All the “God” I need

My wife Susan and I drove past a church the other day. Out front, a sign read TGIF!

I entered high school in the mid-seventies. At the time, poster sales proliferated record stores, drug stores, and Sears department stores—cute animals from kittens to seals, ugly animals from bulldogs to hippos, often portrayed above large white or bright yellow letters. One of the principal messages on these posters read Thank God It’s Friday. This message could be found in schoolrooms, doctors’ offices and various other places people didn’t really want to be. For the past fifty years, to me, TGIF meant only one thing: Thank God it’s Friday. Today, on that church sign, I learned a new one: Thank God I’m Forgiven!

“So that’s the deal? If I believe in Jesus, I’m automatically forgiven? I still gotta dodge jail, but I’ve got a ticket to heaven? Seems a little implausible.”

Susan hesitated, merging onto a highway, “I think that’s the idea, yes.”

So then conversely, if I live an ethical life, help others, and conduct myself much like a would-be Mother Theresa, but I worship the wrong deity, or no deity at all, I’m sentenced to an eternity of purgatory, or worse? Does this seem skewed to you?

I grew up as a christian, little “c.” No one talked seriously about heaven, hell, being saved or forgiven. We went to church and didn’t cuss. My church had a hippy vibe, we studied a progressive bible titled The Way, and when our pastor brought in an assistant pastor in the mid-seventies, he hired a black woman to tend his lily-white flock. Progressive! Heaven never came up as a topic. It was understood we all would go there.

My neighbors, Steve and Jack Peters and another close friend named Will belonged to Fourth Presbyterian. A charismatic church where popular, good looking college kids led the youth program. As a young teen, I started accompanying Steve, Jack, and Will to youth group activities. Not for the religious aspects but because they were fun.  Fourth Presbyterian was capital “C” Christian all the way.  

Ater the relay races and ping pong tournaments and soccer matches and skits, we met for snacks and serious talk. These cool young adults would save us. They told us we needed to strengthen our relationship with Jesus. They iterated and reiterated the message of Bible verse John 14:6—I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. This was when I learned the meaning of the title of my Bible.

One rainy Sunday afternoon at the end of a weekend-long retreat, the counselors passed out a bolt and a nut to each kid. They told us to screw the hardware together as a symbol of our commitment to Christ. They told us to ask God and Jesus to accept us and to acknowledge Jesus Christ as our savior. I tried to do it. I felt like a fraud. That was my last Fourth Presbyterian activity.

A year later, walking home from school with Will, he blurted out “Jeff, how’s your relationship with the Lord?”

Caught off guard and transported back to the pressure I felt from the counselors at the retreat, I slipped into my best Monty Python voice and said “M’Lord, how are you doing today, m’Lord. Top of the morning m’Lord.”

Angry, Will responded, “Jeff, I asked you a serious question about our Lord. Why are you turning it into a joke?” That was the last time I hung out with Will.

I remained a little “c” Christian for another fifteen or twenty years. Over time, through reading, writing and exposure to other cultural beliefs, my ideas about creators, saviors and afterlife settled into a hodge podge of theories that made the most sense to me.  

I find comfort from my belief in reincarnation and the expectation that I’ll re-encounter those souls from my current life who are most important to me. Conversely, I’m agitated by my surety that our universe is almost certainly a science experiment started by an advanced extraterrestrial, an intelligent designer if you will, who checks in on our progress only every hundred thousand years of so. There is no salvation except what we find in our current life by being our best ethical selves.

Ever since my middle teenage years, I’ve been offended by the absolutism of the one-way-to-salvation ethos of Christianity. None of us knows the true path to a rewarding afterlife, because none of us has been there yet. When it comes to spiritual truth, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity and even my own crackpot theories are all on equal footing. Anyone telling you something different, well, that’s just wishful thinking.

At my 8th grade lunch table, we compared hands, budding palm readers, one and all. Marcus Pappas blurted out “Cann’s and mine look like old lady hands.”  He had a point—thin and boney—but it irked me that he said this out loud. Marcus died thirty-five years ago while still good looking, except, I suppose, his hands. My hands resemble weathered saddle bags, scarred and spotted with tea stains. Still thin and boney, add wrinkly now too. Veins squiggle beneath the surface like caffeinated worms.

