With Friends Like Me…

I can’t put my finger on why she bugs me so much. I need to figure it out though, because she’s called me twice already and it would be just like her to keep pestering me until I cough up an explanation. It boggles me that after all these years, after all we’ve been through, I can’t bring myself to return a simple holiday voicemail from my oldest best friend.

We met in church when I was 14 and she was 15. I was new to the 9th and 10th grade Sunday School class and searched the faces of the other kids in the circle of folding chairs for someone I recognized. I was quietly ecstatic to see Phil, an older, super-cute, totally-into-Jesus guy I had a major crush on, but was equally dismayed to find two pretty, stylish, older girls already flirting with him. I hated pretty, stylish, older girls, because no matter how much I saved from my part-time, pet-supply-store job for J. Crew chambray skirts and Outback Red plaid shirts, I never quite managed to be one. Had I not been so sure about profanity being one of many paths to hell, I probably would have muttered, “The hell with it,” and resigned myself to 52 consecutive torturous Sundays watching the two cheerleaders (I was so totally screwed) compete with Jesus for Phil’s undivided attention. But I didn’t. I was a good girl and I wanted to get my God on, so I took the high road and attempted to make friends with them.

I don’t remember much about Rachel, except that she came from a large, screwed up Greek family and was so beautiful she made your eyeballs ache to look at her. We were friends only briefly, during a period where neither of us had anyone else and our matching levels of hysteric teenaged silliness seemed as good an excuse to be BFFs as any. Cherie, on the other hand, got next to me and stuck.

At first our friendship was cemented by a bond of common crushes, unbridled goofiness, a love for preppy designer labels and a deep, passionate commitment to developing a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. At the time, I was smack in the middle of a life-threatening struggle to understand how Good Christians were so consistently ‘victorious’ in their daily walks with the Lord when I couldn’t manage my throbbing hormones, short temper, and sharp tongue for more than five minutes at a stretch. I didn’t realize until much later (ten or fifteen years, actually) that the secret lay in faking it convincingly, so I wasted a great deal of my teenage years feeling like an inadequate, uninitiated failure. I attended the church’s senior youth group with Cherie as soon as I turned 15, and quickly caught on to way Young Adult Christians were expected to behave. I waved my arms during worship in a parody of ecstasy, collapsed dramatically to my knees at the altar or wept gently in a huddle with the Prayer Leaders, depending on the seriousness of the week’s transgressions. When in doubt, I followed first Cherie’s example, then those of the other Young Adult Christians everyone looked up to. And I did it in complete seriousness, believing that this prayer or that scripture or this confession would be the key that would magically transform my act into something real. Like a bolt from Heaven, the Holy Spirit would descend on me with the Great Secret and I, too, would be a Good Christian. I begged, I cried, I prayed, I memorized long passages of scripture, mentally castigated myself for every mean thought and kept one eye on Heaven all the while, watching vigilantly for that sign.

I was convinced it was my fault it never came.

Cherie and I talked about it constantly. As we outgrew the silly, shallow elements of our relationship, we started to trust each other with more serious issues, all of which we thought we could trace to our spiritual impotence. She was shattered at her inability to stop sleeping with her boyfriend, relentlessly berating herself for each new slip-up. Her youthful buoyancy faded into a quiet, pervasive misery she would never shake. I, on the other hand, was confounded at the sheer magnitude of my spiritual ugliness, and in listing my own shortcomings could barely find a place to begin. The glinting edges of my righteous self-hatred were a sharp counterpoint to her stoic pessimism. We roomed together at Spiritual Life Retreats, fed one another’s self-condemnation, and promised to keep each other accountable. We would not backslide into the fires of Hell because we would guard one another with our souls.

We meant it, and that shared responsibility kept us close as we passed from the teenage years into adulthood. It fueled her persistence when for some reason I can no longer remember, I stopped speaking to her. She would send me cards, drop by my house, or ambush me in church, begging me to relent. I refused until the day she asked me to be her maid of honor, at which point I melted with awe at her capacity for forgiveness.

