God is a Bad Boyfriend
“This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people.” –Walt Whitman
It started early. I thought the painting of George Washington that hung in my elementary school classroom, clouds all around his big head, was God. Then I thought it was the lady with the torch at the end of the movie, but when I asked my oldest sister how they got God to agree to hold that torch, she looked at me like, “Who are you?” I asked my parents, and they said that God doesn’t exist. This was, at least, an answer, but I wondered what the hell my Catholic grandmother was going on about when she told me that since I was the youngest and free of mortal sin, I was six, I should pray every night because the rest of my family was going straight to hell. So, I piled all my stuffed animals into my bed and in the unheated attic where we slept, I got on my knees and said, over and over, “God, don’t send my family to hell,” because I didn’t know any prayers. When I demonstrated this to my grandmother, she said nothing counted unless my bare knees were on the floor, I had knelt on my nightie. She had been raised in a Catholic convent. I quit the nightly pleas.
But then my oldest sister got scoliosis and spent a year in bed, my father kept drinking, my friend the handyman shot himself in the head, and someone I liked was hit by a car, and I found out what happened to Anne Frank and the million Jews, and the Irish Potato Famine and watched the Vietnam War on television and felt the pain and the fear of the country enter my body. I secretly whispered to God every night that he needed to make things better. It didn’t work.
photo by Scott Goodwill
One summer, my parents disappeared to Europe, where they drank espresso in Roman cafés and dumped my middle sister and me into a camp called Betsey Cox and my oldest sister into another camp for hippies where she smoked pot. Our camp was Christian Science, a fact my parents failed to notice, and when one girl fell down a dam and broke her leg, there were prayers. On the first night, when I was asked if I wanted to say my prayers silently or out loud, I told the counselor my family didn’t believe in God. I was then known as “the poor little girl who doesn’t believe in God.” I organized a mass cutting of Sunday Vespers one day, and a group of us hung out in the woods singing (Hey) Big Spender, wiggling our non-existent hips until we were caught, and apparently, I was a massive disappointment.
I didn’t say what I thought, that God was a massive disappointment, my father was still drinking, there was war, poor people, children starving, racism, and no indication there would be any improvement.
In college, I had a Jewish boyfriend whose mother called me a “shiksa whore,” so he called her a “nazi,” and I thought, how is this meant to be about love or mercy? During the summer of my freshman year, the best person I had ever known, my wonderful, good, beautiful friend, was killed in a head-on collision. I had told her I needed to stop drinking, I was going to stay with her, and she was killed, dying in her fiancée’s arms. That was it for me. I raged like a wild animal and returned home to tell my parents it was their fault I believed in nothing, and I hated them. I hated everything.
I spent my junior year in Ireland, where the Catholics and the Protestants were busily killing each other, blowing up chip shops filled with children, and torturing whoever didn’t believe what they believed, which, as far as I could tell, was the same thing and totally stupid. I found those like me in that priest-ridden place, believers in love and peace and good books and parties. I fell in and out of love and one day I was helping a famous sculptor friend of my parents polish her gorgeous wood altar in an ancient church and I felt a tiny moment of connection with something, something that wanted me to survive, and it was a miracle made even more miraculous in that place.
But I went back to America, and soon, the despair of the past and the present seemed impossible to avoid. The world was full of suffering, and somehow, I kept having boyfriends who wanted me to help them feel better about themselves while I was wretched. I told many lies. I stopped trying to be helpful and kind and tried to drink myself to death, which is very hard when you’re twenty-five and basically healthy.
Sobriety came easily except for the God part. I told a meeting I would rather tell intimate details about my sex life than discuss spirituality. I had no idea what was in store. The death of my beloved oldest sister, a mother, a genius, my touchstone, my supporter. The phone rang that freezing February night, and I ran barefoot to the hospital. I fell down outside the door and asked God to let her live. I promised anything. She was brain-dead. They wanted her eyes, she was gone without me and there was my father saying, “Come home, come home and help your mother.”
And so, I discovered what was worse than non-belief, the idea that you are not part of anything, not loved by anyone alive, not destined to know any feelings besides grief and anger. I clung to that grief so I could hold on, hold on to my best friend and my sister, hold onto that rage. I went back to the program to get sober with a plan to commit suicide, but something happened. I found a psychiatrist who didn’t flinch when I explained how I needed her not to get fond of me since I was going to die. I fell madly in love with a Buddhist priest who seduced me with ideas that were outside of anything I had ever known; I sat in his Zendo for seventeen hours, spent half my time living there, baked bread and polished wood and thought about how good it would be to become his lover, cut my hair, sleep at the foot of his bed. Instead, I went back to New York City and wrote novels, met a man, had my baby, and realized what I was seeking: love, mercy, and kindness had been there always, and I had to stay alive for my sister and my best friend and I no longer hated anyone except serial killers and some politicians. God had been a very bad boyfriend, but we had broken up, and I was fine.
—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach