What the Hell Does God Have in Mind?

God isn't nice. And Jesus has a hard edge too. Forget the networks! God is strictly for late night cable!
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God invaded my novel "BABY JACK." He might as well have been movie director Bob Altman who said: "I don't direct, I watch. You can pick the best six things in anything I made and none of them were planned. It's the mistakes I'm interested in. That's where you hit the truth button."

I was raised evangelical but traded that religious sub-culture for another. For the last eighteen years I've gone to the Greek Orthodox Church. It was a relief to replace tyrannical simplicity with Byzantine paradox, tidy theology with messy mystery, smug certainty with forlorn hope. Nevertheless the old Calvinist preoccupations stick. God still worries me. And he probably doesn't like you either.

My writing is shaped by experience and that includes recently having my beloved Marine son go to war. So "BABY JACK" was extruded from this slice of life and near death. It is about a father and son at war with each other, a country at war with itself, and God at war with everyone. It is about the widening American class divisions between those asked to give everything and those insulted by the idea that they owe anything to our country.

When you want to explore retribution, revenge and redemption there is no better means to an end than God. He showed up as a foul-mouthed African-American Marine Corps drill instructor on Parris Island.

In this passage a dead Marine tells us about God from the point of view of those living in the all-seeing, all-knowing hereafter:


Eternal life turns out to be such a disappointment for true believers. Sometimes the dead are so bummed they even argue theology with God. A few days ago a newly arrived Southern Baptist preacher was so shocked by God's profanity that he told God that he thought God needed to repent and accept the Lord Jesus Christ as his personal savior. "What are you talking about?" God yelled, "I'm an atheist for Christ's sake!"

One woman emailed me: "I might be one of the very few of my 'ilk' (conservative Presbyterian) who would finish 'Baby Jack' because it is at times offensive. But I had to keep asking myself, 'Is it offensive to you because you KNOW he knows all you know and yet chooses to portray God in an almost 'Oh, God' sort of way?'"

According to Christian teaching, we're made in the image of God and God is love. But what is love?

In the book of Job we read about God stringing a lot of people along and killing a few---all Job's children for a start. And when Job asks why, God tells him to mind his own business. This is not Oprah's definition of love. God isn't nice. And Jesus has a hard edge too. Forget the networks! God is strictly for late night cable!

The Bible says Jesus will come back to kill lots of infidels. There is even a best selling series of evangelical "novels" (the "Left Behind" series), based on Jesus' homicidal tendencies. He swears too.

Calling someone a snake and/or filthy defiled bones in a tomb was as profane (by the standards of Jesus' time) as yelling "motherfucker" would be in a church today. We just don't feel the impact of Jesus' curses because we're not first century Pharisees being called "unclean" creatures. (To get an idea of how this went down picture someone throwing pork fat on some particularly diehard members of the Taliban.)

God's love comes as a kick in the ass, for instance when we first realize that our very existence makes us complicit in killing. Even Vegans crush the living---a billion microbial deaths with every step. And God kills everyone.

Spirituality solves nothing when it comes to the zero-sum game we call life. When my son went to war every time I heard the words, "Today a Marine was killed" my heart froze. "Please don't have it be John!" I cried out. I knew I was really praying, "Let another father bear the unbearable news."

If God didn't want us thinking despairing things like, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity," he wouldn't have created Solomon or death. Solomon just put into words the question we've all been asking ever since someone told us we will die: What the hell does God have in mind?

If God decides to answer He could do worse than to paraphrase Altman: One man's truth button is another man's mistake.

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