The Flowing
- solidfoodpress
- Mar 14
- 5 min read
By Angela Townsend
I am woefully out of practice at writing about Jesus.
This is no fault of Jesus, who has been kneading daily bread and gratuitous inspiration into my soul as recklessly in these wildcat years as in my pious youth.
A construction-paper codex survives to this day, offering canonical evidence that Jesus was the subject of my first novel. Meticulously illustrated, this theological masterwork contemplates the sorrows of Mary and the requisite post-resurrection dancing. There is an implied universalism, but scholars are divided as to whether I was influenced by Origen or Tertullian.
At three, I knew: Jesus is the story. Everything else is overflow.
The ink has been flowing ever since.
Perhaps I’ve always been a desert creature, thirsty but patient. My need to write has been second only to my need for Jesus, and it’s only my dry eyes that have missed the connection.
When my intoxication with fiction went dry in college, I thought my words were in jeopardy. Oh, me of little faith. A glutton for theses, I wrote like day was fading. I read redemption into Pacific Rim anthropology. I saw glaring grace in a study of the local radio station’s demographics. Nineteenth century Russian literature hit me like 77,000 volts of religion—not spirituality, not the refuge of the reasonable, but smelly, velvety, demanding, neighbor-as-yourself, enemy-as-your-friend religion.
I was aghast and aflame. How had I known and not known this? The world was dank and vicious, but God had forsaken the choice to release it. We desecrated love and roared against reconciliation, strong-willed in terrible freedom. Still, we could not keep ourselves in the gulag.
I could not keep myself from seminary at this point, pressing my words into action for the collar. At last, I was empowered to write about Jesus by name.
I wrote about His joy, perplexing and infectious in the songs of the Pentecostals. I wrote about His gentleness, vexing to a vaulting world then and now. I wrote about His hand, huge around mine. I wrote about His friendship with Bonhoeffer and Barth, Julian and Theresa. I wrote about His kind eyes when we confessed our distrust. I wrote about His patience with the honest terror that caused one venerable professor to turn our “Pastor as Person” course into a weekly series of tips on getting out of social events.
I wrote about His politics and His pathos, His presence in my dreams and His presence in my tears. Mine eyes were anything but dry. And when seminary spat me into the Town Without Pity, a church with beady eyes and oversaturated vocabularies, I wrote my way out of despair.
I was, by all accounts, a ghastly misfit for the place, a Jesus freak who blew my cover every time I spoke. They were respectable and erudite, preferring their “Jesus” to be the final pinch of green onions rather than the entire Hamburger Helper (There was not a household in the congregation that had ever purchased Hamburger Helper).
They did not need help. They were the helpers. They were the fixers. They went to New Orleans to rebuild all the houses. Their houses were in immaculate order.
They learned to distrust me with the children, who trusted me anyway, and with the old women, who hatched a plan to cast me as the archangel in the Christmas pageant just to make a point. They fired the pastor who had hired me, for crimes including “preaching on the love of God too frequently.”
I began to have panic attacks that caused me to drive two hours to my parents’ house at midnight, in my pajamas, with both cats in the backseat, chugging diet root beers all the way.
I remembered I could write. I wrote my way out.
Without permission, I began writing weekly devotionals for the adults. I was, after all, the Christian Education Director, even if everyone knew I was a Youth Pastor in everything but salary. My services were needed in the ministry of Driving Teenagers To Paintball, but instead I wrote surreptitious sermons, zipped off on my own printer.
The elderly adored them. A man who looked like Seamus Heaney told me he bound them all together in a little book. The archangels in Chicos sweaters told me I was bound for greatness.
None of us knew I was bound for the cat sanctuary.
When my gentle, generous Jesus gave me a door, I danced through it like a dumbstruck disciple. Jesus knew my one-year way station would become a passionate love affair (sixteen years and counting). Jesus knew that the pagans and doubters and Christians and Buddhists and the anarchic cats themselves were the congregation I needed.
No doubt — Jesus being Jesus — He knew that this would all mean I would not be writing about Him for quite some time.
I would be writing about a field hospital thinly disguised as a cat sanctuary. I would be writing about a long, sloppy table where cats belched borscht and brokenness all over the good china. I would be writing about paraplegic cats as ciphers for resurrection. I would be smuggling the weight of glory into fundraisers for fading kittens. I would be testifying to a kingdom of the gritty whose devotion to each other was rivalled only by their insistence that they were bad. I would be reporting from the litter-tracked front lines of loving the unlovable and defeating death.
I would be writing about death more often than I bargained, having decided early and impulsively that I would pen a eulogy for every cat who died in our care. This started as a high-minded plan to bear witness to each life’s light, but there were sludgy weeks when I willed the sick to live out of pure selfishness.
I even took to writing obituaries for the living, telling myself I was like the New York Times being prepared. I took it all entirely too seriously.
I forgot constantly that every story was the Big Story. But since there’s only one story, I was in its service, nevertheless.
But lately, I feel Jesus’ big hand on the small of my back, and I sit up straight. Off the sanctuary campus, I don’t need to “tell it slant.” With the Sun sitting across from my kitchen counter, I can speak freely of how Jesus sets me free.
The prospect is 77,000 volts of terrifying, a dissertation assigned by a six-winged seraph covered in eyes. I fall on my knees. I fall back to metaphor and play. Language falls to pieces.
Jesus picks up pieces.
Jesus picks up my construction-paper thesis, my crayon crucifixion, my hopeful theology. Jesus picks me up when I trip over the grumpy stump of “a theology.”
Jesus picks me, even when I can’t pick the words out of the sky to dry my overflowing eyes.
I will keep practicing. His mercies are new every morning.