Why Believe in God?

 

Guessing what I’m about to do you could call preaching. But I’m a special case, maybe an emblematic one. Why you should probably listen.

I’ll start with a few non-sequiturs. All focused on a point, seeming random only because the origins of the various foci differ, not their target.

Took up the game of pool when I was in my early teens. Got good at it. I was an outstanding shot maker. Long shots, banks, English, cue ball antics, I was good. Played and often won. Never for money. Just love of the game. In my early fifties, a black guy I’d just met in a seedy hometown bar took pity on me and corrected the one huge hole in my game. I could never sink anything on the break. He showed me what I was doing wrong and never beat me again. I gave up playing pool not long after that.

Gave up drinking in my mid-twenties. I had overdone and needed to save my soul from ruin. Stone cold sober for a dozen years of increasingly cold achievement. A German devil(?) on a plane cracked my sobriety and plunged me back into a human life I had ceased to believe possible. Met people and life experiences I wouldn’t have otherwise. An indirect but otherwise implausible result? I experienced the joys and travails of fatherhood. Which were not in the cards for the machine the sober me was becoming. That’s not all. Rediscovered at length, drunk in the middle of the night, the woman who had always been necessary to make life worthwhile. We’ve been married for 15 years now.

Took up writing in my mid-twenties. Outlet for isolation, which had always been my lot, my seemingly ineluctable fate. My Prime Directive: Do not write about family. Writing about family always gets ugly. Don’t do it. Wrote two great books observing that rule. Thought my life was over. Then Chaos intervened. I was no longer in charge of the writing. I was compelled to write on a daily basis about every subject that entered my mind. The Prime Directive went away. You had to write about family, but you just couldn’t be mean about it. Result? I didn’t die young, as I was sure I would. And I’m still here.

I’m a special case. I have some extraordinary talents, one of which is pattern recognition. I’m old enough now, pushing seventy, that I can see the patterns in my own life. Which, if I’m as honest as my father and two grandfathers taught me to be, seems amazingly arranged. Almost as if I were a kind of experiment. Let’s take a kid of undoubtedly prodigious mental gifts and a propensity for isolation, drop him onto a knife edge from which he can opt for ultimate lifelong snobbery or hard-won humanity, and see how he turns out. We’ll feel free to play with his experiences along the way. Just for fun. And maybe for his soul.

So how did the powers-that-be equip me out of the box? They gave me a marvelous brain, voracious curiosity, and a penchant for religious faith nowhere endorsed by the reality of religious routines. In Sunday School we had coloring books and a sad spinster teacher named Miss Toothacre (not making this up), and we weren’t allowed into the service on the other side of the long black-walnut-paneled wall beyond our curtained classroom. But I still found the zeal to confront my dad about the Abraham-Isaac story, which he calmly dismissed, and then I acquired a new obsession about the relationship between Jesus and Judas.

It would become the subject of my first long poem (lost now, sadly), called Thirty Pieces of Silver, which began with the lines:

    Jesus, Judas, what have they done to you?

    Judas, Jesus, what have they done to you?

I should admit that the appurtenances of religion were not absent in my early life. I earned a three-year perfect attendance pin in Sunday School from pre-school on. My father always dropped me off and then picked me up after, smelling strongly of fresh-cut grass. He was not interested in the day’s lesson or colorings. Later, I helped my grandfather, my dad’s father, count the collection receipts from another Episcopal church ten miles away; he had his own favorite Biblical quote: “In my father’s house are many mansions.” I liked it without having the slightest sense of what he meant by it. Otherwise we stacked the twenties, tens, fives, and singles, put rubber bands around them, and put them in a canvas bag labeled with the name of the bank, First National, not City National, of course. During the Depression, City National foreclosed, First National did not. Old Man Wheeler, my grandfather’s next door neighbor, would never have countenanced that. My grandfather, whom I called Boppa, was a senior trustee of the church and he didn’t think the rector was a Christian. Where things stood.

Jesus and Judas. I didn’t share my concerns about this subject with Boppa, which seems foolish in retrospect, but I felt the answer was probably more complicated than adults would allow on the table for discussion.

You see, I’m not even ten yet, and I’m thinking Judas is a thread that could unravel everything. He’s necessary. Without that kiss, there’s no crucifixion. What did Judas know and when did he know it? Kind of an early glimpse of Schroedinger’s cat, traitor or saint, open the box to find out which. In the world of scripture, he remains in the box, doesn’t he? Judas hangs himself. Guilt or dramatic completion of the plot.

Plot. Yes. Later I learned of the dramatic genre called the Passion Play. The whole thing is scripted, pre-arranged, right? Judas has to betray Jesus, who has to die on the cross. But Jesus is God, which means he already knows that the Romans can’t actually kill him, which means his fear of death isn’t like yours or mine, total, but hardly there except for an interval of excruciating pain. Judas on the other hand, with all his human terrors of guilt and death, has to die and never have another child named for him, ever. Who’s the Christ figure here?

So I spent some years as a Christian skeptic, believing that if there had been a world-changing sacrifice it was the sacrifice of Judas, not Jesus. God trickery at some level. During this time I became acquainted with the works of Ayn Rand, the egoist atheist whose books warm the cockles of capitalist hearts. Even then I wasn’t buying the atheism. The ultimate Passion Play had been arranged. Which meant there was a God behind it. Still not seeing any higher power behind my own life. But I responded to the central part of her message, which is that “I” is more important than “we,”. and the most important attribute of human identity is individual consciousness. I liked the book “Anthem” more than I liked “Atlas Shrugged,” which struck me as a kind of science fiction without the fun part.

I continued to, what’s the word?, evolve, and I consigned Rand to the same category as I’d wrongly placed Poe, as an author for young men who would outgrow the influence in the course of real life.

I finally figured out both Rand and Poe. What we’ll get to next.

END OF PART I