Along Spiritual Lines: Forgiving God
When childhood tragedy creates a barrier to faith
When I was seventeen, my father, in yet
another drunken binge, became so violent that he threatened me with a
loaded gun. The next day my distraught mother, sisters, and I went to our
pastor and asked him to open the church so we could go in and pray for a
solution to our crazy and scary situation.
Later that same day, the “solution” came
when my father turned a gun on himself and committed suicide in front of
us. In the space of two horrible days, I felt abandoned both by my father
and by God. And in the next week, I felt abandoned as well by my church.
Because my father was not of our faith, our pastor said he could not
perform a service for him. So instead of a funeral in our familiar,
comforting church, we held a service in a cold, strange, funeral parlor.
From that moment on, I felt that God was nowhere near
and I was totally on my own. I developed a feeling of contempt for people
who believed as I once had. I searched for my answers in therapy, in
science, in “non-belief” belief systems and, yes, in booze and
drugs.
Fast forward twenty years, years of drinking, drugging,
searching for meaning, and finding fewer and fewer answers as my life grew
narrower and narrower in scope.
When I hit bottom and landed at an AA meeting, the
notion of God or a Higher Power was something that hardly even registered
in my self-absorbed state. When it did register, old feelings of contempt
surfaced.
“You can’t be serious! Don’t you know
what a joke it is to believe that God even exists?” I said.
After a few months of going to meetings and still
feeling miserable, my sister called and asked me to go with her to a silent
retreat at a Trappist monastery. Intrigued, I agreed to go.
The day I was supposed to drive up there, my car died
in the driveway. Fortunately, I had an old camper parked on the street, so
I decided to take it. Halfway to the monastery, it started to overheat. I
happened to be passing an airport, so I pulled in and rented a car. In
retrospect, I recognize that the car problems seem like tests of my
“willingness to go to any lengths.”
In that third car, I made it to the retreat. Over the
course of the weekend, I had a one-on-one session with the spiritual
director. I told her my story of abandonment and how angry I still was over
all that I had suffered. She asked me if I could find it in my heart to
forgive the church for being a human institution. I thought about that and
something began to thaw.
Then she asked me if I could find it in my heart to
forgive God. Forgive God? What a notion!
I realized that I had been trying to “pay God
back” for all the wrongs that had been done to me by my father, the
church, and just day-to-day life. All this time I had still been involved
in a relationship with God. A dysfunctional one, to be sure, since I was
acting sullen and angry toward God and his “minions.” But it
was a relationship all the same. God had not abandoned me; I had tried to
abandon him.
When I looked back over the intervening twenty years in
which I believed God was absent, I counted so many blessings that had come
my way that I had never properly attributed to their source.
The source was indeed God. God was there. May you find
him now!
Fran J., San Rafael, California
You can download and listen to this story at AudioGrapevine.
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