The door didn’t actually slam behind me as I slowly wound my way down the metal stairs in the dim light, but it felt like it did. We’d gone in a side entrance to Mammoth Cave in Kentucky and it had a cinderblock structure with a heavy metal door built into it to keep people from accessing the cave without authorization. I’d already been caught off guard at the visitor’s center. The tour description had said we would be bussed from the main entrance to this side one, but I was surprised when not one but three busses showed up to transport the swelling crowd that was evidently all coming with us.
The ceiling of the cave dripped at random catching me off guard with tiny, freezing droplets that spread out in my hair and occasionally rolled down my neck. I couldn’t readily identify with the exclamations of awe and excitement coming from the people around me. The passages were shoulder width at best as we wound down, ever downward. I’d known there would be narrow passages, but this was beyond my expectations. Breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth, I tried to calm my nervous system that was now silently screaming throughout my body. But I was trapped. Not by the cave itself, but by the seventy or eighty people behind me, also slowly making their way down the winding staircases.
I was mentally telling myself that I was safe, they do this tour every day, and so forth when my nine-year old who was walking in front of me starts going, “wow, this is so narrow! This would be a terrible place for someone with claustrophobia!” I tried to ignore his words, when the woman behind me chimed in, “Yeah! This would be a terrible place for someone to have a panic attack.” I suspected her words were about her, but at that moment it felt like the universe was trolling me.
I do have mild claustrophobia that’s exacerbated when I’m surrounded by a lot of people. I avoid elevators, and in the event I can’t avoid the elevator, I will wait for the next one rather than get on one crammed full of people.
I hike mountains by myself, sleep overnight in the woods by myself. Climb up ledges with 30 pounds on my back and bear crawl over gaps in the rock. Well once anyway. And here I am on a commercial cave tour, struggling.
My nine-year-old had been researching caves and how they form and really wanted to get inside of one and see it for himself. So pushing down my own misgivings, I not only booked us a tour, I booked the one rated the second most difficult. It wasn’t really physically difficult, there were just a lot of steps up and down and up and down. For me it was a mental game, even with the paved walkways and lighted passages. I prefer the sky above me and the trees around me. Sleeping on top of a mountain, feeling the earth beneath me and the expanse of the cosmos around me.
We finally got down into the rooms of the cave itself and while these weren’t the massive cathedral style spaces you find beyond the yawning main entrance, the rest of the tour was much easier on my nervous system and once I was interested in what I was seeing, I forgot to worry about the tight spaces.
This experience reminded me of the difficulty of discerning between, as my friend Amanda put it, deciding “what kind of brave to be.” It’s brave to push through and it’s brave to say no. If we never pushed through discomfort or apprehension, we’d rarely try anything new. On the other hand, listening to our instinct and our bodies about when we shouldn’t do something is a vital skill to hone as well. And we can’t always get it right. Sometimes we’ll pull back from something and regret it. Sometimes we’ll push through and regret it.
I wish there was a simpler formula for knowing which kind of brave is the right one for any situation.
For me and my claustrophobia, a guided commercial cave tour was doable. I doubt I’ll ever take on an actual caving class. Exploring tiny passages in the dark with only headlamps doesn’t sound like my kind of fun, type two or otherwise.
What about you? What helps you determine what kind of brave to be?
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“I wish I could still believe in God, but I can’t be a Christian anymore because of ______” Fill-in-the-blank with racism, misogyny, homophobia, toxic capitalism, and so on. I’ve had this conversation with different people almost word-for-word over and over. White American Christianity has so defined God that many people cannot separate God from the toxic theology they were taught.
But this isn’t the God I see in the Bible. The Bible shows us a God meeting people where they are and nudging them towards justice and total thriving for all: shalom. The Bible details arcs of justice and societal reform. If we understand how radical those arcs were in the context of the day, we can extend them forward into the future and figure out how to work for justice, total thriving, and societal reformation in our day.
I grew up in that first world view. Come along, and I’ll tell you the story of how I escaped, and I’ll show you a theology that I believe paints a more accurate picture: a faith for the common good where everyone thrives and no one is left out.
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Anna Elisabeth Howard writes highly caffeinated takes on shalom as a lens for everything from her front porch in Hendersonville, TN where she lives with her husband and two sons. She is a community organizer and movement chaplain with a background in youth and family ministry and is a graduate of Fuller Theological Seminary. An avid hiker and backpacker, many thoughts start somewhere in the middle of the woods, or under a waterfall. She is a regular contributer to Earth & Altar and her latest book is Inward Apocalypse: Uncovering a Faith for the Common Good.
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