Jacqueline Bussie is director of the Forum on Faith and Life and professor of religion at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota. Her first book, Outlaw Christian, won the 2017 Gold Medal Illumination Award for Christian Living. She lives in Fargo, ND.

Outlaw Christian

Finding Authentic Faith by Breaking the "Rules"

Thomas Nelson

Contents

Tired of Dishonesty?

Become an Outlaw Christian

When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket; and Jacob's hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, "Let me go, for the day is breaking" But Jacob said, "I will not let you go, unless you bless me"

–GENESIS 32:25–26

My mother was my best friend, until the day she forgot who I was. On that day, my own mom looked at me with kind eyes and asked, "Who are you? Are you my mom?" For the next sixteen years, early-onset Alzheimer's made sure my mother had no idea who anyone was, let alone me. On most days, this made me feel like one of the outcasts in ancient India whom the gods required to crawl backward out of the room, broom in hand, sweeping away her own footprints behind her. Parts of myself began to disappear, destined for the dust heap.

Watching the person I loved best in the world die made me realize that nearly everything I as a Christian had ever learned about suffering and evil was a crock, with a lot of pious clichés about "God's plan" and "God needing another angel" thrown in. I wrestled with this conclusion for years, but in the end it won out. All the so-called answers that I had been taught about suffering and sacrifice and salvation, when replayed in my sleepless head after a day of changing my mom's Depends, stung like a splash of bleach in my eyes. Words that once consoled made God feel further away than ever. I found myself asking, "Why didn't anyone ever tell me this is what life and love really feel like?" To make matters worse, all my family members splintered in their grief, and no one ever really talked about how much it hurt to lose my mother. Not talking about the hard stuff was nothing new, though. In the house where I grew up, pain was an invisible queen whom our silence kept on the throne. Fortunately, in the home where I live now, she no longer reigns.

When I was younger, before my mom got sick, I was completely in love with God. If you had known me then, you would have guessed I would grow up to be a religion professor. I often daydreamed about how it would be when I'd next see God's face, because I never doubted there would be a next time. I looked forward to it the way later in life I would look forward to seeing the person I was in love with, with cartwheels in my chest. I did not understand yet that my privilege was what made loving God feel so easy and natural, the same way red raspberries follow white blossoms on the summer vine. My vines had not yet suffered disease or drought, and I had not yet learned to pay attention to the vines of those persons who had suffered all that and more. As it turned out, my friends and their survivor-vines with their impossible fruit had everything to teach me. This book exists because of them.

As I became an adult who lived eyes-wide-open to the suffering of others, my love for God evolved. The way I grew to love God came to feel a lot like the way I felt back in high school when I fell in love with one of my best friends. He did not love me back, not "that way," he claimed as he broke the news that night in his Honda Civic and I hid my wet eyes behind my hands. From that day on, my best friend, though I still loved him with all of my heart, was a constant disappointment. Even looking at him hurt. His presence stung of loneliness, though of course his absence was even worse. I was a disappointment to him too, no doubt, because though he loved me, he recognized that in my eyes his love did not go far enough. Time with him was something I desperately longed for, but when I got it, my joy was so mixed up with longing that I felt like I was at the beach — my favorite place — but was being forced to eat sand. If you have ever loved someone who did not love you back, you know exactly what I mean. Everyone can connect to a story of unrequited love. But the weird thing is that no one ever wants to talk openly about the fact that for big chunks of our lives, millions of us feel this way about God.

In my journey toward becoming a more authentic person, I came to realize I was not like most other religious folks I knew. For one, I never outgrew the longing to talk about the stuff that hurts us most. I came to believe all of this secret keeping and soul hiding was, in the words of my hip nephew, cray-cray (read: crazy). For another, I had more in common with my atheist friends than with many of my Christian ones, though I myself was a Christian and not an atheist. I remember in college discovering the atheist whom Christians love to hate, the "God is dead" philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. I stumbled upon a sentence that made me stop short in which Nietzsche argued that although Christians want to claim Christ redeemed the world, a simple glance at the world and all its death headlines should be enough to tell us that Christ could only be said to have failed.

