Faith and Other Flat Tires: A Memoir

Introduction

STRIPPING OFF THE ICHTHUS

During my junior year in college, I took a butter knife from my mother’s kitchen one afternoon and scraped the Christian fish decal off the back bumper of my Plymouth hatchback. The car was a tin can on wheels. The outside door handle on the driver’s side came off in your hand sometimes, and the engine reeked of sulfur when you drove uphill. My older brother, Ben, had the car for a few years and drove his first girlfriend around in it. After he graduated from college, the car became mine.

On the back bumper, Ben had stuck one of those faux-chrome Ichthus decals that you can buy at Christian bookstores. I don’t know what exactly prompted me to scrape it off, but I can still remember the series of steps I took in doing it. I pulled open the kitchen drawer, lifted a butter knife from the silverware tray, and then walked out into the street where the car was parked. Squatting near the tailpipe, I scratched off the fish decal and with relief watched it fall away in small flakes. I wanted the car as neutral space. I wanted an unmarked car as a symbol of an unmarked heart.

The reasons for my discontent were complicated. I wasn’t raised by zealous, overbearing parents, and I didn’t grow up in a hyper-conservative church. Roughly the first six years of my life were spent in East Africa, where my parents worked as Quaker medical missionaries. When I was seven, we moved to the Pacific Northwest and started attending a Presbyterian church that over the years gave me hymns and mission trips and potluck dinners. I grew up in a healthy Christian home and a healthy Christian community. And yet, beginning in adolescence, I started questioning everything I’d been raised to believe.

One of the stories of my Christian childhood was The Pilgrim’s Progress, the allegory of faith written in 1678 by John Bunyan. In the story, Pilgrim (or Christian) leaves behind his family and goes on a lifelong pilgrimage in search of heaven, the Celestial City. The characters — like Mr. Great Heart, Mr. Worldly Wiseman, and Obstinate — symbolize different qualities that either bolster or weaken a person’s faith. The places — like Doubting Castle, the Slough of Despond, and the Hill of Difficulty — symbolize different episodes in a person’s spiritual journey. My parents read The Pilgrim’s Progress to my brothers and me when we were growing up. Sprawled out on my mother’s lap, I would listen to her voice carry across countries of myth and imagination while Pilgrim went on his epic journey, slaying dragons and getting sucked into mud pits.

The story of The Pilgrim’s Progress had a campy, otherworldly quality that I loved as a kid. But once I became a young adult, my own life more and more started to resemble Pilgrim’s. I passed through episodes of doubt, faith, and despondency. Different people traveled with me along the various stretches of my journey. Never as straightforward as the characters in an allegory — conveniently named Charity and Help or Lord Hate-good and Beelzebub — the people in my life were less caricatured and more complex. Some of them turned me toward faith, some turned me away from faith, and some did both. Some traveled with me for discreet episodes and some for decades.

The most unsettling part of my pilgrimage took place during my early twenties, right after college. When people muse to me about how fondly they remember that era of their lives, I want to say, What were you smoking back then, and what are you smoking now? My twenties were marked mostly by disillusionment. After graduating, I worked four part-time jobs to pay the bills and lived alone for a time in an old apartment. I fell in love with complicated men — including someone twice my age who had a messy marriage history — and found myself perpetually brokenhearted. And I indulged the cliché rebellions of a Christian girl, experimenting with cigarettes, hanging out in bars, and drinking hard alcohol.

If I follow the standard testimonial conversion narrative for Christians, what I’m supposed to say next is that all of this secularity I experienced led me to question my faith. The script goes something like this:

Step 1: Grow up in a Christian church.

Step 2: Go off to college away from said church.

Step 3: Be exposed to the enticements of secular life.

Step 4: Try drugs and cigarettes and Pearl Jam.

Step 5: Leave the church because of so-called worldly enticements.

Step 6: Experience epiphany; realize vapidness of said secular things.

Step 7: Return to church with penitent heart.

Step 8: Reestablish faith, discover good living.

The pilgrimage is never that straightforward, at least not for most of us. The path I took both paralleled and deviated from this script and was motivated less by external influences and more by my own spiritual unrest.

