Faith: Fight it, [Fling it], Find it

I: Catholic Conscience (revised):

Irish-Catholic adolescent on a Sunday, St. Kenneth Parrish, Plymouth, Michigan

Enter the sanctuary, amble down an aisle, stop at a pew and drop to one knee, gesticulate the cross, glance at the Jesus idol, then stand up again, shimmy into the pew, pull down the padded kneeler, entwine the fingers and pretend to pray, thinking “Hail Mary” in full and an “Our Father” or two, and recount this week’s sins in cringe-inducing detail — a couple of curses, irrational anger, elbowing Brother in the face. Must have hurt!

But why did we do them? No priest will explain. We’re all simply sinners, they tell us. In fact that’s how they get us to keep on showing up. We’re eternally flawed, which works out fine for them, as they siphon our guilt like it’s blood.

And oh, there will be guilt! In fact we’re told it’s God’s will. He wants us to have dirty thoughts about our science teacher, eat until our stomachs feel about to pop, and every Friday drink booze with fat joints on the side, plus some Tylenol Three up the nose. God wants us to blow our one hundred-dollar checks so we feel worse when we can’t afford to tithe. It’s preferred that we sin, so His Church can hold us hostage; there’s only one way to paradise — cuff yourself.

Oh but what if we forgot a sin or a few? It can be embarrassing to confess them. Will they make us walk the afterlife plank for calling our mom “a bitch,” way back in third grade, when some dangerous girl dared us to? It’s almost like the priests can feel it. There must be something more juicy!

Well sure, there’s way more. Like we can’t really trust you. And we’re not completely convinced that your God even really exists. Yet we show up every week, always feeling kind of sick, wondering why the deity will not cure us. If we told you every forbidden thought we’d be kicked out of the club, then have to figure out our problems ourselves. But we don’t have the time to over-self-analyze.

So please. Just give us a cracker and one sip of wine. Then let us get back to our sinning.

II: Assembly of Assholes (revised):

The sacredness of cognitive dissonance

Every other Sunday, on my mother’s weekends, my stepfather would drive us to his fundamentalist church. And every time without fail, toward the end of the sermon, the head pastor — wearing a clearly expensive suit, gold cuff links, and rings — would call those seeking to repent to the stage.

Meanwhile the keyboardist would play a contemplative song, people would chant or shout out “Hallelujah,” and a few would bust out some riffed jibberish. Something like, “Hommenah hoomenah, sacti de sancti, oobady doobady doo!”

The pastor would point to the scatters and say, “You hear that, folks? That’s called speaking in tongues. It happens when the Holy Spirit speaks the language of angels through you.”

Then people would moan, as if in ecstasy, raise up their hands, and sigh or say “mmm.” After some years my mom got into it too. And I tried it once or twice, to see if I could feel it, but mostly I just felt a bit silly.

What was I missing? They couldn’t all just be acting. Maybe they were truly hypnotized.

Even Tom, my stepdad, would sometimes let out a “Praise Jesus.” It was strange seeing him, a big burly guy with a police-issued goatee, submitting to a higher power once a week. Maybe as a former Catholic he lived with a secret fear that his bad actions would have consequences. Which probably would explain why one day he was convinced to go up to the front and “give [his] heart to the Lord” (in the parlance of these types of places). 

Although once back at home he’d give the stick to our dog (pretty fitting they call it a “switch”). Not sure what Moose might have done. Likely chewed on something, or shat on the floor. He’d always try to run, but Tom would chase him down (STOMP STOMP STOMP), and “beat his ass” (as he’d say).

“THWAP!”

“YELP!”

“THWAP!”

“YELP!”

My mom would say, “Hey, come on now,” as if he’d ever listen to her pleas.

And though he was nicer to my brother and me, he must have seen us as livestock too. If we weren’t doing housework we weren’t earning our room. We were “lazy” and “spoiled” from eight or nine years old. And Moose was the example of what would happen to us if we didn’t obey all Tom’s rules. If we ever “talk[ed] back” he’d get out of his cushy recliner, STOMP up to us too, and alpha dog us.

So we’d pull weeds and mow the grass, our arms going numb from the motor. He’d watch us from the porch, sipping ice-cold lemonade and critiquing our work, and on occasion wield the weed whacker himself (in the years when we were too young to use it).

One day, I remember, we were in the backyard. I was shoveling dog shit into the compost. Tom shouted some order over the weed whacker’s noise, and somehow THWAPPED his own calf with the cords.

