Hallelujah Anyway Read online

  This is me, the bitter goody two-shoes.

  Another fun-house mirror for me is the story of Jonah, which all Sunday-school kids love because of the whale. Yet the real meat of the story is what happens after Jonah is burped onto dry land and, despite his best efforts, ends up in Nineveh, where God had told him to go all along.

  Nineveh is any big city, hypercompetitive, full of corruption, cruelty, bankers, and Tea Party types. It would later be the capital of Assyria, where Iraq is now, and the Ninevites were like Klingons, violent warriors who were Israel’s enemy. Jonah, like all Israelites, felt about them the way Ronald Reagan felt about the Russians, that they were the Evil Empire. And Jonah is furious that God is making him go there to preach, instead of someplace nice.

  Jonah spreads the word for exactly one day, as it has come through him that God hates the Ninevites. They’re doomed. If they don’t become people of God, of peace and mercy, they’ll be destroyed. So on the spot they repent. It’s like Klingons turning into Alan Alda. And God spares them. But Jonah is furious and sulky because God has refused to destroy the awful evil people that he hates, a destruction that would be a big victory for Israel.

  He thinks God makes him look bad.

  I love this so much.

  The point of the story is the mercy of God. Even when the worst people on earth undergo a change of heart, God in God’s infinite love and goodness changes His mind.

  Toward the end of the story, Jonah sits moping under the shade of a tree on the outskirts of town. He doesn’t notice that there is peace in the land, and kindness, and that shade is a form of mercy in the hot Assyrian sun. Then, to further mess with him, God sends a worm that begins eating the leaves, and Jonah is mad now because God won’t save the tree. He feels mercy for Mr. Tree, but not for the people of Nineveh, who, statistically, are mostly women, kids, and the elderly.

  Did Jonah ever get over himself? We don’t know, because his story ends with a question from God, i.e., “Jonah! WTF? Mercy for a tree but not a people?”

  Did the older son go into the feast for the prodigal brother? We don’t know that. We are Jonah. The parable doesn’t end with the answer. It ends with a question: Will the older brother do the deep dive toward family and mental healing, breathe in all the joy and mercy he has seen, and go into the feast? Will you? Will I?

  TWO

  Life Cycles

  When we lose something important, or someone we love does, we begin by retracing our steps. More often than we’d expect, we have found lost treasures, keys, glasses, and earrings at our feet, whether on the beach beside the rough muscular waters of the channel at Stinson Beach, or in the tide of people at Union Square. My Jesuit friend Tom and I found his wallet alongside the lake in downtown Hanoi, through the smeary smoke of wood cooking fires and exhaust from scooters. I found a friend’s glasses in a Mexican surf. My son and I found his father. The secret is, if what we need and want is missing, we begin by going back to where we last saw it.

  When I realized I’d been losing mercy for much of my life, like air from a tire, and that this damaged my sense of welcome and immediacy, I began to retrace my steps.

  Some people sprang from healthy, adjusted families, with happy, fulfilled parents who, if necessary, sought therapy for their addiction, anger, depression, and grief, and who celebrated children who were deeply different. Or so I hear. Maybe three or four of all the people I’ve ever known. My intimate friends have always been the children of absent parents, alcohol, faithlessness, hickory switches, and manic depression. But that’s just me.

  Putting aside that there were some healthy families, most of us were raised by parents with big problems. If our parents were in a bad marriage, or were alcoholic, or chain-smokers, silent, fundamentalist, unfaithful, or frequently absent, we began as fetuses to marinate in embryonic sacs of our mothers’ anxiety. Picture a rump roast.

  Most of us came out to bright fluorescent lights of excitement and loudness, yet also maybe into a loving mother’s arms. If so, she helped the bad brightness dissipate, helped her new baby relax into wonder.

  We all see those babies who look stoned on life. Maybe we were those babies.

  If not, we got militarized to the beat of someone else’s anxiety; original need got warped. It became too expensive to pay attention to our own bodies. We looked to the metronome of others’ needs. We became serenely attached, or anxiously attached, or unable to attach at all.

