An apology

I’ve had false starts on this piece several times over the past year or so, but it seems important, so here we go again.

I was raised a Christian, and in a good, solid, Protestant tradition.

My family’s faith traditions were heavily influenced by the teachings and beliefs of my maternal grandfather, Earnest Butterfield, a third-generation Methodist minister who preached for most of his career in the Finger Lakes region of Upstate New York. We attended church weekly. We shared a blessing over every suppertime meal. I was taught to pray every night before I went to sleep, and more, to bring all of my troubles to God—to talk to Him as a friend.

I loved church and enjoyed an exultant sense of closeness to God. I whole-heartedly accepted Christ as my Savior and regularly searched my heart for sins, trying to become more godly, to wrestle into submission my obvious flaws—my quickness to anger, my tendency to trap myself within certain resentments.

My understanding of the Christian faith was, of course, lacking in nuance and depth. As a child, I didn’t have the complex and complicated imprint of life’s experiences that we draw on to truly connect with Scripture, to grasp the emotional and spiritual tension behind what may be, otherwise, only a couple lines of text. A 10-year-old can’t really understand how gutted Job was when he learned his family was obliterated, or why David wanted, urgently, for Uriah to sleep with Bathsheba, or why Peter leapt out of the fishing boat and swam to shore when he realized he and his companions were speaking to the risen Christ—the One he had, such a short time ago, denied, and from whom he therefore thought he was parted forever.

Today, even writing a couple lines about that last story is enough to make tears come to my eyes. As a child, it hardly registered at all.

My own denial of the Lord wasn’t so much a sharp break as a gradual drifting.