Читать книгу I Don't Know What to Believe - Ben Kamin - Страница 11
ОглавлениеYOU ARE SUPPOSED TO ARGUE WITH GOD
“What will the Egyptians say?”
—MOSES TO GOD
IT WAS JUST FOUR college chums going out to the movies. Granted, the offering that chilly winter night in Cincinnati was not typical fare. The Exorcist was a runaway blockbuster because of both its chilling storyline and because many religious authoritarians, especially in the Catholic Church, had a big problem with it. No wonder: In their minds, it sensationalized an extremely grave matter in church theology—the invasion of a human being by a satanic demon and the treacherous, sacred rite of exorcizing it from the person. For church zealots, this is serious business and hardly the appropriate material for Hollywood thrillers.
Three of my campus buddies joined me as we trekked out to see “the movie about the possessed girl whose head spins around.” Everybody was talking about that supernatural horror film, and we were intrigued. It had already been named “the scariest film of all time” by Entertainment Weekly.
My friend Eric Downey was joining us against the wishes of his stern Catholic parents. I grew up a few doors from the Downeys on a street that literally ended at the gates of Our Mother of Sorrows Church. Eric, who was mercilessly mocked in the neighborhood for his grueling stutter, was one of nine children and his parents were active in the parish.
The Downeys were neighborly and generous and observed their faith with discreet service and good works. They wanted Eric, their middle son, to enter the priesthood. They did not want him to go see The Exorcist. For them, the motion picture was a celluloid sacrilege. Perhaps they were particularly sensitive about it because the screenplay was based upon a revealing, real-life incident that exposed a whispered-about church procedure.
In 1949, Catholic priests performed a series of such exorcisms upon an anonymous boy in Maryland known as “Roland Doe.” The haunted boy’s family was actually Lutheran; the busy priests just saw a Christian child possessed and controlled by a bloodcurdling spirit and this kind of situation was a denominational specialty of theirs.
The rituals were shrouded in controversy and mystery but regarded with absolute ecclesiastic solemnity by devout Catholics. No different from the many instances across the centuries when fundamentalist or mystical Jews have grappled with a dybbuk—the dreaded but believed evil spirit that enters into a living person. The dybbuk would cleave to the poor soul, cause wild dysfunction and schizophrenia, babble through the person’s mouth and, as with other religious delusions, represent a separate and alien personality.
None of this dark folklore was on our minds as we boys romped to the cinema house. There were two shows playing and we almost made a last minute switch into Blazing Saddles—the Mel Brooks Western satire featuring Yiddish-speaking Indians and a drunken cowboy who punched out horses. Our rabid curiosity about child-actress Linda Blair’s bulging, petrifying eyes; the deep, monstrous voice that inhabited her; the notorious, rotating head; and the intermittent, projectile green vomit she emitted all won us over.
The movie was at once, ghoulish, unsettling, clever, and cartoonish. There are good reasons why it spawned several sequels and is now a classic enshrined in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. Three of us four moviegoers exited the theater howling with mimicking demonic exertions and a show of bravado meant to distill our undeniable mixture of fun and fear. My dorm roommate Walter, an engineering student, kept speculating on “how the hell they made that girl’s head spin like that.”
“How the hell?” That was too much for Dennis, who lived across the hall. The three of us now completely keeled over in laughter and naughtiness. Then we realized that Eric was off to the side, crumpled on the sidewalk, looking like he was cringing in agony. Eric was not laughing. Eric was sobbing even as he cradled his midsection with his own arms.
Snapping out of our release and delirium, we ran over to our friend. Before we could even ask him what the matter was, he turned his head toward us, looking disturbingly like something out of the movie we just saw. His hands trembled, his shoulders convulsed, tears streamed down his face, and his eyes were two dark wells of panic.
“THAT COULD HAPPEN TO ME!” Eric cried out from somewhere within him that we young men could not categorize. A place that now alarmed us more than anything we had just viewed on screen.
“Don’t you see?” He bowed his head down and wept like a fearful child. “That could happen to me. At any time. I could be possessed by a demon!”
He meant it. We understood he was not feigning anything. What was a horror flick for the other three of us was a grim and shocking liturgical reality for our buddy. And this was, at least for me, a marker on my relationship with religion—even as I was planning a career in religion.
