Letting God Go
Mike Finley
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I had been struggling for almost two years since my daughter's suicide in 2009. One key to my struggle was my feelings of bitterness with the religious tradition I had been part of the past decade. I was not your garden variety of evangelical Christian. But I had two complicated kids, and it my desperation I wondered if having an artist as a father might be adding to their burden. So I elected to dial my ego down, and to cultivate a faith that was rooted in humility. My little church believed that God was a always an active part of our lives, so it was never foolish to ask for his intervention. This vision of God as a rescuer was a key feature of many of the Psalms, composed some 3,000 years ago, some of the oldest poems in any literature. Psalm 91, for instance, is a promise that God will not forsake you, but will reach down and protect you from every untoward circumstance. 3
You will not fear the terror of night, nor the arrow that flies by day, nor the pestilence that stalks in the darkness, nor the plague that destroys at midday. A thousand may fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand, but it will not come near you. It is a vision of God as a kind of Superman, reliably rushing to save Lois Lane as she plummets to certain death. A holy insurance policy: no matter what part of the world Superman is in, he can be counted on. A God like that was clearly a wonderful thing. But there were downsides. Lois never learned to stay away from ledges. In a sense, she never grew up and took responsibility for her safety. And a God like that, who broke all the rules to save us, empowered us to break rules, too. Because we're with him. God is so good, such a perfect package, that he redefines good. If God tells us to slay the Amalekites, and their wives, and their children, and their cattle, that becomes a good thing to do. It is a theory of exceptionalism. As Richard Nixon said, “When the president does it, that means it's not illegal.� If God says it's good, it is.
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So I prayed for my daughter, who suffered from severe depression and anxiety, and who had already attempted suicide once. I attended prayer group. I attended church picnics and men's retreats. I did my best to fit in with what was a very sweet, very conservative congregation. One morning in August, 2009, a Buddhist monk, a chaplain with the Minneapolis police department, tapped on our door to tell us that Daniele was found dead in her apartment, a suicide by pills. I grieved. But I also raged, at the God I had humbled myself before, and counted on his saving graces. I knocked, but I had not been answered. I was misled about the way the world works. I said many bitter and unkind things to my old Christian friends, spearing them for their God's failure to perform as warrantied. It was the most awful period of my life. I lost scores of friends. A full year later, in the fall of 2010 I was at a party, a social gathering for local freelancers like myself, and I met a woman author, Mary Hayes Grieco. She divulged that she was about to have a book published on the topic of forgiveness. Abetted by wine, I asked her was what the latest development in the world of forgiveness. Mary laughed at my sarcasm. Unusual for a New Age lay therapist. Red and green lights began flashing. I respected the idea of 5
forgiveness – what a great way to let go of toxic feelings, right? – but I was leery of the format. Scented candles, Celtic harp, herbal teas. But I told Mary that I felt I had a deep need to forgive God. I laid out my story for her, and stressed that I understood that my bitterness was not a good thing to carry through life. "Then let's fire God," Mary challenged me. "Clear him out of your head. Come up with a notion of spirit that makes more sense to you." So I signed up. For two weeks I fretted, because when you squinted at it, it did not seem like such a good idea, to send the All-In-All packing. My old pastor had railed at "cafeteria religion" in which the practitioner picks and chooses what attributes he likes, an a la carte faith. I like Luke, but I hate Paul. I like Mother Teresa, not I'm so big on the Inquisition. And I was being called on to do that very thing – peel away the attributes of the divinity that were untrue, and see what was left, if anything. So I met with another counselor, not Mary, but a colleague of hers named Theresa. We chatted for an hour about the nature of my 6
problem, and the particulars of my life. Then she led me through a hypnotic lesson, which I will detail for you, so you can forgive God – or your mom, or husband, or child, if they are what's been bumming you out – yourself. Here is the format for forgiveness: •
You figuratively sit the person you intend to forgive on a chair opposite you.
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You tick off a list of grievances against the person to be forgiven.
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You inform them that you really needed them to behave differently than they did, but they let you down.
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Then you inform them that you are “canceling” any expectation that they will ever comply with your needs. Henceforth they are off the hook.
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You tell them they are forgiven, and in your heart you have forgiven (but not forgotten).
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Then you send them away.
