The Source | Adventures

A dense old growth forest interior at dawn, tall straight trunks rising like columns through low mist. — Light Through The Canopy Old growth at first light, the trunks standing like columns with the mist still lying in the aisles.

Light Through The Canopy Old growth at first light, the trunks standing like columns with the mist still lying in the aisles.

I am writing this chapter in a dry stretch. There are seasons when the whole thing is as near as weather, and there are seasons like this one, when praying feels like leaving messages for somebody who moved and left no address. I could have waited for a better month and written the confident version. The confident version would have been a performance, and this is the one chapter where a performance poisons everything it touches.

So, from inside the dry stretch: I am a Christian. Everything after this complicates that word, which is why it goes first.

I hold it unconventionally. I think there is a Source, that it is not indifferent, and that the honest study of how the world actually works is itself a kind of worship. Every chapter in this book sits downstream of that. The land, the orchard, the questions, the children. None of it makes sense to me as an accident.

I read outside my own tradition and I have found true things there. Not enough to call myself something else, and not the kind of thing that makes a tidy list. What the reading left me with is a faith harder to summarize and harder to shake.

A close view of two weathered older hands resting on the open page of an old book in raking light against a dark background. — Study As Worship Two old hands holding the page flat, one finger keeping the place. Reading as something closer to attention than to study.

Study As Worship Two old hands holding the page flat, one finger keeping the place. Reading as something closer to attention than to study.

In the good seasons, belief is close and obvious. In seasons like this one it is a decision I keep making on no particular evidence, and I have learned to distrust any account of faith that includes only the good seasons. Both belong in the record, because both are coming to whoever lives beside me.

I do not think I am owed anything for keeping it. Plenty of faithful people have had terrible things happen to them, and it was no verdict on them, and I refuse the theology that says otherwise. Good behaviour does not buy outcomes here, and never did.

What it looks like on an ordinary week is quieter than any of that sounds. Most of it happens while my hands are busy, and most of it happens outside. I pray the way some men whistle, half under the noise of the day, splitting something or walking a line. She should know that about me early, because it is the part of me she would actually be living beside.

The congregation is where I owe the reader the same honesty I gave the van and the land. I am not in one. I keep meaning to be. Sunday loses to whatever the week left unfinished, and it has been losing for years, and for most of those years I filed that under scheduling. It is not scheduling. A man finds time for what he has decided to find time for, and on this I have not yet decided, and that is the true sentence available instead of the flattering one.

A wet stone footpath climbing through misty green woodland, ferns and a rail fence along one side. — If It Is True It Survives The Question A wet stone path climbing into the mist, with the way ahead not visible from where it starts.

If It Is True It Survives The Question A wet stone path climbing into the mist, with the way ahead not visible from where it starts.

What I hope for from a partner here is that the question stays alive in the house, in either direction, whatever her answer turns out to be. Doctrine we can disagree about for forty years.

Different answers included, and honestly welcome. A woman with a real practice I do not share, or a real doubt she has actually worked through, is closer to me than somebody agreeing pleasantly to keep the peace.

I am more curious about what she does than about what she calls it. Whether she prays, and how. What she was raised in, what she kept, what she put down and why. The moment something changed. Any one of those tells me more than the label would.

And I weigh what a faith produces far above what it professes. Love shows up as action or it was vocabulary. How we treat people who can do nothing for us. What we do with what we have. Whether anyone is better off for having been near us.

So the house gets an open door, and the table regularly seats somebody who needed one. The giving stays quiet, and it costs us something. Charity out of the leftovers is a tip, not an offering.

A basket of food with bread, jars of preserves, fruit and a folded blanket on a bench outside a blue door in hard sunlight. — Love Spread Through Action Bread, preserves and a folded blanket left on the bench by somebody's door in hard morning sun.

Love Spread Through Action Bread, preserves and a folded blanket left on the bench by somebody's door in hard morning sun.

I will not push a practice onto her, and I will not accept one pushed onto me. The shared parts get built deliberately, out of whatever proves genuinely true for both of us. An hour a week that is not about logistics. A grace we actually mean. Something outside when the season turns. Made rather than inherited, kept rather than performed.

Weathered stone steps climbing to an arched doorway glowing warm gold from within, cold grey stone walls rising on either side. — One We Build Ourselves Worn steps up to an open doorway with the light already on inside. Something with a shape to it, built on purpose.

One We Build Ourselves Worn steps up to an open doorway with the light already on inside. Something with a shape to it, built on purpose.

Which brings the dry stretch back around, because it is not an aside. I have put the question to this faith my whole adult life, sometimes gently and sometimes with the full intent of breaking it, and it has come back every time so far, smaller and harder each time, the way a thing comes back when the soft parts have burned off. That is the entire basis of my confidence, and it is enough. If it is true, it survives the question. If it does not survive the question, better to know, and to deal honestly with what is left.

And the children see all of it. Two people taking the largest question seriously through the good seasons and the dry ones, without once using it as a reason to stop thinking. What that is worth to a child is the last thing this book has to say, and it waits at the end, where it belongs.