To Drink from the Silver Cup:
From Faith through Exile and Beyond

Anna Redsand

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About the Book

Anna Redsand was sixteen when she heard her mother say of two women at the mission, “They're living in sin. They should see a doctor.” She knew instantly she would have to leave the security and intimacy of family, church, and home—the only world she had ever known. And as that world faded, so too did everything that had been religious or spiritual inside her. The journey was to find it—or replace it. Was there a place that could accept Anna as both a person and a Christian committed to social justice?

To Drink From the Silver Cup is the story of Anna Redsand’s quest. It took her from a missionary life on the native reservations of the Southwest into the shame and exile of being unwanted in her homeland through uncharted territory of new religious, spiritual, and political directions. Always striving for authenticity, continuing to long for home, forty years after taking leave, Anna embarked on a deliberate experiment to see if return was possible—or whether too much had changed in her and too little in the church.

In the past, most memoirs about the conflicts between fundamentalist Christianity and sexuality have been written by gay men—and few, if any, have come to the same resolution that To Drink From the Silver Cup does. It is a unique and memorable story with a resonance for both seekers and those who have never challenged held beliefs.


Preview

Prologue: Leaving

I left before the church could excommunicate me. It wasn’t because I wanted to leave. I went quietly out the back door. I wanted almost more than anything to stay there in the security of all that I knew, there in the place where I’d belonged ever since before I could remember.

A Sunday afternoon in early autumn—I was sixteen years old—when I started to sense that I would have to leave. My mother, father, and I were rolling back into Gallup in the mission station wagon. My brothers had all stayed home that afternoon. As we rounded the corner onto Second Street, I saw the railroad arms descending. Red lights flashed, and bells clanged, and I brought the car to a stop.

My mother started talking about two women who worked at Rehoboth, the hub of our mission in the Navajo Nation. Jennie was a blonde, blue-eyed nurse. Alice was a stocky, slightly older Navajo woman who ran the laundry. “We’re worried about Jennie,” my mother told my father, “because she’s been staying with Alice at night.”

“What’s wrong with that?” I asked, but already I was afraid.
My mother raised her voice and pushed her words out on heavy air. “They’re living in sin. They should see a doctor.”

I might have laughed at that odd juxtaposition, except that her two sentences gripped my belly in a pair of cold claws. My mother was a large woman, always worrying about her weight. At that moment, she became vast, filling the car and the space around it. My father seemed to have gone somewhere else, and I shrank to nothing but my grip squeezing the steering wheel.

I fastened my eyes on the freight cars that rumbled by. Baltimore and Ohio. Orange. Brown water marks. Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe. Rust-red. Grimy white words. My mind grasped at inconsequential facts: “No train ever stopped in Santa Fe.” “The Santa Fe stop is in one-horse Lamy.”

My mother might have gone on talking or not. I heard nothing but the railroad crossing’s bells going off inside my head.

At last I pulled into our gravel driveway. All I could think of was getting to my bedroom and destroying the piece of me that lay in a flat, powder blue cardboard box. Those twelve letters from Grace Vander Laan. Grace had discovered onionskin paper and cartridge fountain pens that summer. When I opened the box, I held the sheets of sheer, crinkly paper in my shaking hands. For one last time, I read her stories about being a mission volunteer in Los Angeles. “I’m nut-brown,” she wrote, “from passing out gospel tracts in the poorest neighborhoods and lying out on the beach in between.”

Then came what I needed to destroy: “Remember being on the bus on the way back from Toadlena? Holding hands, my head on your shoulder? Do you think Charlie is right, that you’re my male substitute? I don’t think so. I just love you for who you are, and I will always.” My body summoned other moments of my junior year—holding hands with her in Reformed Doctrine class, pressing tight and close to each other during chapel, deciding whether to kiss on the mouth—a first kiss—during a pause while we practiced for our brass ensemble.

Grace and I never really talked about us. We just did stuff. But when we were on a school field trip, we shared a room with two other girls. Grace and I shared a bed. My legs and arms entwined with hers, I tried to breathe quietly, but my body wanted to pant and moan. Then Grace whispered, warm and moist in my ear, “This is wrong.” I felt as if she’d blown ice water into my stomach.

I whispered back, “No, it’s not. We’re just friends who love each other a lot.” But I was afraid. Was it because I might be sinning, or was I afraid of losing Grace, afraid she would want to stop because she thought it was wrong? We held onto each other tightly after that, waiting for sleep and whatever else might come.

