The Trouble with God

I buckled myself into the police cruiser.  Our chief of police gunned us out of the driveway and onto the road, fast.  We were looking for one of the sons. 

“I hate a suicide,” the chief said.

“It’s my first.”   

“I’ve been at more than two hundred.  I counted them once.  They never get easier.  Accidents, even murders—those get easier.  Suicides—never.”

“Maybe it’s that…maybe it’s that they had a choice, and instead of trying some more, they chose….”

“Two weeks ago, it was a fifteen-year-old boy—over a girl.  Over a girl.”

Our chief—a father of teen daughters—slowed and then turned abruptly onto another road.  Five teenage boys were riding their four-wheelers toward us on the pavement. They and their vehicles were splashed with mud.  They were whooping it up. 

The chief flicked on his blue lights and stopped and buzzed his window down.  “Where you guys been?”

“Just around,” said one.

“You can’t be riding on the road.  You know that.”

“Yeah.” 

“Don’t make me stop you again.”

“Yeah.”

“Get home now.”

“Sure.”

The chief buzzed his window back up, and we sped on.

After a moment, he said, “His older brother was fine, never any trouble.  But that one?  If we weren’t on this kind of a call, I’d have given all of them trouble.  The other ones, they’re just following that one.”  He was quiet for a moment and then he said, “I’ll probably hear from his father tomorrow, roasting me for hassling his kid.”

“Used to be—if that had been me, and you had stopped me—my father would have roasted me.”

We turned onto a gravel road that wound back and down into the woods.  The cruiser’s headlights came on.  It was evening and dark, now, in the woods—it was a humid, still, Maine evening with swarms of bugs in the air.  After a few turns, we saw the trailer, slowed. 

The chief muttered, “His truck’s here.  Not the car.”

Inside the trailer, dogs—sounded like two of them—began to bark. 

The chief spoke into his radio, reporting our location, then—“Okay, let’s go see.  You going to make the announcement?”

“I scarcely know him.  Know a lot of his family, but not him.” 

“He’ll know you’re from the church?”

“Yeah, he should.”

“Okay.  I’ll make the announcement, then you step forward.”

I trailed the chief up onto a bit of deck, which sagged under the weight of the two of us.  Lots of lobstering stuff piled around.  Louder barking.  The chief peered in through a small window built into the door of the trailer and banged with his fist.  “Arnold?  You here?”

The dogs went berserk.

“Hey, Arnold?”

No answer. 

We backed away, stepping down to the ground.  The chief walked a few steps to peer around the corner of the trailer. “Car’s here,” he called to me. “Arnold’s gotta be here somewhere.”

He strode back to the cruiser, opened the driver’s door, and hit the siren for about ten seconds.  Crows rose from the trees, cawing.  We listened.  Nothing, except the dogs.  The chief hit the siren again.  

Sounds from the woods behind the trailer.  Someone crashing through trees. 

Arnold stepped around the trailer’s corner.  He was carrying a bucket.  “What the hell?”  Then he saw the cruiser and the chief.  He stopped.  “Oh, no….”

“Arnold.”  The chief walked toward him.  I was a step or two behind.  “There’s been a death.”

The chief said a few words in a low voice.

All the blood drained from Arnold’s face.  He staggered.  “What?”

He fell to his knees.  The bucket scattered sideways, spilling black water. 

Arnold collapsed further and now lay on his side on the gravel.  “Arnold?” said the chief. 

Arnold rolled onto his back and, reaching toward the sky with both hands, bellowed, “Why? Why?”

I knelt.  I didn’t know what to do, so I put my hands on his chest and bent closer to him.  He stared at me and grabbed my shoulders and bellowed again, this time at me—“Why?”

“I don’t know.  There’s no way to know.  There’s no logic.”

“I told them.  I told them.  I told them.”

The chief said, “You told them what?”

“It was all going to hell. But why?  Why this?” 

His hands fell away from my shoulders, and he lay boneless on the ground. 

I pressed closer.  “We can get through this.  We can get through this.  We’re a praying body.”  Arnold seemed not to hear.  Not knowing what to do, I repeated myself.  “We’re a praying body.”

The chief squatted down.  “We’ll take you to the house.  They need you there now.  Can you stand up?”

Curses flowed from Arnold’s mouth blacker than the water that had spilled from the bucket. 

My hands were still on Arnold’s chest.  “We can get through this together,” I said. 

His eyes came back to mine.  “Yeah?  How?”

“I was praying with your family, and then we came to find you.  Pastor’s at the house now.”

Arnold twisted and struggled up onto one elbow.  “Oh, God, it hurts.”

The chief said, “Let’s get you up,” and he and I assisted Arnold to stand. 

 

                                                                        ***

 

Arnold needed God.  Of course, a lot of people need God. 

