Angry Conversations with God (5 page)

As soon as I was aware of God, I responded. I memorized the Apostles’ Creed when I was five, and when I said the words I meant
them. I believed in God, the Father Almighty, the Maker of heaven and earth.

But while Jesus was easy to picture, picturing God the Father was hard. God didn't have a body: that was the whole point of
Jesus. Pastor Ingebretsen said God was a deep and powerful mystery. He had a voice of many waters. He was an all-consuming
fire, a rock and a fortress, a strong tower. When he got angry, smoke blew from his nostrils. Okay, maybe God had a nose.

When I turned seven, my birthday fell on Easter and my mom gave me a big gift. I had skipped half-day kindergarten, so while
my dad said I was too young, my mom thought I was ready. She took me to the Bible bookstore to pick it up. It was a white
leather Bible with a gold zipper, and there on the front was my name embossed in gold letters. I got to have my own Bible.
I got to read it myself!

We read about Jesus during devotions, but we also read the Psalms. Mom said they were written before Jesus was born, so that
meant they were about God the Father Almighty. They didn't say what God
looked
like, but they showed what he
was
like. God was a refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. He made me lie down in green pastures. He forgave all
my sins; he healed all my diseases; he redeemed my life from the pit and crowned me with love and compassion. Psalm 8 made
me think of the times I looked through our telescope at the rings on Saturn. I wondered how God could even think about me
and care about me. But the Bible said he did. What's not to love about a God like that?

Mom's favorite psalm was Psalm 24:

The earth is the L
ORD'S
, and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein. For he hath founded it upon the seas, and established
it upon the floods. Who shall ascend into the hill of the L
ORD
? Or who shall stand in his holy place? He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart; who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity,
nor sworn deceitfully. He shall receive the blessing from the L
ORD
, and righteousness from the God of his salvation. This is the generation of them that seek him, that seek thy face, O Jacob.
Selah. Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in. Who is
this King of glory? The L
ORD
strong and mighty, the L
ORD
mighty in battle. Lift up your heads, O ye gates; even lift them up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come
in. Who is this King of glory? The L
ORD
of hosts, he is the King of glory. Selah.
(
KJV
)

Before I understood what glory or the everlasting doors were, the poetry worked its deep and powerful mystery on me. I wanted
to be one of those with clean hands and a pure heart. I wanted to please God. He was more heroic than Mighty Mouse. He was
the Father Almighty. He was the King of glory. Selah.

But God the Father scared me too. When God got angry with his enemies, he wiped them out. When the Israelites turned away,
he punished them—he even killed some of them. If a high priest went into the Holy of Holies with one sin unatoned for, boom!
He dropped dead. Pastor Ingebretsen said God's holiness wasn't vengeful; it was just too powerful. If you touched a power
line you'd get electrocuted. God’s anger was the same way. He hated evil. And who would love a God who liked evil? I understood,
sort of. God’s anger made sense, not like my dad’s. God got angry at evil; Dad got mad at anything.

To say my earthly father shaped my image of God is kind of a therapy no-brainer. And unfortunately for God, my dad was complicated.
When I was very young, Dad was loving and fun. As I grew older, Dad changed: he got mean and angry. Dad never tried to align
himself with God. But when you’re a child, it’s hard not to transpose one into the other.

To be fair, my earthly father didn’t have it easy. Dad was the third of three boys born to a dour Baptist woman who wanted
a daughter. The night Dad came out of the womb, Grandma Jean yelled, “Throw him out the window!” At least, that’s the cute
little story she told every year on Dad’s birthday. Try listening to
that
every time you blow out the candles. Dad’s father and grandfather died when Dad was nine, leaving him to a mother who disliked
him and a grandmother who despised him. Dad grew up, became an optometrist, got married, and had four children. But I now
suspect he never grew beyond the traumatized nine-year-old boy his dying father had left him.

I was born in Hollywood, California, in what is now a big blue Scientology building—not the chichi Celebrity Centre where
movie stars hold press conferences about their personal lives, but a prison-like facility where nameless underlings get released
at noon to do tai chi on the lawn. But it was a hospital back then, which is how I came to be born there. When I was two years
old, Dad moved our family to Orange County, to get away from Grandma Jean and prove her wrong—that he was not a failure.

They used to grow oranges in Orange County. Actually, they grew far more lima beans, but Lima Bean County didn’t sound good
to land developers. So they called it Orange County, bulldozed the limas and oranges, and built tract homes. Miles and miles
of houses filled the map in tedious symmetry, as if entire communities had been laid out on sheets of graph paper.

But Dad scored a coup: he bought a modest house on a swanky street that wrapped around a golf course. The swanky houses backed
up onto putting greens. Their front yards were fenced in and private, and when you walked past, you could hear the faint whisper
of pool skimmers and clinking highballs and success. Our swankless house had no private backyard; it backed into smaller houses
with smaller people of smaller dreams. But Dad dreamed big. He promised Mom he’d buy her a swanky house. He put a For Sale
sign on the lawn, invested in risky stocks, and lay in wait for his moment.

Then one night Dad came home, ripped the For Sale sign out of the lawn, turned on the TV, and spat curses at the stock-market
report. He lost the money he needed to buy a nicer house and move away from Grandmother’s pronouncements. Dad never talked
about moving againat least never as a possibility, only as the dream that his mother’s vengeful God ripped away from him out
of spite. My parents lived in that house for thirtyseven years. And so I grew up in “the O.C.”—not the TV version where anorexic
models languished in mansions on the beach. I grew up in the caste just below that: the striving middle-class chumps for whom
that life lay just out of reach.

