If God wants to burn up everything useless in my life, amen to that. But I want to know whether or not this sorrow has an end. Do these longings in my heart for love and purpose mean anything? I say yes. Is my need for God just misplaced longing that has no place to be satisfied? I say no. The body thirsts because it needs water and water exists. The soul longs for purpose because it needs it, and because it exists. And I wouldn’t long for God if he didn’t exist. I am taking this personally because I am personal. And I don’t think that an impersonal God could create humans to be personal. So I’m taking this personally from a personal God.
A sixteenth-century monk wrote a treatise called Dark Night of the Soul. When we first know God, he lavishes us with blessings and signs of his love, the way you do with your children when they’re small. But God wants us to grow up. So he removes his blessings. The sense of his presence. And even signs of love. Because he wants us to trust when we can’t see, to believe we’re loved even if we can’t feel it, to walk by faith and not by sight. And maybe he wants me to love him for himself, not for what I can get out of him.
Well, if that’s where I am, then okay. I can be here. I’m in my own Dark Night of the Soul. And I’m just waiting for my sun to come up.
Andrea was her usual deadpan brilliant. After the show, her friends clustered around her. Then one broke away to speak to me. “I studied the Torah,” her friend said. “If there was a group that talked about the things you did, I’d go there.”
Terrie hugged me and said I was brave. Brave as in I was brave to make a fool of myself? I noticed a man loitering behind her. He waited for Terrie to leave. “When I was growing up, my parents didn’t believe in anything. I worked a paper route just to pay my own way to church camp. I loved camp. I loved Jesus. So, I’m gay; I have a partner. I haven’t been to church in years. But…I miss Jesus, you know?”
“Yeah. I do know.”
He grabbed me in a hug and left quickly.
I dragged myself to church that Sunday. I had to show up now and then since I worked at the church office. The worship band played their usual 7/11 songs (seven words repeated eleven times). People raised their hands in bliss or triumph. What did they feel that I didn’t? What did they know that I didn’t? I sat down in protest. And then some guy walked up to the piano and started playing “Finlandia,” one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written. A singer came forward and sang “Be Still, My Soul,” a hymn I’d known since childhood:
Be still, my soul; the Lord is on thy side. Bear patiently the cross of grief or pain. Leave to thy God to order and provide; In every change, He faithful will remain. Be still, my soul: thy best, thy heavenly Friend Through stormy ways leads to a joyful end.
Chapter 17
NOBODY’S FAULT BUT MY OWN
THERE’S SOMETHING TO BE SAIND ABOUT THE DULL ROUTINE OF a real job: consistency. I counted the number of beds I had slept in the previous year: from Mom’s house to my old house in New York, house-sits and cat-sits, trips to New York for weddings, pull-out couches I slept on at friends’ houses because I was too distraught to be alone. Thirteen beds in total. So when Frank offered me the job, I said yes, found a long-term sublet, and went to the same job every weekday.
Maybe Frank was pompous, but he was honest and funny, and he was kind to me. He always took time to listen to my thoughts about God that would give Martha an aneurism. At least he listened when he was in the office, which wasn’t a lot. Frank said he worked better from home.
Micah snickered. “His home office is a cigar bar.”
“I guess Calvinists don’t have a problem with tobacco,” I replied.
“But cards are of the devil,” Travis piped in. “I read it in Hermeneutics.“
When your life has been overturned, doing mind-numbing tasks like updating a database and ordering toner isn’t such a bad thing. In fact, it was a blessing. When I was in high school, my whole house was a lab test for entropy. My father left newspapers in piles; his optometric cards sat on the dining room hearth for months on end. The pantry was the worst: Dad never looked for the open box of Raisin Bran, but instead ripped open the new box in the front. I could always find four half-eaten boxes collecting weevil moths. So I went on cleaning rampages: tossing newspapers, organizing soup, and consolidating cereal. At least something in the house had some order.
