Gwen Werner

 

 

A phrase I heard a lot when I was a Christian, one that stuck to my skull, was, “find your identity in Christ,” but what I wanted was an identity in anything concrete, something tangible to hang from, something to reckon with.

Toward the beginning of high school, before I got diagnosed with Celiac’s Disease, a doctor said I might be hypoglycemic. They took my blood, but before we got the results back, I had already told everyone I was hypoglycemic. I’d eat spoonfuls of honey and pretend to fall asleep in front of boys and girls I had crushes on.

A few years ago, a friend of mine said, “You’ll always be my first girlfriend,” and I held onto that with both hands. I started calling her my ex and it started to feel true.

When I started dating my husband, I said things to him like, “I have perfect pitch.” I told him that one night when we were first dating and I was drunk and he was driving us to his parents’ house in Southwest Wisconsin. Right before we hit a deer, he said, “Sing me an E.”

And then I said, “I don’t have perfect pitch, I just want you to like me.” Then we hit a deer.

 

 

My parents’ fundamentalist Christian church is a hands-at-your-sides congregation. The chapel isn’t flashy because flashiness isn’t godliness. There was a little uproar from the older folks when a guitar was brought in for worship, even though it wasn’t to be used during the more meditative service. It is a sterile experience, driven by simple faith.

I wanted grit and bile and broken teeth, but Christ was never on our cross.

There is something about Catholicism that I’ve always liked, though. I like the rituals and the relics, the Latin. I like the idea of eating and drinking God. I like that by some spookiness the bread and wine become literal skin and blood. I like the big choral numbers reverberating in high ceilings and the stained glass and the paintings of fat ladies and bearded dudes in skirts.

At bible camp, where I first got saved, I felt like I was acting in a play. It felt good. I was finishing the first act and relishing in the ovation.

 

 

When I got kicked out of bible college the first time, it was for giving a guy a blowjob. He felt as though he had sinned, so he confessed to the administration and the administration included my mom. If I hadn’t fit in with those Kid Christians before, I definitely didn’t afterward.

The next year, when I returned to bible college the second time, the other girls had been warned about me: the trouble-maker, the whore. Eventually I became the whore both on and off campus because finally I was being identified by something true, something I’d done. The repressed Christian girl finding her sexuality is an easy part to play when she’s you.

Later, I’d figure out that my identity could be found in anything I made or did with my two human hands. I could hang from the neck of anything, not just the neck of Christ’s cross.

I moved in with my boyfriend after I’d known him for three months, without really asking him. I brought over my stuff a box at a time and he gave me a drawer so I took two and then half the closet and here we are.

He and I did the kind of adjusting you do when you love someone. The daily changes people make when they want to scream at each other for leaving their shit everywhere, but somehow still find a way to bang a couple times a week. He would work all day and then come home and write for hours while I kicked the back of his chair until I decided to go get drunk at the bars.

He used to tell me to “be sweet” as I’d leave the house, an “I love you” and a “be careful” and a “stay calm” all rolled in one. He was patient and I was an asshole, because that was who I was trying to be at the time, because I sure as hell wasn’t ready to scrub out laundry baskets or settle down.

I was and am notorious for saying things like, “I should get into gardening” or “What if I got really good at upholstering?” and he always says, “Do it.” And I don’t want to give him too much credit, but over the years he’s given me the right amount of space and the right amount of handholding for me to be the kind of person who says yes to the things that make me better and no to the things that don’t.

He showed me what a real writing life looks like. He showed me writers like Amy Hempel and Rick Bass, bands like Polvo and the Drive-by Truckers, art worth holding in the air and spinning around for a while. Then he showed me with all that magnificence how to make room for me.

 

 

After I left the church, I took my mom out to lunch and told her, “I am pursuing earthly and immediate causes. I’m really happy.”

And while she wasn’t altogether satisfied with that answer, still sincerely and kindheartedly concerned for the state of my eternal soul, I settled myself into the idea that this self was the self I’d been crawling toward.

 

 

My esthetician friend talked to me about charismatic Christianity while ripping out my pubic hair last week. She casually asked about my writing, but this particular friend of mine is one of those earnestly interested people, remarkable at asking big questions, accepting any answer no matter how short or stupid, then moving on to the next big idea. She’s one of those offhandedly bared people, the kind of person who will tell you they enjoy Fleetwood Mac and they dream of sorting out the foster care system and they don’t enjoy wearing underwear, all in the same breath.

I told her about my current project. I said the kind of idiot things you say when you’re describing your art or your kid.

She ripped out a section of hair and held it up to show me, laughed. “That was a good one!”

“I guess I don’t really fucking know,” I said, “I’m afraid of some of it. I don’t want to make my mom cry,” I finished.

She laughed again and yanked out more hair, slapped her hand down where the wax had been and held it there. “So, where are you on God?”

We talked for a while and pretended we weren’t both sort of thinking about my vagina. She said, “I’m way off the deep end. You know, I got baptized in the spirit last year and I speak in tongues and all that.”

We talked about her spiritual gifts and they sounded like magic to me. For the first time in years, talking about God didn’t make me wince, because I get it. The invisible god just doesn’t speak to me like the one carved from stone hanging in a great big cathedral or the YouTube videos of people falling on the ground, touched by something mystical, speaking in tongues, the art and performance of the big guy in charge.

 

 

There’s something living and breathing in something created, whether it lasts or not. Words hold history and future. They are holy. And the daily-ness of making them is like taking the sacrament. It’s ritual enough for me. The writers and artists who came before me and all of us who scribble down our shit for all different reasons, choosing this sometimes lonely, slow, and thoughtful life, are my church and congregation and my body of Christ; each of us making art for the sake of art and identifying ourselves for the sake of identity.

I don’t have an “identity in Christ,” but on my best days I have an identity in the only things about religion that ever made sense to me: verse, craft, community. The noise worth worshiping.

 

 

 

 

“Earthly and Immediate Causes” originally appeared in print in I’m Ruining My Own Life by Gwen Werner, a chapbook published by Passenger Side Books. You can get a copy at http://passengersidebooks.blogspot.com

 

 

 

 

Gwen Werner is doing fine, thanks for asking. She shares a bachelor pad with a mutt, a blind kitty, and a toothless kitty. You can find her here, if you give a good goddamn: www.gwenwerner.com.