They used to grow oranges in Orange County. Actually, they grew far more lima beans, but Lima Bean County didn’t sound good to land developers. So they called it Orange County, bulldozed the limas and oranges, and built tract homes. Miles and miles of houses filled the map in tedious symmetry, as if entire communities had been laid out on sheets of graph paper.
But Dad scored a coup: he bought a modest house on a swanky street that wrapped around a golf course. The swanky houses backed up onto putting greens. Their front yards were fenced in and private, and when you walked past, you could hear the faint whisper of pool skimmers and clinking highballs and success. Our swankless house had no private backyard; it backed into smaller houses with smaller people of smaller dreams. But Dad dreamed big. He promised Mom he’d buy her a swanky house. He put a For Sale sign on the lawn, invested in risky stocks, and lay in wait for his moment.
Then one night Dad came home, ripped the For Sale sign out of the lawn, turned on the TV, and spat curses at the stock-market report. He lost the money he needed to buy a nicer house and move away from Grandmother’s pronouncements. Dad never talked about moving againat least never as a possibility, only as the dream that his mother’s vengeful God ripped away from him out of spite. My parents lived in that house for thirtyseven years. And so I grew up in “the O.C.”—not the TV version where anorexic models languished in mansions on the beach. I grew up in the caste just below that: the striving middle-class chumps for whom that life lay just out of reach.
Early Dad, before failure and resentment got to him, was a lot more like God the Father. Dad was almighty, as most dads are to their kids. Dad wasn’t majestic or holy, but he was good—he was good to me. In fact, my early memories of Dad are the brightest childhood memories I have. Dad loved to tell jokes and was endlessly entertained by mine. He was quick to scoop me up for a hug. Once he came home with a jumbo bag of Starburst candy and threw the contents up in the air, just to watch his kids scramble with delight. I guess Dad was like God the Father in that he delighted in his children and he satisfied our desires with good things. I never imagined God or Jesus having fun, but my dad loved to have fun. It was Dad who told us bedtime stories. It was Dad who took us miniature golfing and out for walks with the dogs. I don’t know where Mom was—maybe at church.
When we first moved to Orange County, we lived in an apartment across a field from the mall. Dad’s optometric practice was in the Sears store there. I must have gotten on my mom’s nerves, asking her to take me miniature golfing or to go on a walk or to give me a hug, because she usually kept her back to me: cooking or ironing or sighing. So I learned to ask different questions: When was Dad coming home? How long was “a while”? When did it get dark?
“Go upstairs and look out the window,” my mother replied one day. “When the green Sears sign comes on, that’s when Daddy is coming home. Go on. Go on upstairs and watch.” So most evenings I went upstairs and sat at the window, waiting for the Sears sign to come on. My older brothers, Rob and Jim, came in to play their Beatles 45’s on the Close ’N Play. Nancy often came and sat with me. But I stayed in the window, waiting for the green Sears sign to come on, waiting for Dad to come home, waiting to be seen.
Early Fun Dad was my hero. When I was four I got a plush toy cat for my birthday. I took Fuzzy everywhere: to the market, to bed, to church, on trips, and especially to scary places like Grandma Jean’s house. Holding Fuzzy filled the hole between my arms and made me feel safe. Eventually Fuzzy wore out. Her fuzz turned to nubs, she lost an eye, and the stuffing came out of her neck. Jim teased me and called her Nubby. Finally, Mom had had it and threw Fuzzy in the trash. But Dad rescued her. Jim restuffed her neck with cotton balls, painted her ears with pink shoe polish. Maybe he helped because he felt guilty for calling her Nubby. But Dad saved her because he loved me.
Years later, we were on a family vacation to Washington. After a day trip to an island, Dad promised my brothers we’d take a train ride through the longest tunnel in the Pacific Northwest. The boys were thrilled and so was Dadtrains were the one thing they still had in common. My brothers were in high school; they had discovered sarcasm. They could sit in the car for hours, silent and sullen, but mention trains and they lit up. The train ride was going to be the highlight of the trip for my brothers, and it was Dad’s last chance to win back their respect.
