We were in the Idaho panhandle just south of the Canadian border. Giant trees, mountains, thick alder forests, mosquito swamps in the low, wet lands. I was on a little wildland fire module out of Montana that had been given the short-term mission of monitoring some lightning fire starts. So we climbed mountains to old watch towers and pocketed lightning glass and waded down rivers and doused ourselves (those of us who cared for our sanity, anyway) in DEET as we lay sprinkler systems around cabins and wooden bridges.
The fires never came to much. A few grey billows and then nothing.
But it was out there that my thoughts took on a particularly poisonous quality. Who knows what caused it—maybe fighting through thick and springy alder mazes, my chainsaw catching on every third branch; or maybe slapping at the thousands of mosquitos that thronged my neck and wrists; or maybe it was that I was a woman on an otherwise male crew, experiencing a pressure chamber (mostly inside my own head) of gender-related frustrations.
In any case, once we got back in cell-range, I called my spiritual father, an Orthodox priest. Walking tight circles in a gravel parking lot, I told him about the resentment and cowardice and lust and insecurity that had become more internally vocal during the long silences of our woodland watch.
He listened quietly. And then, like every time I’d confessed to him before, he shocked me with love. He said (I’m paraphrasing): It’s good you’ve confessed. I’ll say the prayers of absolution. But now, you must forget your sin and look into the face of Christ again, because he loves you and doesn’t want you to suffer anymore.
I kicked a few rocks into the tree line. Maybe my spiritual father heard skepticism in my breath; or maybe he’d just been a priest long enough to know the kinds of problems people have with forgiveness.
So after a few more heartbeats of silence he said: You know, God isn’t your father. He isn’t your dad.
I won’t say the full significance of those lines broke through all at once. Now, seven years later, I still think about them. But something in me rattled free that day as I stood at the edge of a tree-lined parking lot looking out into a deep and dense green.
When I turned eighteen, I joined the Army. I had a lot of reasons to join, but pleasing my dad was the true, unspoken queen of them all. I ran marathons and read The Economist and studied philosophy as an undergraduate at least partly because he approved those things. And I ignored my softer, more artistic impulses because I knew that art wasn’t a language my father spoke.
As a kid, my dad had taken me salmon fishing and mountain climbing in Alaska, so was it any big surprise I was out in the woods with a bunch of dudes swinging chain saws around? How proud would he be? How much would he love me?
Despite all that evidence, I was not aware of the hungers that drove me. And I was certainly not aware that when I confessed my sins, I had, often as not, been speaking to Dad, not God. And when I’d imagined forgiveness, it had all seemed a little impossible because, although my dad loved me, he couldn’t help recalling with a somber shake of his head all the ways I’d screwed up, starting in the fifth grade.
Now, if anyone had asked me: Do you think that Rodney Kilcup is actually God? I would have laughed him out of the room. But in truth, I learned about love and judgement and virtue and all of it from my parents—and so why wouldn’t I superimpose their faces over the face of God?
Why wouldn’t any of us?
These days, when I hear someone describe God as punitive and judgmental I cannot help but imagine a father towering over a nine-year-old version of the same person. God, the boy whispers to himself.
Of course, nothing’s that simple. We shouldn’t over-psychologize religious experience.
But still, it’s hard to ignore the fact that there are millions of us spouting off about just the right way to approach God and what he expects from us and whether we’re to be embraced in a big, universal hug or challenged to grow or burned for all eternity. What are we supposed to do with that? And then our parents’ faces hover over the face of God. And then there’s us, perhaps running away from our parents or towards them. And maybe we love God. And maybe we only love ourselves.
So when it gets to the point of prayer, especially prayers asking for forgiveness—it’s understandable that some of us (ahem) might hesitate, unsure of what exactly we’re asking for, and from whom.
But the truth is (I really do believe it) there is a God who is bigger than my dad and bigger than your mom and bigger than all the spoken and unspoken desires and fears we have. And also bigger than my favorite theologians and your favorite evolutionary psychologist. He’s out there and in here, alive and gently putting down a track of honey he hopes we’ll follow all the way to the hive.
That one forgave me a torrent of ill thought on a hot July afternoon and, through the voice of a priest, invited me to turn and turn and turn again, to peer into the thicket of faces, the swarm of ideas pressed upon me from youth, and to pray towards a God I sometimes only know as a kind of solidity or goodness or direction towards truth. God is not who you thought he was.
So, I think there’s this first step of realizing how really poor our ideas about God are—his nature, his proximity, his judgement, his love, and so on. There can be a kind of despair or rigidity or even confinement to the comfy closet of doubt that comes from encountering that abyss of unknowing.
God is not your dad, the priest says—sending me right over the edge. Then who is he? What can I trust?
Ask Him, the priest answers.
In one of my favorite poems of all time, T.S. Eliot intones the slow shucking off of selves that’s needed to encounter God. The final ‘shucking’ is, of course, death:
If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.— TS Eliot, “Little Gidding”
“You are not here to verify,/ instruct yourself, or inform curiosity…” There have been perhaps no more unAmerican words ever spoken. One of the perilous beauties of modern western culture is an unyielding faith in the independent mind. What we have failed to account for is the astounding weakness of “sense and notion.” I think on some level we all know it. Our reasoning powers might be strong or weak but none of us is up to the task of thinking God. Turning towards that mystery, we must lay down our tools of analysis and weapons of narration. And in place of speech, we kneel “where prayer has been valid.”
Four summers after that parking lot confession in northern Idaho, my father who is not God passed away. He’s buried in a small cemetery on the outskirts of a small town. Once, when I was visiting I walked out to his gravestone, out past the train tracks and the high school, and then the hazelnut orchards, each knotty tangle of limbs in a clean row, the leaves, the fruit. And off in the distance a mountain my dad once climbed.
When I got to his little plot, I knelt in the grass and let dew soak my pants and the fields bend my eyes down over their mustard and red. And then I cried because something in my heart felt like heaven.
I loved this! Sometimes a crisis in faith reveals our need for a new metaphor for God.