PRAISE FOR GOOD APPLE
“With sly humor, ecumenical warmth, and disarming frankness, Elizabeth Passarella builds bridges between red and blue and North and South. Good Apple makes a strong case for New York City as the kingdom of God—and for handwritten thank-you notes.”
—ADA CALHOUN, AUTHOR OF ST. MARKS IS DEAD, WEDDING TOASTS I’LL NEVER GIVE, AND WHY WE CAN’T SLEEP
“I, a total heathen, love this book. Elizabeth Passarella understands that none of us is as simple as any one of our labels might suggest. Not religious? Not a Southerner or a New Yorker? All the more reason to read Good Apple.”
—MARY LAURA PHILPOTT, AUTHOR OF I MISS YOU WHEN I BLINK
“Elizabeth Passarella is a terrible Christian woman of low breeding and ill repute, which is exactly why you should read this book. Those are my favorite kinds of authors!”
—HARRISON SCOTT KEY, AUTHOR OF WORLD’S LARGEST MAN AND CONGRATULATIONS, WHO ARE YOU AGAIN?
“With her wit, warmth, and hilarious transparency, Elizabeth Passarella shows us that Southerners, with their gentility, and New Yorkers, with their grit, both have hearts wide open to the world. Plus, I inherently trust anyone who believes in church clothes, can sing every word of El Shaddai, and professes spiritual truths using the Radio City Rockettes. Y’all are going to love Elizabeth and this book.”
—SARAH STEWART HOLLAND, COHOST OF THE PANTSUIT POLITICS PODCAST AND COAUTHOR OF I THINK YOU’RE WRONG (BUT I’M LISTENING): A GUIDE TO GRACE-FILLED POLITICAL CONVERSATIONS
“In the comedic confounded-believer tradition of Anne Lamott, Elizabeth Passarella redefines ‘good faith’ for me—a Jewish, atheist, pro-choice New Yorker. I laughed at all her jokes, dog-eared all my favorite pages, admired her fearlessness, and felt abiding curiosity about her beliefs. She’s building a bridge to get us all to the same human side of things—and to save us there.”
—CATHERINE NEWMAN, AUTHOR OF HOW TO BE A PERSON AND CATASTROPHIC HAPPINESS
Good Apple
© 2021 by Elizabeth Passarella
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Scripture quotations taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.Zondervan.com. The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.®
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Passarella, Elizabeth, 1976- author.
Title: Good apple : tales of a southern evangelical in New York / Elizabeth Passarella.
Description: Nashville : Thomas Nelson, 2020. | Summary: “A wickedly smart, utterly hilarious debut from a Southern Living columnist--mother of three, Southerner married to a New Yorker, evangelical Christian, and Democrat--about the absurdity, chaos, and strange sacredness of her life on Manhattan’s Upper West Side”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020020611 (print) | LCCN 2020020612 (ebook) | ISBN 9781400218578 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781400218820 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Passarella, Elizabeth, 1976- | Christian biography--New York. Classification: LCC BR1725.P2728 A3 2020 print) | LCC BR1725. P2728 (ebook) | DDC 277.47/1083092--dc23
Epub Edition November 2020 9781400218820
Printed in the United States of America
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For my dad
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Virgin Surprise
Chapter 2: How I Became a Democrat: Part 1
Chapter 3: The Breakup
Chapter 4: Naked Family
Chapter 5: Fighting Outside
Chapter 6: Lions
Chapter 7: How I Became a Democrat: Part 2
Chapter 8: Let’s Talk about Miscarriages
Chapter 9: 1,241 Square Feet
Chapter 10: To All the Jews I’ve Loved
Chapter 11: Songs of Deliverance
Chapter 12: El Shaddai, El Shaddai
Chapter 13: Southern Manners: An Identity Crisis
Chapter 14: To My Work Colleagues, Re: November 9, 2016
Chapter 15: You Get What You Get, and (Over the Course of a Few Years and the Persistent Work of the Holy Spirit) You Don’t Get Upset
Chapter 16: There was a Rat in My Bedroom, and Then I Got Stuck in an Elevator
Chapter 17: The Devil Works Overtime on Sunday Mornings
Chapter 18: Let There Be Ice
Chapter 19: Un-Comfort Zone
Chapter 20: They Got Lost and Were Never Seen Again
Chapter 21: Jesus and the Radio City Rockettes
Acknowledgments
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
THE THING ABOUT BEING AN EVANGELICAL Christian and also a Southerner living in New York City, raising your children in an apartment where one of them sleeps in a closet, is that there are a lot of people in your life to disappoint.
