English Lessons

by Andrea Lucado

  As I neared the building where I had been instructed to go for orientation, I felt like I might throw up. I had no idea what I was doing. I had no idea where I was going. Everything in me wanted to run all the way back down that hill into my dad’s arms and ask my mom if we could go home. But I had kept my vow to return to Oxford. I had applied and been accepted. It would be silly to go back now. So I pushed through the doors, held my breath, and hoped for the best.

  I searched the room for a friendly face. There were a couple of guys standing by a table of snacks and a few people in the corner who looked like professors discussing an important piece of paper. And then I saw one. She was sitting down. She looked about my age and like someone I would have been friends with back home, and the seats beside her were empty. I made a beeline in her direction and sat down in the chair to her right.

  “Hi,” I said, feeling dry mouth coming on. “I’m Andrea.”

  “I’m Sophie,” she said.

  “Nice to meet you.”

  Sophie nodded.

  “Are you from here?” I asked.

  “No, no. I’m from South Africa.”

  “Really? That’s so cool.”

  Sophie laughed. “Where are you from?”

  “America. I mean, the States. I mean, Texas. Have you heard of Texas?”

  Sophie laughed again. “Yes, I’ve heard of it.” George W. Bush had been president for the last eight years. Of course she had heard of Texas.

  Someone called for everybody to take their seats. After the program director made some introductions, we circled around the room saying our name and country of origin. I took inventory. There were about twenty of us, representing four different nations: England, India, South Africa, and the United States.

  I was one of two Americans and, I would soon learn from various opinions voiced during class discussions, one of one Christian. I sat in my chair with my back straight and eyes unblinking and watched them, the tiny islands off the coasts of nowhere near the edge of the universe. So no one else in this room was like me? A pastor’s daughter. A graduate of a Christian high school, where most of her friends were Christians. And now, a graduate of a Christian college, where she had only Christian friends. An employee of a Christian camp in the summers, and someone whose handful of dates were with only Christian guys. I was in a Christian sorority, the whole thing. My life to that point had been the picture of Christian-ness, and Oxford was photobombing my pretty Christian picture.

  Though since birth I had spent more time inside the church walls than outside them, I had also been gifted with the ability to incessantly ask questions about my faith, which had been known to lead to periods of skepticism. My dad tells this story from when I was five years old. He was teaching me and my two sisters about the Garden of Eden. In the middle of the story, I interrupted. “Wait, if God didn’t want Adam and Eve to eat from the tree, why’d he put it in the garden?” And thus my impulsively inquisitive nature reared its head. Such questions and concerns have never quite left me. I’ve always felt the need to ask why? until I get a sufficient answer.

  In high school there had been a few dark and doubting months. As I recall, it started while I was outside running in our neighborhood one day. I was trying to pray, and for the first time since I had become a Christian at age nine, I felt like no one was listening to me. Instead of God’s presence, I felt an emptiness, and this upset me. My logical teenage reasoning said if I couldn’t feel God, he wasn’t there. And if he wasn’t there, I didn’t have to follow his rules. And if I didn’t have to follow his rules, I could do whatever I wanted. So I did, sort of, for a few months. It was a brief, slightly rebellious—by preacher’s daughter standards—time in my life. And it was brought to an abrupt halt as soon as I got caught.

  One of my slightly rebellious activities was sneaking out of the house. I thought sneaking out was so fun and exhilarating and, well, sneaky. One night while spending the night at my friend Leslie’s, we decided, in our wisdom and maturity, to sneak out of her house and go meet up with some boys who were smoking pot. Everything went well, as it usually did. Nobody heard us leave. Nobody heard us come in. We were pros, and the night was a success. The next morning, however, was not.

  A few hours after I returned home from Leslie’s, I got a phone call. It was from Leslie’s mom. Leslie had been overcome by a wave of guilt about what we had done the night before and told her mom everything. Now, Leslie’s mom told me, either I could tell my mom or she would have to. Understandable, since Leslie’s mom and my mom were good friends.

  At the time, neither my mom nor my dad knew I had been doing things like sneaking out of the house. They knew I was struggling with doubt and uncertainty, but they didn’t know about the recent proclamation I had made to myself that I could now do whatever I wanted because I didn’t feel God’s presence anymore. After I got off the phone with Leslie’s mom, and after the sickness in my stomach subsided a little, I walked into my mom’s room and told her everything. I told her I had been lying to her about where I was on the weekends. I told her I had snuck out of Leslie’s house to hang out with boys who were smoking pot. I cried and cried and told her more details than I was planning to. She cried right along with me. She was surprised and disappointed I am sure, but I don’t remember a harsh scolding or a sermon. Mostly what I remember is my mom hurting with me in an empathetic way I had not expected. And later, when my dad heard about everything, he grounded me for three weeks, but he also understood, and he also didn’t yell or kick me out of the house. I saw grace in my parents that day, a grace that eventually led me back to its source.

