Looking after people, sitting with people, being present for people in the way that certain people are present fully without reserve without anything being held back for their own comfort.

She told me her name and where she was from after the communion service ended and the church had slowly returned to its normal Sunday rhythm.

the ordinary sounds of people gathering their coats and talking quietly and making their way to the exits.

We sat in the front pew and she told me about herself simply and directly.

The way a person speaks when they have decided to trust you and the decision is not provisional.

I asked her about the language.

I asked her the way you ask a question when you have spent 6 years building a structure to keep questions like it out and the structure has just developed a crack.

I asked it directly without the armor of prefraring, without the academic distancing I usually used when I engaged with Christian claims.

I said, “What language was that?” She said, “I do not know.

” She said it without hesitation, without embarrassment.

She said, “It happens sometimes when I pray.

It has happened since a few months after I came to faith.

” She said, “I did not choose it.

It comes when I am praying for something that I do not have words for in any language I know.

She paused.

She said, “I was praying for you.

When you reached for the bread, I saw your face before you touched it.

I saw what was underneath the action.

” She said, “I have that look myself many years ago.

” The look of someone who is fighting very hard against something they already know is true.

I sat with that for a moment.

I said, “You are not afraid of me.

” She looked slightly surprised by the question.

She said, “Why would I be afraid of you?” I said, “I just grabbed something out of your hands in the middle of a church.

” She said, “Yes, and then you gave it back.

” She said it as if the giving back was the whole story and the grabbing was just the beginning of it.

I did not know what to do with Sister Amina.

She did not fit any category I had.

She was not the performing Christian who used warmth as a tactic.

She was not the defensive Christian who needed me to be wrong in order to feel secure.

She was not frightened of me, which was unusual.

And she was not trying to win anything, which was even more unusual.

She was just sitting in a front pew in Holy Redeemer Church looking at me with the patient attention of a person who has time and intends to use it.

I said, “What do you believe about what just happened?” She said, “I believe Jesus asks me to pray for you and I prayed for you and the prayer came out the way prayers sometimes do when the love is bigger than the language.

” She said it without drama.

The way my father talked about faith as a simple reported fact.

Something moved in my chest when she said the love is bigger than the language.

Something small and involuntary like the first movement of a thing that has been still for a long time.

I pressed it down.

I said, “I do not believe any of what you just described.

” She said, “I know.

” She said, “You did not believe it 10 minutes ago either.

” She looked at me steadily.

She said, “But something is different now than it was 10 minutes ago.

What is it?” I could not answer the question, not because I did not know the answer, but because saying the answer out loud would require a kind of honesty I had not practiced in 6 years.

The answer was the certainty has cracked.

The answer was the language you spoke was real and I was 2 feet from it and nothing in my six years of preparation gave me anything to do with it.

The answer was I have been building walls my whole adult life and I just watched a 63-year-old Somali refugee pray over me in an unknown language after I grabbed the bread from her hands and the wall has a crack in it now and I can feel the draft from the other side.

I did not say any of that.

I said, “I need to think.

” She nodded.

She said, “Think as long as you need.

” She reached into the small bag she carried and she took out a card.

It was a plain white card with her name and a phone number and the address of the church.

She handed it to me.

She said, “When the thinking is done and the questions start, call me.

” I do not have all the answers, but I have some of them, and I know someone who has the rest.

I took the card and put it in my jacket pocket.

I said, “Thank you.

” Which is surprised me as I said it because I had not planned to say it and the gratitude it expressed was real.

She smiled a plain warm smile and nothing performed in it.

She said, “He has been waiting for you for a long time.

” I said, “Who?” She said, “You already know who.

” I walked out of Holy Redeemer into the cold March Minneapolis air.

The sky was white and the wind of the river was sharp and people moved past me on Nichollet Mall with their coats pulled close.

I stood on the church steps for a moment.

My phone had 17 messages from Belil.

I looked at them without reading them and put the phone in my pocket.

I walked north on Nicollet Mall for about 20 minutes without any particular direction just walking because the inside of my head needed the outside of the world moving past it for a while.

I walked past the restaurants and the office buildings and the light rail station and the target field and I walked under the skyway bridges and passed the bus stops and I did not think about any of it because I was thinking
about one thing only, the sound.

The sound that had come out of Sister Amina when she opened her eyes and found her hands empty.

The sound that had stopped the church.

The sound that I had been two feet from and that had landed in my body the way true things land.

Not in the mind where the arguments lived.

Not in the trained analytical brain that processed and categorized and filed, but in the body, in the chest, in the oldest and deepest part of a person where the things that matter most are registered before the brain has a chance to weigh in.

I had been 2 ft from something real.

I did not have a category for what it was, but I knew what it was not.

It was not performance.

It was not manipulation.

It was not a tactic deployed by a 63-year-old Somali refugee with her eyes closed and her hands cupbed in front of her in the middle of a communion service.

It was not any of the things I had been trained to see when I looked at Christian practice.

It was something else, something older and larger and more immediate than any of my explanations.

