Five Guys I’ve Never Met who Made Me Believe in Life Again, Part 5: Sufjan Stevens

5.
Name: Sufjan Stevens.
Age: 35.
Occupation: Composer, singer-songwriter, and regional biographer.
Alma mater: Hope College.
Influences: Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff, and Flannery O’Connor.

Sufjan Stevens never wanted to be a folk singer. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from NYC’S The New School, went broke, and then embarked on his musical career. In 2003, he declared his intention to record albums for all 50 states, but after the release of Illinois andMichigan, declared the thing a joke. A recent project, a multimedia homage to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, featured a 36-piece orchestra and 16-mm film footage of hula-hoopers.

I’ve been trying to write this essay for a year. You would not believe the copious notes I’ve accumulated in that span of time—fifteen or twenty pages, at least. I’ve read four dozen interviews and twenty-five articles on the man. I’ve written eight drafts. I did all my homework, and yet, every word I tried to write about him sounded awkward and hollow.

I was convinced I was never going to finish writing about Sufjan until last weekend, when Significant Other and I journeyed to Chicago to see him in the flesh. As we sat in the ornate auditorium, every inch of it carpeted or gilded, my anticipation soared. It didn't feel like I was about to encounter a celebrity so much as a mythological figure from my childhood, like Santa, or the Easter Bunny, or the imaginary friends I had from Star Trek. (Come, now. You know you had those too.)

I first discovered Sufjan in 2005, just after the release of Come on, Feel the Illinoise!, the album that got him played in Little Miss Sunshine and earned him indie accolades galore. I only started listening to him because I stumbled across his name in a magazine and was puzzled by it. “Sufjan?” I thought. This was a moniker easily mangled, just like mine. I felt a kinship with him from then on.

Over time, I thought of him as my personal minstrel. His was the voice I chose to sing me through my first heartaches, my first true disappointments, my glimmering mornings and shadowy afternoons. Why him, you ask? Why this eclectic stranger? It was simple: he felt familiar. We had a lot in common. Both of us grew up in large families. Both of us grew up inMichigan. Both of us grew up in—and later left—charismatic and boisterous divisions of the Christian church. Both of us attended small, private liberal-arts schools and studied creative writing. Both of us sat in our cinderblock dorm rooms, clutching our guitars, playing songs we wrote for no one. Fortunately for me, I heard his.

Ballads like these and others sustained me through college. I learned dozens of his songs, emblazoned them on my memory: "To Be Alone With You," "Concerning the UFO Sighting..." But there was one song—an intricate and lengthy epic—that stood out above all others. It was called “Seven Swans.”

Fly with me, if you will, to the February of my junior year, an unforgiving year, a gray year brimming with loneliness and existential crises. A drab and fruitless winter encrusted with gray snow. Picture me, if you will: heart hardened, mind burdened, possessing a cynical soul. I am driving a blue Buick Regal Gran Sport, circa 1995. I am listening to “Seven Swans.” And I am running away from God.

Let me provide you with context. I am not one of those people who can do something half-heartedly. I’m not a toe-dipper in the slightest; I either dive into each endeavor or I leave it alone. This particularly applies to religion. Even as a kid, I was religiously ardent, that irritating waif in Sunday School who peppered each morning with questions. Nor was my ardor limited to inquiry; there were actions too. I prayed perpetually. I studied my Bible, highlighting entire pages in fuchsia and electric green and cautionary yellow. I wanted to be a missionary. And an astronaut. A missionary astronaut. I would lead all them aliens to Jesus—because, you know, them aliens had souls too.

Fast-forward, now, to the roadworn Buick. In my old age, belief in God has become too complicated. It’s not working out. It’s too risky. I, the rational and recently-enlightened undergrad, cannot hinge my livelihood on the existence of something I cannot see or feel or touch, and who academia analyzed out of existence anyway. Confused, I turn to the same old answers everyone does: the cold hard facts of the Real World, the wars and sorrow and friends’ deaths from cancer. Compared to these things, my childhood fervor looks trite. I lean toward giving it up.

These feelings are not pleasant. When your livelihood depends on the truth of one being’s existence, and that being disappears, reality itself seems to crumble.

With positively stunning self-confidence (read: arrogance), I decide that God’s existing depends on my believing in him. Kind of like Tinkerbell. Belief that had gotten me into this mess, this agony of soul, so ceasing that belief will get me out. I decide to walk away from my faith. I make this decision while driving my Buick, imagining fuzzily that God was located behind me, living somewhere on the east side of the city. If drive away from him, God will leave me alone.

