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about the author...
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I Have A Crooked Back by Amy Knauer
I have a crooked back. My spine is curvy like a river and hard to explain. My left shoulder blade sticks out and I have had burning pain as long as I can remember. In fact, I have lived with the pain for so long that I don’t really notice it anymore. Every once in a while, after a good massage or a hot shower, I realize what it’s like to not hurt. The difference is striking, and I am almost more uncomfortable not experiencing the pain than feeling it.
I hate that my back isn’t straight. I look longingly at every woman who has pretty shoulder blades. I hate wearing a bathing suit. Most people are shocked to learn that I have this condition. They assure me that they never notice that I have a hunchback. I must be good at standing up straight. I must be good at faking it.
I have a crooked faith. But, I’ve been good at faking that too.
My story of faith is like many who grow up in a Mid-west middle-class family who has more than enough but thinks the American Dream means you never hurt. I began thinking as a little girl about God because I grew up going to church. Our family fought to and from church almost every Sunday, but we smiled in between. I decided that I loved Jesus as a child and proclaimed it in songs like “Jesus Loves Me,” and “Ho-ho-ho-ho-sana,” Only, I sang it “Ho-ho-ho-ho-Santa.” It could have been the candlelight service or the rendition of “O Holy Night” that somehow always hung in the air after the last note was sung and followed me home to my bed, but one Christmas Eve as a little girl, I was overcome by Jesus. I didn’t know why, but I was overcome when I thought about him. In my eight-year old mind, he represented God’s love to me.
My childhood and adolescence were wrought with the drama and the mundane. I was the tallest girl in my class from kindergarten on, which doesn’t often lead to the development of a secure kid and didn’t in this case. Other than that, I was a decent student. I wanted a closer relationship with my mother. I was in show choir and did theatre. I talked to my dad about math. I started thinking about college when I was a sophomore. I questioned the existence of God in my World Lit class. I had bad hair most of the time, except for one school picture taken my senior year. The common thread running throughout the path of my growing up was a feeling that I didn’t quite belong, but always working really hard to do so.
By the time I graduated from high school, I realized life was messy and cruel and unpredictable. I watched 7 classmates get buried in those last 3 years between sophomore and senior. I questioned a God that allowed such things. I still couldn’t talk to my mom and didn’t have the slightest clue who my dad was (I still don’t). I didn’t really know who I was either, except who I imagined myself to be. In life imagined, I was safe, my journey ahead was predictable, was a straight path where I was free from the pain of figuring out who I was and how I would make my way in the incalculable world. During my freshman year of college, I had an experience that at the time I referred to as “getting saved.” I still refer to it that way sometimes because I lack better words to put that experience into context, at least if I have to explain it in a 3 minute sound byte in passing conversation. But, in October 1992, I felt like my story came full circle as I sat in a dorm room, desiring to belong so badly it dripped from my lips as I confessed faith in a God that became a little more real to me via a 4x6 pamphlet, characteristic of most evangelical churches burning with the vision to teach everyone to describe how to become a follower of Jesus in 30 minutes or less. This experience seemed to end my search for answers, although in reality, I had never really asked my questions.
And like that, I was a follower. The benefit of the evangelical religious culture is that there are specific boundary lines. Every question has an answer. Every debate has a right and a wrong. For someone looking for a straight path, these boundaries seemed to be salvation. I saw the straight lines I could live inside and so, realize the promise of an “abundant life,” which I translated into a life of certainty. The onus was now on me to live a straight-laced faith within that life of certainty. I submerged myself into the “born-again” culture entirely. I dressed myself up with everything I could find that was Christian--small group leader, prayer warrior, spouter of scripture, apologist…it was like I was a walking dorm room, all pinned up with posters and signs and slogans. When anyone would ask me about my faith, about why I followed Jesus, I would point to a picture on my wall and say, “See?” Only, they didn’t understand, and sooner or later they walked away shaking their heads in wonder at my zeal. I would be offended or sad or contemplative. But, in truth, I was shaking the whole time because deep down inside, I really didn’t understand either.
As these questions would stir deep inside me, I would push them down hard, anxious to keep them from surfacing. I immersed myself even deeper into the religious culture, sure that if I could just become a good Christian, all would be well. In that culture, I felt for the first time what seemed to be a sense of belonging. I was known at church, looked up to and admired. People actually praised me for my faith. They liked the way my life looked, and they wanted it. Little did they know (nor did I, for that matter), my back was bending under the pressure of living within the boundaries, and was in danger of breaking in two or three or twenty pieces if I didn’t walk carefully, because I knew deep down inside, if I stepped outside of the lines, the belonging would disappear as quickly as it appeared.