When I took the job at the office, I came in with a great skill set: Clutter Terminator. I updated the membership database. I cleaned out filing cabinets and culled visitor cards from churches Frank had pastored in the 1980s. I threw away old baptismal forms and Bible study aids; I organized half-used boxes of return-address labels. I defragged computers.
“Do we really need dot matrix paper?” I asked Dwight. “Thermal fax paper? Why do we have twenty cassettes of every sermon Frank has preached since he was in seminary? People don’t use cassettes. They use CDs and MP3s.”
Dwight was nearly seventy. I was talking another language.
“How about we keep two copies of each sermon? On CD.”
“You’re the boss,” Dwight nodded.
Frank was stunned the next time he came in. The cardboard boxes were off the floor. His books were alphabetized. The supply room was in order. “I know you love to write,” Frank marveled, “but you’ve got a gift. The spiritual gift of church office management.”
“Lord, please don’t make me an office manager for the rest of my life,” I replied.
“Don’t say that too loud, Susan. God might hear you.”
“He may hear, but he won’t answer.”
I hadn’t been “plugged in” at a church since the Gold Teeth debacle. My New York church boasted a thousand attendees every week; it was easy to slip in and out. Now I was involved with a church on a daily basis—a church I had initially run from, screaming, “Orthopraxy?”
“Orthopraxy means ‘right doing,’” Micah explained. “As opposed to orthodoxy: right thinking. It’s better to do the right thing than to merely think the right thing.”
“Well, that’s not so bad,” I replied.
I was delighted that no one in the office was a fan of Jesus jargon: the insider clichés of church people. In fact, we compiled a list of Forbidden Words we wanted banned from the office: from old-school “washed in the blood” to the more recent clichés of postmodern Christians: relevant, authentic, and transparent.
“Unpack,” Micah called to me from his office. “Let’s ‘unpack’ this sermon. Hold on while I get my Samsonite.”
“I hate ‘doing life together.’” I laughed. “Since when does one do life? Doesn’t one live life?”
“‘Life-on-life’ is worse than ‘doing life,’” Travis offered.
“What does that even mean?” I asked. “Can you use it in a sentence?”
“‘I’m having an authentic, transparent, life-on-life experience within my spiritual community.’ Meaning, I’ve got friends.”
“‘Engaging the culture,’” Dwight groaned, chewing the words with his thick Pittsburgh accent. “If I hear engaaaaging the KULL-churr one more time, I’m going to scream!”
For a seventy-two-year-old guy, Dwight was awesome. In fact they all were. Not everyone had drunk the Kool-Aid. It was a relief to discover that. And it was a relief to discover some mature, jargon-free friends at the church, like Michael, Brad, and Katie. We were sitting together one Communion Sunday when Frank was in a mood to chew scenery.
“Communion is an orgasmic experience of the love of Christ!” Frank bellowed.
“Oh no he di-nt,” I muttered.
“Oh yes he di-id,” Michael replied.
“I’m here for the people,” Brad said over lunch. “Frank is a freak.”
“You said Frank was brilliant,” Katie protested.
“He is. When he’s not a freak. ‘Orgasmic’? They hadn’t even dismissed the kids yet.”
“Come on,” Katie pleaded. “He’s just a guy.”
That was comforting to hear. Frank wasn’t God’s mouthpi
ece or Satan’s emissary. He was just a human being, capable of great insight and great blunders. He was just a guy. At the same time, maybe all of my spiritual experiences at church could be summed up as coming from just a bunch of guys. Did any of it come from God, or were we all just guys shooting in the dark? I was willing to consider God had been involved. But I wasn’t ready to say yes. He still wasn’t speaking to me.
By the fall of 2004, I had been living in the same place, working a steady job, and counseling with Rudy for over a year. And it showed in my life. I had come to accept that for now I was a church secretary who wrote on the side. I accepted that I needed to get my own place and signed a lease on a studio apartment over a garage. Now I wished I’d accepted my mother’s Revere Ware when she was cleaning out her house.
I must have turned a corner on my grief with Jack, because one afternoon I was walking out of a coffee shop and there he was. Jack, in Los Angeles! He said he was in LA to visit friends. A few days later we had lunch. We caught up; we had a few laughs, some awkward silence too. I took the opportunity to apologize.
