Then and now

It’s funny how many of my memories are of inconsequential things, things I never expected to remember. For instance, I’m a teenager and have gone with my father to see about a job at a bachelor’s tiny house. It’s early winter, and the man is obviously proud of his big garden of turnips, collards, and mustard greens. I picture him alone each night, eating greens, beans, salt-pork, cornbread, buttermilk, and sorghum molasses, and I think he must be the happiest man alive.

In another memory, I’m eleven, and my mother and I are sitting in her overstuffed chair watching Have Gun Will Travel. We admire Paladin because he’s tough, caring, cultured, and mysterious. I think she admires him even more than I do, but I don’t know why.

I’m eighteen, and my father and I are roofing a big house next to a playground. A girl who looks to be sixteen is overseeing the children. She is pretty and kind. I want to talk to her but am too shy.

I’m seven, and when I get off the school bus one day, I run across a ditch where a guinea hen has her nest. She flies atop my head and scratches my scalp. I scream, and my granny comes running out the screen door with a broom in her hands. I’m so surprised to see my granny run that I almost forget about the guinea hen.

I’m twelve and have traveled 450 miles alone, on a Greyhound Bus, to visit cousins in Trenton, Georgia. As the bus passes through northern Alabama, dawn breaks, and I see Sand Mountain on my left and Lookout Mountain on my right. I think they must be the tallest mountains in the world. An old man lives with my cousins. He and I sit on the porch, and talk happily about life on the road. Lookout Mountain towers before us. Im called home early because my granny is dying. My cousin Carrie calls and says the old man is accusing her of putting broken glass in his eyes. He scratches the sockets raw.
 
I’m a small child and screaming with the pain of an earache. My mother and granny (that’s granny and me in the photo) look afraid, and it scares me. They heat castor oil and pour it into my ear. I feel better.

I’m nine and my mother has just turned the car onto US Hwy 84 on our way to town. I can’t imagine a time when I was not, so I conclude that I have always been and always will be. Then, I can’t imagine anything existing if I’m not there to see it, so I conclude that I create the world as I pass and it disappears when I’m gone. These realizations have come to me within the space of a quarter mile, and I am certain they are true.

I’m five, and my family and I are leaving the cemetery where my uncle has just been buried. I ask my father where Uncle Byrd is, and my father says he’s on his way to heaven. I immediately look out the back window so I can see him rising like a balloon.
I’m 63 and am taking dishes from the drainer and putting them into the cabinet when I have the thought that even this little chore feels like exercise. My body is hurting, my blind dog is slamming into things, and Peggy is wretchedly sick with a new cold. Outside, the air and everything it touches is cold and gray. The passing years have left me weary of counting my blessings.

Except for this morning’s memory, such fragments stand out from everything that went before and everything that came after, for months if not for years. Why? What do they mean? I’ve lived in this house for 23 years. That doesn’t seem like long, but it’s longer than I have left to live. I think that, once our bodies start to fail, most of us are simply biding time until we die. I want more, but I don’t know what more looks like, and most days I’m too tired to wonder.

5 Things: none of them about religion


Ellie has lived next door for nine years, and is like a sister. In a few months, she will move 1,000 miles away, and Peggy and I are both very sad.

Walt came by last week. He was best friends to both Peggy and me for a lot of years, but hasn’t been our friend for about eight years, and it wasn’t an amiable parting. If I hadnt sent him an occasional email during the past eight years to ask how he was, we wouldn’t have heard from him at all. He came by to tell us that he was diagnosed the day before with malignant melanoma, the tumor reaching two inches across before he saw a doctor. Peggy and I went to the hospital today to wish him luck as he went into a hastily arranged surgery. We arrived to find his wife berating him, and his father-in-law looking like he wanted to cry. I added to the ambiance by sitting in silence reading the obituaries (as with the tombstone in the picture, many of the deceased were my age) while feeling sick, sad, and distant. Only Peggy offered any real support. 

