My friend Gordon wants to talk about God. He has called me from work and over the course of his rambling dissertation on the state of things in his life at present, wonders aloud why nobody wants to talk about God anymore. By “nobody” I assume he means his peers. He wonders why it’s not a topic of conversation among his intimate friends. Real people. In all the years we’ve known each other, why haven’t he and I discussed it, he asks. By “anymore” I presume he means that God, and more specifically, the existence of God and the very essence of faith, was once a central concern of his and his acquaintances. Gordon majored in religious studies at a southern university, got a summer job at a tv station and has been working in television ever since. Twenty years have somehow elapsed. Keeping that in mind and by way of warming up to the subject, I point out there is certainly a lot of public talk about God going on. Professional proselytizers, like angry little cartoon urchins banging away on kitchen implements thinking they are making music, are ubiquitous, and would be amusing except that they are intolerant of Gordon and I, and they want to rule the world.
Their opposite numbers in the secular spiritual movement, if that’s what it’s called, are filling book store shelves with manifestos – in some cases articulating a charming sort of ersatz-buddhism, in others a refreshing and, I feel necessary, environmental revisionism – that see the divine in everything. Gordon, I would have thought, is a prime candidate for this group. He is personally warm and generous, sincere, educated and concerned about the quality of his inner life. But he is oddly oblivious to the entire alternative spiritual genre, perhaps because he clings to an inflexible Biblical definition of God, and perhaps, too, because his mainstream training in television has taught him to be suspicious of anything that can’t be pigeon-holed. So he has avoided this highly self-involved industry for what it is, self-involved. He isn’t really in need of a support group, doesn’t really feel victimized, except, that is, by everything, so emotional and spiritual “healing” is not high up on his hierarchy of needs.
As for me, being a bit of a hell-raiser, I don’t care. Because some sort of authentic spiritual affirmation is missing, or is wanting definition in the culture at large, it’s a party I’m willing to crash. But for those who are skeptical of alternative spiritual movements, and who feel that traditional religious organizations are missing their mark, there is a void. As I tell Gordo to put his antennae up and his nose to the breeze, I can’t help but think that he is ripe for some Robert Bly, Andrew Harvey, or Joseph Campbell to come along and help him initiate the epiphany he so clearly yearns for. Gordo brushes me off, says he wants to get passsed all that, whatever that is. Gordo has faith and trust in our friendship and expects us to be on the same page when we start off using the G-word. But I don’t think we are.
At an airport bar in Toronto not long, before 911 and between the Bush Wars, I was sitting between a Kuwaiti gentleman and a born-again Christian from Texas. The Kuwaiti, a young college graduate, was gulping down Johnny Walker’s at an impressive rate and lamenting that when he got home this drinking would have to end. He also gave an appreciative nod at some females at the bar implying he was going to miss western women, too. He ended his soliloquy with an admission that he would, eventually, have to atone for the sinful habits he had acquired here in the west and, now that he had learned “the evil ways of the world,” he was ready to return to his native land and take on “the responsibilities of manhood.” With a sigh he conceded that now was as good a time as any. I let the conversation meander. I got him talking about the separation of church and state here in the west, something that was achieved at tremendous human expense over hundreds of years – the Reformation, the Renaissance, the Age of Reason, The Enlightenment, etc. – and whether or not he thought such a transformation feasible in the Middle East. Feasible, perhaps, but desirable? No. He thought a more tolerant society was ultimately what made all this western hedonism and decadence possible, implying that by defining it as undeniably hedonistic and decadent we had reached some mutually agreed upon condemnation. I wasn’t in the mood to challenge him; I found his perspective intriguing, if paradoxical.
