In a small church in Huntington Beach California, on a dark late fall afternoon, I announced to the world that I was a Christian.
Not that saying these words qualifies you as such. In fact, if I think back, I followed Christian principles many years before I formally made this announcement. At least most of the time. Not all - who can follow these all the time? The Way is much too difficult.
Rather I formally recognized that I could not do it alone. That I was weak, afraid much of the time. That I made up for this with bluster and bravado. That I was pretty miserable much of the time. That life was a constant struggle forward, that I battled people, that I viewed most people suspiciously. That people were either better than me and thus I envied and resented them. Or they were worse than me, in which case I haughtily viewed them with contempt. And that this was the only game in town.
It is over when you are dead, though, baby. And then what? Death was an uncomfortable topic that I tried to push to the dark recesses of my mind. Let my mind be concerned with other things. Like sex. and drinking. and being cool. and buying stuff. and fighting. and trying to raise kids. and having to deal with them. and having to deal with a wife, who was not happy much of the time. and feeling ripped off. and trapped. and bitter. and thinking how much better my whole life would have been if only I had done this, or that, or the other. I'd be somewhere where people appreciated me. honored me. saw me for the great man I was. almost god-like.
I shudder now at the hubris. At thinking I could be anywhere near the magnificence of God. That I could question him, blame him for letting evil into the world, blame him for the evil men do. blame him for the lack of faith in the world. blame him for letting loose the devil. My mind would spin round and round and round - why evil? Why babies dying? Why me like a character in a Dostoevsky novel, ranting about the injustice in the world. Mad like a rabid dog, haunting city streets at night, prowling and pacing for satisfaction, for that which will take the sharp edge off my hunger and pain.
See I feel I can understand the atheist mindset, at least the ones driven there by pain. By intellectual pain. By the damned uncertainty the world holds. How it sucks that there is no referee in this game, that cheating and dishonesty can get you ahead and those of us too good, too stupid, too fearful to gangster up ourselves live lives of....yes, quiet desperation.
"The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation"
Huh. That is a kick to the groin of your average male. It sounds so pathetic. And pathetic is a blow to the pride.
But back to the beginning. This formal announcement did not descend like doves upon my soul, nor did my spirit surge and climb with joy. Rather we said a small prayer and filed out the room. The pastor turned off the desk lamp and closed the door. I walked several blocks through the evening gloom to my home. I went to bed and the next day caught a bus in to work. And went about my daily routine.
Which is a prologue to what I really wanted to write about, which was crossing paths again with an old college buddy of mine, who we'll call Oscar H. I was passing through San Francisco, looking for a doughnut shop, and I see on this telephone pole an advertisement for a creative writing class taught by one Oscar H. Oscar, or rather Artie as I knew him some 20 years ago, lived in my college dorm. He introduced me to cigarettes and Russian literature and a certain Manhattan cool cocktail combining cynicism, intellectualism and worldliness. Truth was found in squalor, in tenements, in the broken men who took up bar-stool space on weekday afternoons. These were the real heroes of our time.
Doughnut in hand, I hurried back to my family in the mini-van.
"Hey!", I called out to my wife. "I just saw a poster. It had the name of an old college friend of mine."
"Dad I want a jelly doughnut!"
"No fair! Isaac always gets jelly!"
I noted the look of exasperation on my wife's face and knew that driving through the streets of San Francisco was not on today's agenda. But I did get in touch with Artie/Oscar eventually, trading e-mails and phone numbers, until I found out that I was going to pass through his hometown after a business meeting, and would he like to do lunch? I called him shortly before arriving in the town.
"Hey Artie, how ya doing? This is Al. I'm on the I-5, maybe an hour outside your town."
"What the hell? No one calls me Artie any more, now it is Oscar. I thought you were some freakin' Craig's List stalker or something. What the hell are you doing?"
"Well I'm coming into town and would like to stop by. Maybe do lunch."
"Yeah sure that would be great. Lemme give you directions."
I had not seen Artie in 25 years. The house I drove to was on a busy street and a bit dilapidated. I knocked on the front door, and after a few seconds pause, it swung wide open. Artie looked a little grayer, a little gaunter. And he had a baby strapped to his back.
"What the hell! Oh my God, it is Al. Come in, come in! Excuse the mess, eh, we moved in a while ago and still getting settled. So what the hell are you doing here?"
"Well, just driving through, thought I'd checked out how Artie...er Oscar is doing. You got a new addition huh?"
"Yeah, yeah. Say let's go out get some lunch, I know this great place down the street..."
We walked to one of the typical cafes in that part of town, in which tempeh, bulgur and lentils are the main attraction. Talking over lunch we got caught up on past events. His teaching gigs, my trip to Australia, his trip to Paris, my work at a Bank, our lives with the wives. Then walking back through town...I'm not sure how the topic of religion came up, but it did.
