A Walk with Jane Austen

by Lori Smith

  I'm looking for two things in a guy: Someone who loves God with all his heart, with a live and generous faith. And someone who adores me.

  And built into those two requirements are all kinds of unspoken assumptions:

  He will love learning.

  We'll have great, intelligent, funny conversations.

  He'll respect me.

  He'll be kind.

  He'll be basically conservative without being easily annoyed with war protesters.

  He'll like to give money away.

  He'll be normal—someone I could actually introduce to my non-Christian friends without cringing.

  And as Jane would say, he should be good-looking, “which a young man ought likewise to be, if he possibly can.”11 With my apologies to the stellar Christian single guys I've met in the last few years, it's a truth universally acknowledged among single Christian women that single Christian guys beyond a certain age are weird. We used to speculate that it had something to do with the rising sperm count, the lack of sex— that women can handle this, but guys just get weirder and weirder until they are forty-two and completely beyond reach.

  And of course, right? The church is a place for the broken. Anyone who doesn't fit in anywhere else is certain of a welcome in the church. If you have trouble putting two sentences together or looking a girl in the eyes, if you are uneducated or only capable of talking to other Christians, or if you're recovering from a cocaine addiction or a messy divorce, come to our church and you'll be welcomed. And that's how it should be.

  But it doesn't always make for good dating grounds. (Then there is the other side—the guys who attend church but aren't entirely committed to living their faith, guys who try to explain their theological understanding that sex is acceptable anywhere there is love, whatever else the Bible may say about it.)

  It seems as well that there's something about modern evangelical Christianity in America that can encourage a kind of overspiritual weirdness. I went to coffee with one guy, and he prayed loudly for our coffee time together and then asked me questions like, “So what is the Lord teaching you?” which were popular in my high-school youth group but I've since come to loathe, particularly from near strangers.

  Modern Christian America is plagued by the sacred/secular dichotomy. If we are talking about the Lord, singing about the Lord, listening to music by other people who love the Lord, wearing T-shirts or bracelets about Jesus, calling a plumber who also loves Jesus, those are good things. Other things, regular, normal things, are suspect. All of which may make for Christians who fear and cannot relate to the world in which they live. The church is full of guys who believe this. I could never go out with them, and they probably think I'm not a very good Christian anyway.

  So at thirty-three I sit on the love seat in the sunroom from time to time and pray for an amazing guy—someone normal, someone who loves God with all his heart, someone who will adore me—believing that it's nearly impossible, but that God specializes in those kinds of things when he so chooses.

  As someone who's far from a morning person, eating breakfast at 8:00 a.m. in a roomful of strangers is my idea of purgatory. If I could, I wouldn't talk to anyone ever before 10:00 a.m., best friends included. So when I came downstairs wearing my fun pink pleated skirt with the flip-flops that match exactly, I was praying that no one would notice me. I would have given anything for an invisibility cloak, actually. Most especially, I didn't want to admit the possibility that something romantic could exist here, at least not before I'd had coffee and a decent plate of something substantial.

  When I walked into the room, the fire alarm went off. The whole room smelled of toasting bread (alas, no bacon or eggs to be had). Jack was sitting right by the door, looking very good and incredibly awake. He smiled at me and said, “You walk in the room and bells ring. You did good getting up early this morning.” I thought to myself, Crap, he's still here,and like a schoolgirl I couldn't eat my toast.

  Four

  Austenian Faith and Love

  I feel, alas, that I am dead

  In trespasses and sins.

  —WILLIAM COWPER, “THE SHINING LIGHT”

  I've not always believed in the grace of God. Actually, since I was roughly three, I've believed in the big, eternity-changing, salvation sort of grace. That was when I asked Jesus into my heart, childlike and beautiful, I imagine, during evening prayers in my brother's room. My brother and I knelt on the shag carpet with our hands folded on his seventies comforter. He laughed. At least that's what I tell myself because, actually, I don't remember that anymore. I just used to remember and told myself that version of the story for so many years that now it's fact, even if it didn't actually happen.

  As a child in Baptist schools, I prayed that prayer over and over in chapel, at Vacation Bible School during the summer; everyone wanted to know in those days the date and time I prayed the “sinner's prayer.” I was never entirely sure which one stuck.

  Then in college I wondered if I really believed any of it—God, Jesus, the Bible, the need for salvation. I took two years to feel my way through doubt. I still knew, in some way that I'm not sure I can explain, that God was with me, that he guided me even as I asked questions and investigated what the rest of the world believed. I studied C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity and Surprised by Joy and eventually determined that Christianity was true. I felt as if it would take me a lifetime to evaluate all the logical, rational arguments, and I didn't have the brainpower for that or the time, and as much as I could evaluate them, they felt true to me, so I came back. But I came back to a different faith, one that was shaky and easily faltered and could be toppled over into a whirlwind of doubt by the little breath of a series of questions from my brother or a scientific article questioning the existence of Jesus or the occasional realization of the hugeness of the world that did not believe as I did.

