People in Glass Houses Read online

  Now that you’ve ensured that your old family knows who you are now, your new family knows who you once were and you no longer have any real idea who you are at all, the process is complete. Leaving is not so simple.

  Moving to another church used to be like going to a different restaurant, take it or leave it. Leaving a thought-reform program is laden with ‘exit costs’, those things you have to give up to leave or even to doubt the leader. All those business contacts, all that family, all the love, and truth and cash that’s been invested with passion. It’s hard to get up and just walk away from everything you’ve seen and experienced for yourself. And the more time you spend there, the harder it is to remember the old you.

  But why would you want to remember that life anyway? Why would you hanker for your old life of sin when Jesus died for freedom like this?

  ONLY THE GOOD DIE YOUNG

  Jordie was my med student’s best friend. My tall, blond med student, there on the other side of the church room, dreamy thing, always had his bouncy best friend next to him. That’s all I ever knew Jordie as. I had had my eye on that about-to-be doctor since I was sixteen and he is, of course, a specialist now and still unmarried. Oh, the agony. But Jordie, as I’ve said, was his best friend. Popular, outgoing, a Chosen One. Nice guy. His mop of curly hair reminded me of the guy from Simply Red. I never really knew him much, though the other girls did. I didn’t understand why they weren’t trying harder to marry the doctor. Clearly none of them had Jewish mothers.

  I didn’t know Jordie well by the time he came to my house, but I had known him through the others all those years in between. I caught up with him at one of the gang’s overpriced thirtieth birthday dinners and made some off-the-cuff remark about Hillsong merchandising. I was rambling. ‘I see sheets,’ I said, ‘with Hillsong on them, I see crockery with the logo, and most of all I see the amusement park.’

  ‘There are some people,’ he had commented, ‘who probably would agree with you, quite seriously.’

  I had never heard any disloyalty coming out of any of their mouths. They were all there that night, the faces that I had seen since I was sixteen.

  A bunch of them had gone through bible college together, and most of them were still impenetrable. But he wasn’t.

  A few of us ended up back at his fancy city apartment. I was delighted to be among the A-list again. The Spirit really does seem to fall in the front rows. Here I was, the infidel, having drinks with the favourites.

  He was happy at that time but, then, he never stopped seeming happy. We decided we should have lunch but, both living very busy lives—his successful and international, mine humdrum and decidedly local—it was six months before we managed to catch up.

  Platonic relationships with Christian boys are the best, when you can actually find a real one. It’s novel. This was a lovely man, with no shortage of dates with beautiful women. And he was one of those guys where you close your eyes and try really hard but you know you can never be attracted to him, much less marry him, regardless of how wonderful a husband he would make. Sad, but true.

  When a lunch date was finally set, again at his apartment, I turned up, oblivious as ever, having no idea what I was in for.

  Gone was the healthy, happy character who’d been the same since forever. In front of me was a relative skeleton, and the spirit of Tigger was dwindling into Eeyore.

  ‘How come you’ve lost fi fty kilos?’ I said. He turned away, tears in his eyes. Good start.

  He got us each a drink and began his story. I don’t know to this day why he told me. I don’t know why he involved me in his life. He didn’t know me apart from the consensus that I was the difficult one, the one the girls hung on to, who he’d never really talked to because he’d never wanted to date me. Courting is important to Hillsong men. There’s not much time to waste on girls as friends.

  He had no need for my input. His whole life was successful in so many ways, and he had way more friends than time, having always been one of those people who can talk to anyone. He had money to burn and the power and influence we had been raised to believe we could wield. He was changing the world and making money and a fine reputation out of it.

  So here was this well liked and loved man in front of me, swaying as he fixed our drinks. Skinny. Calm but edgy, if that makes sense.

  He told me he’d been randomly attacked by two men at an ATM two months before. He couldn’t tell me all of it, but he told me enough. His bid for freedom, only to be dragged back by his attackers. The way he dropped his key down a grate so they couldn’t get into his building. Then suddenly being released after all those hours.

  Where was God? I thought it but never said it. Where was God? This person had put in years of his life to the Cause— creatively, inventively, passionately—to reach people because he was spirited and determined to do it. Where was the God that he had preached about from the pulpits? Where was God for those twelve hours?

  There was to be no vengeance. His attackers had threatened him sufficiently not to report it. And here sat Jordie, honestly, openly, all that money, all that success, all that devotion, and he did not know what to do in the next five minutes.

  It is a humbling experience to sit next to a broken human being. They do not struggle, they do not argue. They exist broken, not even waiting for an eleventh-hour reprieve, just waiting to find out what to do next. Hope has not gone for good, but it has taken long-service leave, and its substitute is often a simple, cold despair.

  I didn’t know what to say—there seemed nothing to be said— and so when he had finished he took me out on the balcony and showed me most of Sydney’s angles through his binoculars. He pointed out the houses in the next streets. He had been watching them. The views were really overwhelming, stretching one side of the city to the other, but he wasn’t very interested in the city’s breadth. He was fixated on the houses in the next couple of streets.

