My morning commute takes me past two open spaces. The first, a field filled at different times of year with prairie dogs and squirrels, the occasional fox, and deer, is a wonder just dropped down to my left. Slightly lower than the street, it’s a miniature valley between houses, where fawns and does gather against the green hedges in twos and threes–once, there were nine. I’ve never seen a male–just mothers and babies, huddled together trying to make it through the world on their own.
The next open space houses llamas just off quarry property. Bushy and brown and dirty white, a pack settles mostly in the afternoon. They’re rarely grazing in the early dawn, and I know this. I know that space is empty of anything living, but each morning I’m tricked by a tree stump. Long dead, anchored to the center of a fenced in square, I double take it daily, thinking it may be a lost lamb, a hovering hawk, some smallish beast seeking its way home. It never is. The stump, a reminder of what was once alive but will never be again, is situated so perfectly that I forget each day what I’m seeing and instead see a fearsome phantom. Something other than what is truly there that scares me for a few seconds until I settle into the truth.
Martin Luther wrote “whatever you love most, that is your god.” This morning I woke wondering what is truly worshipped by the loudest and angriest members of this country–the ones obsessed with a phantom based on fear. The ones screaming for “family values” and a “return to faith”. The ones who want to outlaw the existence of others. The ones who preach about prayer in school but only if it is to their god and on their terms. What they’re worshipping isn’t family, and it sure as hell isn’t faith. It isn’t love, and it isn’t truth. It is a fear-based full-tilt idolatry of a power they think they have that doesn’t really exist. A fetishization of control to protect them from the unknown. Hungry and horrible, they block the road to any future save the one they’ve deemed “appropriate”. They put up barricades and erect statues in their own image, terrified if they let someone stand beside them that they will be lost in shadow.
There is no light in those broken people, and I’d pray for them if I thought they’d recognize the sound of earnest kindness, but they’ve been deaf to that song so long no amount of melody will bring them back.
I don’t write about my faith much. It’s personal and honestly no one else’s damn business, but I grew up in the church. I taught Vacation Bible School and went to church camp and memorized the books of the Bible and acted in Sunday school plays and sang in church choirs and taught a confirmation class and all of this is to say I believe in a woman’s right to choose because I believe I was given the same fundamental ability to know and govern myself as anyone else on this planet, and I believe that right was given to me by God first and then acknowledged and noted by the founders in nothing less than the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
My Creator gave me the right to my own life, to liberty, to the pursuit of happiness, and that includes my right to choose whether or not I carry a child. How can I have a life if my body is controlled by someone else? How can I experience liberty if my body is metaphorically enchained by laws that bar me from healthcare? How can I experience happiness if my life does not belong to me? A woman can be careful. A woman can be cautious. A woman can use birth control and be lied to by her partner about his use of a condom and say no, scream no, fight back with every breath in her lungs and still end up pregnant.
And a woman can ache for a child only to learn giving birth could kill her and rob her already existing children of their mother. A woman can spend her whole life praying to be a mother only to learn pregnancy is a death sentence.
To not acknowledge these realities is to live in the shadow of the phantom of what is real rather than in the light of the truth. It is to fear ominous animals in the darkness where there is only an aged tree stump.
I’m a transcendental, liberal, feminist Christian who doubts her faith as much as she leans on it and who knows someone will think that’s not a thing, but I’m here to say it is. I don’t wear a cross or make social media posts or wear clothing with verses stamped all over it because my faith is my business. And, for the record, so is my body. I don’t believe in a blonde, bearded, colonizer Jesus or a gray-haired mountainous all-knowing father in the sky as God; I believe God is in each of us and in the trees and in the way we love and treat each other. I believe that every single one of us under the sun is made in the image of that all loving God, and that love isn’t conditional. It isn’t “I’ll love you if or when.” It isn’t “I’ll love you despite or until”. It is “I will love you now and always.”
I became a teacher in part because I believe the best way to show someone you love them is to teach them how to stand up for themselves and what they believe in, even when what they believe isn’t what I believe. I don’t need anyone to feel about the world as I do, but I do need to be allowed to exist as I choose. Without that right, I don’t know how we survive.
Shannon Carriger 