David was the first guy who could keep up with me. In fact, I had to work to keep up with him. David had a video camera, and he made movies. Julianne, Doug, and I went over to his house to write sketches. Well, we watched as David did most of the work. He was a genius. Thank God he was just a geek.
Then something horrible happened. David grew four inches, got a haircut, got his braces off, and joined the water polo team. He turned into a hot jock and started flirting with me. It grossed me out. I’d never been close to a hot guy. What if he kissed me and then forced me to have sex? What if he didn’t have to force me—what if I wanted to? No! That would not happen. Ever. But what if I couldn’t say no? What if the word wouldn’t come out of my mouth?
“Why not?” Julia shrugged. “David is adorable. He’s young. He’ll be in awe of you.” She’d lost her virginity to a rich kid from Newport. She said it wasn’t a big deal.
But it was a big deal to me. So I played it safe. I stopped going over to David’s house to write. I didn’t return his calls. I sat away from him in Production Drama. At first he seemed crushed, but he got over it. He and Doug kept writing sketches without me. Then I was crushed. I missed him. And John Lennon wasn’t cutting it.
And so I fell in love with David Mankewicz—as much as any insecure sixteen-year-old could fall in love. How could God blame me? David was perfect: he was funny like me, he wanted to make movies like me, and he was a Jew like Jesus.
I thought about Pastor Norman and his cardboard demonstration. I was terrified of sex. I was terrified of getting shredded. But I also longed to be loved. I never denied Jesus; I never forgot him. How could I, with that Nice Jesus image cemented into my psyche? I loved the Nice Jesus, but he was so somber and silent. David had a voice to say “I love you” and a body to prove it. I fell hard.
Rudy: You went where the love was. I don’t blame you.
Susan: But does God blame me?
Rudy: Why don’t you ask him?
Susan: I can already imagine him shaking his head in profound disappointment.
God: I haven’t even said a word and already you’ve got me shaking my head at you? I don’t have a head. Remember? “God doesn’t have a body.”
Susan: Psalm 18 says that your nostrils flared when you got angry. If David can imagine your nostrils flaring, I can imagine you shaking your head.
God: Notice you don’t say Jesus shook his head. And he actually has one.
Rudy: Let’s move on. Susan imagines you feel profoundly disappointed.
God: She got that from her dad, and she transferred it onto me.
Susan: And where did I get my dad? From you.
God: Your sister had the same father, and she managed to love me and stay pure.
Susan: Totally unfair.
Rudy: Susan and her sister are different personalities with different needs. You didn’t make Susan to be quiet and complacent; you made her to be active and inquisitive, and you taught her to fight. You said as much in a previous session.
God: Jesus said that. But I’ll let it slip by since we’re the Trinity.
Susan: All Nancy needed was a hippie Bible study. I needed a smart, healthy Christian role model with cojones. You sent Pastor Norm, the Christmas elf.
God: Now you’re being unfair, Susan—and cruel. Norm was a kind, gentle man. You knew what he said about sex was true. He just wasn’t GQ enough for you. You want a hip pastor? How about that skeevy youth pastor who pimped his own daughter into a pop star and put her in her underwear on the cover of Rolling Stone?
Susan: I see your point. I’m sorry.
God: I forgive you. Actually, I already forgave you. I forgave you before you did it. I forgave you before the foundation of the world.
Rudy: Okay, you forgave her. We got it. (To Susan) Everything you imagine God saying is colored with sarcasm or stinginess or grandiosity. He can’t even forgive you without sounding like a jerk.
Susan: I know. I just go there.…(To God) I got it from Dad and I gave it to you. Sorry.
God: And I forgive—you know what I mean.
Rudy: Good. That’s progress. (To Susan) What about Jesus?
This would be harder. I hadn’t cheated on the Father with another deity. But I had fantasized about John Lennon and then had sex with a boy. I wasn’t exactly Bride of Christ material.
How could I respond? Just, “Sorry“? That sounded so flat. And if I added all the reasons why I was sorry, it would sound like a list of excuses. Yes, I was longing for love; yes, I needed a healthy role model. But my sister had managed somehow.