He winced and said, “God DAMN it!” then pulled up his jeans. A red welt glowed across his pale hairy flesh. 

It was hard to feel bad. Really I kind of liked it. And I started to feel that my prayers could be answered.

But he recovered quickly. It wasn’t much of a penance. Though later I guess, while I was outside, he fell down the stairs to the basement. He’d been putting off replacing the handrail for a while, so a sharp metal piece was sticking out from the wall. It sliced open his arm so he went to the ER.

It was nice having the house to myself for a while.

Yet despite God’s efforts Tom never treated any of us nicer. So I prayed that he’d leave without coming back. Then I waited for years, always holding onto the hope it could happen. And the more patient I became the less I believed that the deity even existed.

III: Apathy Ensues (revised):

A classic case of not caring anymore

Before that I would pray for a particular Transformer or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, whichever looked like the best one at the time. I’d pray my braces would stop tearing into the tissue of my cheeks, or that my classmates would stop bullying me. I’d pray for my eyebrows to grow, and for my fat body to shrink, or that I could be someone, anyone but me, someone living in Heaven instead of here in Hell, or at least to just die in my sleep.

I prayed to God, “Why?” so many times different ways. “Just tell me why my life sucks? Why don’t you do something? Why can’t I be a normal kid?”

Later I stopped asking why. Then stopped praying altogether. Stopped feeling guilty and ashamed. Mostly because I stopped caring — if I swore, fornicated, kept the Sabbath day holy, lived in Hell of Heaven, or appeared to be “a good Christian” to others.

Following all the rules never seemed to help. So I figured, whatever. Forget having a faith. I’d just find a way to live on my own.

Around the same time (roughly age seventeen), Tom and my mom set up “a family meeting.” But they’d kicked my brother out, so it was just them lecturing me about how I wasn’t doing twice the work.

It was a symptom, they said, of something called “senioritis” — a disease kids my age often got. I could stop caring about school, they didn’t care a lick, but it was affecting my work ethic at home. The lawn still needed mowing. There was still trash and dishes.

“Don’t forget,” said my mom, “you’re not invincible.” (Which, in retrospect, almost seems like a threat.)

I thought, but didn’t say, “I don’t care either way. When I wanted to die it didn’t happen.”

Thankfully, though, I got a thinner body, somewhat thicker eyebrows, “perfect” teeth, and more toys than I needed. But material things, I would later find out, were not quite as sweet as revenge.

IV: Righteous Rebellion:

Getting revenge on a self-righteous individual

Most days I looked at the dent in the door that once led to my bedroom. My mother and stepfather built another room at the back of the house when I was just starting middle school. My brother, PJ, got the new room, and I kept the old one--which is actually smaller now because they added a hallway, using our old door as an entrance, that led you past my new door and toward my brother’s. But the old door still had that dent, that boot-print, from the time Tom kicked his way into our bedroom when PJ and I were just seven and five.

Some days I would touch the cracked wood of the door. The crack looked like a narrow mouth, with long and sharp teeth. I would look over at the doorframe--the wood splintered from the kick, the loose piece long ago trashed. The door never shut the same after that. 

Before the new bedroom, PJ and I never really got any privacy. Not from each other, and not from the outside world. But after the renovations, when, for the first time, we got our own rooms, we also got our own doors, our own locks. We had a new kind of freedom. The freedom to lock ourselves into our own rooms.

When PJ moved out, after Tom told him he’d have to start paying rent, they converted PJ’s room into a second “family room”—that is, it got a TV and an L-shaped couch. I spent a lot of time back there my last year of high school, playing Super Mario 64 or Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, then watching Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or American Psycho, and falling asleep on that couch instead of my own bed.

One day home alone I try to open the door to the back room, “PJ’s room” we still call it, and the knob doesn’t turn. I check the tops of all the door frames in the house, try to find a key--which is just a straight piece of metal with a flattened tip that opens any bathroom or bedroom in the house--but someone had hidden them. I call my mother.

“Tom locked it,” she says. “He says you left the room a mess again, and you can use it when you learn to clean it up a bit.” A pillow, a blanket, a DVD case, a “mess.”

My Xbox is in there. And my Nintendo 64. And the only movies in the house worth watching are there, too. I press myself against the locked door, inches away from the sweet solace of videogames. I need that escape from reality, need to live in the virtual universe to escape my debilitating teenage angst. Need to jack a Lamborghini and jet down the streets of Vice City and gun down or run down innocent pedestrians or dudes on mopeds then drive up a ramp and jump out of the car in midair just to get back up and steal a crotch-rocket and drive to the other side of town where there’s a helicopter and fly to the tallest building so I can shoot rockets at police cars and SWAT vans and tanks and rack up the highest “Wanted” level I can before they finally gun me down and the screen fades to black.