While I reread Grace’s letters, my insides trembled. I remembered us finally pressing each other’s lips through the dusty window screen of my dorm room. We hadn’t kissed in that pause during ensemble practice, but Grace wouldn’t leave it unfinished. I was almost asleep that night when she scratched at the window. I was afraid Mr. Haverdink, the houseparent, would come by any minute and shine his flashlight under the door and up the walls. If he suspected anything other than sleep was happening, he would barge in. Still, we had our first lip-to-lip kiss.

All the time I reread Grace’s letters, I was nervous. At any moment, my mother might thrust open the bedroom door and tell me to set the table. If she did, I knew her telescopic eyes would read everything on those fragile pages. Before she could, I stuffed the letters back into the box and went into the kitchen to get matches.

“I want you to set the table,” she said.

“I need to take some trash down. Can I do that first?”

“Okay, but hurry up. Mr. Vander Laan is coming for supper. He’ll want to practice with you before we eat.”

I’d forgotten that Grace’s father would be playing the piano for hymn singing at the Twin Lakes Chapter House. He would also accompany me on my trombone solo. I took the letters and rushed down the steps to the rusty backyard burn barrel. I lifted the lid off the blue box and carefully laid the onionskin envelopes on the bed of cold ashes. I lit a match and watched Grace’s words of lasting love and banal mission activities turn into thin black flakes.

*   *   *

Roly-poly, jolly Mr. Vander Laan arrived, and my mother shooed my brothers outside so we wouldn’t be disturbed. Grace’s dad sat at the piano. He asked what I was going to play.

“ ‘The Holy City,’ ” I said. I didn’t know how I was going to get my body to stop shaking so I could blow air into the horn and move the slide. At the same time, I sensed that this horrible quivering vibrated only inside me, that no one could see it. All my thoughts went into each movement I had to make: “Unpack the trombone.” “Mr. Vander Laan is playing those ripples.” “Attach the slide to the bell.” “Mom hates flashy, ripply playing.” “Warm up the mouthpiece.”

Everything happened in slow motion, but at last, my horn was put together and I lifted it to my lips. At the second verse, Mr. Vander Laan said, “Let’s draw out these phrases. Never play two verses exactly the same way. Otherwise, why play more than one?” He grinned up at me and winked. I nodded and mechanically did what he said.

When we were done, I put the trombone back in its case and left my father and Mr. Vander Laan talking in the living room. I could hear them from a few feet away where I brushed my hair with my bedroom door open. Dad went on and on about expanding his mission beyond the little gray stucco chapel at Tohlakai.

I’d only been half listening until Grace’s dad said to mine, “Say, did you hear about those two teachers at the Christian school in Denver?”

“No, I don’t think so. What?”

“They were roommates. Then at the end of the school year, one of them came to the minister—Huizenga I think it is—and told him that she felt she was a man in a woman’s body.”

“What?” My dad said. “What?” and for the second time that day, my stomach whirled. I held my hairbrush in midair.

“Ja. It happens, you know. I guess. They have surgery for it. Huizenga helped her. Him. I don’t know what to say. Him, I guess. Huizenga loaned him men’s clothes, and he had the surgery. So he came to school the next year a man. They say the kids didn’t have any trouble with it. Probably more the adults.”

“That can’t be . . . . ”

“Wait. There’s more. He. She. He was in love with the woman teacher who was her, his roommate.”

“That’s not right. The Bible . . . Romans 1 says, ‘God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women burned in their lust one toward another.’ Verse 26. It’s not right. Plain as day.”

I held my breath and hoped my mother wouldn’t call me back to the kitchen. I needed to hear this. I didn’t want to hear it.

“But that’s just it. It wasn’t two women anymore. I think it took a lot of guts for Huizenga to help him. Them. But you know what it made me think of? Those girls’ parents. How did they react? How would you and I feel if that happened with one of our kids?”

Everything had gone still around me, like I was enclosed in a soundproof bubble so I couldn’t hear my dad’s response. Stillness around me, but my mind churning out one thought after another. “Does Grace’s dad know something about us? Why else would he ask about those girls’ parents? Is that what I am? A man in a woman’s body?” I looked down at my well-developed breasts, my slim waist and flat belly, curving hips. “I don’t think so. But I loved Grace. Grace is gone to college now. And I loved to touch and kiss her. Who am I?”

My mother called the boys in to wash up. I could barely choke down half a baloney sandwich and some lime Jell-O with pears. I tried to swallow my rising fear with the sandwich. Potato chips were a rare treat, but I didn’t want any. No one noticed—one of the good things about sitting at the table with seven younger brothers and company besides.

