“In pursuing a writing life, we often become alienated from the very things we wish to celebrate with our words.” – Aaliyah Bilal

Don’t tell anyone, but I think I’ve lost my faith.

What I mean to say is that the rules and training and dogma of my Christian belief are cracking and falling away. If I’m honest, the fit has always been uncomfortable, and I’ve mostly worn the clothes loosely.

As I strip down, what I’m left with is mystery — too big for containment in only a handful of prayers and holy hymns. Now the boundaries must stretch to hold the God of my understanding. Don’t get me wrong, I still walk with Jesus, and imagine I always will, but that pesky Holy Spirit has taken me to unexpected places and continues to fill my journey with surprises.

My earliest depiction of God was something like the sun: bright lights, multiple colors, an energy I could not capture except with abstract art. That eight-year-old kid, who talked to The Holy and heard The Holy talk back, was close to God and onto something. Trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God, who is our home, Wadsworth wrote, and I’ve been trying ever since to get back to what that kid knew about God.

I waited three years to take comparative religion at my all-girls Catholic high school. The class, offered only to seniors, held an extra level of excitement because of this exclusivity. I was beside myself to finally learn about the rituals and beliefs of other faith traditions, so imagine my fury when the instructor opened class with all the reasons why these beautiful faiths were wrong and Christianity was the only true way to God.

Besides feeling bamboozled, I knew the instructor was wrong. If Christianity was as wonderful as I’d been led to believe my whole life, could it not stand up for itself in a comparative religion class? Could it not make a case for itself without the foil of other faiths as suspect and false? And could we students not be trusted to follow the God at work within us? In other words, if Christianity was so good, where was the instructor’s faith in us, and in God?

I’m not alone. Christian clergy women, colleagues I’ve come to know and regard over decades, too close to retirement to admit this publicly, agree with my expansive, lavish understanding of God.

In New York City, we have the great gift of working alongside Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Sikh, Jewish and unaffiliated siblings. You can’t share meals and stories and taxis and not be changed. You can’t share prayers and petitions and tears and not experience a bigger God. You can’t witness the power and praise present in temples, gurdwaras, mosques, synagogues, rallies, and vigils and fail to question the size of the God we’ve been given and grown accustomed to. The edges don’t hold. They don’t hold for me anymore.

I admit that I have a whatever it takes understanding of ministry and Christian faith. If you need more water, more bread, more ritual to help you get to God, I’m your pastor.

The supervisor at the children’s hospital where I served said we needed to decide in advance if we would baptize dead babies. In the Catholic tradition, sacraments are for the living and so a dead baby would typically receive a funeral but not a baptism. I decided I would baptize dead babies if asked, because the family who remained were the living too and those living ones needed the care a baptism provided. I believed, “God was big enough to hold it.”

A mother of four children under the age of six told me it was not safe for her to have more children. She and her doctor agreed to tie her tubes, but she became pregnant anyway. The danger was that the egg implanted in her fallopian tubes rather than in her uterus. Her doctor recommended an abortion. Her minister recommended prayer. She had an abortion. “I couldn’t run the risk of dying and leaving my husband with four babies under the age of six,” she said. I said, “God is big enough to hold it.”

An excited 20-something told me they had a second baptism. They had joined their first church as a young adult and wanted to claim baptism for themselves. “I was too little to remember the first time, so I wanted to say yes for myself!” They didn’t understand that we believe in ONE baptism for the forgiveness of sin. Did it matter? I asked my 80-something year old mom what she thought and she said, “I really don’t think God cares.” That was good enough for me. God was big enough to hold it.

I would gather the children close around the communion table each month so they could really see what was going on. We served that wonderfully soft, slightly sweet, challah bread and the kids loved it. One Sunday, after everyone in church had eaten, one little kid came forward and blurted out, “Can I have some more Jesus?!” I don’t know if he was really hungry for Jesus or just really hungry, but his question made the whole church laugh. “Of course, you can have more Jesus,” I said. That was music to my pastor ears. May you always want more and may there always be plenty to spare.

Whatever it takes, if you need more water, more bread, more ritual to help you get to God, I’m your pastor. If you have questions about God and how the holy shows up for other believers in other faith traditions, I’m your pastor. I’ve never been afraid of the big enough God. I love the questions and the wrestling and the doubt that being human brings, and I love that I’ve lived long enough to confidently declare that God is big enough to hold us all. He can hold all of our anger, all our disappointment, all our curiosity, all our delight and all our joy. The God of the universe is big enough to hold all of who we are and all of what we carry. And I can only say, thanks be to God.