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  “We want to get away from him,” Amerie said. “I understand if you don’t want to help us, but we don’t know what else to do.”

  I hated being lied to. And my heart felt smaller and harder with every word out of her mouth. My mind was trying to remember everything from the last six weeks in a matter of seconds in order to retell myself the story so that it would make sense again. What had I done? All that money Matthew’s church gave. All the little comments I made in her childbirth class and while registering her for high school: She’s a Katrina survivor. Which really meant, You may have given the Red Cross twenty-five dollars, but I’m helping a real, live pregnant teenager from New Orleans. When in actuality, I was being conned by a pimp and a prostitute from Denver.

  We called the police, who got Amerie, her daughter, and her mother into a battered women’s shelter.

  I never saw them again.

  On our way home, Matthew and I realized that the last time Howard knew where his victims were, they were at our house, and our children were there now. Speeding home, I prayed they were safe. Those rain-soaked streets on that Thursday night in January were longer than they had ever been.

  Four blocks from our house, we saw the flashing lights of several police vehicles driving toward us. I fought to breathe, waiting to see if they made the turn to our house. We exhaled as they passed our street, and I cried uncontrollably. We ran into the house, grabbed the kids, and slept at my parents’ house for the next three nights.

  There are times when you just don’t know what to feel, because you feel things that don’t normally mix in polite company. I felt angry and ashamed at having been conned. I felt deep sorrow for a sweet child and her baby who were victims of a situation far sadder than a hurricane. I felt disappointment in myself for not really wanting to help her anymore. But I hated being lied to. I hate being lied to.

  The next Sunday, I was ashamed to face Matthew’s congregation, who had been told the truth of the Amerie situation in an email the day before. I could just see them coldly avoiding me or, worse, telling me not to “feel bad.” Walking in I tried to not make eye contact with anyone, but an older woman who I hadn’t really interacted with much in the past walked up to me in her piously pink dress and heels. I braced myself.

  “Nadia,” she said, with a kindness I’ll not soon forget, “God was still glorified in this. Who knows if Amerie would ever have had the courage to leave him if she hadn’t received the love she had over the past month while part of our community. Maybe now they know that they are worth more than the life they’ve always had.”

  I cried.

  I often feel like God uses other people to tell us stuff we need to know, and on that Sunday I needed to know that I hadn’t failed, but had been doing a kind of work of which I wasn’t even aware. Still, of all the betrayals in that circumstance, it was my betrayal of myself that stung the most. So much about the situation didn’t add up. Those little security analysts in my head had been trying to tell me that something wasn’t right, and I refused to listen. I even went so far as to put my children in harm’s way, just so I could play the hero. I’ve not completely forgiven myself for that, but I’m trying.

  Jesus calls us to welcome the stranger and serve our neighbor. And the images on our television during the Katrina event begged the question: Who is that neighbor? Being Christian is much harder than I wish it was. We’re called to take care of the poor. But should we open our homes to those in need if it entails danger to our children? We’re called to love our enemies and forgive those who trespass against us. Does that mean we should allow people who have hurt and betrayed us back into our lives? Or does it mean that we simply don’t wish them ill? I really loved Amerie, but do I love Ashley? I’m haunted by how much of my love was based on my need to be seen as heroic, and yet I can’t deny that it did feel like love.

  A better Christian would love her anyway and still want to help her. A lousy Christian is conflicted and maybe a little hurt. She wishes Ashley well, but doesn’t want her to show up at the front door anytime soon. I’m a lousy Christian, and I hope that’s good enough since our call to be compassionate has to include ourselves, too.

  In the days that followed, I was depressed and demoralized. I called my sister, who assured me that God uses our humiliations as much as our victories, which may have just been an act of aggression on her part; but maybe, despite that, she’s right.

  CHAPTER 7

  I Didn’t Call You for This Truth Bullshit

  And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.

  —John 3: 19-21

  Our house has two sinks for some reason,” Candace said as she filled a bowl with cereal for me. “It has something to do with being Jewish, or something.”

  She was right, of course, having two sinks does have something to do with being Jewish. A kosher kitchen has two sinks and often two refrigerators and two dishwashers, or at least one with changeable racks, so that what touches meat does not touch dairy. It was weird having all this (mostly useless) religious knowledge thanks to my new seminary education. I know almost nothing about sports or politics, but I can tell you why my friend Candace now has two sinks.

  She and her husband bought the house, a modern, poshly renovated three-story two months before, because when attempting an open marriage doesn’t save a relationship, then perhaps a half-million-dollar mortgage can do the trick. Except in their case, when it didn’t.

  Candace didn’t know a lot about kitchens because Candace grew up in New England, in a house that had a staff. Most of her life she’d been able to buy what she lacked, unless it was emotional. She’s ginger haired and voluptuous, and favored tight T-shirts and short skirts. As she put it, her debutante ball was more than she could handle, so it’s a good thing she was high on heroin at the time.

