Rev. Lyn G. Brakeman on what happens to me happens to God

My First Chaplain

I was afraid of a glass when I was little. I still am.

This wasn’t just any old glass, though. It was triangle-shaped, filled to the brim with cloudy viscous liquid and contained two cross-eyed green olives. Like mad eyes they stared out at me and frowned. I didn’t see how the long slender stem of this glass could hold up the whole triangle and the big overweight olives as my father twirled it between his fingers and gazed at it with all the affection I wanted for myself.

“Lynnie went down the big slide at the playground today. Isn’t that wonderful, darling?” my mother would say. “Mmmhmmm,” my father nodded and sipped. My mother went right on taking long drags from her white cigarette, leaving little red circles at the end of it. Lynnie this and Lynnie that. No wonder my father got sick of it. Sick of me. I even got sick of me. All I wanted was to jump into my father’s lap but I was afraid of the glass.

Looking good and smelling fresh and sweet got me nowhere against my despised rival, so I made my way to my favorite hideout where I met God for the first time. I crawled under my parents’ big oak dining room table with five Ritz crackers I’d snitched from the cocktail tray. There were cross beams that connected the table’s four fat legs and a cloth that dropped to the floor. I laid the Crackers in a row on a crossbeam, sat cross-legged on the red carpet, pulled my yellow nightie with the white lace and ribbons on it up over my knees, and talked silently with God who listened and listened without talking back.

“She’s just taking the Ritz crackers to eat herself,” my father growled one night. By now the fuzzy grey liquid in the ugly glass had helped him out of his shyness and into his snarliness. My mother said "hush."

Under the table I convened my little community: three imaginary friends and a fourth friend I called God. My friends were Gawkie, a boy who was mischievous and never listened to my instructions, Cookie, a good little girl with blonde hair, like my mother said hers used to be, and a cousin named Cracker who came to visit every once in a while to tell of great adventures like going to the Hayden Planetarium or having a hot fudge sundae at Schraffts. My friends were invisible like God but unlike God they didn’t listen or take me seriously.

I had seen God in a book so I knew he was an old, old man with a long white beard who sat on clouds and made things happen. I told God myself about the big playground slide I went down and that one of the crackers was for him. I told God about my father’s favorite glass and my jealousy. I asked God to turn the cocktail hour into the children’s hour like it said in the poem.

In the morning all the crackers except the one I ate myself were there on the cross beam of the big table. I hoped Daddy would notice.

Then I was three, well, three and three quarters, and God was ageless. We kept up our trysts on and off for years, and, as it is with all first loves, we never forgot each other even though we lost sight of each other for a time and didn’t marry at the traditional springtime of, at least my, life.

I grew up happy enough. A little sister came along and school – something I could really do well. My three imaginary friends disappeared, or left home, or died inside me, but God stuck around.

By 1946, I was eight and New York was safe. The war was over and we won, my father said. Everyone seemed to bounce along the sidewalks like walking on air. My aunt was taking me to a big show at Radio City Music Hall. We would see the Rockettes – ladies who danced all in a row with shapely legs like my mother’s, and mine some day, that looked as if they were one long leg. The music hall was big enough to be a giant’s castle. I could hardly breathe with excitement. I stared at the millions of lights (how did they change the bulbs?) and at the curtain as if I could make it rise just by concentrating on it. The lights dimmed, the curtain rose slowly as if it weighed two tons. I whispered like a feather to God about all the wonders we were about to see.

I never saw them.

An old man with a long white beard who looked just like God to me sat beside me and began to put his hand on my left leg. I took his hand away – over and over. He put it back and let it creep up my thigh and into my pants. I froze with terror and shivered with delight all at the same time. I knew this was bad but it felt good.

The show ended and with it my torment. I saw the old man in the lobby. His beady eyes paralyzed me just as his touch had. He gave me a new commandment: Don’t tell. I didn’t, not even God.

After that day my night time prayers became wooden. I lost God. My grandmother moved in and the dining room table moved out. I didn’t even care any more about the awful glass even though I still wished my father would come in and kiss me good night. I just made lists of blessings, every aunt, uncle and cousin I could think of.

The hissing and puffing of the city busses used to comfort me to sleep —city lullabies just as regular as my own breathing but noisier. Now they made me restless. I wondered if the old man were on one of them heading my way.

The old man finally went to sleep like Rip Van Winkle inside me and didn’t wake up for years and years.

But I didn't stop looking for my lost God. I looked for God in my achievements. I looked for God in the love of my marriage; I sought God in my children; I hung around different churches and found beauty and wisdom in liturgy and sacrament. Finally, I went to seminary to find God by studying about God.

One night, as I strained over an assignment to write about my experience of “the Holy” and stared helpless at a blank sheet of paper for what seemed hours, I suddenly found myself writing about the little girl in the theater, the evil old man and the God I wanted more than anything else in my life. My pages were splotched with tears but at last I had found God in my own soul's deep voice, speaking a love that told me who I was forever, the kind of love that isn’t afraid of differently-shaped glasses, a true first love that never dies – just like under the dining room table.

Ever since that night I have known and try to remember that what happens to me happens to God.

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