During college, I thought of my struggle in terms of the literature I was reading. I discovered the southern Catholic writer Walker Percy and read his novel The Moviegoer, a less explicitly Christian, more contemporary version of The Pilgrim’s Progress. In The Moviegoer, the main character, Binx Bolling, goes on what he calls the search, roaming around the streets of New Orleans trying to find God and meaning in the modern malaise. He feels lost, listless, and alone.

Turn-of-the-century German poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote too about the search, but in different terms. During my senior year, one of my English professors read me a poem from Rilke’s Das Stundenbuch (A Book for the Hours of Prayer). While I was sitting in the English lounge one afternoon, he came into the room carrying a book in that priestly way that professors do. He stood opposite me and began to read aloud:

Sometimes a man stands up during supper

and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,

because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.

And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.

And another man, who remains inside his own house,

stays there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,

so that his children have to go far out into the world

toward that same church, which he forgot.

I won’t attempt to interpret the whole poem here. But in the first stanza, the man who walks out of the house seems to be going on a spiritual journey in search of God, just as Bunyan’s Pilgrim does. I see my own story too as a pilgrimage. For me, though, the end point was always unclear. I didn’t know whether I was leaving the church to find God or leaving my Christian childhood for a different kind of faith or something else entirely. Mostly I just felt confused. I progressed, regressed, retraced my steps, and got lost. If I were a Christian at all, then I was an Old Testament Christian prone to David’s longing, Ruth’s homelessness, and Solomon’s love of beauty and dominion.

As a coming-of-age experience, my pilgrimage was motivated by three separate but concurrent desires for faith, love, and meaning. I was trying to find purpose in my work, a partner on my journey, and a worldview I could believe in. I felt compelled to search for God at the same time that I harbored serious doubts and questions: why does God seem distant? Why do people suffer? Why does the church seem dysfunctional? The questions started weighing down my heart like stones and eventually became too much for me to handle. At age twenty-three, I stepped over the threshold of the church and walked away. I had no idea if I would come back.

This book tells the story of what came of my search. It is written for people who, like me, find themselves driven by doubt and wandering the margins in search of a place to call home.

PART ONE

THE HOUSE OF THE INTERPRETER

A CHILDHOOD RETROSPECTIVE

The House of the Interpreter is a rest stop along the way, a type of spiritual museum providing guidance to Pilgrim and his companions on the road. It contains pictures and dioramas that portray aspects of the Christian faith and lessons on how to live the Christian life.

Chapter 1

MUNGU YU MWEMA

Me with Betsy Kamuka, upper left

One winter afternoon when I was twelve years old, my father picked up a hitchhiker. My two brothers were sitting with me in the back seat of our Plymouth Voyager van, which my grandfather had hauled off the junkyard and rebuilt. The cars we drove were all orphans that had been rolled or flooded or wrecked. The Voyager had a big dent in the sliding door from a downhill tumble.

The hitchhiker looked sixteen or seventeen, a tall Scandinavian wearing blue jeans with big holes in the knees. It was thirty-five degrees out. He ducked his head and climbed into the van with us, and then my dad drove on. The ensuing conversation, which I will never forget, went something like this:

These are my kids, Andrea, Ben, and Nate. My name’s Sam. What’s your name?

Donovan, the hitchhiker said.

Oh, that’s a good name. My father paused. Have you ever heard of Amy Carmichael?

Um, no …

She was a Christian missionary to India who worked to save young girls from sex trade enslavement. The place where she worked was called Dohnavur, which is kind of close to your name, Donovan. So you have a good name, a name with Christian purpose.

Oh.

In the hitchhiker’s long pause that followed, I remember thinking, My father is out of his mind, preying on this young hitchhiker who wanted a ride and instead got a church sermon on Christian missionary history. I felt embarrassed in the same way I did when my dad prayed over our food in a restaurant and the waiter brought the ketchup while he was still praying.

