Chapter Two: Three Decades of Begging the Guy Upstairs for Help
[NOTE: Although this sample chapter makes sense by itself even if you don't
read anything else, I suggest you read Chapter One (which has its own button
on the web page) first. It's only a fraction of the length of this chapter, so it
shouldn't take too much more time.
Alternatively, you can read the even briefer Chapter One abstract (at the
Abstracts button), & then come back here & start this NOT-brief (but, I've
been told, compelling) chapter. If you lose patience you can always just go
back to Abstracts & read the Chapter Two abstract instead of this, but you'll
miss some of the best parts of the story that way.]
My senior year of high school, Mama usually let me take her car to school. The
first day, as I cruised eastward on Lakeland Drive, I found myself looking up at the
sky and begging whoever was up there to help me with a problem I knew I was
about to run into. I had known God was real since he or she or it had zapped me at
that Bible study three years before, but this was the first time it had occurred to me
to ask him to do something for me. “God,” I said, “please no hearing embarrassment
today! It says in the Bible, ‘Ask and it shall be given unto you,’ And that you’ll do
anything for us if we have faith. Well, I have faith so please no hearing
embarrassment. I really believe you can do it, so DO it!”
By “hearing embarrassment” I meant the times when teachers would call on me
in class and I wouldn’t have the slightest idea what they were talking about, or,
worse, wouldn’t even know they had called on me, so that I'd sit there not saying
anything until I finally realized everybody was looking at me and waiting for me to
answer, when I hadn’t even heard the question in the first place. At least now that
my classmates were full grown, they weren’t going to roar with laughter when I
responded with a non sequitur, or when the teacher repeated herself for the fourth or
fifth time, but it was still very embarrassing! And I knew there was nothing I could
do about it on my own. Since my whole problem was that I was embarrassed about
my hearing impairment, talking to a counselor or anyone else was out of the question.
Getting divine help seemed like my only hope.
As I locked the car and started walking toward the senior-high building, I
thought of some other lines from the Bible. “If you have faith the size of a mustard
seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Throw yourself into the sea’ and it will obey
you.” “Anything you ask me to do for you in my name, I will do.” It was exciting to
imagine that all I had to do was ask and believe, and God would then do what I
wanted.
Since I understood (even back then) that faith was the most important element
for getting prayers answered, I just tried my hardest all day long to believe that God
was in fact going to keep up his end of the deal and not let anything embarrassing
happen to me. During activity period, I realized it was working so far; in the first two
periods I had had the two teachers I was most worried about and, surprisingly, hadn’
t had any trouble understanding either of them. Then in the last period of the day,
God used a different technique to grant my prayer, because I did have trouble
understanding the U.S. Government teacher, but, joy of joys, she used an overhead
projector with that day’s questions for discussion written on it, and pointed to them
as she talked. She also seated us alphabetically, which put me right up front. With
those aids, I was able to follow everything well enough to avoid any awkwardness
whatsoever.
What a spectacular start to the school year! Every year before this, I had had at
least two teachers who were pretty much impossible for me to understand. It hadn’t
hurt my grades or anything, since everything important was written down
somewhere, but it had meant plenty of those slow-burn episodes while someone
nearby would try to explain to me what the teacher wanted me to do or say.
The rest of senior year, I said my prayers every morning on the way to school,
and then all day long I simply used my will power and concentration to try to
continue to believe in the face of any trouble I sensed on the horizon. It worked! I
had my best school year yet, and sent up thanks and praise constantly. All those
biblical promises about faith had proven true.
Fast forward fifteen years, to when I desperately wanted to become a graduate
teaching assistant in my master’s program at Mississippi College, even though all the
positions had long since been filled. At first, I used the same method of simple willed
belief that had worked in high school. I prayed hard all summer and felt good about
it. But as August wore on with no assistantship in sight, I came very close to giving
up.
As time seemed to be running out, though, I somehow became aware of another
Bible verse, one less well-known than the simple ones on faith that I had relied on in
the past. The new verse, Mark 11:24, read, “Whatever you ask for in prayer, believe
that you have received it, and it will be yours.”
What an interesting idea—to believe I had already received something even
though I didn't have it yet. I thought hard about what it could possibly mean. Then I
realized that some psychological exercises I had heard of seemed to be based on the
same idea: the “Act as If” saying from Alcoholics Anonymous and "visualization"
from sports psychology. I didn’t know much about either of these strategies beyond
what their titles suggested, but I was thrilled to have some concrete techniques on
hand.
Trying to put them into practice, I pretended I already had the TA spot. I
imagined myself having classes to teach, papers to grade, and students coming to my
office for help. Whenever doubts or other negative thoughts started to arise in my
mind, I refused to dwell on them, even for a minute. I even went to the bookstore
and looked at the texts I’d be teaching from, although I didn’t actually buy them
because I didn’t want anybody to think I was crazy.
Then, literally two days before classes were to begin, when I got home there
was a note from my mother. “Dr. Taylor called—,” it said on the first line.
Underneath were the words, “Wants to know if you’re still interested in being a TA.”
Although at this point I was still ignorant of most of the truths I would later learn
about the petitioning process, God had nonetheless responded to my efforts to
strengthen my faith at this very basic level.
The next big petitioning project I tried was during my doctoral program at
Louisiana State University. I was again a TA, and this time ran into trouble in the
classroom. At the smaller MC, I had gotten by OK because all I really did was assist
a professor in carrying out her lesson plans, plus I was able to lipread pretty well
during class if I needed to. At LSU, the classes were larger and the room less well-lit,
making lipreading all but impossible.
Another difference was that I now had responsibility for my own lesson plans.
For me, this meant I was desperate for anything that might make the course,
Freshman Comp I, more interesting to the students. Thus the time was ripe for me to
do stupid things like try to use class activities that I knew deep down I couldn’t hear
well enough to supervise, especially not in that huge room. And I didn’t pray at all, I
guess because I knew I was already ignoring the warnings God was trying to send
me (in the form of my misgivings if nothing else).
Another complication that semester was that I had a crush on the professor who
taught the TA practicum (a class that teaches people how to teach). This meant that I
absolutely wallowed in the pleasure of the practicum sessions, where I could
understand Linda's crystal-clear voice perfectly. It also meant that I immaturely
wanted to use the lesson plans she gave us the same way everyone else did, instead
of going to the trouble to tailor them to my disability. So, pretty much all semester
long, I simply blocked out the fact that I was having trouble understanding my own
students. In fact, I tackled the written assignments for the practicum so
enthusiastically that they became one of the ways I avoided my duty to do a decent
job in my teaching. (Have you ever let a crush keep you from being responsible?)
One day, for example, I was trying to use an activity where the students came
up with reasons in support of abortion rights, which I was supposed to write in a list
on the board. I reminded them to wait till I was looking at them before speaking, but
that didn’t really help. The first person I called on was a talkative young woman in
the front row whom I thought I wouldn’t have trouble understanding, but all I could
make out was I wasn’t at all sure what she said. I was positive I had heard some
form of the word “private.” I asked her to repeat herself, and wracked my brain for
some phrase that might contain that word. Finally, I picked up the chalk and wrote
“private matter,” when actually what she was trying to say (as I learned after class
from their brainstorming lists) was “the right to privacy.”
Not too far off, but it got worse. I called on a guy in the back row, and all I
could understand was “control,” which in desperation I turned into “self-control,”
even though I knew full well it made no sense as an item on our list. (What he had
actually said was “control over one’s own body.”)
When the semester was over, this class quite understandably gave me low scores
on their student evaluations. The graduate committee responded by taking away my
assistantship, That caused the graduate committee to take away my assistantship until
I improved my competence in the classroom.
I received that news by means of a terse form letter in my box in the mailroom.
When I first read it, I was like, WHEW, I’m so glad I no longer have the
responsibility of those pain-in-the-butt students and that impossible task of trying to
make them care about their writing. In a minute or two, though, that relief began to
morph into fear and confusion. What the hell was I going to do with my life now?
Back at home the next day, I wasn’t the least bit ready to humble myself and
listen to God in order to start solving this super-serious problem. Instead, I found it
very easy to focus on my Ph.D. prelim exams that were coming up in the spring, and
to completely avoid thinking about what was going to happen with my teaching. This
way I also avoided feeling the pain of what had happened. For several days, I was
totally numb.
When I finally did bring myself to pray about the problem, God seemed readier to
respond than I had been ask—as I discovered when school resumed in January.
At that time, God rescued me from the abyss of failure by means of a pint-sized
dynamo of a guardian angel, my dissertation director Professor Karen Eliot. The first
week I was back, she called me into her office and told me that in hopes of
eventually swaying the graduate committee to restore my assistantship, she had
gotten special permission for the two of us to team-teach a double section of British
Survey. One of our objectives would be to develop ways to compensate for my
hearing loss in the classroom. “I know you can teach,” Karen told me confidently
from behind her familiar large-rimmed glasses. “And I want to help make that
happen.” Talk about the weight of the world off my shoulders! But it was par for the
course for Karen to save my tail in this manner. I had always perceived that God had
put her into my life for a reason.