Six weeks ago, I had sudden onset fatigue so severe that I couldn’t stay out of bed for more than an hour or two at a time. I seriously thought I might die so, not knowing what the problem was, I immediately stopped taking oxycodone, Neurontin, Ambien, marijuana, and Cymbalta (Im back on marijuana and Ambien). In the wink of an eye, I fell over an emotional cliff. Now, I still have the chronic pain problem for which I was taking all the drugs, plus I have fatigue, fever, sweaty scalp, depression, irritability, tremulousness, scratchy eyes and throat, and a tendency to drop things. All this, and I still don’t want to go a doctor because I get tired of the same shit happening. To whit, the first doctor sends me for various tests (some of which might be dangerous), and then I get tossed back and forth between specialists (and their tests) for anywhere from a few months to a few years. After shelling out $4,000 before insurance pays the first penny, having up to three surgeries, making countless calls to insurance companies and billing offices, and being put on even more drugs, I still have the problem. If I’m lucky, it’s just not as bad as it was. Of course, by not going, I could end up like Walt. I know that, but still I don’t go.

It’s winter in Oregon. Month after month of almost nothing but gray and drizzle, except for a couple of periods during which the sky clears for a few days, bringing with it wind, cold air, and a sun that stays too near the horizon to be really cheerful. Peggy enjoys life here and has no trouble with the weather. I like many things about Oregon, but it’s only her desire to be here and the presence of a few friends that keep me.

Peggy and I getting rid of a lot of things today, mostly keepsakes. I am very pleased about this because I am finding it increasingly difficult to clean house. We celebrated our 41st anniversary in December. She has been a good wife.

You shall not lay a stumbling block for your brother*


I went to two Episcopal Circle Services (an intimate and informal communion) before I realized that each person in the circle was expected to say Christ is here to the next person during the passing of the bread. This posed a serious problem for me, because it’s one thing to sit and listen to words with which I dont agree  (as I had done with many of the hymns and readings), but quite another to use them. I wrote to one of the leaders of the service about my concern, and she responded:

“We’re not talking body and blood, we’re talking heart and soul... To me, Christ is not a person’s name, but a title that acknowledges a way of being in relationship with the ineffable, and the man named Jesus was really, really good at that relationship…. I hope you’ll stay.”
  
I took her last sentence to imply that she had said all she had to say, and that it was now up to me whether this was to be my hill to die on. I told myself, “Why not just say it? I don’t know why these people regard Christ so highly, but I like and respect them; they like, and appear to respect, me; I hunger for lasting community with different kinds of people; and I feel a need for ritual and liturgy in my life; so I’ll just use the word as a metaphor for something good.” A day later, I realized that I couldn’t bend enough to do this. If the favored word were basalt, I wouldn’t have to hunt for positive metaphors (strength, beauty, integrity, solidity, patience, and regeneration), but Christ? It’s not just the harm that has been done in that name; it’s that for every good thing he reportedly said or did, he said or did something else that was confusing, nonsensical, or appalling.

I know. The word Christ is held in highest esteem by Christians, so what could be more arrogant than for an atheist to show up at a church and object to its use? First, I don’t object to others using it. Second, the order of service states that “All are welcome.” Third, in the words of one of the priests, “the service exists, for those for whom the traditional ‘father, son, holy spirit’ language just doesn’t work.” As I see it, a group of laypeople designed Circle Service with the stated intention of total inclusivity, but then erected a barrier to everyone who doesn’t revere Jesus. While it’s true that they would be fine with me transposing the word Christ to mean light, love, harmony, or oneness, the truth is that only Christians could make such a transposition. When I think of Christ, I think of a world in which millions of non-Christians—and even Christianshave been abused, oppressed, tortured, and murdered by people who acted in his name, so to imagine that I—or any non-Christian who attaches importance to words—can take the name of the founder of the Christian religion and translate it into something worthy of reverence is fanciful.

I now eat fish, but for years I was a vegetarian. One night, a friend who knew I was a vegetarian invited me to supper, put a bowl of chicken soup before me (it was a one-dish meal), and, when I objected, said, “You can take the chicken out, can’t you?” I said nothing more about it because he was an elderly, lifelong meat eater in a rural area containing nothing but lifelong meat eaters, and I wanted to assume that he was acting out of ignorance. As often happens when I go out of my way to avoid conflict by putting a less condemnatory spin on someone’s questionable behavior, I later realized that he almost surely hadn’t been that ignorant. I concluded that he most likely saw the consumption of animals as something that normal people did, and vegetarianism as a needlessly annoying eccentricity that he wasn’t about to accommodate even when he invited a vegetarian to dinner. Likewise, I’m being invited to communion at St. Mary’s, only to find that my acceptance of the invitation requires that I say words I don’t believe—words that NO non-Christian believes. Only Moslems say “Mohammed is here,” and only Christians say “Christ is here.” The people who create the Circle Service surely realize this, or at least they would if they thought about it.

