When It's Time to Jump

What do we do when we come to the edge of the faith we've always known?

Background painting—Cliff at Grainval near Fecamp by Claude Monet

I am twenty years old the first time I jump off a cliff. 

It’s the first weekend in August, and my boyfriend and I are staying with his family on Madeline Island—the largest of Lake Superior’s Apostle Islands. 

One particularly lazy afternoon, his siblings decide to scout out a place for cliff jumping. We pile into his family’s minivan and drive to the nearby state park, where we meander down a dirt path to a mid-sized cliff overlooking Lake Superior. 

After climbing over the craggy rocks, we each take turns peering over the edge into the startling blue below. The water is impossibly clear. From this height, I can see every enormous boulder dotting the bottom of the lake.

One by one, his siblings launch themselves off the cliff and into the frigid water below, each of them resurfacing with a yelp. 

When it’s my turn, I stand on the edge for an eternity. I cross my arms over my chest and tuck my hands under my armpits, as if I can preemptively protect my body from the fall.

His siblings call up to me in encouraging tones. They tread the water. They wait. 

Finally, with a rush of adrenaline, I jump. 

I fall for what feels like an eternity. I can’t find my breath, my stomach, my heart. 

Later, I will struggle to articulate how it all happened so suddenly—first, the solid ground beneath my feet.

Then, all at once, nothing but air.

I have journaled, page after page, about church and faith and God over the past few years. 

I have written poems and raged and cried. I have reached out, again and again, to grab hold of something solid and have felt only air. 

Some people have asked me, “Ok, but what is the problem? What is the hold-up? What is the sticking point?” 

I do not know how to tell them what it is to live your whole life with the lights on, and then one day, find yourself groping in the dark for any familiar shape.

I do not know how to tell them what it is to be walking along and suddenly reach a vertigo-inducing drop-off.

I do not know how to explain any of this, so I use the simplest words I can think of: A faith crisis. A dark night of the soul. An edge. A jump. A free-fall.

They respond with words that feel certain, sure, measured. Something about good intentions. Something about church leadership. Something about doctrine.

All of it is true.

All of it makes me feel desperately alone. 

At home, I flip through my journal and re-read the dog-eared, coffee-ringed scribbles from the past few years—page after page of trying to cobble together a consensus. But there is none. No neat answer. No tidy formula. 

Just the same sentences, over and over and over again. I circle the phrase every time I read it.

I feel stuck. 

I feel stuck. 

I feel stuck. 

And then there is the gnawing feeling I have not been able to bury no matter how times I dig the hole and cover it with soil:

I don’t know what, but something is wrong. 

I am reading a picture book to my children. 

It is the same picture book I read to them every winter—the one with the bear and the bird. The one with the wintercake. The one with the long and difficult journey. 

In the story, the bear and the bird search for their friend, following his footprints in the snow, deep into the wintry woods. They travel through tangled thickets and icy streams, dark woods and tall cliffs. 

After all this, the animals come to a precipice. They tumble from the edge, careening down into the icy water below.

“Mama, what does precipice mean?” asks my six-year-old. 

I think of God. I think of church. I think of what it is to leave a place you once belonged. I think of cliff jumping into Lake Superior—of the steep wall, the sheer drop, my heart in my throat.

“It means, the edge of something,” I say. 

Tomorrow, I will admit to my husband that I am ready to know what I know, to listen to my body, to leave the place I thought we’d stay forever. 

But for now, I finish the story. I close the book, white-knuckling the edge of my chair with my free hand, like I’m the one falling. 

Like I’m the one standing on the edge of everything I know—first, the solid ground beneath my feet. 

Then, all at once, nothing but air. 

For months last fall and winter, my stomach hurt. 

It was not an aching pain or a sharp pain, but a deep gnawing. A persistent burning. A nausea. A resistance to any and all food. 

Every day I woke up feeling worse. 

“I don’t feel stressed at all—how strange!” I had told my doctor, who chalked it up to taking Ibuprofen on an empty stomach or something of the like. 

I knew, though, what was happening—the lining of my stomach red and inflamed, worn thin and unable to heal on its own. 

I knew what was happening because this had happened before.

When people say something is eating them alive, sometimes they really mean it. 

There is a gnawing they carry, deep in their gut, even if they cannot name it. 

I feel stuck. I feel stuck. I feel stuck. 

I don’t know what, but something is wrong. 

Two weeks after the book with the wintercake and the precipice, after I tell my husband what we both knew but wouldn’t name, I find myself doing yoga with a handful of other women. 

