A Walk with Jane Austen (6 page)

I'm looking for two things in a guy: Someone who loves God with all his heart, with a live and generous faith. And someone who adores me.

And built into those two requirements are all kinds of unspoken assumptions:

He will love learning.

We'll have great, intelligent, funny conversations.

He'll respect me.

He'll be kind.

He'll be basically conservative without being easily annoyed with war protesters.

He'll like to give money away.

He'll be normal—someone I could actually introduce to my non-Christian friends without cringing.

And as Jane would say, he should be good-looking, “which a young man ought likewise to be, if he possibly can.”
¹¹
With my apologies to the stellar Christian single guys I've met in the last few years, it's a truth universally acknowledged among single Christian women that single Christian guys beyond a certain age are weird. We used to speculate that it had something to do with the rising sperm count, the lack of sex— that women can handle this, but guys just get weirder and weirder until they are forty-two and completely beyond reach.

And of course, right? The church is a place for the broken. Anyone who doesn't fit in anywhere else is certain of a welcome in the church. If you have trouble putting two sentences together or looking a girl in the eyes, if you are uneducated or only capable of talking to other Christians, or if you're recovering from a cocaine addiction or a messy divorce, come to our church and you'll be welcomed. And that's how it should be.

But it doesn't always make for good dating grounds. (Then there is the other side—the guys who attend church but aren't entirely committed to living their faith, guys who try to explain their theological understanding that sex is acceptable anywhere there is love, whatever else the Bible may say about it.)

It seems as well that there's something about modern evangelical Christianity in America that can encourage a kind of overspiritual weirdness. I went to coffee with one guy, and he prayed loudly for our coffee time together and then asked me questions like, “So what is the Lord teaching you?” which were popular in my high-school youth group but I've since come to loathe, particularly from near strangers.

Modern Christian America is plagued by the sacred/secular dichotomy. If we are talking about the Lord, singing about the Lord, listening to music by other people who love the Lord, wearing T-shirts or bracelets about Jesus, calling a plumber who also loves Jesus, those are good things. Other things, regular, normal things, are suspect. All of which may make for Christians who fear and cannot relate to the world in which they live. The church is full of guys who believe this. I could never go out with them, and they probably think I'm not a very good Christian anyway.

So at thirty-three I sit on the love seat in the sunroom from time to time and pray for an amazing guy—someone normal, someone who loves God with all his heart, someone who will adore me—believing that it's nearly impossible, but that God specializes in those kinds of things when he so chooses.

As someone who's far from a morning person, eating breakfast at 8:00 a.m. in a roomful of strangers is my idea of purgatory. If I could, I wouldn't talk to anyone ever before 10:00 a.m., best friends included. So when I came downstairs wearing my fun pink pleated skirt with the flip-flops that match exactly, I was praying that no one would notice me.
I would have given anything for an invisibility cloak, actually. Most especially, I didn't want to admit the possibility that something romantic could exist here, at least not before I'd had coffee and a decent plate of something substantial.

When I walked into the room, the fire alarm went off. The whole room smelled of toasting bread (alas, no bacon or eggs to be had). Jack was sitting right by the door, looking very good and incredibly awake. He smiled at me and said, “You walk in the room and bells ring. You did good getting up early this morning.” I thought to myself,
Crap, he's still here
,and like a schoolgirl I couldn't eat my toast.

I've not always believed in the grace of God. Actually, since I was roughly three, I've believed in the big, eternity-changing, salvation sort of grace. That was when I asked Jesus into my heart, childlike and beautiful, I imagine, during evening prayers in my brother's room. My brother and I knelt on the shag carpet with our hands folded on his seventies comforter. He laughed. At least that's what I tell myself because, actually, I don't remember that anymore. I just used to remember and told myself that version of the story for so many years that now it's fact, even if it didn't actually happen.

As a child in Baptist schools, I prayed that prayer over and over in chapel, at Vacation Bible School during the summer; everyone wanted to know in those days the date and time I prayed the “sinner's prayer.” I was never entirely sure which one stuck.

