A New GoliathI left Julia that afternoon with straps digging deep into my shoulders, my bag heavy with the word of God.
by MARIE-CAPUCINE PINEAU-VALENCIENNE In the beginning was the word. And the word was God and it was good.[1]
This story begins with words too. But they are not God’s and I wonder if they are good. In this genesis I wonder if God would see that this was good. Probably not. * * * EASTER 1:1
This story begins with Easter. My mother always said Easter is the most important of the holidays. At Easter Jesus was resurrected, and it was here that our religion was born. Easter is a reminder of Jesus’ sacrifice, a reminder that He came alive again.
“In our hearts” my mother said to me as a child. “He is alive in our hearts.” This Easter, Jesus came alive for me again too. Though not in my heart. * * * EASTER 1:2
I woke up in a panic. 9:35 staring back at me from my phone screen. Oh. No. I laid still for a moment, eyes facing the ceiling, and considered not going. I even started to type Claire a text, “Hey I had a late night last night and am really ti-” my fingers trying to explain. But I knew I couldn’t cancel. Not this time. This was for Jesus.
And so with a heavy dose of Catholic guilt I stopped typing and lifted myself out of bed, forcing myself to the shower. My body was angry. Heavy and slow. The next time I looked at my screen there was a text telling me she was outside. I stuffed my pencil case in my bag and started for the door, my wet hair leaving darkened blotches on my shoulder blades. I crawled into the front seat of her car with a huff. Claire looked nice. Her hair was half up and turquoise earrings dangled from her ears. I looked at my outfit in comparison. “You look nice,” I told her, “I didn’t really dress up.” “You’re so fine,” she said, “I just always like to wear my Easter best!” We drove off and the sun split through the windows. It was bright that morning and the dead leaves on the ground made it feel like it was fall again. The car slowed and I could see a stone church in front. The doors of the church were open wide and a priest stood with his arms sprawled out, a man in a blazer holding a stack of pamphlets next to him. “It’s so cute.” I said as Claire tried to parallel park. “That’s not our church.” A small chuckle escaped her tense lips. She didn’t like parallel parking. Where was the church? My eyes scanned the street looking for another stone tower. Instead, Claire led us to the double doors of Hanover High School. Easter mass in a high school auditorium. I considered this for a moment. We found seats mid way down the aisle. As we sat down I looked around for familiar faces. Dartmouth faces. Faces I knew. On the stage stood a podium, on either side planters home to some sort of generic green — one of those plants that is always displayed in the entrances of home depots or Walmarts. Is it a plant or a small tree? Is it real? I didn’t know. There was a band too, fully outfitted with a drum set and microphone stands and electric guitars. My head cocked to right as I considered the scene. A church that is not a church. Plants that may not be plants. * * * EASTER 1:3
I had been to a place like this before. In New York a couple years ago a friend had brought me to her church one Sunday. She was sweet and had big eyes that twinkled in the light when she smiled. There had been guitars there too.
The church was on the west side in Chelsey and for the most part looked like the churches I knew at home. But on that Sunday in New York, when mass started and the opening hymns began it did not feel like the churches I knew at home. On that Sunday in New York I did not know what to do. I remember standing there, my eyes wide, jaw ajar as a band, not unlike the one in front of me now, began to strum electric guitars. Parishioners sang along to music, but instead of reaching for a dusty book of hymns, thin pages and a floppy leather cover, they raised their arms in the air, their palms out and open, and swayed. I noticed some closed their eyes and let the music guide their motion, unconcerned. I remember I tried not to let my eyebrows furrow and my forehead crinkle then, as I could feel them starting to now. On that Sunday in New York I felt truly foreign, alien to the emotion of it all. And now in a high school auditorium on Easter Sunday I felt that alien feeling creep slowly back. The mass started but the hymns were not hymns, and soon enough I could see arms lifting up. There weren’t as many as in New York, yet still I felt a feeling of stark difference wash over me. In this crowd I felt alone. Why did I feel more at home where a church was made of stone and arches and smelled of incense and old vintage furniture and musty attics? Where priests were called priests. Where they wore white robes instead of suits. Where an organ hummed high above me out of sight, and no one showed any emotion at all. It was in a place like that where I felt comfortable and I thought about how strange that was. A place that is cold and vast. A place where my parents took us every Sunday without fail. A place where I would be so bored and uninterested and my mother’s hiss was as routine as holding our hands out in prayer. “Shhhhh” she would reprimand as my brother and I began to fight. We didn’t fight for any particular reason, it was just something to do. Before New York and before Claire and Easter and spring I thought I was Christian and I didn’t care much about being Catholic. But now I realize that I am Christian, and I am Catholic, and those are two different things. “It’s ok, we all love Jesus,” Mama said to me over the phone that afternoon, “they just love Jesus in a different way,” her voice seeping of dry humor (alien to the emotion of it all) and I felt at home again. * * * BIBLE STUDY 1:1
“A Christian,” they said. “I’m a Christian.” Sharp and singular.
