An Angry Conversation of My Own

(A Tribute to Susan Isaacs and Her Book)

Have you ever been dumped in the name of God? I have. Have you ever dumped in the name of God? I haven’t. Well from my jaded perspective I think Valentines Day is a good opportunity to correct some misguided theology in regards to love. That said, I invite you to enjoy my lament . . . my imprecatory psalm . . . my story.

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What the Hell God? Why do you keep intervening and ending all my relationships? I may not be perfect but I’m not a jerk in that traditional sense. I don’t cheat on anyone, I pay for dinners and I open doors and you can believe me Lord I am real polite when I meet mothers. And yes for Your sake I would never hit a girl.

Yet still you and your angels conspire against me. You whisper messages in the ears of these naïve creatures which leave them saying things like: “it’s just not right.” “It’s not you, you are great, really you are, it’s me.” Or: “I’ve just prayed about it and God doesn’t want this for my life.” And my personal favorite God is: “God has not given me peace about it.” I’m no saint but that’s melodramatic bullshit.

I mean, who can argue with the Almighty God who sits on high? Can anyone dispute you? You bet I can.

Lord, why aren’t you telling me about peace of mind and about the future of your will for my life? You have to know that these third-party-marching-orders are confusing the hell out of me and my thoughts about you. It looks like you are passing notes again God and I’m the smelly kid in class. Is this the case? Answer me.

Don’t be fooled by their delicate frames and bashful cheeks. They are evil, nothing good in them I tell you. They’ve high-jacked your language and marred your words. Their irrational emotions mixed with your authoritarianism is shame to my ears. They’ve used this Judeo-Christian-babble far too long. They’ve used it to cover up razor-thin insecurities about themselves and the world around them. Yes God, you own cattle on a thousand hills but you’ve been robbed. These wantons have stolen and ripped your words from your cheek to save their own skin. They twist and tangle your rhetoric and use it to fuel this hellish and heretical harangue that they insist you’ve proclaimed from on high. It looks to me as if they are throwing your will around like it’s a chew toy. Muzzle them.

Because hearing, “its God’s will for my life is getting old.” I mean, I’ve heard it four times now. Four times from these lucrative little prayer warriors of yours. I don’t want to name-call or anything but they are cruel and malicious with your words. Women like this have declared war on men in your name for centuries. I admit Lord that some Christian men do it too. My disdain burns for them as well. Avenge them all. Rid this from the face of the earth. Remove it from our memories. Dismember it from limb to limb. And leave nothing behind . . . no carnage, no tracks, no blood, nothing Lord.

Rein them in. You are better than this. Tell them the truth about love. Tell them that you don’t care about who they marry just as long as when they find themselves at this point that they give themselves whole heartily to the other person. Please tell them that love cannot be divinely orchestrated because if it is it’s not love. Make that clear. And gently guide them into the charm and vulnerabilities of a relationship. Tell them about how it’s both scary and wonderful to love someone more than yourself. Invite them to this table. Let them taste the fruits of love.

Please Lord don’t let this treachery and deceit off the hook. Don’t let them slid and slip and weasel their way out of your hands. They’ve ransacked my heart with your words and now it’s starting to fuck with my theology. I find myself questioning you because they expound with the surety of the prophets. Am I insane? Answer me.

Why are so quiet all of sudden Lord. You talk to them but you won’t talk to me?

It’s hard to blame them. I mean they don’t know what they want. Really who does? Take a girl with her mind made up and God’s Will is about all that will suffice. Have them confess their reluctance to be in a relationship. I could handle this kind of honesty and life wouldn’t be so confusing. You, Lord, wouldn’t be so confusing. I could move on and know for certain that you didn’t have it out for me. I would know that the master of the universe wasn’t plotting against me. Naturally, I don’t think you are but I’m starting to question your ways O God. A guy can’t help himself with this banal message of God’s will for my life cackling and ringing in his brain. I’m losing respect for Christians like this as we speak. So I’m asking you to tell those fluffy-pontificating-psycho-boy-hating-quasi-Christian-girls to silence their pretty-crimson-traps. And Lord, I beseech that you act in haste.