Eric eventually recovered from his trauma. In a way, the shrill alarm he experienced served to cleanse his sectarian-sullied soul of the indoctrinations, the propaganda, and the superstitions. I was close enough to him to learn that two of the parish priests, certainly at their own professional peril, defying the rectory canon, helped Eric out of his anxiety and guilt. This is not to say that those two exceptional reverends did not fall into church code of belief on the rule of the devil. But they at least were equally concerned with the psychological well-being of a young man within their ministry.
Eric also convinced his parents to pay for psychotherapy, ostensibly for his speech defect. In fact, he underwent analysis that relieved him of the stutter in his soul. Years after the night at the movies, I ran into Eric during a visit to my hometown. I knew he had become a schoolteacher—of world religions. He was happily married with two small children, and he spoke without a trace of mumbling and with quiet confidence. We laughed about our milestone night at the movies. I asked him, “How did you really get out of that rut?”
He responded: “I decided to argue with it.”
IN ORDER TO MAKE a bed with your religious tradition, you must struggle with it from time to time. The very name, “Israel,” means “the one who wrestles with angels.” You have to stand up, even to God or those who claim to represent God. The preachers won’t often tell you, because it threatens their authority, that this is a key fabric in the biblical tapestry. As we shall see, every true leader, prophet, and spiritualist of every faith has argued with fate and with God—from Sarah to Moses to Jesus to Martin Luther King, Jr.
It is obvious that uncompromising religious obeisance is the source of most every deadly conflict now blazing in this world. A religious crusade, of any kind, has nothing to do with the human spirit and everything to do with tyranny. Violence is not only physical; there is spiritual violence that turns growing children into cowering, angst-ridden misfits and that corrupts righteous clerics into bloodthirsty warlords. My boyhood chum Eric did not suffer from such persons but he did suffer from such sanctimoniousness.
Being a rabbi, a pastor, or an imam is not about power. It is about possibility. That is something you cannot only believe but you should demand.
When my friend Eric began to argue with the God he was presented with in church, he was merely emulating Jesus. Pastor Ken Silva has written about a verse in the Gospel of Mark: Jesus said to them, “Is this not the reason you are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God?” Jesus’s entire ministry was an argument with the status quo, with what he perceived as a calcified, insensitive, despotic religious pecking order that confused insulation with inspiration. Silva isn’t too happy either with the modern state of affairs in the Christian hierarchy and he summarizes his distress succinctly: “It’s only because the visible church, fearful of conflict, has decided to follow the whimsical ways of our effete culture that Christ’s confrontational style has been hidden.”
Christ’s confrontational style. I’m not a Christian, but I like that. Religion works best when it’s not telling you what to think but when it’s exhorting you to think. In my lifetime, I heard our nation’s first Catholic president, the young John F. Kennedy, close his Inaugural Address on a bitter cold day in Washington, January 20, 1961, by exclaiming: “God’s work on Earth must truly be our own.” Yes, we are God’s partners, not God’s slaves. You can find the proof of this right in the Bible.
Sarah, the mother of monotheism, argued with God. Noah failed at this. Abraham sometimes did and sometimes didn’t—the Jewish tradition is critical and concerned about his inconsistencies. The very greatness of Moses and his high rank among all the Western religions is exactly because he was an independent, cantankerous spiritual legislator who argued with God when he thought God was wrong.
Let’s see how these individuals, all sanctified in religious tradition, did when it came to arguing with God and how their stories can help us know what to believe.
Sarah, like many women, sought to bear a child. She wanted to be a mom. (The Bible spends much more time exploring the pains, joys, yearnings, and anguishes of the people in the narrative than it does portraying the big miracles.) Her husband, Abraham, had children via handmaids and concubines, a routine practice in that time and place. The Bible doesn’t sidestep Sarah’s heavy heart as she becomes postmenopausal. It doesn’t whitewash her resentment—even cruelty—toward a favorite sexual partner of Abraham’s named Hagar. Banished to the desert, thirsty and scorched by sun and sand, Hagar clutched her newborn son Ishmael—the primal beacon figure of Islam.
Whatever is happening in the Muslim world today, the Hebrew Bible unequivocally anoints Abraham’s son Ishmael with special status: “I will multiply thy seed exceedingly.” In other words, Ishmael’s descendants will become a great nation. Here is a rebuttal of blanket Islamophobia.
