Mennonite in a Little Black Dress Read online

  The third deal breaker, as if I needed another, was Christianity's traditionally narrow definition of salvation. Buttressed with a black-and-white vision of heaven and hell as literal places, salvation was like an airline ticket sandbagged by black-out days. You could be saved only if you Accepted Jesus into Your Heart, preferably with tears, testimony, two weeks at Heartland Christian Camp, and a corduroy Bible with a pocket that you had embroidered with, let's say, Shasta daisies. Thus, in one dramatic assertion, all practitioners of competing world religions were damned. They had strayed onto the high arid plains of perdition. (Hence the collective Mennonite interest in the Chaco.)

  My parents had always modeled commitment-to each other, to their word, to their church, even to the lane they had chosen to drive in. When things got sticky, did Christ-followers bail out and change their minds? That's nutso! When there was dissension in the church body, did they up and leave the church? In their dreams, maybe! In spite of my criticisms, I might have been able to treat church membership like a fifteen-year marriage with problems I'd really prefer not to address. I might have stayed, and stayed, and stayed. I might have shut my eyes to all that was not right. But something happened to chase me away.

  I applied for seminary.

  You may be thinking, Are you profoundly retarded? Or, if you are more tactful: Are you partially retarded? But hey, I was in my twenties at the time, fresh from my first master's degree. Applying to seminary may seem like a strange choice for someone who would later feel lasting pleasure in an alliance with a pottymouthed atheist, but there was something deeply attractive to me about seminary. Oh, I never intended to become a pastor or a theologian, like my father. I was thinking of the masters of divinity as a luxury degree, the way writers today often conceive of a graduate degree in creative writing: two glorious years of reading and scribbling, with no guarantee of employment at the other end, and all for the bargain price of forty thousand dollars! I hadn't ruled out the existence of a God. I still don't. In fact, I'm gonna come right out and admit that I believe in God. I have always loved the beautiful, mysterious power of the Bible, its lethal history, its toxic charm. I adored the idea of learning Hebrew and Greek. I longed for sustained study with other students who were also humbled by the power of creation, by the ineluctable search for meaning in a broken world.

  Anyhoo. After having done my homework on the various Protestant denominations, and after learning exactly where each stood on the hermeneutical issues most important to me, I decided to apply to a Mennonite seminary. Go figure: I ended up really liking the Mennonites' position on global peacemaking, though I must say that I was still uneasy about their unstated intention to evangelize the Chaco. Robert Frost would have loved me. There I stood at a crossroads. Down one path, and I'd become a full-on, flat-out Mennonite. There'd be prayer chains in my future, and ruffled skirts, and a perm, and corduroy Bibles, and children whom I would raise up in the way they should go. I would marry a man with bad hair, and we would pray before meals, and together we would advocate for "liturgical movement" during the worship service. Down the other path, and I'd never be able to look back. I stood there hemming and hawing, like Lot's wife, who sadly never got the chance to memorize the Frost poem for extra credit.

  Seminary, dammit! I was on the cusp of dropping the S-bomb on all my friends when I received a letter from the one other woman who was then enrolled in the seminary. Being Mennonite, the seminary did not enroll many women. Although the Mennonites had not passed a rule against the study of theology by women, at that time there was still no future for women in church leadership. I never met the author of this letter in person, but she changed my life forever.

  This woman, let's call her Esther, had heard that the seminary had admitted one other woman. Esther was excited! She was promising to work with me in sisterly solidarity! We would mentor each other! For six handwritten pages Esther took artless swipes at the patriarchy. She was like a sincere kitten ambushing your ankle as you walk by the couch-adorable! Sporty-fresh! She would lift me up in prayer! Then she signed off with a Bible verse and a smiley face, under which she had drawn a cute dove holding an olive branch in its bill. The word agape was used, an early Christian Greek term to denote brotherly-or in this case sisterly-love.

  The next day I applied to twelve grad schools instead.

  My father recently told me a story that probably appears in one of his sermons. He described two World War II buddies who had become great friends. When one of them was killed in combat, the other risked life and limb to bring his friend's body to a Catholic priest in a French village. But before the friend could be buried in the little churchyard, the priest had to ask him an important question. Was the deceased a Catholic? The soldier shook his head-"No, that is, I'm not sure. I don't think he was a religious man." The soldier had to leave but vowed one day he'd return to pay respects to his friend's grave.

