THE GOSPEL OF JOHN (PART II)

Continued from THE GOSPEL OF JOHN – PART I

JOHN AND I are sitting at a Starbucks – it is impossible to drive half a mile in St. Louis without passing a Starbucks – flipping through the Riverfront Times, the city’s alternative newsweekly. John looks like very much like a corporate soldier as he reads: a Starbucks cup clutched in one hand, a Blackberry in the other, and the keys to his Volkswagen Jetta splayed on the table between the two of us like an advertisement. I momentarily consider asking him what Jesus would think of our modern world, but I know John’s days of bearing witness are through. Instead I think about engaging him in an entirely different conversation than the one we’ve been having for the last few days – a conversation about the possibility that he might be wrong.

“What if you are wrong about your atheistic epiphany?” I ask John out of the blue.

The space suddenly grows dead between us. John’s forehead wrinkles as he grapples for the right answer. So far he has considered me to be nothing other than a champion of his cause that he could not have expected this unforeseen curveball.

“Why is Satan called evil?” John asks me after several seconds of searching. “Was it Satan who caused a worldwide flood, pestilences, famines and murder of Egypt’s first born, or was it some other deity?”

I see that John is offering one of the oldest arguments in the book favoring God’s nonexistence. I have heard the argument worded many different ways, but the basic gist is always the same – that how can a God who is so merciful and loving allow and condone (and sometimes even cause) so much earthy evil and suffering?

“It’s not up to me to say whether God is evil, but don’t you think He’s probably a little bit detached just like all parents are,” I declare trying to sound optimistic. “I realize that God’s only Son suffered a human death and went to hell for us,” I add, “but he must have a busy day and can’t honestly be bothered with all the people who die every second.”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about!” John practically shouts at me. “You make it sound as if God keeps His distance and never looks over our shoulders. Fine, if that is what your version of religion taught you. But in my world God wasn’t only in your heart and in your soul, but He was behind your eyes and inside your thoughts, He knew what you were going to think before you did. He told you not to think about your dick when you weren’t even thinking about your dick – yet.”

“Okay,” I allow, “But as for God allowing terrible death to occur, try this analogy: if I painted a picture and everybody said it was valuable and worth millions of dollars and should be preserved so that it will last for a very long time, and then I tore it up and burned it and people got angry – well, I have the right to do whatever I want with it because it’s MY painting, right? Nobody can say I’m a philistine because I tore up my own painting. I might well be judged for my actions (which will no doubt seem cryptic and mysterious), but nobody can say I was wrong for what I wanted to do with my own creation. Similarly, if God is the giver of all life, than He has the power to do what he likes with the lives of all living things, right? In this way it shouldn’t seem like such a violation if he kills us or inflicts us with disease or simply fails to intervene to spare us, right?”

John stares at me. “I can think of a million scriptural verses to discredit your very plausible theory. Your theory is plausible because you go outside of the Bible to justify God’s actions and inactions, but born again Christians are locked into a scriptural programming that doesn’t allow them to think any independent thoughts. When it comes to God and life there is an answer for anything and everything, and it’s in the Bible.”

“So this type of argument is healthy,” I ask, “because you couldn’t argue like this if you were still under the grip of religious dogma?”

“Of course not!” John answers. “When I was a Christian I was, like – “ he slaps his hand to his forehead to indicate a gesture of hopeless stubbornness, or more appropriately, to demonstrate how reason would have bounced right off his thick skull.”

“Cafeteria Christians are the ones who always say God is loving and merciful. If they actually read their Bibles every once in a while, however, they would find more than enough evidence in there which shows that God is nothing but a spiteful, wrathful and merciless deity.”

The sun is now shining brightly on us, the midday trickle of Starbucks drinkers oblivious to our heresy.

“Why do you think God and War fit together so perfectly like a hand and glove, the Middle East, republicans and homophobia?” John asks. “If you take a Christian and a Beatles fan, 9 times out of 10 the former is going to be a hatemonger whereas the latter is going to be a sensible liberal. I mean – is it just some accident that all the narrow-minded people flock to Christianity?”

John’s passion is convincing, but I wonder if I can’t challenge him further on the matter.

“Is it shortsighted to hate Jesus simply because you don’t like his fan club?” I ask. “Is there another way around it?”

“Don’t even get me started on Jesus,” John begins. “Before we can even agree to take Jesus seriously, we have to ask ourselves why he never left us with an inspired written work as a guide. If Jesus was the son of God, than obviously he was able to read and write, and if he was able to read and write, why wouldn’t he write down what God wanted out of us himself? Instead he placed his historical fate in the hands of fallible humans who didn’t even bother to write down a narrative of his life until a generation after his death and resurrection?”

“Are you saying that Jesus never existed?” I ask.

“I don’t know if I’d go so far as to state that the historical Jesus never existed,” John says, “but there certainly are a lot of questions and conveniences to the story, especially when one takes into account the historical context it occurred in. What would you say to these things?”

“What would I say to these things?” I repeat the query. Suddenly I realize how much easier it is to ask a probing question than it is to answer one. After a short pause I say, “Well, I guess I would say we have certain instincts and we are highly perceptive beings in terms of our auditory, visual and tactile senses and higher order thinking skills. Often we can sense our way through life based on these built-in functions. God must have thought, in addition to scripture, that this would be sufficient for us to go on.”

