A Persistent God
February 27, 2023 | Caleb Mangesho BK ‘26
image description: university lecture classroom
When I came to Yale I didn’t want to believe in God.
I had lost my grandmother a few months before. I was still silently grieving despite my giddy smiles on a sunny August day as I moved into an Ivy League school with the help of my family, the support of my church back home, and excited student volunteers in bright scarlet t-shirts ready to haul boxes. Without my grandmother, without her: gentle and intelligent, a devout matriarch, who loved me and inspired my spark for learning, the same spark that fueled my college essays, the same spark I carried into the dorms on move-in day, into the classroom a few weeks later. The same spark I thought would burn my faith away.
It was a reluctant rebellion. It was a logical one. It was not unique. Death shakes the foundations of the lives around it, it reminds us that life is a fragile dimension. Her death made me question the facts of life–especially my Christian upbringing in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Two days after Bulldog Days, in the prime of my life, the same evening I performed what I thought was the best poem I had ever written, I had returned home smiling when my dad gathered my mom and my two younger sisters into his room, releasing the news that my bibi went to be with the Lord last night. She was 70. A sudden death. I fell apart.
It was a breaking point for me. To this day, I can’t pinpoint why. Maybe because when I was in eighth grade and she left to go back to Tanzania, I thought I would see her again—she was in remission. Maybe because I was angry at why, instead of her coming back, her cancer did. Despite my trying to keep it together, I felt a sort of betrayal that she had left us, left me… I still don’t know. Understanding fails the emotions.
I do know my understanding of God was completely shaken; the pillar my grandmother was in my life made me question the very fabric of my faith. Strong as I thought it was–strong enough to give a sermon on companionship in an age of loneliness to my Presbyterian church on Youth Sunday just a few months earlier–I found my faith to be flimsy. The material was not cheap, its contents were no less profound, but my beliefs were not warm enough to bear the cold reality of loss. In fact, I often found myself lonely in the coming months.
I knew I couldn’t go through such an experience alone. I had to rely on my family, my community in Christ, my friends, and most of all, Jesus–the Jesus who wept for Lazarus. But I couldn’t let myself be loved. I wouldn’t. There was an overwhelming fear, a fear that turned Jesus into a figure instead of a friend, a lie instead of the Lord. The fear was this: that how I felt didn’t matter, because if I didn't behave in the way that was expected of me—by my parents, by my church, by my friends, by the world—I would be utterly ruined. It was worse than pleasing people. Maybe it was a fear that if I wasn’t good, I would lose the people I love.
In mourning, “good” meant showing emotion, but not too much. “Good”, irrational as it seemed, meant keeping my naked grief to myself. So I let my sadness settle into an open resentment of God, this savior who left me to suffer alone in the darkest moment of my life, and the people around me who encouraged me to follow Him. I wouldn’t let myself be loved. I came to Yale sure that God and his love would wither away like a rose, pretty in the summer, dead in the winter.
After my first semester at Yale, I came to the resolute conclusion that love was not seasonal. Even as I am writing this, I’m still not sure why I still continued to believe in God. A part of me always knew I would love Jesus as my Lord and Savior. But there was a part of me that was also motivated by fear to be good, a fear of punishment: Maybe I believe in God out of fear that atheism or agnosticism would result in further isolation of my family and friends. Maybe it is easier to believe what I was always taught to be true than to question Jesus, this person I could only learn was the Lord from revelation of the Word.
What I do know was that I found Jesus to be a friend I could not push away. I found myself seeking God in many of the Christian communities on campus, like Chi Alpha and the Christian Union. I told people my story and they listened with a love that failed my understanding. I revealed to them my naked grief and they clothed my heart with unconditional acceptance. It was a series of confounding and unexpected experiences en masse that led me to open my heart to God again.
Throughout Christian life, we are often reminded of the primary commands of Jesus to love the Lord your God with all of your heart, with all of your soul, and with all of your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself.
But sometimes we don’t have the heart, we don’t have the soul, we don’t have the strength. Sometimes our faith is stretched thin and isn’t enough to bear the weather of life, much less the life of another. Our faith becomes worn, with knots and tears in the fabric that refuse to be mended. So when our faith fails, we return to the wardrobe of our ways, valid ways that are unique to our suffering but are utterly human in nature.
We wear shields through our smiles, swords against our enemies, and silence against our friends. We hurt ourselves trying to defend what we believe was a love damaged by the way of the world, a way that sometimes conceives an honest but broken image of God. God, I have learned, is not uncomfortable to confront our broken images of Him. He is Creator, of ultimate power, and over all a personal, palpable, and a persistent God.
This piece is a part of a series for Lent 2023. Read more at https://www.yalelogos.com/lent2023