I turn from the door, and I walk down the hallway. And then I see the dent in the hallway door--the thin but toothy mouth, the cracked frame, the useless lock--and I know what to do.

“Doomp,” my foot says to PJ’s door. But the door remains closed. A second time, with more force: “DOOMP.” And the door swings open. The frame cracks a bit from the kick, but it’s still in tact. The door isn’t damaged, except for a scuff, because I’d pressed my foot flat against the wood, rather than forcing my heel into it. It shuts okay, and locks too. 

When my mom gets home, I’m watching Blow or playing Xbox. She finds me in PJ’s Room. “What happened? Did you find a key?”

“No, no key,” I say. “I kicked it in. You know, like Tom did to the other one? I figured if he can do it, kick down doors, so can I. Door for a door.”

V: Girlfriend Gushes:

Beginning to regret the inclusion of subheadings

Alison: short, funny, sassy, brunette, pouty lips, wide hips, great ass, handful breasts. We meet the second day of the first year of college and spend all day grocery shopping and talking and laughing then end up making out in her apartment-style dorm-room. We kiss for so long our lips and necks hurt but it feels almost weirder to stop kissing than to keep at it. We spend most days of our freshman year together and I sleep in her bed more than mine, and she’s the first person to make me think, “Damn, I love her,” when I look at her face, or into her hazel-blue eyes.

But she says some things that scare me. Like, “I want my husband to love Jesus as much as I do.” And, “Everything happens for a reason.” Or, “When we have kids, I want us to be a good, Christian family.”

I say things that scare her, too. First, “I just don’t really like going to church.” Then, “Me and Jesus are taking a break.” And finally, “I don’t think I even believe in God.”

When I say that last one, we’re lying next to each other on her twin-sized dorm-room mattress. She gets silent, and stiff, then rolls to her side. I can’t see her face, but I can feel her cry. “Hey,” I say. “Are you okay?”

She crosses her arms and presses them against her breasts and scrunches her shoulders up to her neck. She sniffs in response. 

“Why are you so sad?” I say. “I’m just telling you how I feel.” I rest one hand on her upper arm, then weave the fingers of the other into her light-brown hair, and stretch my neck to look at her face.

“It’s just, when I picture our future,” she says and turns her face toward me, her eyes tearing, “I see us taking our kids to church, and praying together, and loving each other through God--[sniff]--I knew you were having doubts, but I thought things could change. I thought you could change. I didn’t realize it was so final.”

“Ehhhhggg-[sigh].” I lay on my back, but with my hand still in her hair. I say, “I’m just not sure what I believe, you know? I’m still trying to figure it out.”

She keeps her body turned away from me for a few more moments, and we lay in silence. Then she turns to me, finally, and says, “Okay,” then puts her hand on my cheek and kisses me on the lips. “Well let me know what you decide.” 

VI: Spiritus Cerebri:

It is a materialistic world, and I am a materialistic boy

About a year into our relationship, Alison and I broke up, then got back together, then “took a break,” then fucked other people, then got back together, then dated other people while together, then she got serious with someone else, and I got serious with bourbon and White Russians and weed. 

Most days post-Alison were mostly the same: wake up half-drunk, take a shit, play Call of Duty Modern Warfare or Grand Theft Auto IV on my roommate’s Playstation 3, watch an episode of “Scrubs” or “South Park,” eat microwaved chicken nuggets or pizza rolls, shower, drive my ’95 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme convertible to work, serve tables for a few hours, drive back, stop by the grocery store down the street from my apartment, buy a bottle of Wild Turkey or vodka and Kahlúa, go home and drink and get angry or sad or both, then black out and pass out with a half-glass of liquor in my hand, wake up at four a.m. to clean up my spilled drink, fall back asleep, and repeat.

Days I didn’t work I would get high with the guys next door then sit out in my car and chain smoke cigarettes while listening to The Mars Volta and feel peaceful. These moments, so few but cherished, allowed me to ignore money (lack thereof), girls (also lacking), and my own ego (damaged, but not destroyed). The music--so complex and strange--when coupled with psychedelic euphoria from the pot, made me feel more spiritual than the Catholic hymns and fundamentalist Christ-songs ever had. 

