An interesting thing happened to me during the Pope's visit to the United States in the fall of 1995. It happened to me while I stood in the shower, doing my pre-going-to-work ablutions and listening to NPR, where the various correspondents reported on this or that aspect of the visit: the church in New Jersey where the Pope would speak first, the divisions among American Catholics, the frailty of the Pope -- the only news game in news town. I washed on.
During one segment of one report, the "sound background" of the piece included a congregation reciting the Hail Mary. Without so much as a "May I begin?", thanks to years of Catholic soldiering, the words started to echo in my own head, the Hail Mary and the Our Father being two prayers for a Catholic that should fall from the lips easier than breath. However, something went awry. Halfway through the prayer the radio congregation faded out as the reporter came back on the air -- and I couldn't remember the rest of the lines. I simply couldn't remember them. I tried the Our Father, and shortly after "Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name," the words petered out as well. I stood there, bubbles pearling off my lathered hair, the room full of steam, and marveled at the memory loss. Words that had once been as familiar as my own name had dissolved -- and I felt strangely happy, as if given an unanticipated gift.
Now, that one should feel joy at losing a religious heritage may strike the reader as an odd, perhaps even perverse reaction. But to me, my showertime amnesia signaled an unexpected but welcome acknowledgement that the last of my spiritual ghosts had deliquesced; for an atheist, that made for a good news day.
Yes, I admit it -- I am an atheist (though, as I'll explain, this admission says less about me than one imagines). I belong to the ranks of the godless, I declare myself a non-believer in religioius belief, I dissent from the theo-ideology of Creation -- a heathen, an infidel, a freethinker, a latitudinarian. And mighty glad of it.
I have had people tell me that I couldn't really be an atheist, that some primal and inescapable urge to believe in God or a god still existed locked away somewhere in some dark basement of my being. They have given me books to read, exhorted me, laid out the arguments, all of them acting like courteous but adamant Jehovah's Witnesses standing on my doorstep -- and I have had to tell them, directly and gently and lovingly, that I simply do not, cannot feel what they feel and see what they see.
Then they take another tack. They say that in order to be an atheist I have to believe that God doesn't exist, which means that I have to believe in something -- call it the Un-God. Furthermore, since I can't prove that God doesn't exist, then I have to have faith in my belief, that is, confidence that the things I cannot see are still true. So, at the bottom line, I don't differ at all from a God-believer since we both share the same mechanics of faith; we just differ in the direction of the believing.
Again, directly and gently and lovingly, I have to tell them that all the label "atheist" tells an outside observer is what I do not believe; it says nothing about what I do eventually choose to accept as a ground for being. I explain this in two ways. First, true, I cannot "prove" that God and the whole rube goldberg set up around him doesn't exist; everything may very well stand exactly how the Good Book says it stands. But if someone gave me a ticket to visit the Kingdom of Heaven, I wouldn't go because I just don't care. Given what all the "evidence" tells me (if that is what we can call the Bible or Koran and all the testimonials evoked by their texts), I simply would find it a place that held nothing for me. I don't deny that it may be real; I simply reject it as a destination for my life.
The second argument goes like this. As an atheist I do not set out to "prove" anything, in the sense of establishing a particular doctrine as the doctrine one must believe in order to achieve transcendence and illumination. Atheism does not set out a list of "shoulds" or impose a dogma like the Catholic Nicene Creed. Instead, atheism resembles a scythe: it cuts the underbrush away; it has nothing to say about what grows up in the cleared spaces. Those spaces get sown by whatever a person feels it most important to pursue in life, and no guarantee exists that anything progressive or compassionate will crop up. Atheism doesn't plant; it simply plows and harrows the field.
Many people have a hard time understanding this because they've been led to believe by the Madalyn Murray O'Hairs of the world that the atheists have a whole program of tenets they want to foist on people. I disagree with O'Hair, and always have: militant atheism suffers just as much from ideological sclerosis as does the Christian Coalition, and in this sense the two overlap a great deal, each of them marginalizing diversity of opinion for the sake of purity and command.
I tell people I have nothing to do with any of this. My atheism is more rangy, languid, forgiving; in fact, I tell them that I don't really even consider myself an atheist anymore because (going back to the agriculture image) I've moved beyond the clear-cutting stage; the energies now go into finding the proper crops to plant.
* * * * *
The genesis of this evolution began, as so much does, in my adolescence. Before that, I was a fully enrolled Catholic, willingly if not enthusiastically going off to weekly Mass with my family, dutifully handing my childish sins over to the priest during confession for disposal, making my Easter duty, and so on. At age eleven I became an altar boy and learned the reflexive Latin. I followed the same arc traced by dozens of other Catholic boys my age.
