[Adapted and expanded from this post: The Primal Scream]

In the wake of the death of my marriage, I began a search for answers to questions that I knew had no answers, but the desire to know, unequivocally, what had gone so horribly wrong was too great. I had to know the answer to “Why?” More than just “Why did this happen to me?” I had to know “Why does this happen to anyone?” even “Why does this happen to everyone, in some form?” Which, really, boils down to the first question, plus a pointed noun, “Why, God?” Yet even in asking that question, in thinking long enough about it, one might even question the necessity of the comma, the necessity of the God, and simply, honestly, ask “Why God?”

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I was consequently delightfully surprised to learn that he wrote The Legend of Bagger Vance: A Novel of Golf and the Game of Life. And while I think I saw the movie, I can’t remember if I finished it. I picked up Legend about a month ago from a local used bookstore. I read it this past weekend. I’ve read a few other books on the “mystic” qualities of golf and life, but they all pale in comparison to what Pressfield did in Bagger. And while I plan to watch the movie again, I’m pretty sure the screen adaptation doesn’t live up to where the book took me. To wit, this passage, especially pointed for the smitten, frustrated golfer:

“The search for the Authentic Swing is a parallel to the search for the Self. We as golfers pursue that elusive essence our entire lives. What hooks us about the game is that it gives us glimpses. Glimpses of our Authentic Swing, like a mystic being granted a vision of the face of God. All we need is to experience it once – one mid-iron screaming like a bullet toward the flag, one driver flushed down the middle – and we’re enslaved forever. We feel with absolute certainty that if we could only swing like that all the time, we would be our best selves, our true selves, our Authentic Selves. That’s why we lionize men like Hagen and Jones and treat them like gods. They are gods in that sense, the sense that they have found their Authentic Selves, at least within the realm of golf.”

“Bernard of Clairvaux understood what it means to be a friend to oneself. He spoke of four stages in the spiritual life, beginning with learning to love oneself for one’s own sake. This is the infant, nursing at his mother’s breast, ecstatic in the warmth of being held and filled, but unaware of anyone outside his own skin.

Then comes loving God for one’s own sake. This is the child who learns to appreciate his mother, maybe to draw her a picture or gather her a bouquet of flowers, overflowing with love mixed with gratitude for all she dos for him.

Then comes loving God for God’s own sake. This is the adolescent or young adult who begins to see his mother for who she is, not just for what she does for him, and his love grows even deeper.

One wonders how any love could go deeper than this, but Bernard sees yet another dimension to the journey of life: loving oneself for God’s sake. This is the young man who has made a mess of his life and feels knocked down and beaten up, but then thinks of how much his mother loves him, and her love inspires him to not give up, but to get up and give life another go.”

Susan, a Hollywood actor with multiple “failures” in both her career and her relationships, decided she’d had enough of God. So she took Him to couples counseling and chronicled the journey in Angry Conversations with God: A Snarky but Authentic Spiritual Memoir. It’s funny as all get-out and painfully honest. Her transparency bleeds from the pages, and where most comics use their gift to hide their inadequacies, Susan’s self-deprecating style brings everyone’s guard down to where we know we are like her in so many ways. Consequently, if she can laugh and grow, then, by God, we can too.

On her book tour (before I’d read the book), Susan challenged me to be brutally honest before God. This is something that had never occurred to me before. I feared being “smoten” for my insolent ways.

Then I recalled my experience, just a few months prior, when I yelled at God like I never had before. And felt bad for doing so, because that’s what a “good” Baptist upbringing will do to you.

Yet I quickly got over that feeling, because the felt injustice of my situation was too overwhelming, to the point where words that I would never have thought about using in a prayer starting running away from my mind and out through my lips. The words came in such a flurry of fury that the sentinel at the door didn’t have time to man the battle-stations and stop the tide of vehemence. He was woefully under-prepared for the onslaught of pent-up rage.

When the words stopped, the silence was dreadful. I was sure I was about to be struck down, to be given the chance to meet my Maker right then and there so I could voice my complaint in his very Presence. But instead of instantaneous death, I heard these words:

I know… I know… I know…

…spoken as from a mother heartbroken over her child’s necessary pain.

I sat stunned, drowning in grace. My anger subsided. And while the answers I wanted didn’t come (ever read the end of the book of Job?), it didn’t matter. The fight I’d had with God (which still continues from day to day) changed me, as if from Jacob to Israel.

So thank you Susan, for being honest with yourself, with God, and with us. It’s helped me, immeasurably. I’m not as mad as hell anymore; I’m just mad at hell on earth.

I was walking along a path with two friends — the sun was setting — suddenly the sky turned blood red — I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence — there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city — my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety — and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.

…an infinite scream passing through nature. That’s terrifying.

It was a year ago today that I wept uncontrollably for everything that was breaking around me. We call it a broken heart for a reason, and I felt as if that muscle inside my chest had been severed, with its separate halves wrenching apart, causing my entire body to split down the middle were it not for the glue of  all-encompassing pain. That may sound entirely too melodramatic, but the words I used to describe that day, on the day that it happened, included convulsive, aching, and despair. It was like nothing I knew a human could experience. In retrospect, it was the the darkest valley of this journey.

Munch’s “infinite scream” had passed through me. I fear it must pass through us all, eventually. For me, it was the sudden and brutal realization that I was not the sole creator of my own destiny and that I cannot control the actions or wills of other people. It was hopelessness borne of desperation, awash in bitter tears. It was flailing hands to an uncaring universe, selfish cries of “Why me?!” to a silent God.

But what if that’s only part of the story? What if the “infinite scream” really originated, in part, from the only infinite Being? What if the scream, that unearthly and primal sound that sputtered from my soul exactly a year ago, was God’s rage at the injustice and the pain and the chaos and the hurt and the confusion and the sorrow of the entire ordeal, for all parties involved? What if that’s His infinite scream, shouted at the dawn of time, coursing through our lives at times of utmost despair, echoing throughout creation, a wrenching pain leaving a lasting scar, like a sword to a side of flesh.

My God, my God…

What if His seeming silence… is because He’s been screaming with you?