I have always been edge, always willing to engage in fight or a discussion. This has made me a great advocate for many causes and it has been one of my best qualities at certain times but when I’m in the wrong it quickly becomes one of my worst. I had made a boogey man out of the Adventist church and my won failures within it. As a pastor at a Hispanic church, I had gone out of my way to espouse ideas and behaviors that I thought were silly at best just to go along and get along.
In the Marshall Islands, I refused to do this. Shannon, Leandro, and I had joined the national band. A government grant had brought a director from Korea who barely spoke English and who didn’t speak Marsahllese. To his credit, he had taken kids who had barely seen any of these instruments and by practicing them 3-5 hours almost everyday of the week had really built them up. With the exception of the three of us, all of them were Marshallese teenagers. Leandro had picked up the tuba for them, I was playing the trombone and Shannon was playing the marimba. We were performing at various events throughout the community including at the capital and I even got to meet the country’s president (while it was very cool, this was not difficult to accomplish for anyone). Controversy arose when the students were going to march on Marshallese independence day which the year we were there happened to be on a Sabbath. The principal and his wife had encouraged me, if not directed me to not play in it to not offend Sabbath sensibilities. Shannon and I blatantly disregarded it and while there were no real consequences, it was a way that I was saying, this is who I am and I’m not bending to placate illogical positions since the Sabbath and celebrating a country’s birthday were not exclusive to me. There would be a few more positions like this. That year the Passion of the Christ came out and while the Adventist tradition of staying away from movie theaters had carried on there, I not only went but organized a group to go. I wasn’t sure I was going back or if I was going away from all of this but in either direction, it made me increasingly confrontational.
I held the staff to very high standards. I didn’t consider the fact that all of these 19-20 year old kids had already left home and country to go literally half way around the world to volunteer to teach kids whose education would likely not benefit them much anyway. No, I wanted them to interact with the community more and actively reprimanded them for failing to do so. They spent a huge percentage of their time after work and on the weekends watching movies in their rooms. There was a whole other country out there, a whole other people and they were failing to get to know them. By and large most of them made very few local friends. Was this something they could have improved on? Certainly. Was it my place to encourage them to do so? Perhaps. Was it fair for someone who was essentially banished out there to be reprimanding them about this as often as I was? Absolutely not.
I did so however and I do so regularly. The truth was that more than their fair share had started dating or at least sleeping together. A few of them were taking in alcohol and other substances while they were missionaries. These behaviors frankly didn’t bother me at all but their constant watching of movies while living in another country, their constant living behind the fenced in compound was shameful. I held God and faith and church responsible and I’m not sure that was entirely incorrect. While one could argue that in any given organization there are always going to be bad people and good people, its unfair to judge the organization by those people. I would contend that if almost everyone who works at a company is racist, that company is racist for all practical purposes. If the majority everyone who goes to an organization is fat, then that’s an overweight organization. They were good kids though. Jared, Farace, Melanie, Autumn, Rordy, Brian; they all meant well. In fact none of them argued with me when I was encouraging them to pursue the culture harder. They were just shy or sometimes just exhausted by taking on a really hard job and just wanted to relax. My nagging was not an effective way to get them to change. In fact when I simply invited them to come with me, while it was still a minority, a fair share of them usually accompanied me.
It’s true that I didn’t give them enough credit for having come over here and dismissed it to easily as people who were trying to pad their resume or surf for a year (shows I had some growing up to do that these didn’t seem like legitimate reasons) but it was then that I started to decide that I would cast my lot with humanity in its messiness rather than faith in its messiness. I became better friends with both the Marshallese and with other volunteers to other organizations from other countries. Interestingly enough many of the non church goers were the ones working hardest at being part of the community. This was not entirely true; I became fairly close with the Catholic priest who regularly used his church and his compound as a place to host entire community events. Shannon and I also very consciously became friends with the Asian kids in the group as well. A huge percentage of the business there were Chinese own and ran and there some tension between the Marshallese and the Chinese. It could be argued that the local culture wouldn’t have stood up but it created some very awkward race relations. Several of those students still contact us (mostly Shannon) to thank us for that and to ask how we’re doing.
But invariably, my past caught up with me. The Adventist system is fairly engrained and enmeshed (in angrier times I would say incestuous) and the rumors that had circulated around PUC came down to the Islands and I realized there was no getting away from it. My scandal had been sexual and those are always the ones that generate the most drama and the most interest. The girls in particular were always trying to hint around at what had happened. One of the missionaries who had come, Alexis Miller, knew that there had been strange things but didn’t know the details. I avoided it as well as I could trying to move on but the questions kept coming. I successfully got through the school year without actually spilling my guys both because I was trying to evade my past but because at PUC I’d gotten very good at lying, obfuscating and detracting away from it. The energy which they pursued the gossip about my life was fairly disturbing and I used it as one more point of criticism. Perhaps, it was just natural curiosity but I wondered why they didn’t use that same vigor to get to know students better.
I shared these ideas with Leandro who kept telling me I needed to focus on God, a statement I’d gotten for quite a while. The truth of the matter is that I’ve heard this my entire life but no one has ever given me a particularly good way to do it. While I realize that no relationship comes with instructions, usually they have some guidelines and I was getting exhausted by the vague ones that I’d gotten. My relationship wasn’t over at that point but it was on its dying days and the life support that was supposed to be the Marshall Islands had not worked. I had allowed to make me more cynical about all that I was broken up about.
It turned out towards the end of the year that I would suddenly not be there for the summer. I was not a US citizen at the time and due to the Bush administration having tightened some regulations, anyone who was not a US citizen and was gone from the country for more than a year would lose their residency unless they had filled out a form before they left the country. I had not done so and so I would have to head back for the summer. I looked at various places but ultimately took a job back at New Horizons working with juvenile delinquents. Back to Angwin, we went….
Monday, February 8, 2010
Thursday, February 4, 2010
46 Falling in Love is Hard on The Knees
From the moment I arrived on the Marshall Islands, there was a sigh of relief. It was just good to be someplace different, someplace new. For the first time in my life, I was “white” as the Marshallese are very dark. I had a mix of friends in California of all types of races but still had tried to keep track of the fact that I was Mexican. Here the white people would see me as brown and the brown people would see me as white.
We were greeted in the school gym and were given these wreaths to wear and drank milk right from the coconut. Out every window in my small one bedroom apartment, you could see the ocean. Walking out there was a porch which I eventually installed a hammock in to just sit and watch the sea pound and feel the sea breeze. On clear nights, the moon was glorious and on moonless nights the stars sang for joy. Everyone should get the chance to live in at least two different cultures in the world and this was the fourth country I’d gotten to live in and I was grateful. Here was a place not too different from Mexico, little corner stores everywhere. There were some unique part of the cultures, taxis were more like buses where you hopped on and off anywhere for just 50 cents. It was a rock island so only four things grew on it: bananas, pandanas, coconuts and breadfruit. Everything else had to be imported so grocery shopping for us westerners was very expensive. We bought a pineapple our first time grocery shopping, also the last time since it was $12 and our salaries were $400 a piece.
The Marshallese lived in houses made up essentially of four wooden walls on a dirt floor. All of their furniture were comprised of strategically placed mats. Different ones were for different purposes, one was the table, one was the bed. The missionaries were not nearly as efficient and had regular furniture. We had a small table, a couch and a bed. The infant mortality was really high and so the biggest birthday celebration was the Cayman (Kay-man) which occurred when a child was 1 year old. It was a huge party that all friends and family were invited to. While I tried to participate in all the cultural aspects of it, I had to pass up the traditional eating of the turtle (and turtle head). Funerals lasted a week and the body was kept in the living room in an airproof casket (the humidity in the Marshall Islands is almost always 80-100%; I used to make a crack that I didn’t understand 100% humidity, shouldn’t you then be underwater?). The funeral process was such that people came by in small groups. The most important person in the group gave a small speech (in our groups when I went with my students, it was usually me), the family gave a small speech saying thank you and then everyone got in a line and deposited their gift in the glass immediately above the dead person’s face. I’d been to one person’s funeral by choice in that entire time and with everyone on the island knowing everyone else, I was doing this regularly. Looking that often into a dead person’s face both freaked me out and gave me my first real sense of my own mortality. At both the cayman and the funeral, the gift from everyone was the same: a dollar or two per person or for the really poor, a small bar of soap.
The Marshallese also had a fairly casual attitude towards sex and quite a bit of the islands practiced wife swapping or sleeping around. It wasn’t completely accepted but the mores were far more relaxed than they were in the states. The school secretary, part of the Adventist denomination, had children fairly close in age from various fathers. This was incredibly common. Far too many of the students I would teach over my time there would take out time for the first year of their kids’ lives. However, despite this attitude about it all, there was a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy where no one ever talked about sex.
There was not a single doctor on the Island so it wasn’t a place you wanted to get sick. There were at any given time four interns from a college in Hawaii but again, not a place where you’d want to be ill. The jail was a place that was more like camp with only two or three people in the entire country behind bars. Many of the prisoners were released for the weekend and would have to check back in during the week because frankly there was no place to go and no one was all too worried about it.
While I was most focused on “paying penance,” I’d left open a window that maybe, just maybe, this was a place for solutions. Ideally I would serve my time here and then go back to the real world unencumbered and I’d hoped feeling absolved. But the glory of creation made me hear the echoes of the work of God resonating in the sky and the people and somewhere in the chambers of a soul I’d forgotten I had. I began to settle down, to calm down, to let some, though very little, of the anger subside. A few weeks into it, I cut my hair and regained my identity. For the first time in weeks, I began to again pray, sometimes on the rocks overlooking the ocean, sometimes on my roof while absorbing the sunrise and the sunset, sometimes on my knees in our one bedroom apartment. Often…on my knees…by myself, apologizing and begging forgiveness, hoping against hope, dreaming my own life would have its own sunrise. But just as quickly and if not more powerfully, I’d led cynicism sink in. I’d remember the people who worked so hard at hurting me again failing to notice that most of those efforts had gone on without consequence. I would also remember that it felt like God had not been around through most of that and that the theology majors and the pastor types had gone with him, all too good to be around sinners. And then I would stand up and walk away from those knees and that prayer.
