Poems About Being a Woman of God

I don't pray the way I was taught— on my knees, hands folded, words memorized like a password to heaven. I pray the way I breathe: without deciding to, usually when something hurts. Jesus, if you walked today you'd be tired too— tired of people using your name to lock doors you spent your whole life opening. I think God's love is not the sermon. It's the casserole brought to the door when words fail. The stranger who stops. The teacher who notices. The friend who says nothing and sits in the silence with you. My praise is not a song. It's getting up when getting up is the hardest thing. It's forgiving someone who hasn't asked. It's looking at this broken, burning, beautiful world and saying: I still believe something made this on purpose. Dear God, if you're listening: I don't need miracles. Just keep the ordinary going— the bread, the breath, the people who show up when the world falls apart and call it faith.

Blessed are those who aren't sure. Blessed are those who came to church for the singing, stayed for the quiet, and left without settling the question. Blessed are the ones who pray the way you'd call a number you're not sure is still in service— half-expecting the tone, half-hoping for the voice. Blessed is the woman lighting candles for a saint she can't remember, because the flame is real and the dark is real and the space between them is as close to holy as she needs today. Blessed are those who lost their faith the way you lose a set of keys— not all at once but gradually, checking pockets, retracing steps, until one day you simply get the locks changed and move on. Blessed are those who move on and still, sometimes, on a Tuesday, feel the old key turning in a door they thought they'd closed for good.

Sunday morning. Before the sermon. Before the hymns and the handshakes and the small talk in the lobby about weather and health and grandchildren who are growing too fast. There's a moment when the church is almost empty and the light comes through the colored glass and falls on the pews like a hand that doesn't ask anything of you. I come here not because I'm sure. I come here because I'm not. Certainty is easy. It's the doubt that needs a building— a place with high ceilings and old wood and the smell of a hundred years of people bringing their questions to the same room and leaving without answers but somehow lighter. The woman in the third row closes her eyes. I don't know what she's asking for. But I know that the asking is its own kind of answer. Faith is not what you know. It's what you do with what you don't. I fold my hands. Not because I was taught to. Because my hands need somewhere to go when the rest of me is trying to be still. The organ starts. The room fills. The ordinary Sunday becomes something that has no name but everyone in the room recognizes. Maybe that's God. Maybe it's just people sitting together in their not-knowing. Either way, I'll be back next week.