It’s a Beautiful Day to Yell at God

When I was in middle school, I knew immediately that Jill had to be my best friend. She was gorgeous and funny and creative. She was not afraid to act foolishly for the sake of a laugh. And that is no small thing when you are thirteen. We went to parties we did not tell our parents about. We once got very drunk from the peach schnapps she brought home from Jewish summer camp. Hilariously, I had my first bagel at her house.

I’m a priest now. She’s an actress. I live in the church-wounded, church-victorious city of Nashville. She lives in the fractured glamour of Los Angeles. And somehow, we still find each other.

I sent her a funny meme about God last week. Or I thought it was funny.

It almost looks like a child’s drawing. Three people are standing away from the viewer facing a huge sun, and the bold print says “It’s a Beautiful Day to Yell at God.” Then there’s smaller script that says “what the f” and “come out we just wanna talk” and — my personal favorite — “face us you coward.”

Even typing it makes me laugh again. Because if the Psalms tell us anything, it is that sometimes everyone yells at God. And that there is something very childlike in us that wants to yell at God face-to-face. 2020–2021 was a year of Dead Parents, Dead Brother, Dead Husband’s Best Friend — so this hit something in me that felt less alone.

I did not really know how Jill would respond. I don’t get the idea that she is very religious. And I mean that only in the sense of I do not think she goes to synagogue regularly. We live a country apart. I do not know the depth of her relationship with Something Bigger than her. Honestly, I think you can live in the same household with someone and still not understand it for anyone but yourself.

She simply responded: “Too bad God can’t fix what man fucks up.”

When I look at the state of our world with too many horrors to list, I don’t even want to list them here to become one more place with a list of horrors. And you know the list. You live here too.

At our back-to-school church lunch I am always taken aback by the tacos. There are 400 people that show up at our church on any given Sunday. Any other church we have attended would have catered tacos. Catered tacos are an easy thing to do. I “cater” tacos to my family at least twice a month.

But this church sends out a SignUpGenius that says things like “8 chopped green bell peppers” or “2 pounds cooked ground beef” and it is like watching the Amish build a barn, only it’s Episcopalians making lunch. It’s hard to not think of the fish and loaves. How will this actually work? And then from dozens of home kitchens, it does.

My husband and fourteen-year-old son went to Kenya to visit a ministry that has an orphanage, school, and farm. They take care of the least of these. And my family members just got to witness it happen. One evening, the couple who runs the organization were late for dinner. A three-year-old had been left on the doorstep of the orphanage, and they needed to settle him in.

“His name was Sam,” my husband told me, “and every time we saw him after that he was being held by someone.”

So I pray for Sam now. And I think of God scooping us up off the streets of God Knows Where and holding us because we have stood on our own for too long, and we are too little for that.

I work with a guy who has ALS, and when we went around the room asking for prayer requests, he said simply, “I’m excited for the work ahead of us this fall,” and I remember thinking, When have I ever thought that about anything?

He also said once that if suffering is everywhere then so is God. I am someone who easily remembers that suffering is everywhere, but forgets that God is there too.

Lately I’ve been missing my mother profoundly. It comes and goes, and right now it’s a lot. Our family went to the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas, last week. It was magnificent and also heartbreaking because it was one more place mom always talked about visiting and never did. I walked around staring at art and thinking about her.

It was overwhelming. They call it Stendhal syndrome. I rounded a corner to see a stunning Dale Chihuly sculpture, and I stood underneath it. And seemingly out of nowhere, three women my mother’s age started talking to me.

“I love your whole thing,” one of them said. I was wearing one of my puebla dresses that mom loved, in turquoise, her favorite color.

We found out we were all from Mississippi. And the unwritten rule of my home state is to try to make as many connections as possible. Their innocent “Where do you parents live now?” turned into tears for me. And they stood there with me while I cried in the middle of an exhibit on putting up exhibits. I couldn’t make this up if I tried.

I wish I could say it was the universe. But the universe is a cold, dark place.

It was God finding me in my despair. Wiping away every tear. Turning towards me and saying, “I’m here. I’ve been here the whole time.”