*   *   *

At Twin Lakes, I played for the singing and then performed “The Holy City” the way Mr. Vander Laan wanted me to. The song is a joyful paean of children and angels singing loud and sweet hosannas—for the most part. The second verse, the flashback or forward, depending on how you hear it, takes you to the dark hour of the crucifixion. That’s the one Grace’s dad wanted me to play like a quiet dirge. I was always good at imagining that horrible, gracious hour when Jesus hung on the cross to save me from my sins. I could take the idea and let it fill my chest with gratitude and sorrow. There and then, I let it fill my horn.

My dad started up a black and white movie about the life of the Apostle Paul. With my part in the service over, thoughts came rushing back. “Alice and Jennie are living in sin.” “Was what Grace and I did together a sin?” “She said it was wrong.” “But I loved her.”

In the movie, I heard a man who sounded like he was in an echo chamber. He cried, “Come over into Macedonia and help us.” It was Paul’s call to his next mission.

That was one of my father’s favorite verses, the call to preach the gospel. Any words about God’s call could set him on fire. My father loved being a missionary. I loved those words too. I had been sure that one day, I would hear God call me to serve. That evening, my hope for a call was gone. I got up, glad that I didn’t have to cross the light of the projector. Anyone who noticed me leave would think I was on my way to the outhouse.

A corral stood close to the chapter house, and I walked around it, listening to the tinkling of sheep bells, smelling the pungent manure soaked in goat and sheep urine. I held onto myself with both arms as I walked, head down. It was chilly after the sun went down. I held on for warmth, but also to keep from losing the only life I knew.

Chapter 6:
Inheritance

Even though I was a girl and would eventually have seven younger brothers, I was my father’s heir apparent. My father’s name was Richard, and he went by Rich. His parents hadn’t had the inclination, or perhaps the time, with eleven other children to give him a middle name. He gave himself a middle initial. “P for Poor,” he’d say. “No one should think because my name is Rich that I’m actually rich.”

He’d laugh, his cheeks scrunched up to his slightly naughty eyes. Then he’d correct himself right away. “I’m rich in children. My quiver is full of arrows.” He’d laugh again. I was the first arrow he planned to shoot forth. He planned and hoped and groomed me to become a Bible woman. He planned that for my inheritance, although I would not be aware of his goal for me until after I’d left home.

Early in 1952, before I turned four, my parents, Dickie, Trudy, and I boarded the train from Grand Rapids to the mission field in New Mexico. As the cars rumbled forward, my father gave me a stack of brightly colored, glossy papers folded like small books. “You go around our train car and ask people if they’d like one.”

“What are they?”

“They’re gospel tracts. They tell people about Jesus and how to be saved. People are just sitting looking out the windows. They have a lot of time for reading right now.”

I took them without hesitation, filled with importance. I headed down the aisle and stopped at each seat: “Would you like a gospel tract?”

“What’s a gospel tract?” a middle-aged man asked.

“It tells you about Jesus. Are you saved?”

The man stared at me.

“Do you know you have to believe that Jesus died to save you from your sins? You have to believe that to be saved.”

“I don’t have time for reading,” he said gruffly.

“Daddy says that we have a lot of time on the train. You don’t want one?”

He took one, no doubt in self-defense. Other people took them because they thought it was cute, this little girl acting the part of a missionary. Some refused.

One woman said when I asked the question, “Yes, I’m saved. It’s wonderful that you’re doing the Lord’s work at such a young age.”

I raced back to Dad, out of breath, and said, pointing, “That lady over there, she’s a believer.” My father and the woman smiled and nodded at each other.

Already, I knew how to divide up the world.

I’ve always believed that the CRC did not place a lot of emphasis on hellfire and damnation. Nevertheless, as I passed out tracts and talked with the passengers, I knew for certain that they would go to hell if they didn’t accept Jesus as their savior. The hereafter was more important than how we lived our lives on Earth. Images of what hell would be like were seared upon my retina and my skin. I saw unsaved people—men, women, and children—immersed in a lake of fire. They burned and thirsted in constant pain for all eternity. Even at that tender age, I had some concept of eternity as something that would go on and on and never stop. I didn’t believe I was destined for such everlasting torture, but I vividly imagined what being cast into that lake would be like. In moments of self-doubt, my imagination terrified me. And it gave me a passion to let everyone within my reach know that salvation was a prayer away, if they only believed.

*   *   *

In Shiprock, our home stood on the top of a hill covered by large, round river rocks. Not far from the imposing two-story house stood a white canvas tent, its walls reinforced with wood scraps from ammunition boxes. Rudy and Bobby Yellowhair lived in that tent with their mother year-round. In Shiprock, the average temperature ranges from fifteen to ninety-four degrees Fahrenheit.

