Where You Been Lord

1. Talking to the Ceiling

She does not kneel so much as she negotiates. One hand on the edge of the mattress, the other pressed to her hip, and then the slow, deliberate descent that age demands of a body that has been carrying things for a long time. The carpet is thin. The room is dark except for the yellow light leaking under the door from the hallway. Outside, the neighborhood is doing what neighborhoods do at this hour: a dog, a distant car, the particular silence that is not quite silence. And here, in a bedroom that smells of lavender and old wood, a seventy-two-year-old woman finds something that resembles her knees and begins to do what she has been doing since she was nine years old.

She begins to talk to the ceiling.

There is nothing remarkable about the ceiling. It is white, or was white, and it holds no icon, no crucifix, no visible evidence of the direction in which prayer is supposed to travel. And yet this is where the words go, upward, into plaster, into the dark above the plaster, into whatever is or is not beyond that. She has been sending words in this direction for sixty-three years. She is still not entirely sure what receives them. But she has not stopped, and that itself is the first thing worth understanding about the kind of faith this book is about.

This is not a book about certainty. If you have come looking for proofs, for the clean architecture of systematic theology, for a faith that has never had a bad night, you will not find it here. What you will find is something closer to what most people actually live: a faith that is inherited before it is chosen, that survives things it was not built to survive, that asks the same question in a hundred different languages over the course of a single life, and that has learned, somehow, to call that asking a form of devotion rather than a failure of it.

The question forming in that bedroom has been forming since 1961. Since a mother's voice first made the ceiling feel like a door rather than a wall. Since a girl of nine pressed her palms together in imitation of the woman she loved most in the world and felt something, not proof, not vision, not the voice from the whirlwind, but something, rise up in the space between asking and silence. That something carried her. It carried her through what followed, and what followed was considerable.

There is a particular kind of endurance that does not announce itself. It does not carry signs or write memoirs in real time. It simply keeps showing up, at the side of the bed, at the kitchen table before the house wakes, at the back of a church where the familiar words settle over a tired body like a hand on the shoulder. The woman in this room has been that kind of enduring for more than six decades, and if you asked her to describe her faith she would probably not reach for words like triumphant or joyful, though it has been both of those things in its seasons. She would more likely reach for the word she uses herself: tired. She is tired in the way that only the genuinely faithful can be tired: not because she has given up but because she has not, and the not-giving-up has cost her something real.

And still she comes back to the ceiling.