Angry Conversations with God (13 page)

“How will
you
fit in at a church like that?”

Cheryl smiled. “Anyone trying to be a Christian
and
an artist needs a therapist.”

We started by visiting a church that was
over the edge.
They met in a school auditorium. It was packed, but not with disco divas or stars from
The Love Boat.
It was packed with punk rockers, actors, directors, teachers, even some surfers and vagrants. They didn’t wear stretch pants;
they wore ripped jeans and blue spiky hair. The warbling Pentecostal organ had been replaced by electric guitars. No Pentecostal
waltzes with lyrics about the victorious Christian life—the worship band played raw power ballads, yearning for Jesus the
way an addict longs for a shot of heroin.

Jesus, you can light my fire (pronounced FYE-YUHHH)! Yyyyou’re my only true desire (dee-ZYE-YUHH)! Jesus, Luvvah of my soul-ahh,
let me to thy bosom FLY-YAHH!

And man, did that music strike a chord with me. They were playing my note—not an artistic note, but a spiritual one. It was
the same note I had vibrated to during Communion as a child, or when I’d sat and prayed for hours in college. And it was an
ache that the Oakie church’s programs and Georgina’s rules had never alleviated; they’d only slapped a Band-Aid on it. Now
this hair band was strumming my pain with their power chords. It was like they ripped off the Band-Aid. I wept with heartbreak
and relief.

Pastor Craig was a hippie drug addict who got saved at a pizza joint on Venice Beach. He left the drugs behind but brought
a hang-ten attitude to his preaching. Sometimes he’d cite John Calvin in his sermons, sometimes
Calvin and Hobbes,
and sometimes he’d just wing it. Something like:

“So I was at Winchell’s Donuts this morning,” Craig croaked, “and the Lord really spoke to me. He said, ‘Dude, you need coffee!’
Seriously, here’s what he showed me: Our hearts are like donuts. On the outside they’re crunchy sweet—maybe they’ve got sprinkles
or glaze, sayin’, ‘Look at me!’ or, ‘Aren’t I smooth?’ But on the inside of every donut there’s a
hole
! There’s a
hole in your heart
where the Lord’s supposed to be! You may say, ‘No way, Pastor Craig. I don’t have a hole. I’m a cruller.’ Then, dude, you’re
twisted!”

Craig said you could have a hole from not knowing God at all, or you’re hiding some ancient wound you’re afraid to let God
heal. He was right! That’s what the ache was—it was a hole! I’d tried to stuff it with food or deny it by starving. Parroting
praises silenced the longing, rules kept me moving. But now I had stopped and the hole was still there. There was still a
HOLE IN MY DONUT!

“Here’s the good news,” Pastor Craig said, interrupting my reverie. “The Lord is here this morning to heal you. The worship
band’s gonna play, the prayer team’s gonna come up, and we’re gonna hang out and let God fill our holes.” Half the auditorium
went forward, crying out for Jesus to fill their holes. I was right there, singing along:
Jesus, luvvah of my soul-lah.…

That’s what they did at the Rock ’n’ Roll church—Sunday mornings, Sunday evenings, midweek home groups. Artists got together,
sang power ballads to Jesus, and let God fill the holes in their hearts.

If the Oakie church had preached salvation through behavior, the Rock ’n’ Roll church preached salvation through experience;
in particular, the experience of healing. Most artists have pain in their lives; it’s why we make art: to create beauty out
of chaos, to find meaning and healing in the art. So it followed that a church filled with artists would preach a gospel of
healing: They needed it.
I
needed it. That’s what the Rock ’n’ Roll church was all about. I made it my home.

One Sunday after the service, I prayed with Fiona, the keyboardist. Because she was an artist, she liked to pray with her
eyes closed and wait for a word or image from God. Like a séance in the Lord. “I see one of those moving walkways at the airport.
You’re on it, running to Jesus; he’s at the other end calling you, arms open wide.”

I teared up, thinking of Jesus with his arms open wide.

Fiona frowned. “You’re running toward him, but the walkway’s moving in the opposite direction.”

I started to cry.

“What’s up?” she asked.

“Why doesn’t Jesus flip the switch?!”

Fiona thought for a moment. “Do you have a father wound?”

“What’s
that
?”

“Did your father hurt you?”

“Whose father didn’t?”

“Well, it’s probably keeping you from moving forward in life. What do you do?”

“I’m an actor. And a lot of what I do feels like running in place.”

“You should check out our Healing the Father Wound class. You need to get that healed.”

“How long is that going to take?”

“What else are you on the planet for? To do commercials?”

Fiona was right. Auditioning for Pampers commercials was
not
playing my note. Yes, I was grateful to be making a living as an actor. But moments like working on
PT&A
and
Scrooged
were oases amid a desert of schlepping all over town to audition for “Woman #5” on some tedious sitcom that might never air,
plus getting rejected, and, well, running the wrong way on a moving walkway. And it didn’t fill the hole in my donut.

Maybe it was time to stop running. It was time to get healed. And it was the 1990s. People were reading
Healing the Shame That Binds You, Codependent No More,
and anything with “inner child” in the title. I was right on schedule.