A lot of people are in pain. Pain is everywhere. But a lot of people in pain hope they can handle the pain themselves so they don’t need to need God. 

The trouble with God is that He has this judgment-through-eternity thing going on, and there are a lot of people who prefer to bear a lot of pain, all by themselves, in order—in their minds—to avoid needing God, who will judge them through eternity.   

Way back when, I might probably have been one of them myself. 

But God has this other thing going on, too, by which He un-remembers our sins.

There’s a catch.  The catch about God un-remembering is that He only un-remembers when, first, we accept the love-gift which He gave to us by the sacrifice of His Son. 

Complicated.  That doesn’t track.  Not for a lot of people.

For me, it tracks, but then I’m a believer, so of course it tracks for me.  But it doesn’t track for Arnold. 

                                                                        ***

Arnold stumbled into the back seat of the cruiser, slumped. 

“Are you okay?” the chief asked.  He leaned in.  “Here, I’ll buckle you.” 

Arnold sat straighter for a moment but when the buckle clicked, he slumped again.

The chief started the engine, turned the cruiser around, paused.  “Anything you need to do here first?”

“Huh?”

“Anything you need to do here first?  The dogs?”

Arnold shook his head. 

The chief radioed our situation and then drove—slowly now—through the woods in the dim air and turned onto the road.

I craned back from my front seat.  “You told them what?”

“It was all going to hell.”

“We can get through this.”

Arnold looked at me uncomprehendingly. 

 

                                                                        ***

 

It’s that whole sin thing.  It’s that whole judgment-through-eternity thing.  Arnold hadn’t done anything to deserve this, but now this horrid thing has just happened in his family, and it was going to hurt him and his whole family for a long, long time. 

Sometimes in life you get tipped toward God, when some horrid thing happens like what had happened just now.

When you get tipped toward God it is confusing.  It was easier before horrid things happened and you got tipped toward God—wasn’t it?  It was easier, when life was simpler.  It was easier then, when life was simpler, like football, and you just played through the pain, and took it like a man, and sometimes you won and sometimes you didn’t.

It was easier before, when you didn’t need to trouble yourself about God’s bizarre economics of love and sacrifice and un-remembering, and when you could keep all that godly economics all tucked away in our human past—like it was just a myth from long, long ago. 

But God keeps on creeping back into our minds in that way that He has, and He keeps on tipping us toward Him. 

It would be so much easier if the Son-sacrifice thing was just a make believe story from a time when people weren’t as smart as we are now, and when they needed to have their hands held in order to get through their days.  Not like us, who get through our days just fine—or anyway we get through them okay enough.     

But Arnold needed God, which meant he needed Jesus first.

 

                                                                        ***

 

I was a deacon at my church, and this was my first suicide as a deacon, and I didn’t know what to do to help Arnold find Jesus except one last time to say “We can get through this together.”   

I did not say any of those other things about sacrifice and un-remembering to Arnold while we drove him through the bug-flickering night to a home racked with agony. 

I was a deacon at my church, and I didn’t know what to do. 

It would need to be God to do something for Arnold because He was the only one who did know what to do. 

 

Copyright -- Dikkon Eberhart, 2014

Seminary...or Court?

 

“I can’t stand it,” said the lawyer, “that’s why.  Honestly, I can’t stand it.  I’m giving up family practice.  Being a lawyer is worse than being a priest.  If I could, I’d be a priest, but I couldn’t stand that either.”

 

            “A priest?  That's different.  But why couldn’t you be a priest?”

 

            “I don’t have time to go to seminary, never have had. And anyway it’s not being a priest per se.  It’s the liturgics.  I can’t stand the liturgics.  You steal a hundred dollars from me, and you go to the priest, and he tells you to do contrition, and he absolves you.  What’s up with that?”   The lawyer rocked back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head.  “I want you to have to deal direct with me!”

 

            “That’s the lawyer in you.”  The other man, a salesman, offered calm to the lawyer’s bluster.  Funny thing was—the salesman had been at seminary himself, back in the day.  “But you’ve got the morality all wrong.  The church, too, wants you to confront the one you harmed.  What did you think?”

 

            “But you don’t need to, see?  You’ve already been absolved.  Think like a criminal, for God’s sake.” 

 

            The lawyer and the salesman sat in the lawyer’s office, in an old brick building, covered with ivy.  Now though, in January, the covering was the bones of ivy.  A cold rain beat on the window panes. 

 

            “And it’s not just family practice.  I’m giving up criminal, too.”

 

            Outside, afternoon descended into gloom.  It was winter on the Maine coast, in rain.  There had been snow for Christmas, lots of it.  But now, where was the snow?  It was forty degrees outside.  Where was that numinous white?  Where was that redemptive white?   

 

            The salesman turned back to the lawyer and asked, “What’s any of this got to do with liturgics?”