I went home to my apartment in Ceda Riverside.

I lived on the seventh floor of one of the high-rise towers, a two-bedroom apartment.

I shared with a cousin who worked night shifts at the airport and was therefore never home during the day.

I sat alone in the quiet apartment and I took a sister Amina’s card out of my pocket and put it on the coffee table in front of me.

I looked at it for a long time.

Then I opened my laptop.

I looked up speaking in tongues.

I read everything I could find.

the theological history, the biblical basis, the psychological literature, the accounts from people across time and across cultures, from Pentecostal Christianity in rural Alabama to Catholic charismatic communities in Brazil to underground churches in the Gulf region.

All of them describing the same experience in different languages.

A sound that comes through a person in prayer that belongs to no identifiable human language that is directed and intentional and carries weight and produces a response in the people who hear it that is different from the response to human speech.

The psychological literature had explanations.

I read them.

They were not satisfying not because they were wrong in their own framework but because they were not sufficient.

The framework they operated in had a ceiling.

And the thing I had been two feet from on a cold March morning in Minneapolis had no ceiling.

It was not the kind of thing that fits inside a framework.

It was the kind of thing that breaks frameworks and leaves the person who built the framework standing in the rubble looking at what the framework was covering.

I sat in my apartment in the Cedar Riverside Tower at the afternoon light went gray and the Minneapolis winter settled back in through the windows.

And I thought about my father.

My father who held his faith the way a scholar hold a well-made argument.

My father who could explain the theological basis for every element of every prayer.

My father whose faith was rooted in what he had read and studied and concluded.

My father had a God who was fully coherent and rationally defensible and intellectually satisfying and who had never, as far as I could tell, appeared in a Catholic church and the spoken through a 63-year-old Somali refugee in a language nobody present could identify.

I opened
my desk drawer and took out a small Gideon New Testament I had picked up from a hotel room 2 years before and kept for no reason I had ever been able to articulate to myself.

I opened it to the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles.

I read about the day of Pentecost, the day the disciples were gathered together and something described as a rushing wind filled the room and they began to speak in languages.

They had not learned and the people outside heard their own languages being spoken by people who did not know those languages.

I read it and then I sat with it.

I said the question out loud, not to God, not addressed to anyone.

Just the question thrown into the air of the empty apartment on the seventh floor of a CEDA Riverside tower on a cold March afternoon.

I said, “Was that you today?” The apartment was quiet.

The radiator clicked.

Outside the city went on, but the crack in the certainty did not close.

I called sister Amina’s number 3 days after the Sunday at Holy Redeemer.

Not because I had resolved anything, because the crack had gotten larger instead of smaller.

As the days passed, and the only honest response to a crack that is getting larger is to stop pretending it is not there.

She picked up on the second ring, she said my name before I said it, which surprised me until I realized she had only given her card to one person that Sunday and had presumably been expecting the call.

She said, “I am glad you called.

” I said, “I have questions.

” She said, “I know.

” She said, “Come to the church Thursday at 2.

” Father Dominic will be there.

He is better at the questions than I am.

Father Dominic Oi was a Ghanaian American priest in his late 40s with a PhD in theology from Notre Dame and a manner of speaking that was simultaneously the most precise and the most direct I had ever encountered in a religious person.

He did not soften things.

He did not perform warmth.

He spoke exactly what he believed with the confidence of someone who had examined it from every angle and was not afraid of any of the angles.

I sat across from him in a small office of the main sacry of holy redeemer.

And I gave him everything I had.

Every argument, every historical objection, every theological problem, the resurrection, the reliability of the gospels, the history of the church, and the violence done in its name, the doctrine of the trinity, the specific Catholic claims about the Eucharist that I had built a video around.

I laid it all out the way I used to lay it out at campus debates, organized, sourced, confident.

Father Dominic listened to all of it.

He did not rush.

When I finished, he was quiet for a moment and then he said, “You are a very good debater.

” He said it as an observation, not a compliment.

He said, “You have read widely and you have constructed your position carefully and most of your arguments are not wrong within the framework they operate in.

” He paused.

He said, “But I noticed that in everything you just said, you did not mention Sunday.

I was quiet.

He said, “You did not mention Sister Amina or what she said or the language she spoke.

” All of this.

He gestured at the space between us where the arguments had been.

All of this is the framework.

And I am happy to work through all of it with you and I will over time.

But Sunday is not inside the framework.

Sunday is the thing that cracked the framework.

And I want to ask you about Sunday before we spend time on the framework.

I said, “I do not have an explanation for Sunday.

” He said, “I know.

” I said, “The explanations I found were not sufficient.

” He said, “No, they would not be.

” He leaned forward slightly.

He said, “Can I tell you what I believe happened on Sunday?” I said, “Yes.

” He said, “I believe the Holy Spirit spoke through Sister Amina on Sunday morning in a language of prayer that bypassed every barrier you had built between yourself and God.

” He said, “Not because you deserved it, because he wanted you.

” He said, “The spirit does not require your permission or your belief or your readiness.