Jesus: I know why you did it. I know you were looking for love. But I loved you. Wasn’t that enough?
Susan: I needed a human to say he loved me, to say I mattered.
Jesus: I know. I’m sad you didn’t get that from a Christian guy.
Susan: Well, I’m sorry.
Jesus: And you know I forgave you already.
Rudy: (To Jesus) You’re not angry or hurt or heartbroken?
Jesus: Just because I’m not throwing a table over doesn’t mean I’m not upset.
Susan: (To Jesus) If you want to throw a table over to vent, I understand.
Jesus: How about I throw that trophy case out the window to prove I’ve got cojones?
Rudy: No, no. I believe you. Last question. Let’s talk about creativity. No one in Susan’s family “got” her. Doesn’t sound like the church did either. Why is that, God? Do you not like art?
Susan: Only if it ends in an altar call.
God: Come on. I love art. The Sistine Chapel, the Bach B Minor Mass. A Man for All Seasons. Love that stuff.
Susan: You didn’t like my kind of art. Show me one joke in the Bible.
God: The hill of foreskins.
God snickered and Jesus joined him. Well, that’s how I saw it.
Susan: That was supposed to be a joke?
God: Come on, Susan, the visual picture alone…
Susan: Why couldn’t one Christian tell me that when I needed to hear it? My mom made me feel horrible for laughing at “Hugo Vas Deferens.”
God: No one in the church got the joke. Sad.
Susan: Well, you know who got the joke? You know who got me? You know who appreciated me and made me feel like I mattered? Heathens and drunks and potheads and Jews.
God: I sent whomever I could get!
His answer caught me off guard.
Susan: That was you? You put those people in my life? Then why were you so upset when I fell in love with David?
God: Don’t boink the messenger.
Jesus: (To God) At least David was a Jew. She could have fallen for a pothead.
Had God used those people to love and encourage me? The ones my church and parents rejected? Well, Jesus did love outcasts and God did choose the foolish to shame the wise. Maybe I could have figured it out. Still, if just one, just one Jesus person had made me feel loved at the time, it could have changed a lot. It could have changed everything.
Chapter 5
WE’VE ONLY JUST BEGUN
YES, I HAD CHEATED ON JESUS. IN MY DEFENSE, WE WEREN’T officially “married” yet—to use the analogy set forth in my story. Ideally you don’t get married until you’re a fully functioning adult. I wasn’t even old enough to vote. But according to American evangelical churchianity, I’d committed a sin worse than murder or genocide or trying to set myself up as a deity. I’d had sex!
Actually, I felt horrible—and it was more than just Lutheran guilt. Sex was awkward. The media presented sex as the ultimate transcendent experience. Girls were fed the A Star Is Born version—Babs and Kris lounging forever in a bathtub with candles and incense; guys were fed the wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am version. And therein lies the first of many diverging expectations.
What did sex set in motion? A wave of insecurity and neediness, that’s what. I worried: Did David love me? Could I make him love me forever? I didn’t even know who I was yet, and now I wanted some boy to tell me who I was? And love who I was forever? Yeesh
. Talk about a recipe for codependency. How come they never mentioned that in Sex Ed?
Sex aside, I was terrified about college. All my friends got into expensive or out-of-state schools. Julianne was headed to USC, Doug to Notre Dame. David got into Yale. My dad wouldn’t pay for me to live in a dorm so after I graduated as valedictorian, I watched my friends fly off to the Ivy League, got into my car, and commuted to UC Irvine.
Eventually David and I broke up. We were two charged particles spinning in different directions. I just wasn’t into sex, and David wasn’t into Jesus. I cried. We promised to stay friends. “You’re still the coolest girl I know,” David said as he hugged me good-bye. He was off to New Haven. I was off to nowhere.
That’s what made premarital sex seem wrong. Not because “the Bible told me so” or because of Pastor Norm’s shredded cardboard, but because it ran my heart through a blender. If I heard God speak at all, it was a new voice inside saying, “This isn’t what you’re meant for, Susan. This isn’t your life.”