I don’t consider whether I believe these words as I utter them other than to conclude that they seem plausible enough. I am not trying to convert John back, I am only aiming to keep the argument alive.

“I often like to figure things out and I enjoy the challenge of a mystery,” I say, “but I don’t like to gamble. If you think Jesus left us at a disadvantage by not bequeathing to us a personal written record, I guess the way you interpret spiritual faith would determine the extent of how much this vexes you. (I.e., do you require a certain amount of evidence before you can make a spiritual leap of faith, or do you enjoy the intellectual stimulation of knowing certain things exist and are real without seeing them.)”

“Born again Christians,” John says, “see things both ways. They believe strongly in faith, but they believe the existence of their faith, and the existence of God and Jesus, can be historically and scientifically proved.”

“I read a book once which sought to historically and scientifically prove the existence of Jesus,” I reply. “It was 500+ pages and it didn’t contain a single convincing argument.”

“Exactly!” John beams. “That is what Christians are good at – making things up. If you’ve ever been to an evangelical church, the minister just paces the stage and makes stuff up for half an hour. Other professions and fields of study depend on something solid and substantive, but not religion.”

“What about philosophy?” I ask.

“What about it.” John says.

“Well, philosophy believes that thoughts and concepts are real, so if God is a concept that started in some man’s brain millennia ago and grew and grew into something so large and huge, then can’t God be real?”

“God is only real in this way as a projection and manifestation of our thoughts,” John responds. “But the big man in the clouds with the beard isn’t actually real, He is not going to judge us when we die, this is what we need to get over.”

“This ‘getting over,’ is this what atheism strives for?” I ask.

“Maybe,” John says. “Atheism is not organized like religion is. I am an atheist but I don’t speak for all atheists. There is no atheist creed. I am sure, however, that many atheists would no doubt agree with me.”

When life presents problems, reach for an instruction manual

I HAVE HAD cancer-phobia for a while now and I think it is causing all sorts of psychosomatic rashes, IBS, insomnia, teeth grinding, snoring, panic-attacks, weight gain, fatigue, and memory loss. I keep envisioning Chernobyl disasters, mesothelioma, lead poisoning, and world financial meltdowns followed by anarchic coup d’états. It might seem as if I am a living/breathing dossier full of fears, nervousness and phobias, but the combination of all these hypochondriac ailments is attenuated by the fact that I’m an over-caffeinated, under-slumbered walking zombie. My half-awake haze is an insulating comforter, but the negative thoughts are still able to seep through and pollute my mind from whence they spread throughout the rest of my body eventually distilling in various places causing aches, pains and other types of malfunction.

A weak mind has the power to spread its bad energy via the nervous system to all other parts of the body leading to discomfort, organ failure or sometimes even death. Because of my current phobic state, I thought I would try to circumvent any future mind/body catastrophes by purchasing Emmett E. Miller’s book titled Deep Healing. Dr. Miller has been a highly acclaimed pioneer in the field holistic healing for over 25 years. My mom used to work in health care and she had several of his deep relaxation/guided imagery exercises on cassette which she sometimes doled out to nervous and fearful patients. Each one of these exercises was accompanied by a cool synth audio performed by Steven Halpern, and once you tuned out the world and focused on Dr. Miller’s narration, you suddenly felt as free and safe as a strange sea creature feeling its way around inside of a big aquarium.

I can flip to any page in Deep Healing and find the same calming clinical reassurance offered in those deep relaxation cassettes. Check this out: “Our beliefs about the world often have a much greater impact on our health than what actually is true about the world . . . Your inner images, metaphors, and beliefs together constitute your personal myth about your relationship to yourself and the world.” Awesome! Here is some more food for thought: “The degree of disempowerment in our culture is extreme. At a deep level, many of us don’t even feel entitled to the simplest form of self-expression . . . This nameless dread is simply a learned helplessness.” Wow!

I have only been skipping around in the book so far, but I have found each of Emmett E. Miller’s teachings to be very much like a spiritual/philosophical epiphany. The copious sections of the book are framed by little quotations by famous people (e.g., “A person will become what he thinks about all day long,” – Earl Nightingale), and Dr. Miller provides several anecdotes and examples to clarify his analysis.

An affirmation which appears on page 277 that probably best summarizes the self-actualizing optimism in Deep Healing is, “My body belongs to me and ultimately will do what my brain tells it to do.” This truism is apt because what this book is essentially trying to teach to its readers is empowerment. Dr. Miller is trying to make us aware of how the mind/body processes work so that we can better control the intermingling between our thoughts (brain) and body (vehicle).

The mind truly is a treasure yet at the same time it’s an inscrutable mystery. Like all complicated things, we often need experienced people to help us navigate it and instruction manuals for daily maintenance. Deep Healing by Emmett E. Miller, M.D. is a good instruction manual to have in your library.

