People in Glass Houses Page 5

  THE WAY WE WERE

  I am standing in a cemetery in the hills as the coffi n of my friend’s mother is lowered into the ground. I have never met her but she is known to be a good woman. As a tireless nurse, she led many a patient to salvation, until her battle with cancer forced her to stop work.

  They are pillars of the church community, this family. They have been believing that God will raise their mother from the dead. They have been praying for three days since she died. They left her coffin open during the funeral, in case.

  Frank Houston is widely known to have raised people from the dead. Theirs is not an unreasonable expectation.

  Her coffin is being lowered into the ground. I’m guessing she’s staying dead. I would never have asked for such a thing in case it didn’t happen. I marvel at their faith. I still do. They talk about having recovered from their mother’s death. Somewhere, I haven’t.

  *

  I am sitting with my friend in the car park while she cries, blows her nose, cries, and turns Mariah Carey up and down on her stereo. ‘You don’t understand, Tanya,’ she says, ‘I’ve given him EVERYTHING, I gave him everything.’ I don’t know what you’re supposed to say to make it better after a breakup, but I am thinking, you can always give someone else everything, can’t you?

  She couldn’t have been talking about sex. Her boyfriend was an elder in the church. It just couldn’t have been sex, that was outside of the realms of possibility for us. But the impossible had happened.

  She loved him with all the intensity of the first adult relationship. By the time the relationship began to disintegrate, the routine was set. He would meet up with her on Friday and despite their best efforts at restraint, they would have sex on the weekend. Directly afterwards, he would insist that they both pray on their knees for forgiveness, which they would do. By the end of Sunday night’s church service, he would be overwhelmed by his guilt and would break up with her. Until Friday.

  This girl took the morning-after pill so many Mondays in a row that it was getting dangerous. Obtaining contraception implies intent. It isn’t an option for Christian girls, reality or not. She was not the only person who had given this elder everything. And as time went on, she was not to be the last.

  The pastors found out about his sexual behaviour and removed him from leadership for twelve months. Later he married and he and his lovely wife – an elegant blonde – went on to pastor a church of their own, although I understand it was taken away from them. They now attend Hillsong. He was always a strange sort of fellow, though she doesn’t seem to mind him. Having had two children of the same sex, he decided a couple of years ago to pray that God would change the sex of their third as-yet-unborn child, after the ultrasound gave an unwanted result. It was a prayer God did not answer.

  Chapter 4

  FRIENDS FOREVER

  Marshall Frady, in his book Billy Graham, quotes Billy as saying to him: ‘I love Chuck to this very day. He’s one of the few men I have ever loved in my life. He and I had been so close. But then, all of a sudden, our paths were parting. He began to be a little cool to me then. I think ...’ He pauses and then offers with a faint little smile, ‘I think that Chuck felt sorry for me.’

  It will sound unforgivably condescending, but I do. He has given up the life of unrestricted thought. I occasionally watch Billy in his televised campaigns. Forty years after our working together he is saying the same things, using the same phrases, following the same pattern. When he gives the invitation to come forward, the sequence, even the words are the same. I turn off the set, and am sometimes overtaken by sadness.

  I think Billy is what he has to be. I disagree with him at almost every point in his views on God and Christianity and think that much of what he says in the pulpit is puerile, archaic nonsense. But there is no feigning in Billy Graham: he believes what he believes with an invincible innocence. He is the only mass-evangelist I would trust.

  And I miss him.

  —Charles Templeton, Farewell to God (1996)

  Shazza introduced herself to me at the door of the warehouse in Gladstone Road. She was one of the people who handed out the church newsletter and greeted newcomers.

  ‘Hi, I’m Shazza,’ she said. I told her my name. She said she was fifteen, like me. Apart from that, she didn’t seem anything like me. She had long blonde hair, a babydoll face and movie-star teeth. She was quiet and friendly. Still, she was at least thirty years younger than my parents.

