About Faith: After Divorce, Don’t Let Labels Keep You from Relationship with God
Does someone drive you crazy because they remind you of your ex? I was on the receiving end of that comparison a few years ago when I flew on one of those airlines that allow you to pick your own seat.That’s a good thing — if you arrive early enough to get on the “A” list, and I did. Once in the A line, I was cut off at the merge point by a B person.
A vigilant attendant caught the line jumper and directed him to the security check area. The guy was nothing but a line jumpin’, B boarder, looking to scam an aisle seat. I figure he got what was coming to him. Once on the plane, I was cheerfully greeted by David, the flight attendant, who urged me to choose a seat.
Pointing to the front row, I said, “Looks like I’ll be flying first class.”
“Yeah, right,” he said throwing me a coloring book, wings, and Oreos.
Kind of surly, I thought. Didn’t he realize he was talking to someone on the A list? I took the aisle seat while another passenger took the window seat. We were golden, two” A” list people ready to share their stories and a bag of broken crayons.
My seatmate told me that she races cars with her boyfriend and recently took first place in three races. Race car drivers! Impressive! Definitely an A-list person. Of course, I’m wondering when I’ll get to impress her with the fact that I’m a man of God. People are usually very impressed with that. If that doesn’t work, I usually tell them I’m a columnist and they fall over with astonishment.OK
— not.
Still, I wanted my chance to tell my story, right? Finally, the racing gal put her monolog in idle and asked what I do. “I’m a hospital chaplain,” I said. “Oh,” she said, in a manner doubting my identity as a human being. I guess not everyone is so enthralled with my noble profession. Then, with 11 words, she demotes me to her F-list. “My ex-husband is a hospital chaplain. He left me for God.”
Hoping to persuade her not to morph me into an image of her ex, I let it drop that I had been happily married for 23 years. “We were married 32,” she said trumping me by nine years. I was twisting in a 650-knot headwind as I reached to draw a stronger distinction between me and her ex.
“What kind of chaplain was he?”
“Southern Baptist”. Uh, oh. Match, set.
May Day. May Day! My ego was rapidly depressurizing as I reached for the dropping mask of professionalism. Suddenly, I realized that I had become someone else to this woman. She desperately needed me to wear the mask of someone she hated, but Halloween wasn’t for another week. Fortunately for me, I began to find some relevance in my questions.
“Where has all this left you, spiritually?” I asked.
“Nowhere. I have nothing to do with church.”
“Church is only a vehicle for spirituality. Have you given this man the power to rob you of your ability to touch God?”
Her pained look gave answer. She had cordoned off her life from anything remotely resembling the person she thought had brought all her pain. I sympathized with the strategy.
Years ago, rumors spread by a Lutheran colleague spun me into a major depressive episode. Despite the fact that God allowed a U-turn out of that depression, I still found it hard to appreciate Lutherans. I tried building a dam designed to prevent me from drowning in Lutherans, but when you are an interfaith chaplain, meeting Lutherans is fairly commonplace.
In the days that followed, I gained a new and wonderful Lutheran boss and a caring Lutheran colleague. Furthermore, my daughter enrolled in a Lutheran college and to make it worse, started dating a Lutheran! Agh! What was God doing? I was sure that there could be no good Lutherans. I wanted to cross these new friends off my “A” list.
The truth is that people come into our lives in different ways seeking to become individuals to us. People can’t be grouped and cloned. Attempting to identify people by A, B, or C lists is a futile way of building our own private biosphere of quarantined living. As our plane approached Las Vegas, she began to voice a willingness to gamble that I just might be a person with little or no resemblance to the hurt she knew.
She had the perfect opportunity to lash out, but in the end she chose a different path. With one last question, she introduced the possibility that life need not be a set of hostile, revolving tapes which doom us to poor relationships. “Can I have your card?” she asked. “I’d like to stay in touch.”