33

IN A FEW DAYS I will turn thirty-three. Thirty-three is a significant year, not only because Christ the Lord is eternally thirty-three, but because many other celebrities have kicked the bucket at that age as well. Christ Farley croaked when he was thirty-three years young, and I am especially troubled by this not least because of the fact that I tend to have sleight issues with weight and hyperactivity just as he did (there is also a scary image of a freshly dead Chris Farley I saw once, and it seared its way into my brain to such an extent that I cannot watch his movies to this day without feeling a sickening rising/falling feeling in my stomach). Layne Staley also died at thirty-three – too late by many of his fans’ expectations (and probably the artist’s own as well), but frighteningly young nonetheless. And who can forget John Belushi, the first modern day celebrity with a penchant for excess who set the precedent for dying at thirty-three. Then there is Eva Peron, William S. Burroughs, Jr., Sam Cooke and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy just to name a few.

I have no intention of dying in my thirty-third year, which is why the demise of so many talented careers at this half-grown age is troubling to me.

It is as if there is a preternatural curse on the number thirty-three as it pertains to the lifespan, and it is similar in many ways to the curse that plagues the twenty-seventh year of life. Several entertainment luminaries like Jimmy Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain have all died at the age of twenty-seven, and I even knew a few people who took their lives at this age as well. The curse regarding dying at twenty-seven is cosmic in nature, and gets its significance from an astrological phenomenon known as Saturn Return. Basically, Saturn Return is a deep life assessment that occurs approximately every 27-30 years, which is the same time it takes the planet Saturn to complete its orbit (i.e., wherever Saturn was at in its orbit when you were born, approximately 27 years later it will be in the same place in the heavens). The first Saturn Return is viewed as a crossing of the threshold from youth to adulthood, and some believe people like Kurt Cobain who kill themselves in their twenty-seventh year are unwilling to relinquish their childhoods and mature into adults. This theory holds a lot of water when one considers the types of entertainers who have offed themselves either directly or indirectly at this age. But it is tragic that nobody told these people that growing up (or “old”) is not obligatory, as there are many fifty year old men and women who like to watch the Disney channel or curl up and read Harry Potter. Sure, Nirvana may have broken up and never recorded another album after In Utero, and Kurt could have gone solo and ended up trying too hard resulting in something that sounds like Days of the New - but he is no longer with us, and Frances Bean doesn’t have a daddy.

Luckily for me, the thirty-third year of life bears no potentially ominous significance in the realm of astrology. The number 33, however, does have revelevance in the similar field of numerology – and it’s optimistic relevance too! 33 is special because it is one of the Master numbers (double digit numbers which cannot be reduced) along with 11 and 22. According to the website www.decoz.com, these numbers, “are called Master numbers because they possess more potential than other numbers. They are highly charged, difficult to handle, and require time, maturity, and great effort to integrate into one’s personality.” 33 is viewed as the most powerful of the Master numbers not only because it is the highest, but because the other two Master numbers – 11 and 22 – can be combined to form it. According to www.decoz.com, 33 is marked by a, “determination to seek understanding and wisdom before preaching to others.” It is also referred to as the “Master Teacher.” It is not surprising, therefore, to see this number ascribed to Jesus Christ when he was at the height and climax of his earthly and eternal mission.

But if 33 is so rich with abstruse compassion, wisdom and enlightenment as the numerologists say (I abstained from quoting more from the website; but, trust me, this is what they say), it did not teach people like Chris Farley and John Belushi a whole heck of a lot. If it taught these men anything, it is not to gamble with your life and think that you can cheat death for another day by snorting all the coke you want. It taught them the cost of their own mistakes. In the case of Layne Staley, he learned the ultimate enlightenment of what he was putting in his veins. But since these has-beens are all dead as a result of their brief and scary satoris, their lessons can be passed on to the rest of us. Their final acts exist as visceral reminders (WARNING GRAPHIC PIC) of the death that hovers not too far above all of us. We can either cling to death and its inevitability, or we can embrace life as long as we’re alive.

I pray that 33 won’t teach me a harsh and permanent lesson like it did to the aforementioned celebrity party animals. I like to think that I am not playing with fire like these people were. Sure, I have my vices; but you won’t see me on any three day coke binge any time soon. I think I would have to gain 100-150 pounds before I resembled Chris Farley, and the only coke you will ever see me using is Diet Coke. But if 33 is the “Master Teacher,” who knows what it will teach me. Jesus often spoke in cryptic parables, and if 33 imparts its wisdom in a similar way, I may find myself sifting through life parables to find the gems of enlightenment contained therein.

Or not. I am not an acolyte of numerology, nor did I even know much about it until I went to www.decoz.com the other day on a whim and looked up the significance of the number 33. But my ability to think analytically makes me somewhat superstitious, or at least I want to believe that my various interpretations of life and the world carry spiritual and supernatural weight. I like to think there is more to life than just coincidence after coincidence. The mysteries are too great, and I don’t find the statistical assurance of coincidence convenient enough. But I think grasping for answers in the stars or picking apart number patterns is misguided. It is simply a way of drawing parallels, and this is where it derives its most intellectual fascination for me.

But it does make you think if there is not something more to everything we see around us. And it goes a long way in proving a point which Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons makes over and over, that the laws of physics (and mathematics and hence science) are God’s laws. There is order and balance all around us, in our bodies, in our ecosystems, in everything. The natural order is very clean and orderly. Whether one is an atheist or not, it has to be admitted that this is a miracle. It can’t always be taken for granted the way the seasons change, the way nature is very resilient, the way language and numbers – the building blocks of human understanding and communication – are so mathematically ordered.

