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  • Witness Tree
  • Cameron Dezen Hammon (bio)

1

Suppose I start with a tree. It's an old tree, tagged with neighborhood graffiti, wide as a linebacker. It's where we met to sing hymns and pray before heading out into the night to find homeless people and sex workers, tell them Jesus died for their sins, and hand them a baggie with a sandwich and a bottle of water. Suppose I tell you that while the others prayed, some in tongues, I had a vision: a boy sat on a fence and dangled his feet.

"We've got to pray for those on the fence," I declared to the group of gathered missionaries, brimming with false confidence. "For those who haven't decided, who aren't certain." The missionaries were a suburban cohort of charismatic Christians who believed that they (we) were sent to save the [End Page 168] neighborhood. I admired their enthusiasm, I aspired to it. But I wasn't comfortable with what we were there to do, had never been comfortable with it. I felt my discomfort was a kind of spiritual failure. I was the only one among us who lived close by, and even as I spoke I wanted to cover my face. Instead, I chided myself, You shouldn't be ashamed of the Gospel.

I could tell you how, after we spread out into the neighborhood armed with Bibles and cheap snacks, we came upon an actual boy sitting on an actual fence. I could tell you that later I bristled but said nothing when the other missionaries referred to the transgender women lined up outside the dance club as "he" instead of "she."

A few years before this I had fallen in love with God, had followed this God from one life into another. That love was a feeling so searing I thought it would never end. It was not my love that ended, but the object of that love. My idea of who or what God is became complicated even further by the night that began at the tree.

I want to tell you about that tree, about its liminal space, the spirit that swirled around it like weather on a mountain. It required nothing, declared nothing. I've had to learn new language for the kind of spirit that requires nothing. I'm still learning it. I know many of the specifics of what we believed were wrong. I was wrong. The idea that what we were doing was helping anyone—this was wrong. But the tree, like a witness to my folly, is still there. Every time I drive past it on my way to the coffee shop or the grocery store, it stands without shame. I duck like a cop in an unmarked car.

2

Liminal means transitional. During the liminal stage of a religious ritual, a baptism, for example, the participant stands at a threshold—between her previous way of structuring and understanding her identity and a new way. Celtic Christians called this a "thin place," a place where heaven and earth meet, however briefly, leaving no one unchanged.

3

My born-again moment coincided with America's. I was born, the first time, a few months before Time magazine declared "The Year of the Evangelical," as Jimmy Carter, the nation's first born-again Christian to win a presidential election, took office. My parents weren't interested in religion. They'd abandoned the strict Catholicism and too-loose Judaism of their respective childhoods, so I was an outsider looking in on bat mitzvahs and confirmations, on Good Friday and Shabbos. I wanted a place of my own.

When I was twenty-five, I first found my way into a church. It was on the Upper East Side, a few blocks from my mother's apartment. It was a place with almost no language at all. I came for the cool, blue silence. I flipped through the hymnals and prayer books on weekday afternoons. I sat in that church and sang quietly to myself, and, alone with God, I was happy.

Just over a year later, in the weeks [End Page 169] leading up to September 11, 2001...

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