This is a shame, because I spend an inordinate amount of my time trying to get everyone on my side.
I want my mother to be proud of the life I’ve built, even though it looks so different from what she imagined for me. She is, on most days, proud of me—I truly believe that—but then a friend will casually ask her if I still live in New York, and where in the world am I going to put that third baby I just had; or I’ll remind her, again, that my children remain in school until the end of June, when most children in the South are returning from a month at sleepaway camp, and she’ll shake her head and start to chew the inside of her cheek. My dad was always an easier sell, something I attribute to the fact that his ancestors came through Ellis Island and lived for a stint on the Lower East Side before migrating south. He was grateful I landed somewhere with decent bagels and pastrami. (He was Jewish. We’ll get to that.) But even so, no matter how much they love having a free place to stay in the city me, they are still disappointed. They are disappointed because I’m a Democrat.
Almost all of my friends in New York are very happy I’m a Democrat, even if I’m kind of a baby, centrist Democrat, which I am. There are some that are even okay with the fact that I go to church every Sunday. But toss out a word like evangelical, especially these days, and you will render people speechless. Which is why, after telling people in New York the subtitle of this book, I immediately start my song and dance about being aligned with them politically, the Democrat being a spoonful of sugar for the Jesus.
It’s dicey.
There may be some of you—most of you—reading this who think you can’t be both an evangelical Christian and a Democrat or be fervently in love with God and also New York City, which, by some accounts, is being destroyed (along with
the state of California, of course) by liberal nutjobs. I wrote this book for you too. I wrote the book for all of you—not to get everyone on my side, although nothing would make me happier, but to give you a perspective you may not have. From someone living in both worlds.
Before we get into the details of how I ended up in this position, however, it’s important for me to speak directly to some of you.
To those who are still hung up on the evangelical business and can’t really get past it: I understand. I grew up in a church that had “evangelical” in its name, and I still didn’t fully get what the word meant until recently. And the word has become more culturally charged in the past decade or so, which is why many Christians who, technically, are evangelical never say the word. Here’s how I—and others I’ve read—think of it: There are little-e evangelicals and Big-E Evangelicals. The first term, which is what I’m talking about, is a theological term. Little-e evangelicals believe in the authority of the whole Bible (not just à la carte parts of it), that Jesus is the Son of God, born of a virgin, who died and rose from the dead, and that believers have become believers through a life-changing encounter with God. Big-E Evangelical is a largely white, Republican voting bloc of people who, in my opinion, probably place their identities in their political beliefs more than in their religious ones. Little-e evangelicals are simply Christians who adhere to a few core theological beliefs. And some of us care about a lot of the same (liberal!) social issues that you do. The way society has coopted evangelical as a political term has made things extremely messy, to the point that the word has become radioactive. I’m not attempting to revive it or take it back from the Republicans, exactly. I’d even support a movement where we decide on a new designation, something completely innocuous, like triangle Christians or corduroy Christians. But no matter what you call us, we are around. There are evangelical Presbyterians, evangelical Baptists, and evangelical Anglicans. Some of us are standing beside you at protests. We are passionate about racial justice and public schools and fighting homelessness.
To those of you who are Christians in the South or Midwest and think I’ve been brainwashed by the coastal elite: well, my husband did go to Harvard, so it’s entirely possible. But my hope is that, through humor and persuasive editorializing that I learned in journalism school (at a southern state university, calm down), I can soften your view of liberal urbanites. So many of us live in cities precisely because we feel called, and because we see cities as beautifully reflecting the kingdom of God. Plus, if you’re weary of reading Christian Living books where women talk about their failures in sonnet form and gloss right over the ugly sin part, please know that I once threw a remote control at my husband’s head. Chapter five is devoted to my penchant for fighting outside, on street corners.
