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burden
light?
    And my father says, well, it is and it isn’t true. He knows what I mean; he knows a lot is demanded, that there is a lot you must demand of yourself, if you are to be truly Christian. But with grace this may sometimes
feel
easy. Like a lifting up, he says. But of course it isn’t easy in reality. No. He agrees. It isn’t. I have a point.
    And then he says maybe I should be thinking more about the words
yoke
and
burden—
they’re there too, aren’t they?— and less about the adjectives. Maybe then the passage won’t bother me so much.
    Another time: I arrive—at the age of fourteen—to tell my father that I won’t be taking communion anymore. I’ve listened to the invitation to my first communion, calling on me to give my whole heart to the service of Christ and His kingdom, to serve the Lord and keep His commandments all the days of my life, and it has set me to wondering:
Do
I regret my sins?
    Not enough of them, I know that. I’m aware, actually, that some of them even please me.
    Do I love Jesus Christ? I don’t know. I just don’t know.
    Am I in perfect charity with all men? I am not. And I’m not sorry about it, either. I have been a very
good
littler girl, shy and anxious to please, trapped between two more willful and attractively dynamic siblings. But being good has got me exactly nowhere. Now I’ve set about enjoying my resentments, my hatreds. I cherish them, in fact. I think of myself as a hard case. It is, as I see it, what I have. All I have. To pretend I’m someone I’m not puts that at risk and takes something precious away from me, something even more precious than the comfort I’ve drawn from the sacrament. I tell my father I can’t, in conscience, any longer participate.
    My father has turned from whatever he was doing to listen to me in all my conscientious self-importance. This is his gift, this full, generous, disinterested attention. It is how he approaches everyone. After his death I will read a testimonial from a student of his describing his quiet, careful
listening
in his office hours, and I will recognize this extraordinary generosity. You never knew—never even had a sense of—what he put aside to give himself to your pressing concerns. But he was
there.
When you asked him to be, he was absolutely there.
    Now my father says he’s sorry I feel this way but he honors my decision. He says it’s all right. I don’t need to take communion right now. I should do what I think is right.
    Instantly I feel a kind of retroactive rage.
It’s all right?
“But why did you make us go to Sunday school and confirmation classes and stuff if it doesn’t matter?” So much of my precious little life, wasted.
    He says it’s not at all that it doesn’t matter, just that I should make up my own mind. He says that what he and my mother have wanted for all of us by giving us religious training is for the path to faith to be familiar to us. Later, he says, if my thinking changes—as he hopes it will—I’ll know how to find my way back to believing, and to the church too.
    I won’t,
I want to say. But then I’m aware again of that part of me that yearns for faith—and for my family, which seems so embedded in it. I stand there silent for a while—he waits—and then I ask my father whether he had a “call.” I’ve read about calls; I certainly know the story of Paul. I have very much wanted a call myself, a sign from God that this is His world, that He wishes to claim me. It is in some measure feeling that no such thing is possible that has turned me away from whatever
believing
might otherwise have been for me now.
    No, my father says, there was not a moment as such for him. It was far more gradual, far more the result of following steadily where his beliefs and feeling led him. And then he makes an analogy I have never forgotten. He compares faith to falling in love; and, more, he says that for him the experience of both was as though he’d entered a room