I’m not good at believing the things I’m supposed to,” I said. “I’m not good at being the person I’m supposed to be. - Lyz Lenz

We find significance in our sense of place. The way a New Yorker brags about the cost of a studio in Queens and the time he got punched on the subway, a Midwesterner brags about those two weeks the buses wouldn’t run because it was colder here than it was in the Arctic. Our pain is our significance. Our survival is our belonging.

In his book Shopping Malls and Other Sacred Spaces, Jon Pahl argues that the consumer aspect of American Christianity is a kind of a feel-good cop-out of deeper truths. But for those who have been hurt by the church, who have been told their bodies are unacceptable in the eyes of God, or have witnessed other’s pain perpetuated by religion, it is nothing of the sort. It’s actually freedom. And it’s freedom that has been sought and found by religious outsiders for millennia. The saints we revere like Joan of Arc and St. Francis of Assisi, were difficult nomadic outsiders who created their own religious spaces when none could be found for them. Even the model of Jesus, walking smelly and dirty in the desert with his band of fishermen, all men, was a rogue, cast out by the religious authorities. But these thoughts can be cold comfort when you are the one deemed unacceptable, deemed sinful by the very community that by its very precepts ought to love you.

So much of our culture depicts young girls dreaming about their weddings. But every middle-aged woman I know dreams about living alone in the woods, maybe with a dog.