A Story Bigger Than My Own

By Debie Thomas

Eastern Orthodoxy and Cathoicism.

           "Is God white or is he brown?"  "What language does he think in?"  "Does he like loud churches with drums, or quiet ones with candles?  Is he strict?  Lenient?  Dressy?  Casual?"  "What kind of person is God?"

           These are a few of the religious questions I worried about as a kid.  They might sound silly now, but they speak to an anxiety I'm still trying to outgrow.  The reason is that I grew up bicultural and a preacher's kid (the daughter of first-generation immigrants from India), and so never had the luxury of taking identity — my own or anyone else's — for granted.

           Having spent years juggling different languages, value systems, cultural expectations, and religious norms, I feel both envy and distrust when people speak with casual certainty about "the way things really are," or, "how God in fact operates."  In some essential ways, my childhood God was split straight down the middle.  Mutually incompatible with himself.

           Until I left home for college, I spent my Sunday mornings in a large Baptist church where my father served as an associate minister.  The God I experienced there was unabashedly American.  His Caucasian angels adorned the organ in fading oils and watercolors, and his blue-eyed apostles lined the upper balcony in stained glass.  This God appreciated hymns and choral music.  He had no issues with women taking the pulpit, or congregants wearing sneakers to church. 

           In his Sunday School guise, this God was like Pa from Little House on the Prairie, Mike from The Brady Bunch, and Father March from Little Women, all rolled up together.  He spoke English in the New International Version, ate honey-dipped donuts after morning services, and shared Hershey’s Kisses out of his jeans pockets.  This God, I was told, cherished my freedom and individuality. Of course he did!  He was an American!  He wanted to know my opinions and ideas.  He was the kind of father who wielded his power from a gentle distance, so as not to mess with my essential autonomy. 

African Pentecostals.

           On Sunday afternoons, my family left this God behind, and headed to a nondenominational charismatic church my father pastored elsewhere in the city.  The immigrant Indian families who attended those services preferred to worship in our mother tongue, Malayalam, and to practice a form of Christianity more in keeping with traditional South Asian culture.

           In "Indian church," women and girls covered their heads and sat on the left side of the sanctuary.  We dressed in beautiful but conservative Indian garb, and refused the "decadence" of jewelry on principle.  Women never preached or led services, though they expertly managed both the Sunday School and the coffee hour after church.

           Where  American church was quiet and orderly, Indian church was loud and lively.  We clapped our hands, smacked our tambourines, and sang Malayalam hymns of exile, loss, and homecoming.  Worshippers prophesied and spoke in tongues, and my father's sermons lauded the virtues of Indian culture as often as they did the holiness and majesty of God.  

           The deity I experienced in that church was neither white nor American.  We tolerated no visual representations of him at all; our walls were bare, our pulpit plain.  One year, we worried that a baby doll in our Nativity play might constitute a “graven image,” and violate the Second Commandment. 

           In fact, we worried a lot about the Commandments, because God was above all things holy, and the holiness of his followers was a very serious matter, a matter of life and death.  Whatever “Emmanuel” meant, it does not mean that God was a soccer dad or a BFF.  The point of Christian discipleship was to respect the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and my Indian forbears — the unchanging God of tradition.       

           Of course, like every good Protestant minister, my father preached grace.  It was grace we stood in, grace that saved, grace that kept us all from wrath and damnation.  But grace in its unpredictable wildness couldn't sit well with the dictates of a culture that prized authority, conformity, and submission above all things.  In the glass house we lived in, visible to all, the point was to honor God with our self-denial and obedience.    

           I'm still untangling all that I absorbed on those bifurcated Sundays.  Part of the untangling has involved exploring forms of Christianity — liturgical, sacramental — I didn't grow up with.  But the more essential untangling has involved a rejection of fundamentalism.  For the first time, I'm accepting the possibility that genuine faithfulness can still embrace paradox.

Chinese House Church.

           But the embrace is hard.  In fact, it's ambivalent and laced with grief, because fundamentalism is — I understand now — an earnest attempt to manage a reasonable fear.  Black and white is so much safer than gray.  A God who fits neatly into the norms of my racial, cultural, and denominational understanding of reality is safer and more palatable than a God who confronts every fiber of my being with his otherness.  Why welcome a stranger if I can hang out with my neighbor instead?

           Well, because Jesus did.

           What I'm trying to grasp these days is that Christendom doesn't have to be a War Between the Creeds.  What if instead it is a very big story, bigger than the biggest novel ever written?  Maybe its settings are varied, its plots layered, its characters multitudinous.  Of course every culture writes God in its own image.  Of course every church does.  Of course I do.  We are small, and the story is very, very big.

           Why does this scare me?  Well, partly for good reason: we can't afford a free-for-all.  We live in a world where misconceptions about who God is and what he requires of us have daily, lethal consequences.  God's story is big, but it also has boundaries, and those boundaries matter.

           And yet.  Given that caveat, if God holds the entire story, and its contradictions don't frighten him, then why shouldn't I explore chapters different from my own?  What might I learn if I'm willing to peruse pages I find unfamiliar or odd?  I'll still be held.  I'll still be safe.  I'll still be loved.  Every word of this huge and hodge-podge story matters to God.