Monthly Archives: August 2025
Overcoming an Exclusionary Faith
Sikh activist and author Valarie Kaur recalls an experience of a childhood friendship ending because of a difference in faith:
I was in eighth grade, sitting in the library with my very best friend in the whole world. Her name was Lisa. We were working …, but we were really giggling and passing notes to each other and messing around, when Lisa gets really quiet for a moment. She has this far-away look in her eyes and she says, “Valarie, I just can’t wait until judgment day.”…
I said, “What do you mean?” She said, “Well, then it’ll just be us. It’ll just be us. I can’t wait until it’s just us who are left.” I said, “Well, where will everyone else go?” Then she looked at me, very uncomfortable. She said, “Well, you know, down there.” It was that moment that I had to break to my very best friend the fact that I was not Christian…. I could see the blood drain from her face…. How could her very best friend not be saved? Not be good? Not be Christian?…
She had inherited a theology that divided the world into good and bad, right and wrong, saved and unsaved. Her theology severed her from her own deep knowing that her best friend was good and beloved. It’s like her theology stole me from home. She was trying to make it all make sense, try to hold both, but she couldn’t hold both. She had to let me go. [1]
In the wake of that loss, Kaur visits a church where she can confront a Christian about the belief in a God who discriminates against people of other faiths. There, she meets a church organist and recalls saying,
“I just can’t believe that there could be a God who would send me to hell,” I said. There was a pause as she looked at me. I was ready to fight.
“I can’t either,” she said. She saw my shock and explained. “I think that there are many paths. It just doesn’t make sense otherwise….” Her name was Faye and she was the first Christian I had ever met who did not believe I was going to hell. I would go on to meet many more people like her and learn that there are many ways to be Christian, just as there are many ways to be Sikh. Our traditions are like treasure chests filled with scriptures, songs, and stories—some empower us to cast judgment and others shimmer with the call to love above all….
Fifteen years after I thought our friendship was over, Lisa would reach out with an apology. She would still be Christian and I would still be Sikh, but she would have long abandoned the particular theology that had tried to sever us from one another. She had gone on her own journey … and had eventually come back to our friendship. In the end, we learned that love was the way, the truth, and the life. [2]
Old Age: Walking Humbly with our God
Old age is for walking humbly with our God. It’s when our worldly strengths betray us, and each day brings losses of family, friends, personal strengths, and sometimes even memories.
Often, like Jesus on His cross, we feel abandoned even by God and are called to trust in the emptiness of our loneliness.
It’s the last part of the spiritual journey. It takes clinging to the tiny signs of grace, like a beautiful butterfly outside our window or a smile from a baby in the grocery store. Thank God, we haven’t become invisible to babies. Our biggest challenge each day is getting up to face it. Our gift for each other now is shared laughter at something embarrassing that’s peculiar to age. Shared laughter, particularly at ourselves, is the saving grace of old age. At eighty-eight, I get to laugh a lot even when alone each day, at my comedy of errors.
My favorite LOL (Little Old Lady) story is of the elderly woman with Alzheimer’s in the nursing home when an aide was helping her get into her nightgown. She turned to the aide and said, “What is my name? I can’t remember it.” Before the aide could respond, she said, “Never mind,” pointing to a painting of Jesus on the wall. “He knows my name. That’s all that matters.”
Our Thorn as a Gift
Struggling to overcome her persistent envy of another writer, author Anne Lamott found comfort in St. Paul’s struggle to accept his own imperfection:
Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, where he talks about the thorn in his side [2 Corinthians 12:7–10], is his spiritual autobiography, his confessing out loud to how shaming life in the flesh was for him. And in his letter to the Christians in Rome, Paul wrote that he hated the things he couldn’t stop doing [Romans 7: 15, 19]…. He had what I have, something awful and broken and stained inside. He was a powerful, learned man, teaching and following the Torah, reaping power’s rewards, yet it all left him desperate….
[Paul] asked God over and over again to remove this thorn, but God said no. God said that grace and mercy had to be enough, that nothing awful or fantastic that Paul did would alter the hugeness of divine love. This love would and will have the last say. The last word will not be our bad thoughts and behavior, but mercy, love, and forgiveness. God suggested, Try to cooperate with that. Okay? Keep your stupid thorn; knock yourself out.
What was the catch? The catch was that Paul had to see the thorn as a gift. He had to want to be put in his place, had to be willing to give God thanks for this glaring new sense of humility, of smallness, the one thing anyone in [their] right mind tries to avoid. Conceit is intoxicating, addictive, the best feeling on earth some days, but Paul chose instead submission and servitude as the way to freedom from the bondage of self.
Lamott explores the challenge of tolerating our imperfect selves and the mercy that saves us anyway:
Our secrets sometimes feel so vile and hopeless that we should all jump off a cliff. Then we might remember something quirky and ephemeral once restored us or a beloved to sanity when we were in a very bad way. We remember that an unlikely invisible agency made up of love, truth, and camaraderie helped with the alcoholism or debt or heartbreak a few years ago. And we practice cooperating with that force for change, because who knows—it might help again now.
Micah says to do justice—follow the rules, do what you’re supposed to do—but to love mercy, love the warmth within us, that flow of generosity. Love mercy—accept the acceptance; receive the forgiveness, whenever we can, for as long as we can. Then pass it on….
Love and mercy are sovereign, if often in disguise as ordinary people…. Over and over, in spite of our awfulness and having squandered our funds, the ticket-taker at the venue waves us on through. Forgiven and included, when we experience this, that we are in this with one another, flailing and starting over in the awful beauty of being humans together, we are saved.
Laughter: Carbonated Grace 