I last saw Marcus at Tilden pool in the mid-eighties. My neighborhood had two pools with competing vibes. To me, Tilden seemed the more laid-back pool. And, it had a swim team. Tilden pool attracted the athletic families. The other pool, Old Farm, is where the rich kids went to bask in the sun. My family wasn’t wealthy, but we weren’t athletic either.

Tilden threw annual parties on the Fourth of July. Beers, burgers, a greased watermelon in the center of the pool for the teenage boys to fight over. My high school friend Drew invited me as a guest one year. Drew’s family were Swimmers—note the capital “S.” When he teamed up with my brother and me on a triathlon relay team, Drew’s leg was the ocean swim. Tilden families! His older brother coaches swimming to this day.

We were just out of college, still living at home. Drew guarded at the pool on weekends, and I settled into the job I loathed for the next ten years. Marcus showed up at the party. His feet were messed up, misshapen, apparent through his heavy black boots. He walked using metal crutches with forearm cuffs. Dark glasses shielded his unseeing eyes. He roughhoused with his service dog on a grassy hill, the two of them smiling, juking, and rolling around. Much of the crowd looked on. My vocabulary still underdeveloped, I didn’t yet know the word, but I understood performative when I saw it. Marcus wore a goatee, and his wavy hair flipped up at the bottom of his ears. A beautiful boy at the end of his life. 

~

In my first weeks of college, I looked to qualify the growing internal ill-ease that washed over me. I charred my knuckles on my desk lamp’s molten metal shade. I sparred with a fire alarm box, punching out the safety glass. I plucked the shards from under my skin to hide the evidence of my crime. I held the glowing ember of a lit cigarette against the back of my hand in a deserted minor league ball park. My friend O looked on, his expression inscrutable. Thanksgiving break, my mother clenched my scabbed hands and tried to read my mind.

~

In the final weeks of my junior year, I punched an oak tree leaving my knuckles rough and swollen. I sneaked out of a mixer early, too self-conscious to talk or dance with my date, I abandoned her for the night. I craved destruction. Not the tree, though, it was four feet wide. A week later, a different tree, a twin, a couple dozen yards away, crashed to the ground on a sunny afternoon. Across campus, drinking beer on the lawn, we looked to the heavens and wondered about thunder from a blue sky. Had I punched that tree, I could have claimed victory when it fell. I couldn’t untwist the cap from a plastic Pepsi bottle for years. Arthritis flares when I make a fist.

~

My wife Susan spotted a porch glider as we drove past a junk shop. The aluminum frame seemed sound, but the wooden seats rotted through, the hardware fused with rust. We crammed it in the back of our Subaru on a fifteen-dollar investment. Susan took the kids to Storytime at the library while I took a reciprocating saw to the glider, cutting off the useless parts. Dripping with sweat as I hacked away at rotten wood and rusted metal, my hand slipped into the oscillating blade, slicing off an unnecessary chunk from the end of my index finger.  

Assessing the damage under a running faucet, I could see the wound wasn’t stitchable, and it didn’t seem to impact the function of my finger, just the shape. I wrapped it in paper towels and focused on dismantling the glider before Susan and our kids got home.  

~

The skin surrounding my right thumb is numb from the joint in the center of my hand to its very tip. It’s a bizarre lingering result of a dramatic over-the-handlebars mountain bike crash. In the time since, my dislocated shoulder has hurt and slowly healed, but my tingly thumb never improved. It’s annoying and it causes me to drop stuff. The surgeon says he can’t fix it, and he says no, it won’t get better with time. As an ironic insult, despite the surface numbness, I’m often left with shooting pains deep inside after I grip something for an extended period of time.

William Shakespeare popularized the saying the eyes are the window to the soul.   That might be true for him, but for me, apparently, it’s my hands. They tell my story, draw a map of my past—a lifetime of dis-ease, recklessness and bad luck. Of course, it would be nice if my hands weren’t so chewed up, achy and numb, but wishing for that is wishing against the person I am today. We are the sum of our triumphs and mistakes.

Inspired by: https://georgiakreiger.com/2025/07/07/hands/

Image courtesy of kstudio on Freepik