Reconnection

Facebook has presented me with a few awkward moments, such as friend suggestions for people I don't know, or friend requests from people that a reluctant soul-searching process reveals I don't like.  However, this weekend Facebook presented me with a really delightful experience: an old friend and his wife that I got connected with just this past week had posted pictures of a trip to this area, and I happened to see the pictures Friday and posted, "If you're ever in the area again, let me know."  Within an hour or two, I'd gotten a note back saying, "Guess where we are right now?"

So the long and short of it is that my prayer partner from college, E, and his wife, B, and their two sons ages 4 and 6 went to church with us this morning and out to lunch afterward, just before they headed back to their home several hours from here.  I don't think I had seen E since his wedding the summer after my senior year in college, but our friendship was formative for me because during college, I came to terms with my faith in some foundational ways.  I had attended a very somber Baptist church all my life, with preaching straight out of the King James Version, and I had never experienced any kind of fellowship, or really even happiness in church, even though the experience of private prayer did make me happy sometimes.  Faith to me meant reading the Bible and muddling along trying to do what it said and talking tentatively to God along the way.  It was kind of lonely, though in a way that I never noticed because I thought everyone was alone in it.  But in college, I discovered lots of people whom I could enjoy and admire, who were fun and cool (in the nerdy way of my school) and hilarious and endlessly kind and grappling with the tough issues of faith without flinching, really wanting to be changed by the things they believed to be true.  

Still, I didn't know any of the songs or even some basic Christian ideas (the Bible being rather confusing on many points), and in that sense, I was kind of wide-eyed for my whole first year.  I remember at one meeting there was singing, and one very kind person noticed I wasn't singing along and said, "For the next song, let's do something Tara knows." And I didn't know a single song.  Not that anyone cared, but there was clearly a culture that I wasn't aware of--and that I still have ambivalent feelings about, though its expression in that context was entirely sweet and welcoming.

E was the opposite, the son of two professors at a Christian college, very well read in Christian theology and source documents in other religions too.  We were opposite in other ways too--I was tidy and prim, whereas I'm pretty sure I once saw E pick a piece of skin off his foot and eat it. During a meeting.  A prayer meeting.  One that he may have been leading.  But we'd gotten paired up in a random match as prayer partners in our first semester in college, and we met every week for the rest of my time there, often walking all over campus for hours and talking about all the big ideas and tender ideals and bold hopes that you have when you're in college.  I think that relationship gave form for me to the idea that faith can make us brothers and sisters, connected by a bond that is not at all romantic, yet is powerful and affectionate and resilient.  

Seeing him and his wife today made me remember what I loved so much about my college friends: the sense that the endlessness of the pursuit of holiness (and by that I don't mean being prim--I mean being broken and changed and made more humble and generous and forgiving) was not discouraging but invigorating, filled with joyous possibility.

At this point in my life, it sometimes feels like the elements I have to work with in relating to God have changed so entirely that I don't know where His alchemy even begins.  I don't mind, and I'm not worried, in that I know that God seeks us (as C.S. Lewis once said, talking about my pursuit of God is like talking about a mouse's pursuit of a cat), but it has been a bit disorienting.  I feel like someone who was once a runner, accustomed to the ease of keeping up a steady pace without having to think about it, and after some surgery or something, all my coordination is all different, and I lurch along in a somewhat horrifying manner.  What once felt easy seems awkward a lot of the time, even as I know that it's just part of the new way I live now.  It was nice to be around old friends, to remember how they once surrounded me and buoyed me along, and to see them further along in their family life and know that hopefully, my strides will even out a little more too in time.