Fishing for Faith

How often does the bobber go down?

I have a friend named Daisy who, when it comes to church, is a migrating bird. She attends around a dozen of them, seldom going to the same one two weeks in a row. She hops between clusters of familiar faces, munching on donuts and mini-muffins, introducing herself to new people, and asking everyone to snap a picture with her (“Be sure you get my shoes. Did you get my shoes?”). I have talked to Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, Pentecostals, and even Lutherans (rare birds in Alabama) who have sighted Daisy on Sunday mornings flitting about their sanctuaries. Whether she ever alights in the liturgical branches of Christianity, I couldn’t tell you, but if Catholics have pizza nights or pancake breakfasts, she has probably found them, too. Daisy will attend any special church event she can find a ride to.

Which is where I come into the picture. Daisy has no driver’s license, and yet she must—she WILL—get to church each week. The constant search for a ride has left her with mad networking skills, and yet it has also left her vulnerable to hurtful criticism. Once, she took home a directory from my own church and texted everyone in it, A-Z, at 10 pm Saturday night, asking to be picked up for the early service. You can’t imagine the chaos this caused. People who hadn’t met Daisy compared notes in Sunday School. Who was this person who seemed to have all their numbers? Was she a hacker, a scammer, a child trafficker? Was there even such a person as Daisy? Should we call the police? When I realized what was happening, I explained to the faux-imperiled that Daisy is a sweet, gentle young woman with some significant limitations. She is literally incapable of plotting harm unless harm means talking you into stopping at Paradise Donuts on the way home and taking her picture with the manager (who wears high-tops).

After that experience, I decided, since I live close to Daisy and know her well, that I could help her out. For two-and-a-half years now (including a long break during the pandemic), I have been Daisy’s Sunday chauffeuse to whatever church she wants to visit, as long as it’s on the way to mine. Sometimes I take her to my own church, but she seems to prefer cavernous megachurches where there are more photo-ready friends and better snacks. (Church of the Still, Small Voice contracts for 5000 mini-muffins per Sunday; how could we compete with them?)

You know that little plastic ball on a fishing line that bobs on the surface of the water? Google tells me it’s called a “bubble float.” In my youthful fishing days, all three of them, I waited cheerlessly for my bubble float to bob beneath the opaque surface of the water, signaling to me that something was under there—even the smallest of fish. I didn’t get many bobs. Daisy, to me, has become a bubble float for what I’ll call “real faith,” meaning the something (even the tiny something) real and good happening beneath the surface of organized public religion in my suburban community. 

Some days, all I can see as I drop off Daisy at one church or another is the scummy stuff on the surface, stuff that sets off my inner cynic: churches like outlet malls or fortresses, armed security guards, upper-middle-class white Christians circling their Yukons against the hordes. It doesn’t help when one pastor tells me I can’t drop off Daisy at his church unless I stay there with her, which is impossible since I work at my own church. He implies that I’m taking the easy way out, dumping my problems on his congregation rather than my own. I say, “No, I’m just giving somebody a ride, like if I were Uber.” But apparently some of the people there find Daisy’s migratory ways disturbing, and I’m asked not to bring her. The pastor tells me he’ll arrange for some members to pick her up and take her to the “special Sunday School class.” I know that this won’t work, and in fact, it doesn’t. I can’t help but wonder how that church would handle ten lepers, a prostitute with a bottle of smelly first-century perfume, or even Jesus Himself, with his slept-in robes and dirty feet. What’s one sweet girl on the autism spectrum compared to any of that? 

The bubble float didn’t bob for me that day—many loving people may go to that church, but I didn’t speak to them on the phone. In contrast, I dropped off Daisy at a different church a few weeks later, and as we sat in the parking lot waiting for the main doors to open, a guy came to the window of the car, stuck in his head, and said, “Hey Daisy! Good to see you!” Daisy’s face brightened. After chatting with her for a minute he left, and I asked her who that man was. “He’s the pastor of the church,” she said. As in the head pastor, a guy who probably has things to do on a Sunday morning. Something of real faith is present at that church, even if it’s only the size of a mustard seed, the nibble of a tiny fish under the surface of a twelve-piece praise band. I see it in the way they quickly answer Daisy’s texts and calls, the way some of them take her to lunch after church, the way they love her spontaneously and genuinely without offering structural answers (organizational charts, reluctant chaperones) to the challenges she presents. 

You may be wondering if I’m aware of how self-righteousness and judgmental I come across here. The answer is yes—not only that I come across that way, but that I am that way. 2021 has done a number on my faith in evangelicals. I’m mortally tempted to believe that I’m a better human than the Christians who took part in the January 6 insurrection, the Trumpists who have left my own church over political squabbles, and the anxious people who don’t welcome my friend Daisy.

I don’t know what to do with this self-righteousness, other than repent of it. I do know that not repenting of it is the road to evils I’m only vaguely aware of at the moment—hatred, a hardening of my heart, maybe, ultimately, apostasy. So today I will turn my eyes away from the things that tempt me to cynicism, and I will borrow some love for God’s people from Daisy, who has abundant stores of it, rivers of life rising up in her soul. If she should ever (and she probably already has) come upon someone in a church parking lot wearing a MAGA hat and driving a Lexus with a Trump 2024 sticker, I know exactly what she will say to that person. “Let me ask you this, sweetheart—can you find somebody to take our picture together? And can you make sure they get my shoes?

M. Elizabeth Carter is a counselor and writer living in Alabama.