An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part VIII (Why I Believe - Or Disbelieve - As I Do)

You may have noticed that these posts are not scholarly works. I don't go into exhaustive detail or cite sources. Other people have done a much better job than I have ever done in putting together a coherent view of The Bible from the point of view of someone who doesn't consider it God's Word. I heartily recommend the works of Dr. Bart Ehrman who has written such works as Misquoting Jesus, Lost Christianities, Heaven and Hell, and How Jesus Became God among many others. 

Before I continue with my opinions of The Bible, especially the Gospels and Epistles, from an agnostic viewpoint, let me give you a brief tour of how my opinion of The Bible has changed in my lifetime. The blog series "So, You Want to Join a Cult" covers most of this ground:  So, You Want To Join A Cult

I grew up in an Irish-Catholic family on the very edge of New York City in a neighborhood that was overwhelmingly Catholic, mostly Irish and Italian. There were a few Protestant churches, and there was a significant Jewish presence, but Catholicism was very much the default in this neighborhood, dominated by two Catholic parishes, St. Pius X and St. Claire. We went to church every Sunday and attended Catholic grade school. As was usual with lay Catholics, at least in that era, we didn't trouble to much about doctrine or theology and left that stuff to the priests. I was familiar with the broad outlines of the Gospels and the major themes of the Old Testament, but really didn't know much about the details of religion at all. It was like the air — it was just there.

In my teens I visited some local Protestant churches. While I noticed some differences in the services, the broad outline was the same, or at least seemed that way. More to satisfy my curiosity than anything else I studied non-Christian religions, but it was simply an intellectual study and never really took. 

When I was fourteen I worked as a clerk in a financial firm in the financial district of lower Manhattan. On my lunch break I encountered a variety of street corner preachers who clustered around the Federal Building across from the New York Stock Exchange and began to hear about some of the beliefs of Evangelical/Fundamentalist Christianity such as "the rapture" and the concept of becoming "born again", which we Catholics never heard about. Still no changes in my overall belief system, but I was starting to entertain some serious challenges to my worldview. During my freshman year of college I encountered The Way.  Eventually I became convinced that this group was a cult, not so much due to their beliefs, but because of their practices. Their theology was for the most part similar to the strain of Evangelical Protestantism known as dispensationalism. Their claim to fame in theological terms was that, unlike almost all Christians, they did not believe that The Bible supports the belief that Jesus was God. A slightly less controversial position (although not unheard of) was that upon death you did not proceed to heaven or hell (or purgatory for Catholics) but were in a kind of sleep until the "return of Christ". 

What attracted me to this group was that they appeared methodical in their study of The Bible and were able to cite specific verses to support all of their beliefs. While this is pretty common now, back then it was pretty rare, and unheard of among Catholics. I was with this group from 1978-2001, with a hiatus in the 90's and was very much a true believer. I believed that The Bible, in its original texts, was divinely inspired by God. The Way taught that, utilizing certain commonsense methods, one could easily determine God's will. The Bible, they taught, interpreted itself, all you had to do was read it without preconceived notions. 

In 2000 the (married) top leader had been expelled after conducting an affair with a married woman that she alleged was nonconsensual. This caused me to question, not The Bible itself, but some of the things that this particular leader had been teaching that, to put it mildly, were "out there" in the context of what the group's main teachings were. I reasoned that someone who didn't have the sense to keep his pants on couldn't expect anyone to trust his interpretation of scripture. I compiled a long list of things where the leader's teachings were at odds with what the founder of The Way had taught. My questioning got me kicked out of the group. 

I became aware of many offshoots from the original group that had split off during the leadership crisis that accompanied the founder's death in the late 80's. Despite all of them using the same "Keys to Interpretation" in their understanding of The Bible they were coming up with wildly differing conclusions. I started to see that even the founder's theology didn't really stand up to the self-interpreting Bible model and that his own conclusions were his own and not necessarily the only possible conclusions to be made utilizing the "Keys to Interpretation". I briefly considered returning to mainstream Christianity, but it didn't take long to see that no one had a reliable grasp of "The Truth" and even though most denominations believed that they were right and everyone else was wrong, they were all using the same Bible to come to different conclusions. 

It was at that point that I determined that there was no objective reason to elevate The Bible and Christianity over any other system of belief. This didn't mean that I had decided that it was definitely wrong, but that there wasn't any reason to assume that it was necessarily right either. I wasn't mad at God (something I was accused of), I just wasn't convinced that he existed, and if he did, at least not necessarily in the form that Christianity claimed he did. 

This is the path that I have walked that got me to the point where I see The Bible as just another book. At best a collection of books and letters and essays and pamphlets outlining men's opinions about God, the world, Jesus and morality. Not a perfect, handed-down-from-heaven, infallible, document. 

Start at the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part IX

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part VII (The New Testament - A Collection of Religious Pamphlets)

There's a lot different ways that people look at The Bible. There's the view that it's inerrant and infallible. That view can be applied to the originals (which no longer exist) or can be extended to the modern texts. Typically those who hold the "inerrant and infallible" position believe that there are translation errors that once corrected will reveal what was in the original. It can be viewed as allegorical and metaphorical. It can be  viewed literally. It can be viewed as containing historical accuracy, or that the historical sections are not as important as the theological lessons being taught. Protestants say they believe in sola scriptura, scripture alone, while Catholics believe that the scriptures must be mediated by Church leaders. Various churches claim to understand what The Bible really means and encourage or browbeat others to "just read The Bible" as if its message was self-evident. 

For a book that so many believe is self-explanatory and will reveal its truths if you simply read it, there are certainly a myriad of opinions about what it actually means, not to mention disagreements about what it actually says. "True believers" will accuse those who interpret it differently of simply being wrong, or more pointedly, as "not Christians" or even being inspired by Satan. They look to a mythical idyllic time, written down in The Acts of The Apostles, where there was a clear, bright line between the truth and lies, between orthodoxy and heresy. When the difference between those who "opposed Paul" or those who the early church branded as heretics and those who adhered to The Bible was as clear as day. 

Except back in those days there was no Bible.

Yes, parts of what became the New Testament were circulating around, and the Tanakh, in its original Hebrew as well as the Greek translation known as the Septuagint, was long established, but the concept of a unified collection of writings that would be consider scripture on par with the Jewish scriptures was an idea whose time had not yet arrived. In addition, there was broad disagreement among Christians regarding a whole range of beliefs about the nature of Jesus, about what his death and resurrection accomplished, about how Christians should behave, whether non-Jews could become Christians, the afterlife, the resurrection, the Kingdom of God and anything else that you can imagine. All of those people were Christians and they all believed that they were following the teachings handed down from Jesus through his apostles. But nothing written down and there was no central authority to ensure there was uniformity of belief. Even in the documents that eventually made it into the Bible there are indications, sometimes quite explicit, that not all Christians believed or taught the same thing. 

It was this disagreement that caused, not only contradictions and variances between the different books of the New Testament but contradictions and variances within some of the books.  Keep in mind that there was no central authority as we understand it today for many decades — plenty of time for competing opinions to grow roots and accumulate adherents. The belief that Jesus' teachings were passed down unchanged from him to his apostles to their followers in an unbroken chain is a myth. We know for certain of several distinct "Christianities" that existed in the early centuries after Jesus that were eventually defeated or subsumed by what became the Catholic Church. Even then there were arguments among the leaders and theologians of a supposedly united church. These differences, and the majority response to them, contributed to what became "canon of scripture". If you know what to look for you can see where certain passages were written as a response to these "other Christianities", as well as changes to the text for similar reasons. 