At first, God had used Karen to keep me in school at LSU, when I would
probably have quit the program after my first year if I hadn’t met her in the spring
and started taking her Milton seminar the next fall. The only reason I’d started the
whole thing to begin with was because I’d followed my friend Anne from my master’
s program on to LSU, where she had a prestigious doctoral fellowship. I'd been at
one of those crossroads where you’re not sure what to do next with your life, you
know? I had no particular desire to get a Ph.D., but didn’t know what else to do.
Anyway, once I was at LSU, most of my classes were OK, and I had some very
good profs, but no one I really connected with. So, feeling completely directionless
that spring afternoon, I went to a large, rowdy meeting having something to do with
political correctness. After two or three militant-feminist professors gave downright
angry speeches, Karen came to the podium and stepped up on a wooden box to help
her reach the mike. “My name is Karen Eliot,” she said in a commanding but calm
voice. “I’m not going to talk about political correctness because I don’t know what it
is. Instead, my job as chair of the rules committee is to make sure everyone
understands the procedure for making a formal complaint to the university if they
think their rights have been violated.” At that moment, you could literally feel the
anger of both the speakers and the crowd start to dissipate.
Although I wasn’t especially interested in the topic at hand, I was fascinated by
Karen. I guess as a metaphor for the situation my life was in at the time, she seemed
a beacon of clarity and hope amid a sea of confusion. When the meeting was over, I
sought her out and complimented her on her talk. She was gracious and kind, and as
soon as I got back to my apartment I looked her up in the bulletin. Cool, she was
actually one of the people who worked on the poet John Donne, whom I was already
considering writing about for my dissertation! There was no question this was a sign
that I should take a course from her as soon as possible.
So when the schedule for fall came out, to the surprise of my friends I registered
for Karen’s Milton seminar instead of the only Donne course for grad students,
which was taught by someone else during the same time period. From day one,
Karen and I hit it off so well that I knew I had done the right thing—even though it
meant trudging through the entire text of Paradise Lost! By the end of that semester,
she had enthusiastically agreed to be my dissertation director.
Now, here she was again, saving me from myself by coming up with a way for
me to keep doing what I was trying to do, namely to succeed at college-level
teaching. I praised God for this amazing opportunity and asked for his help in
carrying out the plan.
Before the team-teaching project was to begin, though, there was the custom-
designed masterpiece (by God) that I like to call the Interview from Hell.
What God did was have the one school in my hometown that I thought I would
someday like to teach at (Millsaps) call and say they had an emergency opening and
would I possibly be interested in filling it? Instead of being thrilled with this invitation
like anyone with half an ounce of sense would have been, I actually felt irritated
because I viewed it as a threat to my master plan of finishing my degree before
worrying about full-time employment. I just did not want that kind of stress and
involvement with the world while I was still a student myself. Even so, I didn’t
consider simply telling them I wasn’t interested. Even I knew that would be
inexcusably idiotic.
During the phone call, which took place on a regular phone rather than the
operator-assisted miracle known as a Telephone Device for the Deaf, I was surprised
to discover that I could understand what the department head was saying, since I
knew her and in the past I had always had trouble with her voice. The bad thing
about this was that it made me decide I didn't need to worry about being able to
understand her at the interview, since usually if I could understand someone on the
phone, I could also understand them in person. But that wasn't the only reason I
decided to just try to slide by at the interview rather than having a back-up plan, such
as asking my sister-in-law to go with me to interpret if necessary. It was also
because since I was PO'd about the whole inconvenient, involved-wth-the-world
thing to begin with, not having a backup was one very good way of minimizing it as
best I could.
When interview day arrived, I grumbled to myself from the minute I got out of
my car in the parking garage and took the elevator to the building above. As I waited
in the English Department’s reception area, I was polite, of course, but every last
person I saw got on my nerves. This wasn’t unusual; all my life I had secretly
despised lots of folks for no good reason. My bad mood just magnified the trait. One
sorority girl annoyed me with her preppiness, while I felt just as put off by a guy
with long hair, grungy jeans, and sandals even though it was still wintertime. Why
were people so endlessly disgusting?
Finally, Diana, the department head, appeared and invited me into her office. A
reserved but genuinely kind person a few years older than I, with strawberry-blonde
hair, sparkling eyes, and a ready smile, Diana didn’t get on my nerves, but as soon as
we started talking, I realized I was in deep trouble. I could barely even tell when the
subject changed, much less make out any individual words. Diana was glad to repeat
herself whenever I asked her to, but that was a losing proposition because even on
second and third tries, I still couldn't understand much of anything she said. I
stumbled through the half hour, trying to pick up bits of what she was saying and
use them as a basis to make statements about myself that seemed relevant to the job
we were discussing, but of course that didn’t work. I left the interview feeling much
worse than I had before, and—needless to say—I didn’t get the job.
Although the Interview from Hell ruined my teaching prospects at Millsaps
forever, it also did me two huge favors, which is why I said it was a masterpiece
from God. The favors were that it forced me, for the first time, to tackle both my
hearing impairment and my misanthropy head on. Before the interview, even though I
welcomed Karen’s plan for helping me in the classroom at LSU, I hadn't been
completely sold on the idea that I needed to develop systematic methods of
compensating for my disability. And, much more significantly, I now realized I
needed to take a very serious look at my relationship to the world. It had never before
occurred to me that my disdain could actually keep me from getting work in my
chosen field, as it had done by causing me to neglect to prepare for the possibility of
not being able to understand Diana.
When I thought about trying to rid myself of this fundamental flaw, though, I
found myself worrying that then there would be nothing left of me. Shaken by this
prospect, I prayed deeply. I asked God to help me see the truth about myself, and to
show me what I ought to do with that truth when I found it. (I wish I could give
some specifics here about the prayer techniques I used, but this was years before I
started keeping my spiritual journal, and I just don’t remember any, sorry.)
As it turned out, I concluded that my identity was largely bound up in my
misanthropy. I had always viewed myself as hard-working and competitive and
looked down on those who weren't. The teeth-gritting contempt I felt for so many
people was my way of keeping myself separate from what I viewed as the lazy,
careless masses. I cringed at the thought of changing into some kind of bland,
benevolent bundle of “niceness,” which was what I thought I’d become if I gave up
my contempt and instead tried to view those folks kindly.
But anything was better than being cut off from my vocation and from the few
people I did like. On that basis, and with much help from God, I finally overcame my
fear of losing my edge—and committed myself to learning from guardian angel Karen
not only how to teach with my disability but also how to treat and appreciate others.
When the team-teaching project finally began, my petitioning was raised to its
highest level yet. I prayed my butt off about every aspect of the experience: that the
campus shuttle would be on time to pick me up, that I would plan my lectures well
and deliver them clearly, and that God would help me every step of the way as I tried
to communicate back-and-forth with every one of my students.
The teaching skill I most needed that help with was fielding questions when I
was in command of the classroom. I loved to lecture, but hated the accompanying Q
& A session because then I had to stand up their and let the students ask me anything
they wanted. I hated not having any idea what they were going to say!
At first, I tried to predict in advance what the questions were likely to be, in
hopes of being more likely to understand them. Standing in front of the double-sized
room in the modern building that Karen and I had requested because the lighting
made it easier for me to read lips, I would perk up my ears for questions I thought
were pertinent, like “Could you explain again what ‘humanism’ was?,” only to be
bombarded with such unforgettable Teaching Moments as, “Can Web sites count as
sources for our research paper?” This utter failure of my efforts to predict what the
kids were going to ask destroyed my composure and made it even harder for me to
handle the rest of the day’s interactions.
Karen was always around if I needed her, ready to repeat what the students had
said, but that pretty much defeated the purpose, since the whole point was for me to
develop my own ways of communicating in the classroom. But along about mid-
semester, she offered a valuable insight.
“I have an observation about your teaching,” she said as she closed the thick
Norton Anthology of English Literature and stood up in order to move it to the far
corner of her desk. “I’m just going to throw it out there and let you do what you
want with it. OK?”
“Sure, go ahead!” It seemed strange that she felt the need to cushion whatever it
was she was about to say.
Sitting back down again, she picked up her pen and leaned toward me as if to
make sure she’d get her point across accurately. When she spoke, her tone was kind,
but serious. “Well, when the students are asking questions after you’ve lectured, you
view the questions as challenges, as though you’re having to defend your ground—
and they’re not!”
