"Saint Andrew, I've been true."

I have believed in story arcs: conflict, climax, resolution. I have believed that life is secretly like The Wonder Years, needing only a voice-over narrator to balance the story and smooth over the edges. I have not believed in chaos.

This certainty, this reliance on a grand-design narrative, is the hallmark of a True Believer, and I have been one. I have attributed actions and events variously to God or to the devil, to testing or trials or punishments or sin or saintliness. I have been reassured by identification of causes, and their effects.

I have repented and been washed of my doubts.

I have turned from repentance, and embraced them.

If God had allowed me to go to Vietnam when I most wanted to – when I had wanted to for ten years – I might have forgiven him. But he sent me to China instead.

If God had not broken apart the plans to live together, with friends, after college, I might have forgiven him that – or if God had not so drastically altered the school at which I taught in DC, I might have been merciful.

If God had allowed me to move to York and start a community, I may have been at peace. But I could not, and so I wasn’t.

If God had not included so many stories of these breaks and alterations and disappointments in the Bible, I might have had the strength to leave him – but they anticipate my complaints, my accusations, my enraged confusion, so I cannot. I cannot purge my body of this understanding that God, some God, exists.

It has been slowly coming into me that God, some God, is not causes and not effects, but something else. This God may be mystery; this God may be the strange harmony of coming into a new place and recognizing, and being recognized. This God may not care what I do or who or why I am the way I am. This God may happen to everyone, regardless. This God may want to love choice and complexity instead of steadfast, earnest purity. This God -- capricious and strange and real -- may allow me, out.

I cannot prevent myself believing in God -- I only don’t know which God is true -- but I am departing the first to be received by the second. I only need to come to terms with chaos, with my id-love for it. I need to embrace mystery and harmony and no-explanations.

At the crux of my soul, I am as I have always been. I believe, and I protect my belief, my innocence from fatal, soul-killing error, with walls and walls and walls -- the same walls, and the same beliefs. Only the walls are changing.

The center still holds.