Bobby and Rudy became my first playmates in the Navajo Nation. Every day, we built miniature Diné home sites in the shadow of our clapboard garage, like the ones I would later build with Ilene Begay. Bobby and Rudy were the ones who taught me this game. We chattered companionably, speaking for our imaginary families in Dummitawry English, the creole I’d picked up with ease. When Rudy and Bobby shifted to the Diné language, I stumbled on in our accented English with its modified syntax. Sometimes I recited the Apostles Creed in Navajo under my breath because it had lots of sentences and made it sound like I was speaking the language I needed.

Without my father’s recollection, that’s all I would remember—the coziness, our games, and the mild subterfuge that enabled me to belong. Years later, my father continued to tell a different, though not contradictory, story. At first, he told it with pride. Later he would tell it to try to win me back.

As he told it, “One day, when you were playing with the Yellowhair boys, you ran to me. You said, ‘Daddy, I told Bobby and Rudy about Jesus dying for their sins. They believe! Can you baptize them?’ I had to explain that I was a lay missionary and that I couldn’t baptize anyone.”

My dad always ended his tale by saying, “At such a young age, you put me to shame with your simple faith and your courage to witness for Jesus to your friends.” It didn’t seem to count with him that every day, he went with his interpreter to people’s hogans to preach the gospel, and he taught Sunday school and religious instruction in the surrounding BIA schools several times a week. Somehow, that wasn’t enough.

“You set me an example,” he would add. For years, his telling of this story could fill my chest with the warmth of his pride in me.

*   *   *

During meals my father asked me and often the rest of the kids too questions about the Bible. I knew he cared about what we thought. He might ask, “What do you think Jesus meant when he said, ‘Unless you become as a little child, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven?’ ” Or, “What does it mean to not put new wine into old wineskins?”

One time, Dad and I had a conversation about a letter from Grandpa, his father. It was about one of Grandpa Kruis’s cherished beliefs. Grandpa had been born within days after his family got off the boat from the Netherlands. Here in the U.S., he was raised in the cheerless Calvinist sect known as the Nederduitsers. No musical instruments, no stained glass windows, no imagery of any kind.

Dad started out with, “Grandpa says that it’s wrong to have a cross hanging in church.

“What do you think?”

I could’ve given the quick and easy, the flippant response: “Grandpa thinks it’s wrong to have a chair in church. He thinks it’s wrong to be happy.” But no, I was quite willing to work out a long answer. “He says so because of the second commandment. ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth.’ Grandpa thinks the cross is a graven image.”

I paused to think through my dissection, and then went on. “God told Moses to raise the brass serpent when the Israelites were being bitten by snakes in the wilderness. If they looked at the brass serpent, they didn’t die from the bites, right?”
My father nodded. “Go on.”

I gained momentum. “The brass serpent stood for Jesus on the cross.” This idea was not mine; I had been taught it and had seen pictures of the brass reptile on a cross-shaped pole. People on the ground were surrounded by snakes and gazed piteously up at the brass one.

My father nodded again.

Certain that I was on a praiseworthy track, I proceeded. “Since God told Moses to make the brass serpent, it couldn’t have been wrong, even though it was a graven image. I think it’s the same with the cross. It’s a symbol of Jesus dying to save us from our sins. It’s just there in the church to remind us of that.”

My father smiled, and I went on. “The point of the commandment about graven images is that we mustn’t worship things we make with our hands. It would be wrong to worship the cross.” Here I could have earned a few more points by adding, “Like the Catholics do.”

“But it’s all right if the cross is just a reminder to be thankful for what Jesus did for us.” I was finished. My father nodded again, and my inner glow mirrored the one on his face.

By the time I was twelve, my father considered me ready to put my knowledge and faith to good use. He gave me my own Sunday school class to teach. By then, he was serving the mission at Tohlakai, which was less traditional than Teec Nos Pos, where we’d lived before, because it was closer to Gallup. Teec Nos Pos was nearer the center of the Navajo Nation, with only dirt-road access. Because Tohlakai was closer to town, more people spoke English, and there was more alcoholism and less self-sufficiency. But some things were still traditional. I could herd sheep with my friends. Turquoise-and-silver jewelry was still a sign of wealth, as were livestock. Older women still dressed in brilliant long, satin skirts and velvet blouses. Middle-aged women, however, had assimilated to the extent that they wore long, full calico skirts and cotton blouses.

