"How do you manage?"
"I just do."
"How do you do it?"
"You might as well ask me how I breathe."
I was raised to fight this hard.
I do not believe in raised Christians. Meaning, I do not believe that someone can be raised a Christian. They can be raised in a Christian household... but standing in a garage doesn't make you a car. I believe that Christians are grown. They evolve naturally, the way a plant is first a bloom, and then a seed, and finally a living thing.
I think we all, as human beings, grow and change over the course of our lives. We are influenced by how much sun and how much rain and how many rocks and how many weeds but most of us do manage to transform from one thing to another and another all through our years. And I think that more of us grow to be Christians than know it.
You are sitting on the rooftop at my side and you are renaming constellations, making up new mythology for them. All of your myths involve young heroes forced again and again to prove themselves to the even the people who love them. Most of your heroes are plain-looking, by your descriptions "unremarkable" or even "odd." All of your heroes are men.
As I sit silently and listen to you, just talking softly while I type with the FlipStart on my knees, I think to myself that you are a Christian and you don't even know it. This voice of guidance and solace that whispers to you in the night and in your dreams and when you lean in pointedly, is so obviously the voice of Christ. But you insist you believe nothing. When our soul leaves our body (and you do admit that the soul is part of our anatomy) it simply does something, goes somewhere but this life is all there is.
You think that makes you not a Christian.
I think that makes you content. You are unafraid to spend your days -- two or twenty thousand -- living fully in your body.
A friend says to me:
"If her touch is the height of sensation I will ever feel... if the most divine moments of my existence are beneath her hands, her mouth... than I walk willingly into any den of lions, into any fire. Christ has placed her in my life and I rejoice with every fiber of my being. I know eternity in her arms."
This is what Terrapyres are. Those children of Fallen Angels and man who are half of the Mardi Gras 3000 brand. They are my messengers. They present a type of Christianity that is alive and untamed, untethered to church or pulpit. They crackle with passion, with seize the moment, with joy. They tumble into oceans of emotion, of possibilities, of experiences and emerge, surface, better people. They cast aside the question of cultural, popular ethics and ethos and embrace transcendent living that is painful, that is brilliant, that is everything beating in their racing hearts.
I think a Christian has to be that alive. There is no such thing as an "arm chair believer."
It seems simple, but I will say it again and again:
I love your loud laughter. I love your bawdy humor. I love your harsh critique and your selfless nature. You are a small woman who takes big risks. You are a fighter, a lover, a charmer, a mother... a Christian. With leather jacket and right wristlet, in dancing, beaded braids and burning eyes, you are everything Christ demanded of us.
We need more warriors to wake up and realize that they have been Christians all along. We need more gamers to wake up and realize that they can change the world because they form their own mythos. We need to wake up and see dawn and accept it as the miracle it is.
My friend writes to me:
"Like the rain when it isn't falling across my face, like the sun on snowy nights, like the sight of the sea beyond the porch, and the crash of the waves throughout the night... I miss you. I think of you. I am not alone but I feel something is missing and it lies in the miles between us. That something is you. Sister. Soldier. Please know I am with you."
And every day when I wake, I realize I am more Awake than ever before. I am not interested in spending my days simply existing, but rather I want to be fully alive. Seize the day is too simple. I want to seize my own potential. Not do everything I want, but to do everything I do to the best of my ability -- beyond my best.
I want the rain on my face. I want the sun. I want the snowy nights. The sea. Your kiss. Your hands in my hair. The heat of our bodies. The cold of the starlight. The speed of my bike, the beat of the music. If I miss you (and I do) than I want to feel it, a tangible ache in my chest. I would rather yearn for you, my sister, my soldier, my friend, than feel nothing.
I don't think a real Christian can feel nothing.
And I have never felt more real.
EJ