Suddenly, I shit you not, the Texan, who had been listening to all this with one eye on the Monday Night Football broadcast on the tv over the bar, asked the young Muslim, “But you have accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior, have you not?” It was unclear whether the Texan meant all Muslims or our young friend specifically, but that distinction hardly seemed to matter. I will spare you a painful recitation of the ensuing conversation except to say that the young man showed grace, poise, patience and the eloquence one can only achieve through repetition, as he explained that Mohammed, not Christ, was at the center of his faith. Listening to this and seeing they were immediately at an impasse, I bought us another round and brought in my favorite mediator, quoting him as best I could, saying, “Ghandi suggested that these are just different paths all leading to the same place, right?” Simultaneously and without hesitation, the Muslim from Kuwait and the born again Christian from Texas, and my pal Gordo, to whom I had been telling this story by way of illustration, all replied, “No, they are not.” I answered Gordo the same way I answered my friends at the bar, “Then the only outcome of that view is war.” Gordo is a good and fast talker and his silences are most always meant to imply a readiness to listen. We have been friends, adversaries and drinking buddies. He wants me to drag him into a loftier exchange than the one I had with those two men at the bar in Toronto. So I ramble on about the human impulse to mythologize what is a natural proclivity for abstract thought, and my view that, as far as mankind has come since the Enlightenment, it wouldn’t take much of a collapse in the progress of Reason to plunge the earth into another Dark Age. For me, that was the real danger behind Reagan’s abandonment of education and his lending political legitimacy to his evangelical supporters.
Gordo has more faith than I in the resiliancy of the idea of progress and the strength of the status quo, but is willing to hear me out. I suggest that, historically, times aren’t always as flush as they have been in post WWII America, the era in which our attitudes were formed; that in ideologically uncertain times, rational cosmological curiosities devolve into irrational, primitive suppositions, and our hopes and fears step in to fill the gaps in our thinking, thereby flirting with a dangerous cultural formula for a return to barbarism. In other words we create, at times, mythologies to get at the heart of the heretofore unexplainable; we create superstitions to compensate for our ignorance. “So you’re saying that God is either a myth or a superstition?” Gordo asks wearily, very nearly doing that tv thing of summing up what someone is saying by throwing some of their own words back at them. I’m not biting. “Well, I think that historically, institutions have attempted to anthropomorphize the concept of God into some sort of politically viable entity.” I add that superstition has played a role in setting comprehensible, if false, limits in the world. Because current knowledge and the ability to hypothesize will only take the observer so far out in space and time before he or she becomes lost and seeks to grope his or her way back to familiar territory. A territory to which, once having left, ideologically speaking, there is really no return. “A point of no return, like Eden,” he says, sounding truly glum.”A point of no return can be a good thing, too. Do we want to return to inquisitions and holocausts?”
I can hear Gordo scratching his beard on the other end of the phone. A good sign. Gordo is a video-tape editor and so it is his job to take long swaths of images and cut them into quick, snappy little phrases. In fact, I can hear him clicking buttons on his tape console as I speak. I can practically see his eyes darting back and forth from one monitor to the other, making professional and aesthetic judgements simultaneously as we talk. I’m beginning to get the idea that he’s been editing a particularly nasty bit of footage today, parts of which we peons here in the general public will never see, thank God. He points out that inquisitions and holocausts are still happening around the world, we’re just calling them different things, like “jihad” and “ethnic cleansing.” He sounds as if trapped in one of his endless video loops. We have somehow put God at the center of a wheel and every time we think we’re getting close, we find ourselves travelling back out a different spoke, toward an inevitable encounter with the harsh reality that exists beyond the outer rim.
I take a second to think back on all the material currently available and recall out loud that one question on the table these days is; if you abandon a sacred canon of behavior, be it a supposedly God-given set of commandments or a political constitution, without replacing it with a better one, more suited to contemporary needs, won’t ethics deteriorate until our deeds become more and more intolerable?
“Questions, questions, questions,” Gordo heaves one of his more dramatic sighs. “Abstract thought is the basis of imagination,” he embarks upon a ramble of his own, returning to something I was getting at earlier. But he sounds a bit peaved. Maybe he doesn’t like thinking of God as an abstraction. Maybe he doesn’t like what he’s seeing on his television screen. He also likes to quote Voltaire in reminding me that, “if God did not exist, mankind would be forced to invent him,” and the conundrum posed by his university theosophy teacher that, “atheists first must believe there is a God – not to believe in.”