I, along with seven senior Dartmouth women, sat on low beige couches with cushions that sank deeply toward the ground for Christian Union bible study. Julia, the bible study leader, sat in a wooden chair in the empty space between the crescent of beige. The bible resting in my lap was open to Deuteronomy 10:12. I was told that Deuteronomy 10:12 to 10:20 was important to the discussion of social justice, as “a Christian.” I wouldn’t know. As a Christian myself I had little exposure to the bible in it’s true bookish form. This may sound strange but I had only ever read the old testament at my classically focused high school as “literature,” and my exposure to the biblical stories of the new testament were from Sunday school catechism and lots of picture books and my mother. My childhood bookshelf was home to a small bible, bound in pale pink leather with a lamb impressed on the cover, but I don’t think I had ever sat down and opened it up. Not seriously at least. When I was a child before bed I would get down on my little knees and recite a child’s prayer and then my mom would come kiss me goodnight. I never opened my pink bible then, I knew the prayer by heart. It was 6 p.m. and streaks of a sun beginning to set lit the room. Julia’s hair was brown and curly and stopped just past her shoulders and a small clip fastened loose streaks to her left side. She wore thin black framed glasses and sat with one hunter boot over the other and I thought how much of her had come from the J.Crew store down the street. Julia had a slow voice. A voice that took it’s time and paused in the middle of sentences, at the beginning of sentences, and at the end of them too. A voice with a hint of a drawl. You could hear it when she talked about God and good questions and social justice and Deuteronomy 10:12 to 20. You could hear it when she talked about Texas. “I was drill captain in high school.” Julia said, a smirk creeping into the corners of her mouth. “It’s not cheer.” She was adamant about that. At football and basketball games Julia wore a sparkly pink cowboy hat and performed kick routines and pom routines at half time. But she did not cheer. She drilled. This week was the week about social justice and how social justice matters as a Christian. They talked about the Israelites and how their hearts were not full. How their hearts were hard and did not love. Obeying, but not loving. “They did not do their due diligence to God” Julia said. They were broken. They were broken, living in a broken world and did not have the Lord. The world, apparently, is still broken now — despite Jesus and 2000 thousand years and Deuteronomy 10:12 to 20. They talked about compassion and I listened wide eyed, trying to freeze all the muscles in my face. “If you’re not a Christian, how can you know true compassion?” “They can’t.” Julia answered. I looked around and saw only blank stares, quiet stares. Julia said that some people suffered from “spiritual bankruptcy,”: non-christians, non-believers, and the Israelites. Now I wondered of my own spiritual wealth. Here, compassion, true compassion, not empty obedience, not a moral compass, was irrevocably linked with Christianity. I could feel my eyes squinting in and my eyebrows furrowing and I prayed that my face would give nothing away. Stop. Freeze. Make no sudden movements, I yelled at my body, petrified of being discovered. “People without faith have accountability, even if they don’t know why,” a slender girl with long brown hair and knee high hunter boots said. Hunter boots were popular here. It’s not their fault, she seemed to suggest. It’s not their fault they do not know why. We do. She pushed further. She talked about her christianity in the context of the outside world and I saw Christian identity completely foreign to my own come out of hiding. * * * CRISTIAN UNION 1:1
Christian Union is steeped deep in American patriotism. Founded in 2002 by Matt Bennett, a Cornell graduate and minister at Princeton, “grieved” at the secularization of elite colleges.[2] He wanted to create “Godly leaders,” he writes, to ultimately “use a transformed America to truly bless the world.”[3] Leadership, Christian leadership, is a pillar of Christian Union’s ideological practice. Christian Union aims to mould young Ivy League minds and produce Christian leaders of tomorrow. It would be the minds from “leading universities” that would “[shape] American culture.”[4] Christian Union claims to be nondenominational but there is Evangelism in their voice. It is the sound of a Christian colonial spirit.
