Heaven isn't real.

(written earlier in the year while still at sea...)

I can't stop listening to "Oh, Heaven Isn't Real" by David Karsten Davies. I'm listening to it mindlessly, drawn to it because it is so happy and cheerful. Something about it is just absolutely joyous.

I'd be lying if I said there wasn't something in the sentiment which also draws me to it.

Sometime last week I listened to a podcast of Fresh Air that was about a modern heretic. I'll have to look the guy's name up later, but the long and short of it is he was an evangelical leader who after some soul searching found himself facing down a belief that everyone will be welcomed into God's presence in Heaven, that it isn't a matter of being saved or not, but rather that Jesus was a sacrifice for all, not just a gate to let the right people in and keep those others out. I've got to say, he's one of a very few Christian leaders I've heard in a long time who made anything that resembled sense when he spoke. The episode was more about how everyone else flipped out when he shared this shift in understanding. Without Hell, lots of people just weren't interested anymore.

How 'bout if you take out Heaven, too?

My childhood was extremely religious. Thankfully, my parents and the other people around me in my family translated this fervor into reaching out to other people. All other people, no matter what. This ecumenical openness and kindness towards all humanity is the part of Christianity that I continue to hold onto and appreciate. Please excuse me if I recount a short history of personal religiousity.

Among my earliest memories is a memory of coming home from church filled with the music. I mean that somewhat literally. I'm guessing that I couldn't read, but I remember looking at the sheet music and images of angels with trumpets coming out of the page and really feeling like singing was making a joyful noise. It all made sense for a brief moment. Why we sang, why people went to church, why there was any church at all and why anyone should worship God. Because of how that song felt, the angels with their trumpets that came in the music and touched this small child, this is why we do all this. The word 'holy' made sense. This, unfortunately, was a brief memory. It isn't repeated, though it was seared into my consciousness. It is this feeling against which I still measure all religious experience. If it leans towards that beautiful connection with the unknown, then I'm all for it. It is doesn't, well, most doesn't. If it seems against that, then I'm bound to be venomous (as I am with most politically religious ass-hats).

Most of my early religious life was spent feeling ripped away from this and having people try to convince me that all kinds of other criteria was important for the salvation of my eternal soul. I prayed and read and tortured myself with trying to reconcile everything to be found in the Bible. Reconciling the text in the Bible with the text in the Bible is a foolish task. Anyone who says they can, particularly with any remotely literal reading of it either hasn't read very much of it, has a very selective and sieve-like memory, or a particularly gifted imagination. It doesn't reconcile literally. If it did, we probably wouldn't spend much time with it. Trying to reconcile it with daily experience can perhaps be more instructive.

Our daily experiences don't make much literal sense either most of the time. So finding something in that expansive text to relate to or bolster what you want to believe isn't the most difficult task. The difficulty comes in being consistent. Actually, consistency isn't the biggest concern for me these days, but once upon a time, it was a dire concern. Anyway, point being I traveled along my own little spiritual journey. I tried to make this text and my life and the world as I experienced it all make sense. How does it all work?

Of course, I rolled around with all the fun little philosophical questions. If God is great, why does he let people die and all that stuff. What do I have to do to get into Heaven? How can he let people go to Hell who never had a chance to get saved? Why couldn't I have enjoyed some of the more fun sins for years without knowing any better before I got saved? If I make it to heaven, but know that other people are burning and tormented forever, then could it ever be heaven? If I am someone who could enjoy this while others burn, why would I belong there?

I'll spare some of the details, but edging up against a mental breakdown that was heavily influenced by a crisis in faith, instead of going over the edge, I stepped back. I'll go ahead and allow it religious terminology, so, if you will, we can call it being born again. This is a fair way to describe the transformation. And it was a transformation.

More than anything, it was letting go and releasing some of the weight that I had carried around. Particularly the moral weight and all this religious crud that I'd spent years piling on. It was partially both reaffirming and completely renouncing my identity as a Christian. It was certainly renouncing all the crap which other people spent years loading into that identity. I was never comfortable with it being an identity based on either I'm-going-to-heaven or you're-going-to-hell, and let's be honest, that's what most evangelical religious identity is based on. Which is stupid and is kind of an asshole-ish way to approach life. So all that was happily out the window.