"So you go to church? And believe in Christianity? And that Jesus was God and he died on a cross? That he wasn't some nut job running around, crazy out of his mind?"
"Yeah, I do", I said a little defensively.
"Wow. Unbelievable. Well, glad we got that out in the open."
"Well", I said, "the alternative to me is just not acceptable. The alternative being we die and that's it - finished and over. That is a really depressing thought. So I'm not sure if I believe out of a conviction of what must be there...faith in other words....or a conviction of what cannot be there. Maybe that is the opposite of faith. And if you believe that something must be there, it is not a big leap to posit that it must be God. And then the concept of God...what is this God like? A personal God who talks to you or one who just ignores you? The two ideas are not that far apart. What I can't believe in is that this, right here, us walking around, is it. That we die, and then nothing. That all there is a void."
"Interesting", Oscar said. "I come at it from another angle though. To believe that an almighty God could just wave his hands and make everything appear, as if by magic? Come on. I mean things in this world happen incrementally. Look at fossils and carbon-dating. The world is very very old, billions of years old. Things move at a glacial and very slow pace. Science has proved all of that. And in that time span a lot can happen. Men can evolve from lower forms, lower forms from bacteria, bacteria from one-celled creatures...and so on. In the lab they've created amino acids out of nothing, and these amino acids are the building blocks of life. So life can evolve out of nothing, and there is no need for a God to pick up some dust, blow on it, and magically imbue it with life. That sounds like a wild fairy tale to me."
"I don't know if it is a wild fairy tale or not", I said. "There's that line from Hamlet that comes to mind: There is more to this world than all your philosophies could dream of. We're always trying to deduce the world, to reduce it to some formula we can understand, to put it into a box. Both science and religious systems do this. We want the formula reduced, but also we don't want it to be too easy....there's not enough effort involved then and effort is needed to create hierarchy among men. It has to be hard to learn and grasp, so only the select few can attain it. I'm thinking of religion before Christ, when there were hundreds of rules that needed to be followed. And you had to follow them otherwise you would not go to heaven. When Jesus came all of that went out the window, and he boiled it down to the two essential things - to love God with all your heart, mind and soul, and to love your neighbor as yourself. And that was it! With those two in mind life is a lot simpler and we're not crushed by this weight of rules."
"But", Oscar said, "you still believe in a God. And that is the bottom line. You believe and I don't. It seems to me that religion is another one of these limiting philosophies you quoted. Why even follow one if you can't be certain if it is right or not? Why not just go your own way and do whatever you want? Yeah, I've heard the argument that religion is necessary to keep people in their place. Without it we'd be randomly killing people with no remorse, we'd be like beasts, like psycho killers. But guess what? I bet more people are killed in the name of religion than any other. Look at the religious wars in the middle east. Look at the abortion doctor killed by that fundamentalist. Religion is the opiate of the masses, right? Well a lot of people have been driven stark raving mad by these opiates."
"I know many people have done bad things in the name of religion", I said. "But I doubt they are doing God's will. God is Love, and hurting people, killing people, is not definitely not love."
"So is it never righteous to kill?", Oscar asked. "There are killings aplenty in the Bible. All these tribes are being completely wiped out, and God is fine with that...in fact encouraging it so his blessed Jews can take over."
"That is hard to reconcile", I admitted. "But I don't know the context of what happened centuries ago. I would say that yeah, there are times when killing is righteous. When you have to fight back and when that is in the will of God. Yes, Jesus turned the other cheek, but part of the problem is one of context. Taking this phrase and stating that it now applies to ALL areas, that we must always turn the other cheek. There is evil in the world. Holocausts. Hitler. Rwanda. Stalin. To name the most notorious. If we turned the other cheek that would be to let evil run amok. But really, this is delving into what some call 'Christendom', meaning it is the political history of Christianity. But at the bottom of it, Christianity is not a history. It is a way of life. And
faith is not a matter of reason. No one can reason their way to belief in an existence of God. But neither can one reason their way to belief in atheism. Both of them become slightly ridiculous if you look at it from an intellectual standpoint."
"But religion is full of hypocrites!", Oscar said. "Like that guy in Colorado who's a church leader. All these people are following him, hating druggies and homos, and he's smoking meth and picking up male prostitutes for a butt-f-ing session."
I paused for a few seconds then said, "Yeah, but he was doing that on a Saturday night. Sunday he was pure and clean again."
We both laughed at that. It was good to break the tension a bit.
A pub came into view and with the natural reflex of a ballplayer rounding first after a hit to the outfield, we rounded the entryway and headed straight in. Very similar to what we used to do at State University after a soccer game, except this time we were carrying a bit more weight, due in part to the baby that was strapped to one of our backs.
