Atheistic mysticism

The more remote the past, the less real it seems, and this includes my own past. I was looking for another picture just now when I came across this one of Dad and me. The year was 1980, and we had been tearing a plaster ceiling out of a hundred year old house in Brookhaven, Mississippi, in 102-degree weather. Dad wouldn’t have worn a dust mask for the work, but I might or I might not, my awareness of such things increasing with time. Twice a day, Mrs. Nations would invite us into the kitchen for a cup or two of strong coffee. I rarely drank coffee, so I stayed ripped on caffeine for days. I found that I liked the feeling, a lot. I also liked Mrs. Nations a lot because she was both cultured and oblivious to the class prejudice that would have kept most upper class women from befriending their carpenters. I thought she represented Southern womanhood at its noblest, and I wish I had told her. It was on this same job that two theatrically slutty women started making eyes at me as I was buying chicken dinners for Dad and me at Winn-Dixie. When the three of us got to the parking lot, they said they had to pick their kids up from school in a couple of hours, but would have time to hang-out for a while at McCall Creek. I said, “Are you ladies telling me you want to fuck?” and they giggled. I figured they wanted money, but I didn’t ask. I did ask if Dad could come. They asked how old he was. I said 70, and they declined. I told Dad about them, and he said I should go if I wanted to, but I considered it all too weird, and, besides, I was never one to pay for sex.

I hastened to look away from that picture just now, not due to any negativity regarding my memories but because it was so long ago that it seems like an event out of someone else’s life. For the past to feel this way un-centers me. I imagine myself floating in space. I feel as if I’m floating in space, and it makes me nauseous, but it also makes me feel high and free.

“There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic, too, and what he had experienced was vacancy—a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no purpose at all. He knew.” Graham Greene (from The Power and the Glory)

Floating without purpose. No center. No foundation. The past and the future a fiction to the present, and the present replaced by the future even as I try to grasp it. 

Men of intrigue

As a teenager, I was drawn to such divergent groups as the Ku Klux Klan and the Black Panthers, so it shouldn’t surprise you that I was likewise attracted to both the deeply religious and to their atheistic counterparts. I heard many a sermon in scornful opposition to the latter, but they only created in me an intense interest in what such men had to say for themselves. I mythologized one type of person as representing atheists. He—for it was a he—was an aging white male in a suit, and I envisioned him standing before a large wooden desk in a book-lined study. He was thin—as befitted someone who had weightier things than food on his mind—terribly smart and intellectual, and had the tortured look of a man who could see the human predicament for what it is rather than for what we want it to be. I would sometimes find his photo in Life Magazine.

I imagined atheists to be far more interesting than anyone I had ever known, and I was convinced that they would understand me in a way that no one else could. I wanted to ask one of them how someone so smart, sensitive, and educated, could fail to believe in God. I knew that the reason had to do with being “overly educated,” but I couldn’t grasp the process by which “too much knowledge” blinded one to truth when truth is knowledge. I knew that I would be putting my soul at risk just by talking to someone so deeply under Satan’s sway, but I was driven, not that I ever found such a person in rural Mississippi.

Preachers quoted Proverbs to prove that atheists were “educated fools” (“The fool hath said in his heart that there is no God”), yet I knew very well that the main difference between atheists and the people I went to church with was that the latter knew less, and ignorance struck me as a poor recommendation for being right about God or anything else. I realized, of course, that Jesus had said, “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children,” but in saying this, he implied that ignorance, credulity, and gullibility, were superior to intelligence, wisdom, and learning, when it came to discerning supreme truth. And, of course, he had said outright that God had deliberately hidden this truth from people of depth and thoughtfulness, presumably because he wanted them to be damned. This suggested that my inability to discern the truth of the Bible occurred because, well gosh darn, God simply didn't like me. My only recourse was to attempt to believe that which made no sense to me (meaning most of the Bible), to call my attempt faith, and to go about doing good and trying to find something to love about God; all in the faint hope that it would get me into heaven. As it turned out, I couldn’t pull that off either.