Meanwhile, in a classic tale of sexism, three mysterious men (“divine messengers”) appear at Abraham’s tent flap and tell the old man that he and Sarah will bear a son together after all. Sarah happens to overhear “the boys” discussing her body and her sexual promise from within the tent. Mystified, defiant, joyous, and indignant, Sarah laughed out loud. To paraphrase her infamous muttering found in the Book of Genesis about this locker room moment, Sarah said to herself: “Right. I’m going to have a kid at my age. And with my old husband.”
According to the legend, God heard Sarah’s little blasphemy and became quite vexed. The God of the early Bible had a number of anger management issues, as we shall see. In keeping with the shameless paternalism of this story, God went straight to Abraham and asked, “Why did Sarah laugh? Is anything too hard for the Lord?”
I feel this segment of scripture was written by men who didn’t want anyone, especially a woman, to question God. Even when what God proposes is a biological impossibility. It’s not that different from the longstanding antagonism of organized religious groups toward women’s rights and access to prayer, study, and even careers in the clergy. What if Sarah hadn’t argued with heaven, hadn’t stood up to male insecurity, hadn’t been bold, and had simply submitted to “God’s will”? Would the countless, valiant campaigns and movements for women’s freedoms, for suffrage, for equal pay have retained an original biblical role model? Would the teenage Pakistani education activist Malala Yousafzai, shot in the face by a Taliban gunman, have a scriptural mentor and go on to win the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize?
All Sarah wanted was to bear a child with her husband and to have the attention and respect of that husband. What she wound up doing was teaching us that before you can believe in God, you have to believe in yourself.
And what of Abraham? Was he a leader with God or a lackey for God? It depends upon where you look in the Bible. Like almost anybody, including you and me, Abraham was filled with contradictions that he reacted to and felt varying levels of motivation about things at several points in his life. It’s just like you and me: On Monday, we don’t believe in God. On Tuesday, we do. When we were teenagers, we were immortal and unassailable and didn’t really stress about God and prayers and fate. Older and frailer, we need to care. But we also need to think and sort out what works for us, what comforts us, as our friends and family die off and we are looking down the tunnel of mortality.
There is the well-known story of Abraham trying to convince God not to destroy the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Here was a double village of depravity and debauchery and our hero is actually bargaining with God not to destroy it. Abraham pleads, “What if there are fifty good people in the city? Will you spare it for fifty good souls?” Okay, God agrees; for fifty good and pure folks, it will be saved. Abraham pushes the envelope: What if there are forty good ones? All right, God agrees; forty. Abraham keeps up the bartering. It goes down to thirty and then to twenty. He and God finally settle at ten. If there were ten virtuous people to be found in Sodom and Gomorrah, the entire place remains standing. (A Jewish tradition asserts that this final numeral in the negotiation, ten, became the minimum number of people required to form a minyan—a group large enough to have a religious service.)
Unfortunately, there weren’t even ten upstanding individuals in that miserable community and it was wiped out. But the story, found right in the heart of the Bible, effectively indicates that if you see a possible injustice or you don’t understand what God (or God’s theologians) is disseminating, then you are supposed to speak out. God did not create us to simply fall in line. We were created to be God’s partners. Heaven is not tyranny; heaven is hope.
Yet later, Abraham strangely goes mute when God commands him to do something unthinkable: “Take your son Isaac (the only child Abraham produced with Sarah), your son that you love, go up to Mount Moriah, and offer him there for a burnt-offering upon the mountain.”
Really? Abraham is supposed to kill and sacrifice his teenage boy to God? Well, after the commotion Abraham put up to save a city of criminals, the man will surely argue with this crazy notion! Look in Genesis, chapter 22, and see Abraham’s response. Not a word. Not a single protest. Here’s the verse that follows immediately after God’s outlandish request:
And Abraham rose up early in the morning and saddled his ass and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son, and collected wood for the burnt-offering, and rose up, and went to the place of which God had told him.
Centuries of anguished scholarship, rationalization, and dispute have failed to mitigate or explain away how a preeminent seer of Western theology did not utter a syllable of protest when God instructs him to slaughter his own child.
Of course we know Abraham did not ultimately do that terrible thing. But not because he didn’t intend do. He had the fire blazing and the blade up in the air to slay the boy and was only stayed by the intervention of an “angel of God.” It was a test, a loyalty check to evaluate just how faithful Abraham really was to this deity: “Lay not thy hand upon the lad, neither do anything to him. For now I know that thou fearest God, seeing that thou has not withheld thy son.” A ram was substituted; God was going to get something out of this strange little trial of allegiance.