Donovan rode with us for several miles until we reached the cut-off road to our house. After pulling the van onto the shoulder to let him out, my dad turned to my older brother, who was about the same size as the hitchhiker, and said, Ben, why don’t you give Donovan your jeans. It’s cold out.

In the back seat of the van, Ben took off his pants and gave them to the hitchhiker while my little brother and I looked sideways at each other. Proverbial Christian wisdom says you give away the coat off your back, not the pants off your backside. In exchange for my brother’s jeans, the hitchhiker handed over his own — the jeans with big holes in the knees — and my brother wrestled them on. Then Donovan got out. He was headed farther north toward Canada. I watched from the back seat as he diminished into the distance, a tall, lean figure standing on the side of a long winter road.

These years later, I remember the whole exchange as a small act of goodness. My father, the funny priest, blessed a hitchhiker not with holy water but with jeans. I can see this only in retrospect, though. Then, in my early teens, my mom and dad seemed painfully Christian and parental. After supper every night we had what was called family time. We sometimes took walks in the woods or played card games, but more often than not, my dad directed us in an intellectual exercise of some kind. He would stride over to the living room bookshelves to find a book like Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, then read a passage aloud and try to engage us in dialogue. On occasion, he slid out one of the burgundy volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which my mom had bought from a door-to-door salesman in the mid-1980s. Family time turned into the Jeopardy game show, except that we didn’t win any money and Dad got to pick the categories: French Huguenot history for 200. Invertebrate biology for 300.

Dad, I have no idea, I said in response to one of his trivia questions. "You know I don’t know. Cut me a break."

My father’s most notorious family time activities weren’t academic or literary; they were spiritual. He would ask us questions like, How did you see the presence of God in your day today? Or, as a way to bring together humor, metaphor, and my mother’s dinner menu, he would ask, How is the Christian life like a plate full of spaghetti? My brothers and I had to ponder the analogy — maybe grace is a good meatball? — and then after a while, one of us would hold up our shackled wrists and ask to be excused.

My mother too had intense parenting tics. As an exhippy who didn’t want her kids to end up brainwashed by mainstream America, she initiated a loosely mandated ban against instruments of pop and consumer culture. On her list of taboos:

TV = lazy bones

Video games = bad reader

Headphones = bad listener

Sunglasses = bad eye contact

You can’t trust a person who hides his eyes, she would say. You look a person right in the eye; that’s what you do.

My parents never bought a TV. Instead of watching cartoons, we read comic books, kids books, and biographies of Christian history. My mother read us stories about Amy Carmichael, the missionary to India, and George Washington Carver, the African-American botanist who in the 1920s helped alleviate poverty in the South. After dinner every night, my parents took turns reading aloud to the whole family from books like the Lord of the Rings series and the Narnia series.

Along with the taboos and the TV alternatives, my parents developed an arsenal of Christian character-forming mantras that were meant to counter the excesses of Western individualism (like selfishness) and teach us how to be strong, brave, and good.

Mantra 1: Love is a choice, not a feeling.

This phrase was meant to help us overcome the weak, bleeding-heart melodrama of teen and preteen behavior. Before I was even old enough to have a crush on the kid next door, I knew love and marriage were not about romance but about choice, commitment, and endurance. Heavy stuff for a ten-year-old. I tease my parents now for laying on their kids such crushing truths of life, but they were honest, at least, doing their best to abolish the delusions of childhood.

Mantra 2: Happiness is a choice.

As a sibling mantra to Love is a choice, this phrase meant Quit your bellyaching. Check your attitude.

Mantra 3: It’s good missionary training.

My parents used this phrase when my brothers and I complained about doing things we didn’t like. It became the catch-all call for Buck up and deal with it and sometimes involved leaning over our dinner plates to shovel in the beans that we didn’t want to eat.

Mantra 4: Choices have consequences.

This phrase usually came before a spank to the backside and was another way of saying, You chose this, not me. Try door number two next time.

Mantra 5: Go M.A.D.

M.A.D. was an acronym for make a difference. After hearing the phrase from Christian radio host Ron Hutch-craft, my mother started using it every day as my brothers and I walked out the door to catch the school bus. Kids, not just adults, were responsible to help alleviate the burden of the human condition by making the world a better place to live.