  Was he paranoid? He was jumpy, edgy, a little manic almost.

  Surely he was post-traumatic. It made perfect sense. Poor guy, struggling without any professional help, surrounded by well-meaning Christians, I thought. After quite a while doing alley analysis, we came back in from the balcony and I said very little about it and went home.

  Weight loss, not working, flashbacks, jumpy, out of character, thought disorder—I began to research post-traumatic stress disorder to find out where he could get information or something, maybe a victims of crime counsellor. He was clearly not doing well. Still, I always assumed that he had more resources and support than he could handle. He was already talking about avoiding family phone calls. He was fine, as far as he was concerned, and wanted to be left alone a lot. Which made sense. It had been a devastating ordeal.

  I found out after I talked with him why the others had been friends with him all these years. I never saw anyone other than someone his mother would be proud of, even in his clearly most confusing and dark times. Arrogant, inconsiderate and rude, sure, but in that adorable, Pentecostal, laugh it off way. Make a joke out of it and everything will be all right.

  A month later he called me asking to stay. His flatmate had thrown him out of the fancy apartment because of his bizarre behaviour. No stranger to bizarre behaviour myself, I offered him a spare room. He chose the couch.

  He stayed there for a month, coming and going and sleeping.

  When he woke up, I would feed him if I was there. I figured getting his strength up was priority one. He slept long and deep.

  Good, I thought, more strength, more time to heal.

  Often he wasn’t there but I made sure not to ask questions. I thought it was respectful, and it was. Whatever he was going through, the pressure from people who cared was intensifying it.

  So I tried to care nonchalantly, as it were. Be there when needed, nothing more.

  He would sleep for sixteen or seventeen hours at a stretch.

  When he was awake, he was dazed. He was still fun, still funny, still quick, still insightful, but he was dre
amy or preoccupied or something. He would tell me stories about the A-list and things that he had seen and been through with the people behind the curtain. I was furious. He wasn’t. I never saw hatred in him, just a more cynical approach. I had never heard stories such as these. He was resigned to them, and had reasonable explanations for all.

  The pastors, he told me, were so wrapped up in the ministry tour that they did not have a connection to reality. They were so far removed that we couldn’t expect them to behave like regular folk.

  But overall they were good guys.

  He ran out one night to see his grandmother, who was dying in a nursing home not far from my house. How he got into the nursing home that late I don’t know, but it was typical of him.

  When she died a couple of weeks later, he gave a eulogy that left everybody weeping.

  After Jordie left my house he went to his close friends, a couple who took him in and supported him for months, I’m told—I had little to do with him. He gained weight, went back to work and not long after met a girl. About a year later, they got married.

  Things had been looking up for a while. Times were still hard, his mind wouldn’t leave him alone, but life was starting over for real.

  It wasn’t going to be all okay, but at least it was going.

  I met him a couple of times for coffee and he still seemed dazed but resigned to getting on with it and mustering up all the enthusiasm he could for his next overseas project, which was bound for success. He was focused on his wife and there was no need to rehash the past, so I didn’t nag for an update. He seemed to have moved on, and so there was truly very little room for me in his life now.

  Then I got a call that he was dead; a drug overdose. I assumed it was a bad reaction to a crazy experiment that zany people might do. I was wrong, and I had been very, very wrong about him.

  They tell me that it doesn’t matter that we will never know how it all came about, but to me it does. Someone sold him the drugs and someone knows what happened. Most of us never even knew he took drugs at all until he was dead.

  Maybe it was my arrogance that got in the way. I had identified that he was post-traumatic, and that to me explained all his behaviour. I’ve worked in this field long enough to know post-trauma when I see it in one of my friends, thank you very much.

  But not a roaring drug addiction. I wasn’t the only one who missed it. He told so few people anything because of the shame, the confusion.

  The funeral was beautiful, everyone wept. Yet there was an understanding, an unspoken relief almost. He had been broken beyond healing. The Lord had taken him to heaven to peace.

  A friend of Jordie’s widow said to me, ‘You work with these things, don’t you? He had a relapse. He was fighting so hard. It was God saying, “It’s okay, you don’t have to fight any more.”’

  Thirty-one years old and too hard for God. This goes against everything we had understood God to be. Through Christ all things are possible. God created the universe with a spoken word—nothing is too hard for him. He who did not spare his own son but gave him up, will he not then give us all things? Is there some time when we are supposed to gracefully let go? I am grateful every day that nobody gracefully let go of me. Because there were too many times that I would damn well have gone, ungracefully, kicking, screaming and cursing, I would have gone with the greatest of joy. So many of us would at different times, wouldn’t we?

  Is Jordie one of those cases we just can’t account for? Is he one of those questions we’ll have to ask God when we get to heaven?

  Is there a bible college with the answer to this that someone could refer me to?

  It isn’t good enough for me that he’s dead and that that’s the best outcome, really. It isn’t good enough that he was way more ashamed than most anyone because of the mantle on his shoulders. Whatever happened—and they keep reminding me that we will never know—he died alone and without the real help that just might have saved him. Why couldn’t he find it?

