part0021

H ome felt unbearably hollow at first. I sat down on the edge of my bed, the second time I had returned home in a week, and my phone rang. I hadn’t even unpacked my bags yet. My cellphone lay far outside of my reach, charging on the nightstand next to the head of my bed. I walked over to see who was calling. I had oafishly assumed that my return would result in a lot of people wanting to reach out and see how I was doing; that turned out not to be the case. Even this call seemed oddly disruptive after so many weeks of being without technology. The world had been building up a lot of opinions about me and my recovery process. There were photos circulating of me smoking a cigarette at The Center. I tried desperately to pick up the habit but couldn’t do it. Now opinions abounded about me and quotes I had made about the dangers of tobacco were being used as a juxtaposition of my current state in headlines of countless blogs. I solemnly thought about how sad it was that Dennis was missing my self-made destruction. I hoped he was looking down on me and seeing all the hard work he had put into helping me expose myself was actually paying off.

I realized that I thought of Dennis in Heaven, laughing with our Parent and Brother at my journey of self-discovery. Maybe I was finally detoxing off a little of that judgment. I said a little prayer thanking Dennis for all his help in getting me here and I hated that it came at the cost of his own life. It was unfair it took two people to die for my sins.

The buzzing of my cellphone continued, vibrating against my nightstand in a rhythmic annoyance. I reached across my bed and answered the phone without even looking at it. Even a telemarketer would have been welcomed warmth in the middle of all this lack of fanfare about my presence in this reality again. It was Christian. The typical zeal was noticeably missing from their voice. This was the first time we had spoken, other than texts, since our spiritual encounter by the fire pit. They called to let me know that on the way home, Michael Green passed away.

What a strange feeling it was that, just seven weeks ago, I had no idea who Michael Green was. The billionaire without a name. He didn’t do politics, he didn’t do religion, he wasn’t famous; he was just richer than God. And now, without any grand spectacle, he was dead. No one knew about it or cared, other than his staff, his cats, me, Christian, and Mary. He had no children, no spouse. I listened for a few minutes until Christian had no more words to give. Finally, when the story seemed to reach its ultimate conclusion, I just pushed the END button on the screen. I hung it up like a Yankee. I didn’t want to say anymore goodbyes that day.

After a few minutes, or an hour, I picked my phone up and called Mary. She didn’t answer. I knew that she knew and that was going to have to be enough for now. She would reach out when she wanted to reach out. I just hoped that this wasn’t the end of our family. I didn’t want this to be the end. But how would we continue forward without our fearless leader ?

I wondered in that moment what the disciples must have felt as they hid away in their homes, alone and afraid, after Jesus died. They had so many plans. They thought they understood what Jesus meant when He said things. They really just made assumptions. I suppose I had assumed a lot about Michael Green too. He told me the doctors had said he had a year left to live. He didn’t say when they told him that. I just assumed we had a whole year left from the time he told me about his diagnosis. I figured that this was the beginning, not that he had gotten sober just for the end. Not that our friendship began at the end.

I made my way downstairs. No breakfast was cooking. There was Penny all by herself, eating a bowl of cereal. This house felt so different. The life that once existed here, it was gone. Absent a person who could never be replaced. Nothing could fill the void of missing a mother and a wife. An individual. How much I had missed that part of her, the whole of her, that I had neglected so much. I had spent so much time only seeing her in parts too. Mother. Wife. Cook. Teacher. Administrator. I never saw that those parts made up the wholeness of who she was and also that she was a deep mystery. That there were things still left undone for her to discover. I wished I could tell her all I had learned. I wish I had learned it all so much sooner. Everything was suddenly feeling too late. And that void was expanding infinitely stronger and larger.

“A strange thing just happened. My friend died. A friend I made at The Center. His name was Michael Green. We only spent the last few weeks with each other but I feel like we knew each other completely. Do you know what I mean?”

Penny stood up and looked at me sternly. I had thought I would never see Rebecca again, but here she was, standing right in front of me about to give me one of her famous talking-tos. I knew the stance all too well. Penny morphed directly into her mother. “Are you really that stupid?”

“Dad! Where are you? I am sorry your friend is dead, but our mother is dead. Your wife is dead. And you’ve gone out and done everything under the sun. And I don’t even judge you. I’m not like you, Dad. I don’t need to feel better than other people because I haven’t done certain things. But you aren’t here anymore. We lost Mom and we lost you on the same day. Do you even know that Millie lost her virginity? That’s right. One of your sweet babies got deflowered while you were out whoring and drinking and doing God knows what! And I’ve been left to cook and to clean and put back together this mess you left behind because you needed to go ‘find yourself’. Grandma is useless. I love her, but she can’t do anything. I don’t even know how much longer we have with her. She’s fading. Everything is evaporating and you are missing it all.

“I’m so sorry you lost your friend, but you are losing so much more than that! Everything around us is dying. Everything you worked for. Everything Mom built for you is disappearing and you’ve missed it all because you need to do what? Get laid? Make some friends? Undo everything you tried to do.

