My bionic Jesus heart

My faith is as earthy as it can be – as earthy as I am. It’s rugged enough that I suspect it will never be replaced by anything else wholesale, as it has replaced what could or would have been fundamental parts of me.

This replacement is like waking up with a bionic arm one day; you may not know how it works or how it got there, or whether it’s superior to your old arm. After awhile you stop wondering. It’s just your arm.

You stop wondering until someone else points it out: “Hey, what’s up with your arm, by the way?”

“Oh, that,” you say. “Yeah, it’s bionic.”

Unless they continue irritating you with questions you can’t quite answer, you go on doing whatever you’re doing.

If they do irritate you, you find yourself in a quandary. You don’t know how you got the arm; it just appeared one day. Maybe someone told you the old one was diseased, or maybe it seemed to you like a magical gift you’d received. Maybe it just struck you as a simple fact, like the grass being green. Whatever your justification, its origin is mysterious, and anything you say about it is bound to be half lie, since you don’t know the answer and can’t explain it to yourself.

At this point, I usually fall back on metaphor. My English-major faith in the desirability and possibility of expressing the inexpressible finds its home here. I am comfortable with metaphors.

The bionic arm metaphor, for instance, quickly reaching the treacherous level of conceit, above.

This is why my faith may be called earthy – because I have an interest in relating it to the earth. But take away the metaphors and the impulse toward practical response, and what you have is a mystic. (What you have is a bionic woman.)

I am, I think, interested in playing with the mystery more than settling on answers. I am interested in this because I have been a player, and have felt something mysterious playing back – playing with me. I am interested in this because those origin-mysterious parts of me are attuned to seeking out mysteries, and know what to do once I find them.

I don’t understand why or how. There have been no literal radioactive spiders in my life, and I don’t give any thought to secret Krypton-like origins. The closest I’ve come is an exhausting, semi-tragic childhood that in the end, I escaped. The coming-out-from-under potentially crushing weight may have sharpened my sense of irony, of the spiritual, of others.

It almost certainly necessitated the transplants: bionic sense of self, bionic sense of wonder, bionic heart.

And here’s why the metaphor: Because when people ask me now ("what do you believe?"), I don't know what to tell them. Or rather, I don't know how.

I have this hope, I might say. It's a transplant.

Paul – lovely Paul, who I know and hate like my own brother – says we should have an answer for anyone who asks where our hope comes from. Presumably, he means that we should have thought through our beliefs and faith enough to be able to articulate them. In practice in modern America, it’s translated to always having a tattered and handy copy of the “Four Spiritual Laws.”

I’ve never been a “Four Spiritual Laws” kind of girl.

I've been a "what do you think about aliens," "why should evolution contradict Genesis," "God how do I live through this next moment and the one after that" kind of girl. I've been an "if I don't have you, I don't have anything," "I'd rather be dead and I'm serious" kind of girl.

I've been melodramatic and sincere like the Four Spiritual Laws, sure, but I haven't been simple like them. My trust has never been simple. People who say "just believe!" make me want to scream.

I do "just believe." I just believe the way I just wake up in the morning, groaning, or the way I wish I had some ice cream, or the way I used to play My Little Ponies when I was little. I just believe the way people believe in their own bodies, but it doesn't simplify things.

How do you explain your own body? (Scientifically, parts labeled and categorized? Poetically, in terms of movement?)

And how to explain the workings of bionic, transplanted parts to the fully intact?

To those who are injured, as an upgrade? "This arm'll go miles and miles without ever getting tired! Trade up for the newest model in spiritual welfare!"

To those who are self-satisfied...as what? Maybe this is what Jesus meant, always saying the sinners would accept (him) but the righteous would not.

Selling -- evangelizing -- a part of yourself seems too modern (too commodifying, too commercial) a take on faith. I do not believe, and pass along or promulgate or push my beliefs. I am my beliefs.

So, to those who wonder what I believe, I say that I can't tell you. It's untellable. (I'm untellable.)

But watch closely and you may see it -- I may see it: the evidence of the amputations and revisions and attachments.

They are what I believe.