We took the hour-long ferry ride back to the mainland to wait for the train. That’s when I felt a thud in my gut: I had left Fuzzy on the ferry. I had already left her in a hardware store in Eugene, Oregon. No way would they go back again—we would miss the train. When Dad saw the horror on my face, he coaxed the reason out of me.
Only now can I imagine my father’s dilemma: having to choose between his sons who were rapidly coming to despise him, and a young daughter who still thought he hung the moon; sons whose approval he longed for, and his daughter whom he still had a chance to keep in his orbit.
Dad drove us out to a promontory to watch the train. The boys stood out close to the tracks, seething as the train flew by without them. My father stood a few feet behind, watching the boys with their backs turned to him, as they would do for the rest of their lives. I sat in the car watching it all, Fuzzy firmly in my grip. My brothers hated me for a week. I didn’t care. Dad had rescued me because he had delighted in me. Just like God the Father Almighty.
I loved movies because of Dad. My sister and I loved to watch TV with Dad: Sherlock Holmes,Laurel and Hardy. Dad’s favorite films became ours: Mister Roberts,The Pride of the Yankees,The Blue Angel. I learned to imitate James Cagney and Marlene Dietrich. It made Dad laugh and kept him from turning the channel to shows that made him mad.
But after the For Sale sign came down, after my brothers got into high school and started resenting him, Dad changed. He became angry a lot. And it wasn’t like God’s righteous anger; it was capricious. He got mad at the Russians and the Democrats and Ted Kennedy. He came home, threw his briefcase on the floor, and turned on the TV. He didn’t watch Sherlock Holmes or The Pride of the Yankees. He watched live sports instead. And live sports made him angry.
“GhadddDAMMIT!” Dad spat out curses, raspy and hot. “Throw the long bomb, you GHADDAMN IDIOTS!” It felt like getting battery acid thrown in my face every time he said it.
His curses got more frequent, more acrid, to the point that every time he cursed, I felt a shock in my gut. I was bound to Dad: all the love and attention I’d craved from him had created a lifeline between him and me. And now that line was carrying an electrical shock. Every expletive went straight from his mouth to my guts.
“GhaddDAMMMIT!”—BZZZT. “Dammit!” BZZZTT, it jolted me. I hated it.
I prayed every time he watched TV. “Lord, I know you’re holy and you hate evil. But please help my dad. Please make Dad’s favorite team win so he won’t curse you, so he’ll love you. Please just make them win. In Jesus’ name, amen.”
It didn’t work. Dad didn’t have a favorite team; he just wanted to curse the one that was losing. One afternoon it got so bad that I leaped up and shut off the TV.
“Stop it!” I screamed.
“What?!” my father replied, his face white with shock. But he knew.
“You keep taking the name of the Lord in vain!”
“I do not…”
“You do too, Bob!” my mom fired back from the kitchen.
I ran to my room, crying. “Lord! Why can’t Dad love you? Why can’t Dad be angry the way you are, when it’s for a good reason? Why can’t you two get along?”
After that, Dad watched fewer movies and more programs about plummeting stocks and how bad the government was. He even watched old newsreels from World War II, footage of bombings and Nazis and bodies being bulldozed into mass graves. At night the sound of it echoed down the hall, under our door. I hated it. I started to hate Dad.
I started having a recurring dream that our house was a cesspool, filled with urine and feces. In the dream, I crawled along in a clear plastic tunnel, tryi
ng to get outside to safety. But when I rounded the corner into the TV room I woke up terrified and couldn’t go back to sleep. Sometimes I tried to stay in the dream so I could make it outside, but I always filled with dread when I reached the TV room: the source of the anger and battery acid and excrement.
Everything about Dad that once resembled God the Father—his compassion, his heroism, his delight in me—disappeared. Dad’s anger consumed everything. I knew God the Father’s anger was different. But what if my anger was like Dad’s—consuming and evil? After all, I had beat up Kirsten. I didn’t want to be like Dad anymore. I had started to pull away from Dad and even resent him, the way my brothers did.
