I booked a week’s work on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Mark and Cheryl came to the taping. Afterward we went out for drinks to celebrate my moment of fabulosity. Mark pointed to a TV starlet at the bar. I turned to look. I didn’t see the actress; I saw the guy she was talking to. It was David.
David, my high school sweetheart. David, who ran after the things of the world. David, who Georgina had forbidden me to see. When he moved here, alone and seeking friendship, I blew him off. Would he return the favor?
I caught his eye and a smile erupted over his face. I’d forgotten how he looked after the braces came off. I ran over and he gave me a hug. He introduced me to the starlet. She was his girlfriend. And he was now a staff writer on the biggest sitcom on TV at the time. Well, of course he was in love and working—he was David. He was thrilled I’d booked the job on Fresh Prince. I was relieved I had something to talk about other than the Oakie church. Before I left, I pulled him aside.
“David, I’m sorry about blowing you off. I was in a bad place.”
“Don’t tell me—was it a church thing?”
“I’m not a part of that church anymore.”
“You know what was the biggest problem I had with you becoming a Christian? You lost all your spontaneity.”
Nothing David said could have been more brutal. Because he was right.
On the ride home, Mark tried to flatter me. “You looked really hot.”
“He looked really miserable,” Cheryl replied.
“No, he looked hot,” Mark said.
“I’m happy for David!” I protested. “He’s in love; he’s writing for [the biggest hit show at the time].”
Mark gasped. “I love that show! That show kicks ass.”
Cheryl interrupted, “How can he be truly happy? He doesn’t know the Lord.”
“Well, I do know the Lord,” Mark replied, “and I’m miserable.”
“This is ridiculous!” I shouted. “Why am I comparing myself to a guy I haven’t seen in ten years?”
“He was your first love, Susan,” Mark said. “He’s an icon.”
He was. I was in awe of David. He was doing what I’d never had the courage to do. He’d found love and success, and he hadn’t waited around for God to direct him. Because he didn’t have a God to call on, he did it himself. Oh, right; I forgot. “The pagan world rushes after these things. But seek ye first…” Seek ye first, seek ye first. That’s all I’d done. “Seek Ye First” was nothing but the anthem of a coward.
I worked harder at the Groundlings. Mark loved my shows. Cheryl was offended by the occasional religious dig or dry-humping dog. I didn’t like them either, but how were these situations any different from things that came up at an average job? Well, okay, minus the dry-humping dog?
Cheryl tried to be more diplomatic. “The show is great. But I know you; you’ve got more depth than a three-minute sketch. I’d love to see you use your gifts directly for the kingdom of God.”
“But what does that look like, Cheryl? I’m not going to do Bible skits.”
I hated her nit-picking. I didn’t judge her for having non-Christian clients. But she had a point. The Groundlings weren’t playing every note I wanted to play. Yes, they were a great place for three-minute sketches. But that’s not what drove me to film school. I was driven by deeper questions about adventure and purpose and meaning. And it was really hard to do that in a three-minute sketch with a wig.
I remembered something Father Michael said to me at the monastery. “The human soul is meant to expand. Things that once captured your heart may no longer be able to contain it.” In the same way Pedro couldn’t contain the whole of my heart, and maybe comedy sketches couldn’t contain the whole of my creativity. Yes, Jesus had called me into a grand adventure. But I’d been suspecting that the adventure was grander than three-minute sketches. Maybe the road was turning. I prayed long and hard about it. “Lord, I’ll go where you lead me. Just point the way. Only, no crappy Bible skits, if at all possible.”
I applied to two exclusive graduate screenwriting programs. I figured I could pack more meaning into a feature-length screenplay than a three-minute sketch. When I got accepted, that felt like a sign where the road was pointing. How else could I interpret it?
“You’re leaving?” one of my Groundlings cast mates protested. “People fight to get into this company. This is how you get discovered! This is how you end up on Saturday Night Live!” Maybe. But I was answering a higher call. You know, from The Lord?
