Backyard Play
Month: November 2017
Evening
The kids are both at an age that they can find something to do all by themselves. The Boy less so, since he’s only five; the Girl more so, because she’s nearing her teens.
This evening, the Girl was researching prices for an electronic item she is saving up for. She’s saved for several items in the past: a Barbie camper, a Barbie bike, and others. Those items are long gone, as well as the dolls which they accessorized. I hadn’t thought about that, though, until I sat down to write this: it’s been so long since she’s played with Barbies that I’d forgotten, on some level, that she ever had. More evidence of that strange way we tend to fall into thinking that the way things are now is how they always have been. And always will be. Remember a Barbie camper reminds me that things change.
The Boy soon contented himself with drawing. I’m not sure where the urge came from, but he suddenly wanted to draw cupcakes.
“Okay, Google, show me cupcakes” he commanded our Chromebook. It’s become a favorite activity: “Okay, Google” activates the voice search, and off he goes. It’s a blessing and a curse: it allows him to research things he wouldn’t be able to investigate otherwise due to his still-blossoming literacy, but it could lead to a kind of laziness if not monitored as he learns to write.
After L made some decisions about which iPod was within her budget, she sat down at the piano and began picking through some songs. She stopped taking piano lessons at the end of the school year, but dear friends’ visit this weekend got her interested again, I think. At least on some level.
I’m a little torn on the whole issue: there’s an argument to be made for insisting that a child learn a musical instrument. But that whole argument is made moot by the fact that the Girl sings three hours a week in the church choir. Let her find her passion, a wiser voice says. Let her follow that.
Interpretation
My English I Honors students have just finished up a four-week poetry unit, which is in a way one of my favorite units we do. It’s not just that I love poetry, which I do, or that I hope to instill in them an appreciation of or even love of poetry, which I do, but it’s also a one of the units where we all see real growth in students’ ability to read and think critically.
At the start of the unit, there are the concerns: Some suggest they cannot understand poetry. Some suggest poetry is just about emotions. Some suggest that learning about poetry has no practical value later in life.
To the first concern, I always point out that learning to read increasingly challenging texts with greater levels of intentional ambiguity is just like everything else: it takes time and practice. I assure them that I’ll give them some skills — some tricks, I call them — that will help them ease the process.
To the second suggestion, I point out that while emotion is a critical element in a lot of poetry, it’s not the end of poetry in itself. It’s a means to an end. The emotion one finds in poetry is not what it’s about — except for some confessional poetry, of course. Even then, there’s always something bigger. I don’t tell them then, but what I’m referring to of course is the lyric moment of a poem, that point at which the reader has an epiphany because the speaker has an epiphany. (I am speaking of modern poetry, of course. When we move back into the nineteenth century and beyond, lyric moments tend to disappear a bit. Just a bit.)
The third worry is easy: No, you won’t read and interpret poetry your whole life, but you will need the skills — picking up on connotation, determining tone, reading for changes in mood — your whole life. No matter what you do, I say, no matter what the job, you’ll need these skills.
So we dive in. We read Elizabeth Bishop and Billy Collins, Dylan Thomas and Theodore Roethke, Langston Hughes and Howard Nemerov, Robert Hayden and in preparation for Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare. There are others, but I’ve found it most fruitful to read less and read more deeply than read more and only skim over the surface. We read poems and then go back to them again when we’ve learned another skill. We read poems once, twice, three times — again and again and again.
Then comes the test. A simple, four-question test. “Four questions, Mr. Scott?! Only four?!” they all reply when we prep for it. I give them two poems, both by W.D. Snodgrass: “Momentos, 1” and “A Locked House.”
Momentos, 1
Sorting out letters and piles of my old
Canceled checks, old clippings, and yellow note cards
That meant something once, I happened to find
Your picture. That picture. I stopped there cold,
Like a man raking piles of dead leaves in his yard
Who has turned up a severed hand.Still, that first second, I was glad: you stand
Just as you stood—shy, delicate, slender,
In that long gown of green lace netting and daisies
That you wore to our first dance. The sight of you stunned
Us all. Well, our needs were different, then,
And our ideals came easy.Then through the war and those two long years
Overseas, the Japanese dead in their shacks
Among dishes, dolls, and lost shoes; I carried
This glimpse of you, there, to choke down my fear,
Prove it had been, that it might come back.
That was before we got married.—Before we drained out one another’s force
With lies, self-denial, unspoken regret
And the sick eyes that blame; before the divorce
And the treachery. Say it: before we met. Still,
I put back your picture. Someday, in due course,
I will find that it’s still there.
