Rachel Held Evans: A (little bit of a) personal tribute.
So I already did this on Twitter, but I’d like to take a moment (in my relatively unknown little corner of Tumblr) to acknowledge the passing of a woman whose example and writings have been very precious to me.
Rachel Held Evans was a woman who was brave, compassionate, funny, outspoken about theological injustice, and most of all open with the ups and downs of living as a Christian. She was a devout Christian who supported women’s ordination, affirmed LGBTQ+ rights, resisted racial biases, believed in evolution, denied Hell and divine violence, and welcomed the wisdom of other religions.
To make a very long story short, I grew up a fundamentalist Christian like Rachel, and I recently went through a really difficult emotional and intellectual stage in life. I won’t go into detail, but I came very close to losing both my mind and my religion. My saving grace during that time was stumbling onto the writings of Rachel Held Evans and others like her (I’ll talk more about them in later posts, perhaps), who demonstrated the importance of empathy and vulnerability over rock-solid certainty. Long before I began to be clued in to my own bisexuality, authors like Rachel Held Evans helped me start reworking my religious convictions about sexuality. When I began, fearfully, to acknowledge that I had doubts, Rachel Held Evans showed me how doubt is integral to living as a religious person.
Okay, I’ll quit with the personal rambling. The point is, Rachel Held Evans was someone whom I sort of looked up to as a kind of model of how to exist as a Christian in the 21st century without being a bigoted (and self-hating) monster.
And now . . . she is dead. I didn’t know her personally, of course, and I’d have liked to. But I don’t think you have to personally know someone to genuinely admire them and miss them when they’re gone. (And she died so suddenly . . .)
Farewell, eshet chayil (valorous lady). May the stars shine on your face.