“I’m sorry. I tried to make you into somebody you weren’t.”
“It’s okay,” Jack replied. “I did that too.”
“You’re a good man, Jack.”
“So are you. I mean, you’re a good woman.” Jack laughed, embarrassed.
I loved that Jack wasn’t afraid to be vulnerable and embarrassed. He really was a good man. Yet I was pierced by the loneliness of watching his life continue without me. We hugged and said good-bye. I got into my car and wept.
I thought I was over him! So why did my heart still rip? Why did I still feel this sorrow? I got this strange sensation that God was with me. And he was angry. He was very angry—not at me and not at Jack. God was angry at the pain I was going through. I wondered if that was why God hated sin, because of the destruction it caused. For a moment I felt awe for a God who loved me enough to hate the things that hurt me without hating me for causing them. But as soon as I tried to grasp the moment, it was gone.
I finally began to accept the fact that I might never make a living as an actor again. Yes, it sucked when Jeannie was writing with her husband, Todd was raking it in with commercials, and Bill and David had just won an Emmy. I was proud of them. I willed myself to accept the way things were. In fact, I distinctly remember leaving the office one afternoon and praying to the God who still had not spoken: “As survival jobs go, this is a great job. Thank you for the stability, a paycheck, friends, and the fact that I live walking distance of a Trader Joe’s. Thank you, Lord. You really are good to me.”
Not two days afterward, I was standing in a supermarket checkout and noticed the cover of TV Guide. There on the front cover was an actor who’d been in the failed TV pilot back in New York with King Baby, now starring in a new sitcom. And two nights later I was watching Law&Order and saw an actress who’d been in that pilot also! She had a recurring role on L& now. They were probably grooming her to be the police chief on Law&Order: Spanish Harlem.
I marched into Rudy’s office, my placid acceptance shot out by a TV Guide.
Susan: I’m in some kind of shooting gallery game. God is picking off everyone around me for success. Stand closer. Maybe you’ll become the next Dr. Phil.
Rudy: I thought you said you were grateful for your job.
Susan: I was.
Rudy: Susan, you’re angry because God didn’t give you what you wanted.
Susan: What’s so wrong with what I wanted? Isn’t it okay to want?
Rudy: God doesn’t always give us what we want. If a child asks her parents for candy—
Susan: CANDY? I am not asking for candy! The thing I loved to do has vanished at a stage in my life when it feels impossible to reinvent myself. You call that candy? How dare you!
A tense silence followed.
Rudy: I’m sorry, Susan. That was wrong for me to say.
Susan: It’s all right. You’re just a guy.
Rudy: Yeah. I’m just a guy.
Rudy closed his file.
Rudy: I loved being a pastor. I loved preaching. I loved encouraging people. The Gold Teeth debacle destroyed that dream for me. It took years to get over it. I like being a therapist. But I loved being a pastor. Not all of my longings will be fulfilled this side of heaven.
Susan: I don’t want to wait for heaven. I want to live now.
Rudy: So do the people in Darfur. But heaven may be the only hope they have right now. If your theology can’t work in Darfur, it can’t work anywhere.
Rudy’s boneheaded remark left me feeling self-righteous. Candy?! Give me a massive break. If my life’s dream was some puff pastry, how come God was passing it out to all of my friends and not to me? Ridiculous.
Sophie had another perspective. “Go read Step Two.” She smirked. I hated when she acted like she knew everything. Just because she’d been sober for fifteen years…What a know-it-all. I read Step Two. It said that I was angry because God didn’t “give me the life I had specified.” I hadn’t asked what God’s will was, but rather had told him what it should be.
Well, that was just wrong. I had spent countless hours on the couch, praying for God’s will. I asked his will for my breakfast! (Okay, so that was excessive.) And I was excessive in the other direction, drinking too much and sleeping with guys. Yes, God helped me heal and blessed me when I was in New York, and yes, I said, “I’ve got it covered,” and put Jack’s will above God’s. But I was ready to give that up before 9/11. I moved back to LA to help my mom, didn’t I? Oh, all right! I also came back to revive my career. What’s so bad about that? And God repaid my (relatively) good behavior by torching everything?!