There was a recent study at the University of Missouri regarding the brain and its link to spirituality. It attempted to scientifically explain the kind of spiritual phenomenon that I felt back then while jamming out to intricate guitar-work and baselines in my green-whale car. In the study, one of the University’s health psychology professors, Brick Johnstone, studied several patients with damage to their right parietal lobe--the area of the brain that focuses on the “self.” He found that subjects with worse injuries to the lobe reported feeling closer to a higher being. The more the subjects relied on their left parietal lobe, wherein language and mathematics are decoded, the more spiritual they felt.

Johnstone concluded, “when the brain focuses less on the self, by decreased activity in the right lobe,”--and instead, perhaps, focuses on the lyrics and harmony of music--“it is by definition a moment of self-transcendence and can be understood as being connected to God or Nirvana. It is the sensation of feeling like you are part of a bigger thing."

Perhaps this too explains why mathematicians and musicians feel that their work provides the language of the universe--the act of contemplating such things is apparently so closely tied to a feeling of universality and unity. And it wouldn’t be imprudent to argue that my general lack of spirituality, when I would sit in the hard pews at church or kneel on those thinly padded knee-rests and beg God to forgive my sins, came from me being such a damn self-loathing narcissist. Maybe the reason I never felt connected to the others at church, never felt that I had a soul that is inexplicably linked to the whole of humanity, is because I spent most of my time wallowing in the right side of my parietal lobe, rather than accessing the communal and spiritual left.

VII: Quantum Chaos: 

Zeal for entropy v. delusions of order

When we were together, Alison would say to me, almost too often, “Everything happens for a reason,” which she wholeheartedly believed, or that’s what her conscious mind forced her to believe. It gave her a reason live, to not bust out in tears every morning when the bliss of her dreams would wear off and the dread of waking life would take hold. You see, when she sleeps, she sees her father, and she can touch him, hug him, ask him, “How are you here?” and “What is heaven like?” Sometimes he answers, and sometimes he just smiles, but no matter what, she is happy. 

So when she wakes up, and she tells me, “Everything happens for a reason,” I can’t just disagree. Because what she means is, “My father died for a reason. He didn’t wither in that hospital bed as the chemo ate his insides just because. His life, his death—they mean something.”

I could argue with her. I could tell her, “Everything is random.” I could say, “The brain creates meaning.” And I would be right. “Everything exists in a probability field.”

“A ‘probability field?’” she would say, curious, but not really wanting to discuss it. She would look at me, next to her in bed, and give my lips a vacuous gaze.

“Nothing has an exact location,” I could say. “Every object requires an observer to determine its position, its velocity, its direction—things that have meaning. It’s easy to find and define the large objects, but for smaller particles, like electrons, you never know exactly where they are--and if you figure it out, you can’t know where they’ll be next. Fundamental particles are always popping in and out of existence—it’s chaos. And without an observer to figure out where these particles are, they don’t exist in any exact spot. Consciousness creates the position, the velocity--it creates the meaning.”

She wouldn’t get it. She would think that I’m trying to stomp her beliefs, dismiss them as nonsense. “It’s not as complicated as all that,” she would say. “God controls all particles, all objects. He decides what happens.” She would try to touch me, try to conductively transfer her faith with her fingers, but I wouldn’t want to be touched. “It’s all part of the Plan.”

I could get angry. I could think that she’s stupid, or naïve. But I could never believe her. “How can you just dismiss a century’s worth of scientific observations and conclusions like that?” I could say. “How can you know that there’s a ‘Plan?’ How can you know it’s not just probability, just chance? How can you know that ‘everything happens for a reason?’”

“Because,” she would say, “I just know.”

VIII: Pretentious Persecution:

Didn’t Jesus smoke a pipe?

I’m at a party drinking brandy from a flask. I don’t know anyone except for my roommate and his girlfriend and they’re passed out in her upstairs bedroom before I even arrive. Her roommate David tells me, “Stay.” He says, “Have a good time.” It’s mostly girls so I think I might get laid. 

People play pong. I watch. 

Boombox bumps beats. I dance. 

Booze buzzes. I go for a smoke. 

I step back inside.

A girl walks into the front room and says, “It smells like smoke in here.”

“Oh, yeah, well I just had a cigarette,” I say, still standing near the door. “So that explains it.”

“You smoke cigarettes?” she says. “You shouldn’t smoke. Aren’t you a Christian?” She has a gold-plated cross tucked into the cleavage of her small breasts. A symbol of her religion’s obsession with human sacrifice.

“Actually no,” I say. “I was, but now I’m sort of a non-theist.” She crinkles her forehead. “Is that relevant?”