Going M.A.D. took various forms. When I was eight, my parents signed up to be foster parents with a humanitarian organization called Healing the Children, which brought patients from all over the world for medical treatment in the US. My brothers and I became temporary siblings to kids with brittle bone disease and Down syndrome who came for months or sometimes years to live with us. We pushed them around in their wheelchairs, played with them, and shared our bedrooms with them.

As if being a foster family wasn’t enough, after school once a week my mom took us to visit elderly widows from the church who were cooped up at home watching TV and reading large-print copies of Reader’s Digest. You’re ambassadors for the family, my mother said as we walked up to the front door of a widow’s house. That was another one of her parenting mantras. In other words: Be good. Do good.

In so many ways, it humors me to remember the intensity of how I was raised. As the architects of my childhood, my parents mixed hippy social-justice values and Christian values to reinforce one overarching principle: anything that distracts you from a fierce focus on God, meaning, and the amelioration of suffering is not worth a cat sniff. Life was all about the big stuff — reaping wisdom from epic allegories like The Pilgrim’s Progress and saving girls from sex exploitation.

Even now, I can still picture my mom holding up books at the dining room table and reading to us from those stories of hope and humanity. I can still remember my father saying in so many words to a hitchhiker, Your name means something. Your life means something too. A Christian, moral, and philanthropic imperative motivated my mom and dad. It drove them as parents. It also drove them in their decision to go to Africa as missionaries.

When my parents were first married back in the early ‘70s, they spent five years in Tucson while my dad did his internal medicine residency at the University of Arizona. At a church potluck sometime at the end of his residency, my parents heard about a Quaker organization called Friends United Meeting that was looking for medical missionary volunteers. My parents applied and then accepted an invitation to go to Africa. In July of 1979, we flew to England so my dad could attend tropical medicine school for three months. Then we moved to East Africa, where we lived for almost six years.

The Quakers commissioned my parents to the Lugulu Friends Hospital in a rural agrarian area of western Kenya. The town of Lugulu had a quarter-mile strip of dukas, small storefronts made of mud thatch with corrugated tin pinned down for roofs. In the farm fields outside town, women worked by hand with their babies tied on their backs, tilling their way across the wide countryside of the western highlands. It was an eight-hour drive from Lugulu to Nairobi. International mail took weeks and often months to reach us. Phone calls cost a fortune. We lived out in the bush, as people called it. The US was so far away that in 1981 when we got a package from Uncle John in Chicago containing an audiocassette of the ethereal music to Chariots of Fire, my parents thought the film was about aliens.

The story of my parents’ first year as missionaries is part of family lore. When we first arrived, Ben at age five learned from his new Kenyan friends how to swear in Bukusu, the local tribal language. One of the neighbors came to my mother and said, Do you know what your son’s saying? My mom was appalled. Ben was sitting at the top of a guava tree cussing. Not long afterward, he threw a stick at our next-door neighbor, a woman named Florah. Throwing sticks at the neighbor doesn’t usually come recommended in the manual on how to start missionary life. Swearing from the top of a tree doesn’t come recommended either.

As the child of my missionary parents, I have my own memories, one of which is captured in a photograph that I’ve kept all these years. My brothers and I are sitting with our dad in a dead baobab tree. We’re crouched together in the heart of the tree where the branches depart from the trunk, looking small in the great expanse around us and yet safe in our father’s arms. The picture is framed in a wide panorama. Mount Kilimanjaro rises behind us. The Rift Valley savanna spreads out to the east and west, part of a three-thousand-mile basin that cuts a long swathe from Syria all the way south to Mozambique.

Historically, the Rift is purported to be the origin of all humanity. To me, it represents the origin of my childhood not just geographically — I grew up on the high plains that run west of the Rift — but spiritually. I came to faith in that place. The trajectory of my spiritual history began there. My relationship with the church began there too.

Every Sunday in Lugulu, we attended a nondenominational church that met in an A-frame auditorium. I liked church as a kid. For most of the service,