All along, really the only thing that kept me tied at all to any type of religious identification was that early touchstone, the feeling from that early memory. I had felt sort of shut out from that for years, and I knew this transformation was real when I could touch that place again. I recognized it and knew it when I found it. This is the peace that passes understanding. Most people want nothing to do with it. They want the peace that is everything in its proper place. This is why people do dumb things like vote republican.

The closest I can come to describing the change is that I came to a point, a sort of realization, that I should just shut up with all my praying so fervently to understand everything and for everything to be in perfect order and to make sense. We'll call it being put in my place, and I suddenly felt both emboldened and humbled and to a certain sense like, "What business do I have even praying at all?" Telling the Almighty what you think should happen or what you'd like to happen or even just asking what he/she/it/them thinks is kind of presumptuous if you think about it. I reconciled the desire to still reach out communicatively by reducing my prayers to "wow." and "thank you." (demure punctuation and lack of capitalization intentional; an exclamation point still seemed a bit big for my britches)

I can't begin to describe how much more beautiful the world became, how much more I liked other people and myself once I got to this place. I like to think that it is apparent in my life, this joy and happiness, but I'm sure it isn't always. I was so dour and uptight before though (but I hid it well). This is slowly making its way back towards something resembling a point.

There was a time when I would have been scandalized and horrified at the existence of this song. I would have probably deleted the file, destroyed the cd if I could get my hands on it, prayed for the singers and everyone who had heard the song, and pleaded on their behalf for God to help them and change their ways. Honestly. This would have seriously rattled me.

Which misses the whole point. The song is happy. It is joyous even. So what if it is blasphemous? My old self would shriek at such heresy, but it is the old self that was further from joy and peace than the current self. I was so ready to be derailed and find darkness. Now I don't have time for it. I started writing all this when I realized how much I liked this song and how it would have bothered me in the past. Trying to put a finger on what is so different, I asked myself if I believed if this song was true or not: do I believe that heaven isn't real?

This is so literal and limiting; I can't even consider it a reasonable question. What does it matter or not? Of course it is and of course it isn't, too. I'm always looking for the beautiful and a more full experience and chances to let myself be a vessel for making a joyful noise, but am I expecting some big fat reward at the end of life for being such a just right the way God wanted person? No. That doesn't sound appealing, but I don't have much time for the question either way. I'm going to do my best to embrace and love and try to treat everyone better than they deserve and smile and spread joy where I can and mischief too. I'm going to embrace the sad and tough stuff too and I'm going to say my prayers, "wow." and "thank you." This doesn't have the least to do with trying to get to heaven. If there is a way to get there, I can't imagine it looking different from this, but the point is that this is just the way I want to move through the world. Why would I do it differently?

Back to the preacher who let go of Hell. It scandalized and fractured his megachurch (is there a grosser word in the english language?) for him to relinquish hold of belief in a literal place of eternal punishment. How toxic do people's minds have to be that this is a thing they want to cling to? Would giving up a literal belief in Heaven also rock people so terribly? How much of most Christian faith is wrapped up in wanting to "be in that number"? Do so many people live their lives based so heavily on some final end goal?

This shouldn't baffle me. I was a religious nutcase. Earlier tonight, one of the memories that came uncalled from the vaults was of me writing in the inside of the cover of a Bible that I was giving as a gift to a boy I was smitten with. It wasn't a love letter, to be sure, but maybe it also was. It was jointly an attempt to reach out to him and an attempt to save his mortal soul. It is painfully embarrassing to look back at. Thankfully I can't remember what I wrote, but you can be sure it was dumb and embarrassing. The point is, I should remember what it is like to feel so powerfully that my eternal life hinged on what I did in this temporal plane. And as far as all that goes I can, but also I don't think fear of Hell or of not getting into Heaven was ever a motivation for me. I've always been inclined to think that anyone doing something out of fear or for reward doesn't really have anything which resembles faith anyway.