  We met in an alcohol recovery meeting a few years earlier and became friends based purely on the unlikely number of things we had in common. We both had colorful pasts but were clean now. We both had collected a long string of damaged boyfriends and girlfriends, some of whom were convicted felons, but we had both gotten married to nice men, had a couple of kids, and had managed to go back to both church and school. We leaned on each other because it’s hard keeping so many contradictions together by yourself. And when your life has changed so much in ten years, sometimes the memory of who you were emerges from the milky mist of your consciousness and starts whispering, “Remember me?” And when that happens, you just have to have a girlfriend around who gets it because if you ignore the whispers they become screams, and then you just can’t shut the bitch up.

  “Jesus, Nadia,” she said as I scarfed the cereal, “is that your dinner?” I’d just arrived from my Hebrew Bible study group after a full day of seminary classes and hadn’t yet stopped to eat when Candace had called and said she needed me.

  Being a loyal friend is something I haven’t always been good at, so at the time, I was trying to make up for my past disloyalties by being (or just making it look like I was) selfless. Candace’s marriage was now ending badly, and she could only have her daughters overnight if someone was there with her. She was an ex-junkie with medical complaints, real or imagined, who had found some idiot doctor to prescribe her OxyContin. Her justifications for using it were both endless and creative: Her medical conditions caused her so much pain that she needed the drug to even function; she didn’t really want to take the pain meds but her doctor insisted; really her pain was so great she wasn’t even able to get high off the Oxy. Her marriage was ending and I was trying to support her.

  At the time I was also trying futilely to believe she was still clean and sober. I was supposedly one of the only people she could get to be with her for overni
ght visits with her kids. So while I was commuting an hour each way to seminary and had small children of my own, I was also showing up for her when I could, even if it meant eating cereal for dinner.

  We’d been doing this for a few weeks: me trying to do what I thought a loyal friend would do, her seeming to do whatever she could to keep the Oxy in her system. Me stretching my time and life too thin, her getting twice the sleep I was. We were like twins in utero, one taking all the nutrients, and the other becoming scrawny as a result.

  I eventually tried, just once, to confront her about what I was convinced was the truth: She was addicted again. But unlike almost every other situation in my life, I had lost my boldness. As soon as she gave me the I’m in crisis and need you to support me look, I backed off. That look was too similar to one I had justly deserved in my past friendships. I would be as “loyal” to Candace as it took to avoid that look and maybe make up for not sticking with Amerie/Ashley.

  One morning, when driving home from Candace’s house, I called my older sister and told her how tired I was and also how much my friend needed me. Barbara had always been naturally interested in helping others, and I knew she would be proud of me.

  “Nadia,” she said, “you have a limited amount of time and emotional energy in your life, and you are squandering tons of it on this one situation just so you can maintain the idea you like to have of yourself as being a loyal friend.”

  “Look,” I said, in my own defense, “I didn’t call you for this truth bullshit.” (The late writer David Foster Wallace was right: The truth will set you free… but not before it’s done with you.)

  Years later, after I had started House for All Sinners and Saints, I thought of Candace when I was writing a sermon about when Jesus goes on and on about how we really actually like darkness more than light because, let’s face it, the darkness hides our bullshit. (Revised Nadia Version.) I thought of all the time I spent trying to be good and all the time she spent trying to pretend she wasn’t high and how perfectly matched our crap was. And all it took was my sister speaking the truth about it for light to come and scatter the darkness. I thought about how, just like Candace, when I want desperately for something about myself to be hidden, for it to stay in the darkness, I am really good at lying. And if I can go an extra step and make it look like I’m actually being good—if I can pawn off narcissism as a virtue—then I win. Like when I am just sick of giving a shit about other people and want to be selfish so I call my two days of watching Netflix and getting mani-pedis “self-care.” Or when I say I’m on “a cleanse” so no one knows I’m really on a diet.

  The list goes on, and the last thing I want is for any light to be cast on the darkness that I’ve spent so much energy curating, protecting, enjoying. But it’s not a cleanse. It’s a diet. It’s not about my health, it’s about my vanity.

  There’s a popular misconception that religion, Christianity specifically, is about knowing the difference between good and evil so that we can choose the good. But being good has never set me free the way truth has. Knowing all of this makes me love and hate Jesus at the same time. Because, when instead of contrasting good and evil, he contrasted truth and evil, I have to think about all the times I’ve substituted being good (or appearing to be good) for truth.

  Very often I will avoid the truth until my face goes red like a toddler avoiding her nap; until limp limbed, she finally stops flailing and falls asleep and receives rest—the very thing she needs and the very thing she fights. When someone like me, who will go to superhero lengths to avoid the truth, runs out of options—when I am found out or too exhausted to pretend anymore or maybe just confronted by my sister—it feels like the truth might crush me. And that is right. The truth does crush us, but the instant it crushes us, it somehow puts us back together into something honest. It’s death and resurrection every time it happens.