The chapel nestled in a broad enclosure of apricot and cream-colored sandstone mesas. I would be hard pressed to call the room where we worshipped a sanctuary. When we first arrived there, the walls were Pepto Bismol pink. An insipid, popular reproduction of an angel guiding two blonde, curly-haired and rosy-cheeked tots over a decrepit bridge across a bottomless chasm hung behind the pulpit. Grandpa Kruis would have been appalled, because to him it would have represented a graven image.

My father didn’t like it either. “It’s not biblical,” he said. “We don’t know what angels look like. And they don’t come down to us physically now anyway.” He sounded a little grumpy.

“Also, the children are blonde and blue-eyed. The kids we serve have brown skin and black hair. How are they going to relate to that?” he said in a moment of cultural sensitivity that came and went.

The picture disappeared as soon as he felt he would not offend any of the members of the chapel. The walls were soon painted a soft, pastel peach, a choice my mother no doubt influenced.

A rickety old man whose son had been my father’s interpreter at Teec Nos Pos lived near the chapel. Mr. Todacheenee came early every Sunday morning and on prayer meeting nights to light the propane heater in winter and to sweep the floor. Despite Mr. Todacheenee’s efforts, whenever I think of Sundays at Tohlakai, my feet go chill because it was always cold down by the floor. The little trailer to the east of the church, where I taught my Sunday school class, was worse. It had no heat source at all, so we were forced to wear coats and jackets while we sang gospel choruses and I honed my skills as a storyteller.

Storytelling was what I loved best about teaching Sunday school. Each week, I had to recount the story selected by the church. My favorite stories were bound to come along at some point: Jacob wresting with God; Rahab brought into the fold; the woman at the well, an outsider who was the first to hear Jesus’s biggest and best secret; the men on the road to Emmaus suddenly recognizing the resurrected Lord whom they’d been grieving. They were all stories of spiritual struggle, loss, redemption, and change.

I loved telling the stories just as much as I loved the stories themselves. I delighted in seeing children’s eyes widen with suspense, watching them jump in their seats when the climax of a story startled them. I loved the power of making that happen. I thrilled when they asked penetrating questions like, “Why did God tell Abraham to kill his own son?” And I basked in the knowledge of my father’s confidence that I was ready for this important task in God’s kingdom.

By the time I was a junior in high school, someone other than Dad had recognized my Bible-teaching talents. I was marshaled into an army of religious instructors, mostly adults, who went on Wednesday evenings and Sunday mornings to the huge BIA school at Fort Wingate, fifteen miles east of Rehoboth. There, I taught second-graders about the characters who peopled the Bible and had been saved by God.

On Sundays, a group of us teens, along with a few adults from the mission, piled into vans and drove into Gallup to the county jail. The moment we stepped inside, the stink of pinto beans with lots of onions, farts they generated, filthy feet, dirty clothes, and stale alcohol assailed us. The jail had two large holding cells—drunk tanks—packed with men picked up from the streets of Gallup on Friday and Saturday nights. We sang hymns to them in English, Navajo, and Spanish. We took turns preaching. Women and girls were not allowed to preach in churches or even in chapels, which is what we called the fringy mission churches. But we could preach in the jail if we called it bringing the message, and I took my turn, first in front of the bars of one drunk-tank, then the other. The tanks weren’t soundproof, and while we preached at the second, men from the first tank, still half drunk and coping with hangovers, shouted and mocked the words we’d just spoken to them. Some of the boys in our group snickered. As the catcalls of the men in the tanks humiliated me—although the Bible says we are blessed if men revile us for the sake of the gospel—the way the boys colluded with them made it even worse. I felt ashamed, not blessed. I struggled to preach on, but I had no joy of it.

One evening a week, we got into the vans again and drove to the Gallup Rescue Mission on the north side of town. The pervasive bean-and-onion smell hit us again. But the men were showered and shaved and wearing clean second-hand clothes. They weren’t allowed in if they’d been drinking. Some of them joined the hymn singing. We played our band instruments for them. And we preached. Girls and women could also preach at the Rescue Mission.

*   *   *

It’s no wonder, given his own frame of reference and the pleasure he took in the exercise of my faith, that my father hoped I would become a Bible woman. Bible women attended Bible school, as my father had. They taught Sunday school, ran ladies’ aid societies, and provided religious instruction in the schools. They might even visit people in their homes with a Bible and some of the pamphlets given to students in Sunday school tucked under one arm. But they could never, never deliver a sermon in church. They couldn’t even pray aloud in a “real” church, only in chapels. They were, after all, just women.

I didn’t know until a year after I taught religious instruction and spoke at the jail and rescue mission that this was my father’s goal for me. He had never mentioned it, and in fact, my mother was the one who told me about his wishes when I came home for Christmas during my first year of college.