The Purpose Driven Tripe

I'm back from the provinces, however temporarily. Much to write about and hard to decide where to start, but before I scramble through a backlog of impressions from Alaska and crab fishing, I'm struck by an annoying bit of news that keeps popping up in headlines and irritating the shit out of me (and what is this blog for if not for griping about current events?).

It seems that richard warren is to give the invocation at Obama's inauguration. I suppose that there are more toxic religious figures out there. It could be worse, much worse, but I have to register how much this decision irritates me. Why him? Why did they have that stupid thing at his bloated church before? Because he sells a lot of books? His books are stupid. My mother sent me The Purpose Filled Life back when it first came out and I tried to read it. I wanted to like it is theory, but it just isn't very good. The writing is crap and the ideas are vapid. And he's anything but a biblical scholar. It is just feel good crap for dumb middle class people not quite happy enough with all their excess who want a religious leader to give them a quick fix to feeling better about their lives. I read for a few days (it is a daily devotional guide) and then flipped through looking for anything that suggested it shouldn't be shelved then dropped it. When I admitted to Mom that I thought it was crap, she admitted that she had also found it kind of useless and quit reading after a few days.

I'm not the most religious fellow these days, but I'm pretty fierce about it when I've got to deal with it. I appreciate the desire to find and feel magic and the supernatural in everyday life (and that is exactly what religion at its best is about), but most of these modern bullshit artist peddling god for mass consumption and easy digestion kill all that with their assembly line vacuum packing of the Word. I was a uptight religious nerd in an earlier incarnation and read and poured through the Bible nightly, seeking and analyzing and praying and meditating. And I thankfully made my way out someone intact and avoided the looney bin that would be the likely end point of my trajectory had I gone to these false prophets and snake-oil peddlers instead of straight to the text. And even that would have likely left me mentally crippled had I not had people to challenge the popular interpretations and assumptions and force me to also find the Word scattered as it is through so much other text. All of this is just to say that having invested so much time in this subject matter I'm not inclined to be particularly generous to folks who condescend on it and proceed to talk out of their ass.

People are going on about mr. warren's support for prop 8 and of course that pisses me off. All his idiot blather about "a five-thousand year old definition" and crap about every culture having the same definition of marriage as between one man and one woman... has he even read the Bible? The definition of marriage changes through out the Bible and even if it doesn't endorse same sex relationships (other than David and Jonathan's love for one another), it certainly explicitly endorses polygamous marriages. I'm not so concerned that he is just one more homophobic prick (who, irritatingly says, "I'm not homophobic; be nice to gay people," right after saying vote to make the law say we are lesser citizens), but rather that he just isn't much of a religious leader. He is apparently effective and people seem to eat it up, but what the man may have in organization, he lacks in charisma. Billy Graham is a rock star; even if you disagree with the man, there is no denying that he has that umph. If we've got to have a religious invocation, could we at least have someone dynamic instead of some fat mega-church fool?

Most of religous leaders (at least on the national level) in this country are idiots. And so are most of their followers. Surely though, there is someone else? I suppose it is only fair, this guy gave Obama something of a fair shake and leveraged his visibility into an opportunity to reach out to evangelicals, so I can't say that it doesn't make some kind of sense. But it is still a dissappointment; it is a failure, if not of standards, then certainly of style.

"...that mythopoeic faculty which is so essential for the imagination."

Since being first introduced to Mary Renault with The Persian Boy years ago (oddly enough by my then girlfriend), I've been a fan. I hadn't read any of her books in years when I stumbled upon The King Must Die in a used book store, so I decided to dive back in. If you don't know her, Ms. Renault's specialty is rendering classic historic tales into lively stories often ripe with rich homoerotic content. The King Must Die is sort of retelling of the legend of Theseus and didn't have any of the homo stuff of the Alexander novels, but was a fun read none the less.

Part of her charm and talent is in taking legendary tales and re-imagining them as more or less plausible historical events. There is of course going to be a certain level of artistic freedom required in any such undertaking, but her final products are usually fairly compelling. I'm of course not a classics scholar, but as you move through these stories you get a sense that she has worked hard to populate her landscape with plausible inhabitants not just transplanted contemporaries. This novel had all of that on display, but it was her treatment of the supernatural that struck me.