“I do?” I said with surprise. I had been expecting a criticism of my teaching
style, not a comment on my interior mental state. “Well, maybe I do—because I do
wish they just wouldn't ask anything, or would only ask things I could understand
instantly. Hmmmm. I guess maybe I even associate it with my childhood fear of
being called on in class and not knowing what the question was. You know,
unconsciously. Because it’s the same feeling.”
“Is it that bad?” Karen asked, wrinkling her brow.
“Well, no, because I’m not embarrassed the way I was when I was little, but I
still feel like I’m suspended over the classroom on a rope or something, so that I can’
t get down to the level with everyone else and therefore understand what they’re
saying.” I paused. “Thanks for pointing this out. How can you tell, anyway?”
“I don't know. It’s not really anything you do or say, but I can just tell by
watching you that you feel defensive.”
“Thanks! Is there anything else? You can tell me anything, I want to know! I’m
going to work on this starting the next time it's my turn to lecture, so tell me if there’
s anything else and I’ll work on that too.”
“Nothing else I can think of. Good luck working on it. I’ll let you know how you
do!”
Wow. The stakes seemed so high here, I did some serious Bible-searching for
anything that might help me get God to help. I sort of skipped around a lot, reading
anything I could find that might be a tip for getting prayers answered, anything in
addition to that very obvious requirement of faith that I had made use of for so long.
I remember coming to the Lord’s Prayer and almost not even reading it because
I figured it was so familiar, how could it possibly help? But somehow I read it
anyway, the version in Matthew 6, which Jesus follows by saying that if we forgive
others for trespassing against us, then God will forgive us our trespasses, but if we
don’t, he won’t. And, by implication, he won’t answer our prayers. How interesting!
In fact, I recalled that a few times long ago I had tried this technique of
forgiveness before petitioning, but hadn’t really thought about it in recent years. So I
asked myself, was there anybody I needed to forgive regarding this matter of my
defensiveness with student questions?
YES! There were a few people in the class whom I just happened to have a hard
time understanding, and—wouldn’t you know it?—it seemed like they were always
the ones who asked the questions. The handful of student I could understand rarely
said a word. And I used to get very annoyed at the insistent questioners. I knew
intellectually that they didn’t deserve any blame —they were just participating in
class, for God’s sake—but that didn’t lessen my irritation. So I really did need to
forgive these folks, in the sense of overcoming my annoyance.
When I saw how neatly this all fit together, I was pumped with excitement. The
very act of losing my aggravation was itself going to improve the situation quite a bit,
plus here was this promise from Jesus himself that losing it would lead God to
forgive me and grant my prayers for help.
Right that minute I set my mind to this new task. Every time I'd think about the
students and start feeling annoyed, I’d let myself feel that way for a minute or two; if
I was alone, I’d grit my teeth, roll my eyes, and do whatever else I felt like doing to
express myself. But then I would force myself to take a deep breath, relax, and turn
my feelings over to God, asking him to take them away. And replace them with
whatever he wanted—maybe even compassion. (Imagine that!)
When it was time for class, I Acted as If I were confident even though I would
have been very nervous if I had let myself start worrying about how the session was
going to play out. While the students were coming into the room, I greeted as many
of them as possible with eye contact, and acted like I welcomed questions from
everyone. (Quite an improvement over what I had done before, which was to hide up
at the podium and pretend to be working so no one would try to talk to me.) If
someone did ask me something, I had my routine down pat: I would repeat the
question to make sure I had it right, and would not panic if they responded by
correcting me. A few times I actually had the presence of mind to send up a quick
plea to God for help before I spoke again.
None of this was easy, but it worked. When the course was over, I had gained
not only a semester of successful teaching, but also a new level of dialogue with the
Creator. In my biggest petitioning effort to date, I had solved a problem that just a
few months before had seemed insurmountable. And—most significantly of all—I
had learned that forgiving others (with God’s help) was a major tactic for getting
prayers answered.
The only thing is, those kids were really pretty easy to forgive, because they
weren’t people I really hated, or even especially disliked. I think God let me start with
them, but eventually God would challenge me with much harder cases of forgiving
others. We'll get to some of those soon enough.
After the team-teaching project was over, I was reinstated as a regular TA and
taught two semesters of comp on my own before finishing my degree. With Karen
no longer around to save me if I got into a tight spot, it was that much more
important for me to make sure I had God helping me every step of the way.
This time, thank goodness, I did much better than I had two years earlier about
talking and listening to God as I planned my lessons. I couldn’t believe how
disconnected from reality I had let myself get before. I was determined not to let that
happen again.
Once the day of class arrived, I became more concerned about things like the
bus being on time, so I also did a lot of praying about that. Luckily, though, after I
was safely on the bus, the five minutes it took to get across campus was just enough
time for me to look back over my carefully constructed plans and ask God to help
with each part in turn.
Once I was inside that same modern building that Karen and I had taught in—all
sturdy and bright and sterile—I’d go straight to the ladies’ room, my sanctuary of
sorts. I’d be pumped with energy, but would stand in front of the mirror pretending
to comb my hair so I could stand there and, silently, yell out to God: HELP! (Have
you ever been in a situation where you had too much energy and needed to control or
channel it?)
These prayers always worked, and I think the reason was that I was able to take
on an attitude of total humbleness in the face of the power of the universe. That was
easy to do because I was 100% positive I wasn’t in control of what was about to
happen. Once I had my humble attitude in place, all I then had to do was try my
hardest to believe that that power was going to help me out. That part of the process
was a lot like the willed belief I had practiced in high school.
Sometimes when I took on my humble attitude, I could actually sense God’s
presence behind me there in the restroom, as though the sturdy metal fixtures and the
thick concrete walls were a direct expression of his strength and reliability. And
whether I could sense that presence on a given day or not, I found I could tap into
the strength by relaxing physically, breathing deeply, and letting my shoulders fall
downward as I exhaled, as if to relieve their burden of trying to be in charge of
everything when really, God had so much more control over the whole situation than
I did. I mean breathing very deeply, with all my might—remember, I was full of
energy. This was a great way to channel it.
When it was time to head for class, I would make what I called my leap of faith,
a sort of close-your-eyes-and-dive-in action of the mind, in which I could pretend I
had my act together when the truth was that I felt partly numb and partly terrified.
The best I can describe the leap of faith is to say that because of the strength my
prayers had given me, I was able to put up a wall in my brain between myself and
my fright. The wall would last long enough to carry me through the few minutes in
which I actually had to put one foot in front of the other and get to the classroom.
Once I got there, the rushing current of reality would instantly replace both my
prayers and my fears with students and lecture notes, roll books and handouts. But at
that point, all I had to do was go with the flow.
One other prayer technique I also used was that just before I walked out of my
restroom sanctuary, if no one was around, I’d make the sign of the cross on my
chest—you know, the way Catholics do. Both this and the deep breathing are ways
of making use of the fact that our bodies and souls are deeply connected. Which, by
the way, seems to me a very good argument for the existence of a supernatural
creator. How else could thought possibly arise out of something so fundamentally
different from it as matter?
In any case, for me, crossing myself serves as a shorthand reminder of the main
attitude adjustments I always need to make whenever I’m trying to ask God for help.
When I first started doing it—decades ago—if no one was looking I usually made
three crosses in a row, to stand for the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, but that
was just a symbolic act that didn’t really have much psychological meaning. So after
I started learning about the petitioning process, I decided to make each crossing
stand for something about petitioning. I made the first stand for forgiving others, and
the second for submitting my will to the will of the universe. (What I mean by that is,
I have to make myself stop trying to do whatever it is by myself and instead turn it
over to the Creator for him or her to help.) (I also have to truly open myself to
whatever lessons he or she wants me to learn about the situation.) (The way the Bible
puts this is, “Be still, and know that I am God!”) (Exclamation point theirs!) Then my
third crossing stands for going forth joyfully in faith and thanksgiving because I
know God is in the process of answering my prayers.
To this day, whenever I make my triple crossing, I rapidly think those thoughts:
forgiveness, submission, and faith. If people are around, I simply tap my finger three
times, sometimes just a very faint tapping that no one else can even see. The neat
thing about this is that the crosses or taps themselves cause that same physical
relaxation as my breathing exercises in the restroom at LSU. Everything really is all
connected.
Anyway, at the time of my leap of faith, crossing myself served as one last faith-
boosting technique before I pulled open the big swinging door and started down the
hall for my classroom.
This whole idea of relaxing and letting God do his thing is another big piece of
the petitioning puzzle. It ranks right up there with cultivating your faith and forgiving
others so that God will grant your requests.
In any event, my ladies’-room strategies worked.
When I got to the classroom each day, I deliberately made myself as available as
I could, as I had first learned when teaching with Karen. As time went on, I gradually
lost my nervousness and got to where it almost came naturally to me to be open to
my students. Believe me, that would’ve been unimaginable not too long before.
