Beautiful and Terrible Things: Faith, Doubt, and Discovering a Way Back to Each Other

Life is beautiful and awe-inspiring. And life is terribly, terribly hard. Nobody told me that when I was in my early twenties looking to find my way in the world. And I’m not alone; I think all of us go about each day trying to make sense of what it means to be human. Yet it’s often on our hardest days, when we’re in the thick of something painful, living through the moments we most want to run from, that we’re offered a chance to really engage that question. The invitation to become who we’re meant to be happens at the intersection of human pain and divine hope, and almost always in the context of relationship.

As a minister and fellow traveler, I am often asked: How do you keep going when things look bleak? How do any of us find within ourselves the person strong enough, graceful enough, and wise enough to jump in feetfirst and answer yes to all that life offers? How do we live with courage in a world that is spiritually alive but can still bring us to our knees in despair?

The answer to these questions is relationship. In my career as a pastor and teacher; in my role as a leader to gracious—and conflict-ridden—communities; as a mother, a wife, a daughter, a sister, a friend; and as a weak and often struggling human being, I have come to see that the most powerful way to know ourselves and to know God, to live and flourish on this journey, is through our relationships. Relationships form us and teach us what it means to be human. Healthy or flawed, loving or broken, estranged or mended, relationships with the companions on our journey change us; they help us find our place in the world, and they move us toward creating a better and kinder universe for those who come behind us. The transformative power of relationship is the reason we even venture near the hard work of building human community. And our relationship to mystery—to God—is not that different from all of the other relationships that color our lives. Joy, loneliness, companionship, betrayal, even estrangement, often describe our relationships with God, with ourselves, and with one another.

I am a Christian minister, and in that work, I have a personal conception of God. But I want to leave space for what you imagine God to be, too, if the Divine is a reality in your life at all. Whatever God is for you, I hope that that looks like lavish and unrestricted love. It is fundamentally the hard work of being human to mirror back to one another that kind of divine love that embraces us exactly as we are. We often fail in that task—I know I have—because our relationships are never perfect. But they do offer us opportunities to learn and to change, to slowly, painfully become more fully the people we were created to be.

It’s a common recitation in the liturgy of the Church: The minister says something like The peace of God be with you, and the congregation responds And also with you. The words are recited every week, and we say them almost without thought. But what does it really mean for the peace of God to be with you? It’s hard for me to imagine a divine presence, relationship, or any sort of peace that comes along with all the doubt and mystery that surrounds our muddled efforts to make sense of God. But we know what it’s like for a person to be with us. Our human relationships help us comprehend God’s presence as a real and compelling part of our lives. This is something I’ve come to understand over time.

I began writing this book as a way to process being human. I kept a notebook with me all the time because I’d have a conversation at work, or hear a story on the radio, or watch my child struggle to learn something, and I’d write about what I saw and experienced. Every time I did, I discovered that it always seemed to be a relationship that challenged what I’d thought and somehow invited me into thinking, and then being, in a new way. I think this realization hits us all when we are faced with unfamiliar experiences, whether painful, bewildering, or even joyful, in our interactions with others.

The result is this collection of essays. With each one, I invite you to explore with me what it means to be human; how relationships with one another, with God, and even with ourselves can change us, if only we will let them. Each chapter describes a moment when I reckoned with and deepened my understanding of who God is and who we are, through the lens of a relationship. In recollecting these encounters with others, I shine a light on the interactions that changed my view of life and faith and community. You’re invited along for the ride, to take the opportunity to examine your own life and find the wisdom to grow in the relationships that have shaped you.

I suspect you’ll find that whether healthy or unhealthy, blissful or broken, it’s the relationships in your life that have been your best teachers, too.

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Many people think religion is all about following the rules and, if you do it right, being rewarded with a good life and, we trust, an afterlife. I felt this way myself when I was a kid growing up in Hawai‘i, trying to love God enough to get good things to happen and keep bad things away. But as I matured, learning from counselors and critics alike—my inner critic chief among them—I understood that good religion is the practice of careful concern.

Good religion is expressed not by applying the orthodoxy of the Church or the rules of an institution, but by paying attention to the interactions with others that I either tended carefully, neglected to my peril, intentionally sought out, or just stumbled into. Good religion is trying to learn whatever lessons my relationships offer by keeping the spirit of loving God and one another at the forefront of our lives. By practicing this kind of religion, I am slowly trying to become the person I was put on this earth to be.