God, like I said, girls have done this for years. They go around wielding the get-out-of-jail-free-card (God’s Will for my life) and you let them do this. It’s safe to say that they’ve pillaged more men in your name than the Catholic Crusades. The Conquistadors, Lord, were dirty, rotten and mean but they have nothing on these conquering-matriarchs seeping up from the gullies of Gehenna. Hell, some part of me wishes that someone would Salem-Witch-Hunt them. I might be getting too mean here but these lewd Philistines are not interested in introspection. They’ll never pursue to understanding their own emotions. They could careless about knowing themselves. These gangly creatures masquerade behind a flimsy-self-construed-spiritual-mask wrapped taut before their shifty gaze. I’m baffled that you let them get away with this pageantry. Why would you do this O God? Shall I remind you that they’ll disown you quicker than they disowned me. And then they’ll give credit to some grotesque edifice that they’ll erect in a whim of loneliness. You’ve seen it all before. Shall I remind you of the fleeting Hebrews melting metal at Sinai?

How can you just sit back and watch them continue to break hearts in your name? I am convinced that the poets and sages . . . that the artisans and custodians of our language cringe at such negligent sophistry. Save face and stop this immediately. If you don’t, I will turn into a withered soul and then I promise I won’t even try to love again. I suspect that there is more heresy festering in the cracks and crevices of these forlorn creatures than there is in a Mormon tapping at my screen-door. In my opinion they are worse than the patriotic-George-Bush-Jihad-War-on-Terror that you were so frequently pinned for. Not quite as bad as Dick Cheney though . . . but then again nobodies that bad. You laughed at my joke. I made you laugh but yet you remain silent to my questions.

Don’t you know that you’ve been reduced to a trite excuse crafted to cover up an inability to connect with another human person. You should not be blamed for this fragile incapability of theirs. There’s no dignity in it Lord . . . none at all.

I have decided to date non-Christians. At least until this, God’s will for my life talk settles. Non-Christian girls won’t use your name to justify things like natural hesitancy and incompatibility. Yes, I’m fully aware that non-Christians are bad people, horrible people, profane people whose names are blotted from the book of life. Your great word makes it clear that they’ll be seared and licked by the dancing flames in your brooding lake of fire and that their teeth will rattle and gnash for all of eternity BUT Lord they won’t dump me and call it your will for their lives. And you know God, I can live with that. They’ll just dump me for other reasons. So God, until things change I’ll be dating non-Christians and I’ll be calling it your will for my life. That’s peace of mind.

Happy Valentines Day!

A Stone of a Woman

The other night as I was coming home I found myself apart of something I couldn’t ignore. The bus stopped. People got off. I was missing something. Four people remained on the bus. Two older gentlemen who were obliviously drunk so much so that they weren’t able to heed the driver’s exit rules. There was a college student who was asleep and me the confused foreigner who had lost the service announcement in translation.

The driver quarreled with the two stumbling men urging them to leave. They weren’t leaving. They were busy slurring insults at him and his poor mother.

I attempted to avert this scenario by politely interjecting and asking the driver why this bus wasn’t going to my home like it should be. The driver’s animosity shifted quickly. I came at me. He went into a red-faced-diatribe about . . . well, it was a bit fast and a little to complex for my Chinese level. I looked out the window and figured it was the last bus of the night and I figured that the last bus of the night wasn’t going to my home. At least that’s what the clues were telling me.

I stood up to exit and watched as one of the weak-kneed-wobblers tipped right into the hazy-eyed college student’s lap. In his defense he awoke hugging a pungent old man. And then only realized that the bus was not where he wanted it to be either. He brashly removed the smiling old man. The old man looked at me and stumbled and continued slurring his side of the story.

The bus driver kept pushing them out as I jumped off. From outside I continued watching these men interact with each other.

I stood next to a lady in a nice purple coat clutching her shiny black purse. She was elegant. This was no place for her. I felt embarrassed on her behalf for what she was witnessing. From here perspective I imagined that this looked brutish. It was a remnant of a more barbarous age. But she didn’t sway one way or the other. She was completely un-amused by the whole scene. Roused not, her gaze remained blank. The stumbling men nearly knocked into her, the stiff liquor swirled in the air but she didn’t as much blink an eye. She ‘nothinged’ them. Her lack of regard was impressive to me. She was a stone of a woman. A ruthless stoic in the presence of these inferiors.

