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Things unseen

If an element of faith yet remains, it is identical to the faith we have in love - invisible, ephemeral, subject to failure, and yet reinforced in what we actually do every day.

When I was nine years old, my father returned to South Carolina to collect my mother, my younger brother, and myself. We left the state and crossed the country, heading generally west in a blue Ford Fairlane, destined for western Missouri and Whiteman Air Force Base, then home of the Minuteman ICBM. The missiles didn’t make much of an impression on me at the time, though later their invisible presence - hidden in one hundred and fifty underground silos - made me feel oddly comforted. We would live on base for the final two years of my father’s stint in the service.

A fourth-grader, I did what fourth-graders do: played, fought, rode my bike the length and breadth of the housing area, gazed wonderingly with friends through the chain link fence that bordered the base - the outside world! - and read dreary textbooks for school. As the spring semester’s end drew to a close, my brother and I rejoiced at the prospect of renewed and unconstrained freedom - only to learn that our parents had signed us up for a foreign experience with a diabolically oxymoronic name - Vacation Bible School.

It didn’t sound like much of a vacation to me.

I had not been a particularly religious child up to that point, certainly not in the traditional sense - the black Southern Baptist tradition, that is. My background would have argued otherwise: my family was peopled by deacons and chorists, and my maternal grandfather was the superintendent of the church which was located, as fate would have it, just two doors down from our house in rural South Carolina. I was resistant to such influences, however; I counted down hours spent in Sunday school and regular church services much as inmates mark the days of their prison sentences. When the church doors opened, I would fly home, feet barely touching the ground.

But for all that, I found the idea of God, angels, and prophets fascinating. Jesus - well, not so much. It’s fair to say that I was an Old Testament kid. That was where the drama lay - a cosmos created in a week, wars and sacrifices and trumpets bringing down walls, angels leveling cities of the sinful. That was religion for me.

So as I, now ten years old, entered into the week-long deferment of summer that was Vacation Bible School, I clung to the hope that the teachings would at least be drawn from the older, more interesting books of the Bible. This was not the case. I remember colorful picture books featuring a gentle, smiling, beatific Jesus, friend to children (and lambs, strangely enough). Lots of talk of forgiveness of sins, of being washed clean, of being welcomed into the heavenly fold.

The week, and my stint in Vacation Bible School, came to an end. And something happened that I did not expect.

It took place on a promisingly bright afternoon. I was alone in the bedroom I shared with my brother - alone in the house, in fact. I was on the floor, on my knees, my hands clasped. I cried, and prayed. Actually, “prayer” is an insufficient word for it; I beseeched God for the sake of my soul. I begged Him to absolve me of sin. I wept as I told Him - God that is, not His son - that I wanted, more than anything, to be good.

Eventually, I stopped crying.

I stopped praying, and rose from where I had been kneeling, and I waited for a reply.

I’m still waiting.

•

I think that tales of religious awakening or conversion are plentiful, and at least as old as Saul on that old Damascus road. I don’t think - or at least, I don’t know - that tales of a more negative “awakening” or realization, tales of divine silence or absence, are as common. Maybe I haven’t heard any, or perhaps I just haven’t recognized them as such.

That silence, that absence of response, sounds like a certain path to disbelief, but I did not become an atheist, not according to the common definition of atheism. I don’t have a “faith” per se or a religion, or even what could be called a spirituality. I have instead a kind of approach. A philosophy that doesn’t require the existence of a particular iteration of God, or any god at all, really. A philosophy of life and the world rooted in some simple guidelines of action- try to be kind, try to be helpful, try to watch what you’re doing - and that’s it, pretty much. My approach is sufficiently open - open because it is still being formed, every minute - that I can empathize with other people and their own beliefs and borrow what seems the best from them, based on my own evolving set of guidelines. It is necessarily incomplete, because I’m still alive.

While there are days in which this approach of mine feels particularly thin and uncomforting, there are other days - for which I am grateful - when I recognize a sense of something larger than myself.

If an element of faith yet remains in that approach, I think it is identical to the faith we have in, say, love - invisible, ephemeral, subject to change and even failure, and yet reinforced - consecrated, even - in what we actually do every day.

By works, not by faith, am I saved.

I mentioned the quality of being open, remaining so; it consigns a certain admitted uncertainty to this approach of mine. When I consider that, I am reminded of what I’ve read of the spirituality of some scientists involved in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence program, and something said by Douglas Vakoch, SETI’s director of interstellar message composition:

SETI requires an acceptance of ambiguity. If there’s a virtue to SETI, it’s that it’s making ambiguity acceptable at a time when people are focused on the concrete and short-term. It is very often uncomfortable not having the answers, but we need to accept that. We try to recognize that, in this domain, with what we now know, the best we can do, the most honest thing we can do, is live with a sense of ambiguity.

And I think of all those telescope dishes pointed heavenward, just as I think of a ten-year old boy, tear-stained in a silent room, still waiting.

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There are no stupid questions…
Off to Rome
Losing his religion

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