As I wrote this book, more layers of this idea unfolded. Yes, relationships can change us for the better, but there were plenty of intense interactions that left me in the same state they found me, or sometimes worse. I had to learn, painfully, to embrace others with authenticity and true openness in order to change. Telling the truth about our lives and opening ourselves to the truths of others takes courage. But when we’re brave enough to do that, we can experience a deep connection to the Divine that helps us become more fully and wholly who we were created to be.

This book is an invitation to find the courage to develop, stay in, honor, and occasionally let go of the relationships that make us who we are. With an honest look at relationships that change us, we will find they are the guides that lead us toward purpose. They direct us to find ourselves, discover what we are called to do, and bring us closer to mystery—to God.

These essays are colored by the many roles I have played over the years: a good girl trying to follow all the rules, a rebel shocking her family, a naive island girl trying to understand life on the mainland, an ambitious woman and successful minister breaking the stained glass ceiling, a member of the #MeToo movement, a wife, an ex-wife, a mother, a patient, a friend.

Here I share stories from my own life and the relationships that have shaped mine. What orders these essays is not so much chronology as what I discovered on the journey: a movement toward complexity, toward moral maturity, toward spiritual understanding. I don’t have all the answers, but I believe that we all yearn to find out who we are and who God is, and to feel that the universe is spiritually alive. We all want to know that we have a meaningful place in that universe, and we all seek to discover it. These are a few notes from this beautiful and terrible journey so far.

It was a hot Texas day, the kind when the air conditioners ice the inside of the buildings and when you step outside the heat hits you in the face like you’re walking into a brick wall. It was my sophomore year in college and it was early afternoon—universally the worst time of the day to be in any class.

I’d always been a great rule-follower, and going to college was what I was supposed to do. Every day I sat in class so I could meet requirements, graduate, and…get married? But beyond checking boxes, my classes led me to notice new ideas that stretched me to think in ways I’d never considered before. I sat in History of Catholicism and began making associations between what I was learning and how I experienced the world.

I registered for courses that were taught by brilliant, accomplished female professors. Shocking even myself, I started to imagine myself in a role like that—one in which I led a room instead of sitting obediently in the crowd.

I attended lectures in which I was introduced to ideas I’d never heard before. Feminism? Pacifism? They all seemed foreign and, because of their unfamiliarity, a little sinister—but oh, so exciting.

I’d come to college with the vague ambition of studying history, but more and more my attention was captured by courses in the religion department. I didn’t give much thought to what I would do after I graduated. I saw only one trajectory in the lives of the women around me: good grades and, eventually, a nice Christian husband. Without giving it much thought, I assumed that would be my path, too.

On that hot Texas afternoon in my sophomore year of college, I walked into my Women in American Religion class, an elective I’d added to my schedule after several semesters of religion courses. I admired the professor, the only woman on the faculty of the otherwise all-male religion department. Curiously, there happened to be only a few women in the class; most of the students were male upperclassmen finishing religion degrees and in need of electives to wrap up their course requirements before they headed to graduate school to prepare to work as pastors of churches. The professor had assigned an exercise, to rewrite a traditional Christian song text using language that was intentionally gender-inclusive. For example, the line in the familiar Christmas carol Hark, the Herald Angels Sing, Pleased as man with men to dwell, might become Pleased with us in flesh to dwell.

The purpose of the exercise, the professor explained, was to illustrate the pervasive use of male-dominated language that runs through every part of our experience and practice of religion. I heard the professor’s explanation with detached curiosity; I’d frankly never even considered this obvious reality until she pointed it out. In fact, this was my first introduction to the phrase inclusive language. Until then, I had been only vaguely aware of a movement, which was building in some parts of the Church, to change pronouns for God and to use only gender-neutral pronouns in holy texts. The idea was to make the religious experience more universally applicable. I hadn’t yet encountered these viewpoints on gender inclusion and spirituality; I didn’t yet know there were women in the Church who assumed that Bible readings including the words he or him or men just didn’t apply to them. All of that male-dominated language was just familiar and comfortable to me.

When the professor opened the class that day, she asked us to share the songs we’d chosen and our feelings about the exercise of rewriting them with new language. Looking back, I can see that her aim was to lead us toward a conversation about the many ways in which religion in America functioned, and functions, as a limitation on the full expression and inclusion of women, but at the time, I still held a pretty sheltered view of that reality.

