“How the hell?” That was too much for Dennis, who lived across the hall. The three of us now completely keeled over in laughter and naughtiness. Then we realized that Eric was off to the side, crumpled on the sidewalk, looking like he was cringing in agony. Eric was not laughing. Eric was sobbing even as he cradled his midsection with his own arms.
Snapping out of our release and delirium, we ran over to our friend. Before we could even ask him what the matter was, he turned his head toward us, looking disturbingly like something out of the movie we just saw. His hands trembled, his shoulders convulsed, tears streamed down his face, and his eyes were two dark wells of panic.
“THAT COULD HAPPEN TO ME!” Eric cried out from somewhere within him that we young men could not categorize. A place that now alarmed us more than anything we had just viewed on screen.
“Don’t you see?” He bowed his head down and wept like a fearful child. “That could happen to me. At any time. I could be possessed by a demon!”
He meant it. We understood he was not feigning anything. What was a horror flick for the other three of us was a grim and shocking liturgical reality for our buddy. And this was, at least for me, a marker on my relationship with religion—even as I was planning a career in religion.
Eric eventually recovered from his trauma. In a way, the shrill alarm he experienced served to cleanse his sectarian-sullied soul of the indoctrinations, the propaganda, and the superstitions. I was close enough to him to learn that two of the parish priests, certainly at their own professional peril, defying the rectory canon, helped Eric out of his anxiety and guilt. This is not to say that those two exceptional reverends did not fall into church code of belief on the rule of the devil. But they at least were equally concerned with the psychological well-being of a young man within their ministry.
Eric also convinced his parents to pay for psychotherapy, ostensibly for his speech defect. In fact, he underwent analysis that relieved him of the stutter in his soul. Years after the night at the movies, I ran into Eric during a visit to my hometown. I knew he had become a schoolteacher—of world religions. He was happily married with two small children, and he spoke without a trace of mumbling and with quiet confidence. We laughed about our milestone night at the movies. I asked him, “How did you really get out of that rut?”
He responded: “I decided to argue with it.”
IN ORDER TO MAKE a bed with your religious tradition, you must struggle with it from time to time. The very name, “Israel,” means “the one who wrestles with angels.” You have to stand up, even to God or those who claim to represent God. The preachers won’t often tell you, because it threatens their authority, that this is a key fabric in the biblical tapestry. As we shall see, every true leader, prophet, and spiritualist of every faith has argued with fate and with God—from Sarah to Moses to Jesus to Martin Luther King, Jr.
It is obvious that uncompromising religious obeisance is the source of most every deadly conflict now blazing in this world. A religious crusade, of any kind, has nothing to do with the human spirit and everything to do with tyranny. Violence is not only physical; there is spiritual violence that turns growing children into cowering, angst-ridden misfits and that corrupts righteous clerics into bloodthirsty warlords. My boyhood chum Eric did not suffer from such persons but he did suffer from such sanctimoniousness.
Being a rabbi, a pastor, or an imam is not about power. It is about possibility. That is something you cannot only believe but you should demand.
When my friend Eric began to argue with the God he was presented with in church, he was merely emulating Jesus. Pastor Ken Silva has written about a verse in the Gospel of Mark: Jesus said to them, “Is this not the reason you are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God?” Jesus’s entire ministry was an argument with the status quo, with what he perceived as a calcified, insensitive, despotic religious pecking order that confused insulation with inspiration. Silva isn’t too happy either with the modern state of affairs in the Christian hierarchy and he summarizes his distress succinctly: “It’s only because the visible church, fearful of conflict, has decided to follow the whimsical ways of our effete culture that Christ’s confrontational style has been hidden.”
Christ’s confrontational style. I’m not a Christian, but I like that. Religion works best when it’s not telling you what to think but when it’s exhorting you to think. In my lifetime, I heard our nation’s first Catholic president, the young John F. Kennedy, close his Inaugural Address on a bitter cold day in Washington, January 20, 1961, by exclaiming: “God’s work on Earth must truly be our own.” Yes, we are God’s partners, not God’s slaves. You can find the proof of this right in the Bible.
Sarah, the mother of monotheism, argued with God. Noah failed at this. Abraham sometimes did and sometimes didn’t—the Jewish tradition is critical and concerned about his inconsistencies. The very greatness of Moses and his high rank among all the Western religions is exactly because he was an independent, cantankerous spiritual legislator who argued with God when he thought God was wrong.
Let’s see how these individuals, all sanctified in religious tradition, did when it came to arguing with God and how their stories can help us know what to believe.
Sarah, like many women, sought to bear a child. She wanted to be a mom. (The Bible spends much more time exploring the pains, joys, yearnings, and anguishes of the people in the narrative than it does portraying the big miracles.) Her husband, Abraham, had children via handmaids and concubines, a routine practice in that time and place. The Bible doesn’t sidestep Sarah’s heavy heart as she becomes postmenopausal. It doesn’t whitewash her resentment—even cruelty—toward a favorite sexual partner of Abraham’s named Hagar. Banished to the desert, thirsty and scorched by sun and sand, Hagar clutched her newborn son Ishmael—the primal beacon figure of Islam.
Whatever is happening in the Muslim world today, the Hebrew Bible unequivocally anoints Abraham’s son Ishmael with special status: “I will multiply thy seed exceedingly.” In other words, Ishmael’s descendants will become a great nation. Here is a rebuttal of blanket Islamophobia.
Meanwhile, in a classic tale of sexism, three mysterious men (“divine messengers”) appear at Abraham’s tent flap and tell the old man that he and Sarah will bear a son together after all. Sarah happens to overhear “the boys” discussing her body and her sexual promise from within the tent. Mystified, defiant, joyous, and indignant, Sarah laughed out loud. To paraphrase her infamous muttering found in the Book of Genesis about this locker room moment, Sarah said to herself: “Right. I’m going to have a kid at my age. And with my old husband.”
According to the legend, God heard Sarah’s little blasphemy and became quite vexed. The God of the early Bible had a number of anger management issues, as we shall see. In keeping with the shameless paternalism of this story, God went straight to Abraham and asked, “Why did Sarah laugh? Is anything too hard for the Lord?”
I feel this segment of scripture was written by men who didn’t want anyone, especially a woman, to question God. Even when what God proposes is a biological impossibility. It’s not that different from the longstanding antagonism of organized religious groups toward women’s rights and access to prayer, study, and even careers in the clergy. What if Sarah hadn’t argued with heaven, hadn’t stood up to male insecurity, hadn’t been bold, and had simply submitted to “God’s will”? Would the countless, valiant campaigns and movements for women’s freedoms, for suffrage, for equal pay have retained an original biblical role model? Would the teenage Pakistani education activist Malala Yousafzai, shot in the face by a Taliban gunman, have a scriptural mentor and go on to win the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize?
All Sarah wanted was to bear a child with her husband and to have the attention and respect of that husband. What she wound up doing was teaching us that before you can believe in God, you have to believe in yourself.
And