Over these two days I have sat among clergy listening to their testimonies — stories of faith filled with certainty, conviction, and vivid encounters with Jesus and God. Their words were confident and assured. They spoke of salvation as something known, of ministry as something affirmed, of belonging as something settled.
Listening, I felt the familiar distance opening inside me.
I have no thing in common with those stories.
I have never had the mystical experiences they describe. No dramatic encounters. No clear sense of divine reassurance. No certainty about my place in the church or even about my faith itself. If I am a Christian — and some days I am not sure — then my Christianity is, as the Apostle Paul wrote, through a glass darkly. It is groping rather than grasping, searching rather than knowing. It is an ongoing attempt to be included, coupled with the enduring experience of being left out — not just by the institution, but by God. Ignored, forgotten, unwelcome, or at least in the experiential manner I hear in these stories.
That absence, the absence of the felt presence of God, has shaped my life more than any moment of revelation.
I entered the church not out of certainty, but out of need. Subconsciously, I was searching for safety — salvation not only from sin, but from the danger of being Blak in a hostile world. Country for me, the country I grew up on, was hostile for it carried the blood of extermination in every grain of dirt I walked upon, and I carried it in my body.
The last local Aboriginal, Tom Penney, died in 1875, all other Aboriginal people were moved out west in 1900. Country, for me, is not somewhere I visit often because the extermination of our stories has continued in the violence of three open cut coal mines gobbling up all that went before them.
I stayed in the church because, for all its limitations, the church was safer than being outside its walls. Something I proved the one time I moved back into the world. The church offered structure, protection, and rules promising order where my life had known only chaos and violence.
And chaos and violence had been my early teachers.
My childhood was marked by violence — at home and at school. There were many experiences that pushed that violence further: abuse, trauma, systemic or institutional abuse, domestic violence, bullying and more. Even when I left school, violence followed me — including moments I still struggle to name without my body tightening in response. Trauma did not arrive as an episode. It arrived as an atmosphere, something I seemed to breathe in every day.
And it has stayed, an unwanted boarder in a one room flat.
It is important to note that the chaos in my family was the result of my parents’ own experiences of personal and cross-generational trauma. They were not ‘bad’ people, to the contrary they were ordinary people impacted by their own personal history and experiences of racism and vilification. I hold nothing against them and have made my peace.
For more than sixty years I have prayed for healing. I have sought freedom. I have asked God — repeatedly, faithfully — for relief from what lives in my body and memory. And it has not come. Not in the way others describe. Not in the way testimonies promise.
The only relief I receive is from medication thallowing me to sleep without deep night terrors, without self-destruction, without self-medication. This allows me a sense of control albeit slippery and uncertain though it may be.
So, what does that make me?
In church language, it can feel like I occupy the place of Judas — the one who stays close but does not fit the story. The one whose presence is uncomfortable. The one who cannot repeat the expected script. Yet framing it this way is only one part of the story. Perhaps my position is not betrayal but bearing witness to a truth the church struggles to hold, that faith is not always accompanied by certainty, and healing is not always delivered on schedule, if at all.
Perhaps my faith — if it is faith — is not about answers, but about remaining. It is about looking out through a bug splattered windscreen on to a dry and dusty country road at midnight, a road almost hidden from view by the blackness of the night and the remains of previously living creatures enmeshed in dust in front of me.
It is about staying present without consolation and assurance all is safe. About refusing to pretend God has been kind when life has been brutal. About naming the gap between promise and experience. It is recognising, in the words of Tom Waits, that God is away on business somewhere else, for someone else and isn’t present here for me. In another lyric he asks this question when you a young girl disappears and is killed, “Why wasn’t God listening, why wasn’t God there, for sweet Georgia Brown?’ I ask that question a lot.
I do not know what to do with this place I inhabit. But I know this: silence and self-erasure are no longer options. If I remain in the church and the world, it will not be by denying my reality. It will be by speaking from it. It is the only experience of God and the world I have, and it’s all I have to offer.
Faith through a glass darkly, or the bug splattered windscreen, may not be sought or celebrated but this form of faith is all I have. If it is experienced or acknowledged by others and the church, it is accompanied with the promise of clarity and hope in heaven. The promise of a later revelation, in heaven, carries little consolation for me when hope in any form is absent now.
And perhaps honesty, rather than certainty, is what this moment — and a church seemingly obsessed with a God who makes all things, including people, shiny and new— most needs. What I do not need from people are explanations or excuses on behalf of God, scriptural affirmations or pious platitudes of understanding and support. Over the years I have heard them all.
What I need is space and presence without judgement, ears listening without minds working to tell me their stories and solutions, the permission to be in the midst of this without people trying to fix me or the situation, the acceptance that this is the way it is and it, I, will never be shiny and new and therefore, rarely comfortable to be about.
But I will always be about regardless of whether you are comfortable with my expression of faith or not. This is where I am and, it seems to me, to be where I am meant to be with all my imperfections and my unorthodox relationship with the Greater Than you name as God.
Somehow, we have come to an agreement that both of us will continue to be who we are and neither will expect the other to conform to eithers expectations. No judgements, no court cases, nor swift exportation to hell, just a commitment to make the world we exist in better when we leave it than it was before we came. In the Greater Than’s case, there is a lot more time and resources available to do so than I have been gifted. Yet, the task is the same and imperfection is my superpower.
Cutting corners, bypassing dogma, extricating liturgy and respecting orthodoxy are KPI’s the Greater Than is prevented from, but are integral to my success. My rudimentary understanding of faith, if it is in fact faith, allows me to go places, do things, and be present to people that your understanding of the Greater Than (God) cannot do or be. By so doing I , embody the power beyond power in my ordinary life exhibited in the incarnated Christ, and am able to do miracles, healings and other ordinary things just by being the I Am I am.
I remain. Here. Now.