  Now in Oxford, in a class of no Christians and in a city and country that was located nowhere near the Bible Belt, I worried that I might lose the feeling of God’s presence again. And if I did, how would I react this time so far away from home? Being in Oxford felt like being sixteen years old again, without the excuse of being sixteen.

  As much as I hated those field crickets in Abilene that summer, I can’t help but see now how like them we are, especially in those confusing years of early adulthood. The “twenties” as some call it, though I suppose this phase is not restricted to one decade. I wish our stories were more similar to the process of caterpillars turning to butterflies. That metamorphosis is such a beautiful picture, with time spent in the chrysalis (such a lovely word). But I think the reality of becoming an adult looks much more like that of a cricket nymph and its gross, painful molting process as the little runt emerges from the ground for the first time, squinting at its surroundings, struggling from one place to the other, losing skin all along the way. Probably feeling small, afraid, and lost and clinging on to building walls when it just doesn’t know what else to do or where else to go.

  I emerged from the ground in Oxford as a good Christian girl from the friendly state of Texas. I was twenty-two years old. I had been to college. I thought I knew things about the world and how it should be. I thought I knew about faith and God. But when I squinted my eyes at this foreign city and my new surroundings, I quickly learned that many of the things I thought I knew—about me, about faith, about others—were not necessarily true over here, in this other place, this other world. Almost as soon as I got to Oxford, I felt lost. I wandered its streets looking as cricket-nymph-like as one can possibly look. I searched for a safe wall to grab on to. A place that looked or felt like home. I looked for the God of my childhood, the faith of my childhood. But it wasn’t there. I never found any rough blue pew cushions in Oxford as hard as I looked.

  The newness and foreignness of Oxford shook me up and out and everywhere, in a way that made Oxford a scary and hard but necessary beginning for me.

  Growing up, no matter when growing up happens, requires shedding layers. Especially when it comes to growing more mature in faith. In order to learn new things, you must first unlearn old things to make space for the new things. The whole process is very sacrificial in nature, which is why it feels hard and painful and sad at any given moment. You a
re giving away parts of your very self, things you always held to be true. But you have to. In order to become more of the person you are, in order to believe in the God who actually is, you must get rid of the old parts that no longer make sense, revealing the truth that lies underneath. Christian Wiman wrote in his book My Bright Abyss, “Doubt is painful…but its pain is active rather than passive, purifying rather than stultifying. Far beneath it, no matter how severe its drought, how thoroughly your skepticism seems to have salted the ground of your soul, faith, durable faith, is steadily taking root.”* I like this idea of faith lying beneath the doubt because it means that what we are looking for is within us and not outside us. When we first come out of the ground, it looks like we have a long way to travel, but really we don’t have to travel to some place or arrive at some external location to find what we are looking for. We don’t have to, but sometimes it does help.

  * * *

  * Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 76.

  2

  The Babel Effect

  The River Thames is England’s longest river, flowing from the Cotswolds region through Oxford, then through London, and finally out to the North Sea. Some think the name Thames comes from the Sanskrit word tamas, which means “dark,” because that describes the color of the water in this particular river. The Thames’s waters are dark, I suppose, but compared to some opaque lakes I’ve spent quite a bit of time on in Texas summers, I think the color of the river is just perfect. The trees beside it are delicate and beautiful the way they watch their reflection in the surface, and the little floating boats on it look so picturesque and quiet from the bridge above. The Thames, to me, is an excellent river.

  During my time in Oxford, I became very familiar with this river. More specifically, the part of the river closest to my house, where it met Donnington Bridge. A narrow path on either side was just wide enough for riding a bicycle or for two people walking while holding hands. I lived less than a mile from there, and I often found myself walking, riding, or running its muddy trail, sometimes alone, sometimes with others. The Thames provided a backdrop for many significant Oxford moments. I stared at it during the long conversation with the handsome Austrian Korean. I listened to the rain fall on it while sitting inside a cozy pub. I stood at its edge on an evening I remember clearly, when, coffee in hand, I asked God big and small questions. But before, after, and in between these events, there were runs. Many, many runs along the river when my hands got cold and my legs tired and my running shoes muddy.

  The Thames was my trail that year. Just mine. It led me home and led me to strange places, conversations, and confusing feelings. A couple of times I was on the river itself in a boat, but mostly I looked at it from the edge. I watched others row on it, live on it in long, thin houseboats. It let me be an onlooker for a while, knowing I would leave in due time as most foreigners did.

  A lot would happen along that river in a year, but the first would be lunch.

  During the early weeks of my time in Oxford, I was determined to make friends at church, where all good Christians go to make friends and where all good recovering doubters go to attend their weekly meeting. I knew of a large Anglican establishment called St. Aldate’s from my study-abroad semester, and I began attending immediately and faithfully each Sunday as soon as I arrived in town. Like Starbucks, church felt like my embassy in Oxford, a building in the middle of a foreign place where my membership meant something and where I felt safe and at home.

