Angry Conversations with God (22 page)

Jack reminded me so much of Pedro: quiet, intelligent, and literate. He loved words. He loved good stories. He loved sad stories
most, maybe because his father died when he was a child. But that tragedy made Jack human and vulnerable. He’d come to see
the world much the same way I had: broken, beautiful, and hopeful all at the same time.

There was another way Jack was just like Pedro. “Sure, I believe in Jesus and God,” Jack said. “I just don’t get anything
out of church.” I understood that: I didn’t get much out of church for a while either. So many of my friends had come to faith
through a back door. I returned to God through the back door of the 12 steps. Just because Jack didn’t get anything out of
church now didn’t mean he never would.

“Danny was just like that,” Gwen said when I told her. “But he came around. Give Jack some time.” I had been too afraid to
give Pedro time. Now I had a chance to do better with Jack. I gave him my entire summer. One afternoon in September, Jack
and I wandered over to the Hudson River boat basin. We stood and watched the boats tacking in the afternoon breeze.

“I love New York!” Jack blurted out.

“And I love knowing you in New York!” I replied.

“And I love you,” he whispered.

The sun peeked out, a vision of the future opened up, and there was someone else in it. Maybe this was “The One.” Maybe Jack
was the one I’d been waiting for.

But there was one issue on which Jack differed from Pedro: Jack was not going to stay celibate. “That’s weird,” he said.

I fumbled for words—other people’s words—Pastor Norm’s cardboard, words about how sex without a commitment made you physically
vulnerable, how destructive and imbalanced it was.

Jack countered, “Getting emotionally vulnerable for months on end without a physical commitment feels destructive. For me,
anyway.”

I thought of the guys who’d spilled their guts while giving me a foot massage but wanted no commitment. The emotional vulnerability
was
just as bonding.

“I want to find a soul mate, Susan. I want to get married. But I can’t wait.”

We didn’t wait. And the next morning I felt like my guts had been kicked in. How did those characters on
Sex and the City
jump in and out of bed? Maybe it was all those cosmopolitans they drank.…(How was it that Carrie and Samantha never ended
up in AA?)

I called Paula. “Sex wasn’t a big deal for me, but it was for Marty. He wanted to wait and I wanted to honor Marty’s boundaries.
Do
you
want to wait?”

“I want to be loved.”

“But how can a man love you if he can’t love your boundaries?”

“I don’t know what my boundaries are anymore.”

“I would not want your dilemma, Susan.”

That night I told Jack I’d made a mistake. Sex made me feel off balance, exposed. I needed objectivity until I knew him better.

“What more is there to know?” he protested. “We’ve been dating two and a half months. That’s long enough for me: I know I
love you. I know I want to marry you someday. But I can’t go backward; it’s just too hard.”

Blecch.
Why hadn’t I just said no the night before and gotten the breakup over with?

“I’m sorry, Jack. I want to have sex, but I can’t.”

“Then you want to break up?” He looked heartbroken.

“No, I don’t want to
break up.
I don’t want to
have sex.
“

“Then we’re breaking up.” Jack exhaled.

“Okay.” I exhaled back.

My train arrived at the subway platform. “Please, Susan. Don’t break up.
I love you.”

I ran off to my train. Couldn’t God work through less-than-perfect situations? Hadn’t I ended things with Pedro too soon and
been haunted with “What if…” for years? I didn’t want to be haunted with what-ifs with Jack.

Who could I talk to? Who would tell me the right thing? Martha? Yeesh!

I never told my mother much about my personal life until after I got sober. When I told her I’d lost my virginity in high
school, she sighed. “Dear, I don’t judge you. But I’m glad you didn’t tell me back then. I couldn’t have handled it.” That
was Mom in a nutshell: sweet, Christian, and not so good with conflict. But she still held the most spiritual weight in my
life. And I needed to talk to someone about Jack. I sure wasn’t going to call Martha.