And, of course, the way a celebrity mired in addiction often dies at the age of thirty-three calls to mind this order. It is a coincidence big enough to make even a statistician scratch his or her head, and it should be an actuarial warning to Hollywood people never to hire a coke sniffing, heroin shooting artist/actor for role in a big production if he is an the eve of his thirty-third birthday.

But I still want the pair of boobs featured at the top of this post!

paradigm shift

Does God punish us?

Because we are moral creatures, we punish ourselves. I also believe the world can beat us down at times, but not because a higher power wills it to. The world can work against us for a variety of reasons, and how we deal with life’s unlevel playing fields results in making us either stronger or weaker individuals.

A religious person might see these grueling uphill challenges as God’s way of punishing us, but a rational person will view these things as a combination of different forces working together, some of which we have control over, and others which are beyond our control.

Why Dan Brown is important

People need to incorporate Christianity into a modern context so that it still has relevance in our daily lives today; otherwise the Bible is just a collection of ancient stories that have no present day applications. People think we don’t need God anymore because we live in a complex world with TVs, computers and medicine. But we’re still going to die, and this is where all the big questions come from: Why do I exist? Why am I here? What do I hope to achieve in life? What comes after? This is why we still have religion, and why we may always have religion. This dilemma (if you can call it that) is what inspires people like Dan Brown to write books like “Angels & Demons” and “The Da Vinci Code.” These intellectual adventures serve as a collective exploration and redefinition of faith for a generation standing at the threshold of something new and uncharted.

On seeing and believing

I believe that current events happen, but I don’t always believe in how they are interpreted and told to us by the so-called “pundits” in the media. For instance, in the 2008 vice presidential debates, I thought Sarah Palin bombed. And yet probably because of some network mandate, all the talking heads were saying that she aced the event and blew Joe Biden out of the water. By watching the debate with my own eyes, however, and seeing how she reeled and stuttered her way through the questions without saying anything concrete that came from her own head, I believe that she flopped. But news is very political, and nothing is ever reported without a spin, hence we get ridiculous assessments like this.

For this reason I carefully filter out everything that comes from the major news networks, and only accept the little trickle of facts that make it through. I have learned by now that most of the opinionated blowhards on channels like CNN and MSNBC are vacuous bags of fat that are pumped full of empty words and slogans by the candidates with the most soft money.

Is That All There Is?

or THE END BEGINNING OF DAYS

(because agnostics wrestle with faith too)

by: Me

“Eh-hem. Many of you, I am sure, had the opportunity to travel someplace last week during Spring Break. Whether you were visiting friends or family or just simply escaping this endless cold weather we’ve been having, I can assure you that none of you folks had a more exotic time than I did (chuckles from the audience). I have been bragging to everyone for the past few days that I had the pleasure this last week of officiating the Bingo tournament at the Masonic Home Senior Activities Center (uproarious laughter begins)…and…and…but that’s not the best part…(more laughter)…the best part – the real icing on the cake – was that I got to hand out prizes to the winners (the whole house now quakes with knee-slapping laughter, I start to wonder where they hid the nitrous tanks). HOW’S THAT FOR YOU DISNEY WORLDERS!!! (laughter crescendos before slowly dying down).

No, but seriously. It has been a crazy week. It began with news of the untimely death of a famous and beloved movie actor and ended with more violence in the Middle East. The death of the familiar Hollywood personality at the age of 53 reminded us that another irreplaceable piece of ourselves is forever gone, and it also caused us to clutch our chests and wonder if we too have some latent health condition that can just as quickly and easily terminate our own lives. Lynn Caine, a writer probably best known for her 1974 book Widows, wrote that, “Since every death diminishes us a little, we grieve – not so much for the death as for ourselves.” This woman, Lynn Caine, who wrote a memoir about widowhood which was subsequently turned into a made-for-TV movie that aired on one of the major networks in 1976, was later taken from us in 1987 at the age of 63.

I remember my uncle dying in 1995. He was seven years older than my father, but the two men were alike in every way. I thought of him as a typical lasting epitome of that group of people who a certain famous anchorperson dubbed, “The Tallest Generation Ever.” They were the tallest because when they stood upright, their shadows enveloped the entire globe. They were so big, this anchor person asserts, that by comparison to their stature the world seemed small and easily conquerable. They are supposedly the crowning star that sits atop the highest point of the bell-shaped arch of humankind and civilization. Everything had been leading up to them, and everything that comes after will be a downhill regression into anarchy and immaturity.

Yes, my friends, life is short. Every time somebody we know dies, a piece of us dies along with them. I remember going home after my uncle’s funeral and looking through my family’s old photo albums. My uncle stood there beside me and my parents, frozen in time inside of the 3 inch by 5 inch photographs. I followed the trajectory of his life from middle age until death within the context of my own childhood and adolescence. The memories of my uncle at Christmas Eve parties and high school graduations were still very fresh in my mind at that time. It was hard to believe that he was actually dead, like maybe he had just gone to Hawaii without telling anybody and he was never coming back.

But now when I think of these memories they seem less fresh. Just as old cars rust and accumulate scratches and dents, the memories of my uncle are losing their relevance due to their outdatedness. And it terrifies me. A big part of whatever it was that was still recent and new in my mind in 1995 is becoming vaguer with each passing year. The image of my uncle is being transformed and discolored by the patina of life. I worry that what I remember about him today is more imagined than real, that I am recreating and plagiarizing the past by injecting it with the pictures, language and sounds of my life today?