Major early divisions among Christians included Ebionites, who believed that a convert to Christianity must follow Jewish Law and practice; Marcionites, a sect that viewed the God of the Old Testament as a different and inferior God than the God of Jesus in the New Testament; and various types of Gnostics. Marcionite Churches competed successfully with Orthodox/Catholic Churches, lasting at least into the fifth century with its ideas surviving in various forms for centuries longer. Divisions even within what became Catholic Christianity centered around the nature of Jesus. Was he a mortal man? Was he actually raised physically from the dead? Or was it a "spiritual" resurrection? Was he God? If so, in what sense was he God? (I'll be addressing the permutations of Christology in another post). These disagreements manifested themselves in the contradictions in the New Testament. 

An article of faith among many people is that at some point in the history of Christianity certain books, or selections within books, were "taken out" of The Bible. Each of the books that eventually made it into the Bible, as well as the many that did not, all had their separate history. The authors of each book each had their own spin on what Jesus' message was, what stories confirmed that message, as well as Jesus' nature, salvation, sin, you name it. Since they were spread by believers manually writing out each manuscript, errors crept in. Some deviation from the originals occurred simply due to human error, some due to the copyist making changes by "correcting" what they thought were previous errors, and others due to intentional changes made in order to insert the copyist's opinion in the text. 

Eventually the leaders of the faction that became the Catholic Church*  decided that they needed an approved list of books that would make up the "canon of scripture". It went through several permutations before assuming the form we have today in the fourth century.** A number of books that had been in circulation were not included in the newly formed Bible, many of them are lost to history, but some survived in whole or in part. So, while no books were removed, definite decisions were made regarding what would be included. 

One way I look at the books of the New Testament, in addition to being biographies and pastoral letters, is similar to political pamphlets, pushing their own agenda and refuting those of their opponents. The minority, or losing, theologies were branded heresies and their writings (mostly) destroyed. History is written by the victors. In the case of Christianity, the victors were the faction that became the Catholic Church. 

Start at the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part VIII

* The churches known as "orthodox" at this time were not separate from the Catholic Church centered in Rome

** There were a number of books in the Greek translation of the Old Testament that were included as part of Catholic Bibles, these apocryphal, or deuterocanonical, books were not included in Protestant Bibles post-Reformation.

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part VI (So, Just When IS The End of The World Scheduled?)

A quick look at the New Testament and we see that it starts with the four Gospels, followed by The Acts of The Apostles, then the Epistles of Paul, a few other epistles and the big scary Book of Revelation. But the books were not written in the same order as the events that they allegedly chronicle. The first book written was I Thessalonians, dated 15-20 years after Jesus' ministry. Galatians, I & II Corinthians, Romans, Philemon and Philippians were all written before the very first Gospel was written, 35-40 years after Jesus' time. All this information from Paul was being passed around before anyone thought that anything resembling a biography of Jesus would be a good idea.  

In a previous post I mentioned that I thought that it was likely that Jesus existed, not that everything said about him was true, but that a person on whom the Gospels was based existed. I believe that the existence of Paul is even more of an historical certainty — unlike Jesus we have contemporary documents — actually written (or at least dictated) by Paul. At some point I'll discuss the conclusion by many Biblical scholars that not everything attributed to Paul was actually written by him. 

One of the most striking differences between the Jesus of the Gospels and the Christianity that Paul writes about is that Jesus, according to his biographers, was mostly concerned with how people acted, while Paul was mostly focussed on what people believed about Jesus. 

As discussed previously, it is my view that Jesus was an Apocalyptic Prophet, i.e. he was preaching that the world as we knew it was soon to end, brought about by God's intervention. God would then establish his kingdom in which Jesus believed that he would be a key figure. He preached that to "enter the kingdom" one had to completely reject the things of the world, including riches, personal attachments and even family. People's actions were of paramount importance. Jesus believed that this would happen soon. 

But that didn't happen. 

One of the subjects covered in I Thessalonians, a letter from Paul to the church in Thessalonica, was the details of Jesus' future return. People among his followers had died and other Christians were worried that maybe Jesus wasn't coming back as promised. Those still among the living were concerned that their loved ones had missed out on the establishment of the kingdom of God. And that if they weren't alive when it came about, they themselves wouldn't make it into the brave new world. It's important to note that beliefs about the afterlife have evolved over the centuries. Resurrection in the Judea of this era was more of a national resurrection, i.e. Israel would be reestablished as a kingdom. Ideas about how this would affect individuals, i.e. an end days judgement and resurrection of people depended on what sect you identified with. Sadducees, for example, did not believe in a resurrection of individuals at all. 

At this point in Church history, none of the writings that would come to be included in the canon of scripture had been written yet, let alone available for people to read. So there wasn't yet a doctrinal standard to which they could refer to for answers. Paul tells them not to worry about it, when the resurrection takes place, the dead will rise first. This is the first attempt in canon to explain away the discrepancy between what Jesus said and what was happening (or not happening). Jesus was pretty clear that The End would take place within the lifetime of his generation; Paul is, like so many "prophets" after him, trying to explain why what had been so confidently predicted wasn't happening. But at this point Paul still believes that the resurrection will take place pretty soon. He's just calming down those who are worried that they'll die before the good stuff happens. Eventually he changes his mind. 

Paul was human, just like everyone else. As he got older and his own death stared him in the face, he wasn't so sure. In the Epistle to the Philippians, he writes: "To live is Christ and to die is gain" and in II Corinthians "..would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord" indicating that a Christian would be in the presence of Jesus Christ upon death. He wouldn't be the first person to change their mind about death as their own approached. But I Thessalonians is still in the Bible, with the description of the dead rising and the living levitating into the sky. An agnostic like myself views that as a contradiction. Some Christians hold to one and ignore the other, others explain away the version of afterlife that they don't like. Still others combine the two, with Christians being temporarily in the presence of God after death and being raised up bodily later to be judged. 

But still, 2,000 years later, Christians are still waiting for Jesus to come back and get them, and he still fails to do so.

Start at the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part VII

Nobody Wants To Be the Creepy Old Guy

Single life: not what it’s cracked up to be. Several married guys expressed envy at the supposed carefree life that I was living during the four years between marriages, but it certainly was a bit less exciting and a bit more stressful than they thought it was. (The grass is always greener, isn’t it?)

The first few months that I lived in The Hovel I didn’t have much time for a social life. In addition to my main job at Super Saver I had a second job as a rural paper carrier, getting started around 2:00 every morning and finishing up at about 6:00. It wasn’t a very difficult job, it fact it was refreshingly easy, no one looking over my shoulder; just delivering the papers. I’d drive about 130 miles every morning and after paying for gas and setting aside money for tires and taxes I was netting about $900 each month, which helped me start to get my huge debt paid off, as well as enable me to put aside some money for a vacation to the East Coast. Having to start work three hours after the bars closed didn’t allow for much late night carousing, although I did try it once or twice. One morning, after closing the bar and picking up my papers early, I got extremely sleepy and pulled off to the side of the road to close my eyes for a few minutes. Six hours later, much more than the “few minutes” that I’d envisioned, I woke up and finished my route. Many customers were angry that morning. Even though I didn’t have any opportunity for late nights, I still managed to convince one woman to date me during my paper route days.

The Hovel had a washer and dryer on the ground level, but they both seemed to be on the indistinct border between appliance and habitat, so I did my laundry at “LaunDry Land” (that’s right, with the capital “D” right in the middle of the word “laundry”) a few blocks away. Marija, the clerk who ran the place in the evenings, and I hit it off (it seemed to me) after I correctly guessed from her accent that she was from The Ukraine, and not Russia or one of the other Slavic countries. Being 20 years removed from active dating, which pretty much means I reverted to having the social skills of a teenager, I mistook her friendliness for flirting until her husband started hanging around while she was working. I don’t know if she felt sorry for me or thought she was doing me a favor, but Marija set me up with Laura, another LaunDry Land customer. At this point in my dating career, I hadn’t quite developed anything resembling standards, and any primitive proto-standards that I may have had floating about my subconscious apparently didn’t include sanity. Continual ranting about the ex-husband who had thrown her out, the string of jobs that she had been fired from and her complete inability to stay focused on a subject for more than ten seconds should have been a clue that I was hooked up with someone with whom things could go horribly wrong. But I was so thrilled that someone was paying attention to me that I overlooked red flags that would have enraged a herd of bulls. After a couple of dinner-and-a-movie dates I quietly moved on when Laura suggested that she accompany me to New York, where I was going to visit family, in order to scout out ideas for her “business”, the details about which it never became clear. She also asked for me to “invest” in her business. Marija apologized to me profusely.

