Faith Unraveled
Two of my favorite Rachel Held Evans books
I didn’t write about Rachel Held Evans after she passed away, as so many others I know, because I simply didn’t know how to. It isn’t as if I ever met her. I didn’t know her at all. We weren’t friends or family. To my knowledge, we were never at the same events or even in the same towns at the same times. And yet my life has been changed by her, by this perfect stranger, this kind, thoughtful, funny woman whom I never even met.
That’s the power of a good book.
Rachel Held Evans died on May 4, 2019. She was a former evangelical Christian who left the evangelical church so that she could hold on to Jesus. She wrote four books full of deep thought on faith, thoughts that challenge and provoke and fight for justice and push against the status quo, and always reach for Jesus. I did not agree with her on every conclusion or direction, but I always admired the way she struggled to define through the Bible what it means to truly follow God, and her writing always sent me to prayer and contemplation. My husband says she reminds him of a quotation by Martin Luther King, Jr., when he said he hoped people would remember he tried to be right on a certain controversial and political situation. He was grasping and seeking. Rachel was too.
After she died, Joe gave me her first book, Faith Unraveled, formerly titled Evolving in Monkey Town: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask the Questions. It was the first book she wrote but the last book of hers that I read, which is a bittersweet way to read her work. In it, she discusses the evolution of her faith. It’s the story of her journey from certainty through doubt and back to faith again, a story of belief maturing and growing legs and feet. In the end of the book, she writes the following:
“I suppose that if absolute truth exists, it must be something that we experience indirectly, like the sun. We see it in shadows, watch it light up the moon, and feel it tingle our skin, but it’s generally not a good idea to try to stare at it or claim it as one’s own. Every now and then, when I’m reading the Bible or Emily Dickinson, I think I’ve bumped into it. But when I try to tell Dan [her husband] about it, it doesn’t come out right. I think I see little pieces of it in all the people I know...I believe it is embodied in the person of Jesus Christ, which means it is relational, because everyone experiences Jesus a little differently.”
I would never have thought to express it in this way, but the mystery of faith fascinates me, and I am, like Rachel, looking for glimpses of Jesus in this world. Like this quotation says, I have seen him, and I have missed him, and I have learned so much about where to find him thanks to people who experience him differently from how I do.
I wish I had met Rachel Held Evans, because she sought and stood up for truth. All truth is God’s truth, whether I understand it or not, and in my moments of doubt, I cling to the faith that leads me through the dark times where I cannot see. Rachel’s books are lanterns God used to light my way, and I will be forever grateful.
