GRAFFITO

Julie Gochenour

My dictionary defines graffito as “an inscription, slogan, drawing, etc. crudely scratched, scribbled, or drawn on a public surface.” A surface like a church wall. As good Christians, however, none of us would spray-paint graffiti on a church wall. Instead, we spray-paint God.

I learned this the hard way. My father committed suicide on August 27, 1999, less than a week before I started classes at Eastern Mennonite Seminary. By early spring, I was furious. Not only was my father dead, but God wasn’t keeping God’s promises.

Specifically, I needed a job and didn’t have one. Most of the work that seminary students do to help make ends meet simply wasn’t an option. A slight handicap leaves me unable to stand for more than about ten minutes. That hadn’t been a problem when I was editor of Virginia Farmer and Southern Dairy, but it certainly precluded bagging groceries at Red Front Supermarket.

I railed my way through the semester. Instead of meeting my needs, God had abandoned me. The Bible does not describe a God that abandons. I had been duped. All this time I had apparently loved and followed a very different God from the one I’d bargained for.

And look where it had gotten me. God’s promises were obviously worthless—another reason God was not to be trusted. Sitting in Tom Finger’s philosophy class, listening to a lecture on nominalism, I decided that the words we use to describe God are no more related to reality than the names of computer components.

See the pattern? Well, I didn’t. Not at first. Sometime in June, however, I finally realized that while I might be looking in God’s direction, I was really seeing my father. Without realizing it, I had spray-painted my feelings of anger, hurt, and betrayal all over God. I found I wasn’t looking at God at all; I was fleeing my own dark response to my dad’s suicide.

Worse, the more I scrubbed away at this graffiti, the more I found. The stuff was everywhere, all over the walls of my religion. Some of it went back for years.

Instead of being honest and dealing with the darkness inside of me, instead of emptying out the ugly pigments in my heart, I had held onto them and spray-painted my worst thoughts, feelings, and opinions across the surface of Jesus’ Abba-Father. Images of my fear, anger, and rigidity were everywhere, marks of insecurity, arrogance, and the secret violence of my heart—some whitewashed yet showing through, some in plain view.

It took me months to accept this. But it’s true. Unless we honestly address the darkness inside us, our world looks like that darkness. And our view of God is just as colored and distorted by that darkness as everything else.

My dad’s suicide uncovered my dishonesty. Believing he had abandoned me, I decided God did the same.

Instead of telling God I was angry, I pretended I wasn’t. Finding myself in an arbitrary world, I made God as unreliable as my dad. Afraid that my dad’s death was somehow my fault, and needing to believe it was, I fled both possibilities.

To cover my fear, I scrawled graffiti and falsehoods all over God and my life. What I didn’t realize at the time was just how much it cost me.

I’m not alone. In hindsight, I’ve come to see that the church does the same. Picking my way through the whole mess one Sunday morning, I realized that not only I but also the church store within us pools of graffiti paint. Far too often we come together insisting on our lies and dishonesty. When we do, we spray our graffiti over the gospel.

Instead of telling God we’re afraid, we turn Jesus into a conqueror. Rather than naming our destructiveness, we justify it with Scripture. Rather than admitting we’re wrong, we insist we’re right and demand others agree. Instead of genuinely confessing our faults, we pretend we’re perfect. Then we lie to ourselves and God to preserve these expectations.

Two years later I finally understand that my response to my dad’s suicide was not about God. It was about me. I had created a god who matched my version of reality. I also see just how quickly the gospel we preach and model can become more about our anger, fear, and manipulation than about God.

But instead of letting God be God, instead of practicing openness in the form of examination, confession, and repentance—all necessary for healing—we, you and I who are the church, self-police and limit our brokenness. We deny these things remain in our heart. Yet if we refuse to discern and acknowledge their presence, refuse to do the hard work of repentance and correction, their darkness persists.

Pretending to be light, we paint our ugliness across our praxis, missions, and corporate life together. Then we point to the graffiti and convince ourselves that it’s a picture of God. So much for witness and evangelism. No wonder people outside the church often refuse to believe us. Our graffiti isn’t good news. It’s a picture of ourselves.

This sounds harsh, but we need to admit it. We need to turn to God and to each other and, together, bring our darkness to the One who is Light. Then we need to kneel before our brothers and sisters not in Christ and confess that we have not been honest with them or ourselves.

Both are crucial. Our graffiti costs us. The stuff we scrawl across God is costing us the salvation of those not in Christ; the persons we see every day who don’t go to church with us. They see our darkness, the darkness we call God, and they flee. They flee the God of Love because the God we name doesn’t look like love but the worst of ourselves, the stuff even we won’t claim.

What we refuse to deal with in ourselves and spray across the face of God hides God from our brothers and sisters not in Christ. Oddly enough, it also does the same to us.

—Julie Gochenour, member of the Religious Society of Friends, is completing her M.Div. at Eastern Mennonite Seminary. As part of her thesis research, she conducted extensive interviews with people who do not attend church. She and her husband Gary live on the family farm in Maurertown, Virginia.