Luckily, a bird has never crapped on my head.

There are times when I’m walking and I catch the sight of a flying bird, its wings akimbo and soaring more like a kite than a sentient being. I get that feeling of wonder—the kind of cheesy awe that will probably make me a “birder” in my twilight years. That is, I’m in awe until it flies directly over my head.

At this point, I crane my neck slightly, bracing myself for something. I stare up at the bird and I get scared that the mere act of looking at it will make its colon relax and unload into my brown hair. I convince myself that this is because I’m staring directly at it, daring it through animal ESP to just try and take a dump on me. I look away when I think about this too much, telling myself that since I’ve stopped challenging its authority over me, it’ll choose a more deserving, defiant target. My last thought before regaining my logical faculties and letting the silly matter drop is: what if it picks me because I’ve stopped staring?

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What kind of Christian am I if it’s these kinds of foreboding happenings that lead me to metaphors of why I still have faith in God?

Let me revise and edit that down to my real question: What kind of Christian am I?

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When I was younger, I attended Christian school and a nondenominational Evangelical church pretty much every week, New England weather permitting. I played tag with the other kids, running in circles around the white wooden sign in front of the church, always trying and failing to use it as a hiding place from my pursuers. I prayed before falling asleep. Most nights, I fell asleep before finishing. One time, minutes before the bus arrived in the morning, I couldn’t find my belt. I threw things, muttered things, starting sweating, then finally, let my knees fall to the blue carpet—Dear God, please, please let me find it. And when I opened my eyes, there it was.

Then I went to college, and I stopped going to church.

I realize what this sounds like: I grew up and sloughed off the mythology of my youth. I got educated. I learned that staring at birds doesn’t make them shit on you, and that even if you want the world to be that kind of connected—a metaphysical kinesthesia of inter-species communication—it doesn’t work like that.

I may have ditched the Americanized traditions I grew up with, but in spite of my logic-honing, I didn’t slough off its essence, nor did I turn my faith into some abstract ponderance. In fact, I pursue it with more vigor than I ever did during those days of hiding behind crosses and praying for belts.

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I am a man at odds with his label. I want to distance myself from most Christians with a media presence, and many historical figures who applied the moniker for their own self-justified gains. But not all of them. No—some of those labels, when you read the ingredients, don’t match the negative stigma. Unfortunately, too many people don’t read the ingredients seriously. If they did, the chemically-altered food-stuffs that weigh down our grocery chain shelves would be gone, and the deceptive term “Natural Flavors” would’ve been publicly flogged years ago.

This whole “who am I/where do I belong” exercise has been fine for the last decade. I can wax theoretical with my peers, and at the end of the day, I know that it is only my own unresolved struggles that sleep in my head.

But, my wife is due to give birth at some point this month, and suddenly theories about where I am spiritually no longer cut it.

In one sense, I don’t want to share this struggle with my children, because it’s turned me into an insomniac. But the alternative of going back to the church habits of my youth doesn’t seem any better, despite the many people I’ve met over the years that say that when they have kids, they’ll start going to church, even if they’ve never been themselves, because “it seems like the right thing to do.” Is it wrong that I want to skip the “black-and-white” training period with my kids, and jump right into the grey abyss? I don’t want them to have to go through the phase of seeing God as a vending machine, where good deeds are shiny quarters turned answered prayers. Instead, I want them to know, right from the beginning, the humanistic manifesto of Christ’s words: “Greater love has no man, that he would lay down his life for his friend.”

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Does faith need a label in order to be transmitted? Does it need a wooden sign out front that spells out—Yes, we are Christians!? If I was to put up my own sign, I suppose it would say “Christian Humanist,” because it combines the two most beautiful and elucidating parts of living: Christ and humanity—that the self is the only lens for viewing the world, but that the world is far bigger than that two-eyed view. I know that there is a veritable history behind Christian Humanism, but I apply it simply because of this gorgeous combination of Earth & Something Else, that we are alone, but we don’t have to live alone—that there is a community beyond friends and family that can say “we know” before I’ve said a word about what ails me.

I know God didn’t move that belt in front of my eyes. I was probably so frazzled that “praying” calmed me down long enough to regain my focus. And I know that birds don’t have volition beyond biology. But still, I get faith. There is a hazy mist that often feels like it emanates from my sternum, but that I wasn’t the one that created it. It is not the drowsy drug of a desire for an afterlife, or a great Cosmic righting of wrongs. It is a soaring intuition that makes my armpits sweat and my heart move like it wants to escape the hiding place of my ribcage. It’s what happens when I read Albert Goldbarth, and I don’t really get it, but, holy shit, I get it.

But, it’s also not that. Sometimes, it’s just the ability to keep staring at that kite-like bird, and not back away in fear of what I can’t know, and then that bird becomes a winged pastor, and I say “Great word” on the way out the door, and think, “I should bring my family here.”

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IMAGES: Title photo is a collage by the author, involving images c/o Natalie Parys and Vectorilla.com. “