Once class had started, I was able use one of Karen’s and my innovations pretty
regularly: a work-study student was paid to come to class and write everything my
students said on an overhead projector aimed at the back wall, for me to look at if I
needed to read what they had said. It worked pretty well, until the last few minutes
when the Q & A session had degenerated into a free-for-all that the writer couldn’t
really keep up with. But then, I was able to make even better use of another of Karen’
s and my inventions. Let me just illustrate.
One day at the end of class, this kind of grade-conscious and earnest guy from
Lafayette asked with his unmistakable Cajun accent, “Ms. Anderson, could I write
my process essay about a ____[unintelligible]_____ ? About the process of ____
[unintelligible]____?”
“About what?” I repeated as I walked toward the fellow’s desk, silently sending
up a quick prayer for God to make this go smoothly. But I still couldn’t understand
his answer: “A _______. Like a _______.” It sounded like he had said, “A Baroque.
Like a cocoon,” except that didn’t make sense. It was time for plan B.
I pulled out a blank index card from my pocket and handed it to him. “Just write
what it is you want to write about because I still can’t get what you’re saying.” He
bent over the card on his desk and labored for a few seconds—he must not have
been sure how to spell it. When he handed the card back to me, there in big block
letters was the word “PIROGUE.” I hadn’t even heard of it, but when I tried to
pronounce it, he said I had it right.
Then he took the card back from me and drew a picture of a small boat or slip
and, repeated what he had tried to tell me previously: “It’s like a canoe—except it’s
flatter and easier to carry. I’ve used ’em all my life to fish and stuff.”
“Oh, a canoe. How interesting!” I answered. “Yes, I think you could write a
process essay about paddling a pirogue, or maybe about the whole process of putting
it into the water and paddling and maybe looking for fish and how you catch the fish
and bring them home. Yes, I think that could make a great process essay if you put
enough effort into it.”
The guy, obviously pleased with that answer, continued the discussion. “Well,
what you do depends on how deep the water is. When it’s too shallow you have to
___[unintelligible]__ because you can’t paddle. I can write about either one of ‘em.”
In the past, I would have simply said “Fine” and let the conversation end. But this
time, I actually lived up to that true two-way communication I had been aiming for. I
handed him the card again as I asked, “What’s the other thing besides paddling?” But
before he could write anything, the guy sitting next to him demonstrated by using his
pencil to push against the wall as he repeated “POLE it!”
I laughed. “That’ll be fine either way. Write about the one you know the most
about, or the one that you have the most to say about. Or maybe both. Just be sure it’
s a colorful and detailed essay, and I think it’ll be very good.”
Next, without even thinking about it, I did something else I had never done
before. Speaking to the whole class, I asked, “Does anybody else want to ask me
about the subject for their process essay?” That was the first time I had ever actually
invited the students to talk to me the normal way, the way they talked to the rest of
their teachers. It felt great.
By the end of the semester, this class—as well as the one I taught the following
semester—gave me much better evaluations than I had gotten in the past, which in
the eyes of the graduate committee showed I had corrected my previous failure to
teach effectively. What an improvement to put on my resumé!
What was more, with my prayerful preparation for my classes and my relaxation
into God’s power when it was time to execute the plans, I had reached another level
of success at getting my prayers answered. Praise be.
Despite those victories, I wasn’t feeling confident or even the least bit right with
God during my drive down from Jackson to LSU the morning of the first day of the
next semester. It was spring 1996, my last semester as a TA, and instead of feeling
good about my accomplishments so far and eager to improve even further, I was
dreading the changes that were about to take place. It seemed like just when I had
gotten used to the people and the daily routine, it had all been pulled out from under
me. (What I didn’t realize was that that’s life!) I was about to start over with both a
new set of students and a new course, Comp II, a research-based writing course that
seemed an even harder sell than the personal essays of Comp I. (Don’t ask me why I
considered it my job to entertain them, but I did.) To make matters worse, Karen
was now on sabbatical. If I wasn’t going to be able to stick my head into her office
when I needed a boost, I wasn’t at all sure I’d be able to carry over my still-
developing communication skills to a completely new group of students.
Another way Karen had helped me was to serve as my counselor for the lovelorn
when the one person I had wanted to spend my life with had decided to marry a
man. I didn’t normally talk to professors about things like that, but Karen had asked
me about it whenever we met to talk about my dissertation. Now, less than a year
later, I was still in plenty of pain, but now Karen wasn’t going to be there for me in
this sense either.
In this stupid-selfish, change-resisting frame of mind, about an hour into my
drive I started freaking out. I knew the only thing that could possibly help would be
to pray about all my problems, but I was totally unable to get anything started. I was
too busy feeling sorry for myself because time had marched on. What a pathetic way
for anyone to feel in this world of flux! But I was also scared to death to go to class
without praying—so as I got closer to Baton Rouge, I started feeling literally
squeezed in the chest by the giant hands of impending doom. Finally, I yelled out to
God. “Please help me, NOW! I know I’m blocking you by my attitude, but I can’t
help it, so you please help me!”
I then tried every keep-the-faith trick I could think of. Acting as If was out of
the question, since that was precisely what I was unable to do in this miserable
mood. But I looked out at the rain that had been coming down hard for a while now,
and told myself that if God could do that, then surely he could help me. I also had the
bright idea to slow down a little, to give him more time to do something before I got
there. I also tried to relax physically, but I really couldn’t.
The one thing that really did get the job done was to belt out some faith-boosting
hymns I knew by heart—like O God Our Help in Ages Past, A Mighty Fortress Is
Our God, and Go Forward, Christian Soldier. Chain-singing them one after another,
loudly and relentlessly, actually did keep my fears and doubts at bay.
Who knows why music has the power to affect us so deeply? Still more
evidence that God exists, in my opinion. In any case, as I sang, I focused on pushing
my pulsing energy out of my chest and into each word and chord in turn. And when
I did that, I felt connected in my mind with the old familiar spirit that had comforted
me in the past, as well as with everyone else who had ever sung those songs in
desperation. (Have you, by any chance? Did it work?)
Slowly, in fits and starts, my panic went away. By the time class met, I had a
reasonably good grip on myself and my faith, although I knew I still had plenty of
work to do on my attitude toward the new situation. I was grateful to have made it
through the current crisis intact.
As it turned out, God wasn’t done for the day. For classwork, the students had
written paragraphs agreeing or disagreeing with some controversial statements from
the textbook, and I read them in my office afterwards. One of the choices was about
gay marriage, and only a few people wrote on that one. One guy was against it for
religious-right reasons, and one girl was against it because she thought it would
threaten the traditional family structure. But another girl was not only 100% in favor
of same-sex marriage, she was also remarkably articulate, even eloquent, in her
defense of it. Using Idgie and Ruth from Fannie Flagg’s novel Fried Green Tomatoes
at the Whistle Stop Cafe as an example of true love, she argued that when a
relationship was as deep and spiritual as theirs was, there was simply no way it could
be wrong. My jaw dropped a mile. Such intelligence! Such depth! And—most
amazing of all—she was actually going to be my student for the whole semester!
The whole thing seemed way too perfect to be true, especially the fact that it
was Idgie and Ruth this “Belinda Thompson” had chosen to write about. As I
commented in the margin of the paper, I had been so taken with the mischievous but
noble Idgie myself that I had named my cat for her.
I wasn’t completely sure which face from roll call was Belinda’s, but never in
my life had I been half this excited about getting to know someone. I leaned back in
my swivel chair, looking up at the ceiling and shaking my head in disbelief. (I hope
you’ve sometimes experienced such good fortune yourself.) I could practically hear
God saying, "See? I've got everything under control. You worried yourself sick for
nothing!" Silently but also at the top of my lungs, I thanked him about a hundred
times.
So the new semester was off to an infinitely more promising start than had
seemed possible just a few hours earlier. But—interestingly enough—it turned out to
require more, rather than less, prayer than before.
That was partly because of who Belinda turned out to be. She was tall and good-
looking, but a tad cold in manner. She was also much cooler than I had ever been in
my life; her china-doll skin, big hazel eyes, and beautiful, waist-length silky auburn
hair were all rather incongruously paired with heavy-metal T-shirts and faded, ripped
jeans. Plus, I wasn’t even sure if she liked me or not; some days she’d be friendly,
other days she’d scamper nervously out of the room the minute I dismissed the class.
What was infinitely more important to me than all these superficial concerns,
though, was that Belinda lived up to the potential she had shown the first day,
demonstrating over and over both her writing ability and her deep sense of morality
and goodness. At first I wasn’t sure she herself was gay, but she soon revealed she
was, which made our association that much more promising. I had never before even
known a comfortably gay woman who interested me in the least.
Can you see why the only way I made it through this emotionally challenging
semester was by begging God, almost constantly, to guide my actions and make
them fruitful? Fortunately, with practice I learned to channel the hyperactive
excitement I felt over Belinda’s very existence into humble and faithful petitions for
help with every aspect of my teaching.
