“You’re a Faithless Woman”
(Photo: Donna tries to pray her way out of a dreaded gym class, By Bruce Day, Focus on the Family. Image courtesy of The Odyssey Scoop.)
Introduction: Hello, readers of At My Whit’s End. Once again I’ve brought in a guest writer, this time covering Episode #60: And When You Pray… Take it away, Eve!
In the year 1999, I was seven years old and I wanted the Official Pokémon Deluxe Collectors Edition Complete With Free Collectible Poster more than anything in the world. I don’t mean this in a cutie pie way; if a strange man in a dented Chevy G20 van beckoned me forth with the promise of the Official Pokémon Deluxe Collectors Edition Complete With Free Collectible Poster I would have gotten into the passenger seat without question. Hell, I would have offered to drive.
The point is, I was raised by Kennedy Catholics with college degrees and art on the walls from museum gift shops. To my parents, hooting and hollering displays of religion were trashy, just like knuckle tattoos and Combos. They didn’t really care for fire and brimstone evangelism but they figured that you had to teach a kid that God existed and made things happen. I was vaguely aware of the fact that prayer could be used to obtain stuff, and I was determined to recruit any force that might be able to help me with getting this book.
“God,” I would say. “I need the Official Pokémon Deluxe Collectors Edition Complete With Free Collectible Poster so much that I am going to die if I don’t get it.”
This would be a breeze.
Sure enough, my prayers were answered, in the form of my parents sending me to my school’s Scholastic book fair with some cash. So if you’re the Adventures in Odyssey listener, what do you think is more likely in my case: God personally intervened on my behalf, or my parents got so fucking tired of hearing me talk about the Official Pokémon Deluxe Collectors Edition Complete With Free Collectible Poster that they would do anything to get some peace?
When you’re a kid, it’s hard to understand what it’s like to be an adult. My father, the guy I’m supposed to talk to God like, was working multiple jobs while gunning for tenure at the college where he taught. He had two sons who were often sick and it wasn’t uncommon for them to be hospitalized. His wife, my mother, ran a daycare from home, which meant all of our furniture was in shambles and privacy was kind of non-existent. When a boy came to my mom’s daycare with the stomach flu, my entire family caught it. In comparison, not having the Official Pokémon Deluxe Collectors Edition Complete With Free Collectible Poster wasn’t much of a struggle.
So back to prayer. What a hard concept to get your head around as a child! Whether you were in a more conservative or liberal denomination, whether you were being taught this concept by the lovey-hippie Jesus crowd or the militant, hateful flavor of Christianity, this one’s still hard to explain. Adventures in Odyssey presents it in much the same way that my Catholic Sunday school teachers did: if you have faith you can do or get anything, as long as God deems it important or relevant or whatever. Whit defines prayer as a conversation, a back and forth between yourself and God, and the reason you don’t always get what you ask for is because he loves us, just like parents don’t always give us what we want. It’s honestly not the worst explanation, at least in the context of the story. The little boy (Jimmy? Jeffy? I didn’t care about him enough to remember) wants a bike, prays for it, and happens to be gifted an old one by his grandpa soon after. Boom. Easy.
Donna tries to test this for herself by praying for rain so she can skip gym, probably so she doesn’t have to deal with her bitch of a gym teacher. It does rain…later in the day. Okay, sure, Whit, God isn’t a vending machine that you can just put prayers into and get Official Pokémon Deluxe Collectors Edition Complete With Free Collectible Poster out of. But there are a few things about this explanation that I don’t vibe with.
For one, Whit’s explanation that God isn’t just going to say yes to your prayers because good parents don’t just say yes to everything kind of falls apart when you think about the fact that your parents have like, human limits. My father, the one who worked multiple jobs and rested on a couch at night that was coated in Goldfish cracker crumbs, was not capable of the same power as the almighty creator of heaven and Earth. If my brothers asked to not to be ill and my father had the ability to take that away, he would have done it as easily as he had given me money to take to the book fair. If I had asked him to prevent any of the things that would later happen to our family -- my brother’s suicide, chief among them -- he would have done it. There are a lot of bad fathers out there, a lot of them, but there are fathers who risk their lives bringing their children to a country that’s safe or give up their own dreams in order to ensure they give their child a stable home life. There are fathers who would give up years of their own life to ensure their children thrive. I’m still not convinced that God is one of them.
A common question about the existence of God, posited by 14-year-old atheists on Reddit and 14th century theologians alike, is “Why does God let bad things happen to good people?” Why do children get cancer? Why do dogs get kicked, why do evil people get elected president, why do bad songs get played on the radio? What do you do when the vending machine holds lifesaving medicine and you don’t have a single quarter in your pocket?
If prayer is a conversation like Whit tells us, the only proof we have of a response is in what happens to us after we try to connect with him. We ask for something and we get it. God must be happy with me, or think I was right to ask for it. We ask for something, something that we believe is important and righteous, and still don’t get it. God must not be happy with me. God must think I’m bad, that I’ve sinned. God must be punishing me. But when did God tell you that? Is the absence of a yes necessarily a no? If I had the same sort of hysterical obsession with a mortal’s occasional gifts that were followed by long periods of indifference, my friends would worry about me. God gets an awful lot of credit for being in the right place at the right time.
I will say, I have a lot of empathy for Donna versus the gym teacher that she kept misgendering. I despised my elementary school gym teacher with a passion. He was the kind of guy who barked instead of speaking and took out his ongoing divorce proceedings on chubby pedants like myself that would rather read than play dodgeball. If I were Donna, I would have prayed for Ms. Butchfield to get crushed by a weight machine at her local Planet Fitness instead of for rain, because here’s the thing. The teacher is the problem. Maybe Whit should have been a trusted adult for a child who feels like she’s being treated poorly by an authority figure, but that’s not the lesson Adventures in Odyssey is here to teach.
In this story, the gym teacher represents doubt. She sneers at Donna for her blind faith in that rain is going to fall. In Adventures in Odyssey, the fact that she is both unkind and skeptical of Donna’s faith goes without saying. Bad people doubt God’s power, just as bad people expect too much of it and require proof of it. Never doubt that God can do literally anything, but don’t think you’re going to witness a miracle or anything.
It’s all very confusing for Donna, and who can blame her? If I could talk to her now, I’d tell her that investing in herself, her friends and family, her community, that’ll get you the kind of things prayer is supposed to deliver. Who cares if that’s cheesy? When I’ve been scared or frustrated or lost, it’s been those investments that have helped me back on track. When I lived in terror of my own gym teacher, I talked to my parents, and they helped me. When I felt like life was unfair, my friends listened without judging. Maybe God’s working through those people, but more likely, they were just the ones listening to me all along.
Eve Yankovich is a Pushcart-nominated writer living in Baltimore with her spouse and cats. Her work has been published in Grub Street literary magazine. She also enjoys Pokémon.