On my car stereo, Sufjan mumbles blithely and strums along on his banjo. Then he sings the following:

He will take you.
If you run, he will chase you,
‘cause he is the Lord.

And, just in case I had missed it the first time, he sings it again:

He will take you.
If you run, he will chase you,
‘cause he is the Lord.

And then, simply,

He is the Lord.

Sufjan sang, and suddenly I believed him.

I’m not going to pretend that this one song changed everything. I didn’t instantly revert back to heartfelt monotheism; it took another concert to pull that one off. But it did make me realize that, even if I turned my back on God, even if I rejected him flat, he would still find me someday. Maybe in a couple months. Maybe in fifty-four years, on my deathbed. No matter how long it took God, he would always keep trying to find me, whether I liked it or not. In those days, those heartsore transitional days, nothing in my life was certain, and so I found these thoughts comforting. I still wasn't sure what I believed or why, but I kept at it. In the meantime, Sufjan embodied a faith I found both stimulating and beautiful.

These days, I feel far more ideologically settled. It could be that college is done and behind me. It could be the new apartment, the steady job. It could be the ever-constant presence of Significant Other. It could be that I've found a church that makes me feel at home. But panic can accompany this stasis; without the perpetual struggle of my faith being endangered, I now fear becoming complacent. Maybe I 'll forget about God. Or maybe he’ll forget about me. These were the thoughts floating through my head as we sat in the Chicago Theater, waiting for Sufjan to appear.

We almost hadn’t come that day, Significant Other and I. Sufjan had released a new album that week, The Age of Adz, and it was freaking weird. Gone was the comforting banjo I’d known, lush folk now replaced with thundering electronica. Sufjan didn't sing of widows or faith; instead, the new record was a concept album inspired by an artist-schizophrenic. Who was this new Sufjan? We recognized him, but only a little bit. It was like seeing Santa flying a spaceship.

The night before the show, we listened to the new album and sat there bewildered. Significant Other wrinkled his nose. “I don’t know if I actually like this, or just feel like I’m supposed to,” he said. Concert reviews informed us he wouldn’t be singing the old songs, anyway. So much for my “Seven Swans.” So much for the comfort I'd known.

In the end, we decided to go to the show anyway. We had third-row seats, after all. This would be miserable if the show was an art-rock disaster. Tour reviews warned us that Sufjan's setlist was comprised of wholly new material; we likely wouldn't recognize a song. But we went anyway.

Sufjan and his twelve-person band sauntered onto the stage. He wore a Korean Frosted Flakes T-shirt. He didn’t say anything. He picked up his banjo, and then he sang,

He will take you.
If you run, he will chase you.
‘cause he is the Lord.

He is the Lord.
He is the Lord.
He is the Lord.

photo credit: www.flickr.com/iamcreativ

The Nine Books that Live on my Nightstand

My title is too kind. Really, this post should be called "The Nine Books that Occupy my Floor, my Desk, and Anyplace Else I Happened to Leave Them." A recent move seemed to demote my level of personal neatness from a seven to about a three. This is bad.

The good news is that I've started reading again. Finally, after four long months of recovery from school, giving my beleaguered brain a chance to rekindle itself, I am returning to my books. (And to writing. Obviously.)

1. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers.
This book is the reason I'm writing again. It's probably also the reason that everything I've written thus far is sprinkled generously with dependent clauses and appositives (that right there is fancy grammar speak for "being long-winded"). I first encountered Dave around the tender age of twenty. At this point, I'd begun to have sneaking suspicions that the world wasn't as spotless as I'd hoped—though I was far too terrified to admit it. Dave gave voice to my anxieties, and I felt emboldened by his brutal honesty.

2. Anne of the Island, L.M. Montgomery.
Most days, I turn up my nose at Anne of Green Gables; it's a schmaltzy and occasionally embarrassing relic from my homeschoolery past. But on some days, days when I'm overwhelmed with Life and the Dizzyingly Rapid Passage of Time and Good Lord We're All Growing Up and Getting Older, Aren't We?, Anne hits the spot. This one's my favorite because it's the one where she moves off to college and—spoileralertspoileralert—finally gets together with Gilbert. Because we all knew THAT was coming. Durr.