One of the problems with those paper route jobs is that its seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, no days off unless you find your own substitute. Since I had planned a trip to the East Coast in June of that summer I began looking for a sub for the route in early March, but without any success. Since I was using the paper route to make payments on my credit card debt I figured out, based on how much I was making each month, how much that I would have to save up so I could forgo a second job and figured that I could quit my route at the end of May and take off until August without missing any payments. So I started the month of June with only my main job, with my evenings pretty much free. I had Saturdays off and had been working 2:00–10:00PM on Sundays, so Friday and Saturday nights were now open, but first, a trip to the East Coast.

It had been eleven years since I had been to New York; I had nieces, nephews and in-laws that I had never met.  I hadn’t been too nice to my family while I had been in The Way; a few months before my trip I started putting together an itinerary that would allow me to visit not only my parents, but also my siblings who lived in other cities and reestablish relationships with them. At the time I was involved with an anti-Way website called Grease Spot Café, which got its name from a remark The Way’s leader made about people who left the organization, predicting that they’d be “grease spots by midnight” and I began working visits to some of my online buddies from Grease Spot into my trip. I left on a Monday afternoon and drove until about midnight, staying overnight in a hotel in Illinois. The Cavalier station wagon was gone, sold to my mechanic after getting in an accident some months earlier. With the insurance money I purchased another rust-bucket, a white 1986 Pontiac 6000. Just as rusty as the Cavalier, the Pontiac had a seemingly unsolvable problem: after driving for a while, it would begin to buck and stall when coming to a stop, especially when stopping or slowing suddenly, like when exiting the interstate. Starting up immediately after it stalled was difficult, involving working the brake and gas pedals simultaneously until enough speed could be worked up. This made for constant anxiety regarding the prospects for the car starting each time it was shut off. Parallel parking was out of the question.

Arising early on Tuesday morning I proceeded to Dayton Ohio to spend the evening with some ex-Way folks who used to live in Omaha. Dave and Dana were the first ex-Way people that I had knew who, appeared to be living a normal, even a prosperous life. I had begun feeling like I was destined to live in “a hovel” and have no friends for the rest of my life, so ingrained had the condemnation from The Way and my ex-wife become. So meeting some people who had moved beyond Way-world was an important step in my evolution. I did drink too much coffee and had a hard time falling asleep in the little kid’s bunk bed that they had put me in.

On Wednesday morning, after a hearty breakfast, I drove across Ohio, a slice of West Virginia and most of Pennsylvania to arrive at the home of Gail, one of the WOW’s from my year in Sidney and Kearney over twenty years earlier. About ²/₃ of the way through Ohio the scenery begins to change from “flat” to “rolling” in preparation for “mountainous”, which describes most of the drive through Pennsylvania. This was a long drive. Accompanying me on this trek across the Quaker State was my trusty collection of cassette tapes. Yes, you read that correctly. CD players in cars, while standard equipment in the newer vehicles, were not universally found in the vintage vehicles that I drove. My habit, technologically speaking, is to stay a jump or two behind the curve, hence a cassette deck when everybody else is laughing at how old fashioned CD’s are. Fortunately for me, the public library lends out CD’s, which I was able to record on to tape for my listening pleasure. So the long miles across Penn’s Woods were made more pleasurable by Mott the Hoople’s Greatest Hits, Dick Dale’s Tribal Thunder, The Who’s Quadrophenia, Oasis’ What’s the Story Morning Glory?, and Birds of Fire by The Mahavishnu Orchestra.

I had not seen Gail in over twenty years and we had only recently been corresponding through email. Gail greeted me at the door with a snarky remark about my car, informed me that she had to go to class and left me in the care of her husband and three daughters, none of whom had I ever met, and gave me permission to use her computer, which one of her daughters kicked me off five minutes later. After sitting around in uncomfortable silence for a while, Chuck (Gail’s husband) decided that what we needed to break the ice was grilled bratwurst, beer and cigars. So when Gail returned from class, there was Chuck and me, sitting out back with a couple of brews, a pair of cigars and with mustard stains on our teeth, deep into some serious male bonding.

After a diner breakfast and a brisk walk to work it off it was back in the car to meet Cindy and her kids in Trenton New Jersey, dinner at Burger King and then off to Jersey City. I spent the night in a cheap motel so that I could be up before dawn on Friday morning to visit lower Manhattan and the location of the World Trade Center. The 9-11 attacks had taken place about nine months previously and the WTC site was still a mess. The enormity of what had happened hit me the night before as I was heading east across New Jersey. At one time the New York skyline, dominated on the south end by the Twin Towers, was visible for many miles to the west. But now, as the lighted skyscrapers hove into view, a prominent gap stood where the steel and glass once soared into the sky. I had to pull off to side of the road; the tears in my eyes made it difficult to drive.

It was still dark the next morning as I made my way across the bridge into Manhattan to visit Ground Zero. It’s fascinating to see New York City in the early morning hours before all the office workers show up. Delivery guys unloading trucks, restaurants firing up the grills, newspaper stands opening up; it’s a different world. It was without a doubt a really different world with the open wound of Ground Zero so prominent a part of Lower Manhattan. With the attacks less than a year in the past, the improvised memorials were still up, photos and notes and flags stuck to light poles and churchyard fences. The atmosphere was at once a great miasma of sadness and a fierce pugnacity and pride that “The City” was still standing, still reveling in its in-your-faceness.

After a few hours I jumped in the car and headed out to Port Jefferson Station, my parents’ home, arriving on Friday afternoon. I had never been to their post retirement home, several hours west of the neighborhood where I spent by childhood, Rosedale in the borough of Queens. Previous visits, the most recent which had been eleven years before, found me sleeping in the bedroom that I occupied from the age of six to when I moved out at twenty, eating at the little table in the yellow-walled kitchen with the poorly repaired hole where I had once thrown a chair at my brother Mike (After throwing the chair at him and seeing the hole, we dropped our disagreement and worked together to repair and paint over the hole, which our parents never found out about. Years later two of my sons got in a fight and put a much larger hole in the laundry room wall. They could not repair it, but did pay for the dry wall guy to fix it.) and grilling burgers on the concrete patio behind the slate blue house on 255^th Street. About a year after my last visit my parents sold the two-family house that I grew up in and moved out to Long Island. Virtually everything else had changed as well. My brother Jim, whose wedding had been the occasion of my last visit, now lived in Rochester and was the father of two rambunctious boys; my baby sister Maryann was married, had a daughter and was pregnant with a second; Mike had gotten a divorce from his first wife and was the proud dad of two girls with his second wife Jean. Patty had also divorced her first husband and remarried as well. Most of my cousins were married and had children also. The family had gotten huge while I was out in Nebraska.

One thing about family that I’ve heard said is that they’re the people who have to take you in, no matter what. I don’t know how literally true that is, but I found my family incredibly open and forgiving, even though I hadn’t treated them very nicely over the past few decades. It inspired me to be more forgiving towards those who I perceived had wronged me.