The men continued assaulting and defiling the driver’s mother. And then it happened. The foggy eyed college student, off the bus now, in a flash lunged with a blunt swing at the driver’s head. It was sheepishly blocked. They squabbled and clawed for a bit. I glanced at the purple lady. She neither looked nor cared. She might have been deaf and blind for all I knew. Was I imagining her? Was she there? Was she real?

The driver and the boy continued to slap each other. These weren’t kung-fu artists by any stretch of the imagination. Dismiss that Asian stereotype. They hissed and scratched and then the doors were shut. No blood was spilt that night. No, it was just that gradual turning-up of the soft Chinese underbelly of social oppression and anxiety. It shows up every once in little social outbursts that you come to expect. And as quickly as it all began the now empty bus hummed its way down the road. Our young-slapper hasted his way into the shadows of the evening. Probably to get some rest. More than amused I was culturally grateful for being allowed to see this harmless and yet poignant exchange among fellow comrades.

In my opinion the drunk guys were just having a good old time. The college student became furious for some reason or another and decided to take it out on the wrong guy. The purple lady seemed priggish (maybe dead) but then again who really knows with purple ladies these days. And I guessed that the bus driver wasn’t going to have a good night when he went home to see his family.

But there we were on the corner of something and something that I can’t really pronounce in Chinese and our hearts were beating as the worlds beyond ours were expanding and bumping into each other in that soft cosmic interchange that happens when nobody seems to have a telescope.

The old men hailed a motorcycle-taxi. I secretly wished that they would do the same for me. But they didn’t. After they struggled getting on the motorcycle the one sandwiched in between his friend and the driver struck the drivers yellow helmet with force like a small child would do to indicate that it was time to go. I smirked. The men garbled out a laugh. The driver even smiled. The purple=stone-of-a-woman did not. She nothinged.

A bus came and the-purple-thing left.

I flagged down a motorcycle. I didn’t smack the driver’s helmet but I did pass the two men who were apparently nauseous from the ride. The one who struck the driver was now hunched over discarding the insides of his stomach on the pavement below. I was more than heartily impressed when he managed to wave me goodnight. The-purple-lady would have never done a thing like that.

The Night Grace Got Drunk

My friend Grace invited me to her wedding this past weekend. I don’t think she much expected me to show up. But I did. I thought it would be nice to see a Chinese wedding while I was in China. And besides I knew I would get a free meal out of it if I went. So I went.

I took a date. Well, not really a date. My date was ugly. Personally, I could have done better. You know, his beard was too scruffy for the occasion.

Solomon (my friend/date) prepped me on all this wedding stuff. He’d been to one of these before. I believed him. In my eyes, he was a professional but man was he ugly.

It was raining and it was New Year’s and the hotel happened to be enormous. When I say it was New Year’s at a nice hotel in China it means that there is more than one wedding going on at once (maybe more than ten). Getting married on New Year’s is pregnant with all kinds of luck here. Not knowing Graces Chinese name we walked from one building to the next peeking our heads in doorways and dodging out of them faster than we entered. I was thinking I could write about how sometimes Grace is hard to find and twist it into a cheesy Christian allegory.

I’ll refrain. But really, don’t you think that sometimes Waldo might be easier to find than Grace.

Eureka! We found Grace. Amazing! How sweet the sound. Well, she looked amazing and she was thrilled to see us at her wedding. She made inarticulate giddy girl sounds. Her husband was a military man dressed to the nines. His English name was Forrest, as in Gump. We signed the guest book (more like the big red banner book) and walked into the banquet hall where family and friends were gathered. They gawked and stared at us like we were the Bride. We weren’t the Bride. We were only white. We took our seats and waited.

It began at seven but it really began at eight. In China, it doesn’t matter as long as it just begins.

People were happy. Speeches were given. Bows were exchanged. Friend and family were spoken of. A former student of hers (Grace is a teacher) from the school on late notice sang a song for Solomon and I. She picked a great song in my opinion, a classic, she sang “Scarborough Fair.” Food was brought. We started with a sweet soup. A lady next to me (Yolanda) told us that the soup (the first dish) was sweet to signify the sweetness of the wedding night. Seafood was brought out (I don’t know what that signified). Wine was poured (who really knows).

