I’ve never been more religious than when God closed a door, literally, in the form of a rejected housing application. It was for a little cottage on the edge of town, and it was all but mine until, one miscommunication and a phone call later, I learned that the lease had already been signed by someone else. When the same thing happened again, twice, it became clear to me that there was a bearded man in the sky, pulling levers, shutting doors, blessing the broken road that would lead me straight to the best cottage in town. I started journaling again, searching the Bible, actually praying in church, trying my best to understand Big Brother who was playing boardgames with my fate. God, I asked, are you trying to tell me something?
When God closes a door, we expect him to open a window, because no matter what the landlord says, we are determined to get inside. Expectations become superstitions very quickly—faith becomes divining tea leaves and tracing inscrutable clues left in the wake of the almighty. During my desperate hunt for housing, I weighed each availability on a scale of “divine intervention” to “not divine intervention”; the divine ones of course aligned with what I wanted. By the end of the process, I had myself thinking that the universe was indifferent and absurd and signified nothing.
Only later, as I was dazedly reading my copy of The Stranger, did I realize that my claims to absurdism hinged only on whether or not the steps of my life proceeded as I expected them to.
*
The following is an excerpt from Dave Eggers’s 2014 novel, Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? (I can’t recommend the novel highly enough—at about 200 pages, it’s a quick read written entirely in dialogue), which explores the prevalence of disappointment in modern society, not just among young people. The book relays a series of interviews between a disgruntled thirty-something man named Thomas and various people he has kidnapped. In this particular scenario, he is interrogating a retired congressman whom he has chained up in an abandoned military base. The exchange begins with Thomas theorizing:
—Don’t you think that the vast majority of the chaos in the world is caused by a relatively small group of disappointed men? …
—[The congressman replies:] I don’t know. Could be.
—The men who haven’t gotten the work they expected to get. The men who don’t get the promotion they expected…These men can’t be left to mix with the rest of society. Something bad always happens…When I see these massacres at malls or offices, I think, There by the Lake of God go I.
—Grace of God.
—What’s that?
—It’s “there but for the grace of God.”
—No. It’s “there by the Lake of God.”
—It’s “grace of God.”
—It can’t be.
—Son. It is.
—I’ve always had this picture in my mind of the Lake of God. And you walk by it.
—There’s no Lake of God.
—It was like this huge underground lake, and it was dark and cool and peaceful and you could go there and float there and be forgiven.
—I don’t know what to tell you, son. I’ve been teaching the Bible for thirty-eight years and there is no Lake of God in that book. There’s a Lake of Fire, but I don’t think that’s the place you’re picturing.
—See, even that…Even that’s a sign that the world has misused people like me. How could I not know that, the difference between the Lake of God and the Lake of Fire?
—I don’t know if that misunderstanding is symptomatic of a societal failure. You got your lakes confused.
Thomas’s conception of the Lake of God, a place where it’s cool and where you float and become forgiven, isn’t so different from the actual grace of God that the traditional idiom fails to capture. But this passage’s real meat is in its beginning when Thomas declares that the world’s chaos is a result of disappointment.
My own disappointment may well find its roots in a little thing called Disney Channel Original Movies, which was a series of TV movies released in the early 2000s, one Friday a month at 8/7 central; these illustrated a life in which a normal kid could win all sorts of awards for having an incredible singing voice, or write a best-selling novel on accident, or become a gold-medal surfer despite being the new kid at school, all before turning eighteen. I couldn’t not expect my life to look at least a little bit like that; in reality, I went to college and became a blogger. “Oh. Interesting,” you say. “Well, there’s nothing wrong with that.” Did God close a door? Is he going to open a window through which I will escape to become Andy “Brink” Brinker, the champion Soul Skater I always wanted to be?
The editor of The NY Times‘s “Modern Love” column, Daniel Jones, said, “People have such a hunger for a formula and for advice that takes the form of a formula.” He was talking about love, but that also applies to life, and God. We expect that God will provide for us in ways that we can understand. From Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation:
Thesis 19: That person does not deserve to be called a theologian who looks upon the invisible things of God as though they were clearly perceptible in those things that have actually happened (or have been made, created).
Let’s call a thing what it is and admit that the invisible things of God are invisible; we cannot understand what we cannot understand. The door is closed. It strikes me that faith doesn’t mean climbing through the bushes to find an open window. Sometimes doors close, and we can’t understand why. And faith doesn’t mean trying to; faith is receiving the closed door. Or, as JAZ wrote in 2010, “Faith, in this respect, is trusting God when we do not know what He is doing, and in spite of the fact we cannot know what double rainbows mean. It is knowing that He is trustworthy even when we do not trust him.”
COMMENTS
6 responses to “When God Closes a Door… (There By the Lake of God Go I)”
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#TeamPupNSuds
Always. Shame i couldnt find any good clips from brink on youtube
Stunning CJ.Thank you so much for writing this.
“Faith is receiving the closed door.” Amen.
Um your Disney Channel Original Movies reference just totally shattered glass for me. It all goes back to Brink and Zenon. This was wonderful, CJ. I’m also eager to know how the house-hunt ended (in a similar boat now, and I’m just sure God is closing doors to lead us to a west coast oasis that’s obviously well under budget 🙂
Thanks, Charlotte! The house hunt actually ended surprisingly well! We got the one place that I didn’t put any effort towards, isn’t that something. I know you’ll find a place soon. The uncertainty is the hardest part