I stayed until Monday morning on Long Island and headed to New England via the Port Jefferson ferry on that morning. I met another Grease Spot participant for lunch and then continued to Hingham to meet Uncle Tim for dinner and stayed in his guest house, leaving for Rochester on Tuesday morning. Tuesday night I stayed with another Cindy, an old friend from Long Island, and her husband Richard. Wednesday morning I drove up to Niagara Falls an hour away, stopped to see another GS buddy and then to my brother Jim’s. I stayed two nights there and then headed across southern Ontario to Lansing Michigan Friday morning to spend two nights with my friends Leah and John. On Sunday morning I was on the road home, stopping in Illinois or Sunday night before arriving back in Lincoln on Monday, two weeks after I set out.

The crossing back into the United States from Canada was interesting. After waiting in an endless line I was interviewed by a Border patrol officer who asked what my point of origin was, as well as my destination. After telling him that I had started the day in Rochester New York and was headed for Lansing Michigan, he squinted at my Nebraska plates and asked me if I realized that I was exiting Canada. Suppressing my natural tendency to make a smart-assed remark, I explained that yes, I was aware that I was exiting Canada. He once again squinted at me and asked why, if I was leaving one U.S. city for another, I was now leaving Canada. All I could tell him was that AAA had recommended it. I avoided the rectal exam and strip search and went about my business.

It was at this point that I started to develop a social life of sorts. I still had my full-time position at the grocery store, but wouldn’t pick up a second job until late August, and even then it was a one day a week job delivering the free Tuesday afternoon paper; at the store I had Saturdays off and due to my previous gig delivering papers I worked on Sunday starting at 2:00 in the afternoon, so I was free to “socialize” on both Friday and Saturday nights, and made frequent, if not all-night appearances at the local bars during the week. O’Rourke’s, my favorite tavern, attracted a diverse demographic, all ages, multiple income levels, ethnic groups, you name it, and it became like a second home to me. Newly freed from the need to go to bed early in order to deliver newspapers, I often headed down to O’Rourke’s right after work at 4:00PM for a beer or two, going home or to a local eatery for dinner, and then back at 9:00PM for a few more beers and in the sack by midnight. Some of O’Rourke’s regular “old guys” became my buddies and drinking companions. There was Doug, a retired postal worker who sported his long white “cool old guy” hair in a ponytail, and who fancied himself a ladies’ man; Kevin, who became one of my closest friends during this time period; Rob, a fellow New Yorker who spent most of his time whining about how his mother wouldn’t send him money; the two Scotts: “Smart Scott”, one of the most intelligent people I’d ever met, and “Lyin’ Scott”, who always had a tall tale to tell; Clarence, then known as Butch, a local newspaper reporter, as well as many other characters.

Now that I was out and about more, I started meeting more people, including women. Something that I found out relatively quickly was that when you’re in your forties, the dating pool is relatively shallow. So there I was on a weekday afternoon seated at the bar in O’Rourke’s, with a reasonably attractive woman who seemed to know everyone seated beside me complaining about not being able to find anyone to go out with her. Since at this point my dating experience was about on par with your average 16 year old boy with a bad case of acne I innocently snapped at the bait; I struck up a conversation and we made a date for dinner for later that week. I say “innocently” because while looking back I’m sure she was throwing that line about no one going out with her in my direction, I was totally unaware of her intentions and ignorant of the come on. I arrived at her home to pick her up at the appointed time, but she wasn’t there. After an extended period knocking on the door, ringing the bell and peaking in the windows I decided to head on down to O’Rourke’s and found her there. No explanation, no apology. When I asked her if we had crossed wires in our communication, she simply said that she’d had a big lunch and was feeling kind of full! I should have run away right then and there, but hadn’t yet developed the bad relationship radar and continued to pursue her.

With the 20/20 vision that hindsight bestows, I believe that I was (again) simply besotted by being paid attention to, by being viewed as a desirable companion after years of being the source of all evil in the world. After a very brief time, things just blew up. Early on in our relationship, I got a glimpse of this woman's jealous streak when she got very publicly angry over a conversation that I was having with a woman at the bar. The woman with whom I was conversing was much, much younger. The response was to very publicly flirt with a much younger man, which didn't bother me at all and he eventually became a good friend of mine. A second, more dramatic display of jealousy, this time in a series of answering machine messages, put an end to our relationship. She attempted to apologize and get back together, but I knew that I had to have some standards and that I no longer had to “just settle”.

Oddly enough, the younger man with whom my jealous ex-girlfriend flirted, a musician/poet named Drew, became a good friend during this time. It was primarily through Drew that I met Pam. (We met Drew and Pam in an earlier chapter involving buying pot) Drew was dating Pam at the time, despite a twenty year gap in their ages. Drew was about 25 years old, tall and thin and rock-star good looking, Pam was in her early forties and was kind of a latter day hippie, working only as much as she had to and living in a commune south of town. For a while I spent much of my after-work time with them, discussing books, music, poetry and Celtic spirituality. Feeling burned by my previous experience and valuing my freedom more than desiring any kind of relationship, I spent the rest of my social time hanging out with “the boys” or enjoying live music at some of the local venues, avoiding any attachments with women.

“Surprised” is a huge understatement to describe my feelings when Pam grabbed me in a parking garage one night and kissed me. The three of us were supposed to attend a show at the Zoo Bar, but Drew did not show up, so Pam and I attended without him. I suppose that I should have seen it coming; in the weeks leading up to this the two of them fought frequently, each coming to me to complain about the other, especially Pam, who seemed to be looking for excuses to spend more and more time with me. We both pretended that it hadn’t happened, but shortly thereafter Drew and Pam broke up and we confronted the feelings we had (or thought we had) for each other.

There is a short list of people who I consider to have helped me stay sane during the years when I was living alone, and Pam is close to the top of that list. She is one of the key links in my ever-changing spiritual quest and was instrumental in helping me define what I believed and what kind of person that I wanted to be. The first time that I ever saw a set of tarot cards was a hand painted set that Pam had made, and when I started reading cards myself several years later, I still remember that short one-card reading that she did for me in O’Rourke’s one night that came true several hours later. Pam was one of the few people who did and said exactly what she thought and felt. She made of fun of what she called my “molester moustache”, laughed at the image of the baby on the diaper pail turned dirty sock bucket in my bathroom, and was not shy about telling me that Quadrophenia by The Who, one of my favorite albums, just wasn’t that good. We wrote erotic haikus together, made fun of people and eventually moved apart.

Despite all that we had in common and the affection that we had for each other, it just wasn’t “meant to be”. I was still insistent that I didn’t want to be part of a relationship and wanted to put myself first, still in my “selfish” phase. For me, the biggest obstacle to a relationship was her inability to understand how and why I had gotten involved and stayed involved in a religious cult. This lack of understanding would become the biggest contribution to keeping us apart; I could not give my heart to someone who lacked a basic understanding of who I was and why I was the person that I had become. Eventually we drifted apart and I saw her seldom until she developed a cancer that slowly killed her in the spring of 2008. Another friend let me know that she was dying in a hospice; I managed to see her a few hours before she passed on, one of the last things she said to me was that she was glad that I had shaved off “that molester moustache”.

With a short hiatus to date a woman my own age in the early part of 2003, I moved into a phase where I alternated between “safe old guy” and “creepy old guy”. The hiatus involved a woman who had worked at Super Saver when I first moved to the Cornhusker Highway location. She attended the company’s annual holiday party in January 2003 as a guest, having left the company the summer before. During a break in the festivities, as I stood in the hallway smoking a cigar she approached me in order to verify that I was not there with a date, which I wasn’t. We ended up dancing and talking, and left the party to go to O’Rourke’s. I drove her home, both of us aware that there was an attraction and set up a time to meet the next night. While part of me was still in the “selfish” mode and not interested in a relationship, I quickly became caught up with this woman, being told after just a few days that I was “her man” (This was a surprise to me, especially since on the night we met at that party Denise was living with a guy and had me drop her off a block from her home so he wouldn’t see her!) meeting her parents and married daughter, socializing with her friends and without realizing that it was happening, involved in the relationship that I hadn’t wanted, which had become serious on all levels. In a few short months frustrated by my aversion to commitment and concerned that I would get back with my ex-wife, I was dumped in the middle of the night, and never heard from her again.