  As Beckett wrote, we too were bonny—once. The bonnyness is easy at first: many things are easy at first. If you were hungry, you were usually fed; skin was flawless; diaper got changed, hopefully before you got a rash; you were nuzzled, sniffed with joy or amused horror.

  We’d already started to complain, but pretty quickly, as we got bigger, we learned to shove it down, because someone didn’t like it, and seemed to like us less, and then our needs didn’t get met. We learned to put on happy faces, like makeup, and to fake feeling okay about ourselves and our family in order to please everyone and thus survive.

  Of course there were beautiful times and we have beautiful memories, and there were some wonderful holiday meals and vacations, although those were incredibly hard work for the moms. But sometime after elementary school began, we discovered that besides family photos and ashtrays, our nests were filled with strange, unhappy people who were our only hope of being nurtured. (We didn’t know yet that nature was our mother, too, that she would be our great abiding source of hope and awe as we grew.) Our parents were weird at best, opaque, or over-the-top embarrassing, or actually needing to be institutionalized from time to time. At worst they were abusers. In any case, they often didn’t get along with each other. We may have weighed only fifty-two pounds at six years old, but we gamely tried to make our home a cuter nest by being a better kid, calming down our father, helping to raise the littler kids, comforting our mother, and mostly agreeing not to see, take in, or mind what life was like at home. We hoped that the big world would be a better nest, or could be made into one, by us, who had learned certain pleasing skills that entertained, impressed, soothed, or distracted the grown-ups.

  But the bigger world had even more of these hungry, damaged birds, who had all once been bonny, who were now worried, or show-offs, or who didn’t seem to mind shoving others out of the way. So for all the pleasant experiences marbled into ordinary life at home and at school, there was always constant danger—you could be ambushed and mocked for your body or teeth or glasses; or Dad might go off on your brother at the table for no reason. We learned from books that we were all animals, like monkeys and goats, but with Edward Gorey minds. Did goat husbands shame their wives? Did little monkey girls hold their breath until they passed out, like I did?

  The world was mean, dreamy, sometimes fun, unreal, lovely, confusing.

  Learning to read gave us a true oasis, salvation, in the same way that coming to know Jesus or the Buddha might eventually get some of us out of the fray, but it also isolated us. Reading helped us get blissfully lost in resonant worlds where we could rest or gape or laugh with recognition, but then we looked up again, at the dinner table, or the blacktop, or church, and we couldn’t close the covers of those spooky books.

  We developed knowledge of our defects, our self-centeredness, our disagreeable ways, what some might call original sin, and it yapped at us—God forbid, people would find out who we were. We were going to fall or be pushed off the ledge, and our underpants were going to show. Some of us thought about jumping. As babies, we staggered and fell on padded bottoms, giggled, drooled, and grinned, and everyone was charmed and laughed. Boy, not anymore.

  Hormones kicked in with dark desires. Our bodies turned grotesque. We were too fat or too thin, and had no breasts or droopy breasts or hideous gargantuan breasts, and our skin broke out, as if pimples were the bad thoughts we’d been having, now erupting on our face. And all those strange feelings and truths about love, in that clums
y body that we knew nobody could love. Yet in retracing the overgrown garden path from playfulness and wonder to toxic self-consciousness, we notice the deep compassion we expressed toward our closest friends, with their equally unacceptable bodies and skin and families. We took younger kids under our wings. We stood up for underdogs.

  The popular kids felt better, as if they had dodged a bullet and had it all figured out. They could pass, at fifteen, as people of beauty and thus value. But everyone steps on the cosmic banana peel sooner or later, and they’d had so little training, compared with us obviously defective goofballs. We had our books and, amazingly, phenomenal friends. The most beautiful girl in my junior high class became a junkie. The most popular kids married horribly. The math whiz drives a backhoe for the county.

