Sunday, October 9, 2011

Destination: God.

Nickel Creek's "Doubting Thomas"

What will be left
When I've drawn my last breath,
Besides the folks I've met and the folks who know me?
Will I discover a soul-saving love,
Or just the dirt above and below me?
I'm a doubting Thomas;
I took a promise, but I do not feel safe.
Oh me of little faith. 



My friend Sara Grimes likes to say that my past encounters with God were just pit-stops on the way to the final destination. Wherever I'm going, it must be a really long trip: I've made a lot of those stops.

Stop #1: I was 15. My father had just stopped drinking, which might have been a good thing if he'd had a little help doing it. Putting down the beer and simply walking away is a noble thought, but it's an ideal: very few people can actually do it successfully. Dale never picked up another drink -- that much I'll applaud him for. But there were times when I wanted so badly to pop open a can of whatever swill I could find and wave it under his nose: "Here. Drink this. It'll make you less of an asshole." Because when my father stopped drinking, he was never quite my father again. When he was drunk he was a coward who turned his back and walked away from his bleeding, broken little girl, but I could always count on him to be there later with my favorite cassette tape or a game of kickball -- his own way, however misguided, of trying to make things better. That stopped when the beer did. He got nasty and mean instead. Instead of being my ally, he became another active abuser. He got violent, shouting and ranting; he punched holes in my walls, my bedroom door; he started beating me. My Daddy. My Daddy. He did whatever my mother told him to do -- if she said punish, he punished. Instead of being relieved to have him come home, I was terrified. Nothing will ever match the level of dread and despair I always felt when he walked into my room, shut the door behind him, and pulled his belt from around his waist.

My life was a shambles. I was so young. I was so scared. I was so bitterly sad, so angry. When my father decided to become nasty and mean and devout and my mother followed suit, I was boxed in: I had nowhere to go. Desperate, I tried copying my parents' behavior: I decided to get baptized.

I only did it because I thought I was going to die and was afraid to go to Hell. That was the new party line in my house: if you die without being baptized, that's it. Say hello to the underworld. I had someone in my life at that time who tried valiantly to show me that God is Love, but I didn't understand. How could I, when I had only ever known fear? I gave in to that fear. I didn't know any better.

When I allowed myself to be ducked beneath the water of the baptistery at Prospect Church of Christ, I didn't feel changed. I still felt hopeless. Worthless. Everyone sang "Oh Happy Day" like they always did at every baptism, and smiled and nodded and hugged their approval. I wanted to shatter into thousands of pieces, curl up in the corner and die, run from the room screaming, grab people by the shoulders and cry, Help me! You have to help me! But I didn't. I couldn't. My parents were devout, faithful, good, God-fearing people in the eyes of everyone who knew them. Who would believe me? I'd already tried and failed to make them see what I saw. I'd been labeled as ill, delusional, even a pathological liar by some of the people in my life. People looked at me with scorn, with pitying contempt. I could scream at them all I wanted and never be heard. It was a horribly lonely way to live. It made a girl think of so many different ways of deliberately dying.

Stop #2: Fast forward three years or so. I was 18 and out, free: I had made it. I had lived through years of brutality and horror and my own urge to die. Somehow, I rolled over out of the nightmare that had been my entire life and found myself on a college campus two hours from my hometown, taking summer classes and living in a little campus apartment. I had no idea what I was doing; I could barely have told you, back then, how I'd gotten there in the first place. I was living on adrenaline and delivery pizza. And I was desperately looking for a place to belong.

In my one and only bid for freedom that didn't involve my own funeral, I alienated myself from my entire family even further than I had already been exiled by showing up at home one day after school in the passenger seat of my guidance counselor's car, accompanied by a county police officer. With their help, a box, and two duffel bags donated by the sheriff's office, I packed up some clothes and a few precious things and walked out for good. I moved in with my best friend for a week, and then, when her mother was uncomfortable having me stay, with my boss and her family. That was in May, before I even graduated high school. The day after I left was actually the day of my senior trip. I celebrated my independence by getting nine full inches of hair cut off at a MasterCuts inside the Opry Mills Mall in Tennessee. I acted like I was large and in charge, putting on a defiant face and tossing my (now lighter) head with a flourish. Really, I was compensating for the fact that I was pretty much scared straight out of my mind. I had family members calling me at my new house, demanding to know what the hell I thought I was doing. Everyone was angry: I had aired the family's legacy secret, and I did not appear to be sorry. I wasn't sorry, not in the damndest, not for that, but I was hurting very deeply because it seemed to me that the people who were supposed to love me most only cared about me as long as I did exactly what they wanted me to do. In some cases, the years have proven me wrong -- and in some others, more right than I'd care to be.