However, by eighth grade something had started to change: Disturbing questions about the moral character of my Lord and Master started to poke through the complacency, and this thing called my intellect began to unfurl, like a pupa chewing through its chrysalis. Anger and doubt morphed into and out of each other as I struggled to decide whether to reject God and his church or accept the illogic of Tertullian's declaration that "I believe because this is impossible." At that age, as a precocious young man who, like Dylan Thomas as a child, loved to read with his "eyes hanging out," an altar boy of several years with his tattered Latin and an easy way with a Novena, I inevitably came to a question for which my New Testament had no answer: "How could he create a world in which children died?" The cathechistic answers to this, and many questions like it, all proved unsatisfying because they led to a debate-ending smugness, the doctrinal equivalent of a parent's "Because....": Whatever goodness existed in the world came from God's grace; whatever evil stalked the earth came from our sinful natures, abetted by Satan. Because our insufficiency as human beings had ruined a perfect creation, the litany went, babies now died; the flaws lay in our selves and not in God's work because, by definition, God could not create anything flawed. End of story.
Letting God off the hook this way always infuriated me because it seemed so craven. The creator of all created could not come out and say, "Babies die because...," and let a person accept or reject the reasoning on its own terms. Instead, he had to hide behind twists of logic that, regardless of their doctrinal coherence, ended up blaming me, a mostly powerless featherless adolescent biped, for what he had set in motion. Regardless of how often my mentors had told me as a Catholic boy that human beings caused their afflictions because they were afflicted by original sin, I had too much respect for the power of my own self to accept being classified as damaged goods and a toxic substance. I didn't feel damaged, I knew I hadn't caused damage, I had no desire to damage anything, so how could I cause the death of babies?
Then in the moments less flushed with anger and righteousness, doubt slipped in, doubt caused by my heretical thoughts, doubt about my right to have them. The romantic, rebellious, adolescent intellectual demanded an accounting for the contradictions and seeming hypocrisy, yet the altar boy steeped in life-long ritual feared that he would pay the price for his boldness by being denied the comforting certainty he believed graced all the faithful around him.
Finally, by the age of 15, the dissonance demanded an answer: Would I stay true to my disobedience or would I let my doubts cower me into being a proper believer? The forces arrayed on either side had great power. In the eighth grade, the last grade before we went off to the Sodom of high school, the nuns and the priest gave us talks about "vocation," about getting the "call." Their pressure, while never heavy, nonetheless made us vigilant about doing anything that might block the incoming message. Most of us started listening on our spiritual phonelines for the ring, wondering if God would summon us to the seminary or the convent or, instead, send us out to sell insurance all our lives. (I thought seriously about joining the Trappists because their fortitude and silence seemed like a good antidote to the noise and shuffling in my own soul.) And the fact that most of us did not hear the call by the time June graduation rolled around didn't mean that it wouldn't come; as Sr. Margaret Anne said, the call would most likely come when you least expected it, so you must always, on some level, be prepared -- it could come during Mass, in the shower, while you were driving. Keeping the faith of the church and believing in all its teachings, no matter how hard it might be to accept them, constituted the best way to keep the line clear for God's voice.
The other side had a priest who taught my freshman religion class in high school. At the time (we didn't know this) he was arguing with himself about staying in the priesthood, and though pedagogically unsound, he tended to try out his thoughts on us, not directly, but through the materials and lessons he presented. For some reason which shall remain always unknown to me, he gave me Albert Camus' The Plague to read. Now, Camus carries quite a wallop at any age, but for an adolescent with pretenses toward intellectualism, the wallop can pack a haymaker. One of the book's main storylines centers on the clash among three responses to the bubonic plague that descends on Oran: the priest's battered and seemingly powerless theology, the doctor's secular humanism, and the doctor's friend's angry atheism. Of the three, the last two win out, so to speak; though Camus eventually comes down on the side of the doctor's slightly agnostic humanism, he gives the anger of the doctor's friend its due and its dignity.
After reading the book several times (the transparency of its prose belied the thickness of its meaning), I spoke with him about it, trying to clarify why, for reasons not apparent to me, I sided with the doctor's friend and his anger, and why the anger felt very good, very cleansing (which was difficult to admit since admitting it meant committing a sin). To be sure, the attraction of the anger in part came from the adolescent rebellion required of my age. Hating God was a good way of letting off some steam about other authorities I couldn't hate so directly, such as my parents and school officials in general, not to mention the generally rotten state of the world and a war in Vietnam that might one day claim me.