After a moment of shocked silence, Mom sighed again. “Oh, Susie, I’ve prayed for you every day, that you’d find a good man
who loves the Lord. It breaks my heart you’ve been alone so long. Do you love him?”

“Yeah.”

“And he’s Norwegian?”

“Part.”

“Then just marry him. Quick.”

A weight lifted off my chest. The kick in the gut was gone. My own dear mother understood! I went back to Jack’s that night
and laid down the law: sexual intimacy would be hard for me. It would bring up issues about nesting and faith and our future.
I might have a freak-out and need to take a step back, and he would have to be patient. Otherwise, it was over.

Jack promised he could deal with that. And so we went forward. It felt wonderful to be loved. The next morning the kick in
my gut was back. And it was never going away. Was it because I was afraid of being known? Was it because sex outside of marriage
kicks you in the gut and is destructive? Or was it simply this: we live in a fallen world, and it sucks?

Rudy: We’re not meant to be single and forty. We’re not meant to be single and thirty.

Susan: Are you saying what I did was okay?

Rudy: I’m saying I understand.

Susan: I pay you to understand, Rudy. But does God understand? I got sexually involved
again.
And it wasn’t out of some furtive adolescent need. It wasn’t out of a drunken angry payback.

Rudy: Then why did you?

Susan: I was single and forty! I thought I was making a mature decision based on reality. There were far more women in the
church than men, and those men didn’t get me. Ergo, I wasn’t going to find a man in church. Jack was a great guy. He loved
me and wanted to marry me.

Rudy: Did you want to marry him?

Susan: We’ll get to that in the next session.

Rudy: So let’s ask the Lord how he felt.

Susan: I already know how you feel, God. I felt it in my gut.

God: Susan, I understand more than Rudy or you do.
I made you for a relationship. But sex was never going to
not
be a big deal for you.

Susan: My secular friends didn’t think it was a big deal. How come they got away with it?

God: Is that what you want, Susan? To get away with it? I’ve given you a sensitive heart. It’s why you’re creative. It’s why
you see a deeper reality in life. That’s a gift. You treat it like a liability.

Susan: It is a liability when I’ve been single this long.

God: I don’t have a problem with sex. I invented it, didn’t I? I did not design the body to be celibate at forty. I also didn’t
design you to be stuck in emotional adolescence into retirement.

Susan: And therein lies the conflict.

God: It’s your messed-up culture that has set up that conflict, not me. Please, go, have sex! Live out the Song of Solomon.
Only do it married, with a Christian man who’s going to understand your whole heart.

Susan: Those men weren’t available. They all read
Kiss My Dating Ass Good-bye.

God: You’ve forgotten Really Nice Guy.

Susan: I didn’t forget him. He was too nice. He was too polite. He was too safe.

God: No, he was too dangerous. He could have really known the deepest part of your heart—where I live—that Jack would never
quite understand.

Susan: What about all my friends whose spouses came to faith in you through their relationships?

God: They were willing to wait. Jack wouldn’t wait. Didn’t your intuition cause you to feel uneasy about that?

Susan: I wanted to be loved.

God: So do I, Susan. I have loved you your whole life. I’ve never left you. Even when you wanted me to. I brought you out
of despair. I dumped so many blessings into your life—you had nearly everything. Except one thing: a man. Don’t you think
I knew that? Did you have no patience?

Susan: No patience?! I was nearly forty years old.

God: Well, as you said: you live in a fallen world and it sucks.

Susan: You created this world.

God: But I didn’t make it fall, Susan. I didn’t make it suck.

The room was silent for a while.

Rudy: God didn’t get snarky on you. Or if it was Jesus, he didn’t get wimpy on you. Who was that anyway, Jesus or God?

Susan: Actually, I’m not sure. They’re sounding so much alike now.

Rudy: Good! I think you know the real God more than you give yourself credit for. Or at least, you’re allowing him to speak.
You’re making progress.

Susan: Well, God is anyway. I’m not so sure about me.