3. Somewhere More Holy, Tony Woodlief.

I came across Tony Woodlief by happenstance. A couple years ago, this Wall Street Journal article lay open upon my parents' coffee table, and I ate it up. Tony writes about about the same things that fill my own head: doubt, education, and the trouble with being an evangelical.

4. American Salvage, Bonnie Jo Campbell.
Bonnie Jo was my professor once. (Would it be tacky to admit she's the only one who ever gave me an A+?) We got to see snippets of this short story collection in our Intro to Creative Writing class long before it was published, long before it almost won the National Book Award, long before she got all famous and was on NPR and stuff. The funny thing was that she didn't expect it to sell.

5. "The Events of October," Gail Griffin.

This one was also written by a professor of mine. I can't tell you how awe-inspiring it is to come across a book in Barnes and Noble, feel its weight in your hands, and realize that you know personally the woman responsible for every freaking word between the two covers. In it, Gail examines the story of a murder-suicide that happened at our school in 1999—in the same dorm that I lived in, actually. There was some speculation that "the event" had occurred in my room. I have recently been informed that it didn't.

6. Je-Parlez Francais?, Berlitz Publishing.

My mother studied French in college. Consequently, my middle name is French. Also consequently, I learned the French word for “brother” (“frère”) right about the same time I learned what a brother was. This book introduced this and other such concepts to me, all via a small brown bear named Teddy. On the page when Teddy visits the playground, I scrawled my name in vibrant pink pen.

7. The Orthodox Church, Timothy Ware.

Orthodoxy is a very old and widespread branch of Christianity that's surprisingly little-known in evangelical circles. Don't be embarrassed that you've never heard of it. I hadn't either, until about a year ago. I think that, sometimes, we'd like to think our religion was invented in 1950. In the Midwest. By Americans. But the truth of the matter is that Christianity is an ancient faith, and it didn't begin on this continent. Timothy Ware explains the origins of Orthodoxy and how it still survives to this day.

8. Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, Clay Shirky.

I first heard about this one in the New Yorker. (Just for the record: I don't usually read New Yorker. I browse it occasionally so I can begin sentences with "I was reading the New Yorker the other day..." It impresses people.) Clay Shirky's arguing that, post-WWII, Americans found themselves with more free time than ever, thanks to sparkly new inventions like dishwashers and ironing boards. Back then, we filled our free time with television. Now, we fill it with the internet. The real question is whether we're using this tool for good or for ill.

9. Sam and the Firefly, Dr. Seuss.
(See, the only reason I can get away with admitting I read New Yorker to impress people is that I confess to reading Dr. Seuss immediately after. It's called being brutally honest. Thank you, Dave Eggers.) This was my favorite book when I was very, very small...small enough that, when I discovered it again, I didn't remember any of the words—just the pictures. And the pictures are beautiful. The setting—a dark and endless night—bears more than a little resemblance to that of Howard and the Purple Crayon, which has also haunted me for years. I think we kids want to know that if we ever choose to go wandering about in the night, we can always come home safely.

A love letter to my senior project

Dear SIP,

It hasn’t even been two days yet, and I miss you.

We both knew this would happen.

I listened to some of our old songs today—a hodgepodge collection of the best Andrew Bird—and I got kind of choked up. Just a little. This surprised me, because when we were together, I treated you like a burden. I complained about you. I groaned over you. I told everyone I’d be better off when you’d gone. I exploited you for my own convenience, used you as an excuse when I was feeling antisocial—“Oh, I can’t go out tonight, guys. I have to work on my SIP.” (Most of the time it was true.)

Lord, was I harsh toward you. I was an expert at finding your flaws and inconsistencies. Until the end, I flipped through your pages and thought, “Dear God. I should have said ‘bibliophilic mass’ instead of ‘bibliophilic pile.’ Who wrote this drivel?” But these were trivial things. I was probably only critical of you because I'm critical of myself.

The truth is, I loved you. I loved you not because of your pomp or your greatness—imagined or otherwise—but because you were mine. I loved you because I could hold you in the hollow of my hands and say,
I made this.

Oh, the nights that we spent together, the long nights that slipped into mornings, the nights when I forgot myself and all my trivialities. On those tender evenings, our selves fused, and parting us became impossible. I got lost in you, became swallowed up in something more beautiful and truthful than myself. On our last night together, you slept by my bedside.

