Angry Conversations with God (2 page)

I should stop and identify my spiritual orientation. But first I must tell you: I hate it when people say, “I’m spiritual
but not religious.” That’s like saying, “I’m emotional but not psycho.” It turns religion into a dirty word. Religion simply
means religion: to reattach, to reconnect to the God you feel separated from. Yet I know we’ve all been burned by religiosity;
even Jesus hated religiosity. So I just say, “I’m Lutheran.” It sounds jaunty and nonthreatening.

And it’s true, I was raised Lutheran: Bible-believing, Jesus-loving Lutheran. But as an adult I tried everything: Pentecostals,
Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Rock ’n’ Roll Slackers 4 Jesus, Actors for Yahweh. Then I said, “Screw it,” and became a drunk
and a slut. (Well, a Lutheran slut—I only slept with two guys.) Then I got sober and into AA, where they said I could pick
whatever god I wanted. I didn’t pick God; God
picked
me. I’ve known him as long as I can remember.

From the moment I could sing “Jesus Loves Me,” I knew the words were true. Maybe I was just given the gift of faith the way
some people get perfect pitch. But I believed in the God of the Bible and in Jesus, his Son. Of course, I also believed in
Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. But while those childhood myths died away for lack of evidence, my belief in Jesus gained
momentum. One afternoon when I was about eight, I was standing in the backyard playing catch with our dog, and I got the sense
that Jesus was standing there with me. He didn’t say, “I died for you so go help your mom set the table.” I just sensed he
wanted me to know he was there. And knowing he was there, I felt loved.

Later I watched my mother take Communion. Her face became weightless and bright. And I realized she knew it too: what it was
like to feel Jesus standing next to you.

Back then, our family had a telescope, and through it I could see the rings on Saturn and the moons on Jupiter. When my father
explained that the stars were millions of lightyears away, I began to understand how big the universe was, and how majestic
the God who made it. I also realized how far Jesus had come to stand next to me in the backyard.

I began to understand that sin was like a sickness. It was why we had the Vietnam War and poverty and why I hated my brothers.
I knew I had the sickness. Then I began to comprehend how much God the Father loved me to send Jesus all that way through
time and space to stand next to me, to heal my sickness, and to be my friend.

As I stood at the edge of adulthood, I saw Jesus there at the top of the road, calling me into the grand adventure of life.
So I went.

It
was
a grand adventure at first. I could sit for hours praying, writing to God in my journal, and listening to his response. I
didn’t hear him audibly, but I learned to hear with things other than my ears. We had amazing conversations, God and I. I
told him how I loved him; he showed me those Scriptures about his plans to prosper me and give me a future and a hope, plans
where my life mattered.

But then there were rules to follow and programs to attend, sins to eradicate and special blessings to earn, all to get that
big life or
keep it big.
I did all of it. I’ve been washed in the blood, slain in the Spirit, I walked through the Bible, I’ve been baptizedt—wice.
I’ve done outward cleansing and inner healing. I even went through a therapy program for ex-gays, and I was never gay. Through
that insanity, even if pastors hurt me or friends let me down or entire denominations went Shiite on my ass, I still believed
God was good—I just needed to find out where God went. Maybe it was a corner of a cathedral or a monastery in the desert or
a bench on the beach. But I could go there and be with the God who was good and the Jesus who loved me, this I knew.

That is, until that moment in Central Park.

From that point on, my thoughts about God began to unravel. (My heartbreak starvation diet didn’t help my critical thinking
either.) Maybe God hated me. Maybe he felt nothing at all, for me
or anyone.
Who was at the helm of the universe? A distant, unfeeling God? Maybe God wasn’t even personal. And if he wasn’t personal,
then my entire life—how I saw the world, how I’d tried to know his will and please him—had all been a lie. The ground under
my feet split open into a Grand Canyon a mile down, and there was nothing but thin air between me and the bottom.

It would have been easier to imagine God was not involved. But how else could I explain the cruel synchronicity of Central
Park? Or the beauty I saw at the end of the telescope? No. When I stood in that backyard, I knew Jesus was with me. Once I
was watching my brother fly kites in a March sky. The clouds were so high they embraced the curvature of the earth. Suddenly
God felt so big, and yet so close. I knew at that moment I was loved, and I knew I was loved by a Person. Ever since then
I had run toward—or away from—that knowing. But I couldn’t stop knowing it.

Let’s be honest: this wasn’t Darfur. I hadn’t witnessed my family getting slaughtered; I hadn’t grown up in a gang war zone
or been forced into a polygamous marriage at age thirteen. So what if my lifelong dream died and my relationship tanked? These
were nothing but middleclass white girl’s tragedies. But I was a middle-class white girl, with a middleclass white girl’s
faith. In fact, my middleclass white girl’s tragedies ceased to be the tragedy at all: the tragedy was God’s responsetotal
silence. I couldn’t hear God or see God or sense God anywhere or in anything. Some people call this the Dark Night of the
Soul. It was dark, all right. And silent. And I was alone.

Martha e-mailed me sometime later to check in, see if I was still “skinny and sad,” and tell me about the latest book that
would solve my problems. “Have you read
The Sacred Romance
?” she asked. The book, Martha said, claimed our relationship with God was a love story. You know, because God pursued us,
promised to love us forever, and called us to a life filled with purpose and meaning. “Susan,” Martha declared, “our relationship
with God is nothing short of a marriage.”

“Well, in that case,” I replied, “God and I need to go to couples counseling. Because we’re not getting along.”

The Sacred Romance
wasn’t the first book foisted on me. Someone else told me to read
Conversations with God,
that new age piffle where God is like the Big Lebowski, telling you to “just follow your truth, dude.”

Who on earth had conversations with God like that? If I wrote my conversations with God into a book, they’d be very angry
conversations. They’d go more like:

Susan: What the _______, God? Are you trying to kill me?