Not that saying these words qualifies you as such. In fact, if I think back, I followed Christian principles many years before I formally made this announcement. At least most of the time. Not all - who can follow these all the time? The Way is much too difficult.
Rather I formally recognized that I could not do it alone. That I was weak, afraid much of the time. That I made up for this with bluster and bravado. That I was pretty miserable much of the time. That life was a constant struggle forward, that I battled people, that I viewed most people suspiciously. That people were either better than me and thus I envied and resented them. Or they were worse than me, in which case I haughtily viewed them with contempt. And that this was the only game in town.
It is over when you are dead, though, baby. And then what? Death was an uncomfortable topic that I tried to push to the dark recesses of my mind. Let my mind be concerned with other things. Like sex. and drinking. and being cool. and buying stuff. and fighting. and trying to raise kids. and having to deal with them. and having to deal with a wife, who was not happy much of the time. and feeling ripped off. and trapped. and bitter. and thinking how much better my whole life would have been if only I had done this, or that, or the other. I'd be somewhere where people appreciated me. honored me. saw me for the great man I was. almost god-like.
I shudder now at the hubris. At thinking I could be anywhere near the magnificence of God. That I could question him, blame him for letting evil into the world, blame him for the evil men do. blame him for the lack of faith in the world. blame him for letting loose the devil. My mind would spin round and round and round - why evil? Why babies dying? Why me like a character in a Dostoevsky novel, ranting about the injustice in the world. Mad like a rabid dog, haunting city streets at night, prowling and pacing for satisfaction, for that which will take the sharp edge off my hunger and pain.
See I feel I can understand the atheist mindset, at least the ones driven there by pain. By intellectual pain. By the damned uncertainty the world holds. How it sucks that there is no referee in this game, that cheating and dishonesty can get you ahead and those of us too good, too stupid, too fearful to gangster up ourselves live lives of....yes, quiet desperation.
"The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation"
Huh. That is a kick to the groin of your average male. It sounds so pathetic. And pathetic is a blow to the pride.
But back to the beginning. This formal announcement did not descend like doves upon my soul, nor did my spirit surge and climb with joy. Rather we said a small prayer and filed out the room. The pastor turned off the desk lamp and closed the door. I walked several blocks through the evening gloom to my home. I went to bed and the next day caught a bus in to work. And went about my daily routine.
Which is a prologue to what I really wanted to write about, which was crossing paths again with an old college buddy of mine, who we'll call Oscar H. I was passing through San Francisco, looking for a doughnut shop, and I see on this telephone pole an advertisement for a creative writing class taught by one Oscar H. Oscar, or rather Artie as I knew him some 20 years ago, lived in my college dorm. He introduced me to cigarettes and Russian literature and a certain Manhattan cool cocktail combining cynicism, intellectualism and worldliness. Truth was found in squalor, in tenements, in the broken men who took up bar-stool space on weekday afternoons. These were the real heroes of our time.
Doughnut in hand, I hurried back to my family in the mini-van.
"Hey!", I called out to my wife. "I just saw a poster. It had the name of an old college friend of mine."
"Dad I want a jelly doughnut!"
"No fair! Isaac always gets jelly!"
I noted the look of exasperation on my wife's face and knew that driving through the streets of San Francisco was not on today's agenda. But I did get in touch with Artie/Oscar eventually, trading e-mails and phone numbers, until I found out that I was going to pass through his hometown after a business meeting, and would he like to do lunch? I called him shortly before arriving in the town.
"Hey Artie, how ya doing? This is Al. I'm on the I-5, maybe an hour outside your town."
"What the hell? No one calls me Artie any more, now it is Oscar. I thought you were some freakin' Craig's List stalker or something. What the hell are you doing?"
"Well I'm coming into town and would like to stop by. Maybe do lunch."
"Yeah sure that would be great. Lemme give you directions."
I had not seen Artie in 25 years. The house I drove to was on a busy street and a bit dilapidated. I knocked on the front door, and after a few seconds pause, it swung wide open. Artie looked a little grayer, a little gaunter. And he had a baby strapped to his back.
"What the hell! Oh my God, it is Al. Come in, come in! Excuse the mess, eh, we moved in a while ago and still getting settled. So what the hell are you doing here?"
"Well, just driving through, thought I'd checked out how Artie...er Oscar is doing. You got a new addition huh?"
"Yeah, yeah. Say let's go out get some lunch, I know this great place down the street..."
We walked to one of the typical cafes in that part of town, in which tempeh, bulgur and lentils are the main attraction. Talking over lunch we got caught up on past events. His teaching gigs, my trip to Australia, his trip to Paris, my work at a Bank, our lives with the wives. Then walking back through town...I'm not sure how the topic of religion came up, but it did.
