I stand on the steps between two sisters. I’m the eldest by one and two years, but I’m the smallest. I always was as a child. At 5’1”, I often still am. Their names escape me, but the image vividly remains. They, comfortable in their long skirts and smooth, dirty blonde braids sandwich me, fidgeting, donned in an oversized ankle-length dress pulled from the back of the youngest’s closet and a wild ponytail unsuccessfully tamed with mismatched bobby pins. Their mom, whose name has also faded from memory, eyes me sternly and unambiguously to stand still.

I don’t know where my mom is because I’m ten and mothers like mine don’t answer to ten year olds. I don’t know where my dad is because I’m ten and dads like mine vanish at ten years old. I, however… I am standing on the steps, sandwiched between two sisters, waiting for the church doors to open.

Growing up with an atheist father and an acquiescent mother, I’d never been to church, or tabernacle, as the sternly-eyed parent of the two girls called it. God was, perhaps, a familiar entity insomuch as he can be in the books of my youth, which is to say that if I had any prior knowledge of him, it would’ve come from the works of Beverly Cleary, Laura Ingalls Wilder, or Jack Prelutsky. Likely, it stopped at me knowing his name. And now, too young to protest but old enough to be with the adults, I wait quietly, though still squirming, to unwittingly learn more.

The doors opened, finally, and we filed in. I can see us, as I write this, and it feels reminiscent of scenes from A Handmaid’s Tale minus the wings. We moved slowly, in step, blank eyes pointing straight ahead - a stark contrast to the scene to come. I felt uneasy in the peculiar energy, though, at ten years old I couldn’t have articulated it, so I sat. Again, sandwiched between the sisters with perfect braids, I sat in the stillness.

Within minutes, the perverse solemnity was shattered. Spontaneous dancing. Arms flailing. Loud voices. Unintelligible sounds. Eyes no longer blank.

I ran out.

*******************

My mom, my sister, and I lived in Pat-a-foot’s house in a small southeast Texas town. The house was old and weathered-white with a long hallway and a claw foot tub. Pat-a-foot was my great grandmother, and though I’d only met her a few months before, I loved her fiercely. She could see me. She could see me and not focus on me. She let me take her old tobacco tins into the woods to collect crickets or fireflies or whatever insect was in season at the moment, making her otherworldly. Seraphic. Divine.

One day, my mom came home carrying a shiny white dress with a pink ribbon attached at the waistband down the long hallway. She stopped at the room my sister and I shared, announcing that she was getting married that weekend and this would be my dress. I tucked it away, hating the dress yet hopeful for change. Even desperate for change.

I knew only facts about my future stepfather and only because I heard them spoken from the secrecy of the long hallway. He was nice. He, too, was divorced with two kids. He was a deacon at a Southern Baptist church, but had his title stripped due to the divorce. I didn’t know what a deacon was, nor did I know what Southern Baptist meant, but I understood that my role was to quietly wear the shiny white dress and say things like “yes ma’am” when spoken to. It’s the southern way, the proper way, my mother’s way.

On wedding morning, I woke up with a stomach ache. I was quiet about it, as I feared the attention it would bring, but my face tells all. Always, my face tells all. Pat-a-foot is there. My entire extraordinary family is there, but Pat-a-foot sees me, sees my face. She slips me into the bathroom and feeds me Pepto Bismol by the spoonful before flitting off to distract the others. I curl into a tiny ball on the floor next to my bed and read The Long Winter from my treasured Little House on the Prairie boxed set.

Maybe minutes go by, or perhaps hours, but my mom’s sharp voice interrupts Laura Ingalls Wilder’s. She’s telling me to “get dressed now” and to “pull my hair out of my face.” I do both, fighting my both my hair and my stomach. It’s time to leave and we’re gathered on the front porch deciding who is driving whom when I lose the silent battle with my stomach.

The front of my shiny white dress is now coated in recycled Pepto Bismol, matching the pink waistband, and my mom is audibly angry. Pat-a-foot scrubs me down as I lay limply on the porch swing. She offers to stay home with me, but my mom declines. She offers to change me into another dress, but my mom declines; so she covers me in a towel and puts me in the backseat where I stare at my feet, pierced with shame and hidden panic.

Ten minutes later, I walk into a church for the second time in my life, stained with vomit and dizzy from the day.

For the next eight years, I would walk into that church twice on Sundays and every Wednesday night because my mom married a former deacon.

*******************

I dreaded summer. School gave me refuge. It took attention from me and placed it on the other kids - the kids who garnered it with their loud voices, their cans of Skoal, their short skirts - and summer made me my mom’s focal point. I spent my summer days cleaning and reading because they were quiet pastimes that minimized trouble. The summer between my eighth and ninth grade years, I read the Bible. I wanted to understand what my stepdad did. I wanted to understand what the preacher did. I wanted to understand what my Sunday School teacher did. I wanted to understand what my best friend did.