I also regard their attachment to a purposefully undefined word as an example of the slippery slope that awaits those Christians who move from literalism to liberalism. I would like to think that liberalism (which has much to recommend it) will become the dominant face of Christianity, but I don’t see it happening. I think it possible that, once a literal belief in the creeds has been discarded, most people will regard the language itself as a hollow shell. Like a Christmas ornament, it might look splendid on the outside but, too little being put in to replace what was taken out, it is empty within. A century or more ago, the Unitarian Church reduced its own God-language to the status of ornaments, but since ornaments are only useful as symbols, the further they moved from valuing what the symbols represented, the further they moved from the symbols themselves. Today, Unitarians speak sparingly, if at all, of Christ or even of God. Is this where other liberal churches are headed? One might interpret a purposefully vague and open view of Christ as a sign of higher awareness, but it could also be like the tunnel with a pinpoint of light at the end that dying people see just before all the lights go out.

*Romans 14:13. The question is, am I their brother?

Three ways of thinking about God


First Version (I speak from experience)

Heaven is somewhere up above. God and Jesus have thrones, and Jesus’ throne is to the right of God’s throne. Heavenly beings stand before these thrones 24 hours a day for all eternity singing praises to God and Jesus. God and Jesus demand that we praise them, but it only counts if we want to do it. Here’s a list of what you need to do to get into heaven: praise God and Jesus everyday; do good works; get baptized by immersion (today if possible); go to a Church of Christ every Sunday; ask God to forgive you your sins throughout the day so you won’t die with any of them unforgiven. If you want to go to hell, here’s how you can do that. Die while masturbating; play musical instruments in church; become a liberal; get sprinkled rather than immersed; use the wrong number of glasses during communion; let women talk in church (including announcements and Sunday school); get divorced and remarry.

Hell is somewhere below, maybe at the middle of the earth. It’s like a big lake, only instead of being blue with water, it’s red with fire, and people writhe in this fire forever and ever, and during every second of that time, the fire is hurting them a trillion times worse than anything on earth ever hurt anyone. If you’re in heaven, you will be a trillion times happier than anyone on earth ever was, and you can even look down and see the people in hell, and they can look up and see you. Almost everyone you ever knew will be in hell, but heaven will be so wonderful that even the sight of your loved ones writhing in agony won’t diminish your joy.

Second Version (I use my own words to report what I have read and heard)

God is of another dimension, and can’t be captured within the language of this dimension, but Jesus demonstrated what our own lives could be like if we lived in constant communion with God. God can be sensed in the silence between words well spoken, or glimpsed through stories, many of which were first told around Bronze Age campfires. God sometimes shines on us through figures of speech that can only hint at his reality. When we feel love, we feel Gods presence. When we speak truth with wisdom, we give expression to the faintest whisper of God’s voice. When we experience wonder, we inhale the barest fragrance of God’s intelligence. 

God is pure joy. God is pure love. God is everything good rolled into a three-letter word. God is the ground of our being. God is that for which even atheists hunger but have no name. Within God we exist, yet God need not be conceived as all-wise, or all-powerful, or even as a conscious entity. God can simply be defined as the totality of the good that exists within every one of us, or even as the evolutionary potential of our species. We look for God in flowers; we hear God in music; we see God’s eyes looking back at us through the eyes of other people. We all came from God, and we will all return to God. Hell only exists on earth. Heaven is an awakening to universal oneness.

Third version (Again, I speak from experience)

Religion is all made up. Most people know down deep that this is true, which is why they only revere people who heard God’s voice in ancient times, while admitting that modern-day people who hear God are insane. Without God, there would be no holy wars; no genital mutilations; no prosperity gospel; no anti-science bias in education; no tax-exempt churches; no denial of global warming; no blaming sin for hurricanes and school shootings; and no soccer stadiums filled with 10,000 men who have come to watch another man decapitate a woman.

