Light poured through the tall, clear glass windows, as I watched the priest and deacon, in their embroidered robes, bow to each other, touch communion wafers, and pray over the congregation with their hands extended. They looked to each other and to God, while we stared back at them.
As an adolescent, I found it deeply disturbing that women could not be priests in the Catholic Church. I decided, early on, that I wasn’t interested in performing the mental gymnastics required to justify the glaring misogyny.
Instead, when I attended Mass, I’d turn my head from the altar to look at the women in the congregation, standing quietly next to their husbands or handing cheerios and coloring books to their children. “Why are they still here?” I’d wonder, while preparing a litany of critiques to recite to my parents during the car ride home.
How vulnerable we women, young and old, all looked standing in the congregation, knowing nothing we touched would ever become sacred. We bowed our heads as men decided what needed regulation and how to turn paradox into binaries of good and evil.
In this patriarchal world, God was a father, and the word of God was filtered through the narrow sieve of male experience. Faith was the Catechism of the Catholic Church, reciting prayers already written and memorized, following the rules.
*
In my mid-twenties, I woke up at 3:00 am every day for nine months: my nightly vigil during my first year in divinity school. Right on cue, my eyes snapped open and my heart beat faster, as unmanageable, existential questions flooded my mind. What happens after we die? What is the meaning of human existence? How could God possibly exist?
In the stillest, darkest, hour of the night, I stared out the large window of my New York apartment. The harsh fluorescent lights of the empty office building across the street poured over me.
Early in the academic year, I’d been warned, “You will fall. You will stumble. Divinity school will deconstruct every aspect of your faith, and you will need to rebuild,” but I was skeptical. On the first day of orientation, I couldn’t even answer the simple question, “What denomination are you?” Honestly, what “faith” did I have to lose?
I chose divinity school for religion’s deep well of ancient wisdom and the long-standing connection between social justice movements and virtue ethics, not to become a chaplain or a minister. And yet, under the weight of competing epistemologies, my worldview had crumbled. The piecemeal spirituality from which I’d gathered strength seemed hollow and fragile.
Sleep-deprived, I scanned the graduate community bulletin board one morning and came across a puzzling line in an introduction for a speaker, “Her faith never wavered.” My throat dried and tightened. My “faith” wavered by the hour. In the morning, hope brimmed. By the afternoon, I’d remember the ephemerality of life. By the evening, I’d read ugly statements about women in the Bible and want to scream. By 3:00 am, I sat in silence on the couch, bathed in artificial light.
It took over a year, but the edges of my existential angst eventually softened. Richard Rohr writes of faith and religion: “In the West, religion became preoccupied with telling people what to know more than how to know, telling people what to see more than how to see… It has been like trying to view the galaxies with a $5 pair of binoculars.” Reading the words of mystics helped me see faith not as a set of beliefs to agree with or a set of sins to avoid, but rather as a way of being, seeing, and relating.
In a recent lecture, Rohr spoke to a group of students, of which I was one, studying contemplative religion, “The opposite of faith is not doubt. The opposite of faith is certitude.” In divinity school, I learned to stop striving for certitude. I learned new ways of knowing, finding telescopes and tracing constellations in the dark.
*
This August, we lost my mother-in-law, after a confusing, painful battle with an aggressive form of cancer. Hearing she had taken her last breath felt impossible, surreal, brutal, inescapable at once, as though life had suddenly turned to sand and slipped through my fingers.
There is nothing beautiful about death. No amount of theological education or hours spent worrying about the nature of life can prepare one for the exquisite pain of loss. Yet life is stitched alongside death, beauty alongside loss. Even in the midst of a global pandemic, economic uncertainty, political turmoil, a terminal illness, and grief, beauty remained. The beauty of life, of her life, was saturated. We grieve, after all, because we love.
Soren Kierkegaard writes, “When in the dark night of suffering, sagacity cannot see a handbreadth ahead of it, then faith can see God, since faith sees best in the dark.” This is the gift of faith – the ability to see the sacred in the mundane, the willingness to be awed by beauty, and the wisdom to attend to human vulnerability. Faith, in the aftermath of loss, is no more tangible than it was before. Faith is still unintelligible wisdom, still the practice of seeing in the dark.
For so much of my life, I have railed against mystery, demanding recognition and answers. But now, finding myself in the midst of it, I feel both hope and grief, both joy and sadness, both gratitude and loss. Surrounded by the love of family, life, even from within the bleakness of loss, is somehow thickened by grace.
Sarah James is a graduate of Middlebury College and Yale Divinity School. Her writing appears in Earth & Altar, Darling, and Patheos.
