by Trish Ryan
“Like a mulligan?” I asked. “You mean like in golf, when you hit a shot that’s so bad everyone lets you start over?”
“Sort of,” Paul conceded, breaking into a smile. “I think for tonight we can think of it as a mulligan. It means that when Jesus died on the Cross, he took all the mistakes that feel like they’ll dog you forever with him; his death cancels them out. When he died,” Paul explained, “they died, too.”
“So if it’s done,” I asked, baffled, “what does that have to do with me? And why do I still feel like garbage if my mistakes aren’t supposed to count anymore?”
“Because you have to opt in,” Pascha explained. “Jesus doesn’t just take over your life; he waits to be invited. We have to let him take our sins—we have to ask him to save us.” I stared at the carpet. I had no idea what to do with this information, or where I’d go on Wednesday nights once they locked me out.
“Why don’t you try it?” Paul suggested. “Tell Jesus you’re giving him all the things you’ve been through and that you want him to take them. See what happens.”
I took a deep breath. “Okay. I’ll try.” I looked at them both, then bowed my head. My nose overflowed and I swiped at it with tissue. “Jesus,” I began, “I give you my asshole ex-husband. Oh crap,” I stammered, looking up. “Am I allowed to call him an asshole?”
“That’s okay,” Paul assured me.
“Sorry. Okay. Anyway,” I continued. “Jesus, I give you all the ways I’m disappointing and terrifying my parents with my life choices. I give you all those relationships that didn’t work out. I give you my relationship with Mark, which isn’t working out. I give you my pathetic life, with no job, no husband, and a gross apartment. I give it all to you, Jesus. Have at it. Amen.” My effort felt half baked, but it was the best I could do. I was exhausted—tired of fighting for the right to do things my way, tired of defending spiritual adventures that left me facedown in the mud, tired of getting up every morning to face my scraps of a life. If Jesus was willing to take on this type of renovation project, the least I could do was warn him what he was getting into.
As I finished, Paul and Pascha surrounded me in a giant, reassuring hug. Shockingly, they didn’t seem to be judging me for my swear words or my reluctant trudge toward Jesus. They seemed happy to see me hanging in, like the people who stand alongside a marathon course long after the winners have past, offering the stragglers cheers and encouragement. I didn’t feel any different, Jesus-wise, but I felt loved.
At the end of the night, Paul suggested that I abandon my smorgasbord approach to spirituality: “Why don’t you put aside the new age teachings,” he proposed. “You know—feng shui, astrology— and just do Jesus for a while? Think of it as an experiment,” he said, “see what happens.” This might have been a major turning point for me, if I’d understood what Paul was asking. I was still clueless, though, thinking, Yeah—it would be good to read the Bible more, the true nature of his suggestion whizzing right over my head.
NEWLY IMMERSED IN my Jesus experiment, I started to miss my other spiritual friends, the ones I knew from my life before the Vineyard. And I worried about them, that they might be missing out on this Jesus thing. None of their lives was going all that well either—like me, they’d all spent years trudging along various paths, always believing they were getting closer to the top of some mountain, but never stopping to notice that for all that effort, the view was still pretty bleak. But when I talked to them about this Jesus thing—about my Fabulous New Discovery—they didn’t seem all that interested.
“Um, yeah. That’s nice for you,” Reina told me one day after our Unity Yoga class. “But, yanno, I’ve tried that whole fundamentalist deal. I’m just not into some guy in a suit thumping a Bible and telling me what to do.”
I didn’t know what to say. I was so accustomed to people jumping on the bandwagon whenever I found a new spiritual path to wander; I was shocked by her outright dismissal.
“But it’s not like that,” I stammered. “Dave—the pastor— he doesn’t even wear a suit . . .”
Jonathan was the same: “I’ve done too much work getting my chakras aligned,” he insisted. “Why would I surround myself with all that negative Christian energy?”
Okay then.