We read it together, make sure there are no unknown or confusing words, then move on to the second poem.
A Locked House
As we drove back, crossing the hill,
The house still
Hidden in the trees, I always thought—
A fool’s fear—that it might have caught
Fire, someone could have broken in.
As if things must have been
Too good here. Still, we always found
It locked tight, safe and sound.I mentioned that, once, as a joke;
No doubt we spoke
Of the absurdity
To fear some dour god’s jealousy
Of our good fortune. From the farm
Next door, our neighbors saw no harm
Came to the things we cared for here.
What did we have to fear?Maybe I should have thought: all
Such things rot, fall—
Barns, houses, furniture.
We two are stronger than we were
Apart; we’ve grown
Together. Everything we own
Can burn; we know what counts—some such
Idea. We said as much.We’d watched friends driven to betray;
Felt that love drained away
Some self they need.
We’d said love, like a growth, can feed
On hate we turn in and disguise;
We warned ourselves. That you might despise
Me—hate all we both loved best—
None of us ever guessed.The house still stands, locked, as it stood
Untouched a good
Two years after you went.
Some things passed in the settlement;
Some things slipped away. Enough’s left
That I come back sometimes. The theft
And vandalism were our own.
Maybe we should have known.
The questions:
- Identify tone and tonal shift of each poem. Make sure you quote specific passages of each poem in order to provide evidence.
- What is the lyric moment of each poem? What epiphany does the speaker have in each poem?
- Compare and contrast the two poems. How are the topics, tones, and lyric moments similar? How are they different?
- The author of these poems was an early writer of what’s called “confessional poetry,” in which the “I” in the poem is very often the poet himself/herself. It involves writing not about what’s going on in the world but what’s going on in the heart and mind of the poet. What can you infer about the author if we assume that the “I” in each poem is the poet himself?
These are somewhat tricky poems. “Momentos, 1” has a couple of tones in the first part of the poem that are then echoed in mutated form in the second half.
“A Locked House” uses a long, extended metaphor that, being a metaphor, is never expressly explicated. Experienced readers immediately see that the house is a metaphor for the speaker’s and his wife’s marriage, but thirteen-year-olds don’t always see that at first.
Flood
Post-flood pictures from a month ago or so.
The Lost Art
You want to enter every conversation assuming you have something to learn.
Teaching
“I just realized we haven’t read E the Christmas story,” my wife said to me this evening. I thought of the Dickens tale, and remembering the new film version of its making that is now out, I thought, “What a great idea.”
“You mean the Dickens story?” I asked to confirm.
“No, the Christmas story,” my wife replied.
I’ve just crashed. I haven’t so much lost my faith as given it up. Tossed it. Or rather, I think I’ve realized that I never had it to begin with. This is the second time in my life that this has happened. Why I didn’t learn the first time is beyond me, but something made me want to be a Catholic like my wife. A desire for consistency? Who knows. I do know that that desire is gone now. It all seems so preposterous, the Bible, the saints, the Son of God — it just seems like a fairy tale to me again.
So the last thing in the world I want to do now is to teach this to my children. But the next-to-last thing in the world I want to do now is come clean to my wife about my new, old skepticism. I’ve decided to just play along, for now, living in a sort of spiritual closet with my children and trying to keep quiet about my doubts in front of them.
And yet I hope to plant a seed of skepticism in my children, a questioning spirit that doesn’t settle for simple answers, that doesn’t accept answers without asking further questions.
As he was eating his pre-bed yogurt, I began reading the story from the illustrated Bible someone gave him.
It begins with the Annunciation, an angel appearing before a young girl and announcing that she will bear the child of God.
My mind immediately began running through the problems with this: the whole nonsensical doctrine of completely human and completely divine; the oddly perverse insistence that the girl must be a virgin out of a desire to use this to fulfill a supposed Old Testament prophecy that the Messiah will be born of a virgin, which in fact was based on an inaccurate translation from Hebrew to Latin; the whole question of why in the world a god would announce his presence in such an oddly ineffective way. All this and more. Yet I just asked a simple question: “What do you think about this?”
“It’s good,” my son said.
“What do you mean?”
“Because God can do anything,” came the odd answer. He is, after all, five: critical thinking is not a skill he yet possesses.
On the next page, we read about Joseph’s concerns about marrying Mary and the account in Luke of an angel appearing to him to soothe his worries.
