Is there any better feeling than walking away from someone who has been an asshole in your life — in a romantic context or otherwise — and feeling a chorus of angels at your back as you make your exit? Is there anything more satisfying than feeling the chains loosened that have bound you to someone who pulls you away from God’s intentions? Our culture vastly overvalues cutting ties, and mending a relationship is almost always more holy than forsaking it. But sometimes burning a bridge is God’s will.
I mused on these questions the other day as I walked to church, listening to the song “Bitch” by Meredith Brooks. The single begins with a sentiment close to my own heart: “I hate the world today.” Lest you think my attitude one of facile negativity, I will remind you that an adversarial orientation toward the world has a long tradition in the faith. The world “is the creation of God,” Rudolf Bultmann writes in his 1956 book “Primitive Christianity.” “Yet at the same time it is an alien place for [people] … Christians, it is true, know that they are ‘strangers and pilgrims’ (1 Peter 2:11), that their ‘citizenship’ is in Heaven (Philippians 3:20), that here they have ‘no continuing city, but seek one to come’ (Hebrews 13:14).” At times the Bible can feel full of conflicting advice. It tells us that God loved the world (John 3:16), but that we should also not be conformed to it (Romans 12:2). It tells us that we should do our very best to maintain harmonious relationships (Romans 12:18), but that it is also very important to step away from evil (Psalm 34:14). What’s a bitch to do?
I'm a sinner, I'm a saint
I do not feel ashamed
I'm your Hell, I'm your dream
I'm nothing in between
You know you wouldn't want it any other way
So take me as I am
As I pondered my decision to exit a soured connection on this sunny walk to church, I wondered if I was crazy or evil or both. But something led me to trust the divine fire within that had never failed to give me the courage to offend those worth offending. This innate pugilism has often been difficult to square with the Beatitudes’ exhortations to be meek, to be a peacemaker. I have tried and tried to temper my temper, but how I have loved the encouragement of diabolical men like Hitchens! (“Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence.”) Or the favorite aphorism of an Italian ex: La pace è per i morti (peace is for the dead).
In “De Profundis,” a letter written during imprisonment, Oscar Wilde stated that “the world had always loved the saint as being the nearest possible approach to the perfection of God. Christ, through some divine instinct in him, seems to have always loved the sinner as being the nearest possible approach to the perfection of man. His primary desire was not to reform people any more than his primary desire was to relieve suffering … But in a manner not yet understood of the world he regarded sin and suffering as being in themselves beautiful holy things and modes of perfection.”
In another letter from prison (prison is starting to seem like a very good place to write), the Marquis de Sade, that saint of artistic freedom, declared that he was “imperious, choleric, irascible, extreme in everything, with a dissolute imagination the like of which has never been seen … there you have me in a nutshell, and kill me again or take me as I am, for I shall not change.”
Was Meredith Brooks’ “take me as I am” inspired by Sade’s? Most likely not. But I am inspired by them both, and something in me will never surrender my holy propensity to slash and burn.