I offered this confession as part of my confirmation into the Mennonite Church of Haarlem. While I recognize a few details that make me chuckle or cringe, much of what I believe today is reflected in the words below. At the time, I believed this church was the most at-home I would ever be able to feel at church. After I moved away to Amsterdam, and after years of being a spiritual nomad, I discovered All Saints.

When I told the warden a while ago that I was planning to enter into this community he said: “oh that’s great, you should definitely do that! Keep your confession short, though. Mine was 500 words.” That brevity doesn’t seem so crazy. After all, what should one say, out loud at church, to God, one’s future brothers and sisters, ministers, friends, and family members to explain why one would call oneself a Christian?

I think a confession is a matter to be lived out. After all, what’s thinking without doing? Or, as Dutch philosopher René Gude put it: “the crux is that you’re a Christian not if you know to confess it extensively with your big mouth, but if it makes you a funner person.” I ask for your forgiveness: this confession is incomplete.

Anyway.

I’m doing this confirmation today with by my side my favorite story from the Book of Books: that of the Fall of Man. Before I tell you why original sin is such an important concept to me, you should know I take the Bible too seriously to take it literally. I’m not concerned with whether what’s in the Bible really happened. More important to me is the thought that it happens over and over again. Through time and space.

The story of Adam and Eve stole my heart. That naked man and woman hearing the very first law, breaking it without much contemplation, and — pardon my French — ruining the whole damn thing for the rest of us. Because they ate from the fruit, we people know the difference between good and evil. If you ask me and I answer honestly, I’ll tell you knowledge of good and evil is worse than evil itself.

One of the most fundamental questions we can ask ourselves and each other is why evil exists at all. Why war? Why do sweet people die young? Why are people brought to doubt their humanity? Why did Eve pick the naughty option? Why did that snake have to be there at all? How powerful is evil, anyway? And if evil is there, does God control it? I thought God was good?

The beginning of Genesis raises so many questions for me. Now that I’m studying Theology in university, I think about the story, and my program offers myriad tools to make sense of what happens in the book. But that, explaining God with logic until you think you know everything, is not what faith is about.

When I read about the Fall of Man and ask myself and God dozens of questions, I return over and over again to the most comforting thought I’ve ever had: I don’t get it, but I’m sure God does. There are really no words to talk about this story. And it’s a pure mystery, the experience it offers me. I can’t think about it properly, and I can’t really do anything with it. I can only be with it.

That is where I encounter holiness.

Today, I connect myself with God. To mine, to yours, the God of the Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and all those people who don’t call God God but experience God anyway. To the One, the Eternal, the Everywhere-and-Always. To the God who enables us to find inspiration in the beautiful story of Jesus. The God who was, is, and becomes. Thanks to God I want to be in this community, together with you.

Because I know myself to be an adult here, letting myself be baptized as such. Because I can dwell and doubt here, forever, about the relationship between thinking, doing, and being. Because human eyes are looking at me here. Because I get to love the Bible here, but also give it a run for its money. Because, here, I get to think about what it means to practice Christian faith, and then do something about it. Because this place keeps showing me how easy it is to be a solid 21st-century church. And because, lastly, this place allows me to believe that the question mark is more important than the full stop.