My mom wanted to make sure I knew that Satan is a fallen angel. In case I didn’t know that part. I did know that part. His name, I told her, is Lucifer. Very devious, I’d heard. We were in the car.

This is how theological education works in my family. Not in a church, not in a formal setting, but in a car (and often on the deck or porch or patio), when someone decides it’s the right moment to clarify a point of doctrine that she’s been thinking about and isn’t sure she covered properly the first time around.I am bringing my newfound zeal to reading the Bible the way I have always brought it to reading anything: as a reading teacher and doing ™ TM: Trademark Too Much. One of my favorite classes ever was the Bible as literature. So I approach it with that — the analytical rigor, the attention to what the text is doing, the awareness that I have a strong stance on how I understand what I read and that this stance is going to make me more annoying than I already am. You all know I’m a reading teacher, so when you throw in my religiously neutral upbringing that lets me digest the Bible in this blank slate state? I’m gonna try not to be fully insufferable the more I read, I promise.

The Reformation thing

Here is where I got to in my own head during this particular car conversation: the Reformation makes sense to me now. Not as history, though it makes sense as history too. As a feeling. The impulse to say: there are specifics here that need working out, and I’m not going to take someone else’s word for what they mean.

Are you saved? Are you not saved? Do you do good things because you are good, or are you good because you do good things? These are complicated questions, and the people who want a strong hardline answer and the people who think there’s more nuance are both, in my experience, trying to get at the same thing. They just have different tolerances for ambiguity.

I have a high tolerance for ambiguity. I am also a reading teacher. These things are related.

I don’t know that we have to come down on a strong hardline. But I do think there’s more to it than people assume God was clear about. I do know that when they act certain, they set up the best jokes for God.

I am bringing the zeal. I will report back, including about how reading the Bible either knowing or NOT knowing that Lucifer is a fallen angel might change one’s interpretation. That’s how my brain likes it. Not so much deviant as diversified. 

The evidence

The zucchini situation, which I will not fully recount here because it has its own post, is relevant. I was going to make zucchini boats. The grocery store did not have zucchini. This happened immediately after a conversation about my newfound depth of belief.

Make of that what you will. I made of it exactly what you’re thinking.

The timing was too specific to be random and too absurd to be a warning. Which leaves one explanation, and it is the one I have been arriving at slowly and with genuine surprise: that God is, in fact, as comically inclined as I had suspected. That the universe has a sense of humor that is dry and precise and slightly inconvenient, which is exactly the kind of humor I respect most.

I told my mom this. She said: he is doing exactly what he does.

We were still in the car. The zucchini was already not available. She was already planning what we’d make instead when that God joke– me so exasperated at having to choose the entree to make– just to have the key ingredient out of stock and remember to be grateful I had help to cook and get to eat.

What I actually believe

I believe that the conversations you have about faith in a car, on the way somewhere, are more theologically honest than most formal settings allow. Nobody is performing. Nobody is being graded. You’re just two people trying to work out what they actually think, which is, I suspect, what the whole enterprise is for.

I believe that inherited belief and examined belief are different things, and that the examination is not a betrayal of the inheritance. It’s what you do with it when it’s yours.

I believe Satan is a fallen angel. His name is Lucifer. Very devious, indeed. My mom wanted to make sure I knew.

I did know. But I’m also glad she told me.