One Sunday morning Pastor Craig started his sermon as he often did—with an illustration from a movie. He’d just seen a black comedy with spiritual overtones that he felt we could learn some lessons from. The Addams Family. My gut dropped to my sneakers.
I chased down Pastor Craig as soon as he left the podium. “The Addams Family?!”
He smiled. “I laughed so hard. Yeah, it was dark, but true too, ya know?”
“Pastor Craig, that’s the film I had the horrifying dream about: the Grim Reaper dream. I thought God was telling me I shouldn’t do it, and you said I needed to listen.”
“Well, maybe watching a film and acting in it are two different things.”
“Maybe? I alienated a casting director who would have kept me working.”
“Suze, God’s ways are not our ways. You gotta wait on God.”
“Yes, Pastor Craig. Everyone in this church talks about waiting on God. And I have. I’ve gotten healed. I’ve healed my inner child; I’ve healed my father wound; I’ve fathered my wounded healer. You know what I haven’t done? I haven’t lived, not outside this church. My non-Christian friends are going after life; they’re not waiting on God. And their lives look a lot better than mine.”
“You know Psalm seventy-three,” he answered. “‘I envied the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.’”
“My friends aren’t arrogant or wicked. But they are working!”
“Well, Suze, I’d rather be on fire for Jesus in the unemployment line than doing some cush job for Satan.”
“So you see a film and it’s funny, but if I act in it, I’m working for Satan?”
“Sorry, bad analogy. I don’t know the answer. But I know God does. Have you told him how you really feel?”
“I just told you. Doesn’t that count?”
Then Pastor Craig told me about a conference at a church a couple of hours away where people were hearing from God, getting healed, “getting their doors blown off, man. You should go. It’s never too late for God to show up.”
I’d had amazing things happen to me at conferences. Just because I had to break up with a guy or miss out on a movie, I shouldn’t harden my heart and miss the gift God had for me. So I humbled my sore-loser ass and prayed: “Lord, I am going to trust you. If you have some wisdom or revelation or healing for me…or even if you just want me to be with you, I will show up.”
So I drove out to the city of Irwindale, a landlocked town an hour east of Los Angeles and home of the largest rock quarry west of Pittsburgh. Brush fires had been burning so the skies were red with smoke. The church was in an industrial park of prefab-concrete warehouses: a plastics manufacturer, a data processing plant, and a church. It felt like Costco for Christ.
I arrived to find a rock band playing. Some bodybuilders stood in front, breaking up blocks of concrete to show the power of Christ to break the bonds of sin. The pastor himself had been a champion wrestler. He looked like the Incredible Hulk, ready to explode out of his own torso. He marched up to the podium, flexed his arms, and shouted to the crowd: “Have you been shredding the Scriptures for Christ?”
The audience whooped it up. A group of women with permed mullets started laughing. Their laughter percolated through the auditorium and didn’t stop. “They’re laughing in the Spirit,” a woman next to me explained. The Lord was bringing “holy laughter” to the room. Other people had been roaring in the Spirit. “You know, like the Lion of Judah. But the Lord isn’t roaring tonight.”
At this point I could have reasoned that, actually, the Lord did not have anything for me here and gone home. But what if I drove those ninety miles and missed the miracle?
Behind me one of the permed-mullet prophetesses got up. “Oh, shamba-rohee-bala!” She spurted some holy freak glossolalia. “I see a gold dust in the air. The Lord is in his temple!” Never mind that it was sunset and we were next to a rock quarry and downwind from a brush fire. She saw gold dust in the air from the Lord. Well, I’d thought I’d heard from God in dreams. I could cut her some slack. But then someone else stood up and gasped, “There’s gold dust on my hand. Shamba-rohee-bala!” People shouted; laughter rippled through the crowd like a stadium wave.
Then a man stood up and screamed, “My tooth filling, my tooth filling! The Lord turned my silver tooth filling into gold!” The warehouse went nuts. People came forward claiming that their silver fillings had turned into gold too. Everyone was buying it. Everyone except me.