Shannon and I also started dealing with our choices and their repercussions. We had done plenty of this at PUC but the environment was toxic for our healing and there was the distraction I had made of Natalie. We had long conversations about what had happened and often these would grow angry and there would be plenty of yelling, some so passionate that any bystander might have guessed we were inches from blows and they might have been right. As often as not, I would cowardly say some mean complaint and make her be the one who had allowed me to sink into this and storm out of the place and find someone else to talk to, something else to do. We would pick it up again. This is not to say that we didn’t have good days, most of them in fact were. It was simply that the bad days came with conviction. Eventually, we discussed all that had happened and at the end we forgave each other but while it has been years obviously we haven’t forgotten. To say that it doesn’t affect our relationship to this day would be naïve, but its stopped overwhelming our relationship; now it’s an old injury that acts up on cold days and is irrelevant most days.
We asked some pointed questions of each other. Many people had said that they could never imagine Shannon being a pastor’s wife, one of them even less than subtly suggesting that perhaps Shannon had sabotaged all this. She was honest with the fact that she didn’t think she was completely suited for it and that her own belief system had never been quite as steadfast as mine. She added that she wasn’t sure I was suited for it. She stated that she wasn’t so sure that I was a good speaker because I was passionate about God but just because I had a flare for being a performer. We talked about never having kids because our relationship had owned so much drama. She asked if I preferred her or Natalie and if that would have been true even if I had the choice from the starting gate if you will. We even talked about those uncomfortable sex details and came to grips with the fact that neither of us now, perhaps ever, agreed with how big of a deal people made of sex in their lives. (Certainly, the Marshallese style of constantly having it and not ever discussing it was not healthy and perhaps the population there and everywhere would be better served with some conversations about the consequences and biological possibility.) And slowly, intellectually, emotionally, perhaps in our own detached spiritual way, we fell in love again. It was more guarded, more hurt but it was more candid as well, more grown up.
I was teaching religion and Spanish and she was teaching English. I was teaching religion with all the conviction I’d always shared God’s word with, perhaps with more so, overbalancing my doubts. I was preaching at the church on occasion, exalting God’s grace and his endless effort to communicate with us even going as far as to shave my head once in the middle of a sermon to illustrate what the prophet Ezekiel did. But I was tired and I was broken and I wasn’t falling in love with God again nearly as easily, if hardly at all. I’d failed Him and in my perspective, He’d returned the favor. All my questions about the universe, the Bible, the church were now the focus instead of the obstacle to the focus. It was like when you break up with someone. They had the same quirks that they did when you loved them, but now their quirks were the reason you broke up with them; and then became the reason you couldn’t stand them. They hadn’t changed and perhaps neither had you, but the relationship has changed and the perspective you had on each other had because of it. Like I had been with Shannon, I was back and forth on whether or not it was best that this relationship continue and at that point the pendulum could have gone either way.
We were greeted in the school gym and were given these wreaths to wear and drank milk right from the coconut. Out every window in my small one bedroom apartment, you could see the ocean. Walking out there was a porch which I eventually installed a hammock in to just sit and watch the sea pound and feel the sea breeze. On clear nights, the moon was glorious and on moonless nights the stars sang for joy. Everyone should get the chance to live in at least two different cultures in the world and this was the fourth country I’d gotten to live in and I was grateful. Here was a place not too different from Mexico, little corner stores everywhere. There were some unique part of the cultures, taxis were more like buses where you hopped on and off anywhere for just 50 cents. It was a rock island so only four things grew on it: bananas, pandanas, coconuts and breadfruit. Everything else had to be imported so grocery shopping for us westerners was very expensive. We bought a pineapple our first time grocery shopping, also the last time since it was $12 and our salaries were $400 a piece.
The Marshallese lived in houses made up essentially of four wooden walls on a dirt floor. All of their furniture were comprised of strategically placed mats. Different ones were for different purposes, one was the table, one was the bed. The missionaries were not nearly as efficient and had regular furniture. We had a small table, a couch and a bed. The infant mortality was really high and so the biggest birthday celebration was the Cayman (Kay-man) which occurred when a child was 1 year old. It was a huge party that all friends and family were invited to. While I tried to participate in all the cultural aspects of it, I had to pass up the traditional eating of the turtle (and turtle head). Funerals lasted a week and the body was kept in the living room in an airproof casket (the humidity in the Marshall Islands is almost always 80-100%; I used to make a crack that I didn’t understand 100% humidity, shouldn’t you then be underwater?). The funeral process was such that people came by in small groups. The most important person in the group gave a small speech (in our groups when I went with my students, it was usually me), the family gave a small speech saying thank you and then everyone got in a line and deposited their gift in the glass immediately above the dead person’s face. I’d been to one person’s funeral by choice in that entire time and with everyone on the island knowing everyone else, I was doing this regularly. Looking that often into a dead person’s face both freaked me out and gave me my first real sense of my own mortality. At both the cayman and the funeral, the gift from everyone was the same: a dollar or two per person or for the really poor, a small bar of soap.
The Marshallese also had a fairly casual attitude towards sex and quite a bit of the islands practiced wife swapping or sleeping around. It wasn’t completely accepted but the mores were far more relaxed than they were in the states. The school secretary, part of the Adventist denomination, had children fairly close in age from various fathers. This was incredibly common. Far too many of the students I would teach over my time there would take out time for the first year of their kids’ lives. However, despite this attitude about it all, there was a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy where no one ever talked about sex.
There was not a single doctor on the Island so it wasn’t a place you wanted to get sick. There were at any given time four interns from a college in Hawaii but again, not a place where you’d want to be ill. The jail was a place that was more like camp with only two or three people in the entire country behind bars. Many of the prisoners were released for the weekend and would have to check back in during the week because frankly there was no place to go and no one was all too worried about it.
While I was most focused on “paying penance,” I’d left open a window that maybe, just maybe, this was a place for solutions. Ideally I would serve my time here and then go back to the real world unencumbered and I’d hoped feeling absolved. But the glory of creation made me hear the echoes of the work of God resonating in the sky and the people and somewhere in the chambers of a soul I’d forgotten I had. I began to settle down, to calm down, to let some, though very little, of the anger subside. A few weeks into it, I cut my hair and regained my identity. For the first time in weeks, I began to again pray, sometimes on the rocks overlooking the ocean, sometimes on my roof while absorbing the sunrise and the sunset, sometimes on my knees in our one bedroom apartment. Often…on my knees…by myself, apologizing and begging forgiveness, hoping against hope, dreaming my own life would have its own sunrise. But just as quickly and if not more powerfully, I’d led cynicism sink in. I’d remember the people who worked so hard at hurting me again failing to notice that most of those efforts had gone on without consequence. I would also remember that it felt like God had not been around through most of that and that the theology majors and the pastor types had gone with him, all too good to be around sinners. And then I would stand up and walk away from those knees and that prayer.
Shannon and I also started dealing with our choices and their repercussions. We had done plenty of this at PUC but the environment was toxic for our healing and there was the distraction I had made of Natalie. We had long conversations about what had happened and often these would grow angry and there would be plenty of yelling, some so passionate that any bystander might have guessed we were inches from blows and they might have been right. As often as not, I would cowardly say some mean complaint and make her be the one who had allowed me to sink into this and storm out of the place and find someone else to talk to, something else to do. We would pick it up again. This is not to say that we didn’t have good days, most of them in fact were. It was simply that the bad days came with conviction. Eventually, we discussed all that had happened and at the end we forgave each other but while it has been years obviously we haven’t forgotten. To say that it doesn’t affect our relationship to this day would be naïve, but its stopped overwhelming our relationship; now it’s an old injury that acts up on cold days and is irrelevant most days.
We asked some pointed questions of each other. Many people had said that they could never imagine Shannon being a pastor’s wife, one of them even less than subtly suggesting that perhaps Shannon had sabotaged all this. She was honest with the fact that she didn’t think she was completely suited for it and that her own belief system had never been quite as steadfast as mine. She added that she wasn’t sure I was suited for it. She stated that she wasn’t so sure that I was a good speaker because I was passionate about God but just because I had a flare for being a performer. We talked about never having kids because our relationship had owned so much drama. She asked if I preferred her or Natalie and if that would have been true even if I had the choice from the starting gate if you will. We even talked about those uncomfortable sex details and came to grips with the fact that neither of us now, perhaps ever, agreed with how big of a deal people made of sex in their lives. (Certainly, the Marshallese style of constantly having it and not ever discussing it was not healthy and perhaps the population there and everywhere would be better served with some conversations about the consequences and biological possibility.) And slowly, intellectually, emotionally, perhaps in our own detached spiritual way, we fell in love again. It was more guarded, more hurt but it was more candid as well, more grown up.