Perhaps I should have been worried about having feelings for a student, but I
decided that as long as I was careful not to show favoritism or to interact with
Belinda in anything other than a professional manner while I was her teacher, then it
was my business if I let myself become obsessed with her within the safety of my
own mind.
That stance worked till the end of the semester. As the final exam neared, I
talked to God a lot about whether I should ask Belinda to have lunch or something
once we were done being teacher and student.
Folks are always wondering—and it’s a great question—how they can determine
what God’s answer is to questions they ask him. My experience has been that God
uses a wide variety of ways to let us know these answers. Sometimes there’s
something big that you can tell is a sign, but many times, God simply lets events
develop in such a way as to show what his answer is. At those times, it’s up to us to
open our eyes and get the message.
That’s what God did this time. One afternoon about a week before classes
ended, Belinda came by my office to get back a graded essay since she had missed
class that morning. The fact that she came by surprised me a little, but not as much
as the conversation, which seemed to happen all by itself. I suddenly realized Belinda
and I were talking about movies, and she was asking me if I had seen Bridges of
Madison County.
“Yeah, I have,” I replied. Then I added, “A lot of people think it’s too mushy—
my next-door neighbor said it was as bad as Love Story—but I like Love Story!”
“Me, too—so did you like Bridges?” Belinda asked, swiveling around in my
office mate’s chair after examining the framed snapshot my office mate kept on her
desk of her and her boyfriend on a hike out West.
“Yes, I admit it. I loved it. Meryl Streep has been my very favorite actress for
years. And she’s so hot with Clint Eastwood. Also, I’m just a sap for the mushy
stuff anyway.” As I made that statement, I felt a flutter in my chest. (Not sure
why.)
Belinda smiled warmly. “Me, too—as long as the people are attractive!”
“But I like other kinds of movies too,” I went on. “Have you ever seen Murder in
the First, with Kevin Bacon?”
“Yes,” she swiveled again. “Did you like it?” she asked, tentatively.
“Yes, but I don’t like all movies that are violent or exciting or whatever you want
to call it. It sort of has to have a purpose for me to like it.” She nodded as though she
wanted me to continue. “Murder in the First was the first time I ever realized what
was so bad about ‘solitary confinement.’ I used to always think that if I was ever in
jail then I’d rather be in solitary.”
“Me, too! I’d want the privacy!” We both laughed. I loved having her agree with
me on something so personal.
I made a point to pick back up the thread of the conversation. “Well, didn’t
Murder in the First change your mind?”
“Yes!” The talk kept on for several more minutes at fever pitch, until I said I’d
better get back to work. I silently praised the Lord for giving me the sense to stop
while we still had so much left to talk about. It seemed clear that even though Belinda
had said she had a girlfriend named Audra, God was giving me the green light to ask
her to lunch.
That didn’t mean I wasn’t nervous about issuing the invitation! But I knew God
would help if I asked him to.
During this time, I discovered that I could talk to God very effectively while
looking into my own eyes in the bathroom mirror, which was also the best place to
practice my approach. “God,” I prayed one evening, “please at least make her not be
bothered that I’m asking. And please let me say it smoothly. And please, if you can
fit it into the big plan, let her say yes. But if not, just don’t let me do anything stupid.
Thanks!” Then I bowed my head and crossed myself three times, thinking
forgiveness, submission, and faith.
Finally, breathing deeply and relaxing into God’s power, I looked at myself again
in the mirror, pretending I was talking to Belinda. “I’d like to continue our
friendship,” I said. Not satisfied with the way it came out, I tried several more
versions till I got it right. Then I prayed some more, repeating my requests for help,
trying to relax in faith, and thanking God in advance for what I knew (at least in that
faithful moment) he was going to do.
I also thought about what I would do if I didn’t have a chance to talk to Belinda
privately in the classroom on exam day. This was important, because once she was
gone, she was gone, unless I wanted to call her on the phone at home, which I really
didn’t want to do. So I decided that if I needed to, I could simply follow her through
the doorway as she was leaving the room, and then get her attention after we were
both out in the hall.
As it turned out, that was exactly what happened. Thanks to my prayers and
practice, I casually followed Belinda as she left the room, then uttered a perfectly
executed “I’d like to continue our friendship.” She replied silently with a smile and a
vigorous nod.
I breathed an excited sigh of relief. “We probably shouldn’t go anywhere
together until after I’ve turned in the grades, so I was thinking maybe we could go to
lunch or something next week?”
“Are you going to be in your office this afternoon? Why don’t I come by and
we can make our plans for next week? Will that be OK?” I loved the way she took
the initiative like this. Plus, now I’d get to see her again before next week. What a
luxury.
“Sure, I’ll be there. See you then!” I was glad I remembered to stop smiling
before I turned back toward the classroom. In my mind, I was yelling THANKS,
GOD! at the top of my lungs. Fortunately, none of the remaining students seemed to
have even noticed I had stepped out.
When Belinda came to my office, we went straight to the business of making
our lunch plans. She worked full time, so we decided I’d pick her up at work—a
huge furniture store called Schroeder’s. “I think I can get a whole hour off, so we
won’t have to hurry,” she said. She drew a little map on a scrap of notebook paper,
and I was holding it as we stood there in the doorway. She was presumably leaving,
but once again the conversation seemed to have a will of its own. We had picked
back up on the movie topic, and since we both had so much we wanted to say, I sort
of automatically invited her to sit down. I could spare a little time from my grading.
This time, we got off on a few non-movie tangents, but I was still careful not to
get too personal, and Belinda seemed to do the same. She did say, though, that Julie
Andrews movies had been a comfort to her when she had needed escape as a
youngster. While I too recalled my heart nearly jumping out of my chest when
Andrews sang in Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music, I was puzzled at this news
that Belinda had needed “escape” at such a young age. Both her parents were
business executives, Catholics who went to Mass every Sunday, and I had assumed
her childhood had been pretty sheltered, like mine.
A few minutes later, I happened to mention that I had spent eleven years waiting
for the great love of my life only to lose out to a man, and I found myself getting into
way more detail than I meant to. That was partly because Belinda had asked
questions that had urged me on, but still I hadn’t intended to spill my guts before our
friendship had even officially begun. When I finally got to the end of the story, I was
a little embarrassed. “I guess we probably both need to get back to our work,” I said.
“I’ve been boring you, but thanks for listening.”
Belinda shook her head forcefully. “No, you haven’t been boring me! I’ll leave if
you need to work, but you haven’t been boring me!”
A rush of happiness surged through my heart. It was so strong that I revised
my decision that Belinda and I shouldn’t go anywhere together until after the grades
were in. We decided we’d go somewhere safe for supper later—I mean safe from
the possibility of running into anyone from class. Then we quickly got back to our
discussion.
My second inkling that Belinda was not as untroubled as her youthful
appearance suggested came when she mentioned that her only sibling, an older sister,
was a drug addict. Belinda had seemed to me too studious and too serious to have
had any more experience with drugs than I’d had, which was just a little pot in high
school and college. But now she was saying that right there in the bedroom next to
hers, her own sister had been a victim of the never-ending struggle of cocaine
addiction.
I tried to ask a few questions about it, but instead, Belinda started telling me
about her own experience, in high school, of losing a beloved—Ashley—to a man.
At some point, I interjected, “I believe in God—I mean I really think it’s true,
most people don’t really believe it, they just say they do—“
Before I could continue, Belinda replied: “I know, I really believe, too. They just
say they do but I really believe!” Her hazel eyes were large and earnest, and her lips
curled into a peaceful half-smile. (Have you ever been positive someone believed,
even if just for that moment?)
I added, “I also think he has a plan for everything, and everything happens for a
reason, even though we can’t always tell what the reason is when bad things are
happening.” She nodded in agreement. “So when Ashley left you, I think there was a
reason, even though it hurt so much.”
“I know! Everything happens for a reason. When God closes a door, he opens a
window!”
Belinda had to tell me later that that was a line from The Sound of Music, since
in the days before captioning, I hadn’t been able to understand but about half the
dialogue. But at the moment, the quote perfectly underscored the absolute
wondrousness of Belinda’s and my conversation. For the first time in years, my deep
craving for emotional communion with a good woman was being satisfied.
Even more wonderfully, our talk kept on with the same intensity as the
afternoon turned into dusk and the building gradually emptied. At that point, we
decided to walk over to my apartment and think about where to go for dinner.
When Belinda and I stepped outside into the gorgeous early-May Louisiana
twilight, first thing she did was take a cigarette out of her bag and light it, in that
casual but unmistakable hurry of a smoker needing her fix. Surprised, I jumped a
little, but then explained, “It seems like smoking would be one of those things people
your age do that you thought was stupid. It doesn’t bother me or anything, but it just
seems like that.” She shrugged it off, saying something about having started when
she was twelve, then put the cigarette out after just a few drags. I quickly forgot
about it. We had more important things to talk about on this magical night.