The “safe/creepy old guy phase” was next. One of my observations as a single guy in his forties was that with few exceptions, young women view men several decades older than them predominantly in three fashions. The first and by far the most widespread is the invisible old guy. Most of my single guy buddies realized that to younger women, men our age were simply invisible. We would even play a game where we would attempt to make eye contact with attractive young ladies, and when we failed, this confirmed our invisibility.

Another type was the safe old guy. This is the guy who women view as a nice guy, easy to talk to, but who is non-threatening, like a father or uncle…or grandfather. This is the guy who young women talk to about their boyfriends, who feel comfortable revealing personal details, even about sex. Women walk up to safe old guy in bars, hug them, kiss them on the cheek and otherwise flirt with them. Sometimes the safe old guy recognizes this situation for what it is and is at peace with it, other times the safe old guy believes that he is really being seriously flirted with. In any case, the attention is flattering. A guy becomes the creepy old guy when he doesn’t understand that he is the safe old guy and starts hitting on the young girls. The creepy old guys are overwhelmed by their non-invisibility and often are confused by it. Often they are in denial about the “old guy” part of the description! Sometimes they just start out as the creepy old guy, flirting with women who hadn’t yet been born when they graduated from college, usually with a distorted view of their own attractiveness. They look in the mirror and see a version of themselves that hasn’t existed for quite a while, if ever. This malady can afflict any guy, but most of us snap out of it, the seriously deluded, however, do walk among us.

I was one of those who started out as seriously invisible and eventually, after becoming visible, morphed into the safe old guy, with brief stints as the creepy old guy. Mainly my transformation to “visible” was due to dating the previously mentioned jealous lady, who a lot of the college aged girls knew, as well as my transition to an O’Rourke’s regular, which meant that all the bartenders knew me, signaling “safe” to the girls.

During this time I was undergoing some internal transformations. I had learned some lessons from the women that I dated, to have standards, to go slow and not rush into “the next level”, to not put myself at the center, yet to be aware of what I needed as well. I learned that running around with women my daughter’s age was not productive. That despite having a brief fling with a much younger woman, to most of them, whatever my own self-image, I was either the invisible old guy, the safe old guy, or the creepy old guy, but what all these descriptions had in common was old.

At this point I had decided that I was ready for something serious, that I was done with hitting on women in bars, that I was done with settling, done with being selfish. It was at that point, when I had gotten all manner of bad relationships out of my system, I met Susie, who I would marry two years later.

 

The "Nobody" Series:

Nobody Ever Joins A Cult

Nobody Likes Your Favorite Band

Reefer Madness (Nobody Wants To Fail That Drug Screening)

Nobody Wants To Move To Nebraska

Nobody Knows Where Sidney Is

Nobody Expects The Nebraska Inquisition

The Hovel (Nobody Would Want To Live in That Dump)

The Hovel (Nobody Would Want To Live in That Dump)

 Here I am; it’s Friday night, sitting in my new apartment, one which I will later dub “The Hovel”. I’ve got my clothes hung in the closet, my mattress on the floor (I couldn’t squeeze the box spring up the stairs so it didn’t make the cut) and my one plate, one spoon, one knife, one fork, a pot & a pan and a handful of ceramic mugs (and tea, I’ve always got to make sure that I have a supply of tea) stored in the kitchen cupboards where I’m pretty sure that I saw mouse droppings. The guy who lives in the Porsche repair shop next door yelled at me earlier for blocking his driveway with my late 80’s Cavalier station wagon (After being convinced by my ex-wife to sell my road-worthy yet ugly Chevy Celebrity, our other car threw a rod in central Nebraska a few weeks later. The only thing we could afford to replace it was a $400 rust bucket.) that has rusted spots in a far greater proportion of total surface area than the white paint that hangs on precariously, while I unloaded my meager furnishings without any help from anyone other than the meth-dealing single mom (To be fair, I never really ever witnessed her dealing, but she talked about it a lot) who lived one flight of rickety stairs festooned with bare wires below me on the ground floor. Darren, my new landlord, gave me a discount on the rent so that I could buy cleaning supplies, but I hadn’t gotten around to cleaning the greasy dust that looks like one of the aliens from the first season of Star Trek: Voyager off the overhead fans, the unidentified motile brown stuff from the top of the stove, or the sentient mold from the bathroom. I open the door to the oven and quickly shut it, horrified by the scene within, vowing to never open it ever again.

“The Hovel” was located on the corner of 17^th & N Streets in downtown Lincoln: twelve one-bedroom apartments on three floors; once a hotel for railroaders, possibly built when the golden spike was being driven and great herds of buffalo still darkened the plains. Lincoln Nebraska, home of the then-powerhouse Cornhuskers football team, Tree City USA, home of The Good Life. Or so they tell me. Or maybe it was on the “Welcome to Lincoln” sign. Next to the Porsche garage is BB&R pawn shop and behind my building is a parking lot that is used by the HMO across the street during the day and us hovel dwellers after sundown. Despite the dismal immediate surroundings, it’s a pretty good location —if your standards are somewhat negotiable. Russ’s Market grocery store is less than a mile away, and Klein’s Grocery is even closer if you don’t mind the smallness, lack of selection, and panhandlers, but they do sell the New York Times. A block and a half away the bars start sprouting. I’ve never counted, but there’re probably several dozen drinking establishments within walking distance; with the University of Nebraska about five blocks northwest, it probably isn’t enough. There’s also the public library, The Gourmet Grill — a gyro joint (Gyros are considered by some to be the perfect food, if by “perfect” you mean a lamb-like substance, dripping with grease and containing enough salt to start your own ocean.) where the Iranian workers claim me as one of them, (After a few months at The Hovel I found that I could often get some free food by bussing a table or two and mopping up some spills.) and a variety of other small restaurants all within a stone’s throw. Of course the State Capitol and the Governor’s Mansion are nearby if you want to hobnob with politicians. Or protest something. Or bribe somebody.

I’d lived in Lincoln at this point for just over twenty years. I spent six months in Kearney, and before that, six months in Sidney after moving to Nebraska from Queens New York, where I was born and had spent the first twenty two years and six weeks of my life, other than brief excursions to Ohio, New Jersey and a couple of trips to Washington D.C. I got talked into coming to Nebraska, and I’m still here due to inertia, or perhaps momentum; I’m not sure which is metaphorically correct in this case. Entropy definitely figures in.

It’s pretty quiet here in The Hovel, since I have no radio, no television, no CD or tape player and no one to talk to. I’ve got a bunch of my books, but they don’t make much noise. There’s some activity outside, from the gay bar across N Street and the constant drone of traffic on the main drag, O Street, a half block to the north. Considering my options, I briefly consider blowing my brains out. The problem with that idea is that I have no gun and have no idea where to get one at this hour. The idea itself, from my squalid corner, looks like it has some merit though. How about jumping off a highway overpass? They’ve got those things all over town. Surely I can jump off a high one, hedge my bets by doing it into oncoming traffic, but I still have enough of a vestige of good citizenship that I don’t want to land on the hood of some poor bastard who hasn’t had his life slide into a pool of crap in the last couple of months. How about sticking my head in the oven and turning on the gas? Hell no! I had made a vow not to open that thing ever again! As I thought up and rejected idea after idea, I fell asleep. One of these days I’ll get better at making a timely decision.