Jessie—whom I knew was a long shot to begin with— berated me for forty-five minutes, insisting that my very act of considering the Bible suppressed struggling women around the globe. Her eyes gleamed with pleasure and fury as she ranted, pouring out the frustration of a generation of lipstick lesbians who didn’t have the benefit of a real-live Christian to yell at. (I hadn’t considered how few opportunities an angry feminist has for these kinds of encounters in Cambridge.) It’s true, I thought later. People hate Christians.
Chapter Sixteen
Weeded and Pruned
I once read a passage by Madeleine L’Engle in which she explained how it was possible to crash through a plate glass door and emerge unscratched. The damage doesn’t come from the breakthrough, she said, but from our instinctual urge to pull back afterward, trying to return to the other side. If we go with the momentum and let it carry us, we’ll be okay. But if we pull back, we end up sliced and bloodied by broken shards we could have left behind.
I crashed through an awfully big window on my way to becoming a Christian. I landed in an extraordinary world of exceedingly friendly people who think it is normal to wait until they are married to have sex, but abnormal to read their horoscopes in the daily paper; a world where prayers are lifted up in Jesus’ name (as if, it seemed to me, everyone needed reminding of whom we were praying to), and people talk about deliverance and prophecy as if they are gifts similar to athletic talent or the ability to draw a still life that actually looks like fruit. Faced with this strange new world, I desperately wanted to pull back. But smashing through this glass and landing in life as a follower of Jesus was like choosing the red pill in The Matrix, I learned: it took me into a place few people know of, a world of spiritual battles and forces larger than life. But once you know, I discovered, you can’t un-know; I was committed to staying the course, even if I wasn’t loving the trip.
To put it bluntly, I wasn’t loving the trip. Here’s the thing: when God told me he had a husband for me that day in Buffalo, I thought He meant right away; I thought He understood that time was of the essence. I’d been going to church, I’d given up sex—by all accounts, I’d held up my end of the bargain. Accordingly, I expected a handsome man to come up to me at any moment and announce, “Hi there . . . God sent me,” after which we’d hop into his chariot, ride off into the suburbs, and live happily ever after.
But that wasn’t how it went. Sure, I had one or two guys ask me out—an earnest insurance salesman who told me on the first date that he’d belonged to a cult and still chanted to his guru, a second-year student from Harvard Business School searching for a willing partner to continue his genetic line. Not exactly what a girl thinks of when she imagines a dream man handpicked by God.
“Have you lost my file?” I asked Him one day, stomping through the woods while Kylie bounded through the piles of fallen leaves, “Because overall, this doesn’t seem to be working. What if I opt out?” I asked suddenly, raising the stakes of our transaction. “What if I decide not to be a Christian?” I taunted Jesus with the things I’d heard he hated most: “What if I’m still a feminist?” I asked. “What if I vote for Democrats? What if I’m . . . what if I’m gay?” I half expected to be struck down, right there in the woods. As I stomped through the leaves and watched Kylie tree a squirrel, I almost wanted Jesus to kick me out of his little club so I could cobble together some sort of a life from the few pieces he hadn’t ruined. Instead, he said to me:
I can give you—and anyone else who wants it—a life that defies your definitions. I can empower you more than feminism, I can make the world work better than any political party. I can bless you to live in the best romantic relationship you’ve ever had. But I won’t do it unless you want me to�
�it’s your choice.
“I want that,” I admitted. “All of it . . .” I decided not to pull back.
NIGHT AFTER NIGHT I had nightmares of snakes. I saw huge constrictors hiding under every pillow and dangling from every tree, waiting to wrap themselves around my head and engulf me. I woke up sweating, the words to that childhood song about being swallowed by a boa constrictor echoing through my mind. I pored over books on dream interpretation and animal symbolism trying to figure out what these images meant. The general consensus of both the psychics and the Freudians was that snake dreams represented emerging sexuality: the stirring of my kundalini energy, as one eloquent yogi put it. Clearly, that was not it. Besides the obvious fact that I’d given up premarital sex for Jesus, there was nothing sexy about a dream where a python ate my dog.