Liberal believers aren’t as bad as other believers because their God only exists as a mile-high stack of harmless metaphors. Unfortunately, their rejection of evidence and reason in matters of faith” still puts them on the side of ignorance and superstition. When the religious right persecutes atheists for trying to keep America from becoming a theocracy, religious liberals support the persecutors by remaining silent. Fortunately, 20% of Americans no longer have any religious affiliation, and their number is growing rapidly. Most of these people still believe in what they call something, but at least they’re not trying to make their beliefs into laws

John Spong (pictured) is a liberal Christian whose writings I have read. His photo is by Scott Griessel. 

Circles. If only mine overlapped, or at least touched.


St. Mary’s has what it calls a Circle Service on Saturday evenings, and I went to one last month out of curiosity. Twenty people were present, 80% of them women, and 80% of them between 55-70. The seats were arranged in a circle, in the middle of which was an altar with candles and communion elements but no cross. The service was led by a lay person, everyone hugged everyone during the Passing of the Peace, and communion was passed from person to person instead of being served by a priest at a railing. I didn’t say the words, and I didn’t sing the hymns, but I did think about how I might do what many Episcopalians do, which is to impose a private meaning onto public expressions of faith. It was a daunting task.

Communion was proclaimed as “open to all,” leaving me free to interpret it in the same way that I interpreted the hugs, that is an act of human intimacy rather than the symbolic consumption of a corpse. When I got home and told Peggy (herself a nonbeliever) that I had taken communion, she called me a phony and said that if she had been one of the communicants and had known that I was an atheist, she would have been outraged. Since about a third of the communicants did know, I wondered how they felt.

I’ve been to two other Circle Services because I enjoy the sense of community and because liturgy fills me in a way that nothing else can. It also enables me to set aside my disagreements with Christians and to meet with them at a heart level. All I require is that they want to meet with me, not as a spectator, but an equal.

Every Saturday, I ask myself whether I want to go that day, and my answer has been about 50/50, mostly because I worry about causing offense. Last week, I went. Judy—who was born in Mississippi 20 miles from my own hometown—was to lead the service, and I looked forward to the heart that I knew she would bring to it, that and her beautiful Southern accent. I first sat on the other side of the circle from her, but when I became aware that I wanted to be near her, I took the empty chair to her left. Before she started the service, Loren (my Yoga instructor) came over and suggested that, if the words of the service didn’t work for me, I use words that did. Priest X* (who also knows of my atheism) arrived, and s/he sat to my left so that I was between Priest X and Judy.

When the time arrived for Priest X to go to the altar and consecrate the communion, Judy whispered that I shouldn’t feel pressured to take it if I didn’t want to. I said that, no, I wanted to do so. She seemed surprised but also pleased. After starting the communion around the circle, Priest X returned to the seat beside me without having taken it, which meant that s/he would be the last person to receive it, and that I would be the one to serve it. I nearly laughed aloud at the thought of an atheist giving communion to a priest.

Serving the bread involved tearing off a piece of it and saying certain words as I put the piece into Priest X’s hands. That being done, I wiped the rim of the chalice with the piece of cloth that accompanied it, and served the wine in the same manner. As all this transpired, Priest X looked me in the eye with extraordinary alertness. I took this to mean that s/he was completely in the moment, although in what way, I couldn’t tell. Only two surmises came to me. One was that s/he was simply struck by the novelty of the situation, and the other was that s/he was looking for signs of disrespect. Aside from these wonderings, I was very much in the moment too. 

Someone later wrote to me that the first priest to consecrate the communion (this was over ten years ago) had wanted to specify that it was for those who were, “seeking a deeper relationship with Christ,” but that the Circle Service community had voted him down. I responded (too bluntly) that any largesse that can be granted by vote can be taken away by vote. I wrote this way because I am the leper, the tax collector, the adulteress, and the woman at the well whom the religious people of Jesus’ day condemned and whom most religious people today still condemn. If Christians believe that the invitation to Holy Eucharist comes from Christ, then I would say to them, who are you to vote anyone in or out? I have no reason to think that they saw things from this perspective, whereas I feel sure that it was hard for them to override the wishes of a priest who had been their leader for decades, and that they were willing to do so precisely because they wanted to reach out to those whom he would have excluded. Priest Y—this church has several priests and deacons—wrote to me: “…no one would be upset that an atheist joined the circle. That's pretty much WHY that service exists, for those for whom the traditional ‘father, son, holy spirit’ language just doesn’t work.”