  After my initial culture shock and some church growth, I was no longer the new kid on the block, and I was ready to blend in a little with others. If I was going to get involved with this church, it wasn’t going to be by sitting next to my mother while she watched to see whether I was looking at boys that I wasn’t looking at. Mainly Fred and Elaine just bored me at church and it was uncool to still sit next to your parents.

  After nagging long enough, I eventually got to go to youth group. I wanted to get into the experience. There was no way that I was going to be all hand-raising and worshipping with my parents standing next to me. I was happy to sing and go along with the basic set-up, but I wasn’t going to reveal any extra vulnerability alongside the people who called the shots in my life. I mean, when the preacher says, ‘If there’s anyone here with sin they’re struggling with right now, put your hand up,’ you’re hardly going to run down to the altar in front of the people who hand out your pocket money.

  So it wasn’t till I got to youth group that I started feeling more involved. Saturday night youth group seemed to reinforce what we were learning on Sundays, and vice versa. By the time I was sixteen I was attending youth group every Saturday night and church twice on Sundays. I also went to an afterschool home fellowship group on Tuesdays.

  Even then I still wasn’t fitting in. I didn’t know how to talk to this kind of teenager. But Shazza was there, and it wasn’t too long before I met her best friend, Jewels. Jewels was cool. In 1987, she wore a headband around her long brown hair, and stockings under denim shorts. She was a much more rhythmical Pentecostal than me; she knew how to clap, when to close your eyes, when to throw a hand up in the air during the prayers. She was sincere. She just happened to be cool at the same time.

  I was desperate for someone who was my age, who was Pentecostal, and who wanted to discuss life. I had no one my age to talk to about the goings-on of the church or God. I found someone in Jewels.

  Jewels was being raised by a widow, who had only intended initially for the church to broaden her daughter’s horizons. A Pentecostal for twenty years before leaving for reasons unknown, Jewels’s mother had become Eastern in her spirituality. She was a nurse and a therapist, and a great fan of Jung.

  After the ashrams, as part of her religious education, Jewels’s mother took her to a small Pentecostal church down the road from their house in Baulkham Hills. Jewels was saved that night, aged twelve, and has never looked back, despite her mother’s indignation. She went to school on Monday and invited Shazza to Hills, and Shazza found Jesus too, having been looking for God at the time.

  While my parents were cursing my friends from school for their worldliness, Jewels’s mother was wringing her hands at her daughter’s devotion to this little group. Bloody born-again Christians, she would say. Jewels and I thought we might have been swapped at birth.

  The foundations of our friendship were set on the things we both believed in, and yet those things became the focus of our disagreements. I had questions, questions, questions, questions. She had faith enough to listen to them, and respond with her thoughts. Over the years, and mainly after some trauma or another, I would ask more questions and, patiently, Jewels would listen. She didn’t always have answers, and somewhere there I knew none of them would be good enough if she did. I wouldn’t accept them, but she never stopped my questioning.

  A Jewels is a rare creature. She is a tranquil soul. In twenty years of knowing her, I have never seen her eyes fl ash with fury, heard a genuinely bitter word drop from her mouth, or seen he
r come anywhere close to the despair I wake up with every second day. She is constant and consistent. And still we manage to laugh a lot together.

  I think she’s a bit sheltered and, like her mother, I always wished she had gone to university instead of bible college, or even as well as. But she is one of the people the System has rewarded. She agrees with them so they agree with her. Above all, she was one of the very first members of the Hills Christian Life Centre and they’d better give her a star in their walk of fame.

  To this day, I really couldn’t tell you why she wanted to be my friend. I know we giggle at the same things, the details in life that we know will amuse each other. I know we are sad at the same things, and curious about the same things. I know that she has always been passionate, determined and committed about whatever she is doing, something I always like in someone even if it’s geology that they’re passionate about. I know that her consistency and unshakeable belief have made her a soothing force all my life. It’s deeply reassuring to believe that someone somewhere hasn’t taken their eyes off the prize.

