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Barron’s Response

On Bishop Robert Barron’s minstry’s YouTube channel — Word on Fire — he had a conversation with staff member Brandon Vogt after Barron’s interview with Alex O’Connor in which they promised to go a little deeper in the responses.

Vogt points out that Barron and O’Connor went back and forth for a long time on faith, and invited Barron to elucidate a little. Instead, he just gave the same analogy, changing it from getting to know his interlocutors to getting to one one’s spouse:

The analogy which I think is very illuminating there I often use is come to know a person. So you’re coming to know another human being. Of course, reason is involved all the time. I mean, reason understands all sorts of things, but there is a moment when that person, if you’re coming to real intimacy with that person, reveals something about herself that you could not in principle know no matter how many google searches and how much analysis and how much how clever you. There’s no way you’d get what’s in that person’s heart unless she chooses to reveal it, at which point you have to make a decision: do I believe it or not. Now is it credible what she’s saying, and you might say, “Yeah it is because it’s congruent with everything else I know about her.” At the same time, is it reducible to what I know about her? No, otherwise it wouldn’t be a revelation. So that’s why it’s a false dichotomy to say reason or faith. No, it’s reason that has reached a kind of limit, but reason has opened a door. Reason has poised you for the self-manifestation of another.

Well, that’s not just with God; that happens all the time. When two people are married and deeply in love, I’m sure you could point to those moments when [your wife] revealed something to you that you would never ever have known otherwise. You revealed something about yourself to her and then the two of you, because you’re in love with each other, I imagine said, “Yeah, I believe that.”

Now, can I reduce that to an argument? No, you never can. In a way it remains always mysterious to you yet your will, in that case, has commanded your intellect. That’s exactly what Thomas Aquinas says about faith. It’s a rare instance when the will commands the intellect. Normally, it moves the other way right? The intellect kind of leads the will. The intellect understands the good and then it leads the will, but in the case of faith, the will leads the intellect. It says, “No this is worthy of belief. This person who’s speaking to me is worthy of belief, and what the person is telling me is congruent with reason yet beyond it, and so I choose to believe.” That’s the relationship between faith and reason it seems to me so.

In the debate with O’Connor, Barron defined faith as “the response to a revealing God.” That makes very little sense in terms of how most people use faith. “You just have to have faith that God’s plan, which involves this horrendous suffering, will result in good,” someone might say. Let’s switch those out: “You just have to have [the response to a revealing God] that God’s plan, which involves this horrendous suffering, will result in good.” Clearly, this definition of “faith” is not the same as the original sentence’s sense of “faith.” This might work for “the Christian faith” — “the Christian response to a revealing God.” That works. That’s fine. You’d also have “the Muslim response to a revealing God,” and so on — but this “faith” just means “belief system” or even “religion.”

Furthermore, the faith that Barron gives in this example is not faith — it’s trust. It’s a trust that is based on experiential evidence. I believe my wife because she’s shown herself to be trustworthy. I wouldn’t make this same move (to use a favorite Barron term) with a stranger. The only time such a move (there it is again) is conceivable is if the revelation the stranger gives you is utterly trivial: “I have a dog.”

This faith/trust often moves into faith/trust in Jesus, that we’re to get to know Jesus and then we’ll have faith in him. Or trust in him. But that is utterly different from the situation with my wife. My wife is physically present with me. She’s not some hypothetical spiritual being out there but a real person that I can observe and talk to.

“You can get to know Jesus,” comes the rejoinder. But how? Directly? No.

I can get to know him through the Bible, but that’s problematic for obvious reasons that I’ve discussed numerous times here. It’s filled with contradictions. The image of God presented in the Old Testament is positively barbaric. It’s packed with immorality commanded from God — it’s just not a good example of a good supposedly written by an omnipotent being.

I can get to know him through what the church teaches about him, and here the Catholic church has a leg up on Protestants because they don’t restrain themselves to the Bible. The magisterium has equal footing — or nearly-equal footing. So if the Pope says it ex-cathedra, it’s an article of faith. Still, that’s just the same as relying on the Bible — it’s a product of humans.

Finally, I can get to know him in that way that Evangelicals and Mormons are especially fond of: that sense we have in our heart (it’s telling that religions insist on using that metaphor when we’ve known for ages that the seat of our intellect is not our hearts but our brains — it’s an attempt, I suspect, to move the whole experience away from the intellect) that God is involved in our lives. That warm feeling in their hearts that Christians attribute to the Holy Spirit. I don’t doubt the experience of that warm feeling, but to attribute it to anything outside one’s own mind is itself an act of faith, an act not based on evidence. “It’s the Holy Spirit!” the Bible proclaims and our pastors echo, and so Christians accept that explanation. Muslims have the same experiences but attribute that not to the Holy Spirit (that would be blaspheme, for God is one!) but to Allah. Hindus would make the same move. (It’s rubbing off on me.)

So all three ways we get to know God or Jesus or the Holy Spirit are questionable: they’re all open to interpretation; none are firmly grounded on rational reasoning based on evidence. That is what we skeptics mean when we say that faith is not reason, that it does not work in a similar way, and that it is separate from (sometimes anathema to) evidence.

Old Friend

M and I were the most unlikely of friends. In many ways, we were as opposite as anyone could imagine. He was raised by his grandparents in the country, and throughout his schooling, I’m sure he was considered “at-risk.” He smoked (cigarettes and more), drank, and was, by his own admission, a hellion. When, at a church youth function, the minister gathered all the boys together and asked who’d brought the flask, it was M. If anyone ever got in trouble for making a smartass remark in youth group, it was always M. He was rebellious and sometimes disrespectful, and academic concerns were of little importance in his thinking. He finished high school, but just barely.

Yet on a church youth trip to Disneyworld, he and I ended up spending an afternoon together. We’d been in separate groups during the morning, but the kids in my group had wanted to break up into small groups. “Mr. K said not to do that,” I protested. But they did it anyway, and the result was the Mr. K, the minister, followed through with his threat: they had to spend the rest of the day with him and his group of adults. I protested my innocence, and the kids in my group admitted that I’d tried to keep the group together, so I was pardoned. M and I ended up spending the rest of the day together. It was the first time we’d really spent any time together, and from that afternoon, we became close friends.

While we had little in common, what we did have in common was enough, I guess. We both loved hot food, for example, and we’d often get the spiciest salsa we could find with a bag of chips to see if we could handle it, washing it all down with Mountain Dew. We loved music, and we spent a lot of time with his grandparents playing bluegrass, Paw (as I came to call his grandfather just as he did) and I on guitar, M on banjo, and Maw singing. We both enjoyed shooting .22s at anything that would sit still long enough, and though we shot at a lot of squirrels and birds, we never hit them. Old cans and cola bottles filled with water were our favored targets. How many times can you hit that two-liter bottle before all the water drains out? The strategy is, of course, simple: start aiming at the top and work your way down. During the summer, if we needed money, we’d spend an afternoon helping this neighbor or that put up hay, and we’d earn enough for dinner, gas, and a couple of movies.

When he graduated high school the year before me, my parents asked him about his plans. “I’ll just get a job in construction, I guess.” They encouraged him to at least take a few courses at the local community college. “Then, you could start your own construction firm and you’d have the paperwork skills to run it,” my mom explained. “Nah,” he laughed, “school’s not for me.”

One July day that summer, Paw gave us a job: “There’s some raccoons that are just giving our garden hell,” he said. “I’d appreciate it if you boys’d take care of it.” We sat at the edge of a small clump of trees that summer evening, a two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew sitting between us, .22s by our sides waiting. Soon enough, three raccoons trundled into the garden. We waited until the were situated so that we could shoot away from any houses then let loose.

Maw and Paw’s farm was in a valley that seemed to echo with the sounds of neighbors’ activities, and as we fired away, we heard their nearest neighbors, who were sitting on their front porch, cheer us on: “Somebody’s gettin’ some coons!” they whooped.

Afterward, we put them in a trash bag and Maw took a commemorative picture.

Eight years after his picture, I came home for the summer after spending two years in Poland and having already committed to a third year. I went to track down M, heading to his grandparents’ farm. I didn’t know if M was still living with them or if he’d moved out. In point of fact, he’d been moved out.

“He’s locked up in the Washington County jail,” his grandmother explained. “Breaking and entering.”

I went to visit him that same afternoon. After the deputy filled out all the paperwork, I waited in the visiting room. It wasn’t a room with a row of chairs and little telephones like you see in the movies. This was no prison, just a county facility: there was a chair on the other side of the bars and the rest of the office with a single chair next to the bars on the visitors’ side. Glancing around, I saw a sign that visitors were not allowed to bring anything to inmates. I looked down at the two packs of cigarettes I’d bought him, wondering what I’d do with them, when I heard the deputy call his name: “You’ve got a visitor.” M’s face was a mixture of pleased shock and utter embarrassment. We talked for a while — I’m not sure because we never really talked about anything important. I had friends that I could sit around and talk about the existence of gods, the current political situation, the ironies of life, but with M, it was seldom more than friendly banter.

As the visit ended, I turned to the deputy. “Here’s some cigarettes. I guess you can give them to any officers who smoke since I can’t give them to my friend.” The deputy smiled: “Go ahead. It’s no big deal.”

When I returned a year later, he was incarcerated again, this time in prison; I was in Boston, starting what I thought would be a long slog to a Ph.D. in the philosophy of religion. We corresponded for about nine months, and then it just stopped just about the time I dropped out of grad school with the realization that while the philosophy of religion is an utterly fascinating topic, it has little practical value. I can’t remember who sent the last letter.

Shortly after K and I moved to America in 2005, I got word that M’s younger brother, who was in his mid-thirties like I was, had died from an aneurysm in his brain. Paw had died just a few years before that, and I hadn’t gone to the funeral because I was still living in Poland, but I was determined to go to C’s funeral.

The day before the funeral, though, a horrible storm swept through Ashville, covering the mountain I’d have to drive over with icy snow. K asked me not to take the chance; Nana begged me not to take the chance. I didn’t go.

A few years after that, Maw passed away. She’d moved in with her older daughter, and we’d moved to Greenville. For whatever reason, I didn’t go.

Some years ago, Nana got a contact number for M from his aunt, who was more like a sister — or was it the opposite, an sister so much older that she was more like an aunt? I can’t remember. I sent a text to that number, but I never got a response.

I find myself sometimes thinking about people from the past, wondering where they ended up. Social media has answered that question for so many of the people I grew up with. Others disappear. But it occurred to me that I might simply Google him.

I did, and I wish I didn’t: I find an article from the local paper where we grew up — “Bristol, Va. man arrested after agents find meth lab.” The link is to a Facebook post, so I click through, but the link to the article itself is broken. I go directly to the site and search. I find two hits.

“Please let this be a different man.”

It’s not.

A Bristol, Virginia man is charged after a tip given to police leads to the discovery of a methamphetamine lab.

Washington County, Virginia Sheriff Fred Newman said a search warrant was secured to examine a home located in the 22000 block of Benhams Road on Monday.

Deputies then arrested Michael Lee Braswell, 44, who is charged with possession with intent to manufacture 28 grams or more of methamphetamine, possess precursors to manufacture methamphetamine, allow a minor under the age of 15 to be present while manufacturing methamphetamine, and possession of meth.

Newman said Braswell is being held without bond in the Southwest Virginia Regional Jail in Abingdon. (Source 1 || Source 2)

The article is from Tuesday, September 20, 2016. I guess had I been in the area then, I could have visited him in the same jail in which I’d visited him almost twenty years earlier.

I head back to the Facebook source and read the comments:

A dear friend from my youth is being called a dopehead (I guess that’s true) and scum.

I guess I could have seen it coming when we were kids. I did see it coming. I was with him on two occasions when he bought pot. He didn’t admit. He didn’t show it to me. He certainly didn’t offer it to me, but there was no doubt. When you pull into a convenience store parking lot, and your friend gets out, goes over to another car, and sits in that car for a few minutes, coming back stuffing something in his pocket, it’s obvious. When you and your friend pull into a driveway, and a scruffy young man walks out to the car, makes small talk, then asks, “How much of that stuff did you want,” it’s obvious.

I clean up his photo in Lightroom to make him look a little less — what?

It doesn’t work. He still looks too much like a — what? A thug? An exhausted and frustrated man? I try again, trying to soften the hardness of his skin.

A little better, but there’s nothing I can do with those eyes, those forlorn eyes that seem completely lacking in surprise, completely resigned to his reality, completely fatalistic.

Every year, there’s a kid or two on the hall that I find myself wondering about, thinking that he or she might end up like this. There’s the same resignation about them, the same air of fatalism. Every year I try to help them, to show them that they do have some control over their fate, to show them that more is in their hands than they probably realize (though the cards are often stacked against them). To try to prevent them from being a photo someone looks at thirty years later, wonders whatever happens to them, then loads a search engine and beings looking…

God of the Gaps, Again

The pastor of K’s parish tweeted a link to “Has quantum physics smashed the Enlightenment deception?” by John Moran with the comment, “Reality is Rubbery.” I clicked through thinking, “Great — another ‘God of the Gaps’ article,” but hoping that I might be wrong. I wasn’t.

The article begins,

Forget Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker and the other high-profile God-denying “clever” boys. It is time for the broader implications of the 20th-century physics revolution, often described as quantum mechanics, to again be debated seriously and out in the “town square,” not just the backrooms of academia or in “deferring to the expert” interviews and documentaries.

The critical word there is “implications.” I’m not sure what Moran is suggesting here. At its heart, it’s simple: “Quantum mechanics is so weirdly different from the physics of our everyday reality that there must be implications for the nature of our everyday reality.” But must there be? There must be if we’ve already nurtured for millennia a belief in the supernatural, but all “quantum mechanics is weird” implies is “quantum mechanics is weird.”

Whatever these implications are in Moran’s mind, though, should be “debated seriously and out in the ‘town square,’ not just the backrooms of academia or in ‘deferring to the expert’ interviews and documentaries.” Part of the reason we “defer to experts” is because they are just that: they’ve forgotten more about their specialization than we laypeople even begin to understand. So when the people who actually work in quantum mechanics say, “No sorry — your implications that you want to discuss are based on misunderstandings of the quantum world,” as they do, we can just dismiss them. Who wants to defer to experts? After all, we’re seeing the benefits of not deferring to experts in the way covid is ravaging the conservative Christian anti-vaxers.

What does Moran say these implications are, though? To introduce them, he begins with a quote from a video by Leonard Susskind

It is hard to understand. Our neural wiring was not built for quantum mechanics. It was not built for higher dimensions. It was not built for thinking about curved space-time. It was built for classical physics. It was built for rocks and stones and all the ordinary objects and it was built for three-dimensional space. And that’s not quite good enough for us to be able to visualize and internalize the ideas of quantum mechanics and general relativity and so forth. …that can be extremely frustrating when trying to explain to the outside world. The outside world, by and large, has not had that experience of going through the rewiring process of converting their minds into something that can deal with five dimensions, 10 dimensions, or the quantum mechanical uncertainty principle or whatever it happens to be. And so the best we can do is to use analogies, metaphors.

Moran jumps on this:

Metaphor? So quantum physics has brought science full circle, back to the world of religion and the story telling methods of Jesus Christ and other religious figures.

Where quantum physics challenges everything, including those who arrogantly dismiss things like spirituality, is that it basically tells us two things:

  1. There might not be such a thing as an objective material object; and
  2. Consciousness has to be fundamental.

Now, let’s be clear. This new science does not prove the existence of God or anything else of that nature. But, it does shatter the arrogant certainty of those who think science is all you need and has killed off the spiritual. Through quantum physics we were again reminded of just how much we don’t know, especially about the mystery of the universe and the atomic world. In fact, we were not even close. This new quantum world was nothing like what scientists had envisaged prior to its discovery.

Why Moran gets so excited about Susskind using the word “metaphor” is confusing: does he not think that we use metaphor for anything other than religious ideas? After all, when we’re examining the quantum world, we’re looking at something so different from what we’re used to that we have to ground it in something we are used to — that’s what metaphor does. The use of metaphors does not equate scientists with theologians. This is an important distinction because scientists study the thing they study; theologians, unable to study gods directly, only study what other theologians have said. Scientists base their ideas on evidence; theologians’ try to do that, but their only evidence is ancient and anonymous manuscripts — again, studying what others have said about gods rather than studying the gods themselves. If, of course, we could study the gods themselves, there would be fewer atheists. Theologians would reply, “If we could study God, he wouldn’t be God,” but for one thing, that doesn’t necessarily follow. It’s based on the presupposition that gods must be so far beyond us that we can’t interact on their plane of existence. That very conveniently explains why there is no evidence for gods. For another, any god worth its salt could easily manifest itself regularly for study and confirmation of its existence. I do that with my own children daily; it’s too bad gods don’t do that with their children.

From there, Moran goes into a layman’s analysis of quantum theory brought about by this quote from Andrew Klavan’s article “Can We Believe?” subtitled “A personal reflection on why we shouldn’t abandon the faith that has nourished Western civilization.”

And is science still moving away from that Christian outlook, or has its trajectory begun to change? It may have once seemed reasonable to assume that the clockwork world uncovered by Isaac Newton would inexorably lead us to atheism, but those clockwork certainties have themselves dissolved as science advanced. Quantum physics has raised mind-boggling questions about the role of consciousness in the creation of reality. And the virtual impossibility of an accidental universe precisely fine-tuned to the maintenance of life has scientists scrambling for “reasonable” explanations.

Like Pinker, some try to explain these mysteries away. For example, they’ve concocted a wholly unprovable theory that we are in a multiverse. There are infinite universes, they say, and this one just happens to be the one that acts as if it were spoken into being by a gigantic invisible Jew! Others bruit about the idea that we live in a computer simulation—a tacit admission of faith, though it may be faith in a god who looks like the nerd you beat up in high school.

In any case, scientists used to accuse religious people of inventing a “God of the Gaps”—that is, using religion to explain away what science had not yet uncovered. But multiverses and simulations seem very much like a Science of the Gaps, jerry-rigged nothings designed to circumvent the simplest explanation for the reality we know.

The problem with Klavan’s thinking here is simple: he doesn’t realize that these conjectures are just that. No one is making dogmatic proclamations about multiverses or computer simulations. Why? Because there is no evidence or at least not enough evidence. Science is free to do what religion can never do: reject ideas it itself has created when evidence to the contrary appears. Indeed that is what science is all about.

It might seem ironic, though, that Klavan himself brings up the “God of the Gaps” fallacy in this article that amounts, in short, to the latest installment in the “God of the Gaps” theory since his whole idea here is nothing more than that. “Quantum theory is spooky and weird, and it’s outside our understanding now: therefore, God.” But irony is when the unexpected happens, and I’ve come to expect “God of the Gaps” theorizing in any apologetic piece, so far from being ironic, it is instead expected.

It is the Enlightenment Narrative that creates this worship of reason, not reason itself. In fact, most of the scientific arguments against the existence of God are circular and self-proving. They pit advanced scientific thinkers against simple, literalist religious believers. They dismiss error and mischief committed in the name of science—the Holocaust, atom bombs, climate change—but amberize error and mischief committed in the name of faith—“the Crusades, the Inquisition, witch hunts, the European wars of religion,” as Pinker has it.

By assuming that the spiritual realm is a fantasy, they irrationally dismiss our experience of it. Our brains perceive the smell of coffee, yet no one argues that coffee isn’t real. But when the same brain perceives the immaterial—morality, the self, or God—it is presumed to be spinning fantasies. Coming from those who worship reason, this is lousy reasoning.

There are just so many issues with this line of thinking here that I don’t even know where to start: with the false equivocation, with the question-begging, or with the general lack of experience this short passage exhibits.

To begin with, equating “the Holocaust, atom bombs, [and] climate change” is a curious mix. Certainly, some Nazis promoted pseudo-scientific reasoning for their antisemitism, but a far amount of it was good old-fashioned Christian antisemitism: the Jews reject the Christ, and so that is at the heart of their malevolence. The atom bomb is an unquestionably evil application of science so I’ll give him that. Climate change, though? I’m not even sure what he’s suggesting here. Is he saying that climate change was brought about by science? Well, it certainly was enabled by it, but our voracious appetites for convenience that science facilitated seem more responsible for climate change than the science itself. On the other hand, is he suggesting that climate change is a hoax that science is perpetuating on the world? That would seem more in line with the article’s source, City Journal, which is an unabashedly right/nearly-hard-right publication.

Klavan then equates, for all intents and purposes, the smell of coffee with God. “Our brains perceive the smell of coffee, yet no one argues that coffee isn’t real,” he writes, and I just scratch my head on that one. When my brain perceives the smell of coffee, I assume that there is coffee somewhere around because in my own experience, that odor has always been associated with coffee. However, if it’s terribly important to me to prove that there’s coffee, I can search for it. I can find evidence that the smell I’m encountering is indeed coming from coffee. It’s worth noting, however, that just because my brain perceives the smell of coffee there is coffee somewhere. I want to scream at Klavan, “Good grief, man, have you never encountered Scratch-And-Sniff stickers?!” We can fool our brain into thinking there’s coffee when in fact it’s not there. That’s why we investigate and examine and confirm. The smell of coffee is a bad example, though: we do this all the time when we think we smell something burning.

Klavan then equates smelling coffee with perceiving “the immaterial” such as “morality, the self, of God” in a perfect example of question-begging. No one suggests that people who say they are perceiving “the immaterial” are not having some sort of cognitive experience. Instead, skeptics are simply pointing out that what we think might be an experience of God isn’t necessarily that. We can fool people into thinking they smell coffee; atheists simply suggest that the mind is fooling itself into thinking it’s experiencing God.

It’s important to point out here that attaching the label “God” to any such experience depends on prior exposure to the idea that a god exists. If no one believed in a god, would we deduce it exists simply from these experiences? Scientifically illiterate people might; scientifically literate people probably wouldn’t. So this is a strange kind of cultural question-begging: the idea of a god was already in place; these experiences simply provide another hook on which to hang it.

Klavan concludes his article thusly:

Pinker credits Kant with naming the Enlightenment Age, but ironically, it is Kant who provided a plausible foundation for the faith that he believed was the only guarantor of morality. His Critique of Pure Reason proposed an update of Plato’s form theory, suggesting that the phenomenal world we see and understand is but the emanation of a noumenal world of things-as-they-are, an immaterial plane we cannot fully know.

In this scenario, we can think of all material being as a sort of language that imperfectly expresses an idea. Every aspect of language is physical: the brain sparks, the tongue speaks, the air is stirred, the ear hears. But the idea expressed by that language has no physical existence whatsoever. It simply is. And whether the idea is “two plus two equal four” or “I love you” or “slavery is wrong,” it is true or false, regardless of whether we perceive the truth or falsehood of it.

This, as I see it, is the very essence of Christianity. It is the religion of the Word. For Christians, the model, of course, is Jesus, the perfect Word that is the thing itself. But each of us is made in that image, continually expressing in flesh some aspect of the maker’s mind. This is why Jesus speaks in parables—not just to communicate their meaning but also to assert the validity of their mechanism. In the act of understanding a parable, we are forced to acknowledge that physical interactions—the welcoming home of a prodigal son, say—speak to us about immaterial things like love and forgiveness.

To acknowledge that our lives are parables for spiritual truths may entail a belief in the extraordinary, but it is how we all live, whether we confess that belief or not. We all know that the words “two plus two” express the human version of a truth both immaterial and universal. We likewise know that we are not just flesh-bags of chemicals but that our bodies imperfectly express the idea of ourselves. We know that whether we strangle a child or give a beggar bread, we take physical actions that convey moral meaning. We know that this morality does not change when we don’t perceive it. In ancient civilizations, where everyone, including slaves, considered slavery moral, it was immoral still. They simply hadn’t discovered that truth yet, just as they hadn’t figured out how to make an automobile, though all the materials and principles were there.

To begin with, the suggestion that an idea doesn’t have a physical correspondence only works with abstract things like morality and love. Two plus two equal four is simple: take two items; set two more beside them; count them. There. I don’t even know what Klavan is suggesting using that idea. “I love you” is harder to prove physically: we can’t scan brains and say, “Look — see that? That’s love.” Yet. All evidence points to the fact that our consciousness is bound in our brain, so it’s not unreasonable to think that we will indeed be able to do something similar in the future. It’s more “God of the Gaps” in action. “Slavery is wrong” is tricky because morality is tricky. Yet morality is very fluid at the same time. The Bible itself endorses slavery, and nowhere in scripture does Jesus or anyone else condemn the owning of other people. Indeed, it seems to suggest the opposite: in 1 Peter, we see an appalling command: “Slaves, in reverent fear of God submit yourselves to your masters, not only to those who are good and considerate, but also to those who are harsh” (1 Peter 2.18). The book of Philemon is almost as bad:

I am sending [Onesimus, your slave]—who is my very heart—back to you. I would have liked to keep him with me so that he could take your place in helping me while I am in chains for the gospel. But I did not want to do anything without your consent, so that any favor you do would not seem forced but would be voluntary. Perhaps the reason he was separated from you for a little while was that you might have him back forever—no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a dear brother. He is very dear to me but even dearer to you, both as a fellow man and as a brother in the Lord. (Philemon 12-16)

Here Paul could have said, “Slavery is wrong.” Here he could have said, “I am not sending him back because I have no authority to do so. He is a free human being with his own will.” But he sends him back and suggests that, since Onsemus is a Christian too, perhaps Philemon should treat him a little better.

Many proponents of slavery used the Bible to endorse the position so maybe this wasn’t the best moral to use in trying to suggest that morality implies a god.

From there, though, Klavan makes a hard, awkward turn to Christianity. He’s essentially saying, “Words often don’t have physical referents in the real world, and Christianity calls Jesus ‘the Word,’ so it’s likely true.” It’s a hard sell, completely out of the blue, completely illogical, for anyone other than a Christian who already accepts all this. Of course, given the fact that it’s a conservative source, Klavan is justified in assuming that most of the readers already accept these presuppositions, but the ideas themselves make very little sense without those presuppositions, which we skeptics reject. This, then, is still another example of question-begging.

The idea that Jesus spoke in parables in order to make the connection between language and ideas that have no physical referent is just speculation like scientists’ speculations about multiverses, so I’m not even going to deal with it.

Finally, there’s this: “In ancient civilizations, where everyone, including slaves, considered slavery moral, it was immoral still. They simply hadn’t discovered that truth yet, just as they hadn’t figured out how to make an automobile, though all the materials and principles were there.” Funny: if there was a god that felt that slavery is immoral and he wrote a book, it’s ironic that he didn’t say as much in that book but left it for us to discover while untold millions suffer in slavery.

Moments

Papa’s existence when the meds that keep him calm and sedated changes from moment to moment: There are lucid moments when he is just like the Papa we all know and love, there are moments enveloped in hallucinations, and there are moments that seem to fall somewhere in between.

This is a lucid moment.

He occasionally smiles while hallucinating, and it’s such a mischievous little smile that I want to catch a photo of it. Tonight, he smiled that smile, a little kid’s smile when he’s gotten away with something and yet is still just nervous enough to realize that he might not have in fact gotten away with it. An “I know you know I did it, but please don’t tell on me” smile. I didn’t have a camera ready, though, so I went downstairs and got our good Nikon. I was telling Papa about that smile and how much I wanted to get a picture of that smile, so he smiled for me. It’s not the smile I’d initially wanted, but it was a smile of intent, a smile of purpose, a smile to fulfill a request. A smile that said, “I know I’m having a lot of problems following instructions when you ask me to open my mouth or to roll over. Right now, though, I can do exactly what you asked me to even if I’m not sure why you want me to. I trust you and will do it because I trust you.”

Those lucid moments are rare, and they are increasingly rare with each passing day. The hospice nurses all say that they have never seen anyone with Parkinson’s progress this quickly. Every day is literally a new normal. Yesterday it became clear that he could no longer eat solid food because he didn’t chew it. He kept it in his mouth sometimes, partially chewed it others, and every now and then chewed and swallowed, each motion of his jaw a supreme effort. Today we gave him only pureed food, and in the morning he did a good job with it, but in the evening, it was difficult to get him to open his mouth to eat. He no longer can draw liquid through a straw, and when he does get liquid in his mouth, he almost chokes on it, so we bought thickener and we spoon-feed him his thickened water to keep him hydrated. Today we also stopped giving him pills to swallow: they’re all ground up own, sprinkled on spoons of yogurt. What tomorrow will bring is a complete mystery.

This is a hallucination.

He pulls treads out of thin air. He talks to people who over his bed, who sneak behind his bed and hide, who stand on either side of his bed. Strangers come to visit him as well as friends. Nana comes often. “Hey, babe! Don’t you think it’s about time we get out of here?”

This is the picture I hesitate to put on here, but this is the reality he’s suffering now. This is the reality that leaves us shaking our heads wondering how much one poor man has to suffer. This is the reality that creates new habits: I walked out of the room today just as he started saying something. I paused for a moment, then realized he was talking to a hallucination. I didn’t respond. I just continued out.

These are the moments when he seems most vulnerable, too. The hallucinations don’t frighten him: he once said he saw a hangman standing by his bed with a noose, but other than that, the people who come to visit him seem relatively harmless. He’s restless, though: he’s always been a mannerly man, a gentleman, a problem solver, so he wants to respond to all the things he sees around him, deal with all the issues around him (the threads that hang endlessly over his bed, for instance). In the past (i.e., earlier this week), when he started talking to these hallucinations or pulling at the threads, we did as the nurses advised: we played along and asked the person he was talking to to leave or took that threads ourselves. “Don’t worry,” we’d then reassure him. “We asked him to leave. Did you hear? Did you see him leave? He just walked out the door.” Now, he doesn’t engage with us when we say those things. That change has come in the last 36 hours.

This is a mystery.

Not hallucinating, not engaging with us — just there. Remembering? We don’t know. This might disappear tomorrow because it only appeared a few days ago. The way things change, “normal” is a fluid concept that can change within one day.

This is the only thing that seems to help these days.

This is what I feel guilty about neglecting with Nana: I didn’t realize how little time we had left with her once she came back from rehab. I didn’t realize how quickly she could go. I didn’t take the time simply to sit with her and to talk to her as much as I could have or should have. And now, so much that we say to Papa just goes unacknowledged. Perhaps because he didn’t hear. Perhaps because he didn’t understand. Perhaps because he was busy talking to someone else. But there’s one thing he understands.

The Inevitable Move

A few days ago, Fr. Mike, on day 50 of his Bible in a Year podcast read Exodus 37 and 38 as well as Leviticus 26. The passages in Exodus all had to do with sacrificial offerings, but the chapter from Leviticus was, in many ways, the most troubling passage in the whole Bible so far. It is, in short, a list of the punishments the god of Old Testament will mete out on Israel if they abandon the proper worship of him, but it presents such a conditional love, which bears all the hallmarks of an abusive relationship that I don’t see how someone can read these chapters and not absolutely cringe.

It begins with a promise of what will happen if they do remain faithful:

“If you walk in my statutes and observe my commandments and do them, then I will give you your rains in their season, and the land shall yield its increase, and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit. And your threshing shall last to the time of vintage, and the vintage shall last to the time for sowing; and you shall eat your bread to the full, and dwell in your land securely. And I will give peace in the land, and you shall lie down, and none shall make you afraid; and I will remove evil beasts from the land, and the sword shall not go through your land. And you shall chase your enemies, and they shall fall before you by the sword. (Leviticus 26.3-7)

One might question whether this god would be upset to discover that people were worshiping him because they want all the benefits, but this supposedly omniscient being should know that and perhaps work that into the passage. “You must honestly love me and worship me.” Something like that. Still, that’s a trivial point compared to what happens later in the chapter.

By verse 14 it turns quite troubling:

“But if you will not hearken to me, and will not do all these commandments, if you spurn my statutes, and if your soul abhors my ordinances, so that you will not do all my commandments, but break my covenant, I will do this to you: I will appoint over you sudden terror, consumption and fever that waste the eyes and cause life to pine away. (Leviticus 26.14-16)

Fr. Mike, in his commentary, explains, “There are consequences for actions. […] He hands them over because he loves them.” If this doesn’t call Israel back to their god, Fr. Mike explains, then their god will let more stuff happen to them until they do turn back to him. “The whole point of this is not punishment,” Fr. Mike assures us. “The whole point of this is rescue.” This is the first problematic idea, and it hits at one of the biggest issues I’ve had with Christianity for some time now. “Rescue” suggests the following:

  • Force A
  • affects entity X
  • and entity Y somehow stops force A by
    • getting rid of force A,
    • removing entity X from the effects of force A, or
    • mitigating the effects of force A.

Within all of this is the idea that force A is separate from entity X doing the rescuing. If I’m beating my son and then stop beating him, I’m not rescuing him. If I’m holding my daughter’s head underwater and then stop holding her head underwater, I’m not rescuing her. It’s only a rescue if someone or something else is doing it, and I somehow stop it.

The problem with Christianity is simple: this god is the one doing the beating; this god is the one holding heads underwater. How so? Simple: Christians frame all this “rescue” as a rescue from the consequences of sin. But the god of Christianity defined sin. He designed the consequences of sin (and everything else) by creating the world as he did. He’s ultimately the victimizer and the savior. That’s not rescuing. That’s a sick relationship.

Putting that aside, though, it’s disturbing to look at the consequences listed in Leviticus, through verse 45:

  • I will bring more plagues upon you, sevenfold as many as your sins.
    This is not a consequence. This is God responding to one’s actions, and with a sort of severity that might even be rare in the mafia.
  • I will let loose the wild beasts among you, which shall rob you of your children, and destroy your cattle, and make you few in number, so that your ways shall become desolate.
    Who is really paying the price if the children are getting devoured by wild beasts? And what kind of relationship does this inspire? We’re just cowering in fear of what this being might do to us.
  • I will walk contrary to you in fury, and chastise you myself sevenfold for your sins. You shall eat the flesh of your sons, and you shall eat the flesh of your daughters.
    What!? God here is saying he will, in fury, bring such desolation that the Israelites will turn to cannibalism. Will he be like with Pharaoh in Egypt? Remember: several times Pharaoh agreed to let the Israelites go, but according to Exodus, “God hardened his heart” so that he would change his mind. Is God going to harden the hearts of the Israelites to make them turn to cannibalism, or will things just get so bad that they won’t feel they have any choice? (And when would a parent ever really feel that way?)
  • And I will devastate the land, so that your enemies who settle in it shall be astonished at it.
    The implication earlier is that Israel’s enemies will do all this destroying, but here it seems to indicate that God doing it. After all, the enemies come and are astonished, presumably at the brutality which has swept through the land.
  • And as for those of you that are left, I will send faintness into their hearts in the lands of their enemies; the sound of a driven leaf shall put them to flight, and they shall flee as one flees from the sword, and they shall fall when none pursues.
    Again, God does this, not the enemies. He seems to be suggesting that he’ll make them such cowards that they’ll be eradicated.

How does Fr. Mike explain all this? He makes the move I’ve been waiting for him to make the whole time, really the only move he can make: The fact that it doesn’t seem right is our fault. “We just need to trust God and understand that there is an answer to all these questions,” he argues:

This is the discipline of a father, and this is so important to us. You know, when we approach scripture, and we don’t trust God, we see these things and go, “Wow, that’s crazy. I’m done with this. Day 50, that’s it. I’m out.” But when we approach the word of God, and we have that spirit of trust where it’s like, “Okay, if I don’t understand this, it must be me that doesn’t understand this.”

If I begin to be suspicious of God, and I say, “Wait, let me pause. God is a good dad. And while I don’t understand what he’s doing here or not doing there, I have to look at him, look at life, look at myself through the lens of ‘Okay, God is a good dad.’ So why would a good Dad allow these punishments to come upon those who are disobedient?” Well, because, like any good dad, like any good parent, I want more for you than just your comfort. I want more for you than for you to just go about your life and do whatever it is you want to do. I want the best for you.

So this is God, who is the good dad. And he says, “I want the absolute best for my children, so if they refuse to walk in my ways and walk contrary to me, here’s the consequences. Because I want to bring them back to my heart.”

But how do we know that this god is a “good dad,” as Fr. Mike suggests? It hits at the very heart of the question of theism: how do we know anything about this supposed being? All Christians claim to know about him comes from three sources:

  1. Personal experiences with what we call the divine.
  2. What the church teaches about this being (and here I have in mind the Catholic idea that the Bible and the church are equal authorities).
  3. What the Bible says about this thing we call the divine.

Personal experiences are just that: personal. If you have a warm feeling in your heart, that’s all you know. To attribute it to the Holy Spirit or anything else is interpretation and therefore highly subjective. In this sense, the believer is putting faith in herself and her interpretation of her inner experience. The other two sources, though, inform that faith.

What the church says about its god is just what other people say about, and so ultimately the believer is putting her faith in these other people.

The Bible is just a book. Nothing more, nothing less. If believers purport it to come from the hand of their god, there should be evidence of some sort in the book itself. The safest way to approach it, then, is to look at the Bible and ask, “What sort of god is presented in its pages?” From this reading in Leviticus, it seems a stretch to say that this being is in any sense “good.” He’s vindictive, envious, and petty at best and ghastly, wretched, and unspeakably cruel at worst.

So where does Fr. Mike get this “good dad” stuff? Simple: it’s his working preconception. He’s making assumptions about the Bible before he reads the Bible, and he’s suggesting believers do the same. And to be fair, what else are they going to do? If they’re committed to his idea that their god is good, they have to approach it with that assumption, and no one really wants to worship an evil god. In addition, if they were raised in the church, they were taught that their god is a good and loving god long before they can read the Bible for themselves and see all these terrors.

It is here that the true horror of the situation enters, for it is here that believers being to look like spouses in an abusive relationship. Take what Fr. Mike said about his god and reframe it: imagine that Fr. Mike is an abused wife and his god is the husband:

If I begin to be suspicious of my husband, and I say, “Wait, let me pause. My husband is a good husband. And while I don’t understand what he’s doing here [with all the unspeakable abuse mentioned earlier] or not doing there, I have to look at him, look at life, look at myself through the lens of ‘Okay, my husband is a good a good husband.’ So why would a good husband allow these punishments me? It must be because I am disobedient.” Well, because, like any good husband, he wants more for me than just my comfort. He wants more for me than for me to just go about my life and do whatever it is I want to do. He wants the best for me.

That is classic victim-blaming. Worse: it’s victim self-blame. “My husband beats me because I deserve it. It’s for a greater good, and if I don’t understand that, it’s just because I’m not as smart as he is.”

If any of our friends spoke this way, we would encourage her to go to a shelter immediately with her children. But Christians simply stay in this relationship. They believe they deserve it because of Original Sin and their own short-comings. How many times have I heard Christians talk about how wretched they are? “Amazing grace, that saved a wretch like me.”

Most Christians would respond, I think, by saying, “That’s the Old Covenant. Look at how beautiful the New Covenant is! That’s where I draw my faith. Jesus saved us from all of that!” Yet the response to this is so simple that even a child can make it — and has. “But that’s the same god!” These are not different entities. The Christian doctrine of the trinity paints them into a corner, and they fail to see that it’s happened. In doing so, it makes the relationship even more toxic.

I, for one, got out of that relationship, and I feel so much better for it.

Day 47: Quartets and Cars

Quartets

This afternoon, while cleaning up the kitchen, putting away groceries, and just generally puttering around the house, I discovered a BBC culture podcast that talks about, among other things, T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, a cycle of four poems that have, from the very first time I encountered them during my freshman year in college, utterly enthralled me. Naturally, I listened to it; naturally, halfway through, I was rooting around in the bookcase where we store such books for my thin volume of the poems.

Some passages of those poems seem pulled from the very fabric of existence itself, so fully do they capture the experience of being a finite human. In “Burnt Norton,” the first of the poems, Eliot writes of the frailty of the one thing that links us humans one to another: language.

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.

I read those lines in college at a time when I was growing very distrustful of language having been in a relationship that I ended largely because I felt like the young lady was lying incessantly, for no reason whatsoever. Was it compulsive lying? Was it even always conscious lying? Was it even lying? I could never figure that out, but I learned I couldn’t trust her, and when that happens, there’s only one thing to do.

The second poem in the cycle, “East Coker,” returns to this motif:

So here I am, […]
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion.

“Is he reading my mind?” I thought. The poem seemed to be a summary of my growing interest in the idea of language itself. Such a strange thing — it’s the only thing we have that connects us to other people, yet it’s such a fragile connection, so easily manipulated and bent.

The Buried Car

This evening, as I was reading the poems again after dinner, the Boy brought me a little car he’d found buried in the backyard.

“I found it buried in Mommy’s flowers,” he explained.

“It was my car,” I said, wondering if he would remember that it had been among the mass of cars that Nana had saved from my childhood just to give to a grandchild.

“Really?!” He couldn’t believe it. “Why did you bury it out there?”

It’s so rare that we can see someone’s entire faulty thinking process from just one sentence, the entire line of thought backing up neatly, step by step, until the whole story is clear, and it was so different from reality. That was such a moment. I knew I could utterly perplex him with one short sentence.

“I didn’t bury it out there; you did.”

I could almost hear the gears clicking. He wrinkled his brow, cast his eyes upward, and his breathing quickened. “I did?”

Back to Eliot — the very next lines:

And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

I had not really lost the car; he had not really gained it. He discovered something that he himself had owned, had played with, had possibly even treasured.

“Yes, you must have been playing with it when Mommy was working out in the flowers and you accidentally left it there. Or maybe you even buried it on purpose, and you just don’t remember.” More thinking.

“I did?”

“Yes.” And I could even imagine how it happened: E, with more than a handful of cars, following K around as she planted flowers or pulled weeds, never willing to let her get very far away from her, picking up everything to follow closely behind.

Nana told me I was the same way. Probably, we all are.

“You must have been playing with it when Mommy was working in the flowers.”

He shrugged, not convinced, still wondering, I think, how I knew it was mine. “Was it one of your favorites?”

True, I think I can remember when I got that car, which means an event likely forty years ago. When we went to our church’s annual fall retreat, we had two-hour church services every day. To keep me quiet when I was a child, Nana and Papa gave me a new Matchbox car every day at the start of the service. I believe that’s where this one comes from. But it could simply be that I just remember playing with that old car.

Are there any of my old toys I wouldn’t recognize? I rather doubt it in a way. Toys are so precious to children — at least they were to me and to my own children — that they form an integral part of our identities. Like the music we listen to as adolescents, the toys we love as children reflect our interest and how we see ourselves.

I didn’t tell him all that, though. Too much back story, and so much of it so very different from the reality the Boy experiences.

“Two-hour church every day?! Why would you do that?” I can hear him ask. Why, indeed.

Back to the Quartets, this time, from “Little Gidding”:

There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference
Which resembles the others as death resembles life,
Being between two lives—unflowering, between
The live and the dead nettle. This is the use of memory:
For liberation—not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past.

It’s attachment to things that makes us remember those toys, I guess, and the sense that they are part of us — thus, attachment to self.

Sifting Through the Layers

I spent the better part of today going through pictures, digital and print, looking for images of Nana to use during Saturday’s memorial. I scanned about 30 images and found about 60 others in our digital collection, and I’m only through 2013. It was much like looking at old pictures of our children: we always feel like our children have always looked like they do today even though we know they haven’t. The changes are so gradual that it takes an image from the somewhat-distant past to jar us into understanding — realizing — anew that our children are on an ever sliding spectrum, that they in fact don’t look like this for very long at all.

Nana in first grade

So it was with Nana. I got used to what she looked like now and forgot all about the Nana of my youth, when she was simply “Mom.” And then I began going through pictures and rediscovering images of Nana before I even existed, images of Nana when she was my age, images of Nana when she was the Boy’s age.

I saw Nanas I never knew. I saw Nana as a young lady, about to go out for a night on the town, looking every bit like someone off the Mad Men series.

Nana in 1963

I saw Nana as a senior in high school, just a little older than most of my students, and wondered what she was like in class.

The graduate

I saw Nana when she was a mother but younger than I am now, with a version of me that’s probably about E’s age. It’s as hard to imagine Nana climbing up into a barn as it is to imagine her bedridden and frustrated.

In the loft of her brother’s barn

And now that she’s passed, all these versions live on in various people’s memories. “That was about the time I met your mother,” Papa explained about the Mad Men photo. Her best friend since forever likely remembers first-grade Nana as they went to school together from kindergarten through graduation.

The rest of the day I spent working on Nana’s obituary. Ever the English teacher, I examined examples before starting to write hers and I noticed I finally have an answer to students’ common question when learning the difference between active and passive voice: “Mr. Scott, when do we use passive voice?”

“In obituaries, children, almost exclusively.”

On Monday, May 27, Naomi Ruth Williams Scott, wife, mother, sister, and grandmother, passed away peacefully at home surrounded by her family after a six-month struggle. Naomi will be lovingly remembered by her husband of nearly 55 years, Melvin; her son, Gary; her daughter-in-law, Kinga; her grandchildren, Lena and Emil; and sisters-in-law Laverne Williams, Diane Mathis, Yvonne Van Seeters, and Mary Barnes, as well as many nieces and nephews, and countless friends. She was preceded in death by her father, Lewis Williams; her mother, Ruby Gordon Williams; and her two brothers, Nelson and Wallace Williams.

A native of Indian Land, South Carolina, Naomi graduated from Indian Land High School and married Melvin Scott in 1964. They lived for several years in the Charlotte/Rock Hill area relocating to the southwest Virginia/northeast Tennessee area, where they lived for over thirty years.

Versatile and skilled, Naomi worked various jobs through her life, including jobs in a flower shop, a printing and finishing shop, a travel agency, later in life, her own business. She would have argued, however, that her most important job by far, her only truly important job, was being a mother. She was a dedicated and loving mother who provided all who knew her a clear example of what it really means to be a mother.

Naomi was a very active church member in all the congregations she attended. She served as a deaconess in the Worldwide Church of God, where she also sang in the choir and provided quiet leadership through example for members. A firm believer in Jesus, she never wavered in her faith and leaned heavily on His love and promises.

The memorial service for Naomi will be this Saturday, June 1 at 3 PM at Woodruff Road Christian Church, 20 Bell Road, Greenville, SC. Following the service, there be time for fellowship and visitation with light refreshments to give everyone an opportunity to share with each other their memories of Naomi.

As Naomi felt special tenderness to all children but especially her son and grandchildren, the family requests instead of flowers memorial donations to the Shriners Hospital for Children and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Since her faith was so important to her and because the church has shown so much support in this time of need, the family would be honored with donations in Naomi’s memory to Woodruff Road Christian Church.

But bottom line, I look at these pictures, especially the most recent, of Nana and Papa, and it hits me again and again:

Probably my favorite picture of my parents

I simply can’t believe she’s gone. I imagine we’ll all be experiencing that for many months.

Strands

I swore I hated that old cat. Looking back on it, I really don’t know what she did to prompt such a response, but I think I was just being ornery. Trying out the grumpy old man act to see how it fit me. It didn’t fit me too well, because I ended up being the one who did most of Bida’s grooming and I came to enjoy it in a strange way.

It was messy: as she aged, she didn’t particularly put too much stock in the importance of hygiene, and that led to obvious problems. I was the one who bathed her. It was irritating: getting the tangles out of her long fur led to anger, frustrating, growling, scratching.

I don’t know why I started doing it if I hated that old cat. I don’t know why I would let her nestle into my neck as I held her, freshly dried but still shivering. She was terrified, angry, and cold; I held her trembling little body, petted her, and insisted the next day that I hated her.

DSC_8763
November 1, 2009

“Maybe she got run over!” L worried one summer when we returned from Poland and Bida had stayed gone for three weeks past our return.

“We wouldn’t be so lucky,” I snorted and thought I was only slightly joking.


At times, it seems that an impossible confluence of accidents comes together in an impossibly ironic way making it impossible not to think that perhaps there isn’t someone pulling the strings behind it all, weaving something terrible yet beautiful out of all the strands of our life.

I spent the summer helping D, my friend and mentor, the grandfather of L’s closest friend and the gentleman who helped me for several weeks in 2016 to renovate our kitchen. We were working on an addition to the house, an extension of the master suite and additional closet space, and D had decided he was going to pull all the insulation out as well. It was going to be new, from wall to wall, from floor to ceiling. Remembering I’d mentioned that I wanted to add some more insulation to our attic, he suggested we pack the still-good insulation into construction waste bags so I could truck it home. Those bags still sit in our basement, almost six months after D gave them to us. Bida discovered how soft and warm they are, and she began leaping on them (they sit about three feet tall, probably eighteen inches in diameter) and sleeping the day away there. That’s the first strand.

Nana has been in rehab for a couple of weeks after a hospital stay, and she’s been having a hard time of it. We visit her daily, encouraging her and doing our best to make her smile. But having someone so close to me so debilitated sparked a new resolution about my own health. Sure, I walk the dog every night, and I ride my bike a fair amount (though “fair” is fairly relative), so the other night, I went out to a sporting goods store and bought some running shoes. I’ve run every night since then. Except tonight. That’s the second strand.

Returning to D, one of the things I admired most about him was his determination to accomplish goals he’d set out for himself. When he was diagnosed with cancer about sixteen months ago, he fought it with everything he had, and he fought to keep his promise to his wife about a new bedroom. The man worked with a small backpack strapped on in the middle of a humid, South Carolina July so that he didn’t have to stop working while receiving his chemotherapy. Yet cancer doesn’t look at someone’s bravery and tenacity. It just attacks, and D passed away this Sunday. K and I managed to see him Saturday morning; his funeral is tomorrow. That’s the third strand.

DSC_5670
May 21, 2009

D’s grandson, E, is the Girl’s oldest and closest friend. They went to Montessori together almost ten years ago, and since they liked each other so much, their joy together drew our two families together. That’s how we know D to begin with. E, like the Girl, is fond of cats. His cat died of over the summer. His mother texted us about it to prepare L for when she saw E at D’s house. (The Boy and the Girl often went to D’s house to help.) “He’s not quite himself,” she explained. That’s the fourth strand.

I’d just been writing and thinking about the fact that Bida is skin and bones, knocking on death’s cliche door, wondering without saying it about whether we might need to have her put down in the near future. That’s the fifth strand.

I’ve been thinking and writing about death and health and age and ignoring pain. That’s the sixth strand.


Tonight, when we came home from visiting Nana and sharing a meal afterward with Papa, K went downstairs to check on Bida. After a few minutes, I heard a panicked voice.

“G, I need your help.” I’d been drawing the Boy’s bathwater, so I turned it off and headed downstairs as K added, “Hurry. It’s an emergency.” As I walked into the basement, she explained: “Bida fell off the insulation bag where she was sleeping. I don’t know if she’s alive. She looks dead.” I pulled back the insulation bag and there was Bida, pinned against some shelving, lying upside down, not moving. I reached down and slid her onto the ground as gently as I could.

“I think she’s dead,” I said. But Bida took a deep, shuddering breath, and K’s sadness overwhelmed her.

I took Bida to the couch in the basement and lay her on it while K went upstairs and got the kids. L was the first one down, tears streaming. E made it down shortly after that with K. And thus began our long vigil, sitting with our poor cat as she slowly shuddered and gasped away after falling from insulation given to us by a hero who himself passed away only days ago.

We sat and talked about Bida, all the silly things she’d done, all the times she’d irritated us. She’d brought chipmunks into the house when she was young and energetic and had a magnetic collar that allowed her to let herself in and out on her own accord. We talked about what an honor it was that a rescue cat, who was initially terrified of us, decided we were a good enough match and stuck with us for over a decade. We talked sadly about the time Bida discovered a rabbit burrow in the grass and cleared it out of all the young rabbits in a matter of minutes. We remembered how she used to torture birds she’d caught but not killed, toying with them in the backyard.

We laughed a little; we brought the other pets down, one by one, to say goodbye; we talked about how the remaining two pets would have to find a new dynamic without the old gray lady there to rule them all; we sat in silence a little; we petted her a lot.

Yet life continues and makes its continual demands on us, and one by one, the others left. K had work the next day — she had to get some sleep. E was exhausted — he had to get some sleep. L stayed with me the longest, but in the end, the sadness was overwhelming and exhausting, so she went up to bed.

I sat with Bida as her breathing went from labored to almost nonexistent, a gasp every thirty seconds or so. A tremor of nerves every ten minutes or so. I sat with her as a strange, sour odor came over her and the time between her gasps increased; the shuddering diminished. I petted her, held her paws, stroked her under her chin, rubbed the top of her nose. Each time she took a deep breath and let it out with tremors, I thought it was her last breath, and then she would begin shallow panting again which would diminish. Then another deep breath. Shudders and twitches. Then stillness. And so it went, on and on, for two painful hours. Her eyes were glassy; her tongue began hanging out of her mouth. At one point she began running her back legs, as if she were dreaming of chasing the chipmunks, birds, or bunnies she used to bring us. She was there and not there.

And then, at 10:54, our beautiful, ornery, sweet, irritating, wonderful Bida, that damn cat I loved to hate, was gone.

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March 1, 2009

I went to the storage room to find a box to put her in and found that K had already taken out a shoebox for me. It was the box my running shoes came in, my latest attempt to outrun mortality I mused.

I gently picked up Bida and put her inside wrapped in the pillowcase we’d put under her on the couch, the pillowcase that covered her old bed she loved until she discovered D’s bags of insulation. I tucked her into the box, making sure her legs were tucked up as if she were sleeping, curling her tail over her legs, and the strands formed a knot, and I wept for them all.

