After years of study and preparation, I entered the ministry at 29. I’m not in ministry now. I’m not even a Christian. People ask me often how this came to be. This six-part series is an attempt at an answer. If you’re looking for a 12-part list of reasons not to believe in Christianity, which could be very helpful, this isn’t it. It is a short memoir of my spiritual development, loosely following a tripartite scheme — orientation (parts one and two), disorientation (parts three and four), and renewed orientation (parts five and six).
Part three: How cancer beats Christianity and why (neo)colonialism isn't a great escape
When she and my dad arrived on campus the day before graduation, there was no more denying it — cancer was winning. My mom’s spine was crooked from the tumors growing along it, her head at a permanent tilt. Her hair was gone, a crimson bandana in its place. Her body was emaciated. She smelled like a hospital. Moving her fragile frame from the car to her wheelchair was no physical effort, but it took all I had within me not to break down and weep.
After seven years, six colleges, seven cities, and who knows how many jobs, I was finally graduating from college. I had barely made it out of high school and was too ashamed to walk a year behind. My college graduation would be the first time I would do so, and my mother refused to miss it.
She seemed fine when I was home for Christmas the past December. And I spent spring break, just a couple of months back, with her at The Oasis of Hope Clinic outside of Tijuana. She seemed more tired then, obviously the cancer was taking its toll, but she was still in good spirits and hopeful.
She made it through the ceremony and the small after-party my friend’s family was generous enough to host. She and my dad left the next morning and made it back to Denver the next night.
Four days later, my dad called to tell me the news: The doctors said she had a week to live, two at best. Coming to see me graduate was too much. I left for Colorado the next day, stopping in the parking lot of a Vegas casino to sleep for a couple of hours, but otherwise driving straight through the night. Whether it was my brothers and I arriving or the doctor had it wrong, she didn’t die that week or the next. She rallied for over two months.
It was the hardest two months of my life. I drove her to doctor’s appointments multiple times a week. I was a nervous wreck, constantly scanning the road to try to avoid all bumps, her tormented exhalations reminding me how even the slightest jolt was excruciating. Even when I didn’t have the night shift, my anxiety made it impossible to sleep. I used permanent markers to blackout all the bikini pictures in the surf magazines I had to diminish the temptation I felt daily to escape by looking at porn. My older brother told me this was neither normal nor okay. My mother disliked me wiping her ass more than I did. It was the hardest two months of my life. I’m grateful for every moment we had.
When I wasn’t caring for her, I was either painting houses for my friend’s business or reading. My dad must have commandeered the TV or something. Otherwise, my obsessive reading makes no sense. I had been a reader for some time, but not like that summer. For whatever reason, I began devouring books.
I read G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, Phillip Yance, and Dostoevsky — all permissible — but I also read Plato, a two-part collection of the history of political thought, Cornel West, Joan Didion, a good portion of Dante, and a plethora of easy-to-read novels, like The House on Mango Street, which I was supposed to read in high school. I remember disliking sections or specific arguments, but not a whole book. The only book I remember not finishing is A Heartbreaking Work of Incredible Genius. I couldn’t read what I was living.
Dostoevsky and West were revelations. West opened my eyes in many ways: you didn’t need to be conservative to be a faithful Christian; the US is an empire; it takes a deep reservoir of inherent strength just to survive in our culture as a black person. He gave me new language. Both for things I knew, like that hip hop is an art form (duh), and for things I didn’t — like how gangster rap is the inverse of the gangster ideology that runs this nation: winner-take-all capitalism, nationalism, and white supremacy. Trying on his ideas was like putting on glasses for the first time, bringing into focus things that had been hazy or imperceptible before. I began to understand why and how identities matter and that I needed to expand my horizon from reading what I had been taught to read — heteronormative, white men.
Other than the extra time I had with my mom, the greatest gift of that summer was having my curiosity sparked.
For the first time in my life, I began to appreciate thinking and reading not as a means to an end but as an end itself. There was joy in finding an answer to a question or finishing a book, but the greater joy came from discovering new questions, those also asking them, and getting lost in stories and language. I began writing short stories instead of just journaling my thoughts and prayers. My world was shifting.
And it wasn’t just my reading that was transforming my mind. My mom’s shitty, painful, drawn-out, and seemingly meaningless death didn’t do much to shore up our overlapping version of faith.
Her church was the worst group of individuals since Charlie Manson’s crew of proselytes. Okay, fine — they were well-meaning people. They wanted my mother to be healed.
The first month I was home, they prayed for her twice a week. Five to ten of them would show up at our door. They’d come in, lay hands on her frail body, and plead earnestly with God to heal her for over an hour. They’d leave with sparkling eyes and smiling faces, as if they’d brought a newborn’s parents dinner, blissfully unaware of how their visits drained my mother. She wanted to be healed too, and she would cry after most prayer sessions, not from catharsis but frustration. Why was God ignoring her prayers? Why theirs? I began to understand they were unaware of their visits’ effects for one reason: they wanted my mother to be healed, sure, but not for her alone. If God healed her, the news of the miracle would spread, bringing glory to God and his grace with a story powerful enough to revive their dying church. They were well-meaning people.
But maybe Manson’s crew was too. After all, if you believe you’re the elect, chosen to rule over the remnants of the human race after an apocalyptic race war, starting the inevitable race war with the brutal murder of a pregnant Sharon Tate and friends is understandable. The ends justify the means. Okay, that’s a stretch. But it isn’t a stretch to say that being a well-meaning person can mean just about anything; it all depends on what your meaning is.
As the summer wore on, I wondered when she would face the truth — she was dying.