I reminded God of the particulars of Daniele's life, how painful it was for her to live her entire life plagued with acute anxiety problems, OCD, panic attacks, deep depression, deep hostility to her own growth and development, deep antagonism to anyone unlucky enough to try to lead her, a messed up personality, and, according to her, attention issues. She was alcoholic, a punk, and in the end, a suicide. 7
I laid all this at God's feet. I told him how he had contradicted his own advertised features. How everything bad, under God, turns into good. How loved Daniele supposedly was by him. How every prayer is answered (even if the answer is No). How, according to many, God never throws anything at us so bad that we cannot handle it. All these suppositions, I reminded him, were wrong. It broke my heart that they were wrong, but I could no longer ignore their failure. So I was forced to let him go – let that concept of God as Superman, as rescuer, as interventionist, as Yankee gunboat, dry up and blow away. I did this with an element of fear in my heart. After all, I was firing the Great and Mighty Oz. This could be catastrophic karma for me and my surviving family. Those thoughts had their moment in my head. Then Theresa asked me to face another chair set up in the room, an arm's length from the chair the Old God had sat on. This was the mystery guest chair, where the New God would appear. This New God – I will call him him, for convenience's sake – was not fleshed in with features yet. He was a cipher – possibly not there at all if I did not want him to be. My job mow was to commence a relationship with this new 8
being, to talk with him and tell him what I needed in a god. I had zero preparation for this step. I did not enter the room with a concept of a God I always wanted. Theresa sprang it on me, asking me to create a God-homunculus. So I felt somewhat insecure. But I proceeded, and said what my heart came up with. I told him I did not want to be lied to any more. Tell me the truth, I said, or say nothing at all. I said I thought I wanted some sense of a relationship – an entity I could go to when meditating or praying, that could pick me out of a crowd, that I did not have to fill in every time we spoke. I told him I wanted a connection not just to one religion or one tradition but to the holy heart of all people. I told him I wanted companionship as I journeyed through loss toward death, not abandonment. I told him I wanted community in the broadest possible sense – with all humanity, with nature, with myself – and not in the narrower sense, a church building with sixty-odd souls sitting in scattered pews. I told him a bunch of things.
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After perhaps fifteen minutes of this, I was asked to rise from my chair and go sit right where the New God had been sitting, and to sit within that spirit, and become one with him. And from that wooden chair I was to look back at where I had been sitting, as if I were New God, contemplating myself, my life, my old person, still in the corner of the couch. It was an eerie feeling. It was a god's-eye view of myself. I saw how unhappy I had been, how knuckle-biting, how restless and irritable. I saw how good my intentions were, no matter how screwed up the outcome sometimes was. I saw my own effort to live a good life, to be a decent husband and father and witness to others. As I did all this I felt a fresh spring of sympathy welling up within myself for myself. Then I spoke to myself, and I astonished myself by using words Jesus had spoken. It surprised me, because up to this point I had not been equating Old God with Jesus. I was firing more the grandfather-on-the-throne-of-ages God. But there was something odd about my Jesus persona. My Jesus 10
was an innocent compared to the verily-verily-I-say-to- you, twofingers-in-the-air Jesus of the gospels. My Jesus was young, ignorant, unlettered, skeptical, and funny. My Jesus had morphed into Huckleberry Finn! My Jesus was a companion to accompany me on a raft journey down the river of life, gazing up at the night stars. Theresa and I hugged and I went out into the night. I felt a tingle along both my arms, like every hair was standing erect, and I could feel the cool air in every pore. I felt every wrinkle of my face, every tired crease, had relaxed, had surrendered, had given up, and had resolved. I started my car. There was Springsteen on the radio. Everybody's got a hungry heart. I was still an old man, I saw, as I checked the car mirror. But an old man at peace, like he had not felt in years. *** So I sent God away, and created a new idea of God to take his place. How did that work? I am reporting back after two years of this new “religion,� one in 11
which the divine is a sympathetic but helpless companion. It doesn't need to be a person at all – just a sense that things hold together, even though they may be going to hell. My new god is more the god of the Holocaust than the old one. The old one was always under pressure to intervene, and seldom did. He was a terrible failure. Contrary to promises, he did not answer when he was spoken to, or open the door when it was knocked. Whereas, my new one is unable to intervene. “He” is cold comfort, in fact – just the knowledge that there is meaning and goodness in life even when life takes a turn for the abominable. You might pray to this deity, as a way to express your despair – but without the thought that God will come swooping down on his winged stallion to set things right. I miss the old god because so much literature centered around that idea of the intervening person. There is vast power in the concept, so much that many individuals continue to have faith in it, that God will heel and redeem, and all's right with the world. The greatest concept of Jesus, perhaps even greater than the power of love, was this idea of the person, that you could speak to eternity ny looking into the eyes of the Christ, who had a biography like we do, who presumably suffered everything we suffer. 12
That's why I kept Huckleberry. He too is a person, sympathetic and modest. He too has eyes you can look into. But without the guarantees that come up short. Is it useful? Yes. Do I talk to him often? No. Because he is powerless, he is less charismatic, and I turn to him less for comfort,. And there is certainly no church I can go to on Sunday mornings. But there is the world, which cam be cruel but also very beautiful, and I take great solace in being here among you all, all of us suffering together, and doing our best to be brave. In the words of Johnny Mercer: We're after the same rainbow's end, Waiting 'round the bend My huckleberry friend, moon river, and me.
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