Sex, Mom, and God

by Frank Schaeffer

  When I got Genie pregnant, I was deemed normal within the Evangelical ghetto in which I was raised. I could sleep with my sweetheart fearing no more than a reprimand for doing something “too soon” and “before marriage.” I might have been called a sinner, but I never would have been castigated as a deviant and told to change my inner sexual self. My “sins” left me respectably accepted within the camp of the righteous and still categorized as fully human.

  Moses was condemned by “moral” people as a “freak” for being born who he is and for possessing normal homosexual sexuality. And so he stood there next to me facing death threats for having done no more than experience the same God-given emotions I had experienced when I met Genie.

  No wonder Far Right American Evangelicals, Mormons, Orthodox Jews, Muslims, and Roman Catholics et al. slander gay men and women and also have an affinity for certain repressive religionsaturated countries like gay-bashing Uganda. Maybe it’s because the Ugandans proposed to do to gay men and women “over there” what many Evangelicals and conservative Roman Catholics would love to do here—if they could carry out what might be called the Reconstructionist solution and get away with it.

  As we’ve seen, a bedrock article of faith in the American Religious Right is that America had “Christian origins” and that today America must be “restored” to its “religious heritage.” The “Puritan heritage” of America is cited as evidence for our need to return to our biblical roots and/or to work internationally, as does the Family, to get others to follow our “holy” path.

  Antigay Evangelicals are just carrying on the tradition of persecuting people in the name of God begun in the Bay State. Puritans, too, believed that they were defending authentic Christianity. They said that they were on a divine mission, even calling themselves “The New Israel” and a “city set upon a hill.” John Winthrop transferred the idea of “nationhood” in biblical Israel to the Massachusetts Bay Company. Puritans said the Bible confirmed their status as the New Israel. And since the Puritans claimed they were God’s “Chosen People,” they said that they had the right to take land from the “heathen.” These were the American Indians whom the Puritans thought of as the “new Canaanites,” to be slaughtered with God’s blessing and, in the case of the Pequot Indians, burned alive.

  Anne Hutchinson was a seventeenth-century settler in Massachusetts and an “unauthorized” Bible teacher in a dissident church group who, in the words of the state of Massachusetts monument honoring her, was a “courageous exponent of civil liberty and religious toleration.” Hutchinson was also a student of the Bible, which she interpreted by the light of what she termed her own “divine inspiration.”

  In other words, Hutchinson came to believe that in order to remain both a Christian and a sane and decent being, she had to pick and choose what she believed in her tradition. Hutchinson was banished from the colony for her stand. And Hutchinson, like all people of goodwill informed by the love-your-neighbor ethic, carried within her evolving ethical self the ability to “listen” for the Lord’s “prophetical office” to “open scripture” (as she called it).

  Hutchinson seems to have concluded that religious believers should worship God, not the books about God. Another way to state her case is that God does not reveal Himself, Herself, or Themselves through books but through the heart and the “prophetical office” of the heart.

  Our hearts connect to a truth larger than ourselves: Love of others in the context of community.

  That is the only value of formal religion. It provides the place and time for the liturgies through which we may unite with others heart-to-heart to seek out those mysterious truths that words can’t describe but that the doing of ritual helps us to tap into.

  And this idea isn’t some modern-era “Liberal” view or even original with the “heretic” Anne Hutchinson. A thread of open interpretation of the Scriptures and religious tradition goes back to the beginnings of the Christian era and coexists with the narrower, harsher view of God. That “thread” teaches that we do not find God through dogma but through stillness of the soul. In that quiet place we may be given the gift of encountering something bigger and more beautiful than ourselves.