“Dad was disappointed that you’re going to Calvin,” she told me one evening when we were alone in the kitchen.

“What?” Calvin College was a rigorous liberal arts college, our church’s flagship institution. There were two other church colleges, newer and not yet accredited but more conservative, so I could guess that his objection wasn’t academic.

“Ja,” she said. “He hoped you would go to RBI and become a Bible woman. He thinks you’d be so good at it.” The focus at the Reformed Bible Institute was on training men to be lay missionaries and women to be what they euphemistically called helpmeets for the men. If they stayed single, they could be Bible women.

“But RBI isn’t even a college,” I protested.

Mom gave me a blank look, and I thought there was no point explaining anything.

“Why didn’t he ever tell me that’s what he wanted?” I asked in a gentler tone.

“I guess he hoped you would decide that on your own.”

I nodded. Earlier on, I would have been thrilled by my dad’s desire for me to follow in his footsteps. But even as I told Bible stories at the BIA school and brought messages to those men who were down and out, things were changing inside me. Years of being attracted to other girls were fulfilled when I fell in love with Grace my junior year of high school. Our relationship was a realization of my earlier dreams. I knew what I wanted, what made me happy. But my mother’s pronouncement about Alice and Jennie had also showed me for the first time that what made me happy would mean losing the faith community I loved and wanted to serve.

The words, “RBI isn’t even a college,” said what I felt most strongly when my mother told me about my father’s wishes. I thought, “He has no idea what I might really be able to do with my life. He has no idea what interests me.” My relationship with Grace and my semester at Calvin had created a shift, so I felt a sort of contempt for the role of a Bible woman. Four classes of professional servants worked in the mission field: ordained minister, lay missionary, Diné interpreter, and Bible woman—in that order. What my father wanted for me was the lowest class in which the church was willing to let me serve.

Chapter 23:
Preparing the Lab

For years, I had waited for retirement so I could write full-time. It was why I retired as early as I could, in 2010. But I’d no sooner retired than all the writing fuel in me seemed to have burned out. I had been writing for a long time, and the absence of kindling happens pretty often, as almost anyone who dedicates themselves to creative endeavors can attest. But I couldn’t help asking myself, “Why now, when, for the first time in my life, I have that most precious creative commodity—time?”

It’s often happened that the right book at the right time has crossed my path. Sometimes what I needed in a given moment has literally dropped off a shelf into my hands. That’s how The Best Year of Your Life: Dream It, Plan It, Live It by Debbie Ford came to me when I was searching a bookstore for something completely unrelated. I found the title uninspiring, but I was willing to look inside, only because Ford had previously written a book with the much more captivating title of The Dark Side of the Light Chasers.

I took the book home, and because my life was definitely not at its best at that moment, when by all rights it should have been, and because I like structure that promises results, I began doing the exercises. Debbie said that doing only one thing, the first exercise, would create powerful change in my life. That one thing was to meditate on the statement, “This is the best year of my life,” for three minutes morning and evening. I was pretty discouraged, depressed really, which is something I hate admitting to myself. I thought, “This I can do. What have I got to lose?” So that’s how I started.

The fourth chapter of the book, “A Clean Slate,” started the preparation for what may have become the most significant experiment I’ve ever undertaken. It became a first step in preparing the lab for my experiment. The charge in this chapter was to list unfinished business and then do what was necessary to bring each item to closure—undone projects, tasks, relationships. I made my list of incompletions. Some things were simple but onerous—for example, turning the former bedroom that had become a large storage bin into an office.

High on the list, but not so simple, was an obstacle for which I had been blaming my family. For almost forty years, I had feared their narrow-mindedness and judgment, their further rejection where I felt most vulnerable—my spirituality. In the “completion” process, I decided that instead of continuing to hide my beliefs or lack of them, I would share my spirituality with them.

A short way into writing what I was calling my Statement of Faith (Appendix A), one of my nephews, a senior at his Christian high school, asked me to be part of an assignment. He had to ask questions of someone whose beliefs differed from his. I chuckled at how the Universe works and mildly chastised him for his assumption that our beliefs were different, since we’d never discussed my beliefs or his. Some of his questions helped me examine things I might not have thought about my own assumptions.

