Angry Conversations with God (28 page)

“So am I. This is a job interview, not an audition for
Boys Don’t Cry.
But I am a kick-ass typist and organizer. When I’m not having a meltdown.”

Pastor Frank introduced me to the staff: Micah, the executive pastor; Dwight, the director of administration; and Travis,
a seminary intern. What did they need me for?

“We’re guys,” Frank replied. “We can’t organize our socks.”

I took the job.

Rudy: I’m glad to hear Frank isn’t a total egomaniac.

Susan: You probably have to have an ego to lead a church. But he’s also funny and empathetic. I told him how I couldn’t sense
God anywhere, and he just listened.
I needed someone to listen because I don’t know when I would hear from God again.

Rudy: God said he’d come back if you wanted to know the real him.

Susan: You mean
I imagined
God said that. And which God is going to come back, another god in my image? God in the American church’s image? What is
God really like? What is true about God that isn’t just another one of the church’s marketing schemes? The whole idea of God
as husband and lover seems like another product the church sold all of us lonely pathetic single people who can’t do relationships!

Rudy: There’s all sorts of imagery in the Bible about love and marriage. Read the Psalms. David spoke to God with love and
longing. The rest of the Old Testament uses marriage imagery too: God made a covenant with Israel and accused her of committing
adultery with other gods. He longed to bring her back and love her. And the church is the Bride of Christ. It’s not just a
modern fabrication; it’s all over the Bible. You can trust that, if for no other reason than that love is the driving force
of life itself. If we’re made in God’s image and we long for love and relationship, then God must long for that as well.

Susan: But how can I trust that God wants that with me?

Rudy: Because it’s the only thing you’ve talked about since you got here.

At the end of every ten-week session, Terrie staged a public performance of our works in progress. This scared the tar out
of me. Terrie supported me and my classmates supported me, but they had become my friends. Now I had to get up and read in
front of a crowd of hip, artsy Hollywood types. Andrea and I walked down to the coffeehouse before the reading. “You’d better
keep working on your God story,” she insisted. “I have to know how it turns out.”

“
I
don’t know yet how it turns out. You like my story, but you’re my friend. My story sucks.”

“No, Susan. It rocks.”

We had a packed house that night. I realized why I was scared. I wanted to be hip and cool like everyone else in class. But
I wasn’t; I was just a middle-class white girl who wanted to find God. Didn’t everyone want to find God?
Get over yourself, Susan,
I thought. It was my turn to read:

When I think of the people whose character I admire, they’ve all walked through deserts or hells far worse than mine. And
when they got to the other side—the ones who did get to the other side—they always said God got them through it. They have
a peace and a friendship with God that I want. But the problem is, the man who’s stuck in the desert because God put him there
looks exactly like the man who’s stuck in the desert because he’s lost. And I don’t know which one I am. I don’t know if I’m
here to find friendship with God or if I’ve been left to die.

My ex used to get angry when I said that. He would say, “God isn’t personal. God isn’t good or bad. God is like science. God
just is.” But even with science…Look at the stars. You see such beauty and order, and you sense the Thought that went into
their making. But if that thoughtfulness is not extended to me, then all that order and beauty is merely cold and sterile
space that mocks me because I’ve been excluded from it.

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.

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 ortho
doxy
: 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 mouthpiece 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.