So I wake up the next morning. Apparently I didn’t kill myself. If I was dead surely I wouldn’t be able to smell the, shall we say, unique aroma of The Hovel. Okay, change of plans: I’ll not kill myself and do something about that smell. That’s enough of a plan for now. (I never really did do anything about the smell other than leaving the windows open, even when it was really cold, lighting candles, spraying Ozium® and discovering the masking properties of sandalwood incense)

Before getting moved in the previous night I had stopped by my part-time job and found out that they were closing down. I still had my full-time job, Assistant Store Director in a local grocery store chain, but it would have been convenient to keep the income from that second job. Two years pastward from the events of this paragraph I sold my soul to the Devil for a dime and became a telemarketer. That’s right, I was the guy who, no matter what time you had dinner, called right as you sat down, the guy who was seemingly oblivious to your repeated ungrammatical assertion that you “didn’t want none”, the guy who apparently didn’t understand the meaning of the word “no”. I sold something called ASDC, which stood for Auto Savings Discount Club, but since it had nothing to do with autos, savings or discounts, and wasn’t a club, changed its name to American Savings Discount Club, (yeah, I know it makes little sense, but they thought that changing that one word solved the problem); but we just called it ASDC. We called people who for one reason or another couldn’t get a credit card, who had effectively killed their credit, and who had credit scores that were expressed in fractions. We called them and sold them “The Plan”. “The Plan” consisted of a “line of credit”. For a nominal fee of $180, ASDC members could draw on a line of credit, instant cash that they could “access at any time by calling the toll-free number”. All that they had to do was give us their social security number, their bank account number, and be recorded giving us permission to draw out the $180 from their checking or savings account. No way! No one would be stupid enough to do that! One would think not, but there were enough idiots out there that a couple of dozen of us made pretty good money selling this questionable scheme. We used to talk about the “ASDC Continuum”. On one end were the people who were too smart to ever buy anything over the phone in the first place, and certainly not this plan. You could hear it in their voices even before you identified yourself, they were skeptical, they were suspicious, and they were smart. On the other end of the continuum were the dolts who were incapable of understanding what you were talking about. They couldn’t have told you what was wrong with ASDC, but they also couldn’t follow what you were saying. You might have been offering to send them a shoebox full of $100 bills and they’d say ‘no’. The people who we sold to were right in the middle of the continuum; stupid enough to have ruined their credit, stupid enough to talk seriously to telemarketers, but smart enough to know what their checking account number was and to have a job of some sort. Okay, maybe not right in the middle; closer to the stupid side would be more accurate.

For two years and then some I labored on the phones peddling ASDC, sometimes also doing political polling or surveys, but ASDC was our bread and butter, at which I was extremely good at selling to the cerebrally deficient and congenitally desperate. During training they taught us that we were to stick strictly to the script. If someone offered an objection we were to reply using a list of predetermined answers. We were to talk to whoever answered the phone, whether it was our target or not, and try to sell them ASDC. There were several problems with that last part. No matter how carefully you explained that you understood that Mr. John Smith, the person that you asked for, was not home, and that you were now making this incredible offer to Mrs. Smith, or John’s brother Ray, or whoever, and that you were pitching directly to them and not merely leaving a message for Mr. John Smith, they would inevitably say, at the end of the long and complicated spiel, “John’s not home”, so I stopped trying to sell to secondary residents. I stopped pushing for the sale to belligerent people and those who were plainly stringing me along. This meant that I was breaking the rules; it also meant that since I was eliminating a large percentage of almost-guaranteed rejections without taking time to talk to them, my sales per hour went up and I was making a large amount of bonus money, despite only working part time. Every time they hired a new quality assurance monitor, I’d get written up for breaking the rules, until they figured out that I was making everyone a lot of money precisely because I was breaking the rules. Eventually they left me alone completely, and even stopped scheduling me, just letting me show up whenever I pleased. It was a pretty good until some regulatory agency whose initials I forget shut down ASDC, and since ASDC was our biggest client, we were shut down too, just when I could really use the money. Crap.

So it’s back to The Hovel, since it’s a Saturday and I’m unlikely to find a job on the weekend. I still have to clean this place and it still smells pretty bad. Even though The Hovel was, well, a hovel, there were always an interesting cast of characters. Right across the hall was Denis the meat cutter, seemingly the only other person in the building who had a job of any kind. Denis always had some down-on-his-luck guy sleeping on his floor, but he often was one of the few people who seemed reasonably sane. Although I suppose that there are different ways that you can define “sane”. After all, he was living in The Hovel too. In the first floor front apartment was a guy who had spent a lot of time in Vietnamese prisons and was somewhat nuts. He might have been a South Vietnamese general. He could often be found walking up and down 27^th Street shouting at passers-by in a mixture of Vietnamese and English, or buying drinks for people with a large wad of bills (I never inquired about their source). One time he fell asleep and left some food cooking on the stove; it caught fire, coming close to burning the building down. Several of us were finally able to wake him up after banging on his door and windows for fifteen minutes. There was Dana, the gay born-again Christian, who moved in after the meth-dealing woman downstairs moved out, and owned two big pit bulls. His church’s position on homosexuality was that it was a sin, but he was still gay, so his was a very confusing life. He lived there until one of his dogs ate a small dog in the neighborhood and they went on the lam from the Humane Society. On the third floor were a father & son who didn’t seem to have any visible means of support. The son would come down to my apartment to borrow my phone, then leave messages that he could be reached at my number. When they moved out two guys who owned guitars & drums moved in; they played loud music and jumped out of the windows into the alley. From the third floor. One day I came home to find them handcuffed and being led away by the Lincoln Police Department, the pieces of their meth lab laid out on a table in the parking lot. And who can forget the woman who stopped by to “borrow a cup of Jack Daniels”.

I lived in The Hovel for about two years. Most people were horrified by my living conditions. But it was cheap, it was close to the bars, and I was too lazy to move. What eventually motivated me to move stemmed from the water being cut off. I came home late on Friday night, in dire need of a shower, and found that I had no water. The next morning I bathed and shaved using some bottled water. After returning home from work the next day, and finding that the water was working, I went about my business, doing laundry, showering, using the toilet, and making tea. After about 45 minutes I heard a horrific screaming from one of the downstairs apartments, followed by its inhabitant, Leroy, running into the hall with murder in his eyes. Apparently the reason that we had no water was that a water main had cracked and every time someone flushed the toilet or the washing machine drained, it flowed into Leroy’s apartment, geysering soap and human waste up through his toilet. I can see why he’d be upset. Everyone in the building had been cautioned to not flush the toilets, not use the washing machine, and use water sparingly, but since I was one of the few who actually worked, “everyone” didn’t include me. I persuaded Leroy to refrain from killing me and got the classifieds and started looking for an apartment. My landlord couldn’t believe that I’d want to move. 

The "Nobody" Series:

Nobody Ever Joins A Cult

Nobody Likes Your Favorite Band

Reefer Madness (Nobody Wants To Fail That Drug Screening)

Nobody Wants To Move To Nebraska

Nobody Knows Where Sidney Is

Nobody Expects The Nebraska Inquisition

Nobody Expects the Nebraska Inquisition

You might ask, as Darren McGavin did in A Christmas Story: “What brought you to this lowly state?” 

Approximately 24 hours before moving into The Hovel, I sat in my five-bedroom house with my wife Pat who I had been married to for almost twenty years, two-thirds of my six children and our Sheltie/Dachshund Mitzi, in a situation that had become all too familiar: listening to Pat enumerate my many shortcomings. It wasn’t as if I didn’t have any shortcomings, like most people I had, and still have, a lot. Somewhere, packed away with my high school graduation pictures, old KZUM radio program guides, vintage Chuck Taylors and 3-ring binders from years of management classes, are yellow legal pads with lists of things that she told me that I needed to work on, change, fix, or line up with the Bible. And these were just the things she knew about. But this time it was different. I was being given a choice: either move out and “get my shit together” or she would move out and take all the kids with her. Not much of a choice.