We were loyal, and we trusted each other. Even when I hinted that her fiancée was making some inappropriate advances to me the week of the wedding, she believed me, although she married him anyway. When six months later he cheated on her, I picked up the pieces and let her bend my ear during hour-long discourses on the pros and cons of divorce for six months afterward. The quiet pessimism I’d noticed before darkened into something more ominous, but our friendship persisted. When I stopped going to church, she continued to send cards, drop invitations and find ways to tempt me with the promise of lunch or a cute Prayer Leader. She continued to take seriously the shepherding of my soul, even when it became apparent she cared more about it than I did. No matter what else was happening in her life – her on-again/off-again marriage, crazy job, disloyal friends – the subject of her Walk With God and her abject failure to live up to it was foremost in her mind, and therefore in our conversations.

I minded occasionally, especially when she started criticizing me for sleeping with my own boyfriend, many years after she’d done the same. I didn’t think she was being hypocritical – I knew her own mistake still haunted her – but I wanted room to make my own mistakes without her constant predictions of doom and gloom. And in truth, I wasn’t so sure premarital sex was the fiery damnation she made it out to be. In fact, it felt pretty good. I had entered a phase of my life where I was questioning our Sunday School education, and I needed room to explore. We drifted apart as both her marriage and my beliefs began to flag. I was still sure I believed in God, but beyond that I was deeply suspicious of everything I’d ever been told. Although she was often preoccupied with the antics of her loser husband, she still managed to always remind me patiently that “God was waiting.” I began to get annoyed. There was reproach in those flowery reminders.

When I moved away six years ago, we said a fond good-bye. We knew we’d never share another lazy Sunday afternoon hanging around my parents’ sunny porch, and neither of us would be available to answer emotional emergency calls, armed with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s and a gallon of cherry tea. There would be no more shopping trips, movie nights, or Youth Group reunions. She sent me off with a hug and a promise to stay in touch.

It didn’t take long before I learned to dread those cards and phone calls. As I began to uncover parts of me that had long lay buried under years of church-lady bullshit, her plaintive pleas and predictions of spi

ritual disaster started to wear on me. I never got a birthday or Christmas card that didn’t inquire after my Walk With God, and her deep disapproval of my choices – from rejecting organized religion to having sex – was always evident in her tone. Even my mother didn’t nag me as much. It wasn’t long before I just stopped answering.

When I went home for a week over my 31st birthday, my mother invited her to the party. The conversation was painfully awkward, as she couldn’t relate to the places my life had taken me, and neither of us wanted to talk about the lamentable state of her crumbling marriage. We both made excuses not to see each other again, and I left there confident we’d put that friendship to rest. I was exasperated at how defeated and victimized she seemed after 10 years married to the same screw-up, and I’m sure she was equally annoyed at what she perceived as my unrepentant indulgence in a blithely Bacchanalian lifestyle. We could not be more different.

Three weeks ago she called and left a message that she had finally divorced her husband and wanted to catch up. As I replayed to voicemail I tried to imagine how that conversation would go, and I couldn’t bring myself to call her back. Later that week I came across some of her old cards and letters and I cringed more deeply at her blatant soapbox evangelism than I had the first time around. I know her concern comes from someplace sincere, but I don’t know if that matters enough to make it palatable. I don’t want to discuss God with someone who cannot fathom the possibility that a pastor or priest or televangelist could be capable of anything other than inspired, unerring, god-given truth. I am knee-deep in a process that requires me to first discount everything I’ve ever been taught before moving on, and I know she would not handle that well. I just don’t have the energy to deal with it.

If I could be confident that the conversation would be limited to news of our lives, I think I might be able to handle it. I wouldn’t love it – I haven’t enjoyed her company as much since she lost her sense of humor in college – but I could handle it. The problem is it would be just the beginning. There would be more calls, more cards, and more unwelcome intrusions into the comfortably balanced existence I struggle to maintain.

I freely admit that I am being selfish. What I’m not sure about is whether or not I should stop.

Because I post here, I don’t really have anything to post here. I might try someday anyway. What is your Wish for the World? I don’t accept notes, but that doesn’t mean you can’t comment.