I was teaching religion and Spanish and she was teaching English. I was teaching religion with all the conviction I’d always shared God’s word with, perhaps with more so, overbalancing my doubts. I was preaching at the church on occasion, exalting God’s grace and his endless effort to communicate with us even going as far as to shave my head once in the middle of a sermon to illustrate what the prophet Ezekiel did. But I was tired and I was broken and I wasn’t falling in love with God again nearly as easily, if hardly at all. I’d failed Him and in my perspective, He’d returned the favor. All my questions about the universe, the Bible, the church were now the focus instead of the obstacle to the focus. It was like when you break up with someone. They had the same quirks that they did when you loved them, but now their quirks were the reason you broke up with them; and then became the reason you couldn’t stand them. They hadn’t changed and perhaps neither had you, but the relationship has changed and the perspective you had on each other had because of it. Like I had been with Shannon, I was back and forth on whether or not it was best that this relationship continue and at that point the pendulum could have gone either way.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
45 I Still Believe
One of the truths of life that most people come to realize is that life has consequences, sometimes not immediate and sometimes unperceived, but always existent in one form or another. The damage that I had inflicted on my marriage and on Shannon resulted in me losing balance and all the drama you’ve read about, but the truth is that I continued to damage both her and Natalie after that suspension. It wasn’t intentional harm; it was just dealing with my own confused emotions and pain but it was still wrong. We all continued to try to figure out what to do but while working from our tenderness we were still both hurting, and once Natalie found someone else, she decided that everything was entirely my fault. It is a pattern far too often in our relationships that when we find a replacement for someone who has hurt us, then we remember ourselves as meritorious and others as being the cause of the failure. Natalie would paint me to some of our mutual friends as manipulative and herself as just some victim. This was a hard sell to anyone as she consistently was the one who came to my house and called me just as often as I called her. Neither I nor these friends denied that there was plenty of faults on my side but Natalie’s ears were deaf to the fact that blame went both directions. There were times where she’d leave me multiple voicemails in one night thinking I was avoiding her when I simply hadn’t gotten any of them. She had always been a girl of intense emotions and once I was the recipient of her anger, it came with conviction. There was a time where her first therapist, a non school one, had decided that I should be brought in to do a therapy session. During that session, I was as honest as I could be about the fact that I did have feelings for her and perhaps always would but that I needed to be faithful to my wife. She tried to point out to me that this was about me worrying about my career, that she and I had a “deeper connection.” I didn’t acknowledge that but responded that I’d made a choice at that point and that my main problem was when I hadn’t been making choices. Shortly after that was when she met David and our conversations ceased very quickly.
Natalie held on to her anger and would try over the next few months to affect negative change in my life. At New Horizons, where she had worked before I did as a substitute, was the first of what I should have read as a warning sign. In one of those odd things, she was scheduled to substitute for me on a day I was supposed to leave early. She had not shown up and so I had to call her from work and she said she wasn’t coming in. I was able to find another sub but had to explain the management that she had not been able to come in. While I did my best, as perhaps I am doing here, to minimize any wrong doing on her part, it was hard to do without explaining all the history between us (which I did not do). She showed up the following business day with her mother and tried to make the case that they should fire me. My manager let her know at that meeting that she would no longer be needed as a sub. She then talked to me about the event afterward and said that she couldn’t understand why someone in the twenties would a) be bringing their mother with them to explain things and b) let their mother do all the talking. My manager very pointedly said “that girl has issues that I can’t figure out.”
Still that wasn’t the last time that we would continue to clash. Apparently, after Natalie had completed all of her degree requirements, she felt the need to let the school know that we had violated the agreement of not keeping in touch. As I’ve heard it told, there was a frenzy of activity among school officials about whether or not to let Shannon, Natalie, and I march. Natalie wanted to be allowed to march and have us not do so, making the argument she should be exempt because she had been forthcoming after the fact. The school didn’t buy that because the explicit understanding was that if we kept in contact, then we all could likely be expelled and they were wise enough to see that it was too convenient for her to come forth with no personal risk. I was completely unaware of it while it was all happening. Truth be told, I actually didn’t want to march; I’d lost any desire for the pomp and circumstance plus it would be a reminder that someone else was giving the Class President speech. I was marching because I was the first in my family to graduate from college and my mother had flown in to see it. However, when she saw me, she was less than pleased with my longer hair. Anyway, we graduated and despite all that had gone wrong, when they announced my name, I was still the student they spent the longest time on. The school had a habit of announcing your name and certain of your accomplishment. Because I had graduated with two degrees, multiple honor societies, with honors and suma cum laude, they had to give credit where it was due. Ironically, the person who had to do that was Ileana Douglas who had told me I should be expelled. It well may have been imagined but I was certain there was disdain in her voice and in all frankness, it was not imagined that there was some satisfaction in hearing her having to spend the time reciting accolades.
I missed again a great point of grace when several of the senior class officers and a few students who knew of all that had gone wrong stood up to clap when my name and accomplishments were announced, partly due to the fact that I was in a hurry to get off the stage. But the point of grace that I didn’t miss was that when Natalie’s name was announced, Shannon stood up and cheered more loudly than she did for anyone else in all of the graduations we’ve attended before or since. When I asked her why she had done it, she said that she really was happy that we’d all gotten here and that she hoped Natalie well.
My mother stayed a few days after graduation as we showed her around Napa Valley and around San Francisco and then she flew back home. The day she left everything started unraveling again. Dr. Paulson let me know that the school would be recommending to the Marshall Islands that I not be allowed to go. The mission trip where I was going to be allowed to speak at let me know that I would no longer be. The director, Steve Case, was incredibly generous about it but said that he had to defer to his staff. The invitation to speak at my old church in South Bay was rescinded. The emotions of rejection and anger and everything I’d started to work towards again all came flaring up again. All the progress I had made up until that point was erased and I was further back than I’d ever been.
I made the mistake of calling Natalie and left a message saying that I’d like to talk to her and settle this so we could both move on. A few hours later, I had a voicemail from her boyfriend David saying that she was pursuing a restraining order and that there was court set up a few days hence. In between that time and court, she apparently tried to get various faculty members and a few of our friends who had been involved in the situation to come to court but none of them would. In court, she claimed that the letter that I had made apologizing and that the phone call I had made a few days before asking to talk were threatening. In California, there are two different kinds of restraining orders; there is one that last three years and another that lasts for a lifetime. She further elaborated that I was so dangerous that I needed to be ordered to be kept away from her, her boyfriend, and all of her family for the rest of their lives. The judge ended up being a level headed fellow and asked the right question; could she produce any of these so called threatening letters? He appeared skeptical when she responded that she was so scared she had thrown them all away. When asked about the threatening voicemail, she said that they had erased it so as not to hear it again. Anyway, no restraining order was issued for any length of time with the judge telling me that with a record of a hearing at court, obviously I would be wise to never speak to Natalie or her family again unless I actually wanted a restraining order. I’ve felt horrible about all that happened and wished that I could offer an apology to Natalie but she’d made it clear she was happy to move on without one. That court session was the last time I saw her and it is an incredibly painful memory that someone who had been a friend and a lover had this kind of ending.
The summer continued to be a time of confusion but eventually the Marshall Islands decided they would allow me to come with or without the school’s blessing and because I had no job prospects and had raised several thousand dollars for this project, I thought we should continue with this plan. Truth was all the uncertainty and perplexity made me appreciate the opportunity to take some time away. Shannon and I could probably use the time to heal without jobs that were going to turn into careers and I was still open to the fact that maybe I should try to rebuild both my faith in my God and in my religion. This was becoming less likely in my view as I had at some level passed the buck on my failures on faith but I still missed God. The soundtrack concept had already begun and I heard a song then that I applied to God. It was Mariah Carey’s, “I still believe.” Like a teenage girl, I’d listen to it with angst in my heart and tears in my eyes:
I know it’s crazy, but you still can touch my heart
And after all this time you think that I wouldn’t feel the same
But time melts into nothing, and nothing's changed
I still believe
Someday you and me
Will find ourselves
In love again
Each day of my life, I’m filled with all the joy I could find
You know that I, I'm not the desperate type
If there’s one spark of hope left in my grasp,
I'm holding it with both hands
It’s worth the risk of burning, to have a second chance
Maybe the Marshall Islands would have that second chance.
Natalie held on to her anger and would try over the next few months to affect negative change in my life. At New Horizons, where she had worked before I did as a substitute, was the first of what I should have read as a warning sign. In one of those odd things, she was scheduled to substitute for me on a day I was supposed to leave early. She had not shown up and so I had to call her from work and she said she wasn’t coming in. I was able to find another sub but had to explain the management that she had not been able to come in. While I did my best, as perhaps I am doing here, to minimize any wrong doing on her part, it was hard to do without explaining all the history between us (which I did not do). She showed up the following business day with her mother and tried to make the case that they should fire me. My manager let her know at that meeting that she would no longer be needed as a sub. She then talked to me about the event afterward and said that she couldn’t understand why someone in the twenties would a) be bringing their mother with them to explain things and b) let their mother do all the talking. My manager very pointedly said “that girl has issues that I can’t figure out.”
Still that wasn’t the last time that we would continue to clash. Apparently, after Natalie had completed all of her degree requirements, she felt the need to let the school know that we had violated the agreement of not keeping in touch. As I’ve heard it told, there was a frenzy of activity among school officials about whether or not to let Shannon, Natalie, and I march. Natalie wanted to be allowed to march and have us not do so, making the argument she should be exempt because she had been forthcoming after the fact. The school didn’t buy that because the explicit understanding was that if we kept in contact, then we all could likely be expelled and they were wise enough to see that it was too convenient for her to come forth with no personal risk. I was completely unaware of it while it was all happening. Truth be told, I actually didn’t want to march; I’d lost any desire for the pomp and circumstance plus it would be a reminder that someone else was giving the Class President speech. I was marching because I was the first in my family to graduate from college and my mother had flown in to see it. However, when she saw me, she was less than pleased with my longer hair. Anyway, we graduated and despite all that had gone wrong, when they announced my name, I was still the student they spent the longest time on. The school had a habit of announcing your name and certain of your accomplishment. Because I had graduated with two degrees, multiple honor societies, with honors and suma cum laude, they had to give credit where it was due. Ironically, the person who had to do that was Ileana Douglas who had told me I should be expelled. It well may have been imagined but I was certain there was disdain in her voice and in all frankness, it was not imagined that there was some satisfaction in hearing her having to spend the time reciting accolades.
I missed again a great point of grace when several of the senior class officers and a few students who knew of all that had gone wrong stood up to clap when my name and accomplishments were announced, partly due to the fact that I was in a hurry to get off the stage. But the point of grace that I didn’t miss was that when Natalie’s name was announced, Shannon stood up and cheered more loudly than she did for anyone else in all of the graduations we’ve attended before or since. When I asked her why she had done it, she said that she really was happy that we’d all gotten here and that she hoped Natalie well.
