As part of “Believing,” The New York Times asked several writers to explore a significant moment in their religious or spiritual lives.
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I was on the road to nowhere. On the map, I kept to the blue highways. At night, I slept in a tent. I thought of myself as an apprentice Kerouac. Gone, Ireland. Gone, the strictures of Catholicism. Twenty-one years old, the deepest faith I had was in what might appear around the next corner.
For the first half of the journey — which is almost four decades ago now — I traveled with a friend. Tracey had been raised in a conservative Christian family in Massachusetts and, though only 19, she knew a thing or two about American churches, so we weren’t shy about crossing the threshold.
In the South, we grew to like Sunday mornings. The churches were open even for sinners of a Catholic persuasion. I was a hungry lad, putting miles underneath my wheels. The picnic tables at the backs of the churches were nearly always full. Pan-fried chicken. Brisket. Collard greens. Cornbread. Iced tea. Sweet potato pie.
South Carolina. Georgia. Mississippi. Alabama. The plates filled. The corners turned into other corners.
By the time we reached New Orleans, Tracey was growing tired of the rigors of the road. We bade each other goodbye in the city where the rest of America seemed to fall into the sea.
Now the blue highways were flung open entirely to me, alone.
I hesitated a little outside the Louisiana churches at first. Thibodaux. Houma. Morgan City. A little roadhouse shrine along an Atchafalaya Basin road. These were different worshiping places from those I had grown up in. They were smaller, more intimate, with no baptismal fonts, no Stations of the Cross, no Jesus on the crucifix.
I ventured south and stepped inside a small wooden structure near Cameron on a Wednesday afternoon. The pastor lived out back. I was given a pew to sleep on for an impending storm.
I had the sense that, in these churches, people wanted me to convert, or be saved, but I had no idea what they wanted me to convert into, or to be saved from. The whole idea that my soul should be rescued seemed anachronistic, given that the territory I was cycling through seemed more than enough saving grace for me anyway. I liked the wildness, and my joy was in change. Strangers confided in me. I took their stories and kept going. I was comfortable not knowing where I might be sleeping. I was reading poetry (Wendell Berry, Jim Harrison), not theology. I didn’t want, or need, another home for whatever faith I hadn’t yet shaped.
I went west, into Texas.
At night I began to have a little quarrel with God under the bullet-holed stars. What exactly did I believe in? Who were these people who were opening their doors? What did I mean to them beyond the fact that I was some lost soul? How could I achieve a sense of personal scripture?
I decided that the church of the open road would be my thing.
In the tiny crossroads of Independence, near Brenham, I found a reason to stay for over a month, and I worked on a Southern Baptist-run farm for kids, most of whom were coming out of struggling families or juvenile detention. I wasn’t much beyond a delinquent myself, but Miracle Farm sharpened my questions about God and action and belief and belonging.
On the farm, we built fences, cut the kleingrass, began a wilderness program. I taught for a while in a small on-campus school. I left with a Bible signed by all the staff members and the kids.
The long straight tarmacadam of Texas rolled out in front of me. Turkey vultures circled on the thermals above. My wheels turned. My questions deepened.
Eventually I ended up in a megachurch in Amarillo. Halfway through the service the pastor asked the congregation to close their eyes. “Let every head be bowed,” he said. “If you’re having doubts, or if you feel the spirit moving in you, raise your hand, we will pray for you.”
This was, I knew, more brimstone than potential barbecue, but I raised my hand. After all, nobody could see me. All eyes were supposedly closed. The dilemma of doubt was entirely my own. Then came the first surprise of a backslap. Then another. Soon I was surrounded by churchgoers, almost lifted off my feet, as I was guided toward the front altar, my head spinning, or was it even an altar, what was it called, where was I, hold on, wait, what was happening? A chorus of hallelujahs rang all around.
Startled, I tried to back away, but the pastor was all high hair and holler. He pulled me back, put his thick white arm around me and declared that I had been “washed in the blood of the lamb.”
Not to put too fine a point on it, but this freaked the living bejesus out of me.
Did this mean that I had just been saved? Had I renounced my Catholic history? Was I a Protestant? Had I somehow made a cultural shift and become an evangelical? Did I now have a new — and quite foreign — certainty about God?
I didn’t hang around. No barbecue. No collard greens. I gathered myself and pushed through the crowd. Outside, my bicycle. It had no rearview mirrors. I rode appropriately: like hell.
I hardly slept. I woke in ditches. I harangued the sky. I didn’t take stock until a number of days later when I snapped a number of freewheel-side spokes approaching Raton Pass into the Rocky Mountains. My wheel was ruined. So, where was this supposed God when I needed Him most?
I found myself a bed for the evening, in a railway hostel in a small village where I paid my way by washing dishes. Still my head spun from my megachurch encounter. Had I lost some essential part of myself? Had I been washed in the blood of a scam?
I telephoned a man I had met back in Independence, Texas. Terry Cooper had become a good friend over the course of a month. Half brother, half counselor, he was a solid Christian, but decidedly not a holy roller. He already knew a good part of my spiritual dilemma. He drove 10 hours in my direction and we camped for a couple of days in the woods outside Raton.
“Did you ever hear the story of the woman at the well?” he asked.
I had, but I hadn’t really — not truly, not carefully — and it was there, under a new series of stars, that I began to realize that I wasn’t really on the “road to nowhere” at all. The woman at the well, he told me, leaves behind her jar of water when she discovers something greater to live for.
“You’re a storyteller,” he said. “And you’re a listener. The God you want will be in the people you meet on the road. Not in a building.”
I figured he was right — the God I needed became articulate in the stories that people wanted, and needed, to tell me as I rode through their lives.
Later, Terry drove me, my bike and my broken wheel over the Raton Pass into Colorado. In the town of Trinidad I found a shop called the Bike Doctor. The owners, the McGuire family, invited me to stay for a little while. They would teach me, they said, to build wheels.
Circles within circles. Stories within stories.
Six months later, I crossed the Golden Gate Bridge in California with the understanding that faith begins with the inclination to listen. The world was the story of everyone else. For me, it was only just beginning.
Colum McCann is the author, most recently, of the novel “Twist.”
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