When I look at old photo albums now and see my uncle’s face staring back at me, the echoes of him are less loud. Time has moved on without him and he exists now in a place that is more foreign. A snapshot taken of my uncle in 1994 shows him proudly kneeling next to a brand new Chevy Silverado, the undetected cancer in his body having not yet ravaged his athletic physique. Everything about the truck, from its fat tires to its mobile phone antenna mounted on the roof, now looks strange due to its dowdiness. Will these things seem even stranger in ten or twenty years as our understanding of styles and trends continues to evolve?

I sometimes wonder if sepia photographs tell the whole story of the late 19^th and early 20^th Century. Are the smells and feelings we typically associate with hundred year old photographs accurate, or are these things somehow caused by the encrustation of time which conceals the way life really was back in those days? Were the stoic and hollow eyed men and women we see in old photographs really that stoic and hollow eyed, or has time moved on to the point that it no longer became necessary to drag their spirits along? Maybe these quaint men and women carried vivacious countenances that exuded life and vitality. Perhaps their eyes were windows to curious, wise and lustful souls. But all we see today are hollow eyed stoic gentleman in funny attire and woman wearing stern masks of preternatural judgment and repression.

The point I’m trying to make people is that we are living in God’s grace right now at this moment. Yesterday came and went and it tasted sweet, but God has a purpose for us right here and now. Take a look around…look at your neighbors…inhale the smells around you…this is life! Today was created for us, tomorrow was created for us! Yes, when we think of the past we ache from nostalgia or we feel an anchor of sadness in our stomachs that there will never be another celebrity like so-and-so, or there will never be another summer like the summer of such-and-such year. It may be true that there will never be another thing which is exactly like a thing that preceded it, but this uniqueness is the beauty of God’s creation! Each day may be similar, but God gives everything a little nudge to make our lives novel and interesting (congregation erupts in happy laughter). Right?…Am I right?…(laughter continues for half a minute before slowly quieting down).

Each day is not a thumbprint people! Monotony is an ugly word, I know we all hate it, but if we stop and think…if we think about this Sunday morning as we sit here – I know some of you are probably having déjà vu (wild laughter) – this Sunday is brand new in its own way, and next Sunday will have something new for us also. As we go about the rest of our days today we might have a fixed schedule that we follow, but nothing ever happens exactly the same…right?

WE CAN’T STAY STUCK IN THE PAST! We can’t wish, for instance, that it was the 1980s again. We can’t lament styles that have come and gone, people that have come and gone, sports teams that have come and gone, musical genres that have come and gone… All we have is this moment that we’re living in right now. It is our duty to make the most of it because this is how new memories are formed. When we let go of our worries that today isn’t turning out to be as good as, say, ten years ago was, we can begin to live and experience all that today has to offer that is new. We may find if we do this that yesterday had its own purpose, but today’s purpose is important and different in its own way.

I’m going to close by quoting a familiar phrase which you all probably know, and maybe it can be attributed to the band Aerosmith, but maybe they lifted it from somewhere. Anyway, the quotation is: “Life’s a Journey, not a Destination.” Life’s a journey….not a destination….I want you all to think about that for a moment.

Our mission shouldn’t be to get somewhere. Friends, we already are here.”

THE GOSPEL OF JOHN (Part I)

RECENTLY I traveled to St. Louis to spend a few days with my old high school friend John Jones. John and I knew each other back in 1992 when we both attended a high school in the upper middle class suburb of Fair Oaks, California. Circa 1993 John moved to the St. Louis area and I departed for upstate New York a few years later. We hadn’t kept in contact since John moved away all those years ago, and our coming together again after half a lifetime of forgotten separation is nothing short of a miracle.

***

JOHN was staring out of the window at his parent’s house which was located three hundred feet away. “When Jesus comes to reclaim his apostate church, He won’t reclaim me,” he said ominously. At 32, John is athletic with blonde hair and a bronze and slightly sun-burned complexion. His eyes are like two burnished blue spheres that seem to probe the depths of your soul and look right through you at the same time. When I met John at a Starbucks the day before, I was amazed by how little his appearance had changed since high school. Besides being a few years older and having a slightly receding hair line, he looked more or less like the 15 year old version of himself. Except now he claimed to know the truth.

“When the people asked him about heaven Jesus told them to, ‘look around them’ because heaven was much like Earth. When I look around me all I see is violence, suffering and poverty. Children are abused and neglected, injuries and illnesses afflict the righteous, and people are getting squeezed into ever tighter corners by fear and lack of resources.”

Across the street from our dark little godless meeting a much happier scene was unfolding. John’s mother was chasing two of her grandchildren around as John’s brother Kaleb and his wife Megan stared on in rapt amusement. There was sunshine, smiles, hand clapping and laughs compared to John’s dimly lit bedroom chilled by the home’s central air conditioning system. John had moved out of his parent’s house a year ago and been invited to live in a spare bedroom at his friend and next door neighbor Brian’s house. His physical proximity to his family, however, did not translate into a spiritual proximity. John had done the unthinkable two years ago and had renounced God and Jesus one night during a packed family dinner.