Irvine was one of the first planned communities, and everything was planned around the color beige: beige malls, beige houses with beige trim, and beige basketball hoops. No, wait. You weren’t allowed to have basketball hoops—they ruined the clean lines. Irvine was so clean it was sterile. And UC Irvine was a college in quarantine.
UCI was a great school if you were studying premed or engineering. It was also good for theater—that is, if you wanted to study postmodern deconstructionist bucket-of-blood theater. I did not. In high school, Van Holt loved my facial expressions. My college professor said I used my face too much. “Stop mugging. What does anger look like in your fingers?” I wanted to flip him off.
My one bright spot was getting letters from David. He filled them with stories about Ivy League. He couldn’t write a sentence without a set-up and a punch line. When he finally wrote me about his new girlfriend, he set it up with “I wanted you to know” and buttoned it off with “She’s not as cool as you.” David wasn’t a jerk; he was just a guy. Of course he’d met someone. He was a smart, funny, Jewish hottie at Yale. I was a depressed Lutheran WASP commuting to the Beige Circle of Hell.
Meanwhile, my sister was blossoming at her private Christian college. She got good grades; she made friends; she even got a boyfriend who wasn’t afraid of my dad. She had confidence and peace. When she came home on weekends, the contrast between our lives was blinding.
“Susie?” I could hear the lecture coming. “How are you and Jesus doing?”
“Why, did he say something about me?”
“I’m just asking. You seem sad. It worries me.”
I hadn’t forgotten Jesus. But I kept him on the periphery of my thoughts. I kept everything on the periphery. I didn’t want to think; otherwise I got depressed imagining my friends’ new exciting lives compared to my beige, decaying one.
So I put on my Walkman and ran. I listened to Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town and ran for miles through the winding golf-course streets. I turned the tape over and ran some more. Running kept me out of the house and away from Dad’s TV. The Walkman pounded out “Badlands” and I pounded the miles and time and thoughts into the pavement under my feet.
My last exam fell on the evening of December 8, 1980. Psychobiology—questions about the interaction of depression and the body. I should have presented myself as the answer. As I was driving home, I flipped on the radio and heard John Lennon asking me to imagine there was no heaven. Why? I was already in hell. I shut the radio off.
When I got home, my father was standing in the living room, face drawn and angry. “So I guess you heard?”
“Heard what?”
“Sit down.”
I knew before the words came out of my father’s mouth. I shrieked, “No, no!” as if that could shove his words back in. But the words came out: shot, assassin, news bulletin. We turned on the news and saw hundreds of people outside John’s apartment in New York. John Lennon was dead.
I ran outside and down the street. I ran past David’s house, past Julianne’s and Doug’s. I ran and ran with the music in my head. Badlands. Badlands. Badlands.
I got home after midnight. My father came out and sat next to me. “I always thought their voices sounded beautiful together. No matter what else people said about them, they sounded good together.” He put his arm around my shoulder and I wept.
My sister came home the next night. We listened to John’s new album and cried together. “Do you think John’s in heaven?” she asked.
“Nancy, please don’t—”
“My theology professor thinks he could be.”
“How?”
“All time is the present to God. So he can send Jesus to John even now and give him a chance to know the real Jesus. After all, they loved the same things.”
“Yeah. Justice and peace, and the truth.”
“Do you want to pray?”
I hadn’t prayed much lately. I hadn’t prayed with my sister since we were kids. Now I wanted to. We prayed that in the eternal now, Jesus would reveal himself to John. Not the wimpy churchy Jesus, but the Jesus who befriended sinners and fought for justice and peace and truth, like John. The Jesus who gave up his life so John could live forever.
Over the next few months I thought about Jesus more. I had prayed for Jesus to save John, but I was keeping him at arm’s length myself. Why? Because I wanted to live life my way? Look where that had gotten me. I cared more about what my ex-boyfriend, friends, and teachers thought of me. Now they were all gone. Who was I, with no one there to remind me? Whose opinion mattered?
