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altView: holly ballard
I don’t know what I believe. That’s kind of a relief, actually, as it’s taken me about seven years to say. Since my fundamentalist upbringing never left a lot of room for doubt, I spent a lot of time bottling up the truth, which was that I no longer knew what capital-T Truth was. Admitting this to myself was difficult enough, but I also found myself faced with a somehow more daunting dilemma: how do I continue to function honestly in the Christian community without people I love rejecting me or—worse—worrying about me? Each time I would come close to exposing the true nature of my (un)belief, I could think only of a time when I had been kept up at night in anguish over a lost soul. What did I do now that that lost soul was me?
My initial solution was not to abandon my challenging but ultimately comfortable beliefs. Instead, I began reading trendy Christian books that pecked at the problem of faith but never really gave me room to doubt. I also tried a couple of newer, less-traditional churches that offered a far cry from the “as together we stand and sing” services of my youth. I was disappointed to find beneath the exciting packaging only the same suffocating space. Throughout this process, I continued trying to keep everyone convinced I wasn’t undergoing a crisis of faith; you may be unsurprised to hear I eventually gave up on the whole thing altogether.
But the whole thing, it turns out, didn’t give up on me. When I didn’t know what else to do, I turned away from institutions and to the only thing that ever consistently made sense to me. That was, and remains, love. The majority of what I’d call worship in the last few years has been simply connecting with other people, namely Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley and Jason Baldwin, three men who I’m convinced were wrongfully convicted of murder and who have spent the last 16 years of their lives in prison. The steps that brought me to this case and the relationships I have forged since are nothing if not spiritual.
It seems to me that every act of love, no matter how small, is an act of worship. My current beliefs about spirituality can, I suppose, best be summed up by a fairly blasphemous thought that occurred to me one morning as I was driving home from a night drinking with friends: it was the most worshipful few hours I’d had in a very long time.
It happened that Sunday morning as it often happens to me now. When all is quiet, the sorrows and joys of the day sometimes transform into tiny prayers I didn’t realize I intended to say until they’ve already materialized. I’m still not sure who I’m talking to, but the interconnectedness of all things constantly draws me back to something bigger. And—get this—I actually believe I’ve found a place where I can openly and honestly figure out the rest.
Sadly (as you likely know) most Christians never figure out what you have, despite all of their knowledge and their doctrine and their big church services.
We talk a lot about how Jesus is the center of Christian Faith, but few Christians seem to have any true faith in Love. Or a willingness to live it out.