I felt these prayer sessions more than anything else contributed to her refusal. The faith her church believed in didn’t have room for grief. To grieve would be to doubt. To doubt would be to lack faith. A faith her healing required. When my brothers and I finally convinced my dad to call an end to their visits, I hoped my mother would be able to face her death. I’m not sure she ever did.
I don’t think most of us ever do. But my mother was one of the most committed Christians I knew. She attended and served at one church or another my entire life. She led women’s Bible studies, served food to the homeless, bought clothes at the Goodwill when we could have at least afforded JCPenney. For Christmas and birthdays, she asked for goats for Africans through Worldvision instead of presents. She remained in an unhappy marriage because her God hated divorce. She prayed and read her Bible daily. She taught me what it meant to see everyone, including the homeless and drug addicts, as children of God, worthy of dignity, love, and respect due to their humanity and nothing more. I disagreed with her on many things even then, but she was the most faithful Christian I knew. Oh death, where is thy sting?! It shook the foundations of my faith to see hers appear so futile.
I glimpsed a truth about religion — it’s often not a means to face our fractured realities but to muffle them.
It wasn’t only my mother and her church who couldn’t face her death. With the exception of a very few close friends, no one I knew could. I felt like an outsider at church again, not demon-possessed (see, part two) but unable to come out from under a dark cloud and enter into the joy of worshiping our Creator and Redeemer. One night, when the mother of the family I lived with (see, part one), another faithful Christian I looked up to, asked me how I was doing, I began to tell her I wasn’t doing well. I was just about to truly open up, to tell her how much pain I was in, when she stopped me, “God has a plan, you know. His ways aren’t ours.” She smiled, hugged me, and that was it.
I know she meant well. But her words, like the words of so many others, were meant to shut me up, to keep my pain at bay. The vast majority of Christians I knew had nothing to offer but trite cliches and pat-on-the-back-while-pushing-you-away platitudes. I glimpsed a truth about religion — it’s often not a means to face our fractured realities head-on but to muffle them.
I can’t merely blame the Church, my mother, or other Christians, however. I’m responsible too. I should have given voice to my grief and began that by giving voice to my rage. I should have lodged my complaint with the heavens, like Job, maybe even shouted and screamed, telling God to go to hell for the shithole of a world he created — a world where faithful service to the God who overcame death leaves you stricken before it.
Instead, I went to Uganda.
Uganda has served as a proxy site for the Evangelical culture wars for years.
Many conservatives, including the pastor of the Southern California megachurch Saddleback, Rick Warren, have used it as a way to spread abstinence-based responses to the AIDs crisis and the homophobic ideology the US finally began seriously rejecting during the Obama years.
Others have gone there to do good. Maybe to help. Maybe to do something other than sit in front of a computer all day for someone else’s profit. Maybe to get laid. I joined a group of others from my university in a stumbling attempt to start our own white-savior non-profit for many reasons — including then unrecognized racist, colonial scripts — but all three of these were at least a part for me. (Of course, mine was the Christian version of getting laid — finding a hot wife!)
A close friend of mine had dropped out of school to tour the world with his video equipment the year before. He came back with a story. He had found a couple of “trustworthy” men on the ground in Uganda. Which was fortunate, because the civil war there, perpetuated by a Sudanese-sponsored Joseph Koney and his child-soldier fueled Lord’s Resistance Army, had left many in wretched poverty and despair. Including many orphans. Others, too, were finding their vocations as advocates for Koney’s child soldiers. The non-profit Invisible Children broke ground in fundraising by dumbing down a convoluted geopolitical catastrophe into a simple good versus evil narrative — giving their target audience, young, white, upper-middle-class females, the hero’s role. Instead of joining their cause, we decided to start our own.
I wasn’t able to go the summer it all began, but I did join our initial fundraising tour. Jessica Dobson, now in Deep Sea Diver, and Brad Corrigan, from Dispatch, joined us too, playing several free shows across the East Coast to help us raise awareness — and money. I joined the Philadelphia and New Jersey leg of the tour. After the shows, I spoke with the wealthy parents of kids who came or invited us to their homes afterward. I raved on about the painful existence of the Ugandan people, as if I understood it, and why our orphanage, run on the ground by trusted nationals, would make a difference. It felt strange even then, but I was happy to be out of the house, a sweet five-day reprieve from the draining toil of caring for my dying mother, and I was ready to help our well-meaning mission however I could.
In January of the next year, I went to Uganda myself to see what the work was accomplishing. Instead of a personal mission, I found an existential wasteland.
After touring several internally displaced people (IDP) camps, seeing what the breakdown of society and the failure of government meant for the vulnerable, and having no clue how to help other than with our orphanage, which even then seemed somehow to me and a couple of others as a shame (we would later discover it was; the children weren’t orphans from IDP camps but members of the nationals’ extended families) — I was left in a daze. I told people I felt sick, but the truth was I couldn’t stomach another potbellied child sitting listlessly under a swarm of flies (a clichéd trope for a reason). I couldn’t ignore another pair of eyes watching us as we lumbered out of our vans, shoving rolling water bottles back inside (we didn’t have enough to share with everyone!) before setting up thousands of dollars of video equipment to film their suffering so we could — help? I spent most of the rest of my time reading in my room, hanging out with the kids in the orphanage, and counting the days until I got to return home to waves, good coffee, plentiful food, and a comfortable bed.
I came home to California full of guilt and self-loathing. My pain had made me so cynical and weak I couldn’t even glean spiritual sustenance from a short-term mission trip. I was supposed to be looking for a job as a pastor or at least at a church, but I felt spiritually empty, emotionally exhausted, dry.
I had nothing to offer. But I was still called to the ministry.
Maybe I needed time to prepare. I definitely needed resources to help me untangle the doubts growing in and twisting around me. I applied to Fuller Theological Seminary, was accepted, and prepared to attend the next Fall.