I felt empty. I craved connections, attention, affection -- something to let me know I mattered. I slept with the boy I'd started seeing and then dumped him before he knew what had hit him because I couldn't deal with the way it made me feel. Then I went on a date with an older man and ended up alone with him on the empty third floor of the city's Civic Center -- not because I wanted to be, but because I had no idea, at that point in my life, that I had a right to the word "No." I managed to get away that time, but there's no telling what might have happened if the Baptist College Ministry hadn't found me.

It was like having instant family. So many wonderful people, people who shined from the inside out with a force I could see but had never known: God is Love. They lived it. They believed it: God is Love. It showed. But I confused God's love with theirs; God's approval with their approval. They saved me, of that I'm sure: instead of continuing down a path that could very easily have led to a lifetime of meaningless, empty sexual encounters I didn't really want but couldn't find my way out of, I spent my spare time building churches and singing in Praise teams. But as much as I thought I was doing it because of the driving force of God in my life, I came to realize I was only doing it in order to feel that I really belonged somewhere. I had missed the mark again.

Stop #3: Pennsylvania, 2006. I was running from my past as fast as I could move. In mid-summer of '05, I had been diagnosed as having Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. This came after a horrible semester at school: I had become so depressed I could hardly get out of bed in the mornings; I was paranoid and nervous and had begun to isolate myself out of sheer terror of the world outside my front door; I had started having lurid, nasty nightmares full of blood and the screams of dying children. It had been a long while since I had left home. All the adrenaline was finally gone, and I was forced to face 18 years of blood and pain that I had tried to deny and know them as true. To cope with the flashbacks and panic attacks I'd started having, I started cutting myself. I'd done it pretty much consistently for a period of about 2 years when I still lived with my parents, but I'd managed, if not to stop it entirely, to drastically curtail it since then. All that effort was lost my last semester at USI. I was every bit as cruel to my own body as anyone else had ever been.

I decided I couldn't handle summer classes at that point and went home for the summer instead. I was still living with my boss's family. They had come to stand in for my own: I called them "Mama" and "Papa" and "brother" and "sisters". But when I got sick, "Mama" couldn't handle it. Three days after I'd spent a weekend on the psychiatric unit of a nearby hospital for debilitating depression, she told me to pack my things and get out.That was early July. She gave me till the end of the month, but I couldn't stand to stay there after that: my very soul was crushed. This is your home, she'd said. My house is your house, she'd said. We love you like our own. She meant she'd love me like her own until it got a little hard to love me, and then I'd become the Other.

Once again, I had lost everything in my life and had nowhere to go. I moved to Pennsylvania because I'd made friends here who happened to have a spare room in their house and were willing to let me rent it. I didn't expect them to stick around after I lived with them awhile: no one ever did. Obviously I was defective; there was something horribly wrong with me that I couldn't see, something that made everyone I loved throw me away. I am happy to say that I have been proven wrong, that I have encountered, finally, two people who love me so much that they hang onto me all the more tightly even when I get scared of their constancy and try to push them away. I think maybe God is like that, because I keep balking and he just holds on tighter and waits for me to get it all out till next time.

I joined the Episcopal church when I moved here because it was so drastically different from anything I'd ever encountered before. I thought maybe I'd find God in the unfamiliar hymns and rituals, and instead I found myself using the rituals to substitute for God. I missed the mark again. Disenchanted, I stopped going to church, period. I never planned on attending a church service ever again. And then I found The Common Place.

Here I am now, looking down the barrel at 2012 and searching for God in a coffee shop. And finding him there. I don't know what it is-- maybe it's how much I have grown in the past few years; leaps and bounds of it. I'm stronger now than I have ever been -- and weaker than I have ever been. I am ready to stop making pit-stops. I want, I need, something bigger than myself. I need to answer this thing that keeps pulling, this thing that keeps hanging on while I kick and scream and try to run. It makes me vulnerable, this needing. I don't like it. It frightens me. Especially since doubt comes naturally to me, particularly in terms of faith. There are things I don't understand about doubt, I guess, and about forgiveness: Will God still want me if I have to fight every day to believe that God is Love exists, that God exists at all? Because for something I need so much, I certainly struggle with this idea of trusting something I can't touch with my own two hands to actually be real. I could be deluded. Everyone could be deluded. We could all be wrong. Maybe when we're dead, we're dead. The end. And sometimes, even though I need God, even though I can't go for very long without trying to find God, I prefer this version of events because it lets me continue in what I have always known. I'm miserable there, but I'm safe. God makes no promises that faith won't be the hardest thing I have ever done. God isn't going to tell me that I won't have to fight for it tooth and claw every day. I might have to. I guess I'm just worried I don't have it in me: I'm not strong enough; I'm not good enough -- when I stand before God and say "Lord, I tried," I expect him to say, "You should have tried harder." I expect to be cast out. I expect to be rejected.

And yet I keep trying. I keep going. I keep looking. Will I find what I'm looking for this time, or is this just another pit-stop? I guess the only way to answer that is to give it all I've got and find out.