  Years later, the ex-soldier made his way back to the little village and found the old church. He wasn't a man of faith himself, but he had since understood that his friend would not have qualified for burial inside the churchyard. Burial inside the churchyard was for Catholics only. The churchyard fence had historically symbolized the boundaries of the Kingdom of Heaven. The ex-soldier therefore searched the perimeter of the churchyard, seeking his friend's grave marker outside the fence. But he couldn't find it. Finally he tracked down the same priest into whose care he had entrusted his friend's body so many years ago. The priest remembered him and led him to a gravesite that was surprisingly inside the fence.

  "But my friend wasn't Catholic! I thought he had to be buried outside the fence!" exclaimed the ex-soldier.

  "Yes," said the priest. "But I scoured the books of church law. I couldn't find anything that said we couldn't move the fence."

  We all have our own ways of dealing with grief and pain. We might find succor in the thought of angels on the wall, guarding us, us especially, in our moment of travail. We might find comfort in the idea of comforting others, as my mother does. But what if there is no comfort? What if an angel atop the wall is the very last thing you'd imagine? If there was an angel on the wall, Nick's brother Flip never saw it. Flip dealt with his grief and pain by killing himself.

  My in-laws didn't attend the funeral, interpreting Flip's suicide as a ploy for pity from a solipsistic slacker. By the logic of their brand of Christianity, Nick's parents didn't know what to do with a son who had committed suicide. They believed that suicides, like unbelievers, went to hell. (I recently learned that some Canadian Mennonite churches buried suicides outside the fence as late as the 1950s.) Nick and I could never quite wrap our minds around his parents' response to their son's death. Given the anguish that drives suicidal depression, how could anyone who has not suffered it wave a self-righteous banner of judgment and damnation?

  Flip was Nick's closest sibling. Flip had made mistakes. He'd become a parent knowing full well that he was too depressed to be a good or even an adequate father. Wrapped in his own misery and despair, he was incapable of the simple practiced presence that love demands. Flip couldn't be there for anyone. He couldn't listen. He couldn't even communicate his own wants and needs to those who cared for him. Like so many people who suffer from severe depression, he couldn't keep a job; he couldn't stay on his meds. Bouncing from one bad job to the next, he lost everything along the way. He was fired once for some unprofessional behavior we were never able to identify. His wife left him; subsequent girlfriends left him. Finally, at age forty-two, he downed a bottleful of antidepressants, asphyxiating in a puddle of his own vomit, kneeling before a toilet in a cheap hotel. A man's life in one paragraph.

  Nick and I were horrified when his parents accused Flip of selfishness. And we were stunned when the larger Christian discourse found Flip guilty of insufficient faith; we actually heard well-meaning Christians say that if only Flip had been able to put his trust in God, the tragedy of his death could have been prevented. One church leader went so far as to suggest that sinc
e Flip had elected to live a hell on earth, he had made for himself a hell in the hereafter. We were simply blown away by the idea that a man's psychic hell would follow him beyond the grave. Whatever Flip had done or failed to do, the very least he deserved was our compassion and love.

  It was easy for me to show compassion and understanding for Flip's suffering, since Flip had never hurt me personally. But it is much harder to show compassion and understanding when we are the ones being hurt directly, when the wrecking ball of someone else's misery takes us down, too.

  In the months before Nick left me, when his behavior became more desperate, I practiced neither compassion nor understanding. I went numb with shock. And the thaw has been a long slow business. It is tempting to make categorical, sweeping statements about Nick. He used me because he never loved me. He left me because he's gay. He cheated because he's cruel. All of these statements would let me off the hook for my own complicity in the failure of our marriage. Also, none of the above statements has the merit of being true. Nick loved me as much as he was able, while he was able. Nor did he ever conceal his bisexuality from me; I entered my marriage with full knowledge that Nick had dated a man before he moved in with Julia, the woman he was with for eight years before he met me. And anybody who's taken Psych 101 knows that cruel behavior is more often a symptom than a cause.