I asked Paul and Pascha about my dreams. And Amy. And anyone else who might have some reasonable explanation for this nocturnal reptile torment.
“It’s Satan,” they told me as if reading off the same cue card.
Oh—it’s Satan. Well then, that explained everything. I stared back at my friends, perplexed.
“Satan is fighting back,” Paul explained. “He doesn’t want you to follow Jesus, he wants you to be miserable. His whole goal is to scare you, annoy you, bug you, and otherwise push you away from Jesus, and from anyone else following Jesus. So he’s hijacking your dreams to freak you out.”
“It’s working!” I blurted. “What am I supposed to do?” It was exasperating that not only was I having this absurd conversation, I was having it repeatedly.
“You fight back,” Amy told me.
“You pray,” said Pascha.
“You renounce all the ways you’ve given Satan a foothold, then tell the snakes to leave in Jesus’ name,” recommended Paul.
“You read Ephesians 6:10,” Pascha added. “That will tell you what to do.”
I went home that night and read the Apostle Paul’s advice to the beleaguered Ephesians about what to do in times of spiritual battle. I read about how I should dress myself with the “belt of truth,” the “helmet of salvation,” and the “breastplate of righteousness,” taking up the “shield of faith” to quench the fiery darts of the enemy and the “sword of the Spirit” which was, somehow, the word of God. But while the Bible assured me I had all these protective garments at my disposal, I had no more idea how to put them on—how they worked—than I would an Indian sari or the complicated obi of a geisha.
Paul loaned me a book on fighting evil, which I hid behind my copy of Prozac Nation as I rode the train. I didn’t care if people around me thought I was depressed; when you’re on the T that just makes you normal. But I wasn’t ready to field the puzzled stares of people wondering why I wanted to fight demons. There were still many questions I couldn’t answer.
ONE OF THE surprising things I noticed about Jesus was how much he talked about gardening. For a carpenter whose unofficial job description was “Save the world,” he exhibited an unlikely preoccupation with seeds and soil. Some of his gospel messages read more like turf management lectures than spiritual direction: plant on rocky soil, and you can’t expect much to take root. Toss those seeds haphazardly in the middle of a thorny patch, he warned, and they’ll be choked out long before they have a chance to grow. It was essential, he suggested, to cultivate the soil—to soften up the hard places and clear out the weeds—before you could expect to produce anything. If you want to plant seeds, he said, you need to loosen up the ground, otherwise it’s all wasted effort. And by the way, he added: those branches that look pretty and leafy but don’t bear any fruit? Those have to go.
ONE DAY AS I was subjecting Amy to yet another explanation of why Mark would be a better husband for me than one of the cute guys in our small group (Mark was a Taurus—the perfect counterpart to my Capricorn-Leo, while the other guy was an Aries, which made for the worst combination imaginable) she broke her posture of patient spiritual correctness and said, “You know you’re not supposed to be doing that, right?”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“Astrology,” she said. “God specifically told us not to look to the stars and planets to guide us. That’s looking to the created for guidance instead of the Creator, and the Bible is pretty clear that God doesn’t want us doing that.”
“But astrology is in the Bible,” I replied, feeling defensive. “The three wise men were astrologers, following the star to Jesus.”
“They were astronomers,” she clarified, “they studied the stars. There’s no indication they looked to the planets to make decisions about their love lives.”
I wasn’t sure what to say.
“You know, don’t you,” she continued carefully, “that not every spiritual message you hear comes from God?”
“But God made the planets and the stars,” I countered. “Why can’t He use them to tell us things, to communicate with us?”
“He could,” she conceded. “But He didn’t set it up that way. When God says ‘Seek me,’ or ‘Ask and I will answer,’ He wants us to pray, not consult a chart of planetary alignment. God doesn’t make it that complicated—He wants a relationship with us, not a science project.”