Once again I had the opportunity to leave. Instead I went to speak to the steroid pastor. He kept one eye on the crowd as we spoke. I’d seen this kind of pastor before—always in front of a crowd, they never quite grasp the concept of a one-on-one conversation.
“Pastor, I know God can do whatever he wants,” I began. “I came here because I believe that, and I want whatever God wants to give me. But the laughing and the gold teeth—” How to say it gracefully? “They don’t feel authentic to me.”
He sneered and glanced out at the crowd as if his mic were still on. “Well, how do you explain the silver fillings turning into gold? Unless it was the Lord?”
“If it was the Lord, why didn’t he turn the silver fillings into tooth?”
“Can I pray for you, sister?” Now I did want to leave, but Roidhead put his pork-loin hand on my shoulder and started in. “Lord, we just come before you. And, Lord, I just pray for my sister. I just pray, Lord, that you would convict her of her sin of pride and of arrogance; convict her of her Jezebel spirit. Silence the demon of unbelief in her, Lord.…”
There it was again, that paralyzing dread that kept me from leaving. I thought of the guy at the high school dance who grabbed me and French-kissed me. Only now it was some jerk with his fist on my rotator cuff. When he finished, I yanked away, scurried out of the warehouse to the parking lot, got into my car, got onto the freeway, rolled up my windows, turned the radio to K-ROCK full blast, and screamed. “GET AWAY FROM ME, GOD! DON’T TOUCH ME!” I was trembling. “I HATE YOU, GOD. YOU AND ALL OF YOUR RAPIST SIDESHOW FREAK FRIENDS. GET YOUR HANDS OFF OF ME! GET OUT OF MY LIFE!”
I don’t know how I made it back those ninety miles on the return trip. It was like driving home after a date rape. And I had been violated; not merely by the people of God, but by the God of those people. It was God to whom I had prayed, God to whom I had offered my vulnerable heart. It was God who led me into that dark, evil place.
Mark was distraught. “Oh, Susan, it’s damaged people who hurt you, not God.”
“But God keeps leading me to them! Why are God’s people such freaks?”
“Honey, I worked in a gay bar for six years. All the world’s a freak show.”
“If the church isn’t any healthier than the world, why bother?”
“Our church is healthy,” Mark offered. “Considering we’re all emotionally tortured artists.”
Maybe there were healthy churches out there. My sister went to a Presbyterian church of mostly married accountants and teachers and soccer moms. They weren’t artists. Was it because I was a creative artist that I ended up at bizarre churches? No, the Roidheads and mullet girls weren’t artists…unless there was some kind of artistry involved in making up that crap and believing it.
Maybe I had Stockholm syndrome. I’d been held hostage too long by wimpy Lutherans, parroting Pentecostals, fascist counselors, and Rock ’n’ Roll Slackers. I blew off David’s friendship and Pedro’s love; I turned down movies and abandoned a career-making comedy troupe. For what? To wait on God? To honor the Lord with wild animal noises and gold teeth and Roidheads? Well, not anymore. I’d had enough. Yes, Jesus loved me. That just made the betrayal all the worse. If this was a marriage between God and me, this was the moment I walked out.
A month later, three of my cast mates from the Groundlings were hired onto Saturday Night Live.
Rudy put down his note pad and rubbed his eyes.
Rudy: You know I was a pastor? I was in that denomination. I was at that conference.
Susan: With the gold fillings and the animal noises?
Rudy: (Nodding) So many well-meaning people got caught up in it. I screamed as loud as you did, Susan. All I lost was my job. A lot of those people lost their faith.
Susan: How do these wackos end up speaking in God’s name? Why does God allow it?
Rudy: The real question is, why do we allow it? I think we allow it because we’re so hungry for God, we’re willing to do anything to experience him. It’s not just fringe Christians. Islam has the whirling dervishes; Hindus chant mantras trying to reach nirvana.