My mother stayed a few days after graduation as we showed her around Napa Valley and around San Francisco and then she flew back home. The day she left everything started unraveling again. Dr. Paulson let me know that the school would be recommending to the Marshall Islands that I not be allowed to go. The mission trip where I was going to be allowed to speak at let me know that I would no longer be. The director, Steve Case, was incredibly generous about it but said that he had to defer to his staff. The invitation to speak at my old church in South Bay was rescinded. The emotions of rejection and anger and everything I’d started to work towards again all came flaring up again. All the progress I had made up until that point was erased and I was further back than I’d ever been.
I made the mistake of calling Natalie and left a message saying that I’d like to talk to her and settle this so we could both move on. A few hours later, I had a voicemail from her boyfriend David saying that she was pursuing a restraining order and that there was court set up a few days hence. In between that time and court, she apparently tried to get various faculty members and a few of our friends who had been involved in the situation to come to court but none of them would. In court, she claimed that the letter that I had made apologizing and that the phone call I had made a few days before asking to talk were threatening. In California, there are two different kinds of restraining orders; there is one that last three years and another that lasts for a lifetime. She further elaborated that I was so dangerous that I needed to be ordered to be kept away from her, her boyfriend, and all of her family for the rest of their lives. The judge ended up being a level headed fellow and asked the right question; could she produce any of these so called threatening letters? He appeared skeptical when she responded that she was so scared she had thrown them all away. When asked about the threatening voicemail, she said that they had erased it so as not to hear it again. Anyway, no restraining order was issued for any length of time with the judge telling me that with a record of a hearing at court, obviously I would be wise to never speak to Natalie or her family again unless I actually wanted a restraining order. I’ve felt horrible about all that happened and wished that I could offer an apology to Natalie but she’d made it clear she was happy to move on without one. That court session was the last time I saw her and it is an incredibly painful memory that someone who had been a friend and a lover had this kind of ending.
The summer continued to be a time of confusion but eventually the Marshall Islands decided they would allow me to come with or without the school’s blessing and because I had no job prospects and had raised several thousand dollars for this project, I thought we should continue with this plan. Truth was all the uncertainty and perplexity made me appreciate the opportunity to take some time away. Shannon and I could probably use the time to heal without jobs that were going to turn into careers and I was still open to the fact that maybe I should try to rebuild both my faith in my God and in my religion. This was becoming less likely in my view as I had at some level passed the buck on my failures on faith but I still missed God. The soundtrack concept had already begun and I heard a song then that I applied to God. It was Mariah Carey’s, “I still believe.” Like a teenage girl, I’d listen to it with angst in my heart and tears in my eyes:
I know it’s crazy, but you still can touch my heart
And after all this time you think that I wouldn’t feel the same
But time melts into nothing, and nothing's changed
I still believe
Someday you and me
Will find ourselves
In love again
Each day of my life, I’m filled with all the joy I could find
You know that I, I'm not the desperate type
If there’s one spark of hope left in my grasp,
I'm holding it with both hands
It’s worth the risk of burning, to have a second chance
Maybe the Marshall Islands would have that second chance.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
44 Losing My Religion
Though normalcy was never established, a new pattern emerged and things started to get into a new groove, awkward and painful that it was. I restarted my 1000 days of running and life began to settle.
However, my frustration with the theology department both students and professors, with pastors and religious people kept eating away at me. These were God’s representatives and frankly the vast majority of them were being fairly mean and smug about their superiority. How hollow this all felt had helped me give up on my belief systems. Truth was that I was finding more peace from day to day without thinking about that. Since life wasn’t suddenly easier and at least temporarily better without it, I assumed and decided that the lack of religion might well be the better way.
The college had a policy that if students had fulfilled their chapel requirements throughout their academic career that they were excused from it the last part of their senior year. I had done so, of course, and being excused from it was one of the best and worst things that ever happened to me.
And in the midst of this, an event occurred which still strikes me as how funny life is. I was driving out near the school and there was someone hitchhiking. I picked up the guy and he looked remarkably familiar; we glanced at each other both did a double take and then I said, “hold on, before anything else, what is your name man?” It was Jeff and it was the same environmental engineer I had picked up years before. We chitchatted and caught up like we were old friends; this time instead of being so smug about ministering to him, I was happier to listen. He had recently had his sleeping bag ruined and by coincidence I had a sleeping bag in my trunk and after I drove him to exactly where he had to go, I gave him the sleeping bag and spend the rest of the drive very intrigued by the coincidences of life.
Shannon and I were making progress with each other, remembering that there was a long standing connection both historically and emotionally. I started to realize that I had made some big mistakes, the hurt and anger were still deep and began to thaw but it was years away from being made right. I focused on the few friends from college that I still have, the ones who had been my friends through it all and had not suddenly decided they were too good to be friends with such a deep sinner as me. Friends who are not your friends when its not convenient were never actually your friends.
My mind was still a quagmire, trying to reconcile why, WHY had I thrown away a dream 15 years in the making that had been achieved. But I spent as much time distracting myself from that thought as I could. I started bringing my laptop to almost all my classes and was using it to play computer games in the back of the class. I started playing pool more and going out with friends to eat at Denny’s until 2 o’clock the morning. I kept focusing on the play, almost any distraction would do.
The other thing that happened then was that I was writing my senior Honors thesis. It was about God asking Abraham to kill Isaac. I looked at tons of different angles, the Christian one, the Muslim one, the Jewish one, Freud’s, Jung’s and various others. Then I presented my own: it may well have been projecting but my position was essentially that this story might be best interpreted as Abraham imagining something that God wanted wanted. The request appeared so unreasonable that I chose to think that it was Abraham who was unreasonable rather than God. The position was more complex and more elegant than this and I found that people in general were rather receptive to it but theology types were really bothered by it.
As my fatter, longer haired self started to get more at ease with life, I started to feel incredibly guilty about what I had done to Natalie. The conversations between us had stopped abruptly and not cleanly. I wrote a letter to her apologizing at length about all of the events that had occurred. The initial events were wrong enough but the handling it afterwards were just as bad with me even having taken back a piece of jewelry I had given her and given it Shannon. I believe she even saw Shannon wearing it once, Shannon’s own way of dealing with it. None of it from any of our angles was healthy. She never responded to the letter but I had hoped that it would be received well.
In the midst of all this, as the school year rounded out, an old friend called. Leandro Bizama, from high school, called to check on me. We had been in contact with each other throughout the crisis and he had been supportive and very kind and now he had an idea. He knew that my mind and approach was still in a dark place but he thought that maybe, just maybe there was still something there worth salvaging. He was going to be going to the Marshall Islands for two years as a missionary; specifically a high school teacher and the school needed another religion teacher and another English teacher, mine and Shannon’s degrees. I blew him off and told him it was a ridiculously stupid idea and that I was quite done with all this. Apparently over the next couple of weeks, he talked to Shannon a few times and sold her on the idea and she slowly and methodically started working on trying to get me to do it. Some of the people I talked to really liked the idea, they figured if I could succeed out there plus be a way for a couple of years, I would have re-earned my wings. Back in high school, our academy had put on a Jewish Seder. We had tried to replicate it as best as we could with the food and customs although we obviously violated one gigantic concept as we had the tables set up in the shape of a cross. Still, I did it all in earnest including taking in the bitter herbs in their entirety (most people passed them up after barely trying them). Not too long after the event, I completely lost my lunch all over the lobby. Leandro and Shannon cleaned it up for me and then each of them kind of sat with me and patted my back and tried to help me feel better. This attempt to get me to go to the Marshall Islands felt remarkably similar.
Eventually, they prevailed on me but I wasn’t in the right frame of mind. I said to myself and to several people at the time that I had failed God, my faith and the church and that I was going to the Marshall Islands to pay penance and then I was done. They pointed out the obvious fact that we weren’t Catholic and didn’t pay penance and I retorted that it sure felt like plenty of the people over the last few months. This was not the best frame of mind to go with but I always work best with a goal in my mind and set my mind to raising money for this project. I raised a couple of thousand dollars which was far more than more people ever raised for these projects. I’m not anything if not hardworking and not enthusiastic.
With that in my mind, I felt a little more at ease and so I started to look forward to being a missionary. I also took a speaking invitation to go do an evangelistic series down in Mexico shortly after graduation, a sermon late in the summer at the South Bay Adventist Church. But it was a mistake because I was now heading to graduate as a theology major, taking sermon invitations, and heading to be a missionary with faith being merely a functionary attribute, something that for the first time I gave more lip service to than I felt. Still I was not just abiding my time to graduate and move away from this place and to paying penance.
However, my frustration with the theology department both students and professors, with pastors and religious people kept eating away at me. These were God’s representatives and frankly the vast majority of them were being fairly mean and smug about their superiority. How hollow this all felt had helped me give up on my belief systems. Truth was that I was finding more peace from day to day without thinking about that. Since life wasn’t suddenly easier and at least temporarily better without it, I assumed and decided that the lack of religion might well be the better way.
The college had a policy that if students had fulfilled their chapel requirements throughout their academic career that they were excused from it the last part of their senior year. I had done so, of course, and being excused from it was one of the best and worst things that ever happened to me.
And in the midst of this, an event occurred which still strikes me as how funny life is. I was driving out near the school and there was someone hitchhiking. I picked up the guy and he looked remarkably familiar; we glanced at each other both did a double take and then I said, “hold on, before anything else, what is your name man?” It was Jeff and it was the same environmental engineer I had picked up years before. We chitchatted and caught up like we were old friends; this time instead of being so smug about ministering to him, I was happier to listen. He had recently had his sleeping bag ruined and by coincidence I had a sleeping bag in my trunk and after I drove him to exactly where he had to go, I gave him the sleeping bag and spend the rest of the drive very intrigued by the coincidences of life.