My mind immediately began running through the problems with this: was he just worried that Mary, being unmarried yet pregnant, risked some sort of horrible punishment at the hands of the first-century Jews, who were still stoning people? Did he find it odd that this happened before marriage, knowing the potential societal reaction? Did he wonder if perhaps Mary was just promiscuous? Why exactly did the angel need to calm his fears?
A few pages later, angels appear again, this time to the shepherds in the fields.
“Has an angel ever appeared to you?” I asked.
“No,” came the direct answer.
“Me neither,” I said. “I wonder why.” And I continued reading.
It’s in these types of conversations that I hope to spark a bit of probing skepticism. Does this mean I am seeking superstitiously to undermine my wife? I suppose it does. Is that a bad thing? I suppose it’s a bit dishonest.
If I keep this up, the real conundrum awaits in the probably-not-too-distant future: what will I say when my daughter, who is almost eleven, begins noticing the changes? I can’t bring myself to say the creed during the Mass because I don’t believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible, and I don’t believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages. I won’t be going for communion anymore because when the priest says, “The body of Christ,” I am to assent to that belief by saying, “Amen.” And I don’t believe that the priest is giving out anything other than tasteless wafers and overly-sweet wine.
So she will notice, and she will ask, “Daddy, why don’t you go to communion anymore?”
And what will I say?
Afternoon Downtown
Purchase
How can you talk to someone who doesn’t accept facts? How can you have a discussion with someone who takes expert opinion with the same degree of credibility that she takes television advertisements?
How do you talk to an anti-vaxxer? How do you talk to a climate-change denier? How do you talk to a creationist?
In all three examples, the jury is in: vaccines work; the climate is changing due to human activity; evolution happened (and is happening). We don’t have to understand how all these things work in order to accept them. I don’t understand how my anti-lock braking system or my cell phone touch screen works but I use them.
Here’s an exchange between an anti-vaxxer and me when I posted this video to social media.
The anti-vaxxer, a neighbor whose kids play with my kids, replied,
There has been no confirmed case of polio since the 70’s. Why would I have my children vaccinated against a disease that no longer exists?
There is a bit of ignorance as well as self-centeredness in this response: there have been confirmed cases (the ignorance) but just in third-world countries (the self-centeredness: who cares about them?). I replied diplomatically:
Polio still exists in the third world, but you’re right about the States: no confirmed cases since 1979. The intent of this post is more about vaccines in general: why haven’t we had polio in the US in almost forty years? The answer is simple: vaccinations.
There’s not a lot of debate among researchers, doctors, and epidemiologists regarding this: vaccines have virtually eliminated polio. Period. The CDC confirms this; the WHO confirms this; numerous university research facilities confirm this. Her response was telling:
I don’t buy it. 90% of the cases were misdiagnosed (example: FDR actually had GBS, not polio). And, you can look a records [sic] that show that the numbers of cases were already declining before the vaccine was put into play.
With those four words, “I don’t buy it,” she discounts thousands, perhaps millions, of man-hours of research, analysis, and thinking by people that have forgotten more about disease and its spread than she and I know collectively. She exemplifies a kind of conspiracy-based thinking that discounts experts and authority on a seeming whim.
What do you say to someone like this? How can you continue such a conversation? In short, I’m not sure it’s possible. My response was simple: I didn’t respond. I wanted to, though. I wanted to ask where in the world she got this 90% statistic.
I wanted to ask how she had that information about the decline of polio prior to the discovery of the vaccine. I wanted to ask her if she had peer-reviewed articles to substantiate her position. But it’s clear that she doesn’t see any value in this type of peer-review authority.
We don’t share a common definition of reality, so how can meaningful dialogue occur?
Conestee Afternoon
Thanksgiving 2017
12:50
Three hours in the kitchen yesterday morning; five hours in the kitchen this morning; I’ve listened to over half of Paul Auster’s Sunset Park in the meantime. (Does he ever write anything that doesn’t have a writer in it? I love his style, but sometimes I get the feeling I’m just reading variations on his autobiography. This one, so far, has no connection to Paris.) I’m thankful that it’s almost done. The turkey is in the oven; the dressing is cooling; the soup and cranberry sauce (this year stewed spiced chai with a bit of bourbon as an experiment) sit in the refrigerator; the broccoli casserole (yes, there simply must be a casserole or else it’s not Thanksgiving) is ready to go in the oven; the giblet gravy is almost ready. It’s time for a cup of coffee, a pipe of tobacco (after years of smoking English and Virginia/Perique blends almost exclusively, I’ve begun exploring burