1 / Eugene, Oregon

Christian. Poor word. Once the fiery name of martyrs, mystics, women wandering the desert. It was a word that kept company with other words, beautiful words, like thirst and burning and holy. A person cannot look at God and survive—but for Christ—and so a Christian was a person who, with fear and trembling, looked at what cannot be seen. But what is the word today? It wears pastels, I think, and eats cookies after church services that evoke intense but somewhat opaque feelings of warmth and security.

I was raised in such a church, and as soon as I was allowed, I shucked the old sheep’s skin—that’s what it seemed to me, complacency and cowardice and dullness of mind and spirit. I dyed my hair an awful shade of blue, proclaiming to my parents, who honestly weren’t at all dismayed by my rebellion, that I didn’t believe in the virgin birth; I didn’t believe in resurrection from the dead; and I was forthwith 100 percent uninterested in church. I think I was fifteen.

In part, the problem was that the church we attended was not in any way prepared—neither liturgically nor pastorally—to address anything like the deep and socially unacceptable hungers I felt. It seemed a place for nice people, and though I was unfamiliar with the interior lives of the parishioners at Ascension Lutheran Church, I felt that I was not like them. I did not especially care about being nice. Instead I wanted—with all the fervent idealism of an untested teenager—something real and painful and beautiful, the mystery underneath the mystery. I wanted the truth. And, perhaps to my credit, I did not sense it in the soft NPR voices coming from the pulpit, reminding me again and again how little is required of Christians, how easy and mild and frankly likable Christ is. I wanted none of it.

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French philosopher Simone Weil has a wonderful line: “A beautiful woman looking at her image in the mirror may very well believe the image is herself. An ugly woman knows it is not.” I remember standing naked in front of a full-length mirror when I was young—already conscious of my ugliness, already aware of how both children and adults seemed to hate me for it, and I was confused. I knew that I was larger than most girls, that my thighs and arms and face were thicker, softer, that clothes sat oddly on my shoulders, that my eyes were pale and framed by blonde, nearly invisible lashes. But I also knew in the deep, inarticulate center of myself that I was beautiful because of the life I was, the fire God had lit in me and kept burning, hour after hour. I was furious that the world could not see how beautifully he’d made me. I’d been cast out. A religion that could only conceive of the outcast abstractly (“the homeless,” “the marginalized,” “the other”) was a poor religion. There I was in a pew week after week, hoping for something real to speak into the pain of my life. But pain was not the subject of Sunday sermons. Reassurance was. The people suffering were out there. Both God and man, it seemed to me, became washed out, thin versions of themselves.

I didn’t stay ugly. Nor did I keep that angry distance from the church for long. I’d become a Christian, but a strange one, full of longing and sin. Imagine a girl in her twenties at a Mediterranean-themed bar. Belly dancers undulate under orange light in a corner. She’s on her third rum and Diet Coke when she begins chatting up the boy standing next to her. When she learns he’s a Christian, her whole body goes electric. As though the church were a secret club, she feels this young man must know about her anguish and her deepest loves, and by the time she’s had three or four more drinks (Malibu and orange juice, then vodka Red Bull) she is unable to hear, through the blood in her head and the joyful glowing stars outside and dreamy fluidity of beauties trembling past them as they walked home, that he was not that kind of Christian at all.

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By the time I met Will, I’d been a devoted, though recklessly sinful, Christian for many years. I’d read somewhere about the left-handed way to God—the way through shadows, then darkness. I’d misunderstood Saint John of the Cross’s “dark night of the soul,” thinking that there was more truth, or a harder truth, to be had in the lightless regions. Truth by way of ruin—by way of drunkenness and shame and an intimacy with sin that would make a more pious sort of Christian blanch.

Will, I think, wanted to be that pious kind of Christian. Or, at least he wanted to be like his dad, who was that sort of Christian. But he also wanted to write plays and hang out with theater people and drink like an artist and hurt like one. And so, we gave that to each other—hurting one another with sin and loving to be hurt that way and also grieving it.

When he broke up with me for good, we were sitting on my bed. He held me while I cried pathetically into his shoulder and begged him not to go. And even though some part of me had seen it coming and that same part of me knew it was right for him to leave, the louder and hungrier part of me, the part that could never be satisfied or loved enough, took over. That, I think, was a mercy—the beginning of a certain kind of end.

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After Will broke up with me, I nose-dived. I went to parties and tried to amass evidence that I was lovable. There were plenty of drunk boys willing to play the part of evidence. But the feel of it all was off—tinny, like the echo of a song that reminded me of something. None of the boys were exciting enough. The adventure wasn’t big enough, bright enough. None of it worked quite right. Not the booze or the boys or the coke. My despair had outgrown my drugs.