Due to a variety of factors, including lack of a college degree and scant evidence that I had any skills that someone would be willing to pay me money for, meager finances was frequently a problem at our house. Food Stamps and government cheese were familiar sights. It was less of a problem when we recognized that we didn’t have a lot of money and therefore couldn’t spend a lot of money, when we shopped at thrift stores and day-old bread outlets and, although paying the bills often required the skills of a Barnum & Bailey center ring juggler, the outgo was always less than or equal to the income, no matter how small. The expectations were also less than or equal to the income. This all changed when (cue echo effects) The Law of Believing reared its ugly head.

The Law of Believing as we experienced it was promulgated by the religious group that we had associated with on and off since the mid-seventies, which taught that whatever you “believed for”, you would receive. Now this went well beyond the normal person’s concept of praying, which usually included the possibility that God would say “no”, the creator of the universe working in mysterious ways and all that deep theological stuff. Most people, although they don’t say it out loud, understand that praying is an iffy proposition at best. When things turn out the way that they wanted to, then prayer works, when they don’t turn out that way, well, prayer still works but…um…okay, the great silent majority generally hasn’t worked out the theology of that just yet, although there are theories. The difference between regular praying and believing is that with believing, it's a law, i.e. it works all the time, in every situation, for everyone, as our group’s founder was fond of saying “For saint and sinner alike”. It’s kind of like gravity, momentum and other laws of physics: they always work; it’s woven into the fabric of the universe. So what happens when it inevitably doesn’t work? It’s the fault of the person doing the alleged believing of course; he or she must not really be “believing”, or, like any good glob of circular reasoning, the result would be there. (In some ways, this was more logical than regular praying, in that it posited an answer to “why didn’t I get the result that I wanted?” that didn’t involve an arbitrary, capricious deity who wasn’t all that clear about the rules.)

This Law was applied to finances by Pat and some of her "believer" friends. Over coffee and cigarettes one afternoon they all agreed that they would hold their husbands to this law. No longer could it be stated that we couldn’t afford something, no matter how little money we actually had. (And we always seemed to have money for coffee and cigarettes) I was to “take believing action” and receive that which I believed for. Now I know that I should have been thrilled to have the opportunity to receive all that I ever wanted or needed, delivered upon demand by a compliant deity ready to supply that pony that I asked for at Christmas, but something happened between the believing and the receiving, and that was reality. 

Our expenses grew, our income didn’t and any attention that I drew to these facts was derided as “lack of believing”. It’s difficult if not impossible to reason with someone who deals in dogma rather than facts, and that was certainly the case here. It didn’t make it any easier that in addition to our precarious financial situation, we were giving at least 10% of our income to the aforementioned religious organization, which was supposedly a form of believing that was to guarantee financial abundance. Keep in mind that no one in this religious organization was prepared for or trained in any kind of financial counseling to show people how to have that financial abundance; they just pointed out that if you didn’t have it you weren’t believing.

In the early nineties, with rapidly mounting expenses on one side and the Law of Believing on the other side, I made the fateful decision to get a credit card. The initial reason for getting the card was related to my job. I worked as a circulation sales rep for a statewide newspaper and often had to pay for meals, gas and hotel rooms out of pocket and wait up to a month before being reimbursed. The plan was to use the card to pay the expenses; then pay off the bill with my expense check. All in all, this was a brilliant plan, except that I followed part one (use the credit card) faithfully, but never got around to part two (paying off the bill).

It didn’t take long for me to start using the card for non-business expenses, and since they obviously weren’t reimbursable as the business charges were, I never got around to paying them. At first it was something small, a ninety dollar lawnmower that I swore that I’d pay for on the next paycheck, then it was a $200 clothes dryer, then it was a $750 used car from Weird Wally’s. I’d charge them, or withdraw cash and put it in the bank account and then write a check. We appeared to be “prospering” according to the Law of Believing, but a simple look at our bank account would have revealed that income hadn’t gone up, yet we were spending more than ever before. It’s a miracle! Praise God!

Soon I got a second credit card to help cover dental expenses since the kids were starting to require expensive dental work, including orthodontics not covered by insurance for every one of my children and possibly a few neighborhood kids who just stayed overnight, and maybe even a stray cat. The first credit card initially had a credit limit of $1000, which was soon raised to $1500, to $2000 and eventually to over $3000. The second card started at $3500 and eventually was raised to $12,000. I maxed out both of them. A third card was quickly maxed out and then a fourth. By the time all was said and done I had racked up approximately $21,000 of credit card debt with little to show for it except an abundance of straight, white teeth. Now at this point you might be saying to yourself: “Dumbass, get a second job, cut back on your spending, tell your wife to get a job (she was home schooling the kids and didn’t work outside the home) — do something”. That, I would answer, is easier said than done. (Since you brought it up)

Part of the problem that I got myself into was that I was afraid of two things: the wrath of God and the wrath of my wife. If you’ve ever met Pat, now my ex-wife, you might be scratching your head in puzzlement. First of all, she was tiny, with the upper body strength of a parakeet, and a pack-a-day smoker to boot. Her lung capacity on her best day couldn’t support a good sustained yell. Although she had many good qualities, she was just one of those people who never compromise on anything; everything was black and white; everything could be boiled down to either (cue echo chamber again) the Will of God or the Lies of The Adversary. (Our religious group referred to The Devil, as “The Adversary”) A lot of my waking hours were spent trying to avoid conflict and confrontation, without any success worth mentioning. I was between a rock and a hard place. Speaking up and saying that we didn’t have the funds to buy an item that the appearance of “abundance” demanded, meant being harangued incessantly for not trusting God. So more and more I took the coward’s way out and used the credit card with no real plan for paying it off. For a while I was able to use the mileage reimbursement checks that I received from my employer to pay off the minimum balances each month. I made sure that I drove enough miles each month so that I would have enough extra to make the payments. But as the balances continued to rise and the interest charges drove them up even higher, I despaired of ever even beginning to pay the cards off, let alone totally eliminate the debt. I stopped pretending to limit the use of the card to things that I was pressured by Pat to buy and started using it to get cash advances which I used to hit the bars late at night when I was supposed to be working.

The wrath of God comes in to play with a relatively new teaching by the leader of our organization that debt in any form was a sin. Pressure was being put on members to eliminate all debt: house loans, car loans, credit cards and any other agreement where you owed anyone anything. (One of my sons, after filling out his tax return, found that he would owe a few hundred dollars, rather than receive a refund. He was chastised for “being in debt” to the government.) Sermons were preached constantly how those who were in debt were cutting themselves off from God, and were contaminating the “household”. No surprise that I was hesitant in the early days to admit to anyone that I had started accumulating debt, and when it got as huge as it did, I was terrified of being found out. Eventually, my master plan to pretend that we didn’t have financial problems, that I was getting along with my wife and that everything would somehow fix itself, came crashing down with a call Pat received from one of my creditors.

The minimum payments on the four cards had gotten so large that I was no longer able to cover them using the mileage reimbursement checks and had started using our family checking account to make payments, faking the account balance in the checkbook to make it look like there was more money in the account than there actually was. At no time during this crisis did Pat ever ask to look at a credit card statement (I had them sent to a post office box) or attempt to balance the checkbook. She was totally in the dark when finally one of the credit card companies called the house to inquire about an overdue payment. Immediately following that call, Pat called the local “leadership” of our little group. Three of them confronted me in my living room about lying to my wife, being in debt, and, most importantly in their eyes, lying to the leaders of this group about being in debt (and lying about lying too). The fact that my hidden debt was now out in the open was a great relief to me, a great burden was lifted from my shoulders. I had gotten myself in so deep that I was afraid to ask for help, help from my wife, my co-religionists, or anyone. I was afraid of the reaction that my wife would have and the action that my church would take against me. But now what I had been afraid of had come to pass, and as bad as it was, it didn’t seem that it was the end of the world. 

