Driftless by David Rhodes

could hear the voice. It was telling her something about herself. She could be somebody after all: a Christian.
    But what did this mean? Other children called themselves Christian and they seemed to get this blessed identity from their parents, like
     being Norwegian. But Winnie’s mother and father had belonged to nothing. They had no religion.
    What did it mean to have a religion, she wondered, and thought about this incessantly. Inordinately shy, she had no skills in talking to strangers, and everyone now was a stranger. There was no one to ask, and she had to figure everything out for herself.
    One by one, things were revealed, and her young mind built from them a safe fortress to grow up in. Christian membership, she decided, was unlike other ways of belonging. It was a community of faith, and so long as you had faith, you belonged—a home of shared convictions. In the family of Christians, togetherness was maintained not by similar physical characteristics or spatial proximity, or even knowing each other, but through the fellowship of sharing beliefs. In the privacy of your own mind, when you thought about these special beliefs you could find safety in knowing that others shared them. Your thoughts were theirs. They conversed agreeably in exchanges of encouragement and goodwill. Sharing in these beliefs was like talking with a friend under a warm blanket, or knowing something in your heart, something good, that someone else also knew. And not just any beliefs would do—only the right ones. The wrong beliefs left you outside, alone, with no firm identity.
    As she was transferred from one foster home to another, she continued to work out these beliefs that qualified her to be a true Christian. She read the Bible from beginning to end, and then started over. Slowly she began to understand what was required, and as her understanding grew her confidence in herself as an authentic person strengthened.
    At fourteen, she was placed with a Christian family and experienced a cautious elation at finally arriving in her mind’s outward community; but the elation quickly faded when she attended church for the first time and was placed in a class for religious instruction. She had lived too long, it seemed, in her own fortress, and the walls had become thick.
    She tried to talk to the other Sunday school students about the beliefs they shared with her, only to discover that they didn’t share
     them. Not only did they not share them, they had never heard of them and had no interest in learning about them. Even her teacher seemed unfamiliar with many, and those he seemed familiar with he had obviously spent too little time thinking about.
    After six months Winnie asked to be excused from the confirmation ceremony following the completion of her religious instruction class. Her teacher was “cut to the quick,” he said, because she was, he said, his best student. But she did not think any legitimate sanctification could be granted solely on the basis of affirming belief, because, she said, a person could be filled with the Holy Spirit and still not believe, in the same way that someone could be electrocuted but not believe in electricity. Professed belief was an insufficient agency between God and woman.
    She of course wanted to accept the things her teacher insisted she must, but as long as there remained the slightest wanting on her part, surely it couldn’t be faith. True faith kept no treasure in wanting. True faith wanted nothing to make it whole; it simply was, and grace could only be called “sufficient” when the Grace of grace was present, and no one, she told her teacher, could say that grace was always present because that would make living outside of Grace impossible. And if one never lived outside Grace, one could never know the experience of living under its benevolent rule. After all, Grace was not just a word for which a meaning could always be assigned and a definition found. Grace was something real that