Greece mythology is filled with supernatural creatures and super-human acts and part of retelling these tales in a believable historical context is figuring out how to render these supernatural elements as believable without losing the magic of the tale. She takes the more unlikely creatures, like the Minotaur in this story, and works with them, turning them into fully human elements or showing them in the context of natural phenomena. But what she notably does leave intact are the religious supernatural bits. I haven't really decided how I feel about this.

On the one hand, I like that she strays from the obvious fantastical elements of the traditional legends. In a way she gives them new life and makes the characters more three dimensional and relatable. And I like that her attempts at realism didn't drive her scrub the religious elements from it. There is still this muted religious dialogue going on, and by dialogue, I mean a dialogue between the protagonist Theseus and the gods. She doesn't have them appear directly before him performing miracles and the story could possibly function with the gods existing in it only as figments of the characters' imagination, but they function as silent partners enough to argue that she intentionally left them in. At some point in reading the novel, a question formed in my head, "Why include some supernatural elements and exclude others?"

The simplest argument would of course be that it is a matter of style. This is her style of rendering historical fiction and apparently an effective one. Perhaps she eliminates the greater external supernatural bits which would intuitively set off bells in the readers head that this is a fictional rendering. It is, of course, a fictional rendering, but a successful one precisely because an argument could be made that it could have happened that way. If he had faced a truly half-bull/half-man monster, you wouldn't really get to make that argument. By leaving all the potentially supernatural elements as the works of unsee players who just happen to sound like and have effects like natural occurrences, you can still argue for its plausibility. The characters can believe the gods caused an earthquake and you can read it as something that could resemble a historical event. The story is narrated by one of those characters so he is naturally seeing the hand of the gods in events around him.

But its inclusion doesn't seem as incidental as all that. I came away with the feeling that she left these gods working in the background as purposely included players in the story. She leaves room for the modern cynic to explain them away, but she breaths into them a certain life of their own.

I know I'm swimming in circles here, but I'm trying to get at something. I'd argue that her stories are richer for the inclusion of this religious element as not just background but as an actual mover in the plot, so I have no complaint with that.

It is interesting to me that in a way, inclusion of a supernatural element renders landscapes more believable. Of course it must be well done; nothing is believable without style. Marquez or Kundera are so believable partly because elements of their stories are so fantastic and impossible. In a way it makes the realism of the story stand out in stark contrast, but they are extreme examples. I'm partly just getting at the importance of exercising the capacity for belief in the unbelievable.

I made a comment over the holidays about "Christians" in third person which shocked someone who I wouldn't think I could shock with any statements about myself considering how intimately he knows me. He asked me if I no longer considered myself a Christian, which seemed an inscrutable question. "Huh?" was kind of all I could think to say. On the one hand, considering the state of modern Christianity, do I consider myself one of 'them'? Hell no. I've said before that most people who call themselves Christian these days are idiots and assholes and aspire to be more of both far more than they make any aspiration to follow the teachings of Jesus. And then there are those who are more truly Christian in the sense of having some code which they follow based primarily on New Testament teachings. Those folks I can relate to. And in plenty of ways I'm still one of them. It was how I was raised, and when push comes to shove with the world, there is a mentality modeled on Christian teachings which is what I resort to.

On the other hand, I think there is something to say simply for the capacity for faith and belief in the supernatural. I read plenty of writers, particularly fellow bloggers, where I perceive an almost total rejection of anything not firmly rooted in the cause and effect world. And I don't mind someone else approaching the world that way, but I like my fantastical bits. I don't try to put them at odds with concrete reality, but neither do I care to try to 'prove' that they are based in concrete reality. They are the magical bits, I don't want them explained to death. The creationists are a bunch of fucking idiots who are just torturing both worlds by trying to have this cake and shit on it too. You want to believe that the earth is young and people lived with dinosaurs? Fine, I don't care if you do believe that, but keep it the hell out of science. They don't fit together and won't.