Gordo thinks that last piece of sophistry more clever than I do. Meanwhile, I am trying to keep that mysterious unmentioned video footage in mind. It could be the reason he’s suddenly found himself in a moral quandary. Of course, if I were to ask, specifically, what he’s working on that minute, he would brush me off with yet another sigh, exhaling some platitude about the endless tedium and sameness of his grueling, thankless efforts. He will spare me those remarks if I let him. But I remind myself before pushing on, that sooner or later he’s going to have to return his full attention to his work. I worm my way back to the topic at hand by reminding him that the imagination is a valuable problem-solving tool, when tempered with reason. It is rarely trustworthy when sparked solely by emotion, and becomes what western enlightenment philosophers would call, the enemy of reason; what fundamentalists of all stripes have always called, the enemy of faith. “So you’re saying that religion and science are both suspect?” This takes me by surprise. I hadn’t given any thought to the age old debate between science and religion. The tv screen in my mental picture of Gordo’s work station has just flipped from the horrors of Bosnia to the moral debate over funding NASA when there are starving people in the world . “Um, yeah. Sometimes. Maybe. I mean, a medicine man in a primitive tribe can be just as out of ideas as a contemporary scholar who suggests we are at the end of history, don’t you think?” Silence.
“But look, we’ve gotten off track here,” I say, trying to pull up, “what I grapple with when I consider this stuff is more or less what every sentient being has contemplated, either literally or figuratively, over the course of time. And that is: What are the genuine wonders of the fact of consciousness and at what point are they recognizable as such? Where inside us is the link to the self forged that will then reveal that greater link to what we are trying to identify as God? How do I account for the unexplainable paradox of life and death? Or, why does darkness appear to be so permanent, and light, only temporary?” Admittedly, I tend to blather like a college philosophy major stoned on Budweiser. So does Gordon. We’re the guys who corner you at a party after four or five drinks pointing at your chest screaming, “And another thing!” But all I’m trying to do here is get him out of Bible class long enough for him to examine his own beliefs without the muddying distractions of dogma, allegory and politics. Not good enough. Gordo wants me to boil it down for him and that implies that he thinks I have boiled it down for myself. I can’t answer the above questions. Heck, I’m happy to just form the sentences. Do you believe or don’t you? Gordo wants to ask – but doesn’t. Or, more appropriately, he wants me to reach back over the many years of our friendship and remind him if he had once believed at all. Yes or no. Quick, simple, comprehensible. Gordo still believes! Film at eleven. Instead, I have slowed him down long enough to suggest that, over the past few centuries, and particularly in the last thirty years, the religious institutions that took the spiritual lead in western society have been forced to loosen their political grip, and as a result, plenty of trustworthy thinkers are free to approach these subjects with wide open minds, blending ancient philosophies with contemporary ethical imperatives, all the while keeping their genuine spiritual inclinations intact. No, most of these current rumminators haven’t claimed for their ideas the legitimacy of coming direct from an unseen deity. That, to me, is what is so refreshing about their points of view. Philosophically, spiritually and ethically, collectively, this could be a golden time in the history of ideas. Or, it could be an invitation to chaos. None of this is very satisfying to Gordo who would like some sort of answer now, so he can get on with his day without the universe imploding in around him. He’d call me a deist if he could remember what it meant. He’d realize that he is one as well. Also, it is such an easy topic to exploit and I know Gordon has unwittingly bought into a discipline that exploits the discourse of society in crude and cruel little chunks. So I’m being careful not to give him a sound-bite. Deep down he knows that. This is why he comes to me when his foundations start to quake. Why, too, that I rarely hear from him when he’s doing well. I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t sense an open mind but, as with so many of us, a door that is only slightly ajar. Pried open by the inevitable panic we all feel from time to time. When Gordo and I hang up the phone we have agreed to get together and talk about God sometime. I smile for a moment, staring out my office window. I thought we just had.
This essay was originally published in WordWrights Magazine.