The “Leaders Matter” page of the Christian Union website reads like doomsday call to action. It calls for Christian “[intervention]” with the goal of a better world.[5] “90 percent,” of students on Ivy League campuses (and Stanford) are not actively christian. “90 percent” of them, of us, “live and breathe in a spiritually stifling and morally confused secular campus culture.”[6] That is why they want to guide them, to change them. It is to ensure that the leaders of tomorrow, the next “influencers,” and CEOs and tech giants, business moguls, and pulitzer prize winning authors were not just educated, but Christian. Not just Ivy League leaders, but Christian leaders. Because that was the way to fix a broken world. These schools were broken too, pumping thousands of flawed products into American society. Leaders made in Ivy League factories. Manufactured on elite secular production lines. Here, underneath the veil of christianity, and the word of God and a broken world, was a political tool. A new Goliath. * * * JULIA 1:1
We sat on a wooden bench on the green, Baker Tower standing proudly across from us. It was a sunny spring morning and loose strands of Julia’s curly hair fluttered in the wind. She wore her black thin framed glasses, a cardigan, and modest shorts, her left hand resting a Starbucks cup on her knee. At the coffee shop she had told me about her 1 year old son Emmet.
“My husband and I switch off days. He loves his Daddy time. He also works in the ministry.” Now, comfortably seated, she wanted to know about my faith, about my relationship with God. I told her that I grew up Catholic. I told her about the Sunday mornings of my childhood. I told her about being very bored sitting in another kind of wooden bench. About the stone church and its big doors and almost always walking in late at 10:40 when mass started at 10:30 and my mother shuffling my brother and I along into an empty pew. I told her that I knew it had shaped me, the way I view the world, my culture and my family. I just didn’t tell her how. I sketched for her a true picture of my faith. But however true and right I aimed to be, it was only an outline, not yet a painting. After I knew she was satisfied she moved on to the Bible. This was important and telling and I would only understand the extent of which later. “The Bible is the authority because it is God’s word. It’s God directly speaking to us.” There was a firmness in her voice, still sweet but strong this time. The strength came from her unwavering sense that she was speaking the truth. She called it “regeneration.” There would be a second world similar to the one we live in now, with fleshy bodies, and work, and family, but it would be perfect. A world rid of sin. A world where humanity is not punished for Eve’s fruit eating ways. A perfect world. It was not her belief that lost me. Lot’s of people believe in things that ring strange in our ears, in things that take on different meanings when said aloud. Julia’s new world was not what stood between us. No. It was her certainty. It was an unwavering certainty in the perfect world to come, in the Bible as the word of God. A warm wind sent leaves rustling on the tree above us. I looked at her then and told her I wanted to know about women. I wanted to understand the women in the bible and how and why and what that meant today. I wanted to talk about marriage. “Context is king, that’s what they taught us in seminary,” her palms lightly taped the base of the bench for emphasis. “Context is king,” she repeated with a nod. I like to think that time it was for herself. “Humanity now reflects creation, all fractured by sin,” Julia explained. “That’s why we have natural disasters, shootings, divorce.” Natural disasters, shootings, and divorce. As the words left her mouth a tidal wave of questions flooded by head. Two thirds of this list were causes of death, natural and social forces of destruction. And then there was divorce. Divorce, small but mighty, was positioned here, in earnest. I wondered how, like divorce, Christian Union could be positioned here, next to the Ivy League (and Stanford), next to the cream of the American crop, next to money and the modern world, in earnest. Like divorce for Julia, I saw how Christian Union was misplaced here, unevenly matched to its peers. Julia gave me a Bible that day. She took me to the Christian Union office. It was a couple minutes away, behind main street and close to campus. The offices occupied a corner on the second floor of a building in town. Down a long windowless corridor were Bibles. Lots of them. Inside, it seemed Bibles had been fruitful and multiplied. They were on rows of shelves, stacked high in corners, stacked on chairs, packed neatly in open cardboard boxes on the ground, some still plastic wrapped,. “Here,” she handed me a floppy white book with a cross on the cover. “Take one, we have lots.” I left Julia that afternoon with straps digging deep into my shoulders, my bag heavy with the word of God. * * * JULIA 1:2
Julia prayed for me. She does most times I meet with her. “Is there anything I should be praying for?” She always asks what I want. At the beginning I told her I thought I wasn’t allowed to ask God for things, but she told me it was ok. So I did. I did then when we met for the first time on a bench on the green, and I did now.