The great-smelling spring air must have affected us like a shock treatment,
because just a few minutes after we had shared our pain in my office, we were
cavorting gaily down the street toward the grad-student apartments where I lived. As
we approached my door, I tried to prepare Belinda for the mess. “When I was your
age, my roommate and I had the neatest room on campus, but now—‘Oh Hamlet,
what a falling-off was there!’” We giggled like teenagers as we spilled into my living
room.
“Really, Shakespeare wasn’t being funny; it was like a—um—a—um—,” I
fumbled for the words to explain.
“The ghost of the dead guy!” Belinda shrieked, which sent us into more gales of
laughter.
It took about a minute for it to register with me: she knew this stuff!
I guess we were still on the subject of British poetry a few minutes later,
because I suddenly realized I was in the middle of reciting—with exaggerated
soulfulness—Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn. I loved this poem, and had recited it in
the mirror millions of times, but never ever to a real person, especially not a beautiful
woman! All the way through the five stanzas, I remember thinking, THIS CANNOT
BE HAPPENING.
When I got to the end, we briefly discussed my favorite line: Heard melodies are
sweet, but those unheard are sweeter. Then, I silently sent up a big Thank you to
God—and a quick prayer for him to somehow make this association as everlasting as
that of the lovers on the urn.
About an hour later, we were still talking, but the mood was somber again.
Belinda and I were sitting facing each other on the thrift-shop rug that occupied the
floor of the tiny living room, and she was talking about how her parents had
unintentionally neglected her when she was growing up because they were so busy
worrying about her sister. She said maybe the reason she was so shy was because
she hadn’t gotten to talk much. Then she added, “A lot of times I got sent to my
room, just to get me out of the way.” With those words, tears came into her eyes.
I instinctively reached out and took hold of her wrist. My own childhood had
been pretty much the exact opposite of this, and now I found myself squeezing and
stroking Belinda’s forearm in an effort to tell her, without words, that I wanted to
give her some of the love she had missed. She had said things weren’t going well
with Audra. Who knew, maybe she’d even break away from that relationship and
take up with me. That wasn’t why I was trying to console her, but at this moment I
started to view it as a possibility.
I didn’t hold onto Belinda’s arm for long, but over the next hour or two, she
talked a lot more about her troubled childhood and teenage years. She said that when
she had fallen in love with Ashley, and had that love returned, that had been the first
time in her life that she had felt like anybody cared about her. But then when Ashley
had left Belinda for a classmate of theirs, the pain caused Belinda to fall into a strange
mute state, where she did not speak—to anyone about anything!—for a whole year.
None of the shrinks her parents took her to were able to get a peep out of her, until
one day she simply “woke up” as if from being asleep, and began speaking again.
Belinda said that during that year, she lost what few friends she’d had, and ate
lunch by herself in the back hallway of the school where no one saw her except a
few of the maintenance staff. The one time she “came alive” was when they had to
write a poem for their English class. When the teacher called for volunteers to read
their poems, Belinda volunteered and went to the front of the room—“fearlessly,” she
said—and read aloud “Greeting the Tundra.” What a poem for an eleventh grader to
write, as I learned the next week when she gave me a copy.
Addressing the beloved who had broken her heart, it began, “Black burning eyes
still linger there,” and continued through five chilling stanzas, the last saying,
“Farewell to winter, my breath now snow” as the speaker prepares to enter the
tundra. Belinda said the whole class had listened intently and clapped enthusiastically
when she finished. She then returned to her desk and retreated back into her silent
state for several more months.
When Belinda had finished sharing this incredibly deep pain with me, she was
sitting in a chair and I was sitting on the floor facing her, so I reached up and took
one of her hands in both of mine, and made some kind of earnest statement about
how she didn’t deserve such a life.
A few minutes later, I had some reason to get up and leave the room for a few
seconds, and when I started back toward Belinda, my heart leapt in my chest to see
that she was still holding her hand in that same position, with her long fingers
stretched pointedly down toward the floor, indicating very clearly that she wanted me
to take hold of her hand again. So I did, and started to talk some more, but then I
suddenly realized that she was deliberately saying absolutely nothing in response.
Instead, she was staring into my eyes deeply, and following every move I made. This
created a magnetic pull for me to do the same back to her, with my eyes, I mean.
I doubt Belinda was familiar with Donne’s poem The Extasie, but it was as
though she was directing the two of us to act it out ourselves. The Extasie’s speaker
and his beloved spend a whole day in silence with their eyes and hands locked
together, the premise being that their souls have gone out of their bodies to meet in
the sacred space between them, a connection that transcends sex and
“interinanimates” them forever. Some critics have found the idea of two people
actually staring deeply into each other’s eyes for more than a minute or two too
implausible to be believed, and I can tell you, it was awkward at first, but it also felt
as wonderful as anything I had ever experienced. So I followed Belinda’s lead, and
we stayed like that for about twenty mystical minutes before going back to more
normal interaction.
It was 11:30 at night when we finally stopped talking and—completely
forgetting to worry about whether we were going to run into anyone from comp
class—hit a nearby all-night diner for a much-needed hot meal of omelets and hash
browns.
Two days later, Belinda wanted to come see me in the afternoon before I had to
leave to drive back to Jackson that night. I had planned to be napping, so I put the
key under the mat for her. I didn’t really think I’d be able to sleep, but I wanted to
act out the deep trust I was already feeling for her. (Do you see why?)
It turned out that I did doze off before she got there. What a thrill to open my
eyes to her standing shyly beside my bed!
When I sleepily invited her to make herself comfortable, she climbed over me
and arranged her long frame crossways on the twin bed. This put our heads
pleasantly close together, and as we talked, I noticed the wisps of baby hair at the
edges of her scalp. Those impossibly diaphanous auburn curls against that impossibly
porcelain skin—how my heart ached to help this defenseless creature escape the pain
of her world and soar to the heights I knew she was capable of!
I kept those thoughts to myself, but remarked lightly on the baby hair—only to
recall immediately that she had a complex about not being thought of as a grownup.
So I added, “That doesn’t mean you’re young, everybody has it!”
How wonderful it was to hear the little half-snort of delight Belinda made in
response. To me, it confirmed that she was willing to accept some of that love I had
such a surplus of. Surely God had put us into each other’s lives because of this fit.
It was a few minutes later that things first took a romantic turn. While we were
lying there on the bed, I was holding Belinda’s right hand in my left pretty chastely,
like I had during the Extasie session forty-eight hours earlier. But then during a break
in the conversation, she took her hand out of mine and then took hold of my hand
again, this time with our fingers suggestively interlocked, which she sealed with a
squeeze. I was SO not used to my attraction to a woman actually being returned.
In any case, thus began what I came to call the passionate month.
For that month, mid-May to mid-June ‘96, Belinda and I spent the evening
together at least one of the two nights I was in town each week. The rest of the time
she was usually with Audra, but I wasn’t the least bit jealous. I totally got it that
Belinda needed to end their relationship gradually, since Audra was unstable and had
threatened to kill herself if Belinda left her. As Belinda and I discussed many times,
what she had with Audra and what she had with me were two totally different
things—and the quality of our time together had continued to be “off the planet,” to
use Belinda’s expression. I knew she meant it when she said things like “In spirit I’m
always with you.”
The week after exams, I had to get out of my campus apartment, and after I
finished packing up and cleaning the place, Belinda took me out to dinner at her
favorite restaurant, a charming little authentic Italian place called Pinetta’s. That
night, even though the two of us were crowded into that narrow twin bed of mine,
Belinda slept what she said the next day was super long and soundly for her. I hoped
it was because of me that she felt so relaxed and safe. When she later said as much
herself, I took it as another bit of confirmation that I was meant to save her from
Audra and the other negative aspects of her young life.
When I was back at home in Jackson, Belinda and I burned up the AT & T lines
to the tune of $300 for the month on my bill alone, not to mention the times she
called me, which were also quite a few. She said everyone at Schroeder’s who had
known her forever (since it was where her mother also worked) kept saying how
happy she was.
In one of those phone calls, Belinda said, “You make me feel really comfortable
about saying what’s on my mind, which nobody else has ever done, including Audra.”
“Well, sometimes I worry that I’m too open myself,” I replied. “I mean I say
everything on my mind, immediately, and it might be too much for someone like you
who’s not used to it.”
“Your openness doesn’t bother me. It’s thrilling,” she insisted. “But this is a
new situation for me, so I’m gonna need your wisdom and your tutoring, you know.
I’ve never ever in my life experienced anything like this before.”