  Like Flip, Nick did what he thought he had to do. Like Flip, Nick made a choice that resulted in an ending, maybe even a new beginning. Both choices reflected ways to conceptualize healing, born of desperation and unhappiness so great there was no adequate language to express the pain. I don't want to end up like Nick's parents, who blamed their son for hurting them with his suicide. And I especially don't want to end up like one of those bitter divorcees who can't forgive their exes for cheating. I know a woman who is still holding on to her feelings of betrayal after twenty-two years! Self-pity has hardened her face; even her eyes seem wary behind their Botox, like children peeking out of an empty house. This woman's world has been steadily shrinking, and now it's the size of a martini glass. What she wants to talk about after all these years is how badly her husband treated her two decades ago. He did treat her badly, no doubt about it. But her ex-husband has spent his twenty-two years learning and changing and growing. He has tardily become a good father and a loving partner while she keeps injecting her syringe of paralysis into the same wrinkle, over and over and over. Are there not other ways to process abandonment than through the lens of our own victimization and anger?

  There's a sad suicide story I remember from Sunday-school days. A guy named Ahithophel gave King David some wise advice that the king ignored. Ahithophel was a big cheese in the world of political counseling, sort of like a Condoleezza to the king. Ahithophel had a sex bomb of a granddaughter, and she looked even better naked. The sex bomb granddaughter was named Bathsheba. In a nutshell, Ahithophel's advice to the king was: Back off Bathsheba. And P.S., Your Highness, don't go murdering Bathsheba's husband just so you can boink her. King David weighed this advice very carefully, but, being king, he chose to ignore it. This is a political pattern we sometimes see among presidents of large capitalist nations.

  On the one hand, there was advice from a counselor who had proven trustworthy over the years. On the other hand, there was Bathsheba's really luscious bottom. When King David made his choice, Ahithophel tried to hatch a desperate but lame plot to kill him. Ahithophel even volunteered to murder King David himself. We nod at what comes next: yup, sometimes convoluted military coups have a way of backfiring. When the plot to overthrow the king failed, Ahithophel went home, put his house in order, and hanged himself.

  Here's the punch line. We are told several times that poor Ahithophel was a godly counselor. Whenever he spoke, "it was as if God were speaking through him." What was a godly counselor doing plotting murder and treason, even if he had good reason? Even if he was hurt, grieving for his beloved granddaughter?

  I think the answer is best phrased in the form of another question, as on Jeopardy: Who knows? Who knows how we can be both good and bad, both hurt and hurtful? The answer is that none of us knows how. None of us knows why. All we can agree on is the fact that the human condition is constituted by wild vacillations between altruism and nefarity, between kindness and cruelty. One moment we're opening our hearts and our wallets to hurricane victims; the next we're torturing prisoners of war and laughing about the photographs with our friends. Of course, when our badness breaks the law and infringes on the civil rights of others, we deserve incarceration, if only to keep folks safe from our depredations. But by and large most of our injurious actions do not break the law. No, most of them create the kinds of hurt that are legal: deceptions, betrayals, infidelities. And since even the most virtuous among us displays this adiaphorous morality, what if we agreed just to let people be who they are, since we can't change them anyway?

  I used to think that virtuous people, for instance nuns, or even my mother, existed as a kind of Darwinian opposite to pederasts and serial killers. I suspected nuns were the recipients of a genetic gift basket featuring predetermined goodness, in the same way that some folks seem blessed with a natural aptitude for drawing in charcoal. Then, in addition to the genetic gift basket, the stars aligned in a confluence of beatitude, causing environmental forces to help out. Would my mother have been so nice if she hadn't been reared in a simple community, innocent and underexposed? God knows nuns couldn't have many distractions in a convent, where soothing rituals purged the world of temptation.