 

            “I need direct experience.  That’s what’s wrong with liturgics.  All that stuff between you and the experience.”    

 

            The salesman smiled.  “There’s a lawyer friend of mine up near Bangor says the most important part of Catholicism for him is that very stuff, the sacraments.  He used to be a Baptist, and he became a Catholic.  That’s what he said to me—the sacraments.   You’ve got something to trust, he said, in the sacraments.  His wife was a Catholic, and that was part of it, but the sacraments is what it was for him.  It’s the tradition.”

 

            “I don’t give a damn for tradition.”

 

            “Course you do.  What’s lawyering?”

 

            “How do I know?”  The lawyer barked a laugh, snapped his chair back down straight, brought his hands down onto the desk with a bang.  “It’s keeping a shotgun next to my bed,” he said. 

 

            “Against OUIs?”

 

            “Not them.”  Suddenly, he grinned.  “Freaks my wife.”  

 

            “Yeah” 

 

            “Family clients want me to solve problems that aren’t even related to legal.  The felons just want to hurt somebody.  OUIs are so relieved to get their licenses back, they’ll pay me anything…specially third and fourth offenders.”  He shook his head.  He blew out a breath.  “Maybe I am going to go to seminary.  Or else just plan estates for rich people.” 

 

            Silence crept into the room.  In the salesman’s experience, silence was unusual for his lawyer, a fast talker, a fast thinker.  He had two computer screens always active on his desk, talked on the telephone and wore an ear-bud for a cell phone at the same time. 

 

            Blowing out another breath, the lawyer mused, “I wonder if there’s any point to it all.”

 

            Only ten minutes before, the lawyer had bought a substantial Internet-based legal library from the salesman, which was stocked with resources for family and for criminal practices…and which contained no resources at all for estate planning. 

 

The salesman raised the contract in his hand.  “Tear this up?”

 

            The lawyer shrugged.  “Hell, no.  What do I know about tax?”

 

            The salesman had watched the lawyer’s career develop from the time he had appeared as a youngster on the local scene, having just left off clerking for a federal judge.  He’d begun as an associate at an established practice.  The salesman had been there when, years later, the lawyer had left that practice and had put out his own shingle.  Just then, the lawyer had needed basic resources, and the salesman had been able to help him decide to invest in more than just the most basic of resources.  Now, two years later, the lawyer had decided it was time to expand his library—he had more money now, and more complex cases, and the salesman was happy to oblige. 

 

            Still holding up the contract, the salesman asked, “So this is still good?”

 

            “Until I quit it all and go to seminary.”

 

            The salesman grinned.  “I’m not putting that in as a clause.”

 

             Every profession offers places to hide.  To the salesmen, back in the day, it had seemed that seminary offered more places to hide than most. Oh, sometimes the salesman wondered if he oughtn’t to have stayed in that cloistered world.  He could have become a professor. He could have been a seminary professor.  But in the end he had found that he was not a hider.  He had wanted to get out there into the raw world to engage face-to-face with people on the battlefield that mattered to them the most, whatever battlefield that was. 

 

He could have been a minister. However, scarcely anyone he had known well at seminary was still practicing ministry now.  Most of them—they were fed up, burned out, had lost their faith, or gotten into trouble with a woman, or run out of money.  They were consultants now, or they had invented a computer game, or they did development work for a non-profit. 

 

So, once when the salesman had needed a job, he’d been able to convince a sales manager that, especially as a trained theologian, he understood what a lawyer’s research was for.  Here’s the case he had made to that sales manager.  Theologians and lawyers each study bodies of established authority in order to ferret out the truth in support of a position on some contemporary question regarding behavior or choice.  The sales manager had been impressed by the argument, but still he had wondered if this prospective book salesman could sell.  In the end, though, he’d needed a body to cover his open territory, and he’d given the salesman a chance, and that had been twenty-two years before. 

 

Sitting in the office, the salesman was conscious of how frequently theological considerations intruded into his sales conversations with lawyers.  What theologians do and what lawyers do is not the same, in fact—the first argues for all of mankind; the second argues for whoever will pay—but the salesman’s early pitch had contained some truth. 

 

In the end, the salesman thought, lawyers do what they do because they believe in the existence of authority, but also because they believe in their ability to manipulate it in the interest of their clients—that’s how they get paid.  It is, then, a malleable authority which the lawyers knead. 

 

Yet in the end—as the salesman continued to think some more—a lawyer’s longevity in the profession does come down to grace.  God provides a lawyer with both belief and skill—belief in fundamental rightness, and the skill to stick to a profession during the long term. And, he smiled to himself, that is why grace is present in the lawyers’ conversations with salesmen, or at least with a salesman who is trained to listen for it.    

 

            The two men stood.  “Think we’ll get more snow?” asked the lawyer.