  First-century Church Father Tertullian summed up this more enlightened view, exhorting the faithful, “That which is infinite is known only to itself. This it is which gives some notion of God, while yet beyond all our conceptions—our very incapacity of fully grasping Him affords us the idea of what He really is. He is presented to our minds in His transcendent greatness, as at once known and unknown.”109

  A whole antifundamentalist, antitheology thread in church history came to be called apophatic theology, or the theology of not knowing. This merciful and open tradition takes a mystical approach (similar to Hutchison’s) related to individual experiences of the Divine, which are given by God as a gift, not acquired or demanded.

  Apophatic theology teaches that the Divine is ineffable, something that can be recognized only when it is felt after it is given. All we can “do” is shut up, listen, and wait. This ancient tradition, this humane thread, flies in the face of today’s Evangelical myths about an “inerrant,” let alone literal, Bible.

  I think that if she were alive today, Hutchinson might agree with me when I observe that the world will not find peace until people wanting to build a Jewish synagogue in Mecca or a Unitarian church in Medina may do so as easily as they could in Chicago; that the world will never be safe until a gay couple may kiss openly and without fear on any street in Tulsa, Islamabad, Lagos, or Kansas City; that America won’t find sanity until Utah and South Carolina are no more defined by any one religion than Central Park is; and that Americans will keep dying for nothing but stupid theology and fear-filled xenophobic ignorance until the very idea of a “Christian country,” “Islamic republic,” “atheist people’s paradise,” or a “Jewish state” is about as credible as a flat-earth theory.

  To be true to what I hope is the heart of the best of the universal religious message, I want to say that redemption through selflessness, hope, and Love necessitates a new and fearless repudiation of the parts of holy books and traditions—be they Jewish, Christian, Muslim (or other)—that bring us messages of hate, exclusion, racism, ignorance, misogyny, homophobia, tribalism, and fear. To find any spiritual truth within any religion’s holy books, we must mentally edit them by the light God has placed in each of us. As Anne Hutchinson put it at her trial, “The Lord knows that I could not open scripture; he must by his prophetical office open it unto me.”110

  Those who wish to live as Christians, Jews, Muslims, agnostics, or atheists by following the humble apophatic thread, as opposed to those who wish to force others to be like them by using Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or doctrinaire secularism as a weapon, must shift from unquestioning faith in the Bible, Quran, Torah, or science to a life-affirming message of transcendence.

  There is a way to live comforted by faith without being part of the evil that constitutes so much of religion. This way of faith is symbolized for me by a certain annual Greek Orthodox service Genie and I love: the Service of Forgiveness. (And no, this is not a pitch for my religion, just a sharing with you of what Genie and I happen to do in our little community, where we encounter a church tradition that, like all other church traditions, is far from perfect, not the way but a way that we happen to love.)

  After prayers are read, this service ends with each person in our local Greek Orthodox community walking to the front of our sanctuary, kissing the icon of Jesus, then bowing in front of our priest. “Forgive me,” we say. “I forgive you,” answers our priest, as does each member of the congregation. We embrace and then together we say, “God forgives us both.”

  After that exchange, each person takes his or her place next to the priest in a line that—after we’ve all stepped up and taken our places—stretches around the interior perimeter of the church. Each of us repeats the action and then moves down the line repeating the “forgive me” ritual with everyon
e in the congregation until we’ve all asked each other for forgiveness. We bow before children and old people, middle-aged parishioners and giggling children. We ask forgiveness from the people we love and from the people we don’t like. Everyone from the priest to the youngest infant in her mother’s arms is an equal in this ritual.

  When I get to the place in the line where Genie is standing, there’s a fraught history in my “Forgive me.” We hug just as we’ve hugged everyone else, but in Genie’s embrace is the healing gift of reconciliation. My wife of forty years says “I forgive you” with such warmth and sincerity that I feel that life is not a step to a “Better Place” but is that better place—now.

  EPILOGUE

  One recent morning I happened to be riding a full Greyhound bus from Boston to New York. The advice I gave The Probably Unsaved Asian Young Woman, as I’ll call the person I met on that bus, was pretty good (though maybe since I was still labeling people, I was less cured of my fundamentalism than I thought).