Part II

After I wrote everything above this paragraph, I went to the Circle Service that occurred the day after the mass murder in Connecticut. I had been very upset by that shooting, and I debated whether Circle Service was a good idea for me since Christian explanations of such events strike me as worse than useless. While I knew what might be said, my growing closeness to the people left me to hope they would do something more meaningful, so I went. It was a mistake. For one thing, I get tense in crowds, and instead of the usual 20 in attendance, there must have been thirty. For another, the laywoman who gave the homily started with, “People always want to know why these things happen, but, of course, there is no answer, not really.” Then she gave a sad little smile which I took to imply that, rational thought being useless, she was ready to offer some thoughts on inner peace. I remembered an old series of Miller Lite commercials that would pose a question (what do women want? is there life on Mars?), and immediately conclude, “Why ask why? Drink Miller Lite,” and I envisioned those thoughts as Jesus Lite.

I looked around at the other people in the circle, and, rightly or wrongly, I took their benign expressions to mean that they liked what they were hearing, and I felt very alone. Then it struck me that when I started going to the Bible study at St. Mary’s, my guess was that people would be offended by my atheism, yet everyone has been supportive. I’m the one who’s offended—at least I was on Saturday—because that brief sermon seemed to verify something I had worried about, namely, is church primarily an escape into fantasy. The people at St. Mary’s are sweet, the songs are sweet, the hugs are sweet, the talk of inner peace is sweet, but the people don’t appear to ask the same kinds of questions that I considered inescapable after age eleven.

You might very well point out that I’m reading way too much into one sermon, and you might very well ask what, if anything, would have pleased me—a Power Point presentation entitled “Theodicy Through the Centuries”? Angry Christians shaking their fists at a God whom many consider willing to help people find parking places and win football games, yet allows children to be murdered? What did I want from them? I wanted something that seemed emotionally real. If they had said, “Yes, sometimes religion seems like bullshit even to us, and, no, we can’t defend it, but, whether you think so or not, we believe it makes us more loving than we would be without it,” I would have felt solid earth beneath my feet. What else would have satisfied me? Tears. Maybe silence. Maybe saying to God, “You know, trusting you isn’t easy when you refuse to do that any of us would hope we would have done, which was to stand between a mass murderer and twenty children even if it meant that we would die without saving a one of them. But maybe none of this would have been real for them. Maybe they really are okay with not asking the kinds of questions that atheists ask. Yet, to immediately turn the focus of Oregon Episcopalians toward their feelings and how they might mitigate their pain over a shooting in Connecticut! Maybe I misunderstood her intent. Maybe prejudice got in the way.

Priest Y also wrote to me: Atheism doesn’t bother me, because I consider atheism, when one arrives at it intellectually and is willing to continue to ask questions and interact with other people as a seeking person on this great journey, to be a valid form of spirituality. Atheists tense-up when the word spiritual is applied to them because they expect the next sentence to be: “You’re too sensitive [or intelligent, or perceptive, or caring, or fine a person] to be a real atheist.” I re-read Priest Y’s email to find such an implication, but when no hint of patronage or condescension appeared, I was forced to conclude that, wonder of wonders, this leader in a worldview (Christianity) that has oppressed and reviled people like me for 2000 years, validates my path. But can I validate his/her path. My answer is that I am trying to be open to the possibility that Christianity at least can lead to wisdom and kindness because I’m tired of the hatred that results from assuming—as atheists often do—that the only salient effect of the Christian religion on its followers is delusion, ignorance, oppression, and buffoonery. If I can’t find some good in Christianity in a church that is willing to include me in its communion, as an atheist, where can I find it? The problem is that, just by looking, I feel like a traitor to those atheists who spend their lives fighting to keep the forces of religious oppression at bay. Im like a person who has become lost in the Arctic and finds himself astride ice floes that are drifting apart, unable to let go of either.

* I feel obligated to keep the identity of most priests private, especially when the opinions they share with me contradict official church doctrine.