When I was keeping it to myself, when I was lying to those around me, I couldn’t do anything to reduce the debt, because that would make everyone aware that there was a problem. Now I had the opportunity to pay off the debt and repair the damage that had been done to my marriage (Or so I thought). I admitted to the $21,000 in debt that I was in (Pat had only found out about approximately $3,500 from the creditor who had called) and to lying to Pat and to my religious leaders. The local leadership then contacted the next higher level in the hierarchy and convened another meeting. They considered my actions to be bringing Satan’s influence into their fellowship. Like many biblical literalists, our church leaders practiced a form of “shunning” that they called “mark and avoid”, based on a bible verse that said “mark them that cause divisions among you and avoid them”. They used this verse to justify cutting off all contact with people who didn’t adhere to the group’s standards or even with people who questioned them. Those who had been marked & avoided were considered by those who stayed loyal to be as good as dead. Active participants were not allowed to have any contact with those who had been marked & avoided. (Ironically, in the years leading up to this event, I had been called upon to sit in on many “confrontation” sessions that ended with people being marked and avoided. Not a period of my life of which I am proud.) An intermediate step, called “spiritual probation”, also cut off the offenders from contact with the faithful, but had a time limit, usually six months, after which the probationer would be evaluated as to their fitness to return to full participation. During this time the probationer was required to write a monthly letter to the state leader, outlining what was being done to correct whatever the problem was that got them put on probation and to continue to tithe, i.e. pay 10% of total income to the organization. This was the action that our group’s leaders took against me.

The fact that I managed to tally up $21,000 in unsecured debt confirmed Pat’s long-held suspicion that I was the cause of all evil in the western hemisphere. She had been critical of my fitness as a father and as a Christian for several years and had been regularly been complaining about me to our leaders; now she had something solid. She fully expected that these leaders would come down hard on me or perhaps put me in stocks before the village gate or at least entertain the possibility of burning me at the stake; when they meted out the same punishment to her that it had to me; she was shocked.

Looking back, her inclusion in my punishment was as much to blame for our future problems as was my own transgressions. It made her bitter, angry and that much more determined to blame me for any and all problems. But I didn’t see that at the time. I was so relieved that I had shed the burden of living a lie and having been given the opportunity to make things right that I didn’t perceive how bad things really were, how irreparable the situation actually was. Things seemed to be looking up. The problem with looking up is that you don’t notice the big steaming pile of shit in front of you until you step in it.

During the next six months I got a part-time job to begin paying off the debt, wrote my letter every month to the state leader, paid my tithes and attempted to heal the rift between me and Pat, who was adamant that I was doing nothing to change and was convinced that at the end of the six months the leadership would clearly see how depraved I was and permanently mark and avoid me, welcoming her back with open arms and vindicating her judgment that I was The Antichrist in training. Imagine her surprise when we both were released from probation with no conditions, convincing her that either the leadership of our organization was blind and stupid or that I had diabolically pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes.

Our church preached the point of view that good things happened because you were “doing God’s Word” and that bad things happened because you were “off God’s Word”. (Although if something bad happened to one of the leaders, it was proof that they were so godly that the Devil was after them in a special way, targeting them for an extra helping of devilishness. If good things happened to bad people that showed only that the Devil was rewarding them for being his faithful minion. You just can’t win with this kind of logic, can you?)

Those who fully believed this doctrine therefore had to assign blame somewhere when things went wrong, you could either blame yourself, or blame someone close to you who was “a conduit” for the Devil to cause problems in your life. Pat seldom if ever looked to herself as the source of problems and was extremely good at was identifying shortcomings in others; she had very definite ideas regarding what constituted “doing the Word”, and wasn’t shy about pointing fingers at those whom she felt were falling short. For years she had bullied and bad-mouthed the local leadership of our group regarding their failings as Christian ministers, and was very vocal about correcting those in the congregation who she felt didn’t measure up. In the mid-nineties she gained any ally in Fred, the newly appointed “Branch Coordinator”. Fred was a graduate of the group’s leadership training program and was assigned to our city as the coordinator of all their home churches in Lincoln. Fred’s graduating class had received specific instructions to “weed out weakness”, to “clean up the household” and essentially to purge those who were not meeting the standards that the head of the organization had set down. Interference in people’s private lives became the norm, and one by one, those who weren’t toeing the line were marked and avoided and thrown out of the organization. Pat happily went along with all of this; that is until they started coming after us. We were being accused of being “spiritually weak”, of being a “conduit for the adversary” and poor housekeepers, possibly even poor spellers. It was at this point that Pat, unable to bully this particular leader, unable to believe that she could possibly be responsible for any of her own problems, and convinced that somebody had to be the scapegoat, decided, since all her other targets had been driven away, that I must be the reason that we were being harassed and constantly reproved. It was into this atmosphere that my secret of the $21,000 debt was dropped. Her belief that I was a source of spiritual contamination for our family was finally confirmed.

About eight months after we were reinstated into full participation with our fellowship, a bombshell was dropped. The top leader of our group, who we viewed as the “Man of God”, who taught and interpreted the Bible for us, was accused by a former member of sexual abuse and in short order resigned his position as President of the organization. Shortly after that he was put on “spiritual probation” like so many others had been and expelled from the organization. This started for me a careful examination of all that I had been taught, leading to doubt in the correctness of the group’s teachings. I began to communicate with people who had left the organization and had been marked and avoided and participated in an internet forum where the group’s teachings and practices were questioned. Eventually I was told by the leader of the multi-state region that included Nebraska that I was no longer welcome at any of the group’s functions. I was being permanently marked and avoided. This was the opportunity that Pat had been looking for. Before my expulsion, if we had a serious disagreement, we would ask one of our leaders to mediate and help us come to an agreement. (Although looking back, even though she was often the one to initiate mediation, if the answer did not conform to what she already had decided, the advice was ignored.) 

Despite my many problems with this organization, I believed that occasionally they had good advice, and mainly just urged us to see the other’s point of view and to find common ground on our disagreements. Now, since no one in the group was allowed to have any contact with me, Pat took the position that in any disagreement, she was right by default, since she was the one who was “standing with the household of God”, her interpretation of events, her take on what the Bible said and how it applied to a given situation was by definition the correct one; anything that I said, was therefore wrong due to my expulsion from “The Household of God”. She began openly telling the children to not listen to what I said and eventually to not even talk to me, reasoning that she and the children were to “have no fellowship with darkness”. The smallest things became evidence that I was bringing evil into the house and the pretext for “confrontations”, where she would bring in one or more of the children as “witnesses” to the “reproof and correction”. In order to avoid this constant confrontation I withdrew more and more, working extra hours at my first job and putting in as many shifts as I could at my second, and not coming home until I absolutely had to after work; even saying I was at work and just walking around town. When I had a day off I would stay up late watching videos and drinking beer so I would be tired and hung over the next day so as to not have to interact with her.

Finally, after coming home from work on a Thursday evening I found the whole family sitting in a semicircle waiting to “confront” me. As usual the charges were non-specific and vague, the justifications quasi-biblical, but it boiled down to me being thrown out of my own house and most of my children having nothing to do with me.

Well, at least the credit card companies still wanted to talk to me.

The "Nobody" Series:

Nobody Ever Joins A Cult

Nobody Likes Your Favorite Band

Reefer Madness (Nobody Wants To Fail That Drug Screening)

Nobody Wants To Move To Nebraska

Nobody Knows Where Sidney Is