  Real life was often slow and disappointing, not one bit like TV. Life seemed to be set up to shine light on our defects. It was natural for us to want life to be smooth and sweet, but good luck with that. Things that didn’t work out right usually stuck out for all to see, and got whacked back down, or swelled up, or broke out. The most awful people had the most beautiful teeth. The bad news was that it felt impossible to be in congruity with one’s true self, but the good news was that by a certain age, we understood that we had a true self, and they hadn’t managed to wreck it entirely yet.

  We saw everyone’s insecurities, strivings, grotesqueries; and everyone saw ours, so it was life in the shrapnel field, with fashion, makeup, achievement, and irony as our armor. Because we had lost contact with the truth of our innately merciful selves, it was almost impossible to have self-respect. But there were always one or two kids whose friendship saved us, fed us, and one or two teachers who got us, who got it, who shared the truth that life was amazing but also hard and weird. Frederick Buechner wrote that perhaps the main job of the teacher “is to teach gently the inevitability of pain.” Teachers, like food, came in many forms.

  For those who went to college, there was a buffet of wild new tastes, compared with the mac and cheese at home, and not just the gifts of sex and drugs. We were in a vessel that could hold us, esteem us, between loneliness and setbacks. We were immersed in great material, crazily deep relationships with kids as smart and odd as we were, thoughts that reached down into the darkness of the subconscious, the realms of the soul. I went to college for two years in Maryland, and these are some of my greatest memories. We thought we’d grown up and been loosed from all those first, pathetic efforts at finding out who we were. We were complicated people with miraculously amazing friends, better skin, some progress, and a persona. We had learned to get outside as often as possible. Nature gave us life, hope, truth, sanctuary. But college took place on the same old pocked blacktop. Half of us were going to fail, so there was always another round of musical chairs. We stumbled and bumbled, and people still shoved others aside and stole other people’s lunch or made bizarre, damaging comments. It was the same scared starving birds grown up, chirping egomaniacs with terrible self-loathing, and there were no longer the easy rewards there were in grade school, when you got a ribbon for playing soccer, or a swimming medal for simply putting your face partway into the water.

  Our expectations were continually dashed. We thought it would be, “Oh, you have such a beautiful voice! Here! Have a starring role, and make good money.” But everyone else in the program had a beautiful voice, too, or could write like an angel, or cook. We were all just cogs.

  Plus, we were going to have to leave again. Panic set in, which unleashed a force for bad that had sometimes felt present in the world ever since we were young, even for nonbelievers. It was not completely unlike the Christian devil, but without the tail. It tempted, seduced, and beguiled. It loved drama, sex, the vampire dance floor: “Oh, look—drugs!” It has always deceived people by presenting them with insight and light, often an idea that screwed up everything. “Hey! Let’s ban alcohol.” Or: “We’re in danger! Let’s invade Iraq.” This thing inside me would tug on my sleeves, fueled by beer and hormones, and I would hear, “This is good, but make it better.” And, “You’re too advanced for this.” It was always in opposition to goodness, with self-obsessed lightbulbs going on overhead. It encouraged me to condemn, disguise, seduce, and take. It harmonized with me on “My Way,” just before the inevitable train wreck. Maybe thirty years later you realize that there is nothing wrong with aha moments, but run them by your rabbi. Not at twenty, though.

  • • •

  If you stuck around, the overlords gave you the certificate, and then the boot. But in returning through memory to those days when we thirsted for truth and justice and equality and understanding, when we wanted desperately to help the poor of the entire world, we find a rare excitement some of us may have lost over time.

  Everyone had to get a job. There was no way around it for most of us. We got okay jobs that we hoped would lead to fame and fortune, jobs that didn’t last, or take advantage of our magnificent talents, or pay well, or heal our psyches and hearts, this job that was also maybe boring, with repellent coworkers. But looking back, we see that we had these great friends who helped us cope, relax, bear up, and to some extent embrace ourselves. They were the main source of nourishment and joy we experienced in the world, as we were for them, and this filled us and kept us company when we were crazy, blue, stuck, or going under. They took us hiking, camping, or swimming in freezing rivers. They took us dancing, to protests, to concerts. They were the ground on which we found meaning and acceptance, a counterweight to our belief that deep down we were frauds, defective, or a total disappointment.

