The following is an excerpt from “No Matter Where I Go”, an essay from Cherie Nelson Senie‘s debut collection, God Stars. A writer, editor, and educator from Kansas, she earned her MFA in Creative Writing and MA in Literature from Colorado State University. A former editor of Ruminate Magazine, her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Florida Review, EcoTheo Review, and other publications. She lives in Colorado with her partner.
God Stars is a debut essay collection exploring faith, doubt, and the uncertainty of leaving long-held beliefs behind. As the death of a close friend, complicated relationships, and the expectations placed on women within patriarchal religion challenge her faith, Nelson Senie begins questioning the sources of stability she once relied on. Through formally inventive and deeply personal essays, she examines what it means to redefine belief, embrace uncertainty, and build a new understanding of faith. It is available now from Orison Books.
No Matter Where I Go
It’s a cold February morning. You and I are dancing around the linoleum kitchen floor to a gospel album. It’s the one that I used to dance to with my younger sibling Ash in the middle of our childhood living room, our raucous steps jostling the boombox, creating cobwebbed scratches over the CD’s metallic back. You and I are laughing, flailing our limbs, sliding around in our socks as the worship leader loudly sings out I am not forgotten, God knows my name! This dance is an act of faith I have in you, you who don’t know what it’s like to wrap your life in a God like I have.
It feels fun sometimes to remember this part of myself, a door to a version of a life I once loved that now feels all but closed. I haven’t been to a church in months, haven’t listened to this kind of music in almost as long. I remembered the album just this morning, the green and yellow cover, something I’d put away deep inside myself. The remembering is usually painful, has been painful for a long time—my shifting away from the little girl who sang songs about a God who loved her, a God who was like a father, who could be trusted to stay. The young adult who wanted nothing but to be with this God, feel close.
The upbeat song with heavy percussion fades into a slower ballad. We’ve moved from kicking our legs outward, shimmying on the kitchen floor, to slow dancing. My face is pressed into your chest, soft blue flannel. The warm of being close to you and the familiarity of the words rush over me and I can’t help it. I start singing out like that girl again, remembering perfectly the harmonies I used to sing over the top of this song beside my father, my mother up on stage playing the church’s piano. He knows my name. He knows my every thought. He’ll never leave me, no matter where I go, I sing, and a lump grows in my throat. I’m embarrassed that my eyes start to tear, wet your shirt.
It comes at me as a wave—a desperation around this feeling of loss, like it will never truly leave me. I want to tell you that it feels like I’ve died and am also aware of being dead, separated. It’s like being abandoned by a parent and then wondering if there was never a parent there to begin with. I want to tell you that God left me and now I don’t think he’s there after all. That this doesn’t relieve the pressure of the loss, only compounds it.
I often think of the story they told me in Sunday school, the one where Jesus is on the cross and calls out to his heavenly father “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The teacher standing in front of our classroom tables says, “No one else can imagine what it must have been like to feel God, your own father, leave you in the time of your greatest need.” We were taught that this was only a moment of anguish, that Jesus knew that God needed to turn away from him for a brief time so that he could create a path of salvation. But up on that cross, in that moment, no one else has ever experienced greater loneliness or isolation.
As a child, teenager, young adult, I would’ve agreed, empathized with poor Jesus who wants his father and a glass of water but receives only vinegar instead. But I see things differently now. I am no Jesus, but sometimes I wish the story was different than how they tell it. I wish that he was up there, dying, feeling God leave him and in the next moment it was suddenly gone: the belief he has in the divine. He cries, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” because he is dying and he can’t believe in God or in a redemptive plan for all humanity and he doesn’t know why all this has happened.
You notice that I’m crying when I pull away from you to stop the music, but don’t say anything just now. I’m desperately lonely but am growing to trust your ability to learn me, to study this grief.
Half an hour later, we’re eating lunch on the floor, sitting across from one another at the living room coffee table, when you ask me how I’m doing. This is your way of telling me “I see your sadness.” I respond as I do lately, “I’m okay, just okay.” You invite me to open myself up again, just like I did in the kitchen when I told you about the gospel album, when I danced around in my wool socks on the linoleum, when I sang the words He’ll never leave me, no matter where I go into your sturdy blue.
I feel the tears start again from where they feel eternally pooled in the back of my throat: a perpetual spring of this loss I will never be over grieving. I tell you I just miss the feeling of believing that what I sang was true. You scoot over next to me and tell me that you couldn’t possibly understand—something that I, even still, wish the crucified Lord, mouth crusted in vinegar, blood running from his temple, would reach down and say to me instead.