How the Myth of "Finding My Tribe" Brought Me Out of My Funk

(This is from a Facebook post I made in September. I haven't blogged in a while because I've been finishing my memoir, Someday We'll Buy Pistachios: What God Taught Me On My Dive From Riches to Rags)

“What kind of a Christian are you, anyway?”

That’s what someone asked me over lunch once—someone I’d just met and was getting to know. I knew what was behind the question, given the context of our conversation. It had become apparent that I don’t publicly display my political persuasion. Tucked silently inside that question was this:

“What kind of a Christian are you if you don’t fly the American flag on your social media account, speak out against abortion and the gay agenda, or wear a red hat?”

The question could have just as easily been some summation of:

“What kind of Christian are you if you don’t warn against climate change, promote women’s rights or vocalize your support of immigrants?”

I don’t remember how I answered the question (it’s been years, but I’ve never forgotten it). I think I was caught off guard before asking, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

If I could revisit that moment now, I’d say, simply, “the Jesus-loving kind.”

Which confession strangely seems to always move me outside of any kind of box and into some space that no one quite knows how to label. No one knows where to place the woman who helped raise one daughter to be a Marine Corps officer and another to be a Refugee Relief Specialist, both of whom I am equally proud. Just about the time someone has me pegged, they find me in the Ithaca commons discussing Nietzsche, or shedding patriotic tears at a Memorial Day parade.

This tetrachromatic vision makes for a lonely existence, I tell you. Everyone seems to suspect me as being secretly indifferent to their particular flavor of justice: neither my evangelical friends nor my “spiritual-but-not-religious” friends, I don’t think, view me as being completely loyal to, or else vocal enough, concerning every single one of their causes. This has left me feeling, at times, quite friendless.

So much so that I entered a prolonged period of extreme cultural loneliness that made me not want to get out of bed in the mornings, and I cried a lot. I was always trying to find my elusive tribe, but realized, finally, that it didn’t exist. If I put all the people I cherish into the same room, “kumbaya” would quickly turn into “come over here and say it to my face.” And I’m sitting in the corner sipping my chai and thinking, “does anyone wanna just talk about fractals or Flannery O’Conner?”

Anyway, one day I was driving to a writers’ conference in Virginia, another attempt to “find my tribe.” At that moment someone sent me a video about the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. It was a long stretch of highway; I hit “play.”

By the end I was weeping. And I heard a voice whisper, “I will be your Tribe.”

Since then I’ve been hanging out with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit as though they are right there next to me, and I haven’t had one lonely day since. Not that kind, anyway. And it must be a miracle, because nothing else has changed.

Well, actually, that’s not true. I did find my tribe, but in a surprising way. I found it in my little country church. It’s hard to type these words through tears, but what I found was what had been there all along–a diverse community of real Christians– “the Jesus-loving kind.” Flawed, ridiculous, and suspicious as we all are of each other at times, something miraculous happens when we gather and shift our gaze toward eternity. You’d have to experience it to understand, but some call it “agape”--that feeling that everything that was so important suddenly doesn’t matter, because Someone has entered the room and has our attention in a way that disarms us, yet leaves us potentially armed and dangerous to our true enemy, “that old serpent, the devil."