  It was pretty confusing. How could life possibly deliver what we needed?

  Wait! I know.

  I’ll get a mate to complete me. That’s the ticket.

  There was usually an initial flurry of hope and sex, maybe even of rich love, but ultimately we discovered that it was strange cranky us side by side, cheek to jowl, with a strange cranky mate, who farted and ate weirdly and didn’t agree all the time with our well-thought-out opinions. Completion? That would turn out to be an illusion. Sometimes a mate was snuggly and fun and even thrilling, but then sometimes this person lied, or cheated, and delivered a lot of pain. It was hard work, the hardest work. It could leave a person empty.

  Wait. I know. We’ll have a child!

  So a lot of us had beautiful children, or our siblings did, and we fell in the deepest love. A miracle, but who knew miracles could also be boring at times, frustrating, nerve-racking and costly? And if we personally had the child, our bonnyness fled as never before, leaving new bags and sags, markings and flaccid flab. We thought we were mentally challenged in adolescence? That was child’s play. Now we had much scarier thoughts rocketing around beneath the coconut shell: That this was all a mistake. Or the baby would die. Or we’d end up needing to borrow the rent, which I did, for a year. Plus, we’d sometimes hate the baby. It was a bad baby. It was colicky. It had a poor character.

  Raising my son brought me the greatest, happiest years of my life. And it was hard, which somehow people had forgotten to mention would be part of the mix. Oops.

  Our children grew. We spent as much time in nature with them as we possibly could. This made up for a lot. They built things, they knocked them down, we helped them build other things. They knocked those down, too, and life knocked them down, and we helped build up whatever we could. Then they got bored with us and wanted to be with their friends instead. Traitors! They didn’t want to hang out with us, nor did they pick up their old projects, so we had to pick them up, with our bad backs and our feet that have basically become our grandfathers’, knobby and prehensile. But returning to those seats at the kids’ playgrounds, schoolyards, and amphitheaters where we sat, cheering and sometimes grieving, we see that no matter how much we screwed up—and we all did, big-time—we always cared, showed up, and stayed close. We gave everything we could. We have hundreds of photos of our kids, nieces, and nephews, beside rivers, in oceans, at
campsites, Yosemite, snow. This beauty was not lost—it cannot be. All that we gave remains.

  Then finally, bizarrely, horribly, and thank you, Jesus, the kids were out of the house. Now we could rest into quiet and the ripeness of the lives we’d created, our homes, work, friends, volunteering, and the natural world. Beautiful, full of wonder, but the world was still so sad and mean and overwhelming for most people, and now with a sniper in our nearest tree, picking off the people we had loved best for the longest time. We were still single and perhaps the tiniest bit less attractive in the dating pool, with jowls, glaucoma, and of course the feet; or one had a crotchety old mate, or a dead one, or someone in between, who was facing the abyss and falling apart. Now what?

  Now it was time for the existential hoo-hah of getting old.

  The so-called lucky, i.e., those who lived, became decrepit and strange. Almost everything but the beauty of nature fails—vision, hearing, feet, memory, the random organ. Most of us try to live in some variation of the Serenity Prayer, in acceptance, courage, and wisdom, but our minds and bodies do not always cooperate. We are now constantly retracing our steps. We’re deeply grateful for all we were given, and all we have seen and survived, still capable of focus and wonder; but old age is hard, hard, hard. And then we become as dependent as those babies we once were. We blinked, and suddenly we have to wear nappies again. Now no one is charmed or cheering. Eventually, they pray for us to have easy, merciful exits; in other words, they hope we will die. After all we’ve done for them! We scare ourselves, we scare our families. We still love the same people and activities—reading, birding, meals, hiking, yoga—and can probably have some connection with them all. We can still find beauty and look forward to being with others even now that we are very wobbly, and incontinent.