I started making breakfast smoothies out of rum and frozen strawberries and almond milk. Then, for ten days, I didn’t eat—a cleanse, I said. My Sri Lankan friend, a brilliant woman who was studying for her MA in English at the local state university, agreed to shave my head with a Bic razor when I asked. My mother cried when she saw me. My brother called it my Britney Spears moment.

Being bald was its own kind of rebuke. Will had loved my hair, and I’d loved that he loved it. And so the logic was that if I could shun the part of me that had made me desirable, I could shun desire. I’d wanted to put away vanity. Except when I did, I did not become less attached to my looks. I was not above it all. I was just, infuriatingly, bald and vain.

Vain and bald and skinny and drunk.

In that state, I arrived one October evening at a bar in downtown Eugene. Here’s what I remember: I ran into an ex, a sallow-skinned kid I’d dated just after moving to Eugene. He was not a great guy. Once, I told him I was afraid of snakes. The next week he took me to a pet shop in the mall and pressed my face against a glass terrarium filled with snakes. I’d screamed, but he kept my face pressed there until I stopped squirming.

I don’t know how it unfolded exactly, except that on this October night we wound up back at his apartment, and what I did not want to happen did—against my explicit and vocal will.

The next morning, I walked home in the early morning rain. If there was light, I don’t remember it. I walked the wet streets. Four miles home. My bald head had become a sign of every shame I had inflicted upon myself.

I probably slept when I got home. (Now I can imagine with such gentleness how the light might have found my resting cheek.) After waking and eating two fried eggs, I called my little brother. He was one of the sanest people I knew, though I wasn’t sure why or how he’d become that way. There was a time when we’d gone head-to-head in the self-destruction department.

But that twenty-two-year-old boy picked up the phone and listened to his hungover sister cry about her tormented life and then said with totally uncharacteristic tenderness that maybe I should go to a recovery meeting for alcoholics to see if I could relate. Half hopeful, half scoffing, I said, “You think I’m an alcoholic?” I was sure I wasn’t. I was sure my problems were much more complicated and deeply rooted and ultimately unsolvable than that.

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Like most American churches, Orthodox churches in the US often print weekly bulletins with pictures on the front. But in the Orthodox Church, those images are almost always reprints of famous icons: Saint George on a white horse, his spear hovering above the head of a black serpentine dragon; Saint Mary of Egypt with tangled, dirty hair and weather-beaten skin acquired after forty wandering years in the desert; the Theophany: a scene of Christ immersed in the Jordan, the water drawing back from him in awe, fish and strange underwater creatures staring at the inscrutable mystery of God’s baptism, the descent of the dove, the voice of the Father represented by a scroll unfurling in the sky.

Orthodox art did not embrace the three-dimensional turn taken by its Western counterpart. Not because there’s anything wrong with three-dimensional representation but because iconography, that specifically ancient Christian form of art that is also prayer, does not aim at realism but at reality—the life that inheres in and is expressed by every holy, living thing. Icons are interested in depicting not just a human face, but a human face lit up by the heart-piercing joy of life-in-Christ. The geometry is flat. Lines are dark and defined. Shapes are somehow more real because of their total disinterest in appearing real. Gold and blue, sand, water. The saints’ eyes are not dreamily canted up toward clouds but often stare, without even a hint of a people-pleasing wink or smile, directly into the viewers’ eyes, as though challenging them with the stakes. Death, remember?

In those days, I couldn’t afford real wood-mounted or painted icons, so I cut out the paper reprints and taped them on the wall next to my bed. There was one of Jonah and the whale. Another of Saint Anthony fighting demons in the desert. At night, before falling asleep, my little red prayer book collecting dust on the box I used for a nightstand, I would look at those icons and sort of press my mind into them, like I wanted to fall straight into the scene. What a relief it would have been to have that kind of clarity. Here are the demons, I could say to myself if I were in Saint Anthony’s place. And I could fight them in the dust of the road and swing a stick, and maybe, like the great saint, I would be overcome by them. But the battle line would have been drawn, and I would have known where to aim.

Then one night as I lay lost in morose thought, orangey lamplight cast up and around the two embattled saints, a thought suddenly occurred to me. You’re in the whale. What I needed was dark ink. Draw the stomach first. The scene. The smell of salt water and rot. It wasn’t much, but it was all the honesty I could afford.

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The first time I set foot in a recovery meeting, I walked straight to the back row and hunched over. I saw a coffee maker on a counter and small Styrofoam cups. Up front a large blonde woman wearing a black leather jacket was talking, and though I don’t remember most of what she said, I do remember with incredible clarity how plainly and honestly she spoke about things that would have sent me into convulsions of shame. And then she laughed. And everyone laughed with her.

Later, a bearded man announced that they would pass a basket to collect money for the meeting and that no one was required to contribute. That was good because I had no money. He also mentioned that anyone who needed it could take a dollar out.

It was fall then. I was in the stinky blue sweater phase. It rained all the time. After the meeting, I darted quickly out the door and felt the cool spatter against my head.