The Book of Beginnings
The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So, it is with everyone born of the Spirit. John 3:8
When I was a teenager, I studied theology at my small Catholic school in a chapel with stained glass windows and wooden pews lined with red cushioned seats. It was my favorite class.
In this chapel, we discussed the history and experiences of the people from that faith tradition as they lived out their devotion to God through the centuries. While the class would inevitably have to come to an end each school day, I loved knowing there would always be a new perspective or dynamic about God yet to be uncovered.
Theology, “The Study of God,” was in fact never reaching the end of the study of God.
Until the day I felt I had.
I looked to the spiritual writers and teachers I had grown to admire for deeper revelations of God only to find the discussions were becoming redundant. Books I read back in my stained-glass chapel era were the same concepts I was pointed to more than a decade later. My faith up until that point had been built on knowing how to argue apologetics and rattle off definitions and interpretations, but it’s easy to speak of being right while remaining inside your own echo chamber. While these words had become my blueprint for a relationship with God, they had only, as a friend wisely put it, gotten me “to the door”.
I wanted to understand what Jesus meant when he said: “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear it’s sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So, it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”
I wanted to follow the wind and discover God in the wild. I wanted to find a community of believers who declare a revelation that doesn’t end at the chapel walls, one that isn’t reserved for eternity. A people stepping out of uncomfortable places and pouring over words of new and ancient writers that point to an unfolding revelation happening in this moment, where the new kingdom meets ancient soil.
A people that didn’t have God figured out.
Because if you have God figured out, it’s not God.
So, you know what they say when you can’t find what you’re looking for… you must create it yourself. This is the community I’m building at Glass Chapel.
When I first started this newsletter three years ago, I knew what the mission was but expressing it proved to be a challenge. I was in a fog of doubts and questions about the faith tradition I had grown up in. Compounding this Dark Night of the Soul was the fact that I was in the throes of new motherhood and with that change came depression and having to accept that my expression of motherhood might look different from the women who raised me.
That my life might look different from the people that raised me.
My earliest articles reflected this inner turmoil of grappling with my role as a mother, which was ultimately tied to a desire to understand who God was and how He viewed me. Because at the root of it all I didn’t know my identity.
I didn’t know who I was when I could no longer be a conformer.
For so long I attempted to understand God and my relationship with Him through titles, religion, and job duties. I tried to live up to other people’s beliefs and expectations and discovered that just as I can’t be labeled, what others have to say about God doesn’t define God.
Who does God say God is?
Christian writer Denise Jordan says, “Historical Christianity and indeed many of the great theologians that have shaped our belief system (whether we are aware of it or not) have seen God from a fallen perspective.”
While I’ve received glimpses of God through teachers and scripture, I remind myself I see through a mirror dimly. I will not stop searching just because seemingly wiser individuals separated by time and space studied these topics before me.I’ve learned nothing from the story of Galileo if I settle for the idea that knowledge of God, like science, is not also unfolding.
If it’s true, the truth will stand.
And this is the mission of Glass Chapel I’ve been carrying in my heart all along, for this to be the place where people can find themselves in the longing and the seeking, as they’re carried by the wild, reckless wind. The people who want to ask the questions echoing in their hearts and find answers in the place both ancient and new.
Before walls, rituals, and sacrifices there was Eden in the Book of Beginnings.