Then the day came—that startling day when I had to turn you in. Hours before, I printed you, and I sat in the library and held you, and I felt your warmth against me. I realized then that I loved you. How frightened I was—frightened for myself, and for both of us—because I knew that handing you in would mean a severance. Losing you would be like losing a limb, like closing a door inside myself, never to be opened again. Losing you would mean the end of something treasured.

Still, I knew the inevitable, and you did too. I had to hand you over.

My affection does not depend on what becomes of you. Maybe you’ll become something someday. Maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll sit on the shelf in Humphrey House with all the other English SIPs and fraternize. Maybe another lost soul will open you in forty years, and discover something of himself inside you.

Whatever happens, you will always be mine.

I love you.

-E.

The Twelve Books that Live on my Nightstand

In no particular order:

1. Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger.
I prefer having this one near me at all times.

2. A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, Don Miller.
Says Don: "The stories we tell ourselves are very different from the stories we tell the world." His stories are the most brutally honest I know. I read them and I say, "Ouch. Yes. I've done that too."

3. Stuff Christians Like, Jonathan Acuff.
For instance: side hugs, occasionally swearing, and ranking honeymoon sex slightly higher than the second coming of Christ. Brilliant.

4. Hunger, Lan Samantha Chang.
For the two hours that it took me to read this book, I forgot I existed.

5. The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, Timothy Keller.
This book saved my faith. Along with Andrew Bird, Spike Jonze, and about a billion other things, of course.

6. The Wild Things, Dave Eggers.
Oh, Dave.

7. The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story, Richard Preston.
This is about germs and diseases and stuff. It's been on my nightstand since Christmas. I can't bring myself to read it.

8. Hamlet.

9. The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate, John H. Walton.
I haven't read this one either.

10. Nine Stories, J.D. Salinger.
Read "To Esme with Love and Squalor." Reread. Repeat.

11. A Year with C.S. Lewis.
This man is my literary father.

12. The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis.
"Try to exclude the possibility of suffering, which the order of nature and the existence of free wills involve, and you will find that you have excluded life itself."

So that's it. That's my nightstand. At present, the Where the Wild Things Are and Fantastic Mr. Fox DVDs live there too.

My literary brain is still eaten up by the senior project. But it'll be done soon. And hopefully, my creative f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s will remain intact.

I only read the New Yorker for the cartoons.

(No, I'm not procrastinating or avoiding my senior project. Why would you ask that?)

This last one isn't New Yorker, but it's my favorite cartoon of all time.

To the Boy who Played Me Chopin: Or, Why I'm Glad as Heck My Life is Not a Sandra Bullock Movie

Recently, I’ve had two odd experiences involving total strangers and a piano.

The first happened at work, in a crusty practice room littered with stale Reese’s wrappers. My job is wholly cerebral, and so on my break I run to the practice rooms and I play, trying to shut off my throbbing brain for a minute. The pianos are tuned only once at the beginning of each school year, and by the time February rolls around they sound pretty awful. My piano today sounded remarkably honky-tonk.

As a musician, I’ve always had this secret fantasy that one day, I’ll be sitting there, playing and minding my own business, and someone will enter the room and he’ll say (yes, it’s always a he), “My God! What were you playing? That’s beautiful!”

“Oh,” I’ll say with a flip of my hand, “it was just something I wrote.”

How casual I shall be! How nonchalant! I'll gaze at him steadily and finger my platinum-blonde hair. (In my fantasy world, I resemble Gwyneth Paltrow. Early '00s Gwyneth Paltrow. Think Margot Tenenbaum.)

Then—oh, joy!—he’ll turn out to be a musician too, and then we’ll be fast friends, and we’ll ride off into the sunset. Or the cafeteria. Or something.

Well, the other day I was sitting there, minding my own business, and I finished playing something my friend Cusack and I have been working on for months—an epic, eight-minute blend of Muse, Chopin, and Debussy. And then this person I had never seen before entered the room and closed the door behind him. He looked like a young, shabby Jason Schwartzman, of all people. “What was that piece you were playing?” he asked.

I reddened. “It was something I wrote,” I said. “I mean, that my band wrote.”

“How did you do that?” he said.

I showed him. Naturally, now that I had an audience, I sucked.

Not-Jason didn’t seem to mind. “That’s wonderful,” he said. “I love it.” He smiled, and then he bent over and unzipped his backpack, pulling out sheet music, Chopin and Debussy. He asked me if I’d ever heard of Muse.