As I hit puberty, my peers shifted from family to friends, my heroes became rock stars, and my interests turned from my father’s to my own. Dad took it personally. He understood the imperative of saving a stuffed animal; he didn’t understand the imperative of letting a child have her own life.
On the last day of sixth grade, Pastor Ingebretsen sat us down for an important chat. “Next year you’re off to public school,” he warned, “where they’ll persecute you because you love Jesus.”
“You mean they’ll try to kill us?” I asked.
“No. In China, they kill your body. In California, they kill your soul.”
Stevie Sutherland chimed in. “They’ll throw spit wads and give you cigarette burns and flush your head in the toilet!” Stevie would know. His sister was in college. She was an art major. And a smoker.
The idea of junior high terrified me. Yes, Kirsten had persecuted me for three years, but after I spun her out on the blacktop she got nicer. Sort of. Kirsten wasn’t even going to my new school. Junior high presented a set of totally unknown terrors.
But something happened when I got there: no one threw spit wads at me or shoved my head down the toilet. And with no Kirsten to bully me into hiding in mediocrity, I stepped out. I got good grades; I took art and drama; I made people laugh. Students didn’t persecute me for being smart or funny or even for loving Jesus; they actually wanted to be my friends.
Now my parents were terrified. Who were my new friends? Did they go to church? Were there any boys around? For three years they had ignored Kirsten who bullied me, and now they were suspicious of people who liked me? It made me suspicious of them. I even got suspicious of Pastor Ingebretsen. He was wrong about the world—it didn’t hate me. Maybe he was lying. Maybe they all were.
I still loved the God in my white leather Bible: The majestic Almighty of the Psalms; the Jesus who died for me. And I had the Holy Spirit because I felt God’s presence within me. I witnessed to girls at slumber parties. I went to summer camp and made a new promise to Jesus.
Now, if my relationship with God were like a marriage, this moment wasn’t the wedding. I was only twelve years old. Ew. But I’d grown up loving Jesus, “the Boy next door.” Now I was in junior high. Jesus and I were going steady.
Rudy: Your father was messed up, man. That must have complicated your image of God the Father.
Susan: You’ve got the gift, Freud.
Rudy: Come on. Don’t make me do all the work.
Susan: Okay. Obviously Dad confused my ideas about God the Father. But God was confusing too. Remember in the Old Testament when the Ark of the Covenant tipped over? Some guy rushed to grab it so it wouldn’t touch the ground and be defiled. God smote him dead. The guy was trying to help! Do the right thing in the wrong moment, you’re dead!
Rudy: Okay, Father: I’d love to know your thoughts on this.
Now I had to imagine God the Father in the room, and he didn’t have a body. Except for a nose that flared. First I imagined God simmering with exasperation. Like my earthly father did. Okay, so I thought about it again, and a different God showed up.
God: I’m glad you remembered those psalms about me.
Susan: I loved that part of you.
God: That is who I am.
Susan: That’s part of who you are.
God: Thanks for the mention. (Laughing) I didn’t expect any praise from you.
Susan: Really? I thought you were omniscient. You’re supposed to know everything.
God: For now, let’s say I can be both omniscient and surprised or even delighted by what you do. I can’t wait to see what you say next.
Rudy: God, do you understand why Susan is conflicted about you?
God: Susan’s father never even tried to like me, and I got saddled with his baggage.
Susan: You’re both called “Father.” You should reconsider your branding strategy.
God: I’m taking “Father” back. Watch me.
Rudy: Okay, let’s cut the sarcasm for a moment.
God: I wasn’t being sarcastic. Well, not right then.
Rudy: Then please give me your opinion.
God: Thank you, Rudy, for bothering to ask my opinion instead of putting words in my mouth like some people in the room.
Susan: That was so passive-aggressive.
Rudy: Susan, don’t interrupt. And God, that was passive-aggressive.
God: Okay, the Ark of the Covenant…You don’t know what was going on in that guy’s head. Maybe he’d been itching to touch the ark for months. Maybe he didn’t really believe it was holy. Maybe he tripped a guy on the pole so he could “rescue” the ark and look like a hero and go around bragging about it. I warned everyone not to touch it! “Don’t mess with holy!”