John humorously describes the occasion as his “coming out party.”

“I came out,” he says unabashedly. ”I told them what was what. I don’t believe in God anymore and that was it.”

“So they kicked you out for it?” I said.

“No. I made the decision to leave later on. I didn’t want to be a part of their programmed way of life anymore. I wanted to watch the TV shows that I wanted to watch and listen to the music that I wanted to listen to. You just couldn’t make those kinds of decisions when everybody is trying to sit you down and have a serious man-to-man conversation about the Bible and eternity all of the time.”

John is like a lot of thirty-somethings who were raised in fundamentalist church communities. Before John’s departure from the rest of the Jones clan, his life revolved around the fundamentalist church in his St. Louis suburb. He attended Christian rock concerts, weekly young adult functions and even participated in sports leagues which were organized by various area churches. He never had to travel farther than the five miles it was from his house to his church’s multipurpose room or soccer field. “I’ve never dated a girl who wasn’t a member of my church,” he said. He listed the names of his former sweethearts as if listing streets in a new sub development: “Kimberly, Allison, Megan.” All one had to do was put the word “Way” or “Circle” behind each name.

In comparison to the split level house John was currently residing in, the Joneses two story home was a constant work in progress. John said it was unusual to not see scaffolding erected along the walls, and the constant traffic of electricians, contractors, architects and plumbers he assured me was dizzying.

Besides Mr. and Mrs. Jones, John’s older and younger brothers both lived at home with their wives and children. The oldest son Mike is 33 and has a 24 year old wife named Katie. They have two children, Noah who is 5 and Eve who is 3, as well as an 11 year old child from a marriage that ended when Mike’s first wife was hit and killed by a drunk driver. The upstairs of the Jones house had been converted into a small apartment for Mike, Katie and their kids.

John’s younger 27 year old brother Kaleb lives in the large basement with his 31 year old wife Megan and their five children. Three of the children, 8 year old Noah, 6 year old Moses and 5 year old Sarah are biological, while two of the children, Elijah and Shadrack, were adopted from Ethiopia.

Mr. and Mrs. Jones occupy the first floor of the house. The living room has been converted into a master bedroom and a wall next to the family room was knocked out to build an extremely large formal dining room addition.

When I looked out the window at Mrs. Jones who was now twirling one of the grandkids around by the arms and muttering goo-goo gah-gah talk to the infant, I thought she looked like a happy and sane enough woman. Mr. Jones soon joined her and added loud and boisterous laughs to all the carefree family commotion.

This can’t be such a bad thing, I thought. Why would John want to run away from all of this?

***

TO UNDERSTAND THE SIGNIFICANCE of my meeting up with John after so many years, one needs to travel back in time to the early nineties. I was raised in a family that can best be described as religiously indifferent. We were Presbyterians but only attended church on the obligatory holidays and a few other days out the year. I never read the Bible, I couldn’t have told you who Moses was, and if you had asked me who was the Son of Man I probably would have said they were a heavy metal band that toured with Judas Priest.

Despite my theologically deprived childhood, however, I had a number of friends who were ardent evangelical Christians. My best friend who lived up the street from me was an evangelical who attended a newfangled church that incorporated ancient fire and brimstone Christianity with modern rock music and Republican Party values. It was through him that I came to meet other fundamentalists – like John.

If one had pressed me in those days to explain the unexplainable, I may have gone so far as to admit to the possibility of supernatural or spiritual phenomena existing. But ultimately I was an atheist: I saw absolutely zero evidence of God’s existence either in nature or in my head. I believed that everything had either a rational or scientific explanation, and my fear of non-existence after death was attenuated by the fact that 80 years on earth was enough time to enjoy life’s sweetness and leave some footprints to be remembered by. One would likely think it impossible, for someone of my temporal persuasions, to get by with a group of fervent Christians. Despite the limitations to our friendships – even though I played with my best friend nearly every day, I was barred admittance to his house by his stoic and suspicious mother – our social synergy was mostly buoyed and maintained by other common interests, and an agreement to disagree on theological issues also helped keep the peace (this latter pact was arrived at after several unsuccessful arguments marked by mutual stubbornness and attempted persuasion reached an impasse every single time).

The distilled sum of our various commonalities was the crazy glue that held us together, and when we were flying down hills on our skateboards or practically asphyxiating from laughing none of us cared that I was a non-believer and vice versa. But this still didn’t prevent me from becoming a fifth wheel on more than a few occasions. No matter how innocent I was, there were times when I felt no better than Dr. Faustus in the company of my Christian friends. If I said, “Let’s swim under that bridge,” I may as well have been the snake in the Garden of Eden tempting them with forbidden fruit. If I suggested we ride our bikes along the river, I was afraid they might reply the way Jesus did when he rebuked Peter saying, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me.”

My Christian friends could get so high on God at times that it would have been futile not to go along with them. Like a straight man to a group of comics, I only would have been adding fuel to their spiritual fire. So I kept quiet at these times out of a desire not to rock the boat. The Titanic was a lavish and majestic ship before it ran into that dreaded iceberg.

