Panic and the Wrath of God
Where have all the fathers gone?
The panic comes back, sometimes. It’s hard to explain, this existential panic that everything is not alright, that something unpleasant and emotionally difficult is looming just over the horizon. Like I am sitting in the Seat of Judgment and no matter what I do, I will be found inadequate. The eyes of God are cold and unfeeling at times like these.
In the Bible, the rules and laws laid down were designed to keep you from God’s judgment, to incur His mercy rather than His wrath. Strict adherence would keep you in God’s favor; sacrifice was needed when you inevitably failed. Confession, repentance. Blood. Silence.
To a child, Father is God. Mother shows the child how to feel about the world, whether people are trustworthy and the Universe is generally kind; Father shows the child how to feel about himself.
God’s eyes have found me inadequate for as long as I can remember. I am comfortable with the Universe - its laws are not laws that we must strive to adhere to, but ones that we are powerless to break. But God’s laws… they change. You learn to deny yourself and deny yourself again, because that is what God wants, but there is always more to deny. You could always be better, more like Him and less like yourself.
The mere absence of sin does not a perfect person make, and the only way you will avoid being abandoned by God is to be perfect.
You give up what you want most for God, because He carries the Earth in His hands and you don’t want Him to drop it. And even though gravity will always pull you down, your willingness to fall will not always satisfy the laws of God.
My earliest memory is one of the few of my father that I still possess. It’s so old, so far back in the corners of my mind, that I’m not even sure if what I remember is the actual memory, or simply a memory of a memory.
I was very small, two or three years old with a fine, downy head of thin blonde curls and wide blue eyes, running around at table height in our hundred-year-old kitchen. The baby was sitting on Daddy’s lap, a rosy-cheeked thing with a fat belly and fat baby hands. I ran around the kitchen, crawling under the table and playing with Baby Jax. I couldn’t see Mommy and Daddy’s face; at my height, it was easier to look at knees and legs.
There was no yelling, no screaming or accusations. Not that I can remember, anyway. There was only that moment, the before, when everything was normal and I was looking at my baby brother sitting in our father’s lap; then that moment shattered and Daddy stood up, handed the baby to my mother, and walked out the door. He left the big door open but the screen door slammed shut behind him.
My whole life changed direction in that moment. The person I would have been was gone, and I was destined from then on to be who I am now. My brother, instead of becoming a man raised by a man, became a man struggling with manhood, with only a mother and a sister to turn to.
What else I remember of my father comes partially from my snatches of memories, and partially from pictures of a tall, curly-haired, bearded man wearing a goofy grin that I recognize so well on Jax. I have read books in which the abandoned child hopes to see her parent again one day — when he becomes a famous actor, or when she sells her first novel — but that was never me. The last time I saw him, when I was seven and he took us to the dam, was the last time I remember caring.
My mother has since told stories of us waiting for him to show up, hoping to see him on our birthdays, hanging on — clinging — to the hope that we would see him again, but I remember none of that. As far as I’m concerned, I could spend the rest of my life without seeing him again.
The panic comes from the twinge of displeasure on God’s face, the downward cast of His eyes. I am not afraid of Jesus, although maybe I should be, but I am afraid of what God may do if I make Him unhappy. Experience has taught me that it will not be good.
If Father is God, then my God abandoned me. As the church, He judged me and cast me out for my inability to conform. As my husband, He squished me between His thumb and forefinger like a careless housewife squishes an ant.
You would think that, with Father, church, and husband out of the picture, having no laws at all would be a relief. That the eyes of God would be gone altogether. But I know that God is always watching, and that His vengeance could come at any time without warning.
Without laws, I have no way of knowing what will earn God’s mercy and what will incur His anger. I am floating in a sea of anxiety.
When God is displeased with me, I need to know that I don’t have to fear His wrath.