But outside of these sociological factors, I felt a genuine revulsion for what seemed to me the cosmic irresponsibility of the Maker of All Things; his carelessness was literally legendary (the whole Old Testament monumentalizes it), and the New Testament seemed like a feeble apology for the brutal treatment of the Maker against the Things Made (and an apology still steeped in blood -- such love of sanguinity!) The clincher for me, as for the doctor's friend, was always this thought: If God so desired, he could end our suffering with a wave. He didn't. Ergo, he must want us to suffer, and I had no use for a God that wanted my flesh for that, regardless of any prior claim he thought he might have to it.
The priest listened carefully to my chitterings and, bless his heart, treated them as ideas worth a hearing and not just some adolescent babble. (They may have paralleled his own, though he never said anything about that.) He affirmed that my anger made sense and that the anger was healthy because it made me question my faith as a way of understanding it. I countered by saying that I didn't have any interest in understanding my faith; if such understanding meant eventually coming to accept the necessity of cruelty, my soul would be better off by rejecting the whole business. I remember his smiling at this declaration, but he didn't try to talk me out of it, as my parents would have done, nor did he trivialize it by any kind of "There, there..." attitude. After my fervent declarations, he just let them sit there for me to contemplate, trusting my intelligence to separate out things said for effect from things that deeply affected me.
He also pointed out to me that the doctor's humanism made sense -- do what you can do to save what you can save because it seems as if the gods have gone home and we're stuck here to work it out ourselves. In other words, without a God on high to hand down answers, we have nothing left but the cold comfort of our own freedom, the very frightening truth that we have no one but ourselves to rely on to salvage our lives and the lives of others; and if we fail, we have no one to blame but ourselves. But, the priest went on, all this had a double edge: we may not have a Father to tell us what to do, but as compensation we now have the liberty to discover who we really are. Frightening, yes, but exciting as well. I had a little difficulty with this part: being a normal 15 years of age and full of two-edged uncertainties, I ached a little for a strong guiding hand even as I resented the loving pressure; being set adrift in an ill-built and poorly provisioned raft on the swelling seas of my own freedom did not have the same appeal to me as it did to a middle-aged man struggling to get out from under his vows.
But I could see his point, Camus' point: we all have the responsibility to set a wrong state of affairs right, and we build our ethics on that footing. Over the years as I read more of Camus and more of everyone, I began to fashion my own moral codes out of both the anger I'd felt at God's aloof cruelty (an anger which began to lessen as I aged) and the desire to extract my guiding principles from the thick injustice and embarrassing abundance of the world. Eventually, the whole God-part withered away, and along with it any belief in noumenal or divine worlds marbled with the ineffable energies of spirit. I stood grounded in more ways than one, filled now with a desire to know the thingness of the world, the full throttle of our four dimensions: grounded like a lightning rod, grounded like fog that must tether to the gravid earth, grounded like the gardener sifting newly turned loam through his fingers.
I began to read more science, especially quantum mechanics and biology, but also moving through genetics and geology and every other discipline. I studied Eastern ways of thinking and found them very congenial because they do not seek an after-life in this life but instead seek to understand this-life. I read people like John McPhee, who anchored himself literally to the earth. I read a great deal in economics because it studies how people transform the earth, and therefore themselves, through their labor. I boned up on my leftist politics, looking for the combination of practice and theory that would match the continuing flux of the world I was trying to map. I lived my life as freely as I could, vowing to make some part of my living as a writer, keeping myself available to jump when the Universe said, "Jump!" And one day, because of all this, and more, I stood in my shower unable to repeat the words of the Hail Mary and the Lord's Prayer and feeling quite relieved by this small gift of forgetfulness that verified that I had fully become "a-theist": one who no longer needed God or any pretender to divine status to anchor his life. To believe in the realm of the supernatural would make about as much sense to me as trying to "eat my teeth" (to use a metaphor from Alan Watts).
* * * * *
So what do I believe? Cosmically, I assert that life begins and ends with the material universe. But I also add that the material universe will surprise us beyond any capacity we think we have for wonder with its strangeness and ebullience. Scientifically, I tend to agree with the quantum physicists who indicate that matter/energy may itself be eternal (thus deleting any need for a God as prime mover). Politically, we should dismantle the capitalist system and look for fairer ways to distribute the wealth we know can create in embarrassing and often toxic abundance. Poetically, my work as a writer should always be aimed at giving voice to the voiceless, not only the people negated by the system's injustices but also the intangible tangibles of life: aging, weariness, doubt, the smell of autumn, a rough kiss. Existentially, we live, we die; everything in between is up for grabs. But morally, I prefer to grab for something that makes the world a little better, or, barring that, a bit less worse, than when I came in. Physically, eating well and exercising ranks high, though equally high, moderate indulgences and occasional sensual benders (just to remind us our of earthy origins, our original humility).
