Returning Home

My "Liberal Drift" Explained

I come from the blazing light and oppressive heat of the Louisiana sun and from the warm grass, parched beneath it.

My heritage is a pink King James Bible with gold edging, engraved with the name Dean Perrilloux, my grandmother and patron saint.

When I was young and vital my soul pulsed with energy and I would lie on the parched grass under a pecan tree, with the pink Bible held tightly to my chest, and I would revel with God.

I use the word revel purposefully.

I talked to God about my troubles, dreams, and hopes. I smiled and lifted my voice and laughed as I planned my days with my Friend and complained about those who wronged me. I cried astringent tears over my sins, of which I kept a careful accounting.

My sun-darkened skin glistened with sweat as I stayed in conversation with my Divine Parent for long afternoons, looking as strange as could be to my siblings and neighbors. And strange I certainly was, there’s no denying it. Each day before school I would tell Jesus to get in my pocket so he could go with me into the savage coliseum that was elementary school. When I was bullied or insecure or felt like crying, and there were countless of those times in my childhood, I would pull him out and talk to him.

Audibly. I didn’t care much who knew it either.

What I find fascinating, looking back on little, sweaty me reveling in grass, is this: though I hated myself through and through, I somehow sensed that it was plain truth that there was a Divine Being to talk to and that this Divine Being loved me.

Many mornings I woke up feeling on fire with Divine Love. I simply reveled in the greatest luck in the world – that I was accepted, and wanted, and loved by something so much greater than my mind could comprehend.

Photo by Nadine Shaabana on Unsplash

In tenth grade I signed up for a through-the-mail Bible study program out of Arkansas. I don’t remember how I learned of it, but I began the correspondence course with the earnestness of a Harvard Divinity student on scholarship. I wrote copious notes for every chapter of the Bible, filled notebooks answering the questions from each lesson.

I read of the retributive justice and possessive love of YHWH in the Hebrew scriptures right alongside the non-violent and gentle-loving teachings of Jesus. At the time, I didn’t know enough about how to read scripture to question the seeming disparity. The only certainty I had was the one I gathered from my own experiences with God – that God’s disposition toward me was one of love and grace, and somehow I saw that writ large on every page.

The overlay about the God of wrath, who despises human bodies (especially women’s bodies), who can barely tolerate the stench of our collective sin, who has destined certain humans for eternal conscious torment, who demands right thinking and correct confession, who relishes punishing sinners, who expects us to swallow our suffering with piety and perfection, who comes with a sword to divide and conquer, had not yet infected my young brain. Again, I find it fascinating that I was reading the same Bible then as I did later in life, but I wasn’t privileging the God-of-wrath parts over the God-is-love parts. I naturally understood that though it might not make perfect sense, somehow love was the lynchpin to it all.

I didn’t realize it then, but those angry-God teachings were barreling toward me. I was one church service away from having my image of God radically altered. I would studiously learn those teachings and strive to believe them, and the consequences would be the near death of my beautiful faith. When you hate yourself through and through, it’s not a stretch to find out God pretty much does too. It wasn’t a stretch, but it was shattering. I had to turn away from what I knew, experientially, of God to live a godly lifestyle.

That’s heartbreaking irony, isn’t it?

But it didn’t start that way. In the beginning there was God and me, the grass and the sun, the Bible and the Baptists who taught me that God had but one heart posture toward me and it was one of love.

Photo by Ruben Engel on Unsplash

Some of you dear readers have been with me for years. I can’t tell you how much that tickles me and honors me all at the same time. You have so many people vying for your attention and so many worthy things to read and absorb. The fact that you read what I write will never stop humbling me.

And it occurs to me that you may have noticed a change in me over the years, specifically in how I talk about God, sin, folks on the margins, and the Church. You may have detected that I long ago began what people in theological spaces call the “liberal drift.”

The truth is, I both have and I haven’t.

In the sense that I no longer subscribe to Western, American Evangelical interpretations of scripture, culture, and institutionalized Christianity, I have certainly changed. Yet, I don’t consider myself liberal and I did not arrive here by “drifting.” Drifting makes it sound like I just aimlessly meandered around until I found myself here. The truth is every shift in my theology, philosophy, and worldview has happened with deep research, conversation in community, wrestling, getting feedback from people on all sides of issues, and – most importantly – listening to God inside of myself.

Much like teenage me pouring over scripture with highlighter and notebook in hand, I continue to approach all things related to my Creator in this manner. It’s the most important part of my life. And in the sense that this kind of deep diving informs everything I do, it is my life.

I shared the story at the beginning of this piece because it highlights that I haven’t so much changed as I have returned home. My young heart intuited that God is real and that God is love. I experienced communion with God in personal ways that can never be taken from me. When I went to church, I learned that Jesus is God’s Son come to earth to save us, redeem us, and teach us what love is. I learned that the Holy Spirit lives on the inside of me and interacts with me. I learned that we’re all God’s children because we’re all made in God’s image. This tracked with my intuition that everyone and everything is infused with magic, what I now call sacredness.

In other words, at forty-three years old, I have returned to the faith I had as a child, when I was a religious tabula rasa and lived from the assumption that I was loved, wanted, and accepted despite all the facts about me that made that reality seem impossible. And once I humbled myself sufficiently to accept my young faith again, the aperture of my soul was opened to the fact that everyone on earth is in the same boat with me.

Little me was bold and unformed and could get “too big for her britches” as my Maw Maw, and patron saint, would say. I’m less bold and more formed than I was then, but I still tend to get too big for my britches at times. I apologize in advance for when I do this, and I hope you’ll extend me grace because I strive to only get hot-headed when there’s good reason to do so.

And that’s the extent of my liberal drift. It’s nothing more and nothing less than an unshakable trust that God is love and because of that we are safe with God. The way we live, when informed by that trust, will lead to transformation – eventually, and in very unexpected ways.

Over the course of the next few posts, I will share more about the major ways my faith has shifted and why. I won’t just rattle on about speculative theology. I will tell my stories. I hope you’ll stick around and engage if any of it resonates with you. But, even if you decide to unsubscribe because I’ve just gone a little too far for your comfort, I understand. And I will revel with God in the grass in prayer for you, blessing the time we’ve shared together anyway.

Xoxo,

Amber

“The sacrifice of Jesus is not a utilitarian payment to an offended deity bound to an economy of appeasement. The ugliness of the cross is found in human sin. The beauty of the cross is found in divine forgiveness.” —Brian Zahn, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God