Ashley Lande. The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever. Bellingham: Lexham Press, 2024. $18.99, 264pp.
We have not come like Eastern kings
With gifts upon the pommel lying.
Our hands are empty, and we came
Because we heard a baby crying.
We have not come like questing knights
With fiery swords and banners flying.
We heard a call and hurried here –
The call was like a baby crying.
But we have come with open hearts
From places where the torch is dying.
We seek a manger and a cross
Because we heard a baby crying.
~ Philip Britts, "Carol of the Seekers"
Years ago a friend of mine told me the story of taking his younger sister and her husband and their newborn baby for a day out in a major global city. The couple were both in their early 20s and it was their first time in the city, so they took it all in with a sense of childlike and wide-eyed astonishment.
What they did not notice were the many people double taking as they walked past at the sight of such an obviously young couple that already had a baby. They didn't notice the lingering looks of strangers because they had no notion of the fact that they would stand out. But they did. So as the day wound down my friend quietly remarked to his sister and brother-in-law that, though they didn't realize it, many of the people who had seen them that day wanted what they had. In a city of seemingly limitless wealth and grandiosity and luxury the most remarkable thing many people saw that day was that baby and the "too young" couple that loved each other and loved that child.
That story, as well as a similar conversation I once had with an elderly woman at the Fox Hill Bruderhof, have marked some portion of my mind. The poem quoted above, from the great Bruderhof poet Philip Britts perhaps explains why: In attending to a baby we are in some sense echoing not only the care and attention humanity has always shown our young at our best, but we are actually mimicking the shepherds and wise man who went in search of a manger and a cross. There is some sense in which the cry of a child is a call to come to Christ.
What happens when that cry is not heard, either due to the simple lack of children or due to the fact that we have created a largely segregated society in which the young are cloistered away from us for such long periods of time? I suspect one answer is what we are seeing now: the sense of wonder provoked in us by a child now must find other objects on which to rest, and other stimulants to provoke it. Perhaps the reenchantment of our moment is itself a cry not so much for what we typically think of as the miraculous or supernatural, but rather for the more banal miracle of life.
These are the thoughts I had as I finished Ashley Lande's moving and surprising conversion memoir The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever. The first half of the book is vivid and at times terrifying, but not necessarily surprising: Lande describes a kind of nominal practice of religion as a child which gave way to adolescent listlessness that leads her toward the new atheists. She stayed with them for about five minutes before recognizing how stultifying materialism was to the imagination and to human experience—and it was not long after that she began experimenting with drugs. It's a rather understandable story, even perhaps a common one through much of human history. It was a 5th century bishop, after all, who observed that we have restless hearts which drive us to search for satiation, satisfaction, rest. The searching Lande describes in the first half of her book is not surprising in this sense. Indeed, it reminded me a great deal of the many conversion stories I have heard from people who stumbled into L'Abri or the Bruderhof after years of desperate, anxious grasping after meaning and, usually to their own shock, found Jesus there.
That is where Lande's book surprised me. I think when most of us read conversion stories involving someone being saved out of a life of rampant drug use and extensive experimenting with psychedelics, including a harrowing evening when she perceived a kind of malevolent spiritual presence in the room with her, we expect the conversion at the end to be similarly dramatic. Someone goes off to Europe to backpack across the mountains and search for meaning and they stumble into Francis Schaeffer. A jaded hippie reads about a group of radical Christian socialists and decides to give it a try. A hurting young woman stumbles across a Christian family, lives with them for a time and through the gifts of radical hospitality and attentiveness finds her way back to faith.
But that isn't really how Lande describes her conversion. It's far more ordinary: She falls in love with a man who was into the same drugs and psychedelic experimentation she was. They are swept up in a whirlwind romance and get married, all the while continuing their drug use. Then she gets pregnant and their life changes in response to that child. Suddenly her husband is interested in visiting a church. Eventually he drags Lande along. And over time Lande's heart begins to open to the Gospel, not through anything we usually describe as "radical" but through the ordinariness of her child's need and the church's care.
I don't want to undersell the miraculous nature of her conversion. Every conversion is a miracle. Every conversion is filled with thrilling stories of unlooked for divine grace. And Lande's story has dramatic moments—a painful experience with pregnancy, a nearly disastrous encounter with airport security, a remarkable encounter with the great hymn "It Is Well." But the thing that lingered with me the most as I read and then thought about her book is the ordinariness of her conversion. She doesn't go to L'Abri. She doesn't join a radical Christian commune. She just falls in love, gets married, has a baby, and starts going to church—and those are the means by which God calls her to himself.
Lande's story is in many ways a vindication of Glen Scrivener's recent comments regarding evangelistic opportunity in our moment. Indeed, you can find all three of his themes—miracles, man, and morals—in Lande's story. The miraculous runs through the entire thing. It is what provokes an intense disdain in her toward the new atheists and the longing for something beyond the material is what drives her drug use for years upon years. The question of what the human person is stands behind that pursuit, of course, and the question of morality announced itself quite loudly in the form of a positive pregnancy test.
When Lande's conversion story is also situated within the larger cultural realities of our moment—collapsing birth rates, growing acceptance of euthanasia, growing acceptance of eugenics, and so on—the expulsive power of a baby crying perhaps begins to make more sense. It was Hauerwas who famously said that if in a hundred years Christians are known for not murdering their unborn or their elderly then we will have done well. It is not at all implausible that we are entering a world in which large families, the presence of disabled individuals, and the presence of the elderly will all be distinctive markers of Christian community. If so, Lande's conversion narrative will not be the last of its kind that we hear.
There is also a challenge here for churches, I think, which is a point Scrivener also made in his video. If churches themselves are not incubators of the humane patterns of life that allow us to welcome children, to welcome the disabled, to welcome the elderly and the infirm, then there is no evangelistic opportunity for us at all because we are no different than the world around us. We have nothing to offer. If our interest is only in the powerful or the wealthy or the successful, then the church has nothing to offer the world. (More importantly, of course, if such a thing is true then the church is engaging in a stark act of disobedience to Our Lord, who condemned such things repeatedly.)
Christianity tells us that human history pivoted on the birth of a baby. It should not come as a surprise, then, that in a world that is so routinely inhumane, so routinely concerned more with efficiency and power and accomplishment than with the needs of the weak, the cry of a child would have a transformative affect. It did for Philip Britts and for Ashley Lande and, indeed, for all who are in Christ.