  The seat next to me was open. The only other empty seat was across the aisle next to a heavyset girl in her early twenties. She was talking loudly on her cell phone and sniffing compulsively while brushing her lank sandy blonde hair away from her pudgy white face. Her sniffing and the incessant dragging of her fingers through her hair seemed to be connected; one action accompanied the other. Had my mother been there—not as she is now at the very sweet and forgetful age of ninety-six, but as she was when she was fifty, vibrant, young, beautiful, and energetically opinionated—she would have described the cell phone talker as “a young woman who clearly doesn’t know the Lord.”

  If This Unfortunate Young Woman, as Mom would have called her (and as I instantly labeled her) had been happier looking, speaking in a less-petulant tone, and carried on a quieter, more intelligent series of cell phone conversations or if she’d worn something besides too-tight, too-short shorts hugging her bulging dimpled thighs, she might have been attractive. Sniffing, those Unfortunate Shorts, her hair-sweeping, and her head-tossing might have been forgiven. But The Unfortunate Young Woman’s face was set in a terminal pout, and her side of successive phone conversations (which she conducted one after the other, like a chain smoker lighting each cigarette off the butt of the last) consisted of badmouthing her friends to other friends, combined with an unforgivable “where-I’m-like-at-right-now” travelogue.

  If the driver on the Boston to New York run is a smoker, he pulls over at a rest stop near Hartford under the pretense of letting his or her passengers stretch their legs. Almost everyone buys something to eat at the Roy Rogers/Pizza Hut while the driver stands by the bus feverishly consuming two cigarettes. He or she sucks the air through those cigarettes with such nicotine-deprived desperation that each drag creates a quarter to half an inch of ash, and you can hear the tobacco sizzle. Some of the passengers also smoke while others ferry food onto the bus.

  For the rest of the way, the air in the bus is redolent of french fries and glopped-up, too-thick Americanized “pizza,” not to mention the smoke smell clinging to the smokers’ clothes. Weirdly, instead of these odors being nauseating, they combine to foster a mood of friendly domesticity that always makes me feel as if our bus-riding collection of strangers is forming into some sort of community that would, in the event of a terrorist attack, flat tire, or alien invasion from outer space, stick together and share food.

  Even without an alien invasion, I’ve had fellow passengers who hadn’t said a word to me before the rest stop offer me french fries soon after we’ve climbed back onboard. I once shared several chicken nuggets with a Polish tourist. Something about disembarking together and then ten minutes later trooping back onto the bus—with everyone obeying the unwritten rule that you go back to your former seat—makes for bonding.

  That said, our driver wasn’t a smoker. There was to be no rest stop. And so I never did develop any community feeling toward The Unfortunate Young Woman, especially since ten minutes out of Boston, after the driver announced that we were stopping in Newton for more passengers, the sniffer arranged herself—on purpose—in such a way as to claim both seats on her side of our row. She spread out like a stranded jellyfish melting on hot sand.

  I didn’t even have a briefcase to protect my open seat. Nor, given that I mow my lawn and cut and stack firewood (and don’t have a sweet tooth), do I have any extra body mass to spread out when it’s most needed. So, short of feigning a particularly severe Tourettesyndrome-type of outburst and/or off-putting Pentecostal-style speaking in tongues, I was defenseless.

  The new passenger, a short young Asian woman with a studious intelligent face that was a bit scrunched looking—everything compressed, flatter, and wider than optimal—was timidly glancing back and forth at the two open seats. I tried not to make eye contact. She looked from the open seat next to me to the one across from me being smothered by The Unfortunate Young Woman’s flaccid right thigh. I was too cowardly to contort my face, twitch uncontrollably, or scream “Praise Jesus!” so instead—something like Sir Alec Guinness playing Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars and instructing the storm troopers to let Luke and him pass unmolested—I projected several telepathic thoughts: Sit next to the big girl! Please, sit next to the big girl! Ask her to move over! Ask!