During this time, I really didn’t pray about anything at all, because (for once)
there was nothing I felt the need to pray for. But that wasn’t necessarily a good way
to be! I remember telling Belinda that she was causing me to lose my bearings, and
even though I said it affectionately, I knew it wasn’t an altogether desirable feeling. It
felt like my tether to the earth had been cut so that I was floating all the time instead
of walking. My relationship with God seemed something I couldn’t quite take hold of
the way I had in the past. I hadn’t felt like that at all with my previous beloved. With
her, our shared relationship to God was one of the most important aspects of our
relationship to each other.
My current excessive excitement wasn’t really due to how I felt about Belinda
herself, whom I was never deeply in love with the way I had been with my beloved.
Instead, I think it was just that I was so unused to my feelings being returned so
consistently. Everyone else I had ever had feelings for had either been straight or at
least not comfortable with the idea of being gay. And Belinda seemed so right for me
in so many ways—mainly her brains and the fact that she did (apparently) believe in
God—that I didn’t mind that I wasn’t in love with her. I had waited so long, and I
might not get another chance!
This thinking ran counter to a solemn vow I had made years before to myself,
to God, and to my beloved (in my mind, not in person) that I would never be with
another woman unless I loved her as deeply as I had my beloved, and unless she
could replace my beloved in that God-centered relationship of ours. Belinda definitely
didn’t qualify, at least not yet. No wonder I didn’t feel right about it.
But most of the time during those few weeks that I was flying high with
Belinda, I did like it, and thought I was happy. About three weeks after exam week,
Belinda and I even signed a lease for an apartment together in Baton Rouge. She
wanted to move out from her sister, whom she had been sharing a place with all
year, but she didn’t want to move in with Audra, so . . . .
I’d be there only two nights a week, but I did need a place to stay since I no
longer had the campus apartment. In a way, it was a sensible rooming decision, but
in another way, it was—for me at least—something I’d never done before in my life.
Belinda and I didn’t really discuss the terms of our living arrangement, but how could
it be anything but passionate?
But the week we signed the lease and the next one were not totally fantastic the
way the first two had been. There were some complications related to Audra, and—
what was much worse—Belinda started showing flashes of this weird inner
disconnect. Instead of the high-minded and compassionate way she had acted at
first, now she would often be in a cynical mood, saying things like “It’s a crock of
shit, Sara” when I brought up the subject of people getting therapy, or “Payback
time!” as an explanation for something she or Audra had done to each other in their
quarrels. She also did a few drugs regularly with Audra, as she always had, although
I didn’t know it at the time. (She didn’t lie about it, it just never came up.)
When we went to look at the apartment, Belinda linked her arm through mine
and glanced down at me as she asked, “Is it OK?,” but I got the distinct feeling she
was just going through the motions. It seemed to me that she couldn’t decide
whether she wanted to be anti-everything (the way her sister was) or enthusiastic
and optimistic—the way I was and the way she had been in our hours and hours of
off-the-planet conversations. We had talked so many times about her fiction-writing
career, and about what other fulfilling occupation she might have as her day job. And
one of her typical phone sign-offs had been “Be a good human being.” But now it
looked like that radical change she had talked about was simply too much for her; she
wasn’t always able to be that good self, the one she had presented to me that
rapturous night when we had bared our souls to each other in the middle of my grad-
student-apartment floor.
You’re wondering, didn’t I pray now? Well, NO. I guess I was in denial that I
needed to. The whole thing—the good and the bad—was still such a shock that I just
kept thinking things would suddenly be magically OK again.
I guess I probably did try to pray a little, but nothing with any real focus or
concentration —which, by the way, are absolutely necessary if we want our prayers
to work. In hindsight, I guess I could’ve tried harder to get a grip on myself and to
reconnect with God, but I didn’t. It was a perfect example of how letting our
happiness come completely from earthly things can make us forget our true position
as creatures whom the Creator will help, but only if we ask him to.
In any case, just before we were supposed to move into the apartment, for
some reason I wasn’t able to reach Belinda on the phone for a day or two. Then
when I finally did get ahold of her, she was distant and spoke about the apartment
arrangement as though we had never planned to be anything but roommates. I still
assumed she was planning to end her relationship with the crazy, damaged Audra,
but that assumption was becoming less and less tenable with each passing hour.
It seems dumb of me now, but the way I first reacted to the change in Belinda
was to try to roll with the tide and hang onto what we’d had, in hopes that she would
soon revert back to her good self. So I moved my things into the apartment as
planned. But after just one absolutely agonizing two-night stay—during which Belinda
and Audra actually came over to our apartment when they were supposed to be
spending the entire night at Audra’s—it was clear that the only thing for me to do
was to get the hell out of there and let Belinda navigate her identity crisis in peace.
So the next day, tired and numb, I loaded my things back into my car and drove
back to Jackson. I decided I’d contact Belinda periodically, just in case the old
Belinda did return, and also because I couldn’t conceive of not having even the
slightest thread to hang onto so soon after the bliss of exam day and the off-the-
planet time that had followed.
With this sudden end to what I thought I had wanted my whole life—I mean to
share my life with a woman—boy was I in pain. Over the next few months, I talked
the ear off my fellow dissertation student Teresa, another theologically minded
armchair psychologist like me, who (bless her heart) always acted interested in
listening. I also reread The Road Less Traveled, since I was finally able to make
sense of the opening sentence, “Life is difficult.” Gradually—very gradually—Peck’s
masterpiece led me out of my darkness and into a whole new way of looking at the
world.
Before I had really started to apply Peck to my life, I tried to pray about Belinda
plenty of times, but it was always on my own shortsighted terms. All I wanted was
for things to go back to the way they had been. But when I tried to ask, “God, how
could she do this? Please bring her back to the way she used to be,” God was
completely silent. No sale. (Maybe you can relate.)
God’s silence didn’t surprise me. I knew what I was asking wasn’t worthy of
God's help, at least not in the form I wanted. I was miserable.
But I still believed God existed, and still believed he or she had my best interests
in mind, so I kept on contemplating what might be the meaning of my pain. On that
basis, I finally started to get through my head Peck’s thesis that the purpose of life is
spiritual growth, and one stimulus for spiritual growth is pain, and that's why God
lets bad things happen to us. (The idea, I later learned, is for us to progressively
become more godlike ourselves.)
As I began to internalize Peck’s wisdom, I made the fundamental decision to
learn and grow from my pain instead of sitting around complaining about it as I had
before. Soon I was able to accept and even welcome the loss of Belinda because I
knew the end result of the whole thing would be my greatest good. As long, that is,
as I kept my faith in God (who is love, you know, as Jesus came to tell us!).
I didn’t realize it at the time, but this growth-based attitude toward life and this
type of conscious connection to one’s Maker also happens to be the only way
humans can be truly happy and at peace while on earth.
As I began to understand the overarching truth about change and growth, I kept
on praying for Belinda, but in a totally different way. “God,” I said one morning as I
looked at the sky through the front window of my house, “I know I can’t just ask
you to give her back to me, but I see that I can ask you to help her grow, and to lead
her to what she’s supposed to do with her life, so please do that, and PLEASE make
her feel the joy of doing good again, as I know she felt for a while with me.” Then I
bowed my head, taking deep breaths and letting them out slowly, surrendering myself
to that great big wave of goodness that had swept me up so long before in that ninth-
grade Bible study. Surely it could do this if I would just trust it.
This prayer session made me feel truly comforted for the first time in months,
so I went on sending up these petitions for Belinda’s growth at least once a day.
Before you go applauding my nobility, though, it’s very important that you
realize that this was an entirely self-interested effort on my part. Since Belinda’s and
my relationship had been based so strongly on the good rather than the bad, the
creative rather than the destructive, I knew that this growth of hers would make her
more likely to come back to me.
The reason it’s so important for you to understand this is because the whole
petitioning program is based on self-interest! In writing all this, I’m not preaching to
you that it would be more “virtuous” for you to get into this mode yourself with
respect to your own problems; instead, I’m saying that it’s going to make YOU
happier to do it this way, to make the choice for growth. It’s a win-win situation all
the way around. You WILL eventually get your prayers answered, and you will also
be happy and at peace during the process, instead of continually complaining and
whining about life, as I was doing, too, until I made this discovery! As Peck said
many times, once we really get it that life is difficult, then that fact is no longer a
problem for us, because we accept it and rise above it by focusing on how we can
improve ourselves.
Sometime during my rereading of Peck, I had one more important “aha”
moment: I suddenly realized how the whole idea of praying for changes in our
circumstances fit together with Peck’s theory of pain-induced spiritual growth. Since
God lets bad things happen in order to stimulate us to make the choice for growth, it
follows that if we want God to remove the bad things, we must first undertake
whatever bit of growth they were meant to bring about. If we do that, and then ask
God with faith to change the circumstances, God will be glad to. But if we pray for
changes in our circumstances without seeking to transform ourselves accordingly,
then God is most likely not going to deliver, since that would defeat the purpose of
having the unwanted stuff there in the first place.