When my statement was finished, I emailed my brothers, sisters-in-law, nephews and nieces over eighteen (not wanting to be taken to task for unduly influencing any minors), and a couple of my closest cousins. I gave them some guidelines on how to enter constructive interfaith dialogue that I had adapted from Joel Beversluis’s book, Sourcebook of the World’s Religions: An Interfaith Guide to Religion and Spirituality. The basic premise of the guidelines was that we would be sharing our faith for the purpose of knowing each other better, for enjoying deeper intimacy, not to convince each other of anything nor to label each other right or wrong. I said I would send my statement of faith to anyone who agreed with the guidelines. Most of the family, interestingly, chose to call the guidelines “rules”: Anna’s Rules, to be precise. Sort of like Robert’s Rules, I guess, and in a way, they were.

My family loves to argue, especially about passionately held beliefs. Several members have very strong convictions and, like my father, believe they are obligated to convince others to join them. Interestingly, the ones with the strongest views chose not to agree to the guidelines or read my statement. Almost everyone in the younger generation, though, wanted to know what I believed, despite the fact that most had accepted their parents’ beliefs. No one offered much discussion, and all clearly tried to respect the guidelines. After the fact, my mother, who’d heard that I’d written the statement, asked for a copy, which I duly sent.

Most important to me was how freeing this process was. I had engaged in another, deeper, level of coming out, of being myself, so the people I cared most about could engage with me if they chose to.


About the Author

Raised by fundamentalist missionaries on the Navajo reservation, Anna Redsand was forced to leave the faith and family that had always supported her and embark on a decades-long quest for a new spiritual home that would accept her as both a lesbian and someone committed to social justice.

She is the award-winning author of Viktor Frankl: A Life Worth Living, as well as a published writer of essays, stories, and newspaper columns. Her essay “Naturalization” was listed in Best American Essays 2014. She also has taught writing at the public school and university levels, and created and presented workshops on the writing of a spiritual journey. Much of her work explores the fluidity of identity, the effects of colonization, race relations, the morality of missions, and the dynamics of cultural contact. Redsand lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Anna Redsand in the News!
Download an interview with Anna from the
July 19, 2016 edition of the Cortez Journal

