“When God Talks Back” … and thoughts on prayer

The other day D sent me a link to an article about otherwise sane, normal people who hear God speak to them, and I knew just what the author was talking about.  Not that I’ve heard God speak to me personally (or, well, not exactly) but … ummm … maybe I should back up.

The article is a review of a new book by Tanya Luhrmann called When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God.  Luhrmann made her name with her first book, Persuasions of the Witch's Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England, where she reported on two years she had spent with a number of British covens studying the question, “Why do otherwise sane, intelligent people believe in witchcraft and magic when the magic obviously doesn’t work?”  (This way of posing the question seriously frosted the covens who had welcomed her and shown her hospitality during her research.)  Her conclusion was that by participating in the practice of witchcraft itself, adherents actually changed the way they perceived the events around them so that they came to believe their magic really had worked after all.  (She also conceded in a fotnote that she too would have come to believe in witchcraft during her two years of close association with these people, except that she had a strong prior commitment to remaining an anthropologist and anthropologists aren’t allowed to Go Native. So she refused to let herself believe.)

That was years ago, but with her latest book Luhrmann does exactly the same thing for the evangelical Christian community.  These are people who pray to God for guidance in the trials and questions of their lives, and who expect God to give them an answer.  Luhrmann starts with the understanding that this may sound bizarre to outsiders, but then explains that the practice of living like an evangelical Christian – particularly the habit of talking to God as if you expected an answer – actually predisposes you to hear the answers come.  Maybe not right away, but after a while.

The thing is, I know this is true: partly from what I read, partly from friends I’ve talked to, and partly by actual test.  In the first column, I could list a number of books; but the easiest one to use (since I have already talked about it in this blog) is John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart, which I have referenced here, among other places.  In the second column, … gosh, I have had any number of friends over the years who talked to God in a pretty casual and friendly way.  My best friend all through high school was one of these.  So was one of my best friends at my last job (before this one) … and again at the job a decade before that.  And of course D is deeply religious; while she may not converse with God in quite the chatty way some of my other friends did, she would certainly allow for the possibility.  Somehow I attract these people into my life.

The third column may take a little explaining, and it is something I generally don’t talk about.  But what the hell: this is all anonymous, right?

How far back do I go?  Suppose I start after college, when I met Wife.  At that point I had no religious affiliation at all, and she was Wiccan.  We fell in love and I started accompanying her to moons and festivals.  I never sought to join her group myself – I’m not much of a joiner – but I watched closely what went on as I hung around, and I can attest to what Tanya Luhrmann says: if you hang out with the people and attend the rituals, you start seeing things that you didn’t see at first.  I could tell that something real was going on there, though I’d be hard-pressed to say exactly what.

Time passed; we moved away; Wife lost touch with her old group and was never able to make lasting contact with a new group, so after a while she gave up practising at all.  Then years and years later, she felt called to start attending a Christian church, and settled on a Baptist congregation nearby.  At first I simply told her, “Have a nice time,” but she pleaded over and over for me – and, at that point, the boys – to join her.  By this time the marriage was already very difficult, but I tried to negotiate with her and agreed to go in exchange for … shit, I don’t remember what any more.  And we went for a couple of years.  She was baptized in this church, and I wasn’t.  (Once again, I’m not much of a joiner.)  Then she had a falling out with the church leadership (long story) and left in a dramatic sulk.  She never went anywhere else after that.

I never had any respect for her abandoning her Wiccan practice, nor for her abandoning church: I figured that if she actually meant the things she said either time, then she should have stuck it out even when things didn’t go her way.  Isn’t that what dedication to God or the gods is all about?  But at the same time it was also true that both times I got a sense that there was something real hiding behind the show.  I didn’t feel like signing up for anything, whether initiation or baptism, but just out of shyness or diffidence. It’s not that I thought either of them was totally off-base.  (I won’t pretend to know how to reconcile the fact that Wicca and Christianity teach flatly different things from a doctrinal point of view. I’m speaking here only of sensed intimations of things unseen.)

And so whenever I would have a really difficult time with Wife – whenever I would want to knock my head against a brick wall with frustration at her deceit, her betrayal, her blindness, or her thoughtless cruelty – I would go outside to get away from it all, take a long walk, and shout at God for a while.  This woman is crazy!  This woman is cruel!  This woman will never understand anything!  What am I supposed to do with her?  How am I supposed to deal with what she has done this time?  What the hell do You think You’re doing to allow this, and what exactly are You asking of me?

For the most part, I guess, I was just blowing off steam.  But you know?  After I had done this a few times, I got to where I thought I heard an echo somewhere softly in the back of my head.  Oh, I don’t mean that literally … exactly.  I’m not sure how to describe it literally.  But I do know that it got to where I regularly “heard” an answer to all those questions.  And the answer, time and again, to the question how I was supposed to deal with the latest crazy, destructive thing Wife had done, was simply: Love her.

That was all, and it was frustrating advice.  But it’s what I heard.  OK, Boss. Got that. I’ll try harder.

And for years I did.

Once in a great while I got a little bit more, although the intellectual part of me kept second-guessing myself.  A couple of those times I’ve already described here, here, and here.  But there was another I never wrote about.  This was once when Wife had really gone far past any known limits.  (I no longer remember what she had done, but it was way worse than usual.)  I went out walking around, stomping up and down the sidewalks of our neighborhood, and this time my questions were a lot fiercer.  What is this about? I do everything for her. I have given up, for her sake, everything else that I might have been or done. And she doesn’t see it. She doesn’t care. There’s not a shred of thanks. And what’s more, after I knock myself out doing everything for her, she turns around and flatly betrays me! She might as well be killing me in slow and painful ways, cutting out my heart or driving spikes into me or something. Are You even listening?? What am I supposed to do about that?  Well, I didn’t exactly get a reply in words.  What I got was a feeling that might have been an arched eyebrow or a curl of the lip … I mean, if God had eyebrows or lips.  But the meaning was clear enough.  If I had to translate it into words, it would have come out something like, You’re telling me you love her, and do everything for her, and she doesn’t see or appreciate any of it, and then she betrays you – cuts your heart out – drives nails into your flesh? Sucks, doesn’t it? Trust me, I know exactly how you feel. Been there. Done that.

Yeah, right.  Thanks a lot.  What a lot of help that was.  I did have to smile though, … just a bit.

I’ve never told that story before … because to whom, exactly, could I tell it?

Somewhere along in this time I started blogging.  And you may remember that my earlier posts – the first year or so – sounded a lot more conventionally pious than anything I have written since.  That was on purpose.  I was trying to find a voice for the character Hosea, and I figured that maybe I could use him to express some of the spiritual intuitions I have written about here.  God knows that nobody would ever associate any of that with my real-life persona.  So I thought that the anonymity of blogging might let me discuss it more openly.  But then things took a different turn, I began the affair with D, and for a long time the Voice seemed to fall silent.  When I decided for sure on the divorce, I tried to listen for it again, to ask if I was doing the right thing, and I heard nothing at all.  That didn’t make me feel any more secure about the decision, but I finally decided that I had to go forward, Voice or no Voice.  And I had kind of given up on hearing it again any time soon.

Well, I still haven’t heard it, but a couple of days ago I began to wonder: that article D sent me … was it maybe, just maybe, the Voice’s way of reminding me, I’m still here?