WHEN MY FRIEND CLEO WAS TWELVE YEARS OLD, HER FATHER HAD
a heart attack. She was sitting in homeroom when her mother’s chalk-white face appeared at the door. By the time they got
home, Cleo’s father was dead. She never had a chance to say good-bye. She didn’t even have a chance to hate him as a teenager
or forgive him as an adult. Her father was gone before he’d become human.

I had time to prepare for my father’s death. His childhood polio slowly robbed him of his motor skills, his strength, and
eventually his life. Two weeks be-fore his seventy-ninth birthday, my sister called. I thought she was calling to plan a party.
“You’d better come now,” Nancy said, “or you’ll be here to plan a funeral.”

By the time I got home, my father had been moved to a convalescent home. The TV sat on his dresser,
Sleepless in Seattle
still in the VCR. A case of Ensure sat next to the door. Mom wanted to take it to the hospital so Dad could regain his strength.
“That way he can come home on weekends.” All those years she’d been praying for some independence; now she wanted to put it
off.

I guess Dad was preparing for his death as well. In his final months, Mom’s church friends came to sit with him while she
got out for a rare cup of coffee. And Dad asked them lots of questions. “Tell me about Jesus. Can he forgive me? Can my children
forgive me? Can I go to heaven this late?”

“He asks them,” Mom said. “He never asks me.”

“He never asked me ei-ther,” I replied. “Have you called Rob?” My father and brother hadn’t spoken in a long time.

“Rob can’t come.” She turned away from me.

I wondered what I could say to my father that would matter to him. I’d forgiven him, grieved over the relationship we didn’t
have, and come to accept who he was. I even made a list of things I appreciated about him. Maybe I needed to read him that
list.

Nancy and I drove to the convalescent home, passing the Sears store where Dad once had his practice. The deco green neon sign
had long since been replaced by a squatty eighties graphic. Nancy laughed. “Remember the candy and nut counter with the warming
lights? Remember Dad sending us to get him candy orange slices?”

“Yes!” I replied. “Remember the air conditioners with the red plastic fringes taped to the vent so you could see the air blowing?”

“Remember Dad’s office and that giant plastic eye with the removable parts?”

“And his test for color blindness?” I added.

“And those notes you wrote him that he taped to the wall?” Nancy asked.

“What notes?”

“Those cartoons you drew. The one with the smashed glasses asking, ‘Is your vision blurry?’ He had that one framed.”

Now I remembered. I wondered what had happened to it.

Dad was propped up in a hospital bed when we got there. His body looked so small, and his eyes were sunken in. “Hi, Daddy,”
I said. He lifted his eyebrows in hello. He moved his mouth but no sound came out. I sat in a chair next to his bed and took
his hand.

Mom and Jim showed up, and the four of us visited for a few hours. I talked about New York; Nancy talked about her children.
He listened steadily. Dad had rarely focused on us before; his mind was usually trapped in the past, trying to rewrite history.
Today his eyes were clinging to the here and now, perhaps to avoid tomorrow.

Visiting hours came to a close. I promised him I would be back tomorrow. “Promise me you’ll be here too, Dad.” He raised his
eyebrows again, I think to smile.

The following day I returned to the convalescent hospital. The hospice nurse met me outside my father’s closed door: Dad was
no longer eating. It was hospice policy not to prolong his life. Was anyone else coming? she asked. I thought of my brother.
I shook my head no. She handed the cans of Ensure back to me.

Dad was dozing when I went in. He stirred when I sat next to his bed. His lips tried to smile. I showed him a newspaper, but
his eyes went to the Bible in my hand.

“Would you like me to read it?” I asked.

He nodded. I read from Romans—how there was no more condemnation for Dad if he belonged to Jesus. The Spirit would free him
from the power of sin and death. I read much of 1 John—how if we confess our sins, God will forgive us. And I read, “See how
very much our Father loves us, for he calls us his children, and that is what we are!” (3:3
NLT
).