Do I believe in spirit, a dimension somehow beyond the physical but deeply implicated as well? In a sense, yes, though I don't think a spiritual world exists separately from the four-dimensional one we inhabit here. Instead, I think of spirit as an event that happens when certain material conditions come together; if the conditions aren't right, then the spirit remains unborn. For example, one of my writing jobs involved attending a Unitarian Universalist conference in Florida. At the beginning of each morning session, the participants would engage in some ritual cooked up by a person responsible for that day's ceremony. None of these had any "official" stamp on them; they simply bore the brand of the individual person's eclectic vision.
These rituals never failed to make me feel, and to make all of us feel, momentarily translated into something other than the stodgy selves standing in the room. In that room each morning, as people passed the split orange among themselves for a taste or inhaled the thick scent of an Indian incense or held hands singing a hymn, a presence threaded itself among us, a cumulative greater than the sum of its parts, and we started each day's workshop refreshed by this energy that came both from within and without us. The rituals set the conditions, and the spirit flared.
But I never felt that this spirit visited us from somewhere else; instead, it rose right out of our swirling DNAs, out of our materiality, extracted from the best parts of ourselves that too often get buried under the tarnish of routine. This "best part," when properly called forth, provides us with the spirit we sometimes crave so hungrily. We don't have to search some vaporous heaven to find it; we just have to muck about in our corporeality to locate it and then put ourselves in each other's presence -- difficult to do, even at the best of times -- to call it forth and let it weave us. At times, yes, spirit makes itself manifest -- and what galvanic and rare moments those are. If religion means anything in its etymological sense of re-ligare, to "tie us back" to our origins, then the spirit "event-ing" from those morning sessions tied us back to each other; and if you think about it, in the end, what else is there to make life worth living other than this "tying back"? As Billy Joel says, we will all go down together, so why not make the journey with the best of company in the best of spirits?
* * * * *
I'd like to end by reproducing a radio commentary I did in 1989 for WEVO radio in Concord, NH. I responded to an interview a reporter had had with a theologian/philosopher about the nature of (as Douglas Adams would say) life, the universe, and everything. As much as anything, this short piece sums up my own thoughts about and hopes for life.
In a recent feature on WEVO, Robbie Hoenig interviewed a philosophy professor about a talk he'd given on the question, "Why, of all possible people, was I born?" What was interesting about his explanation was that he barely mentioned genetics, physics, or even science in general. He missed a far more provocative answer than his musings about available souls and the movements of spirits, stuff that would certainly be on the front page of the Enquirer were it not coming from a Ph.D.'s lips.
I can understand his impulse to want to find some larger purpose to the daily comings and goings of the human race, but the fact is, as far as anybody can tell, any one person is here solely because of the multiple recombinings of DNA that have occurred since the primordial soup. It's that simple, and that complex. It seems as if life in this universe has no discernible purpose, or at least if it does, it's simply to create more life in whatever form that life can take. Life does have pattern, order, energy, and its share of mysteries, but the force that moves it along is wholly and indivisibly material, not divine.
The professor's admittedly religious way of thinking is really not very helpful when it comes to figuring out the why's of life. Religions are essentially a "No" to the question, "Is this all there is?" because many people simply don't want to face that we're only dealt one go around apiece. By focusing on that "No," religion tries to ignore our DNA, to put it one way, or attributes our DNA to something called God that has no DNA at all. Wrong on both counts. Most likely, this is all there is.
Joseph Campbell, in his six interviews with Bill Moyers, explains that humans have created myths to explain the reality around them and illuminate how things in life connect to each other to make meaning. In its own way, science is a mythology. What makes it different from other mythologies is that what it posits as facts, or at least as conditional understandings, can be tested and, if need be, refined or repealed. Religions, with their mythologies geared toward the vaporous, can't do this.
In fact, the odd thing is, the closer religions come to the material, either by advocating social commitment, like liberation theology, or talking less and less about God and more about "A Supreme Energy," the more cumbersome and less explanatory the religious mythologies become. Eventually, as even the Greeks learned, religious adherents will understand that lightning comes from electricity, not Zeus.
What an extraordinary is this "all there is" is! We should honor it because it's what gave us the ability to know it. We should honor it by knowing it fully.
(March 1996)