Susan: At least Hindus get the groovy yoga pants. We’ve got the permed mullets.
Rudy: Hunger for God is part of the human condition.
Susan: Is insanity part of the religious condition?
Rudy: Tell me why you chose those wacky churches.
Susan: I went to the Pentecostal church because I didn’t want to vomit myself into a coffin. I went to the Rock ’n’ Roll church because I had a hole in my donut. Call me an opportunist, but when you’re terrified and depressed with your head in a toilet, healing is a big draw.
Rudy: Fair enough.
Susan: Look, what happened to me is nothing compared to a real rape or murder or the Holocaust.
Rudy: Is that what you think God would say to you? “It’s not the Holocaust’?
Susan: Maybe. I was so traumatized, I blocked him out. I don’t know if I want to hear what he’d say now either.
Rudy: But you need to. Why don’t you wait a moment and listen?
I sat for a while, but I could hear no words. No answer. No nothing. I picked up Rudy’s Bible and skimmed through the Eighteenth Psalm.
Susan: “In my distress I called to the LORD; I cried to my God for help.…My cry came before him, into his ears. The earth trembled and quaked…because he was angry. Smoke rose from his nostrils.” You see, Rudy, I told you he had a nose. “He reached down from on high and took hold of me.…He brought me out into a spacious place; he rescued me because he delighted in me.”
I closed the Bible.
Susan: Only he didn’t rescue me, Rudy. So I rescued myself.
We sat a while longer in the silence. Finally I thought I heard something. It was the sound of God weeping.
Chapter 10
BOTTOMS UP
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
—“The Hound of Heaven,”BY FRANCIS THOMPSON
FEW BREAKUPS HAPPEN INSTANTANEOUSLY. LET’S SAY A MAN IS caught in adultery: he might plead for forgiveness; he might (rightly) blame his wife for driving him away. Even if she hightails it to Vegas for a quickie divorce, she’s still left with the aftermath: the horror of betrayal, the memories of good times, the gnawing suspicion that she was at fault. She doesn’t walk away clean. Nobody walks away clean.
I could not walk away from God clean. For one thing, I knew I could never “divorce” him. He would always exist, whether I liked him or not. When Mark pressed me, I blamed God for what had happened; but I knew deep down it wasn’t God—it was his church. But how can you live with someone if all his friends a
re psychos? Well, okay, not all of them were. I had Cheryl and Mark. But Cheryl was too enmeshed with the Slacker church. And Mark decided to move back to his native New York to pursue theater.
I gave God another chance. I tried a few “normal” churches that summer: mainline denominations with some theological stability. I ended up at a popular yuppie church because they had a ministry for people in the entertainment business. A group of us headed out to a Labor Day film festival. Once we got there, the leaders fanned out to meet filmmakers and invite them to our condo for a party. That’s when the excrement hit the ventilation system. They started crowbarring the Four Spiritual Laws into whatever conversation they could. I heard one guy say, “Jesus is the master editor because he edits the sin out of our lives.” That was it. I was done with this fundamentalist funhouse.
Still, I couldn’t drown out the Bible verses in my head: “I will never leave you nor forsake you” (Heb. 13:5 NKJV). “I have written your name on the palms of my hands” (Isa. 49:16 NLT). “When you are all alone, when you are walking on the beach and see only one set of footprints, it was I.…” Wait, that wasn’t in the Bible. Anyway. I still believed in the Trinity. I could never “divorce” God and stop believing, but I couldn’t live with him anymore either. Yeah, I loved Jesus, but I just couldn’t stand his friends.
I had spent my adulthood hiding from life by going to church. Now I was going to do what the “pagans” did: run after life instead of waiting on my spiritual ass. I was going to fulfill my longings for purpose and love. All right, that was too lofty. I was going to pursue vocation and romance. Okay, I admit it: I wanted a career and a sex life.
Angry Conversations with God Page 11