  And trust me, I tried to distract her. I’ve raged and sniggered, and maligned and threatened and disrespected all of her truths in my speeches. She never did the same to me. I’ve preached and proselytised, I’ve campaigned and informed, challenged and cursed when all she was doing was a load of washing. She never converted. She just listened. And laughed with me.

  There’s a chicken and egg riddle that goes around in my brain when it comes to Jewels. Is anybody really this chilled out, this together and this good in heart because of Jesus, or is it because of Jewels? And does she stay committed to me because of Jesus or because of Jewels?

  After all, I am told by the godly and godless alike that I am difficult. I am intense, and I never know when it’s time to go home. I think too much. For glaze-eyed born-again Christians this can be hard to manage. They don’t like talking about stuff for too long or too deeply and where they have to use their own powers of reasoning. Jewels was different. She was never afraid of a theological challenge. Somewhere, somehow she was given a shot of Jesus and she had been immunised against anything else. I must have been away that day.

  Her best friend, Shazza, didn’t understand the need for the challenge. To her it was redundant and futile. ‘When you love someone, Tanya,’ she would say, ‘these things don’t matter.’ Jewels eased my mind; Shazza broke my heart. While Jewels spent time trying to work with my understanding, Shazza summed up faith in a simple teenage sentence. Neither of them succeeded. Once again, love was never enough. In the end, any honeymoon I’d had was over, and I wanted better.

  The most common story I hear is that when you leave the AoG, nobody goes with you. You go from having a family to being spiritually homeless. There is suddenly no follow-up; the phone doesn’t ring and nobody comes to visit. People you’ve spent years with in deep and intimate fellowship disappear off the radar, even those friends who promised faithfully that your leaving wouldn’t make a difference.

  That was my experience almost completely. Except for Jewels, the only one who practised what I’d heard preached. I assumed when I considered leaving Hills that it would be hard, that everybody would notice me gone and would try to drag me back. I had justifications ready for such events, events which never came about.

  And for over twelve years, while I tried to find me in the midst of the confusion of Jesus vs Hell, Jewels stood by me with the patience of Job and made sure I didn’t get lost completely. I always knew I had a home in her heart and that she thought I was worth more than just a wretched backslider. Sometimes I wanted her to love me with the love of God, because I couldn’t see it any other way. Sometimes I wanted her to love me from herself, because she was such a great person. Sometimes I hated God for giving her a more equal share of faith. Some girls get upset about girls who eat junk food and don’t put on weight. I hate the ones who can listen to a lifetime of Christian propaganda and not get blown up by the letter bomb it comes in.

  Girls like Jewels remain unscathed, not maimed or twisted, but rather refined. By being herself, Jewels saved my life a hundred thousand times. Without her, I would have had nowhere to expunge so much of the turmoil and the turbulence. Nowhere to go to find out if God could still love me after all I’d done.

  No one else understood in the church or out of it. She understood, disagreed and she loved me anyway. Even though I ended up standing against everything she had fought hard all her life to preserve, she loved me. And that’s what we used to call, in the old days, a Christian.

  DEAR DIARY

  4 January 1987

  I can’t sleep … I haven’t been able to lately … I’ll be thin if it kills me! Maybe not kills me. I will be the perfect person yet, if it does kill me!

  Sun, 4 January 1987

  This is the day I was freed from the Spirit of rock’n’roll. I started up a conversation with John O’D who DJs at 2-Day FM and he told me he despises the music. He told me the worst person Satan has anointed is Bruce Springsteen. I told him he was telling the wrong person. He disagreed. We talked. Rock’n’roll is all about fornication, especially ‘Dancing in the Dark’. It hit so hard. He told me to pray when I got home. Then he offered to pray for me. He released me from the spirit of RNR and seduction and I cried. He told me God loves me and has so much for me. I came home and for 1 1/2 hours I sat in the dark crying, taking down posters, breaking records, destroying tapes. I am giving rock music up. I can’t believe I’m saying this. I will be free but I’m gonna miss my Bruce and I’m dying to hear Thunder Road.

