To learn something by heart is a concept more familiar with the ancient world than our own, and the student, feeling misunderstood asked again. “What am I to do…when I have difficulty affirming parts of the Creed—like the Virgin Birth”? And she got the same response. “You just say it. Particularly when you have difficulty believing it. You just keep on saying it. It will come to you, eventually.” The student raised her voice, “How can I with integrity affirm a creed in which I do not believe?” The priest replied, “It’s not your creed. It’s our creed.” Meaning the Creed of the entire Christian church. I can picture this priest, shrugging only as the Orthodox can shrug, carrying so lightly the 1000 plus years of their liturgical tradition. “Eventually it may come to you,” he told the student. “For some, it takes longer than others.”

To believe means to give one’s heart. Our culture has done damage to believing and belief by turning it into a wrestling match between our heads and our hearts. We’re told repeatedly, that to be religious means we must suspend our intellect and give in to some left over primitive relic. In reality, you are able to determine what one believes, by watching where their heart leads them. I was fortunate to meet a modern day Joseph in North Carolina—faithful and just with unswerving perseverance.

She was bent over, only a little at first, so that you hardly even noticed her in the hallway, especially with the closing in of the night. Then, she would be gone, though only for her 8-hour shift, at the factory, in the mountains of Western North Carolina. Her mother worked there too, still did, as her mother before her. Sewing. Their hands filled with the blood and perseverance of women who had gone before them. Hands with stick-out veins strong with purpose and what was just…pay the bills, put food on the table, and love God, neighbor and family. I met her one evening when I was the chaplain on-call at Memorial Hospital in Chapel Hill, NC. I was leaning against a corridor wall, just breathing and taking in the silence and sighing and whimpering and sound of medical equipment, the best that money could buy. I caught her out of the corner of my eye as she emerged out of a corner in the corridor, bent over with fatigue and worry. I walked over and said hello, reaching out for something between us. “My daughter is here”, she said. “I know,” I said. “She needs a liver, now”, she said. Then she began scrambling through her purse. Stuff fell out on the floor. Lipstick, comb with teeth missing, Kleenex, pictures of loved ones peering out through yellowed plastic. We both reached down to pick up stuff, reaching for some kind of order between us. And then the crying came, unstoppable. A mother, helpless to mother in her usual, familiar shapes. “I miss doing her laundry. I fixed her favorite breakfast the other morning and it remained in the pan, staring out at me from across the kitchen. Her smell is all around the house. She has so many tubes I can’t cradle her”, and she collapsed into my arms. We cried, refueling for the next go round of talking and listening.