"God Has Made a Home With Us"

On Rachel Held Evans & Reading That Leads To Reading That Leads To Reading...

“God Has Made a Home With Us”

That is the title of a chapter in Rachel Held Evans’ last book, published postuhumously two years after her death in 2019.

The words of that title are as beautiful as they are challenging. The essay too.

I gravitate towards writers like Evans, who are comfortable with their shadow selves. Or maybe better to say, who are willing to acknowledge and wrestle with, their shadow selves. By that, I mean people who know their own contradictions so well they are are on a first-name basis with them. Who do not grouse or beat their breasts at these hypocrisies but laugh at all the little self-destructive programs inside that run and run and run. And who also–and Evans was a great example of this–usher us in as readers to that laughter and vulnerability, invite us to a more intimate relationship with ourselves, and our creator.

Rachel Held Evans spent a lifetime making that invitation, and it was all too short: she died at 38 years old. I’ve only read this last book of hers, Wholehearted Faith. It certainly makes me want to read more.

In order to invite you, reader, to meet Evans on the page, I’ll spend some time on that essay of hers with the title that stopped me in my tracks on the first reading, and still does now, re-reading it weeks later. God has made a home with us.

This essay does what so many of the essays in the book do: show us a person reading and being read by the scriptures. This dynamic of “reading and being read by” the scriptural text Evans considers in a particularly powerful way in the Psalms and the Magnificat of Mary found in Luke’s gospel. Situating Mary’s prayer within the tradition of the prophets in scripture, Evans writes:

“Notice that Mary does not shy away from naming sin. Sin is real, reluctant as we may be to speak of it, except in the most general terms when it comes to ourselves or in smug specificity when it comes to others. Sin separates us from God. And sin damages our relationships with one another.”

Evans continues:

“In ancient Greek, one of the meanings of the root of the word ‘demon’ is ‘to tear apart.’ In other words, anything that disintegrates us, anything that divides us, anything that destroys our wholeness, is demonic. I see the ways in which I have tried to tear myself to pieces, parsing what’s good and what’s bad, what’s worthwhile and what’s not. So perhaps there’s some unwitting truth to all the detractors who have told me on Twitter that I’m demonic.”

This move towards self-awareness (but note, not navel-gazing) is characteristic of Evans throughout the essay and the book. If it’s really true that God has made a home with us, then the Twitter battles do matter, in some unfathomable way. Then all of what we do (and don’t do) in a day matters, though the value of these things we do and don’t do is not up to us to determine.

Evans maintains that our coming to wholeness must mean showing up to prayer (and everywhere else) as our full (flawed) self, #nofilter, as one of my beloved former students used to say.

One of the great gifts of reading a writer as open with her thinking and feeling as Rachel Held Evans is that in addition to knowing her thoughts and feelings, you also get to read her reading. By that I mean that you witness and pause over pages she has paused over. You learn to exclaim and underline what she has underlined. You even imagine you have some idea what she has scrawled in the margins of those pages.

So, in this essay, God Has Made a Home With Us, you can see the impact theologian and scripture scholar Ellen Davis has had on Evans. Not just through the quotations and end notes–those important formal acknowledgments–but also in the way in which Evans responds to Davis, specifically Davis’ words on the Psalms.

“Reading Davis, I got to feeling as if these psalms were a kind of spiritual turpentine, dissolving the layers of paint that mask the truth of the human condition, paint that was chipping away anyway.”

Evans goes on to quote generously from Davis’ book, Getting Involved With God, and then from many of those same Psalms of lament that Davis encourages the reader to see again, with new eyes. And so, reading Evans on Davis on the Psalms made me get Davis’ book from the library (now overdue) and dive once more back in to the Psalms, back into learning from them as the wise teachers that they are.

I’m sure you have had similar experience, reader–reading that leads to reading that leads to reading. (It’s a beautiful cycle, really.)

And then you, too, have probably had that thrill I experienced as I read these texts–the Psalm and the commentaries on the Psalm–the thrill of knowing yourself to be reading a sacred text in community–in this case with a woman here in the world and another in a world I know nothing of. How old, how common a thrill: as old and as common a thrill as the beat of our own hearts.

It was Psalm 126 during Lent (“He walks along and weeps / the bearer of the seedbag”) and I wept too reciting it, remembering our beloved pastor Father Steve Adrian who died earlier this year, and the church’s recall of that same song that ushered him out at the start of Advent.

And just this week it was Psalm 51, which begins with that helpful narrative context: A psalm of David. When the prophet Nathan came to him after David had committed adultery with Bathsheba.

Ellen Davis’ reading of this Psalm, titled “Voluntary Heartbreak,” emphasizes the need for radical contrition, that is, in her words, “willfully letting your heart break and then offering the pieces to God.”

Davis goes on to say in this essay / sermon, “When we let our heart break before God, the pieces do not sink into oblivion. They are borne up, they float, yes, they sail on the tide of God’s mercy. The psalmist knows that, and does not hesitate for a moment in lying claim to the full measure of God’s mercy. ‘Have mercy on me, O God,’ he cres, ‘according to your lovingkindness. According to the abundance of your mercy, wipe away my transgression.” (51.3)

What a gift, these insights. And even more to say the words of this ancient poem. To make the poem a prayer. To say with Rachel Held Evans, and Ellen F. Davis and countless others past, present, and future: Yes, God, yes. I let my heart break. I offer its pieces to you.

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Notes:

-For those interested in hearing Ellen F. Davis talk more about the Psalms in a recent interview, I highly recommend her visit on her former student Chris Nafis’ podcast, The Current, linked here. “Psalms, Sacred Places, and Hope in Faith Communities.”

-It was Alice Camille, a scripture scholar I am privileged to be representing as publisher for One Subject Press, who introduced me to Rachel Held Evans’ work. I highly recommend Alice’s beautiful reflections on the lectionary reading for Sundays and holy days, God’s Word Is Alive. Buy a book! Support a local publisher.