To those who think I’m making myself out to be some sort of unicorn, when in fact there are a lot of urban, Christian Democrats out there, and I really should look around and stop acting like I’m special: You’re right! I know! And there are a lot of Christian Republicans who also care about racial justice and public schools and fighting homelessness and are as wary of the word evangelical as I am. I wrote this book for all of us, so that we know we’re not alone.
Whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican, Evangelical or evangelical or none of the above, I wrote this book mainly to make you laugh. And cry (good cry!). And realize that, in the midst of marriage or trying to get a job or parenting or trying to grow up and figure out who you are already, we have more in common than not. Some of you are mothers and churchgoers and part-time employees. You will see yourself here. Some of you are mothers and agnostics and women’s marchers and CEOs. You will see yourself here. Some of you are single and dating and wondering if your mother is going to be super disappointed if you stay in New York and marry that guy. You will see yourself here. (And don’t worry. It all works out.)
I’ve learned that I can’t please everyone. I’ll be a disappointment sooner or later, maybe even to you. But I’m not a disappointment to God, and knowing that gives me the confidence to admit all of these embarrassing details publicly. Trust me, it’ll be fun.
ONE
THE VIRGIN SURPRISE
WHEN I WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL, I spent a lot of time at youth group at a Methodist church. I wasn’t Methodist, and it wasn’t the church I went to on Sunday mornings. But it was the most popular youth group with my friends and the boys we hung around, and it is where, one school night in front of those friends and boys and the goofy twentysomething youth director, crammed into a carpeted room somewhere in the fellowship hall, I sobbed because I was afraid I wouldn’t get to have sex before the rapture.
Now, I didn’t know the first thing about sex. In fact, I thought much too late into adolescence that sex happened at night (always) and took all night, meaning if you decided to have sex, you were forgoing sleep. It was one or the other. And I didn’t know much about the rapture either. My Sunday school teachers talked about it a lot, although I’ve heard from some more theologically sophisticated friends that the version of the rapture that I learned as a kid—Jesus returning as saved souls are beamed to heaven with a war between good and evil raging on earth—may not be exactly what the Bible depicts. The precise events of the end times are hard for us laypeople to decipher, because the book of Revelation seems to have been written by a disciple on mushrooms. But what I do understand is that Jesus’ return will usher in a new heaven and a new earth: we get both, like a two-for-one deal. Eternity won’t be all clouds and angels. It will be cities and families and jobs, just perfect ones, without sin. No cancer, no loneliness, no heartburn. I think. Again, I’ve read the Bible in its entirety, and I’m still mystified. What I did know for certain in 1992 was that I did not want all of that to go down before I’d done sex all night.
Of all the concerns a fifteen-year-old might have about Jesus’ return, mine was pretty memorable. Another youth pastor, the boss of the guy who was in the room at the time, even brought it up many years later when I saw him at a Christmas party (at that point, I’d had sex—doesn’t take all night—and two children, so I had chilled out). Why was I so concerned I’d miss something that I didn’t know anything about? I remember the crying, specifically, how I couldn’t keep it from happening. I was half laughing, too, knowing I sounded insane, but also red-faced and genuinely choked up, wondering if someone was going to give me a satisfying answer. In a room full of virgin youth group kids and one pastor who was surely thinking, This is above my pay grade, it was tough sledding, and I’m guessing that one of my girlfriends took me into the bathroom and told me to get a grip. The real answer is that if there’s no more sadness in the new heaven and earth, then there’s probably no existential regret over having never lost your virginity. But it was years later that I realized the thing I was really despairing about was missing out on a husband. The two went hand in hand. Sex was designed by God for marriage. I knew I wasn’t going to have sex until I was married, and I certainly didn’t want Jesus showing up before a boy loved me.