When the time is right, the spirit moves and the only question is whether you are honest enough about what you heard to follow it.

” I said, “I have been building the opposite of what you just described for 6 years.

” He said, “I know.

” He said, “So did Saul of Tarsus.

” And Jesus appeared to him on the Damascus road.

And within three days he was praying in the house of a man he had been planning to arrest.

He looked at me with his precise direct eyes.

He said the distance between where you are and where you are going is much shorter than it looks from inside the argument.

We took it for 2 hours.

He did not give me a program or a process or a set of steps.

He gave me a person.

He kept bringing me back to the person to Jesus in the gospels.

Not the institution, not the theology, not the history, the person.

He said, “Start there.

Read Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

” Read them slowly.

Not looking for weakness.

Not preparing your response.

Just watching a person move through the world.

Watch where he goes.

Watch who he chooses.

Watch what he says to the person everyone else has already walked away from.

I went home and I read.

I read the way Father Dominic described slowly without the argument brain running commentary.

I read about the feeding of the 5,000 and I thought about the food distributions our group had disrupted in Cedar Riverside.

Church organizations bringing food to people who needed it.

And I had stood outside with a sign saying our faith is not for sale.

And the man in the gospel was feeding people because they were hungry and he had food.

And that was the whole reason I read about the healing of the 10 lepers only one of whom came back to say thank you.

And Jesus said, “Were not all 10 cleansed? Where are the other nine?” And I thought about my own life, about every mercy I had been given that I had walked away from without turning back.

I read the parable of the prodigal son, the younger son who takes his inheritance early and goes away and spends it all and ends up in a foreign country feeding pigs and is starving and he comes to himself.

The text says he comes to himself and he starts the long walk back to his father’s house.

And when he is still a long way off, his father sees him and runs to meet him.

does not wait, does not stand at the door with crossed arms composing the speech about what has been wasted and what has been lost.

Runs because his son was lost and now he is found because he was dead and now he is alive.

I read that passage sitting in my apartment in Ceda Riverside at 1:00 in the morning and I had to put the book down and sit with the weight of it for a long time.

The son came to himself.

He came to himself in a foreign country feeding pigs.

I had come to myself in a Catholic church in downtown Minneapolis with a woman’s unknown prayer landing in my chest like a stone dropped into still water.

The stone was still falling.

I could still feel it falling and somewhere at the bottom of the water was the thing it was going to find.

I got on my knees on the floor of my apartment at 1:15 in the morning on a Thursday in March.

The city was quiet outside.

Ceda Riverside at 1:00 in the morning is as quiet as Ceda Riverside gets, which is still not very quiet, the tower hummed.

The radiator clicked.

Someone’s television was audible through the floor above me.

I knelt in the ordinariness of an ordinary apartment in an ordinary neighborhood in Minneapolis.

And I said the truest thing I had said in 27 years.

I said, “I have been wrong about you.

” I said it to the Jesus in the gospels who walked toward the people everyone else was walking away from.

I said it to the prison that sister Amina had prayed to in an unknown language from 2 ft away from me on a Sunday morning.

I said it to the god who runs down the road when he sees his son coming home a long way off.

I said I have used your name as a target for 6 years.

I have heard people who were trying to bring food to hungry people and I called it protection.

I have grabbed bread out of the hand of a woman at prayer and I called it activism.

I have been a son who took his inheritance and went away and spent it on exactly the wrong things and I am done.

I am done feeding pigs in a foreign country.

I am coming home.

I do not know the way exactly and I am not clean and I do not deserve the welcome but I am coming.

And if you are the kind of father who runs when he sees his son coming, run because I am a long way off and I need you to close the distance.

I stayed on the floor for a very long time.

The warmth came the way others described it.

From the chest outward, filling first and then spilling.

And in the warmth there was no sound and no vision and no unknown language.

Just the specific unmistakable sensation of being known.

Not observed, known.

The difference between a camera pointed at you and the eyes of a person who loves you.

I had been known this whole time.

Before the activism and before the movement and before bil and before the crack in the certainty and before the Sunday morning with sister Amina known before all of it known and waited for and met at the end of a long road with arms that did not cross.

I called sister Amina the next morning.

I told her what had happened on the floor of my apartment.

She was quiet for a moment and then she said in Somali which I do not speak but somehow understood in its weight.

Thanks be to God.

Then she said in English, “Father Dominic will want to know.

” I said, “I know.

I will call him today.

” I did.

I began the formal process of catechism at holy redeemer meeting with father Dominic weekly reading learning the structure of a faith I had entered through the back door on a morning when I intended to do harm.

There is something in that I think
about often the way the entry point was an act of taking and the faith I found is entirely about receiving.

I resigned from Cedar defense in April.

I told Bil by phone and he said what I expected him to say and then the line went quiet and we have not spoken since.

Three of the five people who were in the church with me that Sunday have been in contact with me since the video I posted 6 months after the events I have described here.

Two of them are asking questions I recognize.

One of them has already found his own way to a door and knocked on it.

My father and I have had four conversations about what happened to me.

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