Christianity & Literature

When I was eighteen, I took a gap year to volunteer with an international evangelical organization whose mission was to affirm the Bible as the inspired and authoritative Word of God and to share the gospel of Jesus Christ across the globe. It was the craziest year of my life.

For the first half of the year, I lived in a residential center where thirty people shared one computer with dial-up internet. It was the era before cell phones. There was one phone in a dingy not-quite-room under the stairs. Using it involved typing roughly thirty numbers from a prepaid phonecard into its keypad, pressing the hash key, waiting for an update on your phone credit, then a dial tone, and finally entering the number you wished to call. Usually, to hear the engaged tone.

My parents—both evangelical Christians—were worried about me from day one. They had good reason. I rarely called home. This had much to do with the intensity of the program, which involved formal Bible-based teaching all day Monday to Friday, two evenings of volunteering with church youth groups, two evenings of Portuguese classes to prepare us for a five-month outreach mission in Brazil, two small group meetings, reading, book reports and journaling assignments, and indoor and outdoor chores three times a week. Not to mention church twice on a Sunday. They had reason to be worried, too, because safeguarding practices seemed oddly absent and organizational communication about the year's activities alarmingly vague. My mother's only child had gone off into the world to serve her Lord and Savior and that mother was terrified.

It is difficult for me to write about that year. I've never tried before, and while I've done enough therapy to have worked with the material it gave me, I notice now a sense of heaviness as I type. There were good things that happened that year, but it was not a good year. As an introvert, I found the constant social engagement almost impossible to bear without any time to sit quietly and recharge. I volunteered to clean the toilets every week as it was the only chore that let me close a door behind me and be alone. For an hour each week it was just me, my cassette tape Walkman, heavy [End Page 360] duty bleach, and a loo brush. I was sharing a room with two women, one of whom, I now realize, had something akin to a breakdown during those first few months, though no one spoke of mental health, risk assessments, grief, or counselling support at any point during that year. It was Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. He was to be the answer to everything. The beginning and end. Alpha and Omega.

A woman on the staff team picked up on my interest in literature and encouraged me to try writing poems. I did so and enjoyed it. She said she would be glad to read them and give me feedback on my writing, so I passed her a poem. She didn't contact me about it. Instead, our team leader hauled me and my assigned "prayer partner" into a spare bedroom and accused us of being lesbians. I was terrified. I wasn't even sure I knew what a lesbian was, but I knew from her fury it must be evil, and I knew it wasn't meant to happen to people like me. "Lesbian" was not Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, though I couldn't remember Jesus being bothered one way or the other. It was a very confusing time, and not a little lonely and unnerving. I knew and believed "homosexuality is an abomination" because it said so in the Bible. Or so I thought. I figured "lesbian" must be some version of homosexuality. In my mind, homosexuality existed out there—out in the world we were so strenuously cutting ourselves off from. Christians couldn't be homosexuals. So why was our team leader accusing us of something sinful? And why...