Hagar, Father God, and the Wilderness of the Evangelical Church
~be advised: this essay contains descriptions of self-harm and sexual violence.~
When I was married I started throwing back any liquor we had in the house.
no one asked me, what hurts? What are you trying to forget?
They just said, “the bible says you shouldn’t drink.” Poured our wedding wine down the sink.
When I confided in them that behind closed doors I sometimes raged, hurling curses and even a few times my small balled-up fists at my husband’s broad chest, no one asked, why do you feel like you’re in a cage?
Instead they said, “it’s never okay to swear.”
When I sat on the floor of the kitchen my first year of marriage, making lines in my arms with a knife, when I called my father sobbing, I want to be done,
no one asked, what hurts so much inside that you need it to be traced in blood for the world to see?
They simply gripped my arm in terror, faces dark with anger. My mentors gave me patronizing sermons: calling your father is disrespectful to your husband. Next time, keep it in the house.
But I couldn’t. I was in the wilderness.
When I told them I looked up a list of my symptoms and found the words depression blinking at me through the screen, I received a handwritten letter. It was from a woman this time. It was about John Newton, the slave trader who wrote the hymn Amazing Grace.
“Remember that you are as vile a sinner as he was,” the letter said, sweetly. And then something about grace — amazing, probably — but by then my eyes were black with ink.
And then. I found a slim thread of hope — in the story of Hagar, I read, the slave woman who was raped by Abraham in Genesis 16 to make an heir for his lineage. She was the first and only person in the entire Bible to give a name to God.
That, apparently, was a sacred task. Unheard of — except by her.
I picked up the slim thread of words, stitching hope in me, and I sent them to my friend. The one who said she would pray for me because I felt so lost.
I received a message back: “The angel said: go back to your mistress and submit to her,” she quoted. “God told Hagar to return to her abuser. Sometimes God tells people what we don’t want to hear.”
My silence, then, could do nothing but howl.
And you know what they say, about a woman, and silence, inside the walls of the church.
No one. No one. Gave me tools for accountability, healing, and repair. It was all about cutting off the behavior at the top — lopping off the blossom of the plant.
So I had to dig for the roots instead.
With my fingernails.
With my teeth.
No one else looked for the soil’s tracks. No one noticed I was buried in shallow sand when I was a deep green thing with long and thirsty roots. No one bothered to long for, or imagine, what would bloom.
One man gave me a gift card. One, a prayer, and a pat on the shoulder. Most, a bible verse. Or even worse, advice.
Come visit us, they said, when I filed for divorce. We’ll share God’s wisdom with you. Your marriage is worth saving.
None of them told me I was worth saving.
Don’t get me wrong, they wanted to save me — but me could have been anyone. Anything. I was a talisman, a miniature on a shelf, precious to them in their desire to preserve her. It was the saving, pinned to the lapel of their puffed-up chests, that they wanted to claim.
Dear Savior.
“Go to god,” they said, as if those words still meant something. God was the father that watched my mother scream at me. God was the voice of Paul the Apostle, demanding obedience of wives. God was the theologian preaching my depravity on Sunday morning. “It’s right there in the bible,” he said, his words a closing statement. God was the pastor who smiled when he shook my hand, but behind closed doors he waved that hand like an ancient sovereign, pardoning abusers painting their victims as unforgiving. Or the whispers: Crazy, even.
(all of the howlers in the desert are.)
God left a string of women behind him, broken, and folded, and small.
I started to see that there was something else operating with god’s unseen hand —puppet-stringed idol. I wasn’t the only one on the shelf.
I didn’t know yet how unjust power worked — I didn’t know how lies could be planted as implications, as subtleties, as seeds. I didn’t know that people who claim to be protectors are often the ones with the most to hide.
All I knew is that something started to sour on my tongue when certain people spoke--all I knew is that something in my body grew smaller, like a rasping cicada wing folding; I knew how my throat closed like a child about to cry, red-faced, silenced in the wake of his father’s voice.
All I knew is how words worked — how, when I wrote a poem, it wasn’t so much about pinning something down, as letting something go. And I knew the difference because of how it felt — how the cells of my lungs expanded, how my eyes grew bright. My heart open. Like a resurrection. Like wings.
You can’t trust your emotions, the father had said. You can’t trust your heart. That was right there in the bible, too.
Oh, father.
That is when I realized god was either a liar or lied about or both, so when I rejected him, father god, that is, it felt like stepping off a cliff. Leaving the hedge of protection invoked every time we prayed, and set off into the wilderness, like Hagar leaving her patriarch, off into the desert to howl, and to die…
I felt I might die, too— but by then I’d decided that death would be better than this, this intentional culling of life, this deference to a father who only answered the questions that didn’t challenge him and who made parts of me disappear by pretending they didn’t exist, because my awareness of myself was mirrored exactly in his eyes….
Is it any wonder the imprint of me was so small, and so specific?
Every idol suffers because it is made into stone. They wanted to create me by omission, carve me in their image, and for a long time it worked.
What questions does the father never ask you?
What questions of yours does the father ignore?
The silence is a wound the father lets fester. And you begin to think maybe it does not matter. Or, even, that it is not there. Because the acknowledgement of the father makes it real, by his word the world was made…
It must be all in my head, you think instead—
That sounds familiar too, doesn’t it?
I found that the Father wasn’t just in churches, but in the doctor’s offices, the hospitals, the therapist’s couch, in the court rooms, hell, it was even in the healing circles that claimed to have shed all of that hierarchy of lies… the sickness was a spreading fester that clogged the passageways to freedom, that made the skin curl and blaze.
But, even poisoned, we were alive, when we were no longer made of stone.
Our bodies, it turns out, tell more truths than our fathers. Oh our bodies.
They are realms. And we are the sovereigns there.
Hagar met god in the wilderness. Dying under the desert sun. And she, with holy accuracy, the single character in the entire book of scriptures, spoke a spell of naming — she spoke into the void of the wilderness. El Roi, she said: Living god who sees me.
Ishmael, her son, his name was a promise: God will hear.
And Hagar, herself? Heavy with denseness of grief? For, what my friend had told me was true: the god of that story sent her back to the only civilization for miles, back to the lineage that was to be stolen from her very womb, by the father. An idol’s idol, buried in the sand of powerlessness, stuck in the gravity of someone else’s orbit.
Who had followed her tracks out into the desert? Who cared enough to find her puppet strings and, slowly, patiently, untangle and cut them? The living god who sees me. Who heard her howling? Who had given her a promise that, even if her son was stolen, her spirit would come alive? God will hear.
I didn’t know the end of her story, but I wanted to at least know the meaning of her name.
Hagar means flight.
I found it at the edge of a cliff.