All I understood was that begetting was popular, people were killed for strange reasons, and God was damn scary. Why is this our foundation for good?

I finished Revelations, closed my Bible, and only reopened it the three times each week that a grownup told me to.

*******************

In 1996, I moved to College Station, Texas for university. I’d recovered from my car wreck and wanted out of small town life. I met my first real love and my forever relationship-benchmark person as I was hauling boxes into my house. Over Chinese food the next night, he told me he was atheist. This was permission, to me. This was permission to ask questions without violent repercussion or threat of hell or worse: risk of being confined at home with too much attention. This was permission to search freely for answers, for something that resonated. I needed something to make sense.

He spoke candidly and patiently, as any good teacher does, and although he made sense, I wasn’t sold on such hard lines. I wasn’t sold on such hard lines until my dad reappeared and said that he, too, was atheist. I was twenty years old, which is to say that I was young, and even with a lost decade, I loved my dad. I idolized my dad, and I followed his path of disbelief.

Had his path turned toward God, I’d have followed that, too.

*******************

It would be years before I spoke of religion or spirituality or God again. I left it to sit in a dusty corner of my mind with the quiet questions that still lingered like ghosts.

We sat at our breakfast nook, my three boys and I. That’s what they were, then.

Once upon a time, I had a partner and two stepsons, the eldest full of answers and the youngest full of questions. They were Catholic. I was simply me. The youngest had just declared that he was giving up Legos for lent and asked me what atheists do. I smiled at him, both proud of and shocked at his directness, and explained that atheists don’t observe lent. In that moment, I realized that I was wearing the wrong label, and I told him that I was probably closer to agnostic than atheist. I was unsure of the higher power but disheartened by the thought of not having one.

“That’s okay, Adi. You’re probably going to heaven anyway,” he assured me. I patted him on the head knowing I would sit in the confusion indefinitely.

*******************

One Friday night in late January 2017, I unrolled my mat next to a girl I don’t know. Behind me was another girl I don’t know, and filling the rest of the room were a handful of other strangers and four of my students. It was the first night of my third yoga teacher training, but for everyone else, it was the first night of their first. I was in love with experiencing that with them.

Friday nights with YogaWorks are called Philosophy Fridays, and I love those nights more than most others. We talk the yogic roots, traditions, and philosophy that inform the spiritual side of the practice. Until that Friday night in late January, I held yogic spirituality and religious spirituality separately. I craved the yoga while shunning the religion. Inexplicably so, but also undeniably.

We explored the Sutras, the Upanishads, and the Bhagavad Gita, a normal probe in yogic education, but someone new was leading. Our teacher, my teacher, was, much like my first love - patient and permissive. She fostered dialogue among the group, skillfully bridging the gap between my skepticism and ancient wisdom. For the first time in nearly two decades, I was actively erasing the hard lines my dad once helped me draw.

It was quiet, though, as I didn’t want the attention. I absorbed the information, the energy my peers shared, and I countered only occasionally, only softly. I wanted more, but I didn’t want to ask for it. Again, I didn’t want the attention.

We spent five months together, closing our time with hugs and tears amongst scattered rose petals. They were armed with skills to teach, and I with discreet bravery to dig further on another day.

That day would come much later. I wouldn’t wait for it, though. It would just come.

*******************

“Why don’t I ever get invited to Books+Bourbon?” That was the Facebook message that snuck me to it.

We met the following weekend, and the conversation was decidedly untamed. Somewhere in the midst of wild words and bourbon, I implored him to read Ishmael. He did and countered with Conversations with God. It turns out I had befriended a devout Catholic.

I told him that I spent eight years in the Southern Baptist church, where fiery fear is the basis of belief. That space taught me that to respect God was to fear God, and that God’s rewards and punishments were distributed according to behavior. He was the ultimate parent. Something wasn’t right, though. Even to a ten year old, a fourteen year old, an eighteen year old, something wasn’t right.

If God rewards the good and condemns the bad, why do good people die of cancer or car wrecks? Why are good people starving or raped or abused? Why does God give us free will if he doesn’t want us to make choices? Are we just pawns in a game? A source of infinite entertainment? And if everything is God’s plan, how does he keep it all straight? Why do we get to selectively follow Biblical law and still get to Heaven, and who decided which laws are relevant?

Those were the decades-old questions that escaped my bourbon coated mouth. “I think you’ll like Conversations with God,” he says.

I read the book. I loved the book. I championed the book to others.

“Now THIS is a God I can get on board with,” I typed out. “He’s not scary at all. I have more questions.”

He added a third B. “It looks like we need a Books+Bourbon+Bible study next.” And so we did. And so we do.

note to reader: Replacing Ishmael as my favorite and most-read book will be very nearly impossible, but Conversations with God inched into my top five. They can be purchased at the included links.