Shannon and I were making progress with each other, remembering that there was a long standing connection both historically and emotionally. I started to realize that I had made some big mistakes, the hurt and anger were still deep and began to thaw but it was years away from being made right. I focused on the few friends from college that I still have, the ones who had been my friends through it all and had not suddenly decided they were too good to be friends with such a deep sinner as me. Friends who are not your friends when its not convenient were never actually your friends.
My mind was still a quagmire, trying to reconcile why, WHY had I thrown away a dream 15 years in the making that had been achieved. But I spent as much time distracting myself from that thought as I could. I started bringing my laptop to almost all my classes and was using it to play computer games in the back of the class. I started playing pool more and going out with friends to eat at Denny’s until 2 o’clock the morning. I kept focusing on the play, almost any distraction would do.
The other thing that happened then was that I was writing my senior Honors thesis. It was about God asking Abraham to kill Isaac. I looked at tons of different angles, the Christian one, the Muslim one, the Jewish one, Freud’s, Jung’s and various others. Then I presented my own: it may well have been projecting but my position was essentially that this story might be best interpreted as Abraham imagining something that God wanted wanted. The request appeared so unreasonable that I chose to think that it was Abraham who was unreasonable rather than God. The position was more complex and more elegant than this and I found that people in general were rather receptive to it but theology types were really bothered by it.
As my fatter, longer haired self started to get more at ease with life, I started to feel incredibly guilty about what I had done to Natalie. The conversations between us had stopped abruptly and not cleanly. I wrote a letter to her apologizing at length about all of the events that had occurred. The initial events were wrong enough but the handling it afterwards were just as bad with me even having taken back a piece of jewelry I had given her and given it Shannon. I believe she even saw Shannon wearing it once, Shannon’s own way of dealing with it. None of it from any of our angles was healthy. She never responded to the letter but I had hoped that it would be received well.
In the midst of all this, as the school year rounded out, an old friend called. Leandro Bizama, from high school, called to check on me. We had been in contact with each other throughout the crisis and he had been supportive and very kind and now he had an idea. He knew that my mind and approach was still in a dark place but he thought that maybe, just maybe there was still something there worth salvaging. He was going to be going to the Marshall Islands for two years as a missionary; specifically a high school teacher and the school needed another religion teacher and another English teacher, mine and Shannon’s degrees. I blew him off and told him it was a ridiculously stupid idea and that I was quite done with all this. Apparently over the next couple of weeks, he talked to Shannon a few times and sold her on the idea and she slowly and methodically started working on trying to get me to do it. Some of the people I talked to really liked the idea, they figured if I could succeed out there plus be a way for a couple of years, I would have re-earned my wings. Back in high school, our academy had put on a Jewish Seder. We had tried to replicate it as best as we could with the food and customs although we obviously violated one gigantic concept as we had the tables set up in the shape of a cross. Still, I did it all in earnest including taking in the bitter herbs in their entirety (most people passed them up after barely trying them). Not too long after the event, I completely lost my lunch all over the lobby. Leandro and Shannon cleaned it up for me and then each of them kind of sat with me and patted my back and tried to help me feel better. This attempt to get me to go to the Marshall Islands felt remarkably similar.
Eventually, they prevailed on me but I wasn’t in the right frame of mind. I said to myself and to several people at the time that I had failed God, my faith and the church and that I was going to the Marshall Islands to pay penance and then I was done. They pointed out the obvious fact that we weren’t Catholic and didn’t pay penance and I retorted that it sure felt like plenty of the people over the last few months. This was not the best frame of mind to go with but I always work best with a goal in my mind and set my mind to raising money for this project. I raised a couple of thousand dollars which was far more than more people ever raised for these projects. I’m not anything if not hardworking and not enthusiastic.
With that in my mind, I felt a little more at ease and so I started to look forward to being a missionary. I also took a speaking invitation to go do an evangelistic series down in Mexico shortly after graduation, a sermon late in the summer at the South Bay Adventist Church. But it was a mistake because I was now heading to graduate as a theology major, taking sermon invitations, and heading to be a missionary with faith being merely a functionary attribute, something that for the first time I gave more lip service to than I felt. Still I was not just abiding my time to graduate and move away from this place and to paying penance.
43 Somewhere in the Night
The next few weeks and months were a complete nightmare or at least that’s how I overdramatized them to myself. Feeling like I had failed at everything in my life and not ready to face up to it, I started to lose my sense of identity. For the first and only time in my life, I grew out my hair and started shaving less regularly. I started to gain weight; having thrown away 600 plus days of running, I was running two or three times a week if at all. I also got into emotional eating, enjoying oreos and too many things just to get through the day or night. My sleep schedule was sporadic at best and inexplicably I would wake up in tears or frightened from a nightmare I could not remember. My days of waking up in a good more were suddenly suspended.
The practices for A Midsummer Night’s Dream were the highlight of my life at that point. I don’t know whether it was ironic or appropriate that pretending to be someone else was when I felt the most at ease in my life. I had always been part of dramatic endeavors throughout high school and college but they were mostly an amusement. I started putting together these dinner parties that were murder mysteries that were fun but were also pretending to follow a character. I was pretending every chance I could get because pretending was now therapy.
Speaking of therapy, I went to it but and while it started well, it became one of the most dishonest things in my life. I had grown unreasonably mistrustful of almost everything and believed that the therapist was somehow going to report what we did in therapy to the school since he was employed by them. I therefore feared being forthright and also thought that perhaps if I could paint myself as better to him that maybe there would be a path back to all that had faded so fast. He never did either and merely reported whether or not I had shown up to our weekly appointments.
Shannon would not move back in for a while and during that time I was still regularly in contact with Natalie. There were times we even met late at night to see each other; we would pretend like it was to talk in person but there was rarely any talking. This was due to many factors but one of them was that I wasn’t sure how much I blamed her for my problems. She was proposing that we wait this out and that we then start a life with each other; she had a ten point plan that sounded incredibly attractive. I thought about it constantly and I didn’t pursue it as much because of the history I had with Shannon as the fact that it would almost certainly make sure that my career in the ministry wouldn’t be resurrected. A number of people were concerned with this; it bothered Shannon to no end that at times it seemed more were concerned with that than with the fixing of our marriage. There were days if you’d asked which one of those two I would pick if it excluded the other I wouldn’t have had a good answer. There were plenty of days I might have said both but just as many where I would have said neither.
I continued to try to connect with God, trying to listen for a direction, for some validation, for some hope or some measure of grace. While in retrospect I imagine there were things that I could have interpreted as such, at the time, I actively missed them. Joseph Charles, one of the theology majors, would come by and take me running, probably being responsible for about 80% of my runs during that time. Sal Garcia, another theology major would come by and just talk, carefully if not consciously avoiding anything heavy. Myron Widmer, one of the theology professors, said that he didn’t know what happened nor was it any of his business but that I should know there was a friend there. Julia and Orlando regularly checked on me. But where I focused was that by and large, lots of the psychology majors and professors were the people who were most prominently there. Professors like Dr. Fulton and Dr. Schneider were consistently there to lend an ear. Students like Winter, Christi, Rose were always lending smiles and were the few friends who kept coming over as if nothing had happened. Perhaps because I was uncomfortable with how I had failed my faith, the vast majority of people I was talking to at the time were people whose faith was not a significant part of their life.
But I was severely off balance and therefore rigorously not focusing on kindness. The gossip around campus was heavy with it almost all being focused on me. Shannon was amused once when while waiting for me in a campus lobby, a couple of students passed by and said hey wasn’t that guy the theology major who was suspended for having threesomes while sitting on a couch across from her. The academic dean scheduled a meeting with me to encourage me to not march because I was an embarrassment to the school and making sure to point out that the discipline committee had gotten it wrong and should have expelled me. The chair of the honor department, now a college president, was working hard at trying to convince the honors committee that I should not be allowed to graduate with honors. The professor of the theology senior seminar, now the chair, was bothered by how angry I was coming across in class and spoke to Greg King about how maybe it would be best if I took this class independent study to be less of a bad influence on the rest of the theology majors. What I missed then was that none of those things had happened! I was incredibly angry because there were people who had wanted harsher things but I overlooked the fact that none of those things prevailed.
That anger kept taking me to darker places where I was sometimes yelling at Natalie, other times at Shannon, other times at God, and not nearly often enough at myself. I am not sure which was the cause and which was the effect but in a vicious cycle, the theology department, both faculty and students, withdrew themselves from me and most of my friends became people who had little to no use for religion. I kept complaining to anyone who would hear about how we talked about grace until people actually needed it, not cluing in on just how much I had received. Dr. Paulson, the dean of the school, gave me the sagest advice that I would receive then but I would see it as nonsense at the time. She let me know that I was talking way too much and that maybe I should realize that through this time silence was a better route. She said “less is more” but I interpreted it only as one more person who was just trying to get me to sit down and shut up.
I got a new job then through somewhere that Natalie recommended me. It was a group home working with juvenile delinquents trying to straighten them out for the real world. The place was called appropriately enough New Horizons. The job they offered me was 8 hours on Friday evens and 15 hours on all day Saturday. This effectively meant that I was working the entire time I was conscious on the Sabbath thus ending my church attendance. This was a mixed bag because it allowed me to get some distance from it but it also let me think that I was fine if not actually better without church and God. I started to realize or at least imagine that I was far more like those juvenile delinquents than I was like the people at PUC. I was a minority, raised in poverty who had never been part of the main crowd; I was not like those privileged middle class kids who I’d been attending school with for so long. I decided to become a victim of my own life and interpret these events as not that big of a deal. It was just these conservative, republican up tight puritans who just had such a narrow world view who couldn’t handle it. When we have a hard time living with what we did, its amazing how many of us want to blame anyone but ourselves.