Boys didn’t really love me in high school. Even though I had a group of nice, funny, good-looking guy friends, none of them were angling to make out with me on a deserted football field or underwater in the pool in his backyard (I had very specific kissing fantasies). I had my first kiss with my first boyfriend after junior prom when I was seventeen. Seventeen. We once made out for an hour in a cornfield on a friend’s family farm, which wasn’t underwater, but it felt extremely romantic at the time. That all ended the following year when my boyfriend went to college, started dating another girl, and didn’t tell me about it until I showed up to visit him. Then I didn’t kiss anyone else until my junior year of college. There was a quote, or more like a short letter, that circulated among Christian high school girls I knew, called the “Ultimate Relationship.” It was like the “Footprints in the Sand” story. Do you know that one? Where the writer is deceased and in heaven, talking to God, noting the two sets of footprints in the sand as he walks throu
gh life, God by his side, and then during the hard times, there’s only one set. The writer accuses God of abandoning him in his time of need, and God answers, “It was then that I carried you.” Chills. Every time. Kickers like that were catnip to me. In the “Ultimate Relationship,” God is writing to me, a girl who desperately wants a boy to like her and cries in front of dozens of teenagers at youth group because she might not find love before the second coming of Christ. God talks about a Great Love, about being cherished and adored, full-on, final-scene-in-Sixteen-Candles stuff. And then, the kicker: God is that Great Love. You already have it. Jesus is your boyfriend. I kept that piece of paper folded in my teal, faux-leather-bound Bible for years and years, and as cheesy and dated as that little inspirational missive was, the general idea holds up. If I wasn’t putting God first in my life and finding my value in the fact that he loved me, I would be putting pressure on a human man to meet a need he couldn’t. You know, God-shaped hole and all. The message is actually kind of feminist, if you ignore some of the pandering language (it calls you “dear one”): I could be fully confident in my awesomeness because God made me in his image and loved me enough to die for me, even if I were the only person on earth. In other words, I don’t need a man to make me feel worthy. Right? Right?! Of course, I’m writing that in 2020, a wise forty-three-year-old with hindsight. Holy crap did I want a man to make me feel worthy in 1995.
. . .
My mom felt bad for me. You have to understand, my mother was a beauty queen in her youth. Growing up in Ripley, Mississippi, she was crowned Miss Tippah County and went to the Miss Mississippi pageant, one step below Miss America. She was beautiful and pleasant and didn’t talk about sex in front of her youth group friends. Plenty of men wanted to date her. So I honestly think she was perplexed by my sister and me, who seemed pretty enough if we’d “just put on a little lipstick” but who never got a critical mass of male attention. My sister had more self-confidence than I did. I think she called bull on the juvenile high school social scene and knew college was where it’s at, which turned out to be true; she met her husband freshman year. I was the one sobbing on the pink shag carpeting of my bedroom because a boy I liked ended up kissing my best friend. My mother would kneel by my bed and pray with me every night, asking God for patience and contentment, praying that I wouldn’t be bitter toward my best friend. It must have been exhausting. Eventually she just started buying me books. One of them was called I Kissed Dating Goodbye, and it was written by a man—yes, a man, who, in my world, held all the power to make the dating happen in the first place, so how nice for you to have the choice to kiss dating goodbye, you jerk. The cover showed a guy, his face turned down and obscured, tipping a black fedora. As if to say, “And a good day to you, dating!” Ugh.* The other book I remember reading in college, during a particularly fallow and depressing time, was Quest for Love by Elisabeth Elliot. Elisabeth Elliot wrote more than twenty books about Christianity before she died in 2015, but I remember her most as the voice behind a radio program my mother would listen to called Gateway to Joy, where she’d open with “You are loved with an everlasting love.” She was strong and smart and reassuring. Her first husband was killed by a tribe in Ecuador while he was a missionary, and after his death, she moved there—not yet thirty years old and with her infant daughter—to live with the tribe, which eventually welcomed her, and continued to preach the gospel to them. That’s a powerful female role model. But you wouldn’t necessarily think that, reading Quest for Love. It’s the kind of book that people point to as Exhibit A for traditional Christians being sexist. Each chapter in the book is a story about frustrations with dating and marriage, how a woman pursuing a man ended in flames, how physical intimacy led to disaster. There were uplifting stories about honorable young men asking a father’s permission to date his daughter and sweeping her off her feet in a first kiss that came after a marriage proposal (I loved those). In her defense, Elisabeth Elliot was of a different time. But still, when I read modern-day advice columns or listen to single coworkers talking next to me in the office, the gripes are things like, “We’re hanging out as friends, but I don’t know what the status is,” or, “We’ve been living together for three years and he still won’t talk to me about marriage.” And I’m going to say it: the answers, the truth, aren’t far-off from what Elisabeth Elliot would have told these women. It came wrapped in a quaint and old-fashioned package, but the message was the same: stop wasting your time with that clown and hold out for someone who respects you.
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