I grew up in a religious tradition in which women warmed casseroles, taught children’s Sunday school classes, and sometimes—with the endorsement and supervision of the male pastor—taught women’s Bible study classes. It’s not that I had ever heard anyone preach or teach about specifically why women couldn’t be pastors, it was just that I’d never seen a woman pastor. I honestly didn’t even know such a thing could exist.

Even as I approached eighteen years of age, that critical edge of adulthood, the mystery of vocation—the way God’s Spirit wanders in and out of our lives, nudging and pulling, sometimes drop-kicking us into foreign territory and pushing us to change—hadn’t planted itself deeply enough for me to know I was breaking any rules by wanting to work in the Church. I just knew I loved Jesus and could organize a church potluck with one hand tied behind my back. I’d learned all my life, after all, that I was supposed to somehow discover God’s mysterious and perpetually just-out-of-reach plan for my life. My primary focus was to find a husband with whom to build a family, and whatever job I had would support that goal.

With all of this wondering about my future swirling around me, it seemed like the best course of action, though still vague, was to do something like marry a pastor. That would check many of the expected boxes, and I thought it might also fill a need in my own heart to do something…anything…meaningful. I wanted to serve God, to help other people in my community. But I didn’t have a clear idea of how.

As the discussion in class that day began, I heard some sniffling, gradually louder, until it became clear that a woman sitting somewhere behind me was crying. Finally, she managed to choke out, not just distress, but a deep objection to the exercise; to her, this assignment was sacrilegious.

Since I hadn’t yet considered the role of organized religion in the oppression and exclusion of women from the Church (and from all societal systems, as a matter of fact), I am sure I thought—if I’d given it any thought at all—that feminism was something bad, if not verging on satanic. After all, Phyllis Schlafly was a name I knew; talk of the evils of the Equal Rights Amendment peppered conversation at my childhood dinner table, and my mother participated in organizing efforts to defeat it. While I’d always secretly wondered why people having equal rights was something we should object to, I valued obedience above all, and I never openly questioned my parents’ beliefs. My mother stayed at home caring for five children, but we all knew of her considerable academic and professional achievements; her work at home with us was a choice she’d made. The message was clear: A woman who chooses a domestic role was making the virtuous choice; anything else was vaguely…wrong.

In that refrigerated classroom that afternoon, my thighs sticking to the avocado green plastic seat, something began to shift. Writing a song with gender-inclusive language wasn’t that big a deal…was it?

When I heard my fellow student crying, I was first curious, then viscerally annoyed—seriously, she’s crying about this?

The professor pointed at me. Miss Dill, she asked (that was me back then), is there a problem?

I stammered No and lowered my head, desperate not to let my facial expressions give me away.

But what I really wanted to say was that it seemed ridiculous to cry about this assignment; that perhaps there might in fact be some male bias in the Church; and that it could be interesting to think a bit more deeply about this question…in an academic way, of course. I felt dismissive of my classmate’s tears because I didn’t yet recognize what they represented.

As I recall, the girl sitting behind me seemed like the type who was even more intent on finding a husband than I was. For her, the professor’s words did not present an opportunity for thoughtful consideration, but more likely a challenge to the gender roles that defined her goals and her future. An assignment as simple as rewriting song lyrics represented to her a dismantling of the framework by which she lived her life, and within which she imagined her whole future. Of course she was upset, and probably afraid. Why did I feel so dismissive of her emotional reaction? Maybe it was because I didn’t want to look any closer at what the assignment signified for me; it was too scary.

Since that day, I’ve come to think that nothing fundamental changes in us humans until we cry about something—that is, until it impacts us in ways that challenge our assumptions and change our hearts. Crying is the manifestation of the knowledge that change is on the horizon, the external evidence that we are in the process of being transformed. It’s likely that my classmate was a little further down the road of deconstruction, the experience of clearing out and totally rebuilding what you believe. That experience is never a walk in the park; it always hurts if you do it right.

I wasn’t crying right then, but perhaps my classmate’s tears were a precursor to my own. My assumptions, and most painfully my heart, were about to undergo significant renovation. I didn’t know then what I know now: that my life would be profoundly marked by the work of navigating a male-dominated institution; that reality