I decided maybe I could stomach The Way. I pulled it out of my closet and read. And read and read. I knew all these verses, but they seemed more real to me now.
For I know the plans I have for you, says the LORD.
They are plans for good and not for evil, to give you a
future and a hope. (Jer. 29:11)
For long ago the LORD had said to Israel: I have loved
you, O my people, with an everlasting love; with
loving-kindness I have drawn you to me. (Jer. 31:3)
Never! Can a mother forget her little child and not
have love for her own son? Yet even if that should be,
I will not forget you. See, I have tattooed your name
upon my palm and ever before me is a picture of
Jerusalem’s walls in ruins. (Isa. 49:15-16)
That was just the Old Testament. That was God the Father speaking. Jesus had so many things to say about how I could have abundant life, how he laid down his life for his friends. And he called me his friend. This time I heard the voice again: God’s still, small voice. “This is what I created you for, Susan. This is your life. Life to the fullest.”
My heart broke, knowing how I’d turned him away. But it broke open too from all that love. God had never left me. Jesus was still knocking on the door.
As a child I loved Jesus the way a girl loves the boy next door. As a teenager, I wandered away. I was an adult now. It was time to make an adult decision; to say “I do” or stop stringing him along. My life stretched out ahead of me. And there was Jesus standing at the top of the road, calling me into a big, abundant life. Would I follow, no turning back?
“Yes, Jesus. I do.”
I didn’t wake up from that with a different molecular structure. But the loneliness and despair left. I’d caught glimpses of God’s presence before: standing in the backyard, looking at the stars, taking Communion. Now I felt it, the way you feel the difference between the desert and the tropics. The air was thick with God, with hope and with possibility.
I knew I was forgiven. But I wanted more than forgiveness. I wanted to make it up to him. My first prayer as a “married” woman went something like this:
Dear God, I know I’ve done everything wrong and you hate me. From now on I’m going to do everything right so you’ll love me. I’m going to read the Bible every day and pray. I’m going to ask for your guidance o
n everything. I’m never ever going to have sex again! Well, until I get married to a real guy.
Amazing what getting a new life does to your energy level. I got into action! I went on the Scarsdale diet and lost fifteen pounds. I looked and felt great, so I kept on going. I got down to ninety-two pounds and lost my menstrual cycle. But anorexia had its perks. It sure made chastity easy: it’s hard to be horny when you’re not ovulating. But who cared? God had a wonderful plan for my life, and Jesus was leading the way. “Come on, Susan! Anything can happen! It’s the eighties!”
We had a great honeymoon, Jesus and I. I wanted to spend all my time with him, soaking up the love I’d pushed away for so long. I listened to Nancy’s Christian rock songs about how Jesus loved me. I sang about how I loved him back. I woke up every morning, and before I had breakfast—which as an anorexic wasn’t much—I spent hours hanging out with God and reading the Bible to find out what he had in store.
Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you
by your name; you are Mine.…Since you were
precious in My sight, you have been honored, and
I have loved you. (Isa. 43:1, 4 NKJV)
The LORD your God is with you, he is mighty to save.
He will take great delight in you, he will quiet you
with his love, he will rejoice over you with singing.
(Zeph. 3:17)
I hadn’t felt that loved since my father scooped me up as a child. When you’re loved, you want to love back. My sister’s pastor called it “discovering God’s will for your life.” I prayed, “Lord, I want to know what your will is for me every moment. I don’t want to do anything, go anywhere, or make any decision without you. Like today: should I eat grapefruit or can I have a muffin? Just show me!” Sometimes it took a long time to get out of the room.
But that’s how it is when you’re in love. Your senses are heightened; everything is loaded with meaning. I’d smell a gardenia and think, Wow, God. That is so “you“! You are such an artist! I’d hear Elvis Costello and think, Yeah, Lord. What is so funny about peace, love, and understanding? I was no longer alone in a beige void, going nowhere. The Maker of the universe had a will for my life. All I had to do was discover it.
Angry Conversations with God Page 6