I didn’t know what to make of this. Astrology was still the basis of every decision I made, my way of negotiating the world. It didn’t seem contrary to my “Just Do Jesus” project, but rather complementary. I couldn’t imagine functioning without the information astrology provided, or why this might be necessary.
“I’ll tell you what,” Amy said after a lengthy silence. “Why don’t you ask God how He feels about this stuff? Ask Him what you should and shouldn’t be doing, and trust Him to tell you. We’ll leave it up to Him.”
COULD AMY AND Paul and Pascha be right? I wondered—was there really a problem with my “many paths to the top of the mountain” approach to spirituality? I thought of one of my law professors, a theatrical septuagenarian who had warned us endlessly of the importance of recognizing “red herrings”—facts or evidence that look important but are really distractions, false leads designed to pull you off course and take you down the wrong path. His exams were filled with such temptations, sentences leading us to believe we were dealing with a certain type of case, except for a word or two buried in the next paragraph negating that conclusion. “That’s it!” you’d think, excited and proud to have recognized the issue so easily. Puffed up, you’d blow right by that next paragraph, already drafting your brilliant answer. If you fell for one of these red herrings, you could spend the whole exam time analyzing the facts from the wrong perspective, miss the real issue, and fail the class. And the kicker was that you wouldn’t realize what had happened until it was too late. Red herrings were the most dangerous part of his tests. Could the Course, astrology, and all my other practices be spiritual red herrings? I wondered. Amy’s words echoed through my mind: “You know, don’t you, not every spiritual message you hear comes from God?” What did that even mean?
I e-mailed Pascha for advice. “It’s true,” she wrote back. “Not everything we pick up on comes from God. But don’t worry—there are ways to get rid of the funky stuff, and ways to sort it out.
“Essentially,” she explained, “there are three places messages that seem spiritual come from: some are from God, some are things we make up in our own mind, and some are from Satan. It’s like you’re a TV antenna,” she continued, “and you pick up a wide variety of stations: great programming, static, porn—the key is to learn the distinguishing characteristics of the great programming channels so you can filter out the rest.”
Are you kidding me? I thought. Is this possible? But even as I chuckled at how preposterous this sounded, my brain clicked away, registering the twelve billion little experiences this explained about my life—nightmares, senses about people, creepy feelings when I entered certain places or picked up certain books. I’d never had any way to work with this information, no inkling that it meant anything in the larger scheme of life. (I’d alwa
ys thought this sensitivity was due to the placement of my moon sign on the cusp between Aquarius and Pisces.) What if, I wondered, in all my wandering around, I somehow made a deal with evil forces, aligning myself with them in exchange for little snippets of information, taking myself off of God’s path for my life?
“How do you sort this out?” I wrote to Pascha, trying not to panic. “How do I realign myself and make sure I’m hearing from God?”
“Don’t worry,” she assured me. “Jesus can sort you out.” I wasn’t sure what this meant. She described how God’s messages are always consistent with what He says in the Bible, and that they bear good fruit: they are encouraging, and the choices they lead to bring good results. I thought about the Course, and its “fruit”: how no matter how hard I tried to apply its principles, the results were bad. My astrology planning also failed: my ex-husband was a Virgo, Mark was a Taurus; my “perfect” matches weren’t viable in any of the ways that mattered.
Digging deeper, I remembered the time I went with Kristen to see a psychic three months before leaving my marriage. Knowing only the first letter of my name and my date of birth, the woman used tarot cards to reveal a shocking level of intimate knowledge about my life: how my husband controlled me, how it would get worse before it got better, and how I’d soon live in a giant house filled with valuable antiques. She was deadly accurate; clearly she was getting supernatural information from somewhere. But there were none of the hallmarks of God in her message—nothing encouraging, no advice for what to do next or how to make things better. I’d left that day feeling awed, but grim. What she said was true, but her recitation only served to underscore my misery and make it seem endless and inevitable. Was that bad fruit? Had I been making little deals with the devil all this time, trying to find supernatural information without going to God? If so, how could I get Jesus to sort me out?
