Introduction

I am currently completing a year in a Christian service corps program, and my coordinator, S., is fascinated that I identify as “not religious.” I like to consider metaphysical questions and discuss the uncertainties of human existence, but I was not raised religiously, nor do I operate day to day with a firm  sense of God or even a commitment to atheism. If I were religious, I would probably not be Christian. Yet here I am, fresh out of college with a degree in religious studies-- with a focus on Christianity-- living in a historical New York City church and, for the third time in my life, receiving paychecks from a church.

I'm one of those people that Christians probably talk about behind her back. “She may not know it, but she'll be Christian one day,” they'd say. “She seems riper for conversion every day.”

During our biweekly, one on one meetings, S. holds her backpack to her chest as we sit in a cafe and leans over it like a cheerful kitten clutching her first mouse. She is a woman of wisdom, but sometimes her manner, and her massive and adorable eyes, remind me more of youth than middle age. Her brow furrows slightly as she leans forward, and asks,

“Do you feel... spiritual at all?”

It's a genuine, fascinated, uncritical question, but it puts me on the defensive. Around S., I find myself trying to be even less spiritual than I actually am, lest she snatch the word 'God' out of my mouth and start a mad, joyous jig in a circle, right there in the cafe, singing, “She is! She is! I knew it!”

So I say, "not really."

One night, the other volunteers and I sat in our apartment living room holding a book club meeting with S. and the church reverend. I had recommended Franny and Zooey, one of my favorite books, for that month. After the reverend and I batted back theories about the book back and forth for awhile, S. got her thinking face on.

“Would you say,” she said, holding the book out with one hand and bobbing it up and down with each word as she spoke. “Would you say that this book,” (dramatic pause) “defines your spirituality?” My housemates all exchanged glances with each other, half anticipatory, half amused, and I feel bouyed up by them-- for all of their spiritual goals, they have been wonderfully supportive of me and my religiousless-ness, and we've joked before about her questions to find me otherwise.

“No.” I said flatly.

But in truth, yes. Franny and Zooey does mean a lot to me spiritually, even as I hesitate to use the word. In that, it's been formative to my thinking and feels deeply right in many ways. I always finish rereading it and feel like bursting open some elaborate french doors and breathing in all the glory of life as birds sing and young girls luxuriously roll over in bed.

So I am left to wonder: why has this year, in which I am living in an intentionally Christian world, been all about my own defensiveness about and denial of my own beliefs? It's not genuine, and frankly I don't really like it. I'm tired of defining myself as the “apartment atheist,” an epithet I've fed to my roommates.

It's not that I'm not an atheist-- I just don't feel particularly atheist sometimes, nor do I feel theist, nor do I like the idea of being agnostic. But that's where my difficulty lies-- muddled in metaphysical currents on all sides, as a young woman who has studied religion from the outside for so long and been so fascinated by faith, I am unclear on what I believe. I do not know how to talk about it, which words to use.

Belief is notoriously hard to put into words for most people, but its a difficulty that the more Christian of my housemates encounter in the different way. I stand wistfully listening over the stove, waiting for my spaghetti water to boil as they sit on the couch beside me snacking and comparing church services, discussing their own struggles with the church, their changing conception of Christ in specific terms.

I can, though, point to stories, poems, ideas, experiences, and places that affect me in a deeper way than mere admiration or inspiration. And in writing, I feel like I transcend my worldly self in some way, and tap into a more boiled down essence of myself.

So these series of writings are meant to start at other people's words and arrive at my own. This writing intends to be a more trusting revelation to my dear housemates; a more complex answer than the atheism I conform to alongside my sister and some of my dearest friends; and it is a more genuine answer to S.