Sarah Sentilles - Breaking Up With God: A Love Story

BREAKING UP WITH GOD

a love story

SARAH SENTILLES

For Eric, love.

And for Gordon, gratitude.

LOVE AFTER LOVE

The time will come

when, with elation

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror

and each will smile at the others welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life.

Derek Walcott

Contents

I BROKE UP WITH GOD . The breakup was devastating. It was like a divorce when all the friends you had as a couple are forced to choose sides and end up not choosing yours. It was like waking up in an empty bed in an empty house. It was like someone I loved died. It was like when Mary Magdalene, Mary the Mother of James, and Salome arrive at Jesuss tomb with spices to anoint his dead body, and they find the stone rolled back, and they look inside the cave, and hes gone.

God loves you, church signs announce when I drive by. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind , Jesus says when hes asked which commandment is the greatest, and in the river, when hes baptized, God claims Jesus as beloved. Its the best love story ever told: God chooses you, sacrifices for you, kills for you, knows you, sees you, saves you. No wonder losing my religion felt like heartbreak.

Still, I hesitate to call what happened to my faith a breakup. Im not completely comfortable portraying it as a love affair gone wrong. Figuring it as a romance seems simultaneously so medieval-mystic, so patriarchal, so oedipal that it makes me cringe. Even worse, calling it a breakup means I have to come out: I have to admit to myself and to the rest of the world the kind of God I lovednamely, a man. Im a feminist theologian. Saying out loud that I believed in a male God is like a yoga teacher smoking a pack of cigarettes every day between classes behind the studio. So lets get that part out of the way: I believed in a male God. I loved him. I needed him. Sometimes he was gentle and kind. Sometimes he frightened me.

You could say God and I lived together, which made it hard for me to admit the relationship was over. Staying was easier than looking for a new place to live. God might have been invisible, but he took up a lot of space, and I had never been alone. Sure, the passion had gone out of our relationship, and he wasnt who I thought he was anymore, but we were still comfortable together. Habits, routines, rituals. If youd gone out to dinner with us, you wouldnt have noticed that anything was wrong, but we definitely didnt run home to tear each others clothes off. Sometimes we stay with what we knoweven if it makes us miserable, even if it makes us feel smallbecause its familiar. Its not that misery loves company, its that were willing to be miserable if it means well have company. I was afraid of being by myself. A dead relationship seemed better than coming home to an empty house.

My relationship with God was never casual. When it began to unravel, I was going through the ordination process to become an Episcopal priest. I was the youth minister at a church in a suburb of Boston and a doctoral student in theology at Harvard. You might say God and I were engaged and the wedding was plannedchurch reserved, menu chosen, flowers arranged. Calling it off would be awkward.

Breaking up with God meant letting go of someone I had believed in, loved, and built my life around, so I hung on for a long time because I was scared of what would happen if I let go. My relationship with God was connected to everythingmy family, my friends, my sense of justice, my vocation, my way of being in the world. I lost more than belief. I couldnt go to the places we used to go anymore. I couldnt use our special language. I couldnt celebrate the same holidays. I even had to trade red wine for beer. People say you can use a simple mathematical formula to figure out how long you will feel like shit after a breakup: one month of pain for every year you were together. God and I were together for my entire life. Thirty-four years. Which translates into thirty-four months of post-breakup misery. Almost three years.

Saying I broke up with God feels like courting divine disaster. The most dangerous time for women in abusive relationships is when they leave. I imagine God browsing the shelves of a local independent bookstore, seeing the title of this book, tracking me down, and smiting me. Doubting is one thing. Actively choosing to end a relationship with God is something else altogether. Not to mention what might happen when God finds out I started seeing other people. He doesnt respond well to restraining orders. He doesnt have a good track record when hes pissed off. He sends locusts, turns women into pillars of salt, kills firstborn children, and drowns people in the sea.

...

At the gym a few months ago I saw a woman I knowa friend of a friend of a friendwalking on a treadmill in the last row of exercise machines. She had her treadmill set at a steep angle and was walking quickly uphill. Her headphones were plugged into the television monitor in front of her, and she was watching FOX News.

She took off her headphones and waved me over. Shes a teacher, and Im a teacher, so we chatted briefly about our work in classrooms, and then she said, I remember youre a writer, but I cant remember what you write about. What are you working on now?

I considered making something up, telling her I was writing a book about ax murderers or kitchen remodeling, but I told her what I used to tell everyone: Im writing a book about losing faith in God.

She hit the red emergency-stop button. You lost your faith? she said. Her eyes filled with tears. I am so sorry. That makes me really sad.

Im fine, I said. Really. I patted her on the arm.

But Im not, she said, shaking her head. She gripped the handrail that could count the beats of her heart. I wasnt born a Christian, but Ive been a faithful Christian for twenty-six years. Im a believer. Ive never doubted. Not even once.

I didnt know what to say. I stood there reading the machines warnings about doctors and dizziness and shortness of breath until she composed her face and smiled. She turned the treadmill back on and walked in place. You know what? she said. We should have dinner sometime. She clapped her hands. Thats what well do. Well get together. Well drink some wine. Well talk. Doesnt that sound like fun?

Sure. Fun, I said. And then I went directly to the locker room, sat down on a toilet, and cried in the tall square space of the stall. I felt like I did when I dropped out of the ordination process, that it was my doubt that was the problem, not the version of God I was being asked to believe in.

Try a little harder, the faithful say to the doubters. Ask God to give you strength .

...

In a lecture I heard in college, Ann Ulanov, a professor of psychiatry and religion, compared people of faith to painters, who must remember that a painting of a thing is not the thing itself. She warned we forget the difference between our image of God and God. Our experience doesnt match the image weve createda child dies, a levee breaks, a job is lostand the old image of God will not hold. Enraged, we turn from the image and annihilate the first thing we see.