Praise for To Drink from the Silver Cup: From Faith through Exile and Beyond

Anna Redsand has written a lyrical story of her journey from a fundamentalist missionary upbringing in the Navajo Nation through sojourns in other spiritual traditions while always longing for the home she left when her sexuality was condemned by family and church. An important read for anyone who has left a once-treasured tradition and wished to return when there was nowhere left to go.
—Stuart Dybek, author, Ecstatic Cahoots
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Having written of my own “coming out” from a strict evangelical past, I’m sick and tired of books on the same subject. So imagine my delight in discovering that Anna Redsand’s To Drink from the Silver Cup is not just “another book” on the same subject but a unique gem. This is a work of literary nonfiction and sexual self-discovery. It is “about” only one truth: that love, beauty, and God go hand-in-hand—or they don’t “go” anywhere at all.
—Frank Schaeffer, author, Crazy For God
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A compelling chronicle of the journey that results when a deeply religious young woman finds herself condemned and rejected by the only faith community she has ever known. Anna Redsand provides a prophetic witness against the grievous damage that exclusionary religious teaching inflicts on LGBT believers . . . . A rich source of inspiration for spiritual pilgrims of all stripes. Highly recommended.
—Reverend Mark Achtemeier, author, The Bible’s Yes to Same-Sex Marriage
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So much of what shapes us has more to do with the agenda of religion and society than it does with who we are at the core of our being. Few of us can hear the sensuous whisper of the voice of God competing above the tumultuousness of everyone else’s definitions of how we are to live our very individual lives, a voice which only asks: “Where are you?” Anna Redsand managed to discern God’s voice and dared to explore this, the very first question Creator asked First Human. In so doing, she found herself exiled from the embrace of a spiritual communion that had enwombed her and nurtured her from childhood on. Anna’s journey is skillfully and entertainingly chronicled in this delightful and inspiring read.
—Rabbi Gershon Winkler, PhD, author, Magic of the Ordinary: Recovering the Shamanic in Judaism, and
co-author, The Invitation: Living a Meaningful Death
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From Navajo dwellings in New Mexico to Scandinavia to the evangelical Midwest, Anna Redsand’s beautiful, heroic story is for anyone who has ever felt outcast from a community they love and tossed into the desert of doubt and despair. Here you will find spiritual hope embodied, and the promise that, no matter where we are lost, it is possible to find our way home to new communities of faith, compassion, healing, and belonging.
—John T. Price, author, Daddy Long Legs: The Natural Education of a Father
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To Drink from the Silver Cup breaks new ground by situating the reader in a spiritual and physical landscape that is familiar to anyone longing to break free from imposed belief; yet its roadmap is beautifully fresh with each turn of the page. I could not put the book down as I let Redsand’s honesty and kindness raise my awareness of what is most sacred about the human experience—authenticity.
—Paul Renigar, Assistant Professor of Language and Technology, University of Alabama; gender, language, and identity researcher
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In To Drink from the Silver Cup, Anna Redsand has written a brave, graceful, and intelligent account of her struggle to rediscover her lost faith and find acceptance of her sexuality. She depicts a journey filled with doubt, pain, joy, and ultimate affirmation.
—Arnold Johnston, playwright, poet, fiction writer, translator, author, The Witching Voice: A Novel from the Life of Robert Burns
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By sharing her unique and deeply personal faith journey, Anna Redsand illustrates universal truths about the human person: that every person is sacred, that it is in our human nature to seek to know God however we might define that Presence, and that we all long for peace within ourselves and within community. In lyric prose, she tells her story with elegance and grace. She is a writer and person to be admired.
—Ann Przyzycki, Editor, Isthmus
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The central character of this beautiful, seeking memoir is a woman who is unwilling to be kept outside the gates of the church because of the way God made her. Maybe someday, we will stop treating church and faith like a closed club. Until that time, Anna’s book reminds us that He calls all of us to the table to drink from the cup.
—Molly Jo Rose, columnist, “In and Of the World,”
U.S. Catholic
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In To Drink from the Silver Cup, Anna Redsand graciously invites us into the captivating story of her own spiritual journey, from her early years in fundamentalist Christianity through the pain of exile because of her sexual orientation to her cautious and glad return to a faith community. In the process, she opens our hearts and minds to examine spiritual challenges with which many struggle, whether LGBTQ or straight. Her writing will make you laugh, cry, rejoice, question, hope, and perhaps see the grace of God anew.
—Reverend Catherine Robinson, minister, Presbyterian Church (USA)
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If you have any interest whatsoever in religion, spirituality, sexuality, personal growth, family relationships, community, the search for meaning, the Navajo Nation, or finely crafted creative nonfiction memoir, you need to read To Drink from the Silver Cup.
—Monica Friedman, author, Rosalind Franklin’s Beautiful Twist
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Anna Redsand is a masterful storyteller. This intensely personal narrative of her spiritual journey struck a particular chord with me, an ordained minister who is also gay. However, it will resonate with anyone who has lost the faith of their youth but is seeking to reconnect with it in a deeper, more spiritually authentic way.
—Reverend Dwain Lee,
gay minister, Presbyterian Church (USA)
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Anna Redsand knows the language of the Bible the way you know the language of your mother tongue. She also knows that she won’t be spiritually satisfied with any religion that views itself as the “only way.” Before it can excommunicate her. Anna leaves her childhood church and sets out on a quest to find a new spiritual home. In the process, she opens herself —and her readers—to Native American spirituality, Buddhism, Protestantism, Calvinism, Judaism, Unitarianism, Christ­ianity, and more. Read To Drink from the Silver Cup and think, learn, heal, grow—and believe.
—Jody Keisner, essayist and Assistant Professor of Creative Writing, University of Nebraska-Omaha
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To Drink from the Silver Cup is the best kind of quest: brave, unexpected, and full of discovery. Redsand’s voice is lyrical and honest. Her story will speak to anyone on a journey of the most difficult kind: growing up as the “wrong” sort of person in an unforgiving world. Her loving optimism in spite of it all is inspirational.
—Linden McNeilly, author, Map Art Lab and War Torn
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As a gay man who came from the same denomination as Redsand, I eagerly gulped each chapter of To Drink from the Silver Cup. Many LGBT+ people are alienated from their childhood faith communities and long for that place of belonging. Too many give up. Redsand’s story is a powerful journey of faith, alienation, and reconciliation that speaks of hope, inclusion, and belonging.
—Douglas Houck, former board member of Exodus International
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Anna Redsand’s memoir, To Drink from the Silver Cup, captures the complex journey of being true to herself and her family in a life-giving way while trying to reconcile and find a community of faith that saw her as beloved. Anna claims all her identities and complex relationships in the most gracious way. It is a powerful story.
—Annanda Barclay, M. Div., Co-Moderator of the National Board of More Light Presbyterians
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To Drink from the Silver Cup shares the author’s journey through the heartbreaking loss of family and church because of her need to live an authentic life. I recommend this book to anyone looking for ways to more deeply understand tender experiences often lost in theological discussion.
—Cara Oosterhouse, Board Co-President, All One Body
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I am so blessed by Anna Redsand’s writing. Great work, great experiences, and such a depth of spirituality as I’ve hardly ever known in anyone.
—Reverend Alyzsa Van Til, Unity minister