I stared at those words for a long time, hating how much they wrapped words around an unnamed fear that surfaced in my gut whenever I watched cable news or listened to my high school friend Mary Beth explain that she put a deadbolt on her bedroom door to stop her brother from "messing with" her. I began to suspect that perhaps Nietzsche, whom most forget was the son of a Lutheran pastor, was an atheist because he was as disappointed by God as I was sometimes. We both were confused by what looked like unkept promises. Secretly, part of me admired and was fascinated by Nietzsche's audacious authenticity, though I almost never admitted this to any of my conservative Christian friends and family, let alone to myself.

Unlike some of the atheists I knew, however, I didn't want to let go of God or my faith. Okay, that's not totally true. Some days I did want to throw God out like a used sweater that no longer fit, was irretrievably retro, and had holes in the elbows and stains down the front. But this sweater somehow kept reappearing in my closet, messing with my style. I couldn't ever completely break up with and let go of God even when I wanted to, or maybe closer to the truth, God wouldn't let me go or break up with me. For whatever reason, unlike my atheist friends, I wanted God back. Some of the Christians I knew admitted to sometimes feeling far from God like I did, but they had been taught to fear talking about it. Unlike them, I didn't want to accept God under the usual laws of dishonesty, silence, intimidation, and fear. About the time my mom was diagnosed with her illness, I decided to go to graduate school in religion. I wanted to become a theologian and a professor of religion in order to reclaim what I had lost as best I could.

And so, today, I am a Christian, but a strange one — one who sometimes finds herself closer kin to Buddhists, atheists, and agnostics than Christians. I am a teacher of religion, but probably unlike any you have ever met. No question or doubt is ever out of bounds in my classes. A religion major who was taking his fifth course with me once blew my mind when he raised his hand mid-class and declared, "You are the only person who ever tells us the truth about anything." Though I doubt I am the only one, since then, many other people in my life have said something similar. Apparently I am willing to go places that most other religious folks are unwilling to go.

But let's face it, honest people are usually lawbreakers. No wonder most people turn tail and run from truth telling, for who wants to live inside the jail of other people's judgment? Once I realized this tough truth about honesty, so much about my life clicked. No wonder I am always in trouble. But also, no wonder I can always find joy.

Some years later, a dear friend was reading some of the early pages of this book when he exclaimed, "You know what you are? You're an outlaw Christian." As you can see, the name stuck. The novelist Reynolds Price coined the term, but I want to put my own spin on it.

The name outlaw Christian describes the kind of Christian I am and the kind I'm setting myself free to become: namely, a follower of Jesus who no longer accepts cocky clichés, hackneyed hope, or snappy theodicies — defenses of God's goodness and power — that explain away evil and suffering with a theo-magical sleight of hand. An outlaw Christian doesn't condemn questions or discourage doubt. Instead, an outlaw Christian seeks to live an authentic life of faith and integrity, and chooses to defy the unwritten laws governing suffering, grief, and hope that our culture and our religious traditions have asked us to ingest.

The faith of an outlaw Christian is bold, outspoken, and active in a world of pain. On the one hand, I am tired of the Barbie-doll-smile kind of hope so many Christians embrace that refuses to get dirt under its fake fingernails in the struggle against the world's deep suffering and injustice. On the other hand, I am tired of why-bother-even-getting-out-of-bed despair — especially my own — which at times has preemptively broken up with hope and authentic living in order to avoid further disappointment and heartbreak. Neither path will do. The faith of an outlaw Christian laments, loves, laughs, longs, and lives, but the one thing it never does is lie ... about anything.

These days I try to be an outlaw Christian who walks the tightrope between realism and hope, between the Way Things Are and the Way We Long for Them to Be. I am a person who lives in a house of longing — not for daydreams, but for revolutions. I call it revolutionary because my longing — for a world, for example, of more mercy, justice, presence, hope, and humanization — changes things. Most of all, it changes me — where I go, to whom I show love, whom I sit down beside, and what I do, say, want, and teach.

Perhaps at this moment you are asking yourself, "Why should I read a book like this?" Let me start by saying that this is the book I wished I could've read during times of struggle in my own life — struggles with meaning, doubt, love, despair, hope, God, and justice. If you are a person who does not have all the answers about faith and life but can't stop thinking about the questions even though they are hard, this book is for you. If you are a person who sometimes watches the news and wonders in the pit of your stomach what God could possibly be up to these days while the world cannonballs even deeper into greed, war, and violence, this book is for you. If you are a person who has ever loved someone, lost them, and then heard the hidden question why blacksmith your heart so hard it felt like your ears bled, this book was written with you at heart.