Anybody who knows this story and is honest with him- or herself has thought the same thing: I don’t know what to believe. The story begins to be comprehensible, fathomable, and even acceptable (as opposed to being repugnant) only when we start questioning it. It’s not enough that the Jewish doctrine on this claims that it teaches people not to sacrifice their children. People continue to sacrifice their kids all the time—to wars, abuse, addiction, trafficking, and neglect. The story has no moral possibilities if we just believe in it. It only has ethical value or spiritual merit if we argue with it, and that is what you can believe.
And then there was Noah.
It’s worth noting that Noah of the Bible was neither a Jew nor a Christian nor affiliated with any organized creed. I mention this because of the frequent co-opting of his story and that of the global flood (or total genocide, if you look at it for what it was) by clergy people in the name of their faiths. Noah was an unassuming man who, according to the writ, was selected by God to build an ark and save his family along with “two of every kind” from the animal kingdom. This is perhaps the most renowned tale of all time and the destruction of humanity by a cataclysmic deluge appears as a parable in other ancient literatures, including from Babylonia, Egypt, and Africa. Most all of these traditions also showcase a boat and feature returning, redemptive birds—like the dove in the Genesis account that returns with a green leaf and some hope.
What were Noah’s credentials for this assignment according to Genesis? He was not a seer, an oracle, or even a nautical expert. He wasn’t exactly Billy Graham or Nelson Mandela. All Genesis tells us is that Noah was “a righteous man in his time.”
A righteous man in his time? What was “his time”? In terms of human behavior, this was a period of history so desperately bleak and despicable that the Bible summarizes it in one succinct sentence: “The earth was corrupt before God and the earth was filled with violence.” In fact, the scripture intimates that God was thoroughly disgusted with the human beings he had created and that the entire demographic of the planet amounted to a bunch of hedonists, rakes, thieves, rapists, and degenerates. Against that standard, Noah was the best. This is not a ringing endorsement of Noah’s character or standards. He was all God had to work with.
You don’t have to believe the whole story; it’s a shared myth of many civilizations, and it does have a powerful and meaningful ethical message. What you can take away from this very drenched business is that greatness is relative to the period being examined. Noah happened not to be a total debaucher. So in his time he stood out. We could use some of this perspective in our current era of celebrity worship, narcissism, and sycophants. Better than deifying Noah—or any of the highly flawed human heroes of the biblical literature—we should remember their “greatness” is always to be defined against the reality of their circumstances, as well as their own human frailties.
When we beatify well-known people or even private individuals in our lives, from parents to popes to ballplayers to media icons, we will inevitably wind up hurt, disillusioned, and confused.
Here’s something you can believe when it comes to people, theology, miracles, and psaltery: The answer is always somewhere in between. There is somewhere you can alight in between atheism and evangelism and even that point of landing will—and must—fluctuate as you pass through the triumphs, setbacks, illnesses, recoveries, crises, and renewals of this thing called life.
When it comes to the flood phenomenon, for example, don’t get drowned in the torrent. In general, don’t get stuck on miracles. You and I are not angels, saints, or demigods. We are people. We get scared, hungry, sick, angry, unhappy, divorced, and we are mystified and threatened by life’s incongruities. We battle with our weight. We dread cancer. We fall out of love. We make mistakes and we damage other folks, unwittingly or not. We have nightmares and we suffer the effects of family dysfunction. We struggle with demons. We are dismayed and shaken as we notice our parents weakening, stumbling, and forgetting in old age. We drive by a cemetery in the afternoon and try to subdue the dark grip of mortality on our hearts. We bury our parents there, our brothers, sisters, and sometimes our children. Their open graves leave gaping holes in our hearts. Don’t we scream at God, dispute with God, and even condemn God at such moments of incredulity? So shouldn’t religion offer a valve for such inevitable apoplexies of the spirit?
We are usually doing the best we can in a world whose madness is broadcast and cyber-blasted into our heads twenty-four/seven and the last thing we need is an authoritarian lecture or a devotional booklet telling us that unless we act or think in this or that way, we are doomed, going to hell, or will generally suffer the disapproval of God Almighty. We get enough of that without even going to church.
Again, the text is not our homeland; life is.