  But I have come to believe that virtue isn't a condition of character. It's an elected action. It's a choice we keep making, over and over, hoping that someday we'll create a habit so strong it will carry us through our bouts of pettiness and meanness. Until recently I dismissed Niccolò Machiavelli's brutish philosophy that the ends justify the means, but lately I've begun to question that. If in the service of choosing virtuous behavior we need to practice some odd belief, where's the harm? Don't we all have our weird little rehearsals and rituals? Sure, from a ratiocinative point of view, the invention of angels on the wall seems an unlikely way to achieve virtue in praxis. Or take the case of the nuns. Insisting that you are the bride of Christ is pretty wacky, in my opinion. So is the bizarre corollary, giving up sex on purpose. Yet these choices, odd as they are, harm nobody. It seems to me that there are many paths to virtue, many ways of creating the patterns of behavior that result in habitual resistance to human badness.

  And let's just hypothesize: what if there are angels on the wall? To be sure, neither you nor I have seen them. But does that negate their existence? I can imagine a counterargument that might retort, "Well, neither have we seen zombies, and most of us are pretty sure that the utter absence of documentation regarding the undead makes a persuasive case that zombies do not exist." True. Yet I'd like to assert an important distinction between angels and zombies. (Hopefully I am not the first to do so!) The existence of angels adverts to the person of Jesus Christ, a real, living, breathing historical figure; whereas the existence of zombies does not attach to any real historical figure, unless you count Calvin Coolidge.

  At this stage of my life, I am willing to accept not only that there are many paths to virtue, but that our experiences on these varied paths might be real. We can't measure the existence of supernatural beings any more than we can control our partners. And anyhow, I don't want to measure supernatural beings or control my partner. What I want to measure, what I can control, is my own response to life's challenges. If my husband needs to dump me, fine. Let him. This is why I say: Let husbands ditch their wives for guys named Bob. Let Bob dump our husbands for reasons we still haven't heard. Let the angels promenade upon our walls. Let them sound the trump in public, crying, "Prepare ye the way of the Lord."

  ELEVEN

  And That's Okay!

  One afternoon before I left for the Mennonite left coast, I was simultaneously cooking and talking long-distance to my friend Alba. Ready to sauté some shallots, I add
ed a Schulps of olive oil to a skillet. Since the broken clavicle prevented me from clamping the phone under my chin like a normal long-distance cook, I had to pour with the right hand and hold the phone with the left. Thus when I reached over to replace the bottle of olive oil among its fellows, the difficulty of holding the phone shorted my reach. I had to replace the olive oil with the front facing sideways. "Hang on a second," I said automatically to Alba, as I set the phone down to straighten out the cattywampus bottle.

  Then I realized what I was doing. Personally, I didn't care whether the front of the bottle was ninety degrees skewed. It was Nick who would have cared. And Nick wasn't there. I experimentally turned the bottle sideways again, to see how it felt to defy my husband's rage for order. Then I stared at the sideways bottle in brief but silent agitation. I'll be damned, I thought. I couldn't do it! Fifteen years cannot be rotated a quarter-turn to the left, just like that. I righted the bottle one more time. It was an eye-opening moment. For the first time I saw how very far I had been willing to go to accommodate Nick's anxiety. Since I liked things tidy, I'd always told myself we were in accord, we were thinking as one. But the nitpicky perfection he demanded was not what I would have aspired to. Whether Nick had been projecting his artistic eye on the minutiae of his environment or simply assuaging his anxiety by controlling me, all I now felt was a bemused sense of wonder at my need to accommodate. I had work to do, so much was clear.

  As soon as my friends learned that Nick had ditched me for a guy on Gay.com, the self-help books started pouring in. Some provided wise counsel. Some offered strong therapy. Some triggered new insights. And then there was The Language of Letting Go. This book was organized into daily meditations, directed to persons recovering from situations of codependency or addiction. This author was all about affirmation, eager to include everyone in her program of self-acceptance and positive change. Her desire to be inclusive and upbeat emerged in passages that I might paraphrase like this: "Sometimes, we feel confused and broken. Sometimes, we have a hard time leaving relationships that are hurtful. Sometimes, we do the hurting. Sometimes, we do the leaving. Sometimes, we are left. Sometimes, we leave and feel bad about it. Sometimes, we leave and feel good about it. And that's okay!" No matter what the list of our putative faults and self-destructive behaviors, the conclusion would always be some form of "And that's okay!" I imagined this advice uttered in the poignant, sincere tone of Barbara Walters. I loved this book very hard and tried to apply its many useful lessons to my life.