Then in college I wondered if I really believed any of it—God, Jesus, the Bible, the need for salvation. I took two years to feel my way
through doubt. I still knew, in some way that I'm not sure I can explain, that God was with me, that he guided me even as I asked questions and investigated what the rest of the world believed. I studied C. S. Lewis's
Mere Christianity
and
Surprised by Joy
and eventually determined that Christianity was true. I felt as if it would take me a lifetime to evaluate all the logical, rational arguments, and I didn't have the brainpower for that or the time, and as much as I could evaluate them, they felt true to me, so I came back. But I came back to a different faith, one that was shaky and easily faltered and could be toppled over into a whirlwind of doubt by the little breath of a series of questions from my brother or a scientific article questioning the existence of Jesus or the occasional realization of the hugeness of the world that did not believe as I did.

But the point is I firmly believed in the love and grace of God. I knew that was one of Christianity's distinctives. I could tell you how to confess your sins and be forgiven “of all unrighteousness,” even the things you didn't know you did. But I didn't actually believe in grace for myself, not on a daily basis. And this has been my great struggle: I've often felt like it's impossible to keep up with my confession. I'm simply too wrong in my core. As soon as I confess and receive forgiveness and occasionally feel the depth ofthat, the cleanness of being right with God, I set off on another pattern of wrong thinking, where I'm the center of my universe, where even when I try to put other people first and love God (and don't always put that much energy into that), I fail miserably and am aware of the fact that seemingly two seconds after I've been irrevocably washed clean, I am dirty again, like filthy rags. And after years of church and faith—being instructed over and over to read my Bible every single day to please God, being taught
implicitly that my spirituality is directly related to the number of services I attend or the number of people I witness to, and being part of a family that doesn't enjoy or maybe believe in lying about, in taking three hours by the pool with only a drink and a magazine (we are the industrious, entrepreneurial type)—I believed in the necessity of earning the pleasure of God.

I thrived on doing and forgot how to be. When I finally went to counseling to work through depression, I was in a state in life where I couldn't even make myself a cup of tea. I watched my roommate make tea and wondered how she could take the time to do such a thing, to let the water boil, let the leaves sit, actually slow down enough to drink it. Everything in my life was about doing. Every minute was scheduled to take advantage of my limited energy. So I worked until I crashed and couldn't work any longer. And when I crashed, on my lost days, I could barely make or eat anything. I couldn't even enjoy watching TV. The days rushed past as I lay on my couch with pictures going by on the screen in front of me, too numb and dissociated to be involved in the stories.

Everything was work. Work was my salvation. And not being able to work made me distraught. It bothered me that I had forgotten how to relax. I wasn't enjoying life. Part of me must have known that I couldn't save myself.

Jack and I got seats together for lectures by the doors that opened to the back lawn, letting in the gorgeous seventy-something weather. David Wenham was talking about the Sermon on the Mount, about its two groups of pronouncements, the first about God's grace and the
second, which can be “profoundly depressing,” about God's standards, which are so high that no one can live by them.

I leaned over to tell Jack that I have such a hard time balancing those things, the grace and judgment of God. He said quietly, “Yeah, I've found in my life that the grace has to come first.”

I'm afraid I'll make some people cringe by tying Jane to Christianity in any form. She was not evangelical, though her cousin, clergyman Edward Cooper, was part of the new evangelical movement beginning to sweep the country. Unfortunately, Jane didn't always like his sermons, which she found too full of “Regeneration & Conversion,”
¹
and he had a habit of sending “Letters of cruel comfort,”
²
which seems to hint at Mr. Collins. Jane still found a way to admire the young movement, if she found it too “loud and noisy”
³
for her own tastes. She wrote, “I am by no means convinced that we ought not all to be Evangelicals, & am at least persuaded that they who are so from Reason & Feeling, must be happiest & safest.”
⁴
I recognize that Jane's religious experiences must have been far different than mine, but I think in fundamentals of belief we might be much the same.

Jane's books are Christian in that there is a solid Christian moral foundation throughout her writing, but they are not Christian books per se by todays definition. She didn't have to deal with the evangelical culture I was raised in—the one in which Christian things are separate from other normal (or as the church sometimes describes them, “worldly”) things.