  The Probably Unsaved Asian Young Woman looked my way again, then back at The Unfortunate Young Woman’s open seat. As the bus left Newton, The Probably Unsaved Asian Young Woman peered at the rows behind us. I knew that nothing was open back there. Still undecided and still standing, she held onto the back of a seat as we rounded the bend out of the parking lot and headed for the Mass Pike. I knew that the decent thing to do was to offer to move so that she could step to the open window seat next to me. I’m ashamed to say that instead of moving, I decided to take a last stab at projecting more telepathic thoughts: “No right-minded twenty-something woman chooses to sit next to a fifty-eight-year-old man!” I thought as hard as I could. “Sit next to the nice, albeit extra-large girl your age! She’s made herself look far bigger than she really is! It’s the oldest trick in the book! Ask her to move! There’s plenty of room for you both! You can lower the armrest and contain her! The large ones fall asleep, so you’ll have a nice quiet ride. Sit there! SIT T-H-E-R-E!”

  “May I sit here?” The Probably Unsaved Asian Young Woman asked me so quietly that she was almost whispering.

  “Of course,” I muttered, given that my mother had a “special burden” for the Chinese and that I’m the product of British boys boarding schools from back in the day when politeness counted. I usually play the part of a gentleman by habit, if not by inclination. I smiled as if I’d just noticed her and swung my legs around into the aisle, making room for her to step to the window seat. It was the right thing to do, and besides I’ve arrived at the F-you stage of life.

  Once you’re old enough to know that the accomplishments and possessions you once craved aren’t what they’re cracked up to be, and once you spend enough time on your hands and knees crawling around with your ten-month-old granddaughter finding everything she does deeply fascinating—say, taking boxes of raisins and cornmeal out of a kitchen cupboard again and again—then everything else in your life begins to be fascinating again, too.

  Each grandchild Genie and I have been blessed with is something like cataract surgery: The misty veil lifts, and I see more clearly, not that I’ve ever had cataracts. The F-you stage sounds antisocial. It’s not at all; it is just my way of saying that these days I’m content to let the chips fall where they may. The point is that the F-you stage isn’t directed against anyone, just against the Virus of False Certainty that is threatening to destroy us. The F-you stage is a state of mind that I fell into after hitting my fifties, wherein I say what I think because almost nothing much embarrasses me these days, except my own past false certainties. Knowing you could and probably are wrong about most of what you say is freeing. There is a peaceful sort of “knowing” in admitting unknowing once you accept the basic human Paradox: The evolution
of our species is a journey, not a destination, and we are only just at the very beginning.

  In my grandchild-rejuvenated, F-you frame of mind, I talk to strangers as if they were old friends. People respond to selfrevealing, even self-flaying transparency. So strangers talk to me. They tell me surprisingly intimate details about themselves. I’m a good listener. I also give outrageously forward personal advice. For instance, while flying to Los Angeles, after hearing one divorced and unhappy middle-aged guy’s life story, I told him to track down his high school sweetheart and start over. On a train to Washington, D.C., I told a young Harvard Business School graduate who said he didn’t find his career rewarding to forget his fancy job on Wall Street and join the Marines while he was still young enough to “do something useful.” I advised a businesswoman I met on a flight to London, who (in return for me telling her about how I got Genie pregnant when we were teens) told me about her struggle to “balance career and family,” to go ahead and have a third child if she wanted to, and “damn the career consequences!” I’ve told atheist Jews that they need Jesus, and Evangelicals that the best thing they could do is never set foot in a church again, that they should become secular Jews. I’m sure I’ve had next-to-no effect on most people, besides making this or that bus or plane ride interesting and/or intolerable; I may have helped one or two people and probably ruined a few lives. I enjoy the conversations nonetheless and get a strange adrenaline rush from offering unsolicited advice.