If you believe you could gain something by listening to a story from someone who does not have all the answers but has met a lot of amazing people, learned a lot of hope-giving things, and spent a lot of time reading, praying, and walking around in the labyrinth of life's big, messy questions, again, this book encourages you to read on. If you have ever courageously wondered what the meaning of all this working, laughing, and laboring is, this book in your hands urges you not to put it down. One of my favorite sayings is that there is only one real difference between the courageous and the non-courageous, and that is, the truly courageous hold on to courage for five minutes longer. This book wants your five minutes.

A second question you might have for me is: "Why did you write this book?" I have four answers. First, I wrote this book for the many people in my life whom I love and appreciate and to whom I realized I had so much to say that I had never said. For my two pastors, who when I was a preteen never shut me down when I asked all the prickly questions in Sunday school like, "Why was my cousin Denise born with brain damage?" "Why did God let my friend Sunny die when that drunk driver hit her car?" and "Can't God love people of other faiths enough to send them to heaven too?" For my friend Tara, who after her third miscarriage in a row composed piano music to replace the prayers she could not pray and asked me, "How do you pray when you don't know what to say?" For my student Leah, who came to me one day to tell me she had been raped by her brother and father since she was twelve-years-old, which caused her to feel so utterly abandoned by God she sobbed into her arm, "I mean, is God just an a****** or what?" For my students' and my South African host mother who saw her family murdered right in front of her during Apartheid but nonetheless opened her heart and no-running-water home to us, and who one day asked, "Why didn't anyone ever warn me life could hurt this bad?" This book is for all these people I love, and for many more, including the people you love who are brave enough to ask you tough questions like these.

Second, I wrote this book for myself, because this book is the story of a wrestler wrestling. I wrestle every day to believe that God is love and that hope is more than just marshmallow armor in a world sworded with disaster, lovelessness, and despair. I'm too embarrassed to admit to you how old I was before I realized that my name, Jacqueline, is the female version of the name Jacob, the famous troublemaker and God-wrestler in the Bible. Let's just say I have accidentally but consummately lived into the name my parents gave me. Like Jacob in the Bible, I get hurt a lot of the time and walk away from my faith-wrestling matches with limps and scars. No good can come from pretending otherwise. But the more willing I am to talk about my tough time in the ring, the more willing other people are to show me their own bruises and out-of-joint hips. Such openness changes everything in a way I hope you will experience for yourself.

Third, I wrote this book because of the invisible outlaw creed that lies behind its pages — the beliefs I would be willing to bet my life on if it ever came down to it. My creed goes a little something like this: I believe in the value of bearing witness to the hope, pain, love, and loss that I have experienced in this life, and in the value of listening to you bear yours. I believe none of us can heal until we start telling one another the terrible truths that shape our deepest grief. I believe that our secrets, when kept secret, are killing us. I believe God is real but a mystery through and through, which makes God worth talking about and trying to understand better because maybe if we all share clues, God won't be unsolved forever. I believe God is hidden much of the time, and all the folks who tell you otherwise are either lying to protect you (or themselves) because the truth hurts too much to admit, or they are incapable of telling the truth because they have not yet suffered the kind of soul-crushing loss that makes God feel majorly MIA to the rest of us.

But I also believe God loves to be found the same way an old secret journal knows its ink is wasted until the moment someone blows the dust off the cover and reads the first page. I believe you, too, want to be found, want to be known by God and other people more than you feel you are known now. I believe I will grow if you share your story with me, and that you will grow if I tell you mine. I believe God will grow if God hears all of our stories, and if we demand God listen to them all, no exceptions. I believe that sharing despair has the power to wither despair on the vine. Likewise, I believe hope can bloom even in the desert of conflict and loss. I believe our stories are love's currency, and faith's too. They can make us rich or leave us poor, and if they go untold, the result is always poverty. I believe in the power of community to hold us when we can no longer hold ourselves. I believe community can form around anything we are brave enough to share with one another, even if all we share is loneliness and loss. I believe shared vulnerability has the power to change the color of the sky as well as the seasons. I believe it is possible to dress for the weather.