I told him I plagiarized Muse on a regular basis. Not-Jason didn’t seem to mind this either. He was a pretty easy-going guy. He started going on and on about all these songs by Muse. I hadn’t heard any of them, but I wanted to look like I knew what I was talking about, so I nodded and said, “Yeah. Uh-huh. Oh, that’s a good one.” Not-Jason sat down and started playing Chopin. He wasn’t bad.

After that, we stood around and looked at each other for a minute, and then we talked about nothing, and then I told him I had to get back to work. And that was it.

If this had been a movie, things would have ended differently. If my life was a crappy rom-com directed by Garry Marshall that will make $50 million on its opening weekend just because of Sandra Bullock and her not-quirk, it might have ended like this:

Not-Jason finishes his Chopin. Elyse giggles uncontrollably. She snorts.

ELYSE [covering her nose]: Oh my God! I’m so sorry!

NOT-JASON: Did you just snort?

E. [still giggling]: No! [She snorts again.] Yes! Oh my God!

[She starts to run out of the room, but trips and falls. He catches her.]

N.-J.: I think it’s cute.

[They stare at each other. Cue “Chasing Cars” by Snow Patrol.]


Dear God.

Truth be told, I like the real ending better, in which I ran off and phoned my friend Cusack—the one who wrote the song with me—and told him our music was so good that it moved total strangers to interrupt private practice sessions and declare their adoration. Thing is, I was so excited that my phone skills (which are pretty shoddy to begin with—I hate talking on the phone) deteriorated and I found myself shouting, “Boy! Piano! Muse! Plagiarism!” Needless to say, Cusack was thoroughly confused.

The second Weird Thing happened in the chapel at school. (As a side note, I’m surprised we’re still allowed to call it “the chapel.” Chapel services themselves, which have been secular for decades, were recently redubbed “Community Reflections.” This reached a new level of absurdity last quarter when we held a Community Reflection about Intimate Partner Violence. I wouldn’t be surprised if soon we have Community Reflections in the Center for Spiritual, Humanistic and Tree-Huggery Thought. Anyway. )

Nomenclature aside, the chapel is an ethereal place to play. It’s one of those places I run to when I’m either glowingly happy or blackly depressed, like last winter, when I got turned down from study abroad. I ran up the hill to the chapel and played for two solid hours. I played until my arms hurt, and then I kept playing anyway. Outside, the snow fell slowly.

A year later, on the afternoon of this Strange Occurrence, the sun was out. I took my shoes off. (I always take my shoes off when I play in the chapel. That way I can actually feel the smooth metal of the pedals.) Then I stepped on the stage and sat down at the Baldwin grand, which is ancient and immaculately tuned.

Half an hour later, I had to go to class, and so I descended from realms ethereal and started getting ready to go. Then I heard a voice from the balcony.

“You took me to the woods,” it said.

I looked up, startled. “I what?” I said.

“You took me to the woods,” the lady said. She was a cleaning lady, and she was staring down at me. She had long gray hair and had probably been a hippie in a past life.

These are not the sorts of conversations one usually has with strangers. “What did you see in the woods?” I asked. (The nice thing about conversations with strangers, though, is that if something becomes awkward, you never have to see them again. Thus, it's appropriate to take a little more risk than usual.)

“I saw a lot of things,” she said, arms slung over the railing. “I saw a lot of things, and you took me there.” She paused contemplatively, and then she said, “How does it feel to be enormously talented? Does it feel good?”

I shouldered my backpack of Important Books to Read and pondered how to answer this question. These aren’t the sorts of things one usually asks of strangers unless they’re irritated--i.e., "How ya feelin', punk? Ya feelin' good?" But the cleaning lady didn’t sound malicious. She wasn’t making fun of me. It occurred to me suddenly that this maintenance person was in possession of sensibilities just like mine. She could feel things too, even though I carried a bag full of Important Books and she scrubbed walls dirtied by the soles of selfish liberal arts kids.

It’s a very strange thing when something you do moves somebody enough for them to tell you about it. It's strange because making art is an often solitary and sometimes very lonely affair. I wrote one of the songs I played for the cleaning lady after the death of a friend a couple years back. I never thought I would share it with anybody: it was just my attempt at reckoning with something that didn't make sense. But apparently it made sense to her.

