I thought. In reality, it probably was exactly my pursuit of Jeremy that made me take my faith in a new direction. I’d like to think that I was more of a feminist than that that, but I wasn't.

Whatever the case, I'm here on this journey. It's been 9 years, and I don't know if I'll ever be able to articulate my destination. But lately, I’m wondering if this journey is even about the destination. Maybe this journey is simply about the journey.