Better you should stick to the measured human insight that a man’s or a woman’s “greatness” (and the assumed gospel-wisdom of a spiritual dignitary) are all measured against what’s going on around that person. And it is suckled by the naïveté and/or insecurity of those of us who cling to these champions. Believe in yourself before you surrender your faith to the anointed. Remember the devotional manual offers us answers, but we have the questions and these don’t always match up perfectly.
Meanwhile, Noah was a faithful tool in this drama, but he was not so great at all. The genuinely great ones argue with fate—especially when fate threatens human life.
God hones in on Noah and tells him “the end of all flesh is before me” and God is going to wipe out every form of life on the planet. Not a particular nation, tribe, city, or subdivision. Everybody is going down. Noah, build an ark.
What is Noah’s response to this astonishing report? Nothing. No protest, no debate. Basically, it’s “What are the measurements of the craft, what kind of wood should I use?” Noah just listens to a divine blueprint involving gopher wood, pitch, and the precise number of cubits. Oh, and there’s to be a single window. And a large side door. Get going, man. The rain is coming. And God also declares he is making “a covenant” with Noah—only his family and the saved wildlife will survive and that’s the deal.
The Bible tells us bluntly: “Thus Noah did.” Good man follows instructions, but this is not a candidate for induction into the Hall of Greatness. It clearly took Noah and his offspring a significant amount of time to construct the big boat. This was done out in the open sunlight, and it can be presumed that passers-by noticed all the busy work ongoing, heard the mallets and saws being used, not to mention the long procession of paired giraffes, elephants, apes, goats, cows, cheetahs, boa constrictors, possums, turkeys, alligators, geese, squirrels, peacocks, and warthogs making their way onto the platform.
Even the rabbinic commentary on this episode lambasts Noah for not reaching out to a single person, warning them to change their ways, repent, or at least seek higher ground! Nor are the more progressive biblical sages particularly impressed with Noah’s absolute, wordless compliance with God’s horrific intentions. Maybe the man just focused on “the covenant” God offered him and chose to be utterly selfish and thoroughly ordinary.
Not so with Moses, a flawed man like anybody else except when it came to looking out for others before saving his own skin. Atop Mt. Sinai, alone and literally burning in the light of God’s countenance, about to receive the Ten Commandments, Moses gets a real twist in the conversation with the Almighty: “Get thee down, for thy people which thou brought out of Egypt, have corrupted themselves.”
Moses listens as God excoriates the Hebrews below for ditching all their jewelry and gold and building “a molten calf,” which amounts to an abominable idol-god. They are praying to this golden calf and offering it sacrifices. I’ve seen it, Moses, and these people are nothing but a bunch of ungrateful, stiff-necked hacks! The Bible makes it quite clear that God is in a livid meltdown and he’s out to kill again.
“Now, therefore let me alone, that my wrath may wax hot against them, and that I may consume them. And I will make of thee a great nation.”
In other words: Don’t try to talk me out of this; I need to vent my spleen; I need to wipe these flunkies out. And then God throws in the same “covenant” deal to Moses that he offered Noah. Basically, God will start all over again with Moses as the progenitor. Although in this case, God is killing Hebrews exclusively, not dunking the whole Earth and the entirety of creation.
How does Moses react? First of all, he reacts. Completely disregarding the offer of his own lineal covenant, Moses responds: “Why are you so furious with your people that you freed from Egypt with such great authority and a mighty hand? What will the Egyptians say? That you freed them just to destroy them?” And then, with unabashed chutzpah, Moses actually challenges God: “Turn from your fierce wrath and repent of this evil against your people.”
Whenever you pray (and it doesn’t matter where you pray), aren’t you negotiating with God? It’s important to know that Moses—who had a pretty successful career as a rabbi and civil rights leader—regularly contended with God about what Moses thought was right. Even if what God was doling out appeared wrong. This is what you can believe: A relationship with God is not about simply acquiescing to heaven. It’s about arguing with fate and eternity and angels and even with God. Sometimes religion helps us to accomplish this, especially when it’s not skewed by the arrogance and self-importance of its leaders or the dogmas of its liturgies. All of these kinds of things are readily serviced by our understandable fears and insecurities, and sometimes preachers and cultists feed off them.
Religion should not take advantage of us. It should take us home. And the way home is discovered along the path of a vibrant and, yes, contentious spirituality. You can look this up in the Bible.
It turns out that Moses completely convinces God to spare the Hebrews. By lowering the temperature on top of that mountain, by exhibiting some spiritual muscle, Moses saved religion for that day.
