Comfort and Belief

In times of distress, we turn to the comforts of our childhood.  A huge piece of my childhood was my rearing in the Catholic Church.  I grew up in the New York City metropolitan area (Fairfield, CT), where Catholicism often means big old churches.  Pipe organs and stained glass windows, vaulted ceilings and pillars, huge altars and the Stations of the Cross.  The rhythms and cadences of Sunday mass were imprinted in my soul through almost a thousand iterations.

When my wife and I lived in Chicago, the stone walls and pealing bells of the church a block away drew me in.  I was fascinated by the building.  I loved to photograph it, walk by it, stand near it, look at it from the roof of our apartment building on cold, snowy nights.  I began to attend morning mass now and then just to sit inside it and feel that sense of calm.  The rhythms and cadences of the mass seeped in and activated the imprints in my soul.  It brought comfort.

It was an urban church, progressive, interested in social justice.  I could tell most of the people there were poor.  Latino immigrants and old holdovers in the neighborhood from another era.  I wanted to be a part of it.  Sitting there in my leather jacket and jeans, my battered black fedora sitting next to me, I wanted to be a part of it.

My neighborhood in Richmond has a big, old church in it.  St. Benedicts.  The parish offers a great elementary school (where I hope my daughter will attend her middle school years) that feeds a Catholic girls school (St. Gertrude's, where I hope my daughter will attend high school) and a military academy (Benedictine) for boys. It's not quite my church from Chicago, but it is a photogenic old building complete with stained glass windows, vaulted ceilings, arches and pillars.  It has the organ.  The rhythms and cadences of 7:15 Sunday mass are the same.

It's a city church, but its soul is more suburban.  Most of the people were middle class.  Its idea of social justice was to print an open letter from the Catholic Medical Association opposing health care reform.  Well, it claimed to want some reform, but it opposed any government involvement and seemed to want a reform that involved talk in generalities while leaving it to the insurance and medical industries to provide care to all.  I didn't want to be part of it.

I went there seeking solace.  My soul is in distress.  My wife and I are in grave financial straits, and the future presents as fearful.  We're neither of us terribly optimistic about the economy or the political system.  We've had some serious health issues that are adding to the pile of debt we carry.   Walking and biking past St. Benedicts, I've felt the draw of the Big Old Church.  Seeking that solace, I went in.

It was calming.  I stood when you stand, I sat when you sit, and I kneeled when you kneel.  As in Chicago, I did not speak or sing, nor did I share peace with anyone around me or partake of the sacrament.  Were I to attend confession I would be entitled to take eucharest still.  But I choose not to.  I choose not to take eucharest for the same reason I choose not to open my mouth -- I believe none of it.

I listen to the mass and I could recite nearly all of it from deep memory.  It hasn't changed in 40 years.  That comforts me.  I listen, and I think, "I don't believe any of this."  I don't.  It makes me ask myself, "What do I believe?"  I've settled such questions for decades now by claiming to be an agnostic and not concerning myself with the unanswerables.  I don't care how the universe began, or how life began, or how man came to be.  I don't worry about what comes after death (although I confess to being scared of it).  But maybe some of these questions do matter.

In the last few days, I've come to decide that I do believe in god.  I'm not sure I would define its nature, but I think I have to believe in god.  My reasoning comes down to a few things:

I absolutely believe in the existence of spirit, of the soul.  The soul is what gives a living being life.  It's what binds energy to matter and creates a living being.  When life ends, you can run all the electrical current you want through a body and all it does is fry the atoms.  It is no big step, then to conclude that there is a source or creator of that spirit, or that all spirit is in fact one entity and that one spirit entity is god.  This also, as an aside, leads me to accept the possibility of the concept of soul mates.

The universe is a lawful place.  The physical world operates according to laws.  Where did those laws come from?  Random chance?  Generally, when there are laws, someone made them.  Someone programs the computers.  Perhaps our universe is a child's toy.  God is the person who programmed it.

Finally, the world and living creatures are incredibly beautiful, and incredibly ingenious.  A human body, an ecosystem, these are ingenious systems.  It's hard to believe they developed randomly.  Now, biblical creationism and its current descendant are bunk.  For all I know, big bang and evolution explain how the place was created.  I don't think we'll ever know, and I say "good."

I also believe in Christ.  Now, I don't even know if any such person ever lived, and I certainly don't believe the story cobbled together by the churches over the last couple thousand years from about 40 pages of the bible.  That story is about as believable as the story of creation.  It's a myth created to justify the existence and power of the church structures.  What I do believe, though, is that the key to heaven on earth is found in the teachings of those gospels, supplemented by the gnostic gospels.  As a system of first principles for guidance of individual and social life, the gospel teachings are far superior to the Madison Avenue Creed that Americans live by, and it is the replacement of the gospel code by the Madison Avenue Creed that is causing the disintegration of American society.

It is my belief in the gospels that leads me to hate Christians.  I don't think more than 1 in a thousand has any clue what is really in the gospels.  I think if they read and reflected they would realize that everything they believe to be Christianity is really something else.  There are so many things that the churches do and teach, so many beliefs and principles that modern American "Christians" live by that are antithetical to the teachings of the gospels.  I intuited as a young boy that if Jesus Christ were to return today, he would treat the Christians the way he treated the Jews.  The Pharisees and Sadducees and all those other guys, they would relate to the Priests and Ministers and Televangelists of our day.  Those synagogue congregations that cast him out and spit on him, those would be today's Christian congregations.  He would hang out with the SAME people he hung out with then: the prostitutes and druggies, the losers and the simple people.  He would sneer at the PRZHIM license plate on the Escalade, and spit on the suede Guccis of the old socialite spooning out soup on Thanksgiving.

And yet I can sit in a stone cathedral and feel god.  I can in my deepest thoughts go back to the gospels for guidance.  I think issues through and draw conclusions, and then I see how those conclusions are in a gospel passage I remember from my youth, but I never thought of it that way then.  I think back to my college years, and the conversations I had through pen and ink with that odd guy from the Ethiopean Zion Coptic Church, and I find myself once again drawn to many of the ideas he shared.

These issues will be further pursued through this blog.  We need a moral change if we are going to avert disaster.  I firmly believe that all the reforms and revolutions and laws and PR campaigns and greenings and whatnot in the world are not going to change anything as long as we live by the principles we do.  The primary engine driving us to perdition is the Madison Avenue Creed, and as long as we accept that Creed and live by its principles, we will continue on that road.  We've become a society that lives by the motto, "I've got mine; fuck off."  We are atomized and alienated, viewing everyone else not as a human being with a soul like our own, but rather as a paper cutout of one Group or another.  This is by design.  All the easier to control and manipulate us.  There has to be something better.