 

            “It’s January.  Anything can still happen.  We’ll get the gift.”

 

            “I’d like to do some skiing.  Get off where it’s quiet.”

 

            They walked together to the door.  The salesman said, “Maybe it’s just that, the quiet, which you need, not seminary.”

 

            “No,” said the lawyer positively.  “If I could, I’d go to seminary.  I know a lawyer who did, you know, after he retired.”

 

            “So…thinking of retiring?”

 

            “With three kids?  No way.”

 

            “Good.  First I want to sell you that Platinum package.”

 

            “Next year.” 

 

The lawyer held the door open for the salesman.  He smiled and reached out his hand.  They shook.  “If I’ve gotten any skiing in—and if I haven’t gone off to seminary—you come see me about that Platinum.”

 

            “I’ll do that.  If there’s snow.”

 

            “Yes.  If there’s any snow.”

 

            The salesman stepped out the door into the rain.  He needed to walk up the street and turn the corner to where he had parked his car.  When he reached the corner, he realized the wind blew differently.  Coming around northwesterly. 

 

If Maine were lucky, the new wind would chill the air for the last of the rain, and there would be snow. 

 

A dusting of it anyway; a hint. 

 

               

Copyright 2014 -- Dikkon Eberhart

 

Evil is Everywhere, Like the Air We Breathe

            “Dikkon, there is no difference between you and me and Charles Manson.” 

This was a startling opinion from the man who was to become my pastor.

            Before I became an evangelical Christian, I knew the word evil.  I knew that evil was prevalent in the world.  I myself, of course, did not do evil, but I was aware of actions in my life when I did things that were just plain wrong to have done.  I had desired to hurt. 

            Of course, I hadn’t murdered people.  Goodness no.  Who would even think such a thing about me? 

            Now and then, I might just say something that would wound another, or I might just ignore another and not catch an eye, or I might just pass along a little piece of news to someone, about another, who would have no way to defend himself or herself. 

But that’s just what anyone would do under the circumstances. 

            Then, in the process of my becoming an evangelical Christian, my to-be pastor said that there is no difference between him, and me, and Charles Manson.  I stumbled over that one for quite a long time…and I became an evangelical Christian anyway!

            Why in the world….? 

            Any sensible person would have turned tail and run straight away from such a nutty group of God people who would make so preposterous a claim.  Charles Manson indeed!

            But here’s the thing--and you’ll just have to take my word for this if you aren’t an evangelical Christian yourself. 

Knowing that my pastor, and I, and Charles Manson are not different from one another turns out to be more comforting than believing that there is a vast difference between my pastor and me, on the one side, and Charles Manson, way over on the other side, far away from us. 

            Here’s why—

            As an evangelical Christian, I believe each of us is a sinner.  Some of us are able to moderate some of our evil actions, but each of us can do what Charles Manson did.   

            Before, when I thought that a fundamental divide existed between the Charles Mansons of the world and the Dikkons of the world, instead of making me complacent in my purity, there was great anxiety.  You see, one day in the future, I might just feel the slightest twinge inside me, a twinge that was just a little, tiny, bit—just a little, tiny bit—like what I imagine Charles Manson feels. 

Does that mean I would take a carving fork to Sharon Tate? 

No, no, no, I would say to myself.  And then all by myself because this was a dark secret and must not be revealed to others, I would shove that twinge back somewhere into the darkness inside me, so I could restore my comfortable conception that I am not someone from the other side. 

But my comforting conception that I was not someone from the other side was very precarious.  At any moment, I might feel a twinge.  Or even two twinges. 

Here’s why being an evangelical Christian is more comforting than not being one. 

Now, when I feel a twinge, I know everyone else feels them, too.

Now, when I fight to moderate my behavior, when under the influence of a twinge, I believe that all my companions, who are believers, are, right then, moderating theirs, too.

Now, when I fight to moderate my behavior, I am not alone—as I was before—but I am companioned, not only by my fellow human believers, but by Jesus Himself. 

I’m speaking of that same Jesus—the famous one—who, though He is God, is also a man.  Though Jesus is God, the fact that he is also a man means that, during those days when He was personally present among us, He felt, suffered, struggled, was tempted, and tried to get off the sharp stick in the same way that I do. 

And, on the other hand, the fact that Jesus is not just man, but He is God—and therefore that He knows me and loves me—that means He can instruct me how to moderate any behavior and lead me in the right direction, each time, so that I do actually get off the sharp stick each time. 

And then God Himself can unremember my sinfulness and take me back into his forgiving embrace, now on earth, and later in Heaven. 

            Ain’t that better than having only myself to engineer myself out of each evil deed? 

…with no end of the twinges—and of the deeds—in sight? 

 

Copyright 2014 – Dikkon Eberhart