She prayed that I would get a summer job soon, one in particular that I was hoping for, and she prayed for my visa papers to arrive in time and we both said amen. I always had things prepared when we met, questions, a specific topic. “So, what do you have for me this week?” she asked as we settled on a bench on the green, our usual spot. The sun was high and there was slight breeze in air. It always sunny on days I met Julia. I pulled out my little red notebook and my blue pen with the cap, as I had every time, and opened it to the marked page. I took a breath. There were no questions written down, no midnight thoughts, no “for Julia next Wed!” scribbled in lopsided lettering in the margins. Blank. I knew why. “I have some questions about the Israelites,” I said finally. She nodded faintly. It was then that I told her. Telling Julia about myself felt like standing in a shallow pool. Now the water began to rise. “My mother is half jewish,” I told her, “she was raised in a Catholic home, but half her family is Jewish.” I told her someone converted. She seemed pleased. She told me that is what they call a “completed jew” or a “messianic jew.” “Their hearts grew hard to the Lord,” Julia said to me. “Why?” I asked her. “They became the gods that they served. Gods made with human hands.” That was an undercurrent I recognized. An association, cultivated over the years, a characterization, an assassination, a link between Judaism and materialism. And there it stood, fabled, mythic, like the boogie man in the night but it was real and it wore J Crew. And it smiled at me and prayed for me and I did not understand. “Their hearts grew hard to the Lord.” This sentence reverberated in my ears. The first time I heard it was at the Bible study. It hit me violently then, thrashing against my ear drums, and it hit me again now. “It’s like a play,” she said. “The play is God’s plan and the jews left during the intermission.” Julia laughed, the balls of her cheeks danced on her face. “I love this metaphor,” she said. “Jeremiah and Isaiah warned them” She used a knowing voice here. “Warned them about what disobeying God meant.” Was I disobeying God now? “Through Abraham, Jews would be a light to nations around them.” But that didn’t happen. “Instead, they disobeyed God by assimilating with other cultures.” They assimilated with the pagans, the un-holly and sinful, neighboring peoples that were not chosen by God. I never got a clear answer as to who exactly these neighboring peoples were. But it didn’t matter. They were not chosen by God. Later I would come to understand who Julia was referring to. Historically, religion in ancient Israel was not always the strict picture of Deuteronomistic Yahwism presented in the Bible. It was, as one of my professors once called it, a “religious marketplace.” Yahweh ruled in many places, the important places like Jerusalem, but not everywhere, not always. Israel and Judah were home to other ancient tribal religions, to to other Gods, like Baal and Asherah and Yamm.[7] Yahwism, the religious tradition that we know as the bedrock of Christianity, had some competition. Yahweh was the God of the Israelites and according to the Hebrew Bible he was the only God, the only one that mattered. As it turned out, the ungodly people Julia spoke of, the ones with “hard hearts” that fell victim to their neighbors’ idols, had God all along. Just not the God prescribed by King David.[8] Ancient Israel was a land where politics and God worked together and it did not seem so far away from where I was sitting now. Julia told about the time she went to Passover seder. “It’s so beautiful” she said. “As a Christian it’s that much more fulfilling.” I remember cocking my head to the right. Jesus died the night before passover. For Julia, going to the Passover seder was seeing in practice Jesus’s role as a the lamb of God. It reinforced his sacrifice. She told me there was a richness in their history. “You have that in your blood.” In my blood. I felt an uneasiness wash over me, uncanny, the kind reserved for moments that exist on the edge of reality and a dream. But I held it tight in my chest and smiled. I looked down at my hand, pen poised on the page of my notebook, the interior of my right wrist pale. Looked down at the highway of blue and purple under my skin. |
Footnotes.
[1] King James Bible John 1:1
[2] https://www.christianunion.org/about/welcome
[3] https://www.christianunion.org/about/welcome
[4] https://www.christianunion.org/about/welcome
[5] https://www.christianunion.org/about/welcome
[6] https://www.christianunion.org/about/welcome
[7] Richard S. Hess, “The Religions of the People of Israel and Their Neighbours,” In The Old Testament in Archeology and History, ed. by Jennie Ebeling, J. Edward Wright, Mark Elliot, Paul V. M. Flesher (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2017) 477.
[8] Hess, “Religions of the People of Israel,” 477.
[1] King James Bible John 1:1
[2] https://www.christianunion.org/about/welcome
[3] https://www.christianunion.org/about/welcome
[4] https://www.christianunion.org/about/welcome
[5] https://www.christianunion.org/about/welcome
[6] https://www.christianunion.org/about/welcome
[7] Richard S. Hess, “The Religions of the People of Israel and Their Neighbours,” In The Old Testament in Archeology and History, ed. by Jennie Ebeling, J. Edward Wright, Mark Elliot, Paul V. M. Flesher (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2017) 477.
[8] Hess, “Religions of the People of Israel,” 477.