Cheryl suggested I try a 12-step program for people with eating disorders. People sat around whining: “I’m an overeater; I’m
a bulimic; I’m anorexic.” I hated it. But I
was
one so I gritted my teeth and kept going. And whaddya know? I stopped throwing up. Ironically, the program used the same
tools Georgina did. I wrote down what I ate and told a sponsor. I made a list of things I’d done wrong or felt resentful over
and had to forgive. But there was a difference: my sponsor was a peer, not a dictator. She didn’t scold me; she nodded in
recognition. “Yeah, I did that too.” I felt a lot less shameful and a lot more human.

I also plunged into anything the church had to offer: classes and retreats and conferences on healing, like Healing the Father
Wound, Filling the Mother Void.…If it had “healing” in the title, I went. They ran a ministry to heal gays of their gaiety.
Over time they decided that people with codependency issues or addictions—like,
hello,
eating disorders!—had the same root issue: the freakin’ father wound. So they opened the program to anyone who wanted healing.
I said, “Yes, please.”

I made some great friends in that program: Jill, a seminary student who’d felt like a lesbian her entire life; Mark, the actor
with an abusive father, molested by a neighbor boy at eleven and identified as gay ever since. We went to class, we prayed,
we worshipped, we brought our wounds to the foot of the cross, and we let God heal them.

I confided to my gaiety group about my two main problems: eating and anger.

“I totally eat over my feelings,” Mark said. “Feelings. Feelings. Nothing more than feelings.”

“What’s the eating about?” Jill asked.

“Food is comfort. It’s our earliest need.”

“It’s the Mother Void, ding, ding!” Mark crowed.

“What’s the anger about?” Jill pressed.

“Not getting enough to eat?” I quipped. “All I know is: if I’m angry, no one will like me.”

“I love your anger,” Mark said afterward. “If I were straight I’d date you.”

“Do you think you’ll ever get there?” I wondered.

Mark sighed. “You just have to stop throwing up. I’m supposed to change who I’m attracted to.”

“I’ve got to eat food three times a day,” I protested. “You don’t have to have sex three times a day.”

“You don’t know me.”

Mark became one of my best friends.

Our group leader said anger is the first defense a child learns to protect herself from pain or abuse or neglect. “But you
don’t have to stay angry. God can heal you. There’s no place so dark he can’t go. You just have to let him into your dark
places.”

In film school I watched others churn their dark cesspool dreams into horrible, gothic beauty. I had not been ready to look
at my dark places…until now. As the psalmist wrote, “If I say, ‘Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night
around me,’ even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you”
(Ps. 139:11-12).

Fiona prayed for me on another Sunday. But this time it was I who saw images in my mind as we prayed. I “saw” my mother and
me, arguing at my old high school. We stood yards apart. She was crying because I didn’t go to Luther League. I was crying
because she never knew me or understood what I loved.

“Where is Jesus right now?” Fiona asked.

I saw Jesus standing next to me. He put his hand in mine, and then he led me over to my mother. I saw that she was one of
those Russian matryoshka dolls, hollow inside. But she wasn’t even a smaller doll within a smaller doll. She was the completely
hollow, tiniest of dolls at the very bottom.

“She’s just a frightened little girl,” I said to Fiona. Jesus put his arms around me, and I cried. It gave me a lot more compassion
for my mother. This healing prayer worked.

I also gained compassion for Dad. I reached out and visited him and sometimes he opened up. But all stories led back to the
same ones he’d been telling for years: the stag film he never should have seen, the house we never sold, the med school he
never should have forced on my brother. He was doomed to relive those moments, like Lady Macbeth washing her hands. Dad was
reciting a monologue, and I was the audience. Maybe he didn’t know I was there. Maybe it didn’t matter. I couldn’t save someone
who didn’t want to be saved.

I got a call from my favorite casting director—the man who cast me in
Scrooged
and other films. “I’m casting a small role in
The War of the Roses.
Can you meet the director?” I drove onto the lot and went into an office. It was just the director sitting in a chair. He
smiled broadly and had me sit. I remember little about the conversation except that I brought an appointment calendar with
impressionist paintings to the meeting with me and I just had to show him one image of some boys playing in an alley. “Oh,
forget it.” I stopped myself. “I’m here for an audition. Do you have pages for me to read?”

“Nah.” He smiled. “The role is yours.”

I spent a couple of days on the set, playing an auctioneer’s assistant. I had a couple of small scenes. I was mostly there
to react as the two stars fought to outbid each other for an art piece. Little was left of me when the film came out, but
the payoff was just being there. The day after I finished I got a call from the casting director. “They watched the dailies
from yesterday. You had everyone in the viewing room on the floor laughing. A director has never called me to say that. You
should feel encouraged.”

I saw the director at the wrap party. “Just keep doing what you’re doing, Susan. It’s only a matter of time.”

Okay, so I wasn’t on the planet to do Pampers commercials. But I also wasn’t on the planet just to get healed. Healing led
somewhere. It was leading me back out into life, to play my note.

After so much inner healing—going deep into prayer and dreams, interpreting each symbol and image as a pointer to some grand
super-reality—the whole world began to look like one big cryptic sign from God. Life wasn’t just random chaos; God was speaking.
Everywhere, all the time. I needed to listen!

I had a dream that I was onstage doing vaudeville buck-naked. “Hey, it’s just comedy,” I told myself. “It doesn’t count as
nudity if you’re joking.” A friend offstage wanted to introduce me to a group of producers. Finally, my big break! Just as
I took her arm, she whipped around and became the Grim Reaper. Cape, skeleton, scythe. The reaper drew back its scythe to
decapitate me. That’s when I shot up in bed. I couldn’t go back to sleep for an hour.