And then, just like in high school, death claimed 2 more of my young friends. A few days after Marc died in a car accident while traveling to raise funds to be in ministry as a vocation, I stood with my friend George at the funeral. As we clung to each other and looked at the grave where Marc would be laid, I had no idea I would be standing at George’s funeral just a year later, after he was attacked by a mysterious virus that claimed his life. I stood there and remembered George’s face, now gone forever. I looked around that graveyard, confused and lost. My fears and questions flowed freely through my veins. There was nothing certain anymore. There was no way my faith could talk me out of this one. These thoughts scared me and I felt guilty for even having them, the lines I lived inside said this was weak faith, so instead, I smiled my sad smile and mumbled God’s will into the wind. As it drifted away over that lonely graveyard, I felt my faith crack and begin to drift with it.
Several years after college, after the death of my friends, and after continuing to cover myself with a faith that sought certainty, I came to a point of disillusionment. The catalyst was being involved in a bitter, angry church split. As my illusions with the church and Christian culture began to crack, it revealed the cracks in my own faith. One day I remembered to look myself in the eye when I was looking into the mirror, and I saw what and who I really was. I was a woman hunched over. All my fears, all my doubts, all my questions for a God who I had thought promised me certainty but didn’t deliver, came falling from my eyes. In that moment, I realized I had to back up to see if there was faith inside of me, one that would be accepting of mystery and searching and longing. One that would grow outside of the Christian life I had lived in past years. I knew I could do this as the woman inside of me that I had covered up, or I could continue to live as the woman I had created. That moment of reckoning was almost tangible, but I also felt it to be transient. I knew it could slip away like that moment between dusk and night. The light would vanish and I would find myself straining to see in the darkness. If darkness fell, I might never look myself in the eye again.
I dug my toes into that moment of reckoning and have been fighting to stand with eyes open in the light of disillusionment ever since. With the boundary lines gone and the illusion dispelled, I have found myself in a wide world of possibilities and direction. To be honest, I have often longed for the straight path, for the road of knowing. Instead, I am now on the road of asking. In asking, I have come to this-- for me, finding faith in God is about finding the courage to live my life, not to follow a preset path. I know my destination of found faith lies ahead in the future day when there are no more questions, when we will know fully, but I am also living in the reality of finding faith each day. It follows me as I walk. It hangs in the air around me, and when I lie in my bed at night, quiet and still from the day’s journey, I am often overcome by who I am and who I have found God to be.
There continues to be death in young people around me. To me, the world seems to grow more and more uncertain as I get older. I still get confused about exactly who I am, and the thin thread of belonging still runs out and around and through me. Even if I think I have figured something out, even if the old straight-path girl whispers out the answer, I ask my questions of God. In fact, now I let that straight-path answer drift away in the wind. Not my crooked faith.
Inside of me is the realization that everyone I meet has a story. If I remember to look closely I see the lines of experience on people’s faces, the curved backs of women and men walking next to me, and I sense a common journey to find faith and life in an uncertain world. It’s like we all have a trail of tears carved into our cheeks, and anyone who misses it isn’t looking us in the eye.
I have come to a sort of peace that a life of faith is not about certainty, but about walking a path and living in the mystery of that journey. I have found that this winding path includes peace and pain, joy and sorrow, death and life. Crooked lines pave the way to my destination and I am doing my best to walk down that path standing up straight and tall, crooked back and all. Your writing was so good although i have had an eintirely different past you drew me into to your past and present search as if i could somehow capture your voyage. Thank you nancy
I know how hard it is to be that physically different from what seems like the rest of the world. I too have a crooked spine, and had to wear a hard plastic brace through middle school; I also have a birth deformity in my left hand, and just recently lost my right kidney. Life has by no means been fun, but ever since 1998 my faith has helped me through it all. The world needs to hear more of the life stories of people like you, that way the world, and we will learn that God has allowed us all to be different in one way or another, to help those struggling with the same things that we went through. You are someone that I can truly understand, and I thank you for telling your story.
Now THIS is beautiful....
Thank you for your realistic account of life as a thinking Christian. What more pertinent advice toward following this God Whom we suppose to know all than that to ask... seek... and knock. Pax, dear sister.
Thanks for putting into words your experiences with faith, life, and the contemporary Christian sub-culture that we all share in North America. If only more of us would wrestle through all of the conflict that exists within us as we attempt to reconcile our experiences in this life with many of the shallow answers and cliches that our C.C. sub-culture gave to us. Too many of my friends had houses built on sand which they left behind during the last decade or so since leaving youth group.
Thanks for putting into words your experiences with faith, life, and the contemporary Christian sub-culture that we all share in North America. If only more of us would wrestle through all of the conflict that exists within us as we attempt to reconcile our experiences in this life with many of the shallow answers and cliches that our C.C. sub-culture gave to us. Too many of my friends had houses built on sand from which they left behind during the last decade or so since leaving youth group.
You have quite a gift for writing. Thank you for sharing your journey - I can certainly relate to everything you wrote. It helps to know that you're not alone in feeling what you're feeling!
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