Rudy: You want God to apologize.
Susan: Yes, I do! I want him to apologize for tricking me into thinking my dreams meant something. And if he’s my husband, he owes me more than an apology. He owes me spousal support. But he’s not even here for the court hearing!
I’d finally uttered the words that had been lurking under my tongue all these months. They didn’t sound right; they sounded ugly.
Susan: An apology would be nice.
Rudy: So basically you think you know more than God does.
Susan: I know more about what it feels like to live in my skin!
Rudy: Susan, what if your mind is sharper than God’s? What if your heart is purer than God’s? Take that thought to its logical conclusion. Imagine what the world would look like if we knew more than our Creator. Do you really want to live in that universe?
Susan: No, I’m not saying that.
Rudy: But you are. That’s the logical end of your belief. If you know more than God, then God knows less than you do. God is dumber than you; he’s stingier than you; he’s more sinful than you.
Susan: God is not sinful.
Rudy: But if God owes you an apology, then he screwed up. You’re better than he is.
Susan: But I’m not.
Rudy: Then what are you doing telling God how to do his job?
I drove home smarting from Rudy’s suggestion that I thought I was the greatest being in the universe. I knew God was smarter and holier and more loving than I was. And how could Sophie suggest I was angry at God because he had not granted the life I had demanded?
Had I sought God’s will? At times I had, in moments of gratitude or naïveté. Back when I was young and silly, when I thought the answers to all of my questions were Yes and Amen. I joined Jesus because he promised me a big life, filled with adventure and meaning. Hadn’t I obeyed Georgina because I wanted life to go well? Hadn’t I sought healing so I could be happy? Even when I gingerly returned to God, hadn’t I kept him at a safe distance? When I sought his will, hadn’t it been for the promise of a good life? From the moment I prayed that first prayer, there had been a stipulation: “No Bible skits.” I was still putting riders and stipulations on every agreement with God: Deliver to me the life I specify.
Come on, I defended myself. Who would love someone who offered a life of
disappointment and hardship? Sure, people made wedding vows: for better or worse, for richer or poorer. But what sane person would knowingly sign up just for the worse, the poorer, the sicker, the sadder? Who on earth would do that? Come on. Who?
A list of heroes and saints, real and fictional, came to my mind: Frodo Baggins, William Wallace, Dorothy Day, Mother Teresa. Mom. Each was dogged by pain and suffering. They fought evil without, doubt within. Some of them died, but I loved them for their courage. And then there was Jesus, who did not consider his equality with God something to hold on to tightfistedly (the way I hung on to my promises) but emptied himself, became a servant, was stripped, filleted, and hung on a cross to die a horrifying death.
Why had they done it? For the goodie bag? For the glory? No. For the worse, the poorer, in sickness until death. For the love. Even my distorted God said it early on in counseling. He didn’t love me because I was good. (And I wasn’t.) He loved me because he is Love.
I saw now all too clearly why I had married God: for the power and the glory. For the money. I was a spiritual gold digger. It is a chilling moment when your soul is laid bare in front of God: the real God who is wiser and fairer, more loving, and, yes, holier than thou. He owed me no apology. I thought of Job’s words: “I spoke of things I did not understand.…I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes” (Job 42:3, 6).
Rudy: It’s a horrifying gift to see yourself as you really are.
Susan: I got the horrifying part. What’s the gift?
Rudy: You know how much God loves you. Not because you’re good, but because you’re his. And now you know what you need to change.
Susan: I’ve got a lot of things to change, all right. Like, I’ve got to stop blaming the church. Take my pastor, for instance: he’s brilliant, sincere, and messed up. But he’s just a guy. Maybe that’s what church really is: just a bunch of guys, trying to figure it out together.
Angry Conversations with God Page 19