Early Dad, before failure and resentment got to him, was a lot more like God the Father. Dad was almighty, as most dads are
to their kids. Dad wasn’t majestic or holy, but he was good—he was good to me. In fact, my early memories of Dad are the brightest
childhood memories I have. Dad loved to tell jokes and was endlessly entertained by mine. He was quick to scoop me up for
a hug. Once he came home with a jumbo bag of Starburst candy and threw the contents up in the air, just to watch his kids
scramble with delight. I guess Dad was like God the Father in that he delighted in his children and he satisfied our desires
with good things. I never imagined God or Jesus having fun, but my dad loved to have fun. It was Dad who told us bedtime stories.
It was Dad who took us miniature golfing and out for walks with the dogs. I don’t know where Mom was—maybe at church.

When we first moved to Orange County, we lived in an apartment across a field from the mall. Dad’s optometric practice was
in the Sears store there. I must have gotten on my mom’s nerves, asking her to take me miniature golfing or to go on a walk
or to give me a hug, because she usually kept her back to me: cooking or ironing or sighing. So I learned to ask different
questions: When was Dad coming home? How long was “a while”? When did it get dark?

“Go upstairs and look out the window,” my mother replied one day. “When the green Sears sign comes on, that’s when Daddy is
coming home. Go on. Go on upstairs and watch.” So most evenings I went upstairs and sat at the window, waiting for the Sears
sign to come on. My older brothers, Rob and Jim, came in to play their Beatles 45’s on the Close ’N Play. Nancy often came
and sat with me. But I stayed in the window, waiting for the green Sears sign to come on, waiting for Dad to come home, waiting
to be seen.

Early Fun Dad was my hero. When I was four I got a plush toy cat for my birthday. I took Fuzzy everywhere: to the market,
to bed, to church, on trips, and especially to scary places like Grandma Jean’s house. Holding Fuzzy filled the hole between
my arms and made me feel safe. Eventually Fuzzy wore out. Her fuzz turned to nubs, she lost an eye, and the stuffing came
out of her neck. Jim teased me and called her Nubby. Finally, Mom had had it and threw Fuzzy in the trash. But Dad rescued
her. Jim restuffed her neck with cotton balls, painted her ears with pink shoe polish. Maybe he helped because he felt guilty
for calling her Nubby. But Dad saved her because he loved me.

Years later, we were on a family vacation to Washington. After a day trip to an island, Dad promised my brothers we’d take
a train ride through the longest tunnel in the Pacific Northwest. The boys were thrilled and so was Dadtrains were the one
thing they still had in common. My brothers were in high school; they had discovered sarcasm. They could sit in the car for
hours, silent and sullen, but mention trains and they lit up. The train ride was going to be the highlight of the trip for
my brothers, and it was Dad’s last chance to win back their respect.

We took the hour-long ferry ride back to the mainland to wait for the train. That’s when I felt a thud in my gut: I had left
Fuzzy on the ferry. I had already left her in a hardware store in Eugene, Oregon. No way would they go back again—we would
miss the train. When Dad saw the horror on my face, he coaxed the reason out of me.

Only now can I imagine my father’s dilemma: having to choose between his sons who were rapidly coming to despise him, and
a young daughter who still thought he hung the moon; sons whose approval he longed for, and his daughter whom he still had
a chance to keep in his orbit.

Dad drove us out to a promontory to watch the train. The boys stood out close to the tracks, seething as the train flew by
without them. My father stood a few feet behind, watching the boys with their backs turned to him, as they would do for the
rest of their lives. I sat in the car watching it all, Fuzzy firmly in my grip. My brothers hated me for a week. I didn’t
care. Dad had rescued me because he had delighted in me. Just like God the Father Almighty.

I loved movies because of Dad. My sister and I loved to watch TV with Dad:
Sherlock Holmes,
Laurel and Hardy.
Dad’s favorite films became ours:
Mister Roberts,
The Pride of the Yankees,
The Blue Angel.
I learned to imitate James Cagney and Marlene Dietrich. It made Dad laugh and kept him from turning the channel to shows
that made him mad.

But after the For Sale sign came down, after my brothers got into high school and started resenting him, Dad changed. He became
angry a lot. And it wasn’t like God’s righteous anger; it was capricious. He got mad at the Russians and the Democrats and
Ted Kennedy. He came home, threw his briefcase on the floor, and turned on the TV. He didn’t watch
Sherlock Holmes
or
The Pride of the Yankees.
He watched live sports instead. And live sports made him angry.

“GhadddDAMMIT!” Dad spat out curses, raspy and hot. “Throw the long bomb, you GHADDAMN IDIOTS!” It felt like getting battery
acid thrown in my face every time he said it.

His curses got more frequent, more acrid, to the point that every time he cursed, I felt a shock in my gut. I was bound to
Dad: all the love and attention I’d craved from him had created a lifeline between him and me. And now that line was carrying
an electrical shock. Every expletive went straight from his mouth to my guts.

“GhaddDAMMMIT!”—
BZZZT.
“Dammit!”
BZZZTT,
it jolted me. I hated it.

I prayed every time he watched TV. “Lord, I know you’re holy and you hate evil. But please help my dad. Please make Dad’s
favorite team win so he won’t curse you, so he’ll love you. Please just make them win. In Jesus’ name, amen.”

It didn’t work. Dad didn’t have a favorite team; he just wanted to curse the one that was losing. One afternoon it got so
bad that I leaped up and shut off the TV.

“Stop it!” I screamed.

“What?!” my father replied, his face white with shock. But he knew.

“You keep taking the name of the Lord in vain!”

“I do not…”

“You do too, Bob!” my mom fired back from the kitchen.

I ran to my room, crying. “Lord! Why can’t Dad love you? Why can’t Dad be angry the way you are, when it’s for a good reason?
Why can’t you two get along?”