I was watching an interview with Chris Martin of Coldplay the other day, and he said that most of his songs, now consumed by millions, were written in moments of extreme loneliness, dark hours when no one can hear you and all the world’s asleep. And yet here were these songs, songs borne out of sorrow, being sung by stadiums full of people. Turns out Chris wasn’t the only one who was “lost and hurt and lonely too.”

I stood in the chapel, stood beneath the balcony with the cleaning lady. She thought I was enormously talented. Did it feel good? She wanted to know.

“Yes,” I said. “But only if I get to take people to the woods.”

Five Guys I've Never Met who Made Me Believe in Life Again, Part Four: Spike Jonze

“Now stop!” Max said and sent the wild things off to bed without their supper. And Max the king of all wild things was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all.

-Where The Wild Things Are



4.
Birth name: Adam Spiegel.
Age: 40.
Occupation: Film director and sometimes screenwriter.
First job: Working at a BMX shop.
Dislikes: Olives and mushrooms. (He says they’re evil.)

Spike Jonze is not heir to the Spiegel family fortune. He grew up in Rockville, Maryland and spent most of his childhood skateboarding. Jonze is known for his films Adaptation and Being John Malkovich, as well as a slew of inventive commercials and music videos.

The photo above is the whole reason I saw Where The Wild Things Are. Hitherto, I’d had no interest in the book or the film; all the connection I had with them was a fuzzy memory of being six and freaked out by little stuffed Wild Things in Barnes and Noble. I didn’t understand why anyone would cuddle something with fangs. But then I saw this photo of Spike Jonze and Max Records, and I knew I had to see this movie, though I wasn't sure why. It reminded me of something.

When the trailer for Wild Things first came out in March, I watched it over and over again. Seldom had I anticipated a movie so much. I watched countless behind-the-scenes videos, read dozens of interviews, and indulged in other such reckless nerdhood. Finally, it came out in October. I loved it. I saw it three times. It was an honest and devastating look at childhood. But still, I was kind of disappointed. The movie was beautiful, but the third time I saw it, I felt like it was missing something.

Eventually what I figured out was that, though I loved Wild Things, what I really loved was the story behind it. The story of Spike and Max Records.



This video really gets me for some reason. The part that gets me the most is when Max gets licked by one of the Wild Things, and he gets grossed out because his face is all goopy. Spike yells “CUT!” and then he walks up to Max.

“Sorry,” says Max. He sounds like he’s afraid of getting in trouble.

“It’s okay. I know it’s hard,” Spike says, and he wipes the goo off of Max’s face himself. He doesn’t ask a crew guy to do the dirty work for him. He doesn’t cry out for the makeup team. Spike walks up to Max and he wipes the goo off his face himself.

There was another scene in Wild Things that required Max to be covered in goo, and Max hated it so much that, after a couple takes, he would only let them film the scene again unless Spike let Max cover him in goo. And he did.

And I started thinking…this kind of reminds me of God.

“But Elyse,” you say, “this is a seriously flawed metaphor. God doesn’t hire us. God doesn’t pay us money to act out stuff. God doesn’t control everything that happens to us like some master puppeteer.” And you’re right on all accounts. Really, any metaphor that attempts to describe God is flawed on some level, because God is indescribable. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

Here’s my attempt: God is like Spike Jonze, who gets covered in goo.

Let me explain. I’ve been wondering for some time if God is really empathetic. At the beginning of one of my writing classes last year, my professor asked us to write down what question we would ask if we could ask anything in the world. I wrote, “What does God really think of us?”

For all I’ve been taught, a large part of me still pictures God as being indifferent to our circumstances. He doesn’t want to help us, I think, and if he does help, he does so begrudgingly. “Elyse needs me again?” says the God In My Head. “Geeeeez. Can’t this girl take care of herself by now?”

I thought this, and then I met my friend Dante.

Dante is a brilliant writer. He's so brilliant that, after his professors read his essays, they gallavant around the room like the teacher in A Christmas Story. (I know this is true. They’ve told me so.) I've tried telling Dante this, but I don't think he believes me. I think someday I will tell people that I used to get coffee with Dante, and they won’t believe me either.

Dante is also an atheist. The funny thing about this is that I’ve learned a lot about God from Dante. I’ve learned more about God from Dante than just about anyone else I know.