  But the point is I firmly believed in the love and grace of God. I knew that was one of Christianity's distinctives. I could tell you how to confess your sins and be forgiven “of all unrighteousness,” even the things you didn't know you did. But I didn't actually believe in grace for myself, not on a daily basis. And this has been my great struggle: I've often felt like it's impossible to keep up with my confession. I'm simply too wrong in my core. As soon as I confess and receive forgiveness and occasionally feel the depth ofthat, the cleanness of being right with God, I set off on another pattern of wrong thinking, where I'm the center of my universe, where even when I try to put other people first and love God (and don't always put that much energy into that), I fail miserably and am aware of the fact that seemingly two seconds after I've been irrevocably washed clean, I am dirty again, like filthy rags. And after years of church and faith—being instructed over and over to read my Bible every single day to please God, being taught implicitly that my spirituality is directly related to the number of services I attend or the number of people I witness to, and being part of a family that doesn't enjoy or maybe believe in lying about, in taking three hours by the pool with only a drink and a magazine (we are the industrious, entrepreneurial type)—I believed in the necessity of earning the pleasure of God.

  I thrived on doing and forgot how to be. When I finally went to counseling to work through depression, I was in a state in life where I couldn't even make myself a cup of tea. I watched my roommate make tea and wondered how she could take the time to do such a thing, to let the water boil, let the leaves sit, actually slow down enough to drink it. Everything in my life was about doing. Every minute was scheduled to take advantage of my limited energy. So I worked until I crashed and couldn't work any longer. And when I crashed, on my lost days, I could barely make or eat anything. I couldn't even enjoy watching TV. The days rushed past as I lay on my couch with pictures going by on the screen in front of me, too numb and dissociated to be involved in the stories.

  Everything was work. Work was my salvation. And not being able to work made me distraught. It bothered me that I had forgotten how to relax. I
wasn't enjoying life. Part of me must have known that I couldn't save myself.

  Jack and I got seats together for lectures by the doors that opened to the back lawn, letting in the gorgeous seventy-something weather. David Wenham was talking about the Sermon on the Mount, about its two groups of pronouncements, the first about God's grace and the second, which can be “profoundly depressing,” about God's standards, which are so high that no one can live by them.

  I leaned over to tell Jack that I have such a hard time balancing those things, the grace and judgment of God. He said quietly, “Yeah, I've found in my life that the grace has to come first.”

  I'm afraid I'll make some people cringe by tying Jane to Christianity in any form. She was not evangelical, though her cousin, clergyman Edward Cooper, was part of the new evangelical movement beginning to sweep the country. Unfortunately, Jane didn't always like his sermons, which she found too full of “Regeneration & Conversion,”1 and he had a habit of sending “Letters of cruel comfort,”2 which seems to hint at Mr. Collins. Jane still found a way to admire the young movement, if she found it too “loud and noisy”3 for her own tastes. She wrote, “I am by no means convinced that we ought not all to be Evangelicals, & am at least persuaded that they who are so from Reason & Feeling, must be happiest & safest.”4 I recognize that Jane's religious experiences must have been far different than mine, but I think in fundamentals of belief we might be much the same.

  Jane's books are Christian in that there is a solid Christian moral foundation throughout her writing, but they are not Christian books per se by todays definition. She didn't have to deal with the evangelical culture I was raised in—the one in which Christian things are separate from other normal (or as the church sometimes describes them, “worldly”) things.

  The Church of England was everywhere in Jane's day, a social norm. Everyone went to church. Everyone believed or feigned belief. Which led to other problems, like rectors who cared more for their incomes than their congregations, and sermons that were perhaps sufficient to entertain or simply endure on a Sunday morning but lacking in spiritual depth. One has only to imagine the torture of being part of Mr. Collins's flock to begin to grasp the weaknesses (evils?) of the church system in Jane's day.

  One thing I know Jane and I would agree on is the ridiculousness that the church can bring out, if not encourage, in people. I believe sometimes that as a group, while trying to be good, we do not exert enough effort toward being normal.

  Austen understood this. Even in her day, faith was sometimes used as a cloak for ridiculous behavior. She didn't spare anyone like this. For her, it seemed nearly as serious as a moral failing.

  There's a lovely spot in the grass by the River Cherwell. If you wander through University Parks heading southeast and continue through a few gates, you will find it. Apparently the Oxford dons used to lay out naked here. Academic dons and nudity don't naturally go together. Today, thankfully, everyone is clothed. It sits in a crook of the small river, so there is water on two sides; there are huge trees and expanses of sun. It's mostly quiet, groups of people talking and solitary people sleeping. A loud crowd of tourists has managed to get a punt stuck in the grass by the bank, and two ten- or eleven-year-old boys have stripped down to their shorts trying to work up the courage to jump in.

  Jack and I sat with our quiet conversation in the midst of the summer commotion. I'd never felt so comfortable, so at home, just sitting and talking.

  “So what do you think you'll do when you finish grad school?” I asked.

  He hesitated a minute. Everything about him was easy—slow and calm. “I'm not really sure,” he said. “I felt called to do this program, and I love it, but I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to do when I'm done. I think it may have something to do with writing.”

