style="font-size:15px;"> “And address?”
After giving her address she anticipated that directions would be needed and began explaining how to reach the farm from Madison. Before even getting off the interstate, she was interrupted.
“Pardon me, but I have enough information for right now. Next week you will be notified about a time to come into the department. Thank you for contacting us.”
Cora put down the phone and tossed the papers she was holding into the box on the floor.
She felt undone, unfinished, like a room with a fresh coat of paint but no furniture. How could someone register so little interest in what she assumed would be the lifeblood of his agency?
Not wanting to remain in her tomb of arrested expectations, she drove into town to pick up her children and save them a long bus ride.
FAITH KEEPS NO TREASURE
WINIFRED SMITH OFTEN FELT SHE LIVED TOO MUCH INSIDE her own head. She thought about things longer than she should and this presented quite a problem, especially in the ministry. It made her appear out of place.
Sharing reality with others had always proved difficult for Winnie, a problem made much worse after the death of her mother. Child Services had placed her with a foster family whom she suspected would without a second thought jam her into the coal-burning furnace in their basement if her roasting would result in an additional payment from the state. She later understood this probably wasn’t true, but at the age of twelve her imagination fashioned whole garments out of the soiled cloth of her despair. Her inconsolableness over the loss of her mother gave her the demeanor of belligerence, loneliness made her seem aloof, and the perpetual fear she lived in caused others to think she might be mentally challenged.
Lying awake at night in her first foster home, she knew she had nothing. She was nobody. No future waited for her and she had no answer for the tiny yearning voice inside her that asked over and over: Am I going to be all right?
After months of listening to this, one night Winnie noticed another, deeper voice. At first she couldn’t make it out—only that it was not asking the same fearful question. This new voice was making a statement and the feeling attached to it gave her comfort, and the more comfort she felt the more clearly she could hear the voice. It was telling her something about herself. She could be somebody after all: a Christian.
But what did this mean? Other children called themselves Christian and they seemed to get this blessed identity from their parents, like being Norwegian. But Winnie’s mother and father had belonged to nothing. They had no religion.
What did it mean to have a religion, she wondered, and thought about this incessantly. Inordinately shy, she had no skills in talking to strangers, and everyone now was a stranger. There was no one to ask, and she had to figure everything out for herself.
One by one, things were revealed, and her young mind built from them a safe fortress to grow up in. Christian membership, she decided, was unlike other ways of belonging. It was a community of faith, and so long as you had faith, you belonged—a home of shared convictions. In the family of Christians, togetherness was maintained not by similar physical characteristics or spatial proximity, or even knowing each other, but through the fellowship of sharing beliefs. In the privacy of your own mind, when you thought about these special beliefs you could find safety in knowing that others shared them. Your thoughts were theirs. They conversed agreeably in exchanges of encouragement and goodwill. Sharing in these beliefs was like talking with a friend under a warm blanket, or knowing something in your heart, something good, that someone else also knew. And not just any beliefs would do—only the right ones. The wrong beliefs left you outside, alone, with no firm identity.
As she was transferred from one foster home to another, she continued to work out these beliefs that qualified her to be a true Christian. She read the Bible from beginning to end, and then started over. Slowly she began to understand what was required, and as her understanding grew her confidence in herself as an authentic person strengthened.
At fourteen, she was placed with a Christian family and experienced a cautious elation at finally arriving in her mind’s outward community; but the elation quickly faded when she attended church for the first time and was placed in a class for religious instruction. She had lived too long, it seemed, in her own fortress, and the walls had become thick.
She tried to talk to the other Sunday school students about the beliefs they shared with her, only to discover that they didn’t share them. Not only did they not share them, they had never heard of them and had no interest in learning about them. Even her teacher seemed unfamiliar with many, and those he seemed familiar with he had obviously spent too little time thinking about.
After six months Winnie asked to be excused from the confirmation ceremony following the completion of her religious instruction class. Her teacher was “cut to the quick,” he said, because she was, he said, his best student. But she did not think any legitimate sanctification could be granted solely on the basis of affirming belief, because, she said, a person could be filled with the Holy Spirit and still not believe, in the same way that someone could be electrocuted but not believe in electricity. Professed belief was an insufficient agency between God and woman.
She of course wanted to accept the things her teacher insisted she must, but as long as there remained the slightest wanting on her part, surely it couldn’t be faith. True faith kept no treasure in wanting. True faith wanted nothing to make it whole; it simply was, and grace could only be called “sufficient” when the Grace of grace was present, and no one, she told her teacher, could say that grace was always present because that would make living outside of Grace impossible. And if one never lived outside Grace, one could never know the experience of living under its benevolent rule. After all, Grace was not just a word for which a meaning could always be assigned and a definition found. Grace was something real that made all the difference, something that could be experienced, and because of this it had to be admitted that it could also not be experienced, and if it was not experienced it could not be sufficient.
And as far as the Holy Trinity was concerned—this was of course a wonderful idea so long as you did not worry about the need for All to be One rather than All to be Three, but what Scripture, exactly, was it based upon?
Her teacher placed his head in his hands, looked at her through the spaces between his fingers, and called her a “bad girl.”
After leaving church, her foster parents took her home and whipped her until she bled, but this was expected, because suffering at the hand of others, she had come to believe because of many resounding examples in the Bible, was a sign of having true beliefs.
Within the month, she was taken to another foster home.
That was a long time ago, she reflected on her way back to the parsonage behind the Words Friends of Jesus Church. Now she was no longer a child and did not expect other people to share her thoughts or beliefs. It wasn’t necessary. The Holy Bible Theological Seminary had taught her that. There were hundreds of Christian denominations and all of them had different practices and different shades of belief. They talked about believing the same things, but when it came right down to it, they didn’t. Whatever unity there was came from a shared agreement to not be very specific about what those beliefs entailed. And only odd ducks, like herself, bothered to look very deeply into them.
The congregation she currently served belonged to the Society of Friends. She had known little about this denomination but studied up before coming for the interview.
Their mid-seventeenth-century