  St. Aldate’s met in a large, ancient building that blended in perfectly with its historic surroundings near the center of town. The inside of the church was light, with high ceilings, Roman arches, and massive stone pillars. It looked nothing like the megachurches back home, but it was, at least, a church, and there were, at least, fellow Christians all around me. The Anglican traditions of this church reminded me of my seven years spent in an Episcopalian private school in Texas. Walking forward for communion, reading liturgy, lighting candles—these old-as-the-building-itself practices lulled me into a settled and comfortable space and time, one much like when I wore a pleated skirt, kneesocks, and a necktie and sang Gregorian chants in the school choir. Except here, this time, all was done and said in the loveliest of English accents, and the staff called themselves “vicars” and “rectors.”

  I loved services at St. Aldate’s for this reason, the way they transported me home. I did not love when service ended and I would emerge from my trance on the pew to find that the people in front of me, behind me, and to my left and right were not friendly American acquaintances but, instead, foreign English people I so desperately hoped would befriend me. Not quite tiny islands off the coasts of nowhere near the edge of the universe, but close.

  Fortunately, the process of being a successful church member did not elude me like the process of cultural integration did. Inside these walls, I knew the steps to take to get involved, and I took them.

  Step one: join a small group. Step two: find a place to serve or volunteer. Step three: spend time with church people outside church in order to make them your friends, in order to always have someone to eat lunch with after service. I have considered collecting these steps into some sort of pamphlet for national distribution. I would call it “Three Steps to a Successful Church Experience by Andrea Lucado (someone who has nearly thirty years of successful church experience).”

  By week three in my new city, I was already in touch with a small-group leader (step one). I had signed up for worship-band tryouts (step two). I had introduced myself to members of the graduate-student group that met on Tuesday nights (step three). And by that third Sunday, I had an invitation to lunch. The steps work. Trust the steps.

  I tried to hide it, but I was thrilled when my new small-group leader invited me to go out to eat with her and her husband and their friends. This is it, I thought. This is the day I cross over to the English side. They will be so charmed by me; they will wonder why they had not let me into their circle sooner.

  We all cycled to the restaurant together, me and my “future friends,” as I thought of them. I clumsily trailed behind the others, being the only one more comfortable in a car than on my bicycle. Everyone rides bikes everywhere in Oxford, and because I didn’t want to feel left out and because riding the bus was, from what I could tell, considered not cool, an old, rusty blue bicycle had been one of my first purchases upon moving there. The cycle to the pub took us along a path with the river to our left and the countryside to our right. Low fences with tiny gates protected fields with horses and cows. They made me curious about the land inside, whose it was, and how long it had been theirs.

  Suddenly, after nothing but trail and fields for a couple of miles, a pub appeared, and what seemed a deserted part of the river was now a clamor of people locking up their bicycles, chatting with their friends, and carrying shiny pints from here to there. My party chose a table in the sun beside the water.

  Although I sat near them, I felt far from my lunch companions, my future friends. First, there was the matter of my appearance. I wore clothes purchased from stores no one shopped in here. I had meticulously straightened my hair, which, I would learn, was not exactly the fashion for English girls. And then of course there were my teeth. I exposed them with each nervous and uncertain smile. After some time, I learned that having straight white teeth is not really a measure nor standard of beauty in England. Surprisingly, the English don’t see the value of torturing their adolescents with contraptions like braces and retainers and find it odd that we Americans pay so much attention to this feature.

  Besides how I looked in comparison to the others, I also struggled with the conversation. Their accents muddled things, but so did words and phrases that were familiar to me yet had new definitions in this country. Words like fancy and pudding and pavement. Discussing school became increasingly difficult.

  “Do you have a lot of schoolwork this week?” I asked one of the guys beside me.

  He lau
ghed. “No, I haven’t had any schoolwork to do for a very long time.”

  “Oh, your teachers must be easier than mine.”

  “No, it’s just that here, the word school is used for the younger levels, which I of course haven’t been in for a while.”

  “Oh!” I said. “Then do you have any college work to do?”

  “No, but I do have university work to do,” he told me.

  I stared back blankly. Somehow “college” was different from “university,” and neither college nor university was considered “school.” This sounded needlessly complicated.

  I thought life in England would be a simple transition from home. I had been there before, and, most importantly, I spoke the language. Or so I thought. In reality, no matter how similar a language seems on the page or sounds to the ear, what we actually speak is a language informed by our surroundings and upbringings. We speak our food, our weather, our societal habits and quirks. We speak what we were taught by our parents, political leaders, friends, pop-star idols, and grocery-store clerks. That’s what I spoke in Oxford, and it wasn’t translating well.