  We talked about my writing and his sisters, and he said something about his grandmother calling him William. It was the second time I'd heard him refer to himself as William, and it was like an evil prick in the middle of all this pleasantness. I had to say what I'd been debating.

  “Does…urn, does your family call you William?” I willed out the words.

  “Yeah, how did you know that?”

  “It's just that you were talking about your family a couple times and I thought…you said…‘William.’” I fumbled.

  “Actually, everybody calls me William,” he said. “My real name is Jack William—it's a family name—but everybody calls me William. When I registered for the school here, I gave them my full name, and they started sending me stuff as Jack, and I never corrected them. I'm not sure why. I like it, and I thought it would be kind of fun, and it reminds me of Lewis, I guess. I don't know.”

  “Well the weird thing is”—alarms were going off in my head but it was far too late to stop—“I probably shouldn't tell you this.”

  “No, go ahead,” he said.

  “Well, you kind of remind me—I mean you look a little bit like an old boss I had, and his name was William, and he was sort of, urn, horrible. He lied a lot or most of the time. He was really one of the most horrible people I've ever known. I'm not sure if he knew when he was telling the truth. I ended up confronting him about some things, and he fired me and lied about the whole thing to make it look like it was my fault. It was more complicated than that, and I didn't handle everything as well as I could have, but it was really horrible.”

  “Well then, by all means,” he said in his gentle southern accent, “call me Jack.”

  “IVe dealt with people like that before,” he said. “Actually, there was one situation where I ended up having to confront a guy who was really high up, a guy we were working with—he was a CEO, actually, and the way it happened ended up being in a public forum, but I had to say something because he had to be called on it. I was really worried about it, and I didnt want to come off as arrogant, but it had to be done. Anyway, so Fm not your boss, but Fve confronted him.” And he laughed—not in a mean laughing-at-me way, but in an its-all-really-okay way. His saying that made me relieved. Still a tiny bit creeped-out and skeptical, but relieved.

  We talked about our common perfectionism, which he seems to be a little further along at mastering, and about my trying to accept and really believe Gods grace. He told me about the orphan he loves in South Africa and about how that's when God's grace really broke through for him. A life-changing experience of loving a little girl who didn't want to be loved and didn't deserve love, but Jack loved her anyway, wholeheartedly. At that moment God said to him, “This is how I love you.” And that stuck.

  We talked about how both of us have a hard time relaxing—the perfectionism thing—and Jack said, “You seem perfectly relaxed now.” And I was. And I was insanely, cautiously happy.

  Jane makes me think of my own small meannesses. (How much of our lives are spent being mean to one another in small ways?)

  I met the dashing stranger from the stairs today. The one I imagined to be Frederick Kent—the friend of a friend's friend's fiancé or something crazy like that. And I greeted him with a series of small meannesses under the guise of politeness. I introduced myself, but with that brief look in my eye and turn of my head and little bit of archness that told him I was already closed to him, that he did not entirely measure up.

  I dont know why. Perhaps I was feeling insecure. I probably came across to him as a little arrogant. It was all silly. And to the casual observer it would have seemed just two people meeting each other. But I think he knew I had closed the door on him in that brief period of time.

  As it turns out, our theological bents are quite different, and the vibe just wasn't there. To be honest, I am now consumed elsewhere, so maybe I wanted him to not really be a match.

  A guy friend told me once that he can tell within thirty seconds if he wants to seriously date a girl. I was deeply offended. I mean, is it really all that superficial? The sound of her voice, he said, and the way she looks—his impression after that thirty seconds is never wrong.

  I make those
snap judgments myself but admit often to being wrong (Jack, for example) and actually being pleased to be wrong. I love the surprise of finding incredible potential where first I could see none.

  And today I seemed determined to find no potential at all where first I imagined loads.

  Fickle, fickle woman.

  He is not Frederick anyway.

  So Frederick Kent is still safe out there somewhere, a bastion of smart, orthodox—and in my imagination very good-looking—potential.

  Five

  Alarms (Fire and Otherwise)

  And now I may dismiss my heroine to the sleepless

  couch, which is the true heroine's portion; to a pillow

  strewed with thorns and wet with tears. And lucky

  may she think herself, if she get another good night's

  rest in the course of the next three months.

  — NORTHANGER ABBEY

  At 11:42 p.m., I still couldn't sleep. My room was Spartan, but not in the quaint old-English-hall way I expected, more in an old-1970s-furniture-and-dirty-orangish-brown-carpet way: institutional cream walls, a dirty blue blanket on a bed that upon close inspection looked like someone had at some point been sick on the middle of the box spring and it was never cleaned.

  I've not slept well for so long that I no longer really know how to fall asleep. My exhausted body doesn't actually get sleepy anymore, perhaps because I've had to fight being tired so much to get through the days that my brains reaction to being worn out is to send adrenaline to stem the tide. So I alternately sink into sleep and jerk awake in what feels like panic. But mostly I lie in bed awake, thinking about things, waiting for sleeping pills to kick in.