Despite all of the good times we had, I also couldn’t shake the creeping suspicion that they were secretly planning to convert me. They probably realized my anarchic independence posed the biggest threat to their purity, and in order to maintain our friendship through puberty and beyond, they would have no choice but to convert me. This is why – after 7 years of having a mostly secular friendship – my Christian friends started introducing me to the religious side of their lives. I attended more Christian parties, youth groups, rock concerts and church services during my early teen years than I did during all of my previous childhood years with my family.

I was standing at the threshold of a new life. But of all the new possibilities that were forming and materializing quickly evaporated and came unraveled. In the rapidly changing world of adolescence, my Christian friends and I were soon scattered to the four winds. With all the things vying for the young mind, psychedelic drugs soon made more sense to me as a religion than Christianity ever did or could. My best friend was growing more and more serious about his guitar skills and his band than anything else. And John just sort of dropped off the radar before up and moving with his family to the St. Louis area. Other people in this Christian milieu also faded away too.

But just as drugs proved a short-lived avocation for me, my former Christian friends soon tired of their godless hobbies and each eventually found his or her way back to God. And after a brief religious epiphany in the late nineties when I was sure I had accepted Jesus as my personal savior forever, my belief and interest in discipleship slowly faded from skepticism and now – in the spectrum of religion and spirituality mindedness – is hovering somewhere between atheistic clarity and agnostic curiousness.

During my teens and twenties, after experimenting with drugs, dabbling in religion and battling addictions to nicotine, food and sex, I had finally come full circle. I was once again an ascetic practitioner of the Great and Responsible Here and Now. By my late twenties I had matured into the boy-man I always dreamed of becoming – an adult version of my 12 year old self. The only vestiges of my coming of age spiritual journeys is an awareness of and respect for the unknowable and unexplainable, and an acquired humbleness from the realization that I am mortal and insignificant in the larger picture of the universe. This is why I have traded in my naïve teenage atheism for a mantle of intellectual agnosticism.

***

JOHN UNDERSTANDS IRONY. It is all he ever seems to talk about. When he is talking about baseball it is as if he is really talking about irony. If he talks about what he is studying in college he is really indirectly expounding on irony.

“Everything I do feels like an affront to God,” John says. “And yet it’s entirely liberating, like being a millionaire.”

We are strolling through the quads and breezeways of his former church, a modern structure that looks half like a high school and half like an office park. A large pyramid-shaped building with a cross-topped copula and stained glass roof in the center of the complex is the only indication that this is a place of Christian worship. Even though it is Saturday (the day of preparation for the Sabbath), the place is practically deserted. Only a custodian and some kids on skateboards unsuccessfully attempting to hop a stairway are the only other signs of civilization besides us.

“In the mid nineties I dropped out of community college after two semesters,” John says. “What is a Christian going to do with an education?”

The actual reason John stopped attending college, however, had to do with the conflicts between a liberal arts education and the doctrines of the Bible. When religious dogma clashes with science, history and social studies, the religiously revved mind often repels any teachings that conflict with its scriptures. “The overlap between the Bible and all other fields of study is very small,” John says, “and most fundamentalists aren’t willing to yield to anything.”

“I can’t think of a single Christian I know of who aced Geology,” he adds. “In high school we all sat together and had to cheat off of each other because we just couldn’t swallow the scientists’ theory that the world was however many billions of years old.”

John says it is the same for other subjects such as political science, philosophy and even literature. He dropped his American Government 101 class after his teacher refused to admit that America was founded on Christian beliefs and principles and that the framers of the Constitution were actually devout Christian men with the same views as Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell. John thought he was righteously following God by rejecting what he perceived to be the lies disseminated by higher education. He was trying to obey the 9^th Commandment: Thou Shall Not Lie.

“I thought if I just sat back and pretended to learn what they were teaching me, I would be no better than a liar.”

After two years of scooping ice cream and dating a girl at his church, John got married at the age of 22. With no room at the Jones house and an inadequate income between the two of them, John and his new wife had to move in with her parents.

“It was cramped,” he said. “Screaming infants (children of his in-laws), crowded kitchen, ten people at the dinner table not to mention all the pets – it was insane.” John likened the experience to living on Noah’s Ark. “I was claustrophobic and sick to my stomach the whole time.”

Unlike the other potent and fertile members of both of their families, John and his new wife were unable to conceive. It turned out that, because of a congenital birth defect, his wife’s egg supply was deficient and she had already gone through her whole supply by the time she was 19.  John would later ironically identify this as his Deus ex machina moment, the divine intervention that saved him.

“Things started to go downhill in our relationship after the realization that we could never be parents,” he said. “But I think as things nosedived toward divorce, I was secretly grinning in the back of my mind the whole time. I knew that eventually I would be free.”

After 6 years of a rocky marriage, John finally moved back into his family home in 2004. But it was not the familiar home life he remembered as a teenager. His older and younger brothers were now both married with biological and adopted children of their own. Several additions had changed the architecture of the house and more were constantly being planned and added. While there may have been more room than there was at his former wife’s house, the lack of privacy was the same.

“When I first moved in I was sharing a room with my niece and nephew,” he said. “All these kids were like spies, looking over my shoulder every time I went on the computer or watching me every time I so much as took a dump.”

John felt as if he had switched boats from one Ark to another, and he was not happy. He found it hard to pray and find God in the midst of so much chaos. “A lot of jaded people think of religion as a private experience,” he said, “But in the households I had been living in it was a group experience – like a cult.”