God: Shut the _______ up or I will!

And that would be the end of the book.

Still, Martha’s idea grew on me—not to read
The Sacred Romance,
but to take God to couples counseling. What if I could get God in a room with a third party and compel him to respond? What
would I ask him?

• So, Lord, is there in fact a “purpose-driven life”? A “secret”? A “best life now”? Or are those just your latest marketing
campaigns designed to get me to buy books and CDs and to tithe?

• Did you ever speak to me? Were you ever involved?

• Your people love to quote Jeremiah 29:11: “I know the plans I have for you,…to prosper you and not to harm you.” How come
I never heard Jeremiah 20:7: “O L
ORD,
you deceived me, and I was deceived”?!

• And don’t tell me, “Despite how it looks, I really do love you.” I’ve gone to Al-Anon. If it looks like abuse,
it is.

But what sane, licensed therapist would counsel a woman who claims her spouse is invisible? And what devout Christian therapist
would dare question the Almighty?

So I set out to find a therapist daring enough to take on a client whose spouse was the immortal, invisible, God only wise.
God probably wasn’t going to change. But if this was a marriage and he was my husband, he needed to learn that (a) women just
need to vent, and (b) men are wrong. More important, maybe the process of counseling could show me where I’d gone off track.
Maybe I could find a way back to what I once knew: that God was good and Jesus loved me.

Just in case I ended up a pile of charcoal, I decided to write this book; that it would serve as a record of my counseling
sessions with this God whom I loved, whom I could not escape, and with whom I was very, very pissed off.

WHEN CHOOSING A THERAPIST, ONE SHOULD CONSIDER CRITE
ria such as the therapist’s reputation, field of expertise, affordability, and location. Since I was broke and my spouse was
God, my criteria were “cheap” and “won’t call the psych ward.” Which is how in September 2003, I ended up working with Rudy
O’Shea, a former pastor accumulating his hours for his therapist’s license.

The therapy center where Rudy worked was at an old Baptist church. Rudy’s office must have doubled as the Baptist rumpus room,
because it was massive. In addition to Rudy’s “counseling corner,” it housed a piano, a coffee table with mismatched chairs,
book-shelves, and a trophy case. What kind of trophies did Baptists win? Maybe memory-verse competitions—my Baptist grandmother
knew every Bible verse about hell.

The walls were covered with photos of church secretaries, pastors, and missionaries of yore. And peppered among the photos
were pictures of Jesus—Jesus with children, laughing Jesus, Jesus praying, Jesus tending sheep in the Alps, Jesus knocking
on the door of your heart. (Actually, it was a farmhouse door; it looked like Thomas Kinkade before he went neon.) And last
there was that famous portrait of Jesus—the brownish one where Jesus sits looking sober and kind. I grew up with that picture.
More about that later.

Rudy O’Shea staggered into our first session one minute before the hour. “Sorry, man. The traffic from Topanga was gnarly!”
Rudy was a short guy in his late fifties with gray hair, buckteeth, and a Hawaiian shirt. He pulled out a file and beckoned
me to sit.

“You’re Susan, the girl who wants to take God to couples counseling?” I nodded. “I’ve been looking forward to this all week!”
Rudy smiled broadly. He looked like Jimmy Buffett imitating a chipmunk.

“Obviously, I don’t expect God to actually materialize and have conversations with us.”

Rudy shrugged. “Actually, I think it would be cool if he did. But I also dropped acid before I got saved.”

Maybe I was going to get the Big Lebowski after all.

“That was thirty-five years ago,” he assured me. “I was a pastor for twenty years.”

“Why’d you stop?” I asked.

“Therapists help people who
want
to get well.” He smirked. Cool. I figured we’d get along.

“So, Susan, tell me how you got here.”

I gave Rudy a synopsis of my history with God, much as I wrote in the introduction. “Either God isn’t personal and I’ve wasted
my time, or he is personal and he hates me.”

“There’s a third option,” Rudy suggested. “God loves you, but crappy things still happen.”

“That’s easy for you to say, sitting over there in your comfy therapist’s chair.”

“It’s not comfy at all. No lumbar support.”

“Rudy, I know worse things have happened to better people. Mine are just middle-class white girl’s tragedies. But I’m a middle-class
white girl, and they’re my tragedies.”

Rudy opened his legal pad and began taking notes. “So what do you want to accomplish in therapy?”

“Did they teach you that question in therapy school? It’s really therapese.”

“How else can I say it? What do you expect to happen here?”

“God’s not going to change—he’s immutable, right?
I want
to change. But not all of this is my fault, is it? Some of this is God’s responsibility, or at least the church that represents
him. Isn’t it?”

There was a sadness in Rudy’s smile, as if he had an answer I might not want to hear. What
did
I want to hear? That it was all my fault? Actually, that would have been easier. Because then I would’ve been in control
of the solution: me. But that’s not what Rudy said. His smile disappeared entirely. “I can’t tell you how many people come
in here feeling disenfranchised, disillusioned, and disgusted with church. I’m talking solid Christians, lifelong churchgoers.
They don’t know where their faith is or where God is. I think the American church got away from the gospel, and we took a
lot of people with us. People like you.”

“Have I been in a cult? Has Jesus left the building?”

“I’m sorry. I was a pastor; I feel protective of people like you. I just want you to know that you’re not alone. And there’s
good news. You can change with God’s help. So tell me why you want to do this as ‘couples therapy’ with God.”

“It’s easier to complain to a person than a concept.”

“Who’s going to speak for God?”

“You are. You’re the therapist/pastor. We can role-play. I’ll be Susan the neglected wife, and you’ll be God the abusive deadbeat
husband.”

“I can’t speak for
your
God, Susan.”