  My parents are very proud. I am very scared and Michael Murphy is one of the most beautiful people in the world. He has an incredible joy bursting out. My walls are so empty. I’m very confused. I must talk to John again.

  5 January 1987

  Yes, it’s like someone died. I tried to exercise. I couldn’t. I rang up John. He is so good! I feel born again. I am a bit confused about some things he says but he is a great friend and he prayed and called me his young sister. I feel free but I miss Thunder Road. (John was the first person in Melbourne to play it.) He is a good man. Why he stays in radio, I don’t know. That is very strange. However my walls are bare of the High Priest of Satan but now there is definitely only one Lord of my life. I love Jesus heart &soul & always will. I can’t let something get in the way of us again. We hung on to a couple of tapes. Billy Joel and stuff. I’ll make a couple of copies & give ’em to Mum to keep.

  I’m gonna miss this life but I am gonna make it.

  John says he spiritually prophesies a life of glory & beauty for me. I love him. He is so powerful but I can’t believe him 100%. But I keep thanking God that I was freed from the spirit of rock’n’roll.

  Wed, 7 January 1987

  It’s okay! I’m surviving. I’ve never felt closer to God! Sometimes I just sit there and feel Him love me. I took communion by myself this morning and instantly I felt warmth and love. Jesus loves me and He loves everyone and I want to tell everyone.

  9 January 1987

  I know that whatever sadness, regrets, worries, doubts etc. I have, Satan tries to play with my mind (and I won’t let him). I would do the same again in a split second never looking back. I love my Lord. All barriers are broken down We are so close. I hang around the house all day restless. I read The Stand and watch Days. I am alive. I am Christian. With so many ‘bad’ witnesses no wonder there are so many bad people.

  Sun, 11 January 1987

  It’s okay. Lara came over for the last three days. Every day she comes to visit. I really wanted to talk to John O’D but he wasn’t in church today.

  12 January 1987

  Just quickly I read the bible so much now. Today about 1 1/3 yester 1 2/3 hours, that’s a lot for me but I need it. I’m going to beat this cancer. The days are running away sprinting, it’ll be school soon. I love my Lord Jesus!

  21 January 1987

  I enrolled in a Christian Foundations course, we sent for Vol I. This morning when I
woke up the intense craving for my love was gone. I really wanted to be rid of it! I feel ashamed for wanting it back. I’m very confused guilty unhappy but taking it one day at a time. God will help me. His angels will be of constant assistance and aid—they will make me realise the purpose for which I am here. Believe me, if I can live without it, you can! Although I feel guilty for wanting to compromise my sacrifice! I still feel there MUST be some acceptable music. Tell me, is it out there for me?

  I have no right to cry myself to sleep over music from Satan. I can tell you now that I love God with all my heart, mind and soul. When I said goodbye to Bruce a barrier was taken away and I could see clearly. I could touch God and really know he was there. I have only one Lord now. This is what it must be like to be saved. Thank you Jesus.

  28 January 1987

  I miss Bruce but it’s worth it.

  P.S. Footnote: When I finally spoke to John O’D on Sun 18 Jan (he had been sick) he spoke well but I felt I was getting a tape-recorded message and at the end he said, ‘Tanya, isn’t it?’ I laughed a little cynical ironic laugh so I am no longer overawed. He doesn’t like to listen, only talk. On last Sunday he preached. He just told stories, not any meaning, any point!! I like him but I used to like him much more.

  5 February 1987

  It’s so hard. I just had a huge fight with Mum and I can’t listen to Thunder Road and I miss him so much. God, will I ever survive this? I’m so alone. I try to remind myself of all my blessings but it’s so hard when you’re alone.

  12 March 1987

  I’m so fat and I have no boyfriend. I can’t live without it. It hurts me so much. It kills me. I almost regret my actions. I’m going crazy and I can’t hear anything from God, I miss it so much. I try so hard to be good. Oh God help me, I’m going crazy.