“You mean you don’t believe in God?”

I pause. “No, I guess I don’t.” This girl is borderline belligerent. “Do you?”

Some other girls walk into the room. “Hey you guys,” the first girl says and aims her finger at me. “This guy is an atheist.” 

Thunderclap.

A second girl says, “You don’t believe in God?”

A third girl says, “How can you not believe in God?”

A fourth girl says, “What is wrong with you?”

I shrug.

Then I give up on getting laid.

IX: Duo Deos: 

A creation story for the twenty-(unspecific) century

“We’ve done it,” says Professor Zaius. “The experiment worked.”

Professor Farnsworth hadn’t expected this news so soon. In fact, he hadn’t expected this news at all. “You mean--“

 “Yes, Farnsworth. Come, see for yourself.”

The laboratory is large, enormous some might say--for it contained the world’s most elaborate particle collider. The scientists and engineers travel via electric carts--four tires, a steering wheel, an accelerator and a brake peddle. Farnsworth and Zaius sit in a cart labeled “3” and scoot toward the control room near the center of the collider.

Farnsworth has been to the main control room before. In fact, he’s been there nearly every day for the past fifteen years. So once they enter, Farnsworth walks briskly past the monitors and wave detectors and quantum mainframes, and follows Zaius to the main screen. The screen where he had once witnessed the production of anti-matter, and the discovery of the elusive Higgs boson/field, and the first particles to experimentally transcend the barrier of time, and the taming of a quantum black hole, and then of a wormhole--but nothing had compared to this, not even close. 

The screen magnified the image 100,000x, but slowly zoomed out as the object grew. It was translucent, a dodecahedron, and expanded exponentially. “It’s based on the design of our own universe,” said Zaius, “but time in there moves much more quickly than for us. Before you arrived, it completed its inflationary period, and its state of quantum chaos. Now, as you can see, galaxies are starting to form. Soon, very soon, there will be stars, and planets, and maybe even--“

“Life,” says Farnsworth. He watches as swirling streams of light move quickly across the surface of the tiny universe and wrap around miniature black holes. The object is already almost too complex to comprehend.

“Yes,” says Zaius. “Life. But don’t get too attached. If this thing expands too quickly, we’ll have to shut it down.”

“Shut it down?” says Farnsworth. “Don’t be preposterous! This is our greatest accomplishment--[scoff]--shut it down.”

“Hey, I don’t like it any more than you do. But we’re all answering to a higher power here,” says Zaius.

Farnsworth turns and looks at him, glaring. “Higher power?” he says. “What are you saying?”

“Whoa there, Farnsy, just a joke,” says Zaius. He laughs. “I meant the investors, of course.”

“Of course,” says Farnsworth, relieved. For a moment, he thought his partner had lost it. “You do know, Zai, if there is a higher power,” Farnsworth says, then turns and gazes at the screen, in awe of their creation, “then we’re it.”*

X: Inebriated Insight 

A wee bit o’ Irish, as consumed by an adult male at Z’s Bar and Restaurant in Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA

Enter bar, present state-issued identification, choose booth, order whiskey on the rocks, drink to Albert Einstein, spin glass with fingertips; order pint of stout, drink to Carl Sagan, tip glass till it’s only foam; order g-and-t, squeeze juice from wedge of lime, drink to Neil DeGrasse Tyson, poke at ice with black swizzle sticks; order whiskey-Coke, drink to Edward Baum, drink another to Amalie Noether, drink to Maxwell and Kepler, and one to Heisenberg and Hubble. Drink one to Giordano Bruno and one to Galileo. Drink until you’re carefree, happy, drunk, mellow.

Feel pleased. Pleased for wanting to fuck the girl at the end of the bar, and for eating half-a-dozen fried buffalo chicken rolls. Pleasure in all the drinks and all the bong-rips and all the LSD and speed. Pleasure in every cigarette, every book, every song, every independent dramedy. Feel pleasure in everything you eat smell touch see hear that has been created for its own sake or for your nose hand eyes ears. Feel pleased with life.

And have faith. Faith in science, and in knowledge. Faith in the unknown, and in the human drive to disentangle what we don’t understand. Faith that mankind will not destroy itself with petty squabbles over religion and race and cash and control, but that we may one day prosper as a united species that seeks to transcend our modern immorality. Faith that, after all the chaos and persecution and diseases and guilt, a person might find happiness and pleasure and peace in this strange and perplexing enigma of consciousness. And faith that, in life or in death, we will one day understand the Universe.