“And we’ve all learned so much about you from reading it online. Is this what our life has to be like? Are you even sorry that you left? Do you even realize what we’ve had to endure? No. Do you realize how many threats we’ve gotten? While you were gone, the sheriff had to send someone to stay outside the house because they thought there would be a bomb or something. But you were blissfully locked away in your little crazy house just singing and dancing and not giving a flip about what we had to do to make it through each day.

“Do you even know they are actively trying to take the church from you? Do you even want it anymore? We are about to lose everything we’ve ever had; our house, where Mom used to comb our hair and taught us how to read. We are losing her all over again if we lose this place. Not just metaphorically but literally. You ran away, far away from the reality that Mom is there in a box, in the ground, right back there! We’ve been here with that reality every day. Not you. So you need to decide what you want. You’ve been out there searching for all your answers, but we need our daddy. Our church needs their apostle. So you need to decide if you want that too. Because if you don’t, I want to just go ahead and mourn you like I already had to do for Mommy.”

She was only just that month 16 years old and already wiser than me. Her mother used to give me these talks. She would set me straight. It was unfair that Penny was forced to do it now. That was not the place she needed to take. No one could replace their mother and these girls certainly didn’t need to try to be the ones to do it. They needed to be worried about first kisses and exams and dances and going to the movies and living. Instead, they were wandering around in this void too. That void I was feeling in this house, it wasn’t just Rebecca being gone. It wasn’t just the absence of a mother but also the absence of a father. As much as they might resent me for it, I had been given the time to heal, I had been given the tools to do better. It was now time for me to use them.

Suddenly her tears turned to laughter and soon we were both laughing so hard we were crying again. “Yeah, Dad, you have been. I’m glad you can see it. I’m even prouder of you for being able to say it! Who taught you to cuss?”

That is the strange thing about healing. It is truly selfish. Sometimes we have to step completely away from our roles and responsibilities. When we are hurt in an accident, we aren’t allowed to work or go to school. We have to recover. We are put in the hospital to regain energy and heal. But that doesn’t mean the world stops, even if we have to rest. Sometimes they replace us at work. Sometimes our spouses leave us while we aren’t watching. Even though something happened to us, people are allowed to have hurts and resentments about it or how we choose to respond to what happened to us. We are still absent, even if it wasn’t our fault. But sometimes we have to be absent to heal. Healing is dangerous business and even though we have to do it for ourselves, that doesn’t mean everyone is going to accept that reality. That’s the risk of growth.

And I wasn’t totally an innocent bystander here. I could blame all kinds of people. My father, even my grandfather, the drug companies, society, but at the end of the day I was responsible for the choices I made. Someone once said, “You aren’t responsible for what happened to you, but you are responsible for your own healing.”

Once that healing comes though, we have to re-enter the life we once had or explain why we are leaving it. In this case, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be a pastor again. But I also didn’t want my girls to lose everything they knew. What was that supposed to look like? How was I going to fulfill the promise I just made that we would preserve their mother’s home and memory but also stay true to myself and what I had been out here learning? Could I truly mesh these worlds? Was our family, our church, ready for someone like me? Or was I ready to throw everything I knew away because I had an awakening? Can you really unlearn a lifetime of indoctrination in a matter of weeks and was that even what was really being asked of me to do? Or was I supposed to incorporate this new knowledge into what I already had? Was I in danger of “putting new wine into old wine skins” and making the whole thing burst into a thousand shattered pieces I could never put back together?

I wasn’t even certain of what I had truly encountered on this journey. Had I found God out there? Was my faith stronger or weaker? Did I have less doubt or had I opened a chasm of uncertainty? Would my congregation even accept me back, as broken as I had become, no matter how healed I was now? Should they? My head was filled with questions. What does the family of God even truly look like?

My heart was telling me that it probably looked a whole lot more like our band of misfits. Like that church started by those faithful people in the French Quarter. The ones that gathered the new lepers of society together and called them blessed, only to be set ablaze. We had made new martyrs and then called them wicked for living life differently than what we understood. We like to think of the apostles after Pentecost as running around in regal robes and blessing the congregations with lofty words, but I imagine they still had the stench of fish under their fingernails and splinters of sailboats in their palms. No, they probably looked a whole lot like Michael Green, broken and uncertain and so ready for the end to finally come.

Mary had promised me that she wanted a church where the pastor was authentic and real; he showed all his scars and was willing to be truthful about his own shortcomings. How many Marys were there in the world? Was it enough to build a new life out of? Maybe that wasn’t the point. I was still stuck in a mindset that I needed to fill the pews of the building next door to my house and not that maybe I just needed enough people to fill the upper room of our home. That was good enough for the first ever communion. It was time to rethink this whole damn thing.

Instead of trying to figure all of this out straightaway, I realized I had a much more important responsibility to worry about than my calling as a pastor or the theology that would justify me moving forward. I lifted my baby girl’s little chin up, tears drying on her cheeks. “You want to watch a movie?”

We made popcorn and ice cream with extra caramel and salt. We settled down in front of the glow of the screen and we laughed together. She cuddled up under my arm and fell asleep. She slept the way you do after you feel like you are finally able to stand down. I watched as the face of her mother scolding me disappeared and she was finally free to be just a little girl again for a few more years.