No “The”
You get very ragged hunting The dogma.
Even if you wear waders, leeches hug your jeans. Even if you wear burlap over buffalo plaid, surly branches poke through your sweater.
Even if you find the tree with the knothole — the one that holds the whitest scroll with the blackest letters — you will be wet and hungry and always rather worried.
How much fairer to lay on your back on the far side of the forest.
The forest people will not let you down, but they will not let you in on the secrets you assume somebody knows. They will show you where the night flowers gather and where the careful voles dig.
They will show you the pleasure of not digging.
In my nights of wildest fear, I have wanted neither pleasure nor peace.
I have wanted to dig, to unravel, to be spent by the hunt for The dogma.
I was not raised to hunt or to fish, and to this day my mother asks “did we do this to you?” The answer is “no.”
I was raised to braid the clover and daisies, a child of peace under willow and oak. I was raised to run with the animals, elbow-deep in the river where laughing tadpoles told tales.
I was raised with an expansive faith.
Although I am as Dutch as a calzone, I was raised among the Reformed, sturdy faithful with -Oes and -Ees and -Ostmas in their names.
They read and taught and fought. They declared that “many hands make light work.” They loved their hymns and their neighbors.
They slapped together thousands of mutant ham-salad sandwiches, telling me I looked like Audrey Hepburn as I “waitressed” our Pot Luck Suppers. They loved their thrift store, outfitting me in blazers older than my mother and stories of old men reportedly once young.
They crocheted me pocket crosses and carried my crosses.
They came to our house, galumphing hordes at a time, for mysterious pie-scented meetings of Consistory. They came to our house, tearful ones at a time, for eggplant parmigiana and crinkly renditions of “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”
They made it as easy as the backyard creek to believe in our friend Jesus, the Jesus who loved weeping Mary Magdalene and sprightly Zacchaeus and all the earnest Easter pageant characters and me.
I never doubted, from age three, that Jesus loved me.
I never asked if there was an outer limit to the forest.
I never heard the -Oes or the -Ees ooh or ahh about who was in or out.
I never locked the door to my cabin. I was raised with an expansive faith.
But danger came, and danger wears a doubt-pelt, a dead thing whose eyes have been replaced with black marbles.
Danger came, and danger sells insurance.
When danger picks off your people, you you start buying locks and reels and rifles to hunt The dogma.
That’s what you do if you are eighteen and away from home for the first time, away from the daisies and away from the blue expanse. Danger knows that you are away from your dying deacon Dad and your poet Mom with the Complete Treasury of Bible Quotations under her arm.
Danger tells you that you had better find some arms to hold you, or else you might blow out the cabin window. Danger has some promising candidates.
Fundamentalism, for instance.
My college friends and I wouldn’t have used this word. We would have been properly offended by it. But we were nothing if not a pack of control bandits, certainty thieves in the heist of our lives. We were earnest and anxious, never-doubters who had never felt so scared; awkward innocents who had never held a weapon.
Certainty felt powerful in our arms.
Lock-tight answers held us fast.
The world was wicked and unwieldy, our bongo-balmy classmates and zinging professors as dangerous as the demons who surely had footholds on their hairy feet.
The world was lean and lonely between these lines, but you knew your fellow travelers by their dialect.
We had no idea how to be free, but we knew how to behave and what to believe.
We were elite and extreme and “on fire for Jesus.”
Fortunately, the forest people were guarding the trees.
The -Oes and the -Ees sent me love letters, my 88-year-old “prayer partner” knitting me bookmarks that I tucked into my tracts. In the shower, I still sang “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” and “This Is My Father’s World,” groundwater beneath the brittle limestone of come-lately praise choruses.
The Dutch sent for their Scottish cousins, the smart sapphire Presbyterians, who sent for me. Somehow I staggered into a seminary so spacious, I was in love and in deep before I could crawl ashore to clean black-and-white lines.
The Presbyterians claimed to do everything “decently and in good order,” but they were as wild as sunrise. They believed Jesus was bigger than the Bible. They believed grace was not just amazing but reckless, torrid. They believed mercy is God’s ace. They believed the most shameful shammy hams had places at God’s table.
They made it easy to believe that God was too good to comprehend.
They picked my fears like scabs. If Moses didn’t write the Torah, how was I supposed to survive life or death? If so much is poetry, can love be prose? If truth laughs like a tadpole, can it keep me safe? If we write in pencil, will God remember our story?
Danger didn’t like any of this. Danger shook its pelt. The dead eyes rattled in their sockets.
But danger is lazy and overconfident, and danger dropped the pen while I was picking up sticks at the forest edge. There were so many, cherry and pine and ebony and ham-salad pink. I had to keep wandering further in, had to drop my rifle to hold them.
The next thing I knew, I fell in the river.
I started spilling water everywhere.
I started seeing Jesus everywhere.
I started singing “This Is My Father’s World” in Walmart parking lots and long walks, oohing and aahing at peculiar people who hymned me home in a thousand languages.
I kept company with lithe cats who claimed The dogma is imaginary but cacophony is kind.
I squinted into a rainbow coalition of kindness, the nones and the gunless with empty hands and whitewater hearts. I kissed the mystery. I had missed the mystery. I lay under the willows.
I ran repeatedly. But prodigals don’t surprise The Lover.
I dated danger when I lost my name, trying on old waders in a new color. Perhaps Catholicism, heavy as velvet, stinging as incense, could hold the tarp down over my broken heart. Perhaps The dogma would bark to quiet the contempt, shooting the sharp end off my marriage.
Perhaps I could be right, or alright, for awhile.
Perhaps my prayer partners were praying still. Again I ran free, crying oe and ee.
Perhaps someday I will forgive myself for the days and ways I betrayed my spirit, pressing it into a damp, dour box for safekeeping. Perhaps someday I will abandon the need for The anything, the lock or the key or the one.
In the meantime, I cast my lot with the -Oes and the -Ees, the forest people and the disarmed, Zacchaeus and my parents and the voles and tadpoles, and my Jesus, my Jesus, my gigantic Jesus, my everything.
I am not a Protestant or a Catholic, not O/orthodox by even the most tortured definition. I am a child, dressed in thrifty blazers or clover crowns depending on the day, dressed in Great Mercy, elbow-deep in peace that passeth understanding.
My doors are unlocked. The forest is overgrowing. The river and the rocks gab questions. Everywhere I go is home.
Story is the soul of Angela Townsend’s calling. As Development Director at Tabby’s Place: a Cat Sanctuary, she has the privilege of bearing witness to mercy for all beings. This was not the vocation Angela expected when she got her Master of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary, but love is a wry author of lives. Angela also has a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology from Vassar College. She has had Type 1 diabetes for 32 years and lives in Bucks County, PA with two shaggy comets disguised as cats.
Amethyst Review 