But when my friend asked me if I was no longer a Christian, I think his question was about faith more than identity politics. In effect his implied question was, "You've lost your faith?" The answer to that would be no. My crisis of faith came years ago and nearly splintered my head (you think I exaggerate, but in this instance, not in the least), but I walked away from it with my faith and mind intact, if perhaps a little less dogmatic. I felt like I stepped up to a precipice and looked over into the shrieking vastness, all existential turmoil and angst hurling me over the edge... and then I quit trying to make it all fit. The expanses quit howling and I could again smile at the music of the spheres and get out of some of my self-righteous importance and desire to have all the answers and be RIGHT, and so learned to just relax. It is an amazing world we live in, a spectacular universe we inhabit. I felt somehow put in my place, which was both the center of it all, most important of all things ever and at the same time the least important, most insignificant speck. I backed off the demands and more properly positioned myself and decided that the only prayers that I'm really qualified to make amount to "Wow," and "Thank you," (though to tell you the truth in my more centered moments, even the simple "Thank you," feels a little indulgent and self important).

This isn't to say that I don't still argue with the cosmos and beg and plea with God. I do. I'm writing this in the middle of the ocean. If nothing else will at the same time bolster and shatter your faith, the ocean will. But the point of all this, the faith that came out on the other side has its deepest roots in Christianity and that remains central to the way I approach the supernatural, but on the other hand, after feeling like my spiritual ego was so broken and freed by all that, referring to myself as Christian feels a little constricting. The identity of someone as 'Christian' has more to do with how they align themselves historically than anything to do with faith. My older sister made this very clear to me when she told me before the last election that she was voting for bush because he was the 'christian' candidate. Kerry was a Christian candidate too just like every other damn candidate we've ever had, but bush's invocation of belonging to the same social demographic as my sister was more important as an indication of faith that his actions.

Perhaps that frustration has made me particularly reluctant to refer to myself as a Christian these days. There has been a loud claim staked on the American Christian identity, and to put it plainly, I don't want to be counted in that number. The jackasses and idiots have claimed that title for their cultural touchstone. But as far as my faith, it remains. I'm still uncertain about plenty, but also in the context of having to deal with all these fucking pharisaical idiots parading their cultural identity around as faith, I've perhaps become a little bit more grumpy and easy to rouse. It gets confusing with people like my sister, who in terms of actual faith and having this core set of beliefs which governs how I interact with other people, we aren't very different. We are amazingly similar. Though it pisses me off when she identifies her faith with warmongers like the president, I know that the creed she follows personally leads her to first treat others with respect and kindness.

I've gotten off track. Simply trying to write down my original question born of reading The King Must Die, "Why include some supernatural elements and not others?" brought out the explanation without even trying and let the nagging questions presented to me earlier about my beliefs come bubbling up. We live in an absurd world. This isn't a complaint. I guess in the end for me the inclusion of the supernatural in a view of the world, be it a novel or personal faith, ends up being a choice of style. Do the supernatural elements render the whole more spectacular or do they detract?

Mary Renault uses the invisible supernatural elements in her stories to connect the characters to the events of the natural world around them and the emergent properties of the civilization they live in, or perhaps more accurately she uses these elements to show how her characters make these connections. In the end this is what all supernatural elements are, a way of connecting things which may not otherwise be connected or for understanding connections which aren't otherwise clear.

While home over the holidays, I dug through damn near everything I've ever owned (you could call me something of a pack rat; I like to think of myself as an archivist) in a vain attempt to find my dive card, but I did manage to find some books I'd been looking for. Among those, perhaps the smallest and easiest to lose is The Decay of Lying by Oscar Wilde. It is ostensibly a play, though I can't imagine it ever put to stage, but is more or less a soliloquy split into a dialogue about art and life and the cult of Truth. It deserves its own consideration and will perhaps get it in a future essay, but there is a line which I quite liked about religion: "As for the Church, I cannot conceive anything better for the culture of a country than the presence in it of a body of men whose duty it is to believe in the supernatural, to perform daily miracles, and to keep alive that mythopoeic faculty which is so essential for the imagination." What a wonderful description! If only that were what the church concerned itself with these days...