Natalie also needed an escape pod. She had always had an obsession with the biblical character David, making comments about his story and loving pieces of art dedicated to him. She started hanging out with a guy who she eventually began to date who was named David of all things. When the relationship was still relatively new and she and I were still meeting and not talking, she confided many things about him to me. She was disappointed if not angry that I wasn’t more jealous but at that point I was so emotionally exhausted I could have barely managed it if I’d tried. This, thankfully, led her to draw closer to him and away from me. He, never having met me, only had a limited perspective but as our conversations started to dwindle away she seemed to be painting a picture that I was a manipulative jerk and he was reinforcing it in his pursuit of her in a cycle that reinforced their connection.
There was even a time where I was talking with Natalie on the phone where I couldn’t figure out why she was vehemently denying some less than flattering things she’d said about him until I realized he was listening in. While we haven’t had contact since then, I understand she eventually married him and they are doing well together.
As I felt more and more alone during this time, my prayers eventually all but ceased and my care about these things then started to fade. God, his department and his church had failed me when I needed them most and those people who were most disconnected from those ideas had been there the most.
The practices for A Midsummer Night’s Dream were the highlight of my life at that point. I don’t know whether it was ironic or appropriate that pretending to be someone else was when I felt the most at ease in my life. I had always been part of dramatic endeavors throughout high school and college but they were mostly an amusement. I started putting together these dinner parties that were murder mysteries that were fun but were also pretending to follow a character. I was pretending every chance I could get because pretending was now therapy.
Speaking of therapy, I went to it but and while it started well, it became one of the most dishonest things in my life. I had grown unreasonably mistrustful of almost everything and believed that the therapist was somehow going to report what we did in therapy to the school since he was employed by them. I therefore feared being forthright and also thought that perhaps if I could paint myself as better to him that maybe there would be a path back to all that had faded so fast. He never did either and merely reported whether or not I had shown up to our weekly appointments.
Shannon would not move back in for a while and during that time I was still regularly in contact with Natalie. There were times we even met late at night to see each other; we would pretend like it was to talk in person but there was rarely any talking. This was due to many factors but one of them was that I wasn’t sure how much I blamed her for my problems. She was proposing that we wait this out and that we then start a life with each other; she had a ten point plan that sounded incredibly attractive. I thought about it constantly and I didn’t pursue it as much because of the history I had with Shannon as the fact that it would almost certainly make sure that my career in the ministry wouldn’t be resurrected. A number of people were concerned with this; it bothered Shannon to no end that at times it seemed more were concerned with that than with the fixing of our marriage. There were days if you’d asked which one of those two I would pick if it excluded the other I wouldn’t have had a good answer. There were plenty of days I might have said both but just as many where I would have said neither.
I continued to try to connect with God, trying to listen for a direction, for some validation, for some hope or some measure of grace. While in retrospect I imagine there were things that I could have interpreted as such, at the time, I actively missed them. Joseph Charles, one of the theology majors, would come by and take me running, probably being responsible for about 80% of my runs during that time. Sal Garcia, another theology major would come by and just talk, carefully if not consciously avoiding anything heavy. Myron Widmer, one of the theology professors, said that he didn’t know what happened nor was it any of his business but that I should know there was a friend there. Julia and Orlando regularly checked on me. But where I focused was that by and large, lots of the psychology majors and professors were the people who were most prominently there. Professors like Dr. Fulton and Dr. Schneider were consistently there to lend an ear. Students like Winter, Christi, Rose were always lending smiles and were the few friends who kept coming over as if nothing had happened. Perhaps because I was uncomfortable with how I had failed my faith, the vast majority of people I was talking to at the time were people whose faith was not a significant part of their life.
But I was severely off balance and therefore rigorously not focusing on kindness. The gossip around campus was heavy with it almost all being focused on me. Shannon was amused once when while waiting for me in a campus lobby, a couple of students passed by and said hey wasn’t that guy the theology major who was suspended for having threesomes while sitting on a couch across from her. The academic dean scheduled a meeting with me to encourage me to not march because I was an embarrassment to the school and making sure to point out that the discipline committee had gotten it wrong and should have expelled me. The chair of the honor department, now a college president, was working hard at trying to convince the honors committee that I should not be allowed to graduate with honors. The professor of the theology senior seminar, now the chair, was bothered by how angry I was coming across in class and spoke to Greg King about how maybe it would be best if I took this class independent study to be less of a bad influence on the rest of the theology majors. What I missed then was that none of those things had happened! I was incredibly angry because there were people who had wanted harsher things but I overlooked the fact that none of those things prevailed.
That anger kept taking me to darker places where I was sometimes yelling at Natalie, other times at Shannon, other times at God, and not nearly often enough at myself. I am not sure which was the cause and which was the effect but in a vicious cycle, the theology department, both faculty and students, withdrew themselves from me and most of my friends became people who had little to no use for religion. I kept complaining to anyone who would hear about how we talked about grace until people actually needed it, not cluing in on just how much I had received. Dr. Paulson, the dean of the school, gave me the sagest advice that I would receive then but I would see it as nonsense at the time. She let me know that I was talking way too much and that maybe I should realize that through this time silence was a better route. She said “less is more” but I interpreted it only as one more person who was just trying to get me to sit down and shut up.
I got a new job then through somewhere that Natalie recommended me. It was a group home working with juvenile delinquents trying to straighten them out for the real world. The place was called appropriately enough New Horizons. The job they offered me was 8 hours on Friday evens and 15 hours on all day Saturday. This effectively meant that I was working the entire time I was conscious on the Sabbath thus ending my church attendance. This was a mixed bag because it allowed me to get some distance from it but it also let me think that I was fine if not actually better without church and God. I started to realize or at least imagine that I was far more like those juvenile delinquents than I was like the people at PUC. I was a minority, raised in poverty who had never been part of the main crowd; I was not like those privileged middle class kids who I’d been attending school with for so long. I decided to become a victim of my own life and interpret these events as not that big of a deal. It was just these conservative, republican up tight puritans who just had such a narrow world view who couldn’t handle it. When we have a hard time living with what we did, its amazing how many of us want to blame anyone but ourselves.
Natalie also needed an escape pod. She had always had an obsession with the biblical character David, making comments about his story and loving pieces of art dedicated to him. She started hanging out with a guy who she eventually began to date who was named David of all things. When the relationship was still relatively new and she and I were still meeting and not talking, she confided many things about him to me. She was disappointed if not angry that I wasn’t more jealous but at that point I was so emotionally exhausted I could have barely managed it if I’d tried. This, thankfully, led her to draw closer to him and away from me. He, never having met me, only had a limited perspective but as our conversations started to dwindle away she seemed to be painting a picture that I was a manipulative jerk and he was reinforcing it in his pursuit of her in a cycle that reinforced their connection.
There was even a time where I was talking with Natalie on the phone where I couldn’t figure out why she was vehemently denying some less than flattering things she’d said about him until I realized he was listening in. While we haven’t had contact since then, I understand she eventually married him and they are doing well together.
As I felt more and more alone during this time, my prayers eventually all but ceased and my care about these things then started to fade. God, his department and his church had failed me when I needed them most and those people who were most disconnected from those ideas had been there the most.
42 Crazy
The next few days are blurry at best. I am not sure why this happened but I think because of both the public nature of fallout and who I was, the school was compelled to react and held a disciplinary committee meeting to determine the fate of the three of us. Shannon was off in Texas and could not represent herself so she wrote several lengthy pages about her view on it. It was shredded afterwards and I never saw it and one of the people on the committee told me to not try to but that that if I ever did to realize that it was one point in time for Shannon and to see it as such. Natalie and I both took turns before the committee and spoke with each other in the lobby and also at some length with each other afterwards. It was a few days before Christmas when all of this broke down. While at the time this thought never crossed my mind, it must have been incredibly inconvenient and bothersome for those faculty to have their Christmas break ruined by my drama. I don’t envy their role, having to figure out what to do with this poster boy kid who most of them had embraced mentally. Most of them had at least done it physically… To have been a fly on the wall of that room…
I don’t remember how long the decision took but I’m almost certain they didn’t decide it for a few days. The silence was just eating away at me because I had no clue to what would happen. The president of the college, Richard Osborn, was kind enough to sit down with me during that time and while showing the fact that he was disappointed conveyed a great kindness about the fact that humanity was hard and that he would make sure I wasn’t expelled for this. (Over the next few months, there would be multiple kindnesses like this, there would even be some kindnesses that I would grossly misinterpret because I was off balance and because I chose to focus on the people who were being cruel. As this story continues, know that when I tell those stories, I am not trying to be a victim of my own life, I am just reflecting what I remember and trying to tell the story honestly). Dr. Ashworth was on the discipline committee and I still can’t decide how I feel about the fact that he said this showed “a consistent character” issue because of things that he “knew about but wasn’t at liberty to share.” I go back and forth between appreciating that he didn’t say it but a little annoyance at that he referred to the previous episode.
Natalie had previously planned to spend Christmas with her father (her parents were split up). Shannon was at her parents and had made it clear she didn’t want to talk to me. I had gone from having both of their time and attention to neither. I was just planning on staying at home alone; I’d had a couple of invites but they were pity ones. I had actually left the light and the heater off the entire time after Shannon went home so I was consistently literally in the cold and dark. Natalie’s mother was kind enough to invite me over for Christmas eve and I went. She had apparently spent a good part of the day cooking up really good food and I went there and because I was in crisis mode, I went there and verbally beat myself up in front of her and didn’t eat any of her food. The incredible rudeness of this didn’t strike me for several days.
I went home and the phone rang around 8:00 PM. It was Shannon and she finally was ready to talk, not necessarily about the crisis but just talk. We had a history of five years and she wasn’t ready to throw it away though she was thinking about it. So we talked and talked and talked, sometimes about what was going on, sometimes about what the last few days had been like, sometimes awkward painful conversation, at points venomous angry conversation. We have a tradition of hanging up an ornament representing the most important event of the year on Christmas Eve and that was the only time we weren’t together but I did it while talking to her on the phone. It was an Eiffel Tower, representing our trip to Paris that summer. The conversation just kept continuing with no sign up wrapping up and then I noticed the time. It was 11:30PM.