  The God I was told about could have performed a miracle, a trans formation, turned his life around, upside down and brought him out of Egypt’s bondage. But what happens after you get to the Promised Land, when you’ve swallowed all the milk and honey you can handle and more? Then what? Once you have maxed out your life, and blessed many with your blessing, then what? How do you cope with reality?

  His wife was serene at the funeral. She was graceful and strong.

  She wasn’t angry or unresolved like I am. She stood proudly and said that, in her grief, Isaiah was all she could find for comfort, for in chapter 57 it says:

  The righteous perish and no one ponders it in his heart; Devout men are taken away, and no one understands That the righteous are taken away to be spared from evil.

  Those who walk uprightly enter into peace; they find rest as they lie in death.

  I had never met her but the admiration welled up, again, for her strength during the unfathomable. The Christians were convinced of Jordie’s newfound happiness. I’m still not. The state provides welfare that shuns the hard cases. Wasn’t Jesus supposed to be different like that? And with my friend’s private-school education, his mastery of language and his buoyant personality, with all that love and all that support, how much harder, then, will the really hard cases be?

  He was clever and shifty, a storyteller, a prankster, an actor and a preacher. In the end he lied to almost everyone and told different lies to different people. There was little that anybody really could have done. He was determined and headstrong and spoilt.

  Those who loved him are not alone in asking why and how this happened. It happens in every drug death.

  Still, it haunts me. My own insecurity, my own arrogance, did they get in the way? Almost no one would have thought he would take drugs. He knew this and used it as every middle-class drug user does to get away with it for as long as he possibly could. Still no one suspected. And if they did, they scoffed at the idea. He and my mother are about as likely to be injecting drug users, I would have thought, but I have been forced to scrutinise my mother now.

  It’s none of my business, really. I can lay no claim to this grief.

  I just wish I had recognised humanity in Christians for what it really is instead of what we are told it is. Or could be. If only we try harder. Or let God in more. Make God bigger. Reach our potential. Have all God’s got for you. I thought the cream of the crop was special, too special to get hurt, and even more dangerous, untouchable.

  It is what it is and, yes, we may never know. But if I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me and if two or more are gathered together in his name it will be done, then why wasn’t it? And more than that, when they buried him, why wasn’t anybody else asking?

  Alava Shalom (M.H.D.S.R.I.P)

  ALL ALONG THE

  WATCHTOWER

  Chapter 15

  HOLL ABACK GIRL

  In the case of the girls, one watched them turning into matrons before they had become women. They began to manifest a curious and really rather terrifying single-mindedness. For the girls also saw the evidence on the Avenue, knew what the price would be, for them, of one misstep, knew that they had to be protected and that we were the only protection there was. They understood that they must act as God’s decoys, saving the souls of the boys for Jesus and binding the bodies of the boys in marriage. For this was the beginning of our burning time.

  And I began to feel in the boys a curious, wary, bewildered despair, as though they were now settling in for the long, hard winter of life.

  —James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963)

  Wanting to be a good Christian, Elaine always forgave him.

  She told herself: this time it’s different. This time he’s really sorry. He even prayed with me! I know he’s really changed and that he’s seeking God this time.

  —Dr Margaret Josephson Rinck,

  Christian Men who Hate Women (1990)

  It started as a conversation with my next-door neighbour. He told me his
work colleague went to Hillsong to pick up girls.

  ‘Is he a Christian?’ I asked, yet another layer of my green skin starting to peel.

  ‘No,’ he laughed at me, shaking his head.

  ‘So he goes to Hillsong for the sole purpose of picking up girls?’ I was in shock.

  ‘Yes,’ he tried to explain, ‘all that music, lights, it’s like a dance party.’

  Then Sam de Brito from the Sunday Telegraph wrote about his friend Benny, who had recently converted to Christianity and was attending Hillsong.

  ‘You could do a lot worse than hook up with a Christian girl,’ Benny said. ‘At least you know she’d be honest, she’s living a good life and, if things get tough, she’s not just gonna bail out but work on it with you in front of her community.’

  But it was when Miranda Devine, also in the Sunday Telegraph, wrote three months later that I realised this approach was a common one. Due to the male terror that is arising from this century’s female coldness towards them, the Stronger Sex are choosing weaker women and overtly trying to break the spirit of those who would survive. ‘My friends are seriously considering quitting the bar and nightclub scene and dating girls from Hillsong,’ a young bachelor is quoted. ‘The women out there are mystifying.’

  Once again, the winner is Sydney. We have a brand of cheerleaders all of our own. The Hillsong Girls. Don’t Christian girls wear denim skirts and white blouses? Not these ones. They know that if you don’t look great you won’t get (as good) a husband, and that if you already have one, to quote Bobbie, he’ll leave you ‘should the world come knocking on your door’.

  Hillsong girls don’t take drugs and go out all night. They are generally financially confident, if not well endowed, because they understand prosperity principles. And they know that boys will be boys, so women must submit and obey. That’s what they’ve been taught. All they need is a handsome prince to place a largecarated diamond on their French-manicured finger.