One night, I was up really really late writing. It was three or four o’clock in the morning, and I was trying to distract myself through the Internet, like I usually do. Through said Internet I found out that Dante was in trouble. Big trouble. The kind of trouble that you can’t get out of all by yourself.

Now understand that I am not an especially empathetic person. Maybe it’s because I was raised Republican, but I used to look at suffering people and say, “That’s nice. Now pull yourself up by your bootstraps, please.” I think this might be why I expected God to be indifferent too. (In retrospect, this was anthropomorphism at its worst.)

But when I found out about Dante, I didn’t feel that way at all. I wanted to help him. I didn’t have his phone number, and there was nothing I could do, so I just stayed up all night and prayed for him. Had I known where Dante lived, I would have jumped in my car and sped to his house, even though it was three o’clock in the morning and there was black ice on the roads. I would have broken down the door. I would have done anything to save him.

Later, when I found out that he was okay, and that the whole thing had been a misunderstanding, I went to my car and cried for half an hour—which was weird, because I only cry maybe three or four times a year. My best friend has never seen me cry.

I told my friend Lindsey this whole story, and about my wondering how God feels about us, and she said, “Well, that’s it right there.”

“What’s it?” I said. (I’m kind of slow sometimes.)

“‘I would have done anything to save him,’” she said. “If you’re trying to understand how God feels—which is pretty unfathomable—God pretty much said, ‘I’ll do anything to save him,’ and then he ran off and did just that.”

When Lindsey said this, I had to sit down for a minute. I was stunned. If I, a person, and a pretty selfish one at that, had been so worried about another person, one that I didn't know very well, how did God feel about us?

I told Dante about all of this, about all of the things he had taught me about God. (I made sure he knew I wasn't hitting on him, because, you know, girls say weird things to get guys sometimes.) I rambled on for a good ten or fifteen minutes. When I got to the part about my wanting to help him, I thought I was going to cry again.

It didn’t matter if he believed what I believed. I wasn't trying to make a convert out of him. I just wanted him to know that I cared about him. Dante sat there silently and gave me this look I will never forget. Dante gets very sad sometimes, and when he does, his eyes look like dark holes inside of his head--they're closed off, like they don’t want to take in anything else of the world. But that night, his eyes weren’t like that. They searched me. They were looking at me like they wanted to bore right through me. They were looking for a catch.

This shouldn’t have surprised me, because I do the same thing to God all the time. Okay, God, I say, that stuff about you loving me unconditionally is nice and all, but where’s the cold, hard truth? Where’s the heart of the matter?

The heart of the matter is that there is no catch.

Back to Spike and Max. Back to the goo. When my friend said that “God ran off and did just that”—did the anything to save us—she was referring to the Incarnation. This was God's ultimate act of empathy: becoming a man, dealing with the common cold and the same crap (pun intended) that you and I deal with on a daily basis. God let himself get covered in goo. Some of this stuff we don’t really like to talk about in church—like I told Dante, Jesus had a penis. (If you’re curious about Jesus and his manhood, there’s a book called The Gospel of Biff that I highly recommend.)

Why does this help? Because it means that God understands what it is to feel pain.

I, like everyone else on the planet, often wrestled with the “Why Do Bad Things Happen?” question. I came to the conclusion that bad things happen because people make bad choices. I was okay with that, because of free will and everything. But what I wanted to know, what I needed to know in order to trust God, was that he was moved by these things. I wouldn’t want to follow a God who sat indifferent and unmoved by all our sufferings. I needed a God who felt things, and felt them more deeply than I did. After talking to Dante, I understood that he did.

Contrary to logic, though, a caring God is far less comforting than you might think. It’s easier to deal with the thought of a God who’s indifferent—because if he’s indifferent toward me, it’s okay for me to be indifferent toward him. But a God who can feel, can be hurt, and I hurt him all the time.

Some days I wish God didn’t give a damn about me (again, pun intended—sorry), because that would mean I could do whatever I want. Some days I’d prefer a Big-Man-In–the-Sky God who waves his fingers and says, “Go off and do what you want, my children! Fornicate away!” But if parents did that, we wouldn’t think they were good parents. We’d think they were crazy. Parents tell us not to run out in the street because they love us. By the same token, it’s God’s giving a damn what happens—his giving a damn about me—that makes this whole thing worth it.

So really, this has nothing to do with Spike Jonze at all, which is why writing this essay took me four months. But look at this picture of Spike and Max Records anyway. It reminds me of me and God.