This insight proved to be the next—and maybe the last—big piece to the
petitioning puzzle. I had known about the forgiveness requirement for years, but now
I saw that other types of transformations may also be necessary. Forgiving others, in
our hearts and minds as well as with actions and words, seems to be a universal
requirement for getting prayers answered, which makes perfect sense since it’s a
way we become more like the God who is love. But other changes of heart or habit
may be called for too. (You identify these by listening to God and your conscience,
as I demonstrate repeatedly throughout this book.) (You may not be able to make the
changes yourself, but you can make the decision to turn them over to God.)
Armed with these answers—and VERY thankful for all these wonderful truths!
—I went on about my business, but also kept on asking God regularly to help Belinda
choose the good as she decided what kind of adult she was going to become.
About three months after the apartment debacle, Belinda wrote and said she was
sorry for the way things had ended, and that she had never intended to drive me out
of her life completely. This didn’t mean the old Belinda was back, but it was a start,
and she said she wanted to keep in touch. So over the next two or three years, I
wrote her pretty regularly and called her sometimes when I was in Baton Rouge.
For about another year, Belinda and Audra continued to be a tumultuous couple, and
Belinda said Audra was jealous of me, so if Belinda and I decided to get together, she
always wanted me to come see her at work, where there was no Audra.
The few times Belinda and I did this—maybe three or four—weren’t terrible,
but they weren’t great either. Mostly, we talked about her latest ideas regarding her
career choice; she was thinking she’d like to become either a lawyer or an FBI agent
and profiler. We also made plenty of small talk, which I had never much cared for
with anybody, including Belinda. All this time, what I really wanted to know was
what kind of progress she was making in her personal development, but that’s not
exactly something you can ask people about, even if Belinda and I hadn’t had the
recent history we did have. So, I just tried to be there for her, while continuing to
send up regular petitions for God to help her.
These three or four meetings were the high points of our relationship during
these years. There were also plenty of low points, the lowest of which was probably
the fall of ‘98.
Belinda, after a final breakup with Audra, was living with and working for Nita,
a thirtysomething bar owner, while still taking courses at LSU. When some letters I
had written her came back undelivered, I put them all in a big clasp envelope and
mailed it to her at the bar. But that package also came back undelivered, with “NO
SUCH PERSON” block-printed rudely over Belinda’s name. Woo, boy, was I pissed!
I made a half-assed effort to calm myself and pray for wisdom, but all I could think
about was getting those damned letters into Belinda’s hands.
I was teaching a linguistics course on Monday nights at a branch of Mississippi
State, and working hard the rest of the week as a freelance editor, but that didn’t
stop me from taking off one Wednesday morning, driving to LSU, getting Belinda’s
schedule from the registrar’s office just as if I were still an instructor there, and
stationing myself on a staircase across the hall from the classroom where she was
supposed to be the next period. When the previous classes let out and the hallway
was suddenly jam-packed with students, I leaned against the wall opposite Belinda’s
classroom and tried to get a look at everyone who entered.
Suddenly the hallway was empty again. Had I not been able to see Belinda in the
crowd, or was she cutting class that day, or had something actually happened to her,
which was why she hadn’t gotten the letters? I didn’t think she was merely late,
because back when I had taught her, she had always been either ridiculously early or
absent.
Well, since I was already in the middle of stalking her, I wasn’t about to give up
so easily. So I sat on the stairs, opened my book bag, and started working on my
lesson plans. I could easily sit there the whole hour and ten minutes, and then try to
catch her on her way out. I begged God to calm me and help me.
Fifteen minutes or so went by. I was actually pretty absorbed in my planning
when my consciousness was jolted by a tall, slim figure hurrying past me, practically
scraping the opposite wall in an apparent effort to stay as far away from me as
possible. I looked up just in time to recognize those familiar long ivory legs
underneath a barmaid’s black miniskirt, and the even more familiar waist-length
auburn hair falling rather messily down the back of a pleated white blouse. “Belinda,”
I said quietly but urgently. “Belinda.”
She stopped and looked at me nervously, clutching to her chest some report she
must have been about to turn in. “I have to go to class; I’m late.”
“OK, I’ll wait,” I replied. She hurried on into the classroom, no doubt shocked
to have run into me in the middle of what I later learned was one of her cocaine-
fueled twelve-hour workdays at the bar.
When the class let out, I was ready with the big envelope of returned letters, but
Belinda walked out of the room side-by-side with a male classmate, apparently trying
to slip past without me seeing her. But I hurried to catch up with them. At first she
tried to put me off. “Sara, I can’t talk, I have to go back to work NOW,” she said
firmly, then turned and kept on walking toward the staircase at the opposite end of
the hall, the guy dutifully staying in tandem with her all the way down the hall.
I caught up with them as they went down the stairs, and instinctively went on
the offensive. “Just five minutes, please? I drove all the way down here to give you
these letters, so if I could have your attention for five minutes, PLEASE?”
At that, Belinda told the guy to go ahead, and turned to me impatiently, though
also with the slightest perceptible air of apology. I said, “These letters keep being
returned to me, and I want you to have them, they’re important.”
Without even looking at the envelope with the NO SUCH PERSON notation over
her own name, she protested, “That’s not Nita’s writing. I don’t know how it
happened, but that’s not Nita’s writing.”
“That doesn’t matter,” I said. “What does matter is that you keep these and, I
hope, read them, for the sake of the long-term future of our relationship. I think you
care about that, even if right now someone doesn’t want you communicating with
me. Please. For the long-term future of our relationship.”
At that point, she looked me in the eye for the first time. Her eyes seemed
smaller and darker brown than I remembered them, and distant even in the moment
of contact, as though Belinda was really somewhere else, her body merely a shell of
the Belinda of my memory. And she didn’t allow me in any closer, answering simply,
“OK, but I really have to go now. I’m late for work.” I said OK, and she took the
envelope and placed it carefully in the back of a three-ring binder before hurrying
down another hallway, this time toward the back door of the building.
What a load to digest, I thought as I stood there, stunned, watching her walk
rapidly away. The fresh-faced Belinda who was always already in the classroom
when I walked in, sitting peacefully in the second row reading a novel! The youthful
Belinda with whom I had shared my love of poetry and God and writing at the end of
that glorious semester! That Belinda was nowhere to be found in the hyperactive,
overworked, unkempt Belinda I had just encountered. She seemed to be staying in
school by only the thinnest of threads.
Back at home that night, I had to struggle just to make myself think about my
experience. I think my biggest fear was that Nita, whom I knew nothing about,
would steer Belinda away from a real career and possibly even away from her
writing. I worried about the drugs, too, which I figured were probably part of the
picture, but not as much as about the work situation. “God,” I said, “I know there’s
nothing I can do to get Belinda out of this job or this relationship, but please show me
what attitude I ought to have about it.”
As I sat there, I suddenly realized there was one thing I could do, and that was
to pray for Belinda as hard as I ever had, to ask God to help her choose the good, at
least in the future if not right away. I also saw that choosing to do this rather than to
despair was the decision I had to make between the good and creative versus the evil
and destructive.
The idea that there was something I could do made me feel some hope. So I got
down on my knees, feeling very small and humble. Taking deep breaths as I raised
my arms above my head, as I exhaled I opened them like a flower opening to the sky
to receive its light and life. And I said out loud, “God, I choose to be faithful and to
keep praying about everything, but I need your help with that, too. So please help me
stay positive and faithful, and then help Belinda choose the good!”
I think this act of choosing the good, loving attitude over the negative,
destructive attitude is something we all have to do every day, usually many times a
day. Think how many times it comes up. Do you—like me—have to choose whether
to tackle your work with a good attitude or to procrastinate, whether to worry or
have faith about your long-term financial security, whether to wallow in resentful
thoughts about people who irritate you or to rise above your resentment and let God
change your heart? And those are only on days when nothing big is going on.
On the days when something big is going on, like my experience with Belinda,
then we have that many more challenges to meet if we want to make the right
choices. But that’s exactly what I did, over and over again, in the months that
followed my disturbing meeting with Belinda in the hall at LSU. Always first asking
God to help me maintain my faith, I prayed for her at least once a day, or whenever I
found myself thinking about her. I didn’t try to write her anymore, but I kept on
praying.
[SAMPLE CHAPTER READERS: If you want to know the rest of the story,
including what happened to Belinda, click on the Abstracts button, which will
take you to the whole story in condensed form. I suggest reading the Chapter
One abstract if you haven't already read Chapter One, then skip the Chapter
Two abstract since you just read that whole chapter here, then pick back up
with the Chapter Three abstract. Thanks for reading!]