  This, to me, is the point of the confession and absolution in the liturgy. When I first experienced it—the part where everyone in church stands up and says what bad people they are, and the pastor, from the distance of the chancel and the purity of her white robe says, “God forgives you”—I thought it was hogwash. Why should I care if someone says to me that some God I may or may not really believe in has erased the check marks against me for things I may or may not even think are so-called sins? This obviously is the problem with religion for so many: It makes you feel bad enough that you will need the religion to help you feel good again.

  But eventually the confession and absolution liturgy came to mean everything to me. It gradually began to feel like a moment when truth was spoken, perhaps for the only time all week, and it would crush me and then put me back together.

  One Sunday in 2006, after the last night I spent at Candace’s house, I stood in the blue-carpeted sanctuary at my husband’s church and for the first time I really paid attention to the confession.

  We have sinned by what we have done and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart. We have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.

  Saying the words that morning with all the elderly transplanted Minnesotans, young mothers, and distracted teenagers, I felt like I had just said the truth about myself (the specifics about Candace and my pretending didn’t matter), and it felt like that feeling I’d get in the backseat of my parents’ car when I finally exhaled after holding my breath through a mountain tunnel.

  And then the pastor said, “Fear not, brothers and sisters, God, who is full of grace and abounding in steadfast love, meets us in our sin and transforms us for God’s glory and the healing of God’s world. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, your sins are forgiven, be now at peace.”

  Exhale.

  In 2009, a year after I had started House for All Sinners and Saints, Candace emailed asking if she could come to church. I said yes, but that we should meet first.

  Later we would walk through the city park, passing moms and their sticky-faced toddlers and the homeless men napping under trees like urban Monet paintings, geese gliding in the lake behind them. She and I had shown up wearing almost identical black T-shirts with flowers, low cut. It was good to see her, and I longed for the friendship I knew was gone—for the times when we had the same story and it was effortless to be together. At one point we matched, she and I. Now it was just the T-shirts. I had aged in the years since I stopped saying yes to her. I had a couple extra wrinkles and sags. But not her. Her forehead didn’t move when she talked, and her mouth had enough crap injected into it that the protruding upper portion had begun to resemble a bill rather than a lip. There wasn’t much truth to her.

  As we walked, she told me of the divorce and her health and all the reasons she just can’t work a job: fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome. Things that often come with soft diagnoses and hard prescriptions. I thought back to when my children, Harper and Judah, were young and I was unhappy and had come down with a wee touch of hypochondria. The demands of staying at home with a baby and a toddler were too much, and I got sick a lot, which convinced me that something was really wrong with me. I wanted something to be wrong with me. I wanted a hall pass for a while so no one would expect anything of me. But the tests always came back negative and, finally, after my third visit to the doctor in two months, he said, “Nadia, nothing’s wrong with you. You just have to deal with your life.” Truth. It can make me hate the person speaking it. Until the point at which I want to kiss them for setting me free.

  But I still couldn’t be that person for Candace. She said she wanted to be a part of the church and also to be my friend again, for us to lean on each other. I was torn between “being good”—saying yes, by all means, come and be my friend and parishioner, someone like you could really use a nice church—and wanting to tell the truth and say I just cannot trust her and as a Lutheran clergywoman I need people a touch more stable to lean on. But I couldn’t. Something about us matching each other in the past, no matter how much we no longer matched in the present, m
ade me feel as though I had no right.

  I wish I could say that I had learned how powerful the truth is and that I am unwavering in my commitment to it. But in that moment I couldn’t manage to be good or tell the truth. Instead, I said that I had the friends I needed. Sometimes we can’t manage to choose the truth or to be good, and in those moments I just hope God comes and does that thing where something is transformed into healing anyway.

  Candace came to church once. She kind of laughed as I served her communion and then never came back.

  CHAPTER 8

  Clinical Pastoral Education

  When they came to the place that is called The Skull, they crucified Jesus there with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left.

  —Luke 23:33

  It was 2007 and I was clunking along nicely in seminary, writing papers, triaging the inordinate amount of reading, and usually showing up for class, when I realized there was a requirement that I had somehow missed: clinical pastoral education. You want to be a pastor? Great. But first you have to work for ten weeks as a hospital chaplain. This felt to me like saying “You want to be a cab driver? Great. But first, here are the keys to an ambulance, they are yours for the next two-and-a-half months.”

  This is what was required of me to become a student chaplain at a hospital: I filled out a CPE application, and then they handed me a clipboard and a name badge. Viola! I am now a hospital chaplain. I felt about as qualified to wear the chaplain’s badge as I did to don scrubs and a stethoscope.

  When I knocked on the dusty–rose colored door of my first patient and said, “Hi, I’m Nadia, from the chaplain’s office,” I was sure the patient would immediately know two things: (1) I’m not really a hospital chaplain and (2) I had just bought the clothes I’m wearing the day before. At thirty-seven I had, for the first time in my life, a need to own grown-up drag: slacks, blazers, and shirts that not only buttoned, but also covered my heavily tattooed arms. Yet dressing like an adult didn’t make me feel more confident; it made me feel even more like a fraud.