The Story of the Word God (part I)

I feel that I’m a little strange most of the time //

but I don’t really mind //

Not when my heart feels strong

— The Tallest Man on Earth

I’ve had a few conversations about my new religion at this point, mostly with close friends. Some thought it was funny, others were non-plussed. Several were initially put off by the use of the word God. Which makes sense.

I feel I ought to explain some of how I got here. Why make a religion that has only one belief? Aren’t you basically saying you don’t believe in anything? If you want a religion so much, why’d you leave Christianity in the first place?

So let me begin to tell the story of the word God in my life:

My parents are and have for nearly thirty years been evangelical missionaries living and working in Kenya. They are cut from the cloth of moderate, highly educated conservatives, Christians that came of age through early college ministries in the 1980s (what seems to me like a heyday of Evangelical fervor) such as InterVarsity.

Both were raised in religious households. My father’s parents were overtly devout and extremely active in their church. Bill Mixon (my grandfather) was a church elder, my grandmother Louise what one might call at this point a ‘classical’ southern church lady. I don’t have many specifics on hand (perhaps I’ll track them down at some point), but what I know is that my father grew up absolutely steeped in the quasi-puritanical culture of southern Methodists and then Presbyterians. Churches with big organs, beige-carpeted Sunday School rooms with lots of felt boards. A repository of over-fifty and unduly smug white professionals. If you know you know. There’s a sort of oppressive normality to it all.

Of course, to a quirky little white boy, all of these people were perfectly nice. Hell, they were perfectly nice to most people, I imagine. But only occasionally would I meet an interesting one — fewwho compelled me to ask Why they were who they were, and how their faith had led them there.

My mother’s family was perhaps a little less parochial and a little more stilted. Grandaddy Echols was, to my young memory (he died several years ago), generally pleasant-natured but a bit taciturn. George had been in the army as an arms instructor in Florida during the Vietnam War, riding the tail end of the Greatest Generation, inheriting the seriousness if not, perhaps, the spiritual gravity of American men coming out of the Second World War. Growing up on the grounds of the Georgia state psychiatric hospital may have contributed to his restraint. He became a doctor, like his father.

He and my grandmother Polly, a homemaker and Southern debutante out of the world of Flannery O’Conner, were regular attendees of an Episcopal Church in Milledgeville, Georgia — a church where General Sherman of the Union Army famously had his men vandalize their beautiful organ, pouring maple syrup down the copper-tinted pipes (as I recall the story — no fact-checking here). But a personal spiritual vocabulary, even if they had one for themselves, failed to trickle down to my mother, who caught religion rather independently as a middle-schooler.

Mom has a soul of sharp relief. The trough and crest of her inner life are wide (an attribute I inherited). The tools of that Christianity (the reformed-ish kind that, whether or not they admit it, treats Grace as prior to Law) excavated her spiritual landscape in ways that changed the trajectory of her life. In other words, she’s a Believer.

This early ownership of her faith seems to be different from my father’s young religious experience. Dad, the child of a hog farmer and a perfectionist, also had an intensity (in his own words, obsessiveness) to parts of his soul, but this energy was focused at hunting, success in school, and being a generally ‘good’ kid. The religious culture was more like the water he was swimming in. But eventually the drive to ‘serve overseas’ crept up on him. He had earned his veterinary degree and practiced for several years in Georgia before joining the Christian Veterinary Mission after an initial visit to CVM missionaries in Kenya.

He got The Call — a phenomenon I both resonate with and absolutely fail to understand in anyone else. He married his “mud is fun” farmboy ethos with his unique clarity of purpose, rightness. His is a stalwart and in many ways simple faith. I know him now as a singular and authentic ebullience; I’m still coming to know how he got that way.

Although I haven’t used the word yet, it might be apparent that ‘God’ got us to this point in the story. Underlying the unfolding of my parent’s lives was a compass oriented by their sense of what they would call the Christian God. I’ll just call it God. To drive the point home, my mom broke up with my dad in college in large part because she became convicted she ought to move to China as a single missionary. She had a difficult study abroad there and thanks to my dad’s willingness to show up as a friend even after their break-up, he got her back. They ended up missionary-ing together instead. Life really is a marvelous symphony.

I’m sure I’ll fill in and fill out more of how ‘God’ evolved for my parents, and how it equipped them to equip me to ask some big, strange questions in my life. If you happen to still be reading this, then you clearly aren’t concerned about brevity, or more importantly, closure (my kind of people).

If a religion is for contemplating Ultimate Reality — that is, the practice and ritual and creating of space for this contemplation — this is simply my practice, my space. There is never any particular point, nor any particular answer. Welcome.