Before the practice begins, I motion for the instructor to come closer. 

Can you help me? I am saying. 

I show her where I feel constriction. I draw invisible, sweeping lines across my ribs, my mid-back, my shoulders, my neck. 

I can tell she has heard this before. She speaks slowly. 

Consider how women often carry themselves through the world.

Consider how we’ve learned to make ourselves smaller, to curl inwards, to shield our hearts. 

She shows me how to shift my posture, how to expand, how to anchor my shoulder blades down the expanse of my back.

I think of all the times I have sat in the pews of our home church, shoulders hunched, arms crossed over my chest, hands tucked under my armpits. 

I think of all the times I have cried in the car, telling my husband that I feel as though I must leave my heart—my body—outside its walls. 

When the yoga instructor begins class with a series of heart opener poses, I root my shoulders down and back. 

The pose is vulnerable, and I feel laid bare, naked. 

Tears build behind my eyes, and still, I breathe deeply through my ribcage. 

I am remembering what it is to offer my whole heart, again—soft and open—to the world. 

I was twelve the first time my stomach began hurting.

That was the fall I became suddenly and inexplicably ill. Every morning, my day began with ocean waves of nausea and the urgent feeling that I may vomit at any moment. 

I began dropping weight at an alarming rate. I visited the nurse’s office a dozen times every school day, unable to make it through a single class. 

Every morning, I bargained, I begged, I pleaded. I choked down a dozen dry Cheerios, crying huge, gulpy sobs, begging to stay home. 

And every morning, I cried all the way to the door and over the threshold, the latch clicking shut behind me.  

That was the year my mom bought me my first mascara so I would have an incentive to stop crying all morning, every morning. If I cried, my makeup would run. 

I stopped crying. 

That was the year the school counselor made me a sticker chart to bribe me to stop going to the nurse’s office. If I made it through all eight classes, I got a sticker.

I made it through all eight classes. 

I learned many things that year: how to solve for an unknown, how to write a three-paragraph essay, how to apply the order of operations, how to find the area of a triangle. 

I learned all of these things, and then I forgot them. 

But some things I haven’t forgotten.

I have not forgotten how to ignore my body—how to slick on the mascara and swallow my tears. 

I have not forgotten what it is to believe the problem is me—that I am the broken thing.

I have not forgotten the words that quietly knit themselves together underneath my skin: do not, under any circumstances, let yourself know what you know.

Six months ago, I began taking barre classes. At the barre studio, there is an understanding:  If you’re hurting, you can—and should—pivot. 

The instructors remind us of this often because we are women, and we have learned—in so many ways both spoken and unspoken—to push down our pain and keep moving.

Today, the instructor has cued us to complete a series of weighted split squat pulses. 

She weaves in and out of the rows of women, adjusting our form, providing modifications, catching our eyes in the mirror. 

Remember, she says, you can move.

Remember, you are not stuck. 

One Sunday, my husband and I take the girls to a church that is five minutes away from our house.

This church, I am surprised to learn, is known for being a place of rest and healing for people coming from church backgrounds similar to ours.

Guarded and skittish though I may be, I breathe easier here. There are artists. There is liturgy. There are people asking the questions I am asking. And at the center of our time together is the body and the blood of Christ, received together.

When it is our turn to go forward to receive the bread and the cup, my husband and I open our hands, and the priest marks our children’s foreheads tenderly with the sign of the cross, reminding them Jesus loves them.

“I really like that place,” my six-year-old says to me on the way home. “Can we go back?”

My husband reaches for my hand and gives it a squeeze.

“Yeah, Babe,” I say.

“We can go back.”

There is the cliff jumping, certainly. 

That is one kind of jump. And then there is this: 

I am four. My dad arrives home to our white, suburban split-level after a long day at work. The minute I hear the dull moan of the garage door, I race across the kitchen tile in my turn-cuff socks.

Sitting on the top step, I wait for the squeal of the door, the thump of his briefcase against the linoleum, his tired and familiar hello. 

Catch me, catch me, catch me! I say, because he is my whole world.

He opens his arms, and I launch my small body from the steps.

When he catches me, I wrap my arms around his neck and press my face against his button-up shirt.

I do not know, yet, what a precipice is. 

I do not know, yet, what it is to carry my heart in my throat, to feel the terror of a sheer drop, to plunge myself into the void. 

But I do know this: When I jump, there will be arms to catch me.

When I jump, I will not feel afraid. 

I will only feel free.