John dreamed of the cloistered dormitories of the monks, he fantasized about wandering the countryside like an ascetic and not being turned away whenever he knocked on any door. He spent a lot of time listening to music on his iPod, reading books and magazines and watching movies on his laptop. These isolated experiences became his escape from the noisy world he was a part of. He had a job at Blockbuster for a while, and later he worked at Penguins and Borders. Oftentimes after work he would go to one of the college libraries in the area and read until closing time, which was as late as 2 am on some occasions.

John’s family members began to take notice that he was becoming increasingly more distant and exclusive. Concerned that his faith was slipping, people in John’s household began to sit him down and talk one-on-one to him about his relationship with Jesus Christ. They started praying for him, they gave him Bible passages to read, and his siblings even went so far as to corner him in an intervention style family meeting.

This show of family concern, John assures me, is when his real troubles began.

2012 is Coming…

2012

With Age Comes Wisdom: Part IV (I think)

On pushing the envelope: “Why do most democrats live in the coastal Northeastern, Midwestern and Western cities while republicans largely live in inland, southern places that have shitty climates and poorer economies? And why do democrats tend to be well educated, have more wealth and are more culturally fleshed out than conservatives, who just sit at home and watch TV all their lives.

Contrary to what you may have heard, democrats are NOT Socialists. They are in fact living examples of how the system of capitalism works. That: if you work hard, apply yourself and follow the rules, you will reap the fruits of your labors. Also, we do not pander to Middle Americans in order to win votes. It was republicans who started the whole class warfare system which pits the Joe “six packs” against the Joe “Honda Accords.”

Conservatives always bash Obama for not knowing what he is doing. I’m sure they think McCain had all the answers in his wooden leg, or the solutions were up there somewhere in Sarah Palin’s beehive.

Damn! If only the GOP were in charge right now. A trillion dollar war is what we need to get us out of this recession, not a trillion dollar bailout package. Contracts for new jets and tanks would revitalize the factory cities of the Rust Belt by putting people to work. We need to be expanding our missile guidance research instead of trying to become a leading exporter of alternative energy technologies. Remember, there is still enough oil to get us through the next 100 years. And the world is going to end before that anyway, so who cares, right?

Never mind about the piles of innocent dead people who will have to be sacrificed for our progress as a nation. They will all dance and sing with us in the New Jerusalem which God will create after Jesus slaughters everybody in the year 2036. Manifest Destiny, people! Manifest. Fucking. Destiny!

It’s too bad high school dropouts aren’t being drafted to go fight in Iran or North Korea. This would not only make us safer as a nation, but it would have the added benefit of making the chasm between haves and have-nots even wider. A greater polarity in wealth would ultimately mean more people for the GOP to pander to. Faced with only two options – become a soldier or become a business professional – young people would have to decide. And the ones who chose the latter would be better off than the generation before them. No more half-assed professionals like teachers, social workers and librarians, right?

-Trickle down economics, yay!

-No more wealth redistribution.

-More development.

-Real estate values that become increasingly out of out of reach.

-And a giant wall to keep the Mexicans out.

Just think, it could be the 1980’s forever. You republicans with your same-old, same-old. Just keep on drinking Rush’s Kool-Aid.

OK, time to take my meds.”

I have doubts

Agnosticism can probably be viewed in some ways as one of the last station stops on the tortuous slide to atheism. But one of the unmistakable characteristics of this marginal faith is wrestling–the mind wrestles with itself in constant dialogues which are heavily nuanced with issues of morality, the facts of reality and the hidden mysteries of the unknowable.

A homily which Hoffman’s character delivers in Doubt begins with the line: “There is a wind behind each of our lives that propels us…” I’m not entirely sure if he said propel, he may have said push or compel. But the point I think the film is trying to make is that we are driven by unknowable forces. Uncertainty is a cruel bedfellow, and the movie proves that we can even be uncertain about ourselves and the kernel of our identities, about the things which we knew we were always certain of. And this type of uncertainty has a way of obfuscating Truth.

Hoffman is quoted in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine talking about life as a messy truth. “Being a human on this earth is a complicated, messy thing,” he says, adding that he is, “uncomfortable with this messiness.” Of course everybody is. We like clean, safe predictable certainty. We like it when TV shows start on time and when trains arrive on schedule. We like to believe people always tell the truth and won’t let their promises fall through. Hence the need for the agnostic to arrive at the destination of atheism where he is most comfortable. A destination that offers comforting rock solid certainty.

But many people will say that the existence of God (or an afterlife) can’t be proved to be true or false. It is just something one has to accept on faith. Evidence might point one way or your gut feelings might lead you in another direction, but there is a limit to what is ultimately knowable. And this is why faith is a tricky, messy thing. The uncertainty of faith can be where it gets its strength and motivation from, but it can also be its bane.

The characters in Doubt totter with Shakespearean majesty around these issues of faith and uncertainty. The film portrays how a religious life can also be a tortured life. How something that is supposed to bring so much earthly comfort and certainty, also has the power to strip us naked and reveal our human frailties and weaknesses.

But more than anything, this film shows how hard truth is to get at. It teaches us that we should let some things go even though we never can. And Doubt makes us forget that sometimes not knowing is the best thing of all.

The day the music died