Life Is Not An Error
There is no way to “return to the faith of your childhood,” not really, not unless you’ve just woken from a decades-long and absolutely literal coma. Faith is not some half-remembered country into which you come like a long-exiled king, dispensing the old wisdom, casting out the radical, insurrectionist aspects of yourself by which you’d been betrayed. No. Life is not an error, even when it is. That is to say, whatever faith you emerge with at the end of your life is going to be not simply affected by that life but intimately dependent upon it, for faith in God is, in the deepest sense, faith in life—which means that even the staunchest life of faith is a life of great change. It follows that if you believe at fifty what you believed at fifteen, then you have not lived—or have denied the reality of your life.
–Christian Wiman, from My Bright Abyss
In these early weeks of launching St. Lucy’s, I’ve been thinking a good deal about who St. Lucy’s is for. After listening to the stories of those who have begun to gather with us, I have noticed some similar threads. There is, of course, the time of day—Sunday evenings tend to work for many folks when Sunday mornings do not—there’s the non-polished approach that we take to the liturgy, and the centrality and freedom of the kids in the service, but I’ve also noticed a deeper thread present among us: that of return.
Many of us, in coming to St. Lucy’s, are returning—from God-knows-where—to some part of ourselves. It might be some part of ourselves that we haven’t seen in a while, that we haven’t trusted in a while, or that we thought we had to leave behind. And in this return we have wondered if where we have been and what we have become will come together now, in this space.
I don’t know (obviously), but I hope so. Because “life is not an error, even when it is”—that is, even when we have made mistakes, when we might have taken the wrong turn, what we have become is not an error. And I suppose our ability to walk through and not around these wrong turns, to bring these mistakes with us rather than trying to avoid them, is all part of how it becomes less “error” and how it is that we can live in the reality of our lives and so of God. I believe it is in this reality, the one brave enough to live and change, that we can know the thrill of life in God.
And so I guess this is who St. Lucy’s is for: people who want to bring with them the whole of their lives because we understand that faith in that life, in all that it is, is a doorway to faith in God. My prayer and my hope is that coming to St. Lucy’s brings us back to ourselves and to a life of faith that can hold all that we are.
–Emily