Susan: Well, maybe you should have put that part in the Bible so we’d understand why you did what you did. Because maybe the way it reads now, you look really harsh.
God: Can I ask a question? Are you just going to call me in every week, taking me away from life-and-death crises as well as people who actually want to be around me because they love me, so I can explain myself to your liking? If that’s all we’re going to do here, I’m not available for that.
Rudy: But Susan has a lot of questions. And I’m curious why her version of you is so sarcastic.
God: Just because Susan’s version of me is sarcastic doesn’t mean I’m not sarcastic. Sarcasm is a viable form of communication. What about when Elijah taunted the prophets of Baal? “Where’s your god? Is he asleep? Is he off taking a dump?”
Susan: He did not say that. He said something about going on a journey.
Rudy: “Going on a long journey” was a Hebrew euphemism for taking a dump.
Susan: Great. Can I use it in counseling?
Rudy: No, you can’t. Lord, are you available to listen to what Susan has to say?
God: Sure. You’ve got an hour; I’ve got eternity.
Rudy: Susan, what other ways have you associated God the Father with your earthly father?
Susan: They were both jealous! As long as I thought what Dad thought and loved what he loved, I was loved back. But the moment I got my own interests, I was Enemy Number One. That’s how God is.
God: How am I like that?
Susan: “I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God.”
God: That’s about worshipping another deity.
Susan: “Your life is not your own; you were bought with a price.”
God: If you want your crappy, directionless life back, go right ahead.
Susan: What happened to God the Father Almighty I knew in the Psalms, the one who forgave all my sins, who crowned me with love and compassion, who satisfied my desires with good things?
God: You warped him into a caricature of meanness and contempt.
Rudy: Well, regardless of how you got this way, I used to be a pastor, and you’re not a God I’d want to know. So you’d better change, because Susan cannot stay married to you like this.
God: I’m all for it. But remember, I’m just an apparition of Susan’s warped ideas. So who’s really responsible for changing me?
And God pointed at me. You know, if he had a finger to point.
Chapter 4
CHEATING ON JESUS
IN HIGH SCHOOL, I CHEATED ON JESUS. NOT WITH OTHER REligions like Buddhism, Hinduism, or Eckank
ar, but with ideas like intellectual curiosity, writing, and the Beatles. I didn’t think I was cheating. I still loved Jesus. I just found other things to love too. And high school is a time to discover the world and your place in it. It’s about figuring out who you are and what you love. I discovered I loved movies, comedy, and John Lennon. So what?
God could have been excited, proud even, that I was smart, funny, and interested in the world. But he was threatened. At least, the people who represented him were—the church, my mom, and my sister. They acted like Woody Allen, Monty Python, and John Lennon led to sex, drugs, and atheism.
Besides, God could have provided some healthy, fun counterprogramming, like a youth group that was fun and intelligent and liked Saturday Night Live. Instead, our church offered Luther League, run by Kirsten Shanahan. No thanks. God also could have provided me a macho Christian authority figure to admire and a cool Christian boy to date. Just one boy who was smart, was funny, loved Jesus, and wasn’t a wimp.
(Sound of crickets chirping in the void.)
I never stopped loving Jesus. But Jesus was invisible, church was boring, and my parents ignored me. Every day at school I met teachers or friends who were excited about where life was taking them, regardless of what Jesus thought about it. Wouldn’t you go along?
When I reached high school, my parents stopped monitoring me and my friends. Not because they trusted me, but because they had found something else to worry about: getting my oldest brother into medical school. If my father couldn’t afford a house on the golf course, he was going to make sure one of us did. Rob was first in line; he bore the brunt of my father’s thwarted ambitions. So while Dad obsessed over Rob’s future, the rest of us slipped by. Jim retreated into classical music; Nancy disappeared into her books and her hippie IXOYE club, and I found comedy. Or maybe it found me.
Angry Conversations with God Page 4