Madam, Your Slip is Showing!
Turns out I am actually NOT magical.
I have a friend who I first met on Ash Wednesday more than a decade ago as she smeared ashes on my forehead and told me to “repent, and believe in the Gospel.”
I met her for coffee today and she told me something surprising about that moment: before she got to my forehead, she felt self-conscious at the front of the church, as though she were on stage performing the whole thing. When thumbing the soot onto my own particular greasy forehead, she said, something changed. She could “feel” my faith and she was suddenly aware that it wasn’t her doing the ash distribution at all - it was God doing it through her.
She said some more nice things, but that comment really got me. It was kind of embarrassing. I’m quite bad at taking compliments, so I thought some of my discomfort might stem from that. I reflected on her comment as I drove home. “Maybe she’s a little more nuts than I thought and thinks I’m magical or something,” I thought. “Am I magical?” I wondered for a sick-ass second.
And then the same epiphany happened to me! The change in her perspective had nothing to do with me whatsoever. Turns out, I’m not magical at all1. A little sentence from St. Paul2 popped into my head:
“It is not I, but Christ who lives in me”3
I now suspect that somehow, the breath of God (Holy Spirit/Wild Goose/Holy Fire/Magic and Source of All Magic, whatever) was blowing through me to her: accidental evangelization; some sort of jolly contagion. And somehow, by this weird Pauline arithmetic, the breath blew through her and back to me so I could learn the same thing she did: this whole situation has nothing to do with me - in the best possible way.
Isn’t this what every Christian dreams of? That somehow they can step backward in their lives and the crazy love of Christ will step forward and light up all the hearts around them? Without having to hand out pamphlets, wear a sandwich board/khakis, or spew lingo at someone?
Whatever faith I happened to be emanating at that moment wasn’t mine. It wasn’t made of “vibes.”4 It didn’t come from my forehead or my goober face, whatever arrangement my overly-earnest features had assumed. The twitchy faith I had in that moment was given to me, implanted like a microchip, independent of my will.
I didn’t create it! In fact, I fought it tooth and nail for a long time until I finally flopped down and surrendered. Christians have a pretty awful reputation in the circles we travel in so for a long time I didn’t talk about the faith with anyone other than my husband5. Then, and I’m ashamed to say, sometimes now, it feels like a too-small sweater your grandmother gave you, but you wear it over to her house anyway because you love her.
Now, I happily realize that despite my best intentions to blend in with the rest of humanity, my faith shows sometimes. Madam, your slip is showing!
please don’t tell my husband
a biblical frenemy of mine, more on this later
paraphrase of Galatians 2:20, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.”
in our house, this is a forbidden word. We say “unconsciously perceived microcues” because I am a pedantic asshole with psychiatry training.
who IS, in fact, magical.