So it was that God became ever more of what he always had been in my life—an object of fear and loathing who threw lightning bolts at trees, breathed forth hurricanes, and filled lakes with eternal fire. Yet, it gradually dawned on me that the concept of a perfect being becoming anyone’s object of fear and loathing made no sense because a perfect being would, by the necessity of its perfection, instill its entire creation with perfect joy and thus win the perfect allegiance of everyone, right down to the tiniest germ. Even Satan would give up his lust to rule heaven because no pleasure would be even remotely comparable to the delight of pleasing God to the fullest extent of ones God-given ability. No one could say no to God because no one would even think to say no to such an entity. What then, I came to wonder? Could my inability to believe in the written word of a perfect being mean that such a being did not exist, or that I had the wrong written word?

 

Against this internal background, I was being warned repeatedly in sermons of the threat posed by atheism, yet I knew that some atheists could be brought to God. For instance, I heard what I thought was a recent account* of an atheist who was walking down a remote beach one day when he found a watch. As he reflected upon its presence in such a place, he realized that, just as the intelligent complexity of a watch proves the existence of a human designer and builder, so does the intelligent complexity of the universe prove the existence of a heavenly designer and builder. I considered it a compelling argument, but it also struck me as such an obvious argument that I felt sure an atheist would be able to dismiss it from the comfort of his study, and I wanted to know how.

...As I write, it occurs to me that if I had a suit (preferably a three-piece), a book-lined study, and an air of sophisticated urbanity, I would look like my early image of those men about whom I was warned, men I wanted so desperately to know, sensing as I did that the preachers weren’t representing them nearly so well as they could have represented themselves.

*It was made-up by William Paley in 1802. 

The truth about Peggy, or at least a start

I have grown, over the decades, to hate cleaning house. When I tell Peggy that I hate cleaning house, she says that there is a lot that she hates about her nursing job, but she has to do it, and so it is that I have to clean house, so I might want to work on being less whiny about it. Hearing this helps me tremendously, but I invariably forget and have to be reminded a few times a year. I can’t say that she seems happy to remind me, but I trust her to do it, and she has never let me down.

By the way, have I ever mentioned that Peggy can’t find her way around town after 25 years of living here? Directions to the most basic destinations are as mysterious to her as are the pottery patterns of the Zhou Dynasty, but Peggy’s mind isn’t just steeped in mystery, it’s drowned in irony. For example—and in regard to her not knowing directions—Peggy always wants to drive when we’re together. Most of the time, I wouldn’t care who drove, but I can’t relax when she’s driving because as soon as I think that, surely, she knows to turn right just the other side of the Alaska Bush Company Gentlemen’s Club, she doesn’t turn right just the other side of the Alaska Bush Company Gentlemen’s Club, and we have to go back. It’s also true that her driving scares the bejesus out of me, a fact by which she seems much amused.

Peggy has other, shall we say, features, that I might allude to while I’m at it. Peggy is intimidated by credit card scanners, so she gave me the job of making sure she always has cash in her billfold. Why she is intimidated by credit card scanners, God only knows (said the atheist with the curly horn), but she generally avoids shopping partly for this reason but also because all she ever wants are buttons, and she can get those from her button cronies who act like pusher/druggies would act if pusher/druggies were addicted to clothing buttons instead of heroin. Peggy is also intimidated by airplanes and spiders. If she’s not worried about an airplane falling with her, she’s worried about one falling on her. Her idea of hell would be eternal entrapment in a burning airplane filled with panicking tarantulas.

Peggy is going away tomorrow for four days. I will be happy, but I would be just as happy if she stayed home. Peggy says it hurts her feelings that I don’t suffer when she’s gone. Peggy also says that she too would like to be alone sometimes, but she can’t because I never go anywhere. This hurts my feelings because of the way she used to bitch when I spent months at a time traveling all over the country having sex with other women. Now she’s bitching because I never go anywhere?! I told her that, look Peggy, I’ll give you some time alone; I’ll put a tent up in the backyard, and you can stay out there all you want. When I went out to put the tent up, she wouldn’t let me back in. Peggy is a lot harder to get along with than any woman has a right to be. I often tell her that if a beautiful and generous rich woman comes along, she can kiss her marriage goodbye, but she just laughs.