After the initial hundred days of running right before our marriage, I had decided to run a thousand consecutive days. At this point, I was at over 600 days and suddenly I had a very odd decision to make. In order to make these 1000 days work, my ocd had led me to pull over the car and run in dress clothes at 11:30 at night, to run up and down stairs in a subway in New York at 11:30 at night, to get up at the crack of dawn because I would be crossing the international date line (always had to be local time). I considered than finding an excuse to get off the phone just to keep the streak going. The conversation wasn’t really going anywhere as some of it was just rehashing many things but this was the first chance she’d given me to talk to her. I weighed it out and decided to stay on the phone which I did until almost 2:00 on the morning, her 4:00 AM. We fell asleep on the phone.
The school eventually came back with the decision that we were all suspended for 1 week, we were forbidden from talking to each other (unless Shannon decided that she wanted to fix our marriage), we would have to go to therapy until our graduation that June. This meant that some classes had to be rearranged (Shannon and Natalie were in the same major) and for a brief moment our role in the school production was up in the air. The school yearly put on a play and Shannon, Natalie and I had all tried out for it. That year it Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dreams. Shannon and I both had tried out for the part of Puck and she had gotten it but they liked me enough to bring me back and gave me the part of Lysander. Natalie had not gotten a part. It was ironic that in the midst of all this I was cast in a part where I go back and forth between being in love with two girls. Shannon fairly quickly decided to officially state that we were going to try so the ban on us speaking was lifted. In addition to this, the school required me to resign from pastoring the two churches and from being senior class president.
Shannon came back to PUC and to her credit and my chagrin; she moved out and moved in with a friend that I’d introduced her to, Donica Ward. My pride wouldn’t allow me to admit this to essentially anyone and while it was fairly obvious to many friends and neighbors this had occurred, I don’t believe I ever owned up to it to anyone.
I’ve always been the kind of guy who has an excessive amount of energy and to all of a sudden have no job, no positions, no wife living with me and everyone gone on Christmas break was driving me nuts. They then got back and it was worse. The school had further added that during the week I was suspended I wasn’t allowed to step on campus so I was in exile in my own home with no wife. My friends for the most part didn’t know what was going on so they didn’t know to come by and I was still so ashamed and proud that I couldn’t face up to any of them. Plus the school gave us this vague directive about the fact we weren’t allowed to talk about its decision. The Angwin church was on campus so I figured I couldn’t go to that either and it wouldn’t make sense to go to either of the churches I had pastured so even on Sabbath I was home alone. I tried to pray and talk to God on those days but it felt hollow from both ends. More earnestness didn’t seem to help the situation and the prayers got less frequent.
All of this pent up emotion and confusion had me on edge. So the Sabbath that was two days before we were scheduled to start classes, in a frenzy and an act of desperation, I threw a bunch of my clothes into my car and was headed to Texas to my mother’s house. I didn’t have much of a game plan beyond that, whether or not I would continue college or not or graduate at all wasn’t crossing my mind. I got as far as Napa where I got a cell phone and for some reason I checked my answering machine messages before heading out and there was a message from Greg King, the chair of the theology department, asking me to come to his house. I drove back the half hour to campus and he tried to get me to stay, saying I still could have a bright future. His wife then said what was meant to be a very kind thing but is probably still the most painful thing anyone’s ever said to me: “Satan is out to get the best and the brightest and you let him do that with you.” I was a long way from home.
I don’t remember how long the decision took but I’m almost certain they didn’t decide it for a few days. The silence was just eating away at me because I had no clue to what would happen. The president of the college, Richard Osborn, was kind enough to sit down with me during that time and while showing the fact that he was disappointed conveyed a great kindness about the fact that humanity was hard and that he would make sure I wasn’t expelled for this. (Over the next few months, there would be multiple kindnesses like this, there would even be some kindnesses that I would grossly misinterpret because I was off balance and because I chose to focus on the people who were being cruel. As this story continues, know that when I tell those stories, I am not trying to be a victim of my own life, I am just reflecting what I remember and trying to tell the story honestly). Dr. Ashworth was on the discipline committee and I still can’t decide how I feel about the fact that he said this showed “a consistent character” issue because of things that he “knew about but wasn’t at liberty to share.” I go back and forth between appreciating that he didn’t say it but a little annoyance at that he referred to the previous episode.
Natalie had previously planned to spend Christmas with her father (her parents were split up). Shannon was at her parents and had made it clear she didn’t want to talk to me. I had gone from having both of their time and attention to neither. I was just planning on staying at home alone; I’d had a couple of invites but they were pity ones. I had actually left the light and the heater off the entire time after Shannon went home so I was consistently literally in the cold and dark. Natalie’s mother was kind enough to invite me over for Christmas eve and I went. She had apparently spent a good part of the day cooking up really good food and I went there and because I was in crisis mode, I went there and verbally beat myself up in front of her and didn’t eat any of her food. The incredible rudeness of this didn’t strike me for several days.
I went home and the phone rang around 8:00 PM. It was Shannon and she finally was ready to talk, not necessarily about the crisis but just talk. We had a history of five years and she wasn’t ready to throw it away though she was thinking about it. So we talked and talked and talked, sometimes about what was going on, sometimes about what the last few days had been like, sometimes awkward painful conversation, at points venomous angry conversation. We have a tradition of hanging up an ornament representing the most important event of the year on Christmas Eve and that was the only time we weren’t together but I did it while talking to her on the phone. It was an Eiffel Tower, representing our trip to Paris that summer. The conversation just kept continuing with no sign up wrapping up and then I noticed the time. It was 11:30PM.
After the initial hundred days of running right before our marriage, I had decided to run a thousand consecutive days. At this point, I was at over 600 days and suddenly I had a very odd decision to make. In order to make these 1000 days work, my ocd had led me to pull over the car and run in dress clothes at 11:30 at night, to run up and down stairs in a subway in New York at 11:30 at night, to get up at the crack of dawn because I would be crossing the international date line (always had to be local time). I considered than finding an excuse to get off the phone just to keep the streak going. The conversation wasn’t really going anywhere as some of it was just rehashing many things but this was the first chance she’d given me to talk to her. I weighed it out and decided to stay on the phone which I did until almost 2:00 on the morning, her 4:00 AM. We fell asleep on the phone.
The school eventually came back with the decision that we were all suspended for 1 week, we were forbidden from talking to each other (unless Shannon decided that she wanted to fix our marriage), we would have to go to therapy until our graduation that June. This meant that some classes had to be rearranged (Shannon and Natalie were in the same major) and for a brief moment our role in the school production was up in the air. The school yearly put on a play and Shannon, Natalie and I had all tried out for it. That year it Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dreams. Shannon and I both had tried out for the part of Puck and she had gotten it but they liked me enough to bring me back and gave me the part of Lysander. Natalie had not gotten a part. It was ironic that in the midst of all this I was cast in a part where I go back and forth between being in love with two girls. Shannon fairly quickly decided to officially state that we were going to try so the ban on us speaking was lifted. In addition to this, the school required me to resign from pastoring the two churches and from being senior class president.
Shannon came back to PUC and to her credit and my chagrin; she moved out and moved in with a friend that I’d introduced her to, Donica Ward. My pride wouldn’t allow me to admit this to essentially anyone and while it was fairly obvious to many friends and neighbors this had occurred, I don’t believe I ever owned up to it to anyone.
I’ve always been the kind of guy who has an excessive amount of energy and to all of a sudden have no job, no positions, no wife living with me and everyone gone on Christmas break was driving me nuts. They then got back and it was worse. The school had further added that during the week I was suspended I wasn’t allowed to step on campus so I was in exile in my own home with no wife. My friends for the most part didn’t know what was going on so they didn’t know to come by and I was still so ashamed and proud that I couldn’t face up to any of them. Plus the school gave us this vague directive about the fact we weren’t allowed to talk about its decision. The Angwin church was on campus so I figured I couldn’t go to that either and it wouldn’t make sense to go to either of the churches I had pastured so even on Sabbath I was home alone. I tried to pray and talk to God on those days but it felt hollow from both ends. More earnestness didn’t seem to help the situation and the prayers got less frequent.
All of this pent up emotion and confusion had me on edge. So the Sabbath that was two days before we were scheduled to start classes, in a frenzy and an act of desperation, I threw a bunch of my clothes into my car and was headed to Texas to my mother’s house. I didn’t have much of a game plan beyond that, whether or not I would continue college or not or graduate at all wasn’t crossing my mind. I got as far as Napa where I got a cell phone and for some reason I checked my answering machine messages before heading out and there was a message from Greg King, the chair of the theology department, asking me to come to his house. I drove back the half hour to campus and he tried to get me to stay, saying I still could have a bright future. His wife then said what was meant to be a very kind thing but is probably still the most painful thing anyone’s ever said to me: “Satan is out to get the best and the brightest and you let him do that with you.” I was a long way from home.
41 Fallin' Apart
Shannon and I, oddly enough, went to New York that year for Thanksgiving. We were going to go the year before but because of the 9/11 attacks had put it off for a year. We had a good time going to the museums, catching a couple of shows, seeing all that New York has to offer. Part of the reason it was a good time was that we were away from Natalie but it was a very uncomfortable vacation. There was en elephant in the room or rather across the continent that was weighing in on us. Truth be told I was still very much in love with my wife but I was also in love with another girl and that couldn’t be held. The I love NY things everywhere certainly contributed to the tension.
We had a couple of arguments and even spent some time apart doing some things on our own. We were staying with her family and the tension at points was thick enough to where frankly speaking, they thought I was a jerk. There’s no way to spin that they were completely right, that Shannon was asking me to stop this stupid experiment and get back to real life, the one with her that I had committed to.