Larry

The smoke from my Saturday-evening cigar blurs the view of his picture that hangs over the fireplace in our basement, and I look down at the wad of burning leaves pressed between my fingers and realize that it’s because of men like him, my uncle whom I never met and after whom I am named, that I can enjoy such a little pleasure. In the picture, he sits before a brick wall, his peaked cap pushed back to show a hint of his hairline, his forearms on his knees, fingers almost fidgeting, with an expression of tired sadness. I really have no idea when the picture was taken. Perhaps he was home from Vietnam on leave; maybe he hadn’t even shipped out yet. In a way, it’s not as important as the simple fact that the expression on his face mirrors my own when I really think about him, when I remember the odd bits and pieces I heard about him growing up, when I think of the simple but profound fact that, after my parents adopted me and decided that the name my short-term foster mother had been using for me fit me perfectly, they decided his name would make the perfect middle name. The uncle who, my mother more than once laughed, hated baths as much as I love them. The uncle I never met.

As a child, I remember seeing this picture hanging in my grandparents’ home, smudged brown with the nicotine of thousands or even tens of thousands of cigarettes. It was the house in which they both died tragically, though ironically neither passed as a result of the stains that seemed to cover so many of their possessions of their house. Like so many in my family, they died not from what everyone in the family thought would kill them — like my uncle. The picture — one of only two I know of him as an adult, of only three I know of him in his short life — is framed in a gold-painted rectangle that, after all these years, seems brighter than the picture itself. The mortar and the bricks behind him have faded into an almost indistinguishable hue that seems only a darker shade of his uniform, and the triangle of his white undershirt seems only a lighter shade still.

The other picture of him as an adult seems likely to have been taken at the same time, though perhaps earlier. The same brick wall seems to be over his left shoulder, but he hadn’t yet pushed back his cap, and its brim hides his eyes in shadow. I think he would have liked it that way. Perhaps the tired expression in the second picture comes from being asked, badgered, to push his cap back a bit, “so we can see your eyes.” Over his right shoulder is a tree, and in the triangle of his right arm he stands with his hands on his hips is is a dumpster with white letters stenciled in to instruct someone about something that must at all costs be “down.” Or “town”?

He died on Thanksgiving, a fact that seems so fought with irony that it almost seems like it must be one of those made-up details that our memory seems sometimes to invent in order to add almost unconsciously to the most significant events. I heard this week that there are only two truly significant American holidays: Thanksgiving and Memorial Day. My uncle embodies them both.

I am much older than he, the baby boy of the family, was in the picture, and I have been blessed with what he likely dreamed of: a beautiful, loving wife, the mother of my two incredible children. A house with a room downstairs where I can smoke my cigars with offending my wife’s nose, harming my children, or leaving a stain over picture frames that hold images of their lives. Two cars parked on a pad of concrete. A few tomato vines and zucchini plants in the backyard. All of which I have because of people like my uncle.

Goodbye, Nelia

“Mr. Scott, today is my last day.” Nelia looked at me matter-of-factly when she said it one Friday morning, but the news was anything but matter-of-fact. There are students who, though it pains a teacher to admit, could say those words and the teacher would find it difficult to suppress the resulting smile. Few are their numbers, thankfully, but every year almost every teacher has at least one or two students about whom he thinks, “If only this kid wasn’t in my classroom–I could get so much more done with these other children.”

Nelia was not such a student. Indeed, she was the polar opposite: a quiet child who applied herself diligently each and every day, who turned in model work as a result, and who seemed to draw my attention in class like no one else. I knew she was trying; I knew she was paying attention; I knew she wanted to learn the things I had to teach. When explaining things, I found that I glanced at her more than almost any other student. Hard workers get that kind of attention.

I’d had my eye out for her from the first day. Mrs. Wilson, a teacher from a lower grade, had seen her name on my roster and exclaimed, “Oh, Nelia! You’ll love her!” She’d gone on to explain that Nelia had had a difficult life and had brought a lot of issues into the classroom. “But by the second semester, she’d worked a lot of them out–anger management, patience, things like that–and just became a sweet, wonderful student.” We teachers all like to hear that about rising students, so I was ready and very eager to meet her.

Because of her last name and the fact that I arrange my students alphabetically the first few days, Nelia sat in the back. She seemed quiet, not really talking to anyone and certainly not talking out of turn, but she always appeared sad. Tired. When students did group work, I found that she quietly participated but didn’t really take the lead. At the same time, the other students immediately realized that she had a quick mind and grasped things before most others in the classroom, so she became the de facto advisor to the group. She often finished before anyone else and then helped the other members of her group: not exactly the ideal for group work, for among other things, group work is intended to give students and opportunity to practice the real-world skill of cooperation in pursuit of a common goal. Still, her willingness to help had its own positive effects, and not just in the subject matter.

Her work was impressive. Always neatly organized in clear, looping handwriting, her work demonstrated from the beginning her impressive intellect and her pursuit of virtual perfection. Yet when praised for the quality of her work, she often smiled only a bit, the edges of her mouth just turning up and a sparkle temporarily flashing in her eyes.

All of this I noticed in just over a week.

When she told me she was leaving, the news hurt immediately, though initially for admittedly selfish reasons. It’s always a little sad to see a productive student who has a positive impact on the classroom environment leave, but it’s even more upsetting when it’s a student known to struggle, known to have overcome some bad habits and replaced them with some positive behaviors. When I found out why she was leaving, though, I sat silently for a few moments, wondering just how I should respond, considering how I could wrestle the wild and wildly depressing thoughts that surged into my mind when she began her explanation, “You see, I’m in foster care, and the lady that is taking care of me right now has decided she’s too old to do it anymore.”

Suddenly it all made sense, all the things the other teacher had mentioned, all the little implications. The changes Nelia had made, breaking habits built up from years of disappointment, rejection, and loneliness, were all the more impressive. I found myself suddenly grateful that I and my children knew where we would wake up tomorrow, the next week, the next year. I found myself unexpectedly thankful for the little habits that we take for granted, habits that sometimes even annoy, but habits that can only form in a secure environment where there are no surprises like, “Guess what!? You’re moving next week and that means changing everything in your life!”

And then the wild thoughts, the unrealistic thoughts that I just couldn’t beat down: “How quickly can someone get to be certified to be a foster family? Could we do that fast enough?” Thoughts that I knew the answer to.

As she left class that day, I pulled her aside and told her that I was very sad that she was leaving us. “I was really, really looking forward to working with you this year. I can see already that you would be one of those students that make me think, ‘This is what I got into teaching for.’” She smiled and thanked me, then started down the hall. I called after her and told her, “Make sure you head up to the seventh grade hall and say goodbye to Mrs. Wilson.” She smiled and assured me she would.

On the drive home that day, I began wondering if I should have said more, if it would have been helpful or even appropriate to say what I truly wanted to tell her: “If I had it in my power, I would take you into my family’s house and gladly try to provide a stable environment for you until you graduate high school, or even longer if necessary.” Unwarranted hope? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Maybe hearing those words, essentially telling her, “You’re not unwanted. You can have a secure place in this world” would have been an incredibly positive thing; perhaps hearing those words would have had the opposite effect. Possibly she would have thought I was just being a little weird. I don’t regret not saying it, and yet I’m thinking and writing about it still.

I did say something though, something to hint that she’s wanted, that she’s appreciated. Enough to make up for any of the sadness in her life? Certainly not: that’s a hole impossible to fill with only a few minutes of chatting. But she smiled when I said those things, and it made the day a success.

When Monday rolled around, I was still hopeful she would walk into my classroom. “Perhaps there’s been a change. Perhaps she got the dates mixed up,” I thought. No mistake. No change. Simply no Nelia. She was always so quiet that I really didn’t notice her absence until five or so minutes into the class, the students working on their bell-ringer and I checking roll.

“Michael,” I said, glancing up, checking his name with I saw his tuft of blond hair.

“Nelia.” And then I remembered. A voice from the back of the classroom: “I think she moved.” I stood silent for a moment, wondering where Nelia was, wondering what family had taken her in, wondering what school she’d landed in, wondering if she would settle in quickly, wondering how long it would take for her teachers to notice what I and others had seen, wondering if old habits might return as defensive mechanisms, wondering, wondering, wondering.

“Yes, she moved,” I finally confirmed, hoping the students wouldn’t notice the crack in my voice.