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those with clean hands and a pure heart. I wanted to please God. He was more heroic than Mighty Mouse. He was
     the Father Almighty. He was the King of glory. Selah.
    But God the Father scared me too. When God got angry with his enemies, he wiped them out. When the Israelites turned away,
     he punished them—he even killed some of them. If a high priest went into the Holy of Holies with one sin unatoned for, boom!
     He dropped dead. Pastor Ingebretsen said God's holiness wasn't vengeful; it was just too powerful. If you touched a power
     line you'd get electrocuted. God’s anger was the same way. He hated evil. And who would love a God who liked evil? I understood,
     sort of. God’s anger made sense, not like my dad’s. God got angry at evil; Dad got mad at anything.

    To say my earthly father shaped my image of God is kind of a therapy no-brainer. And unfortunately for God, my dad was complicated.
     When I was very young, Dad was loving and fun. As I grew older, Dad changed: he got mean and angry. Dad never tried to align
     himself with God. But when you’re a child, it’s hard not to transpose one into the other.
    To be fair, my earthly father didn’t have it easy. Dad was the third of three boys born to a dour Baptist woman who wanted
     a daughter. The night Dad came out of the womb, Grandma Jean yelled, “Throw him out the window!” At least, that’s the cute
     little story she told every year on Dad’s birthday. Try listening to
that
every time you blow out the candles. Dad’s father and grandfather died when Dad was nine, leaving him to a mother who disliked
     him and a grandmother who despised him. Dad grew up, became an optometrist, got married, and had four children. But I now
     suspect he never grew beyond the traumatized nine-year-old boy his dying father had left him.
    I was born in Hollywood, California, in what is now a big blue Scientology building—not the chichi Celebrity Centre where
     movie stars hold press conferences about their personal lives, but a prison-like facility where nameless underlings get released
     at noon to do tai chi on the lawn. But it was a hospital back then, which is how I came to be born there. When I was two years
     old, Dad moved our family to Orange County, to get away from Grandma Jean and prove her wrong—that he was not a failure.
    They used to grow oranges in Orange County. Actually, they grew far more lima beans, but Lima Bean County didn’t sound good
     to land developers. So they called it Orange County, bulldozed the limas and oranges, and built tract homes. Miles and miles
     of houses filled the map in tedious symmetry, as if entire communities had been laid out on sheets of graph paper.
    But Dad scored a coup: he bought a modest house on a swanky street that wrapped around a golf course. The swanky houses backed
     up onto putting greens. Their front yards were fenced in and private, and when you walked past, you could hear the faint whisper
     of pool skimmers and clinking highballs and success. Our swankless house had no private backyard; it backed into smaller houses
     with smaller people of smaller dreams. But Dad dreamed big. He promised Mom he’d buy her a swanky house. He put a For Sale
     sign on the lawn, invested in risky stocks, and lay in wait for his moment.
    Then one night Dad came home, ripped the For Sale sign out of the lawn, turned on the TV, and spat curses at the stock-market
     report. He lost the money he needed to buy a nicer house and move away from Grandmother’s pronouncements. Dad never talked
     about moving againat least never as a possibility, only as the dream that his mother’s vengeful God ripped away from him out
     of spite. My parents lived in that house for thirtyseven years. And so I grew up in “the O.C.”—not the TV version where anorexic
     models languished in mansions on the beach. I grew up in the caste just below that: the striving middle-class chumps for whom
     that life lay just out of reach.
    Early Dad, before