Shannon and Natalie’s friendship faded fast and quickly it became evident that this was not sustainable. But I was loathe to quit all that I was doing wrong, almost if not worse than a drug addict. Natalie was too hesitant in quitting as well, perhaps because she thought this was the only way to deal with her emotions for me. I pushed the point of no return when Shannon went to a dinner of the theology departments to represent me and found out that I had been with Natalie and not at anything of consequence. We had a gigantic fight in the car that night and I essentially dared her to leave. This was shortly after the Christmas break has started. We had just finished our finals and had no real commitments except work for almost a month.
When we got back to the house, Shannon called my bluff, got out of the car and walked away. I tried to walk after her but it became painfully obvious that for the time being, she was not going to be stopped. I called Natalie and explained to her the drama and she said she would be right over. As corny as it may sound, it was a dark and stormy night when she left. It was windy, rainy and about as miserable weather as you can imagine in Angwin, California. To cap off a perfect evening, the power even went out. In my mind, the utilities and the firmament were laughing at me.
I had laid down the gauntlet and Shannon would break it. She came in with Craig Philpott who kept insisting “he was only a guy holding a flashlight” though he told Natalie that she should go. Natalie had some lame answer to that. I wished the verbiage was a little more dramatic but I can’t remember any of it so it must not have been. They packed up some stuff and then they left. And then…Natalie and I were in the dark.
We talked for a while…wondered what Shannon would do…I asked Natalie to stay because I wanted her there…no, I just didn’t want to be alone…or maybe I wanted her there…I don’t know. She left nonetheless and in the biggest stupor of my life, amidst quiet, angry tears, I fell asleep.
At 3’o clock in the morning, I woke up, rather I was woken up. There was Craig again, with the flashlight and the same line and Shannon getting more stuff. I tried to get her to talk. She refused to engage me. Then she left. Again.
I went to sleep again. More confused and naively but full heartedly believing that when I woke up in the morning, like so many other times in life, it would be ok. I didn’t know how but this had to be a nightmare that I would wake up from…that magically perhaps Shannon might even be there in the morning…perhaps that they both would be…but at least her. She wasn’t. That was the last time I ever fully trusted someone.
The next few days were a blurry of activity. By sheer coincidence, Greg King, the chair of the theology department called me into his office the next morning. Apparently, he had found about what was going on the last few weeks and wanted to talk to me about it. I assumed, incorrectly, that it was because of the previous night’s activity. It turned out that someone else had somehow been suspicious (Natalie had been leaving my house oddly enough on many mornings) and had talked to Greg King. I spilled my guys to him about much of it and that may have been the most unguarded I ever was about it.
A few years before, Shannon’s parents had found some pictures of me in various states of undress in her home. They had been taken in college dorm room, the worst one being one of me from the back and going into the shower. This was beyond evidence to them that I was corrupting their daughter. They had sent the pictures to the theology department with a letter that I clearly had issues and that they should kick me out of the program. The theology department had convened and let me explain it as what it was, an idiot move by a college freshmen and told me to be smarter. This attempt to force someone’s hand had caused a big rift between Shannon and her family, a rift I was happy to feed because her family was against me. My egocentric selfishness made me have strong venom against those who were trying to point out my faults because I still wasn’t ready to deal with many of them. It had been a missed opportunity on my part, perhaps the department’s part, but mainly mine to deal with some of these issues that I’d struggled with since high school. Like before, I was the only one who knew all the connections and like before I thought ignoring them would make them go away. Obviously this had not been true. I wonder how much Greg King thought about that as we talked about this new Natalie episode. I certainly did.
Shannon caught a flight to her parents the day proving the old adage that home is where when you go, they have to let you in. For several days, she wouldn’t take my phone call at all and her parents, who were already not fans of me, made it clear I wasn’t to call their home anymore. I went over and talked to Natalie and her mother about it all. Natalie’s mother had also for the first time heard about all of the happenings and her main point was to press us to see if we were in a position to deny it. I was still so shaken up about everything that I was going on that I was spitting at the mouth.
The days were dark and I had no clue what to do with myself; people wisely advised me to stay away during pastoral duties. I was home alone in the cold and there were times I would go into a catatonic stare with occasional tears just streaming as I would just collapse. A friend of mine, Orlando, was so worried about me that he started sleeping on my couch with just a couple of weeks left till his wedding. He also hid all my knives because he was afraid I would hurt myself. While that thought never crossed my mind, I’m not sure I would have minded had I been hit by a bus around that time. I kept running then; after the initial three months before my marriage where I had lost all that weight, I had decided I would run 1000 consecutive days. I was at over 600 days when this was going and I kept running because it was the only thing that felt normal. In something that felt entirely appropriate, several of those nights were cold rain and one was a pounding hail. I kept running in it, letting it beat my face and body feeling extremely narcissistically that this was God showing his displeasure.
We had a couple of arguments and even spent some time apart doing some things on our own. We were staying with her family and the tension at points was thick enough to where frankly speaking, they thought I was a jerk. There’s no way to spin that they were completely right, that Shannon was asking me to stop this stupid experiment and get back to real life, the one with her that I had committed to.
Shannon and Natalie’s friendship faded fast and quickly it became evident that this was not sustainable. But I was loathe to quit all that I was doing wrong, almost if not worse than a drug addict. Natalie was too hesitant in quitting as well, perhaps because she thought this was the only way to deal with her emotions for me. I pushed the point of no return when Shannon went to a dinner of the theology departments to represent me and found out that I had been with Natalie and not at anything of consequence. We had a gigantic fight in the car that night and I essentially dared her to leave. This was shortly after the Christmas break has started. We had just finished our finals and had no real commitments except work for almost a month.
When we got back to the house, Shannon called my bluff, got out of the car and walked away. I tried to walk after her but it became painfully obvious that for the time being, she was not going to be stopped. I called Natalie and explained to her the drama and she said she would be right over. As corny as it may sound, it was a dark and stormy night when she left. It was windy, rainy and about as miserable weather as you can imagine in Angwin, California. To cap off a perfect evening, the power even went out. In my mind, the utilities and the firmament were laughing at me.
I had laid down the gauntlet and Shannon would break it. She came in with Craig Philpott who kept insisting “he was only a guy holding a flashlight” though he told Natalie that she should go. Natalie had some lame answer to that. I wished the verbiage was a little more dramatic but I can’t remember any of it so it must not have been. They packed up some stuff and then they left. And then…Natalie and I were in the dark.
We talked for a while…wondered what Shannon would do…I asked Natalie to stay because I wanted her there…no, I just didn’t want to be alone…or maybe I wanted her there…I don’t know. She left nonetheless and in the biggest stupor of my life, amidst quiet, angry tears, I fell asleep.
At 3’o clock in the morning, I woke up, rather I was woken up. There was Craig again, with the flashlight and the same line and Shannon getting more stuff. I tried to get her to talk. She refused to engage me. Then she left. Again.
I went to sleep again. More confused and naively but full heartedly believing that when I woke up in the morning, like so many other times in life, it would be ok. I didn’t know how but this had to be a nightmare that I would wake up from…that magically perhaps Shannon might even be there in the morning…perhaps that they both would be…but at least her. She wasn’t. That was the last time I ever fully trusted someone.
The next few days were a blurry of activity. By sheer coincidence, Greg King, the chair of the theology department called me into his office the next morning. Apparently, he had found about what was going on the last few weeks and wanted to talk to me about it. I assumed, incorrectly, that it was because of the previous night’s activity. It turned out that someone else had somehow been suspicious (Natalie had been leaving my house oddly enough on many mornings) and had talked to Greg King. I spilled my guys to him about much of it and that may have been the most unguarded I ever was about it.
A few years before, Shannon’s parents had found some pictures of me in various states of undress in her home. They had been taken in college dorm room, the worst one being one of me from the back and going into the shower. This was beyond evidence to them that I was corrupting their daughter. They had sent the pictures to the theology department with a letter that I clearly had issues and that they should kick me out of the program. The theology department had convened and let me explain it as what it was, an idiot move by a college freshmen and told me to be smarter. This attempt to force someone’s hand had caused a big rift between Shannon and her family, a rift I was happy to feed because her family was against me. My egocentric selfishness made me have strong venom against those who were trying to point out my faults because I still wasn’t ready to deal with many of them. It had been a missed opportunity on my part, perhaps the department’s part, but mainly mine to deal with some of these issues that I’d struggled with since high school. Like before, I was the only one who knew all the connections and like before I thought ignoring them would make them go away. Obviously this had not been true. I wonder how much Greg King thought about that as we talked about this new Natalie episode. I certainly did.
Shannon caught a flight to her parents the day proving the old adage that home is where when you go, they have to let you in. For several days, she wouldn’t take my phone call at all and her parents, who were already not fans of me, made it clear I wasn’t to call their home anymore. I went over and talked to Natalie and her mother about it all. Natalie’s mother had also for the first time heard about all of the happenings and her main point was to press us to see if we were in a position to deny it. I was still so shaken up about everything that I was going on that I was spitting at the mouth.
The days were dark and I had no clue what to do with myself; people wisely advised me to stay away during pastoral duties. I was home alone in the cold and there were times I would go into a catatonic stare with occasional tears just streaming as I would just collapse. A friend of mine, Orlando, was so worried about me that he started sleeping on my couch with just a couple of weeks left till his wedding. He also hid all my knives because he was afraid I would hurt myself. While that thought never crossed my mind, I’m not sure I would have minded had I been hit by a bus around that time. I kept running then; after the initial three months before my marriage where I had lost all that weight, I had decided I would run 1000 consecutive days. I was at over 600 days when this was going and I kept running because it was the only thing that felt normal. In something that felt entirely appropriate, several of those nights were cold rain and one was a pounding hail. I kept running in it, letting it beat my face and body feeling extremely narcissistically that this was God showing his displeasure.
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