"So you go to church? And believe in Christianity? And that Jesus was God and he died on a cross? That he wasn't some nut job running around, crazy out of his mind?"
"Yeah, I do", I said a little defensively.
"Wow. Unbelievable. Well, glad we got that out in the open."
"Well", I said, "the alternative to me is just not acceptable. The alternative being we die and that's it - finished and over. That is a really depressing thought. So I'm not sure if I believe out of a conviction of what must be there...faith in other words....or a conviction of what cannot be there. Maybe that is the opposite of faith. And if you believe that something must be there, it is not a big leap to posit that it must be God. And then the concept of God...what is this God like? A personal God who talks to you or one who just ignores you? The two ideas are not that far apart. What I can't believe in is that this, right here, us walking around, is it. That we die, and then nothing. That all there is a void."
"Interesting", Oscar said. "I come at it from another angle though. To believe that an almighty God could just wave his hands and make everything appear, as if by magic? Come on. I mean things in this world happen incrementally. Look at fossils and carbon-dating. The world is very very old, billions of years old. Things move at a glacial and very slow pace. Science has proved all of that. And in that time span a lot can happen. Men can evolve from lower forms, lower forms from bacteria, bacteria from one-celled creatures...and so on. In the lab they've created amino acids out of nothing, and these amino acids are the building blocks of life. So life can evolve out of nothing, and there is no need for a God to pick up some dust, blow on it, and magically imbue it with life. That sounds like a wild fairy tale to me."
"I don't know if it is a wild fairy tale or not", I said. "There's that line from Hamlet that comes to mind: There is more to this world than all your philosophies could dream of. We're always trying to deduce the world, to reduce it to some formula we can understand, to put it into a box. Both science and religious systems do this. We want the formula reduced, but also we don't want it to be too easy....there's not enough effort involved then and effort is needed to create hierarchy among men. It has to be hard to learn and grasp, so only the select few can attain it. I'm thinking of religion before Christ, when there were hundreds of rules that needed to be followed. And you had to follow them otherwise you would not go to heaven. When Jesus came all of that went out the window, and he boiled it down to the two essential things - to love God with all your heart, mind and soul, and to love your neighbor as yourself. And that was it! With those two in mind life is a lot simpler and we're not crushed by this weight of rules."
"But", Oscar said, "you still believe in a God. And that is the bottom line. You believe and I don't. It seems to me that religion is another one of these limiting philosophies you quoted. Why even follow one if you can't be certain if it is right or not? Why not just go your own way and do whatever you want? Yeah, I've heard the argument that religion is necessary to keep people in their place. Without it we'd be randomly killing people with no remorse, we'd be like beasts, like psycho killers. But guess what? I bet more people are killed in the name of religion than any other. Look at the religious wars in the middle east. Look at the abortion doctor killed by that fundamentalist. Religion is the opiate of the masses, right? Well a lot of people have been driven stark raving mad by these opiates."
"I know many people have done bad things in the name of religion", I said. "But I doubt they are doing God's will. God is Love, and hurting people, killing people, is not definitely not love."
"So is it never righteous to kill?", Oscar asked. "There are killings aplenty in the Bible. All these tribes are being completely wiped out, and God is fine with that...in fact encouraging it so his blessed Jews can take over."
"That is hard to reconcile", I admitted. "But I don't know the context of what happened centuries ago. I would say that yeah, there are times when killing is righteous. When you have to fight back and when that is in the will of God. Yes, Jesus turned the other cheek, but part of the problem is one of context. Taking this phrase and stating that it now applies to ALL areas, that we must always turn the other cheek. There is evil in the world. Holocausts. Hitler. Rwanda. Stalin. To name the most notorious. If we turned the other cheek that would be to let evil run amok. But really, this is delving into what some call 'Christendom', meaning it is the political history of Christianity. But at the bottom of it, Christianity is not a history. It is a way of life. And
faith is not a matter of reason. No one can reason their way to belief in an existence of God. But neither can one reason their way to belief in atheism. Both of them become slightly ridiculous if you look at it from an intellectual standpoint."
"But religion is full of hypocrites!", Oscar said. "Like that guy in Colorado who's a church leader. All these people are following him, hating druggies and homos, and he's smoking meth and picking up male prostitutes for a butt-f-ing session."
I paused for a few seconds then said, "Yeah, but he was doing that on a Saturday night. Sunday he was pure and clean again."
We both laughed at that. It was good to break the tension a bit.
A pub came into view and with the natural reflex of a ballplayer rounding first after a hit to the outfield, we rounded the entryway and headed straight in. Very similar to what we used to do at State University after a soccer game, except this time we were carrying a bit more weight, due in part to the baby that was strapped to one of our backs.
No comments:
Post a Comment