For sure, this was an expensive event. Grace, a teacher, doesn’t have much money. I was wondering how it was all getting paid for. Solomon pointed out that the table full of men near the front were footing the bill. They were The Leaders, he said. The Uncles. The guy’s who were giving face to the Bride and Groom. The guys whom the Bride and Groom would go on giving face to for the rest of their lives. They were The Hosts of the party. The Masters of the Banquet. And of course they were having a great time. I mean, they were throwing a great party.

In China the Bride and Groom go around and toast every table. Congratulations and you look beautiful are said. Best Wishes and Peace and Love and all those other pleasantries are exchanged for the next hour or so.

This is where The Masters of the Banquet try to trick the Bride and Groom into getting drunk. Grace and Forrest had smaller glasses and their own wine that everyone knew was watered down. The Masters, not to be fooled, poured them their wine from their table and gave them their bigger glasses instead. It was funny to watch. They had to go around and toast each member of the table. This is where the bridesmaid and groomsman come into play. They drink on behalf of the bride and groom. They help absorb the lush trickery of The Masters. This doesn’t detour the Masters one bit. No, one of them occupies the bridesmaid with a cheers and another Master hands the bride a drink and demands a clink. A tricky and funny bunch those Masters are. Everyone was smiling.

Eventually Grace made it over to our table. I reckon I will never truly understand the social dynamics of the Chinese culture. After all I am only a visitor. We gave her a toast. And she said with all smiles, “You being here has made my wedding more impressive!” I shrugged it off. What Bride in her right mind would tell two scruffy dudes that they made her wedding more impressive. But I was told that her word choice was not a mistake. She told us to come to her house anytime we wanted. This is where Solomon told me that we gave her a lot of face (honor) for being at her wedding and that her inviting us to her house was a way of saying that she owed us big time for attending. Forrest and Grace moved on to the next table. I reckon, I’ll never truly understand the social dynamics of the Chinese culture.

The Masters were finished with Forrest and Grace but they weren’t finished with the Foreigners. In a matter of seconds we were duped into drinking barrels of wine for various of ridiculous and unsubstantiated reasons. Apparently we were giving large amounts of face (honor) to Grace and Forrest by doing this with The Masters of the Banquet. Or at least that’s what my scruffy date was telling me. On the surface it looked like we were just getting drunk . . . plastered . . . smashed. But he assured me that this was not the case. With bellies full of wine it was now an ‘impressive wedding.’ A ceremony signifying love, unity and matrimony. As the Chinese say, it was all Harmonious!

It wasn’t until the next morning until I began jotting down some of these memories that I started thinking about something else. Another wedding. I opened to John chapter 2 verses 1 through 11.

. . . there was a wedding in the village of Cana in Galilee. Jesus’ mother was there. Jesus and his disciples were guests also. When they started running low on wine at the wedding banquet, Jesus’ mother told him, “They’re just about out of wine.”

Jesus said, “Is that any of our business, Mother – yours or mine? This isn’t my time. Don’t push me.” She went ahead anyway, telling the servants, “Whatever he tells you, do it.” (I guess even Jesus wasn’t allowed to talk-back to the Immaculate Mary – [insert a Jewish mother joke]).

Six stoneware water pots were there, used by the Jews for ritual washings. Each held about twenty to thirty gallons. Jesus ordered the servants, “Fill the pots with water.” And they filled them to the brim. “Now fill your pitchers and take them to the host,” Jesus said, and they did.

When the Host tasted the water that had turned into wine (he didn’t know what had just happened but the servants, of course, knew), he called out to the bridegroom, “Everybody I know begins with their finest wines and after the guests have had their fill brings in the cheap stuff. But you’ve saved the best till now!” This act in Cana of Galilee was the first sign Jesus gave, the first glimpse of his glory.

I reckon I will never truly understand what happened that day in Cana of Galilee. I mean, I’ll never understand the social, political and religious dynamics brooding below the surface. I mean, I’m only a visitor to the text. I’ve read this passage plenty of times and have heard sermons, homilies and even lectures on it. I’ve read Biblical Commentaries on John 2 but I’ve never experienced like I did that morning thinking about Graces wedding.

So now I know that I don’t know anything about 1^st Century Jewish weddings, 21^st Century Chinese weddings or Jesus’ Miracles. What do I know? I know that Grace got drunk the other night and by watching her something happened in me that took something as familiar as John chapter 2 and made it into something unfamiliar.