It is the first Sunday of Lent, one month and twenty-three days since Maribel was stabbed to death, in daylight, in the neighborhood of her home. The man who killed her kept her against her will for a long time. He beat her. He raped her. He threatened to kill her mother. So Maribel stayed with him until she couldn't anymore. Until she was too afraid to stay. Then he stalked her, cornered her on the street, pulled her from her truck, stabbed her 52 times, sliced her throat twice to be sure, and surrendered to the police who found him--that moment--knife in hand, covered in blood. She died then. Just as they got to her.
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This is a prayer for Maribel and me. Against unbelief.
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It is also a prayer for those who want to believe--those who choose to believe--despite a painful, baffling, and relentless state of unbelief. For those who understand I am speaking of the kind of doubt that asserts itself as real. For those who live with the niggling sense that Christianity is a very beautiful, very compelling, very strange collective myth--and like other collective myths, nothing more--and for those who put aside those feelings (every moment) in an effort to grasp the truth.
You. Unbelief.
Unbelief transforms prayer into pretense, for when I pray--( "______" )--I am trying not to look over my own shoulder, not to eavesdrop, as I do now, listening for what is self-conscious and disingenuous. Unbelief subverts hope by calling on evidence against wishful thinking, for when I hope I am already laying aside the statistically improbable and seeking a more knowledgeable physician for a second opinion. Unbelief suppresses faith just as--in the same moment and for the best reasons--I put aside the child's playground of elaborate fictions. Unbelief refuses love when I am sure I am incapable of real love and must rely instead on approximations to myself, projected sympathies, transferences, human likenesses, if I am to connect to anyone at all. And when unbelief looks at God, it can discover no difference between the God who's gone missing and my childhood father. Who also went missing.
So that I have only the most negligible experience of the difference. And it isn't a feeling. It is always a choice. I am here to make a choice.
I am not talking about lukewarm Sunday mornings when the attempt to get everybody out the door and into the car all but fizzles or implodes. Nor am I talking about momentary lapses into apathy or boredom or comfort. You who can talk of soul-certainty, who can appeal to common sense or to the natural law, as though these things are obvious to everyone--you of great faith: these things are not obvious to everyone. God has never been obvious to me. I have longed to become more faithful, but longing is a far reach from love. What is obvious to me now is that I longed for a beautiful dream. A walk in a gauzy shroud. An idea of God.
When faith, it seems, requires more than infinite resignation. A suffering to probe depths: an unwavering gaze on God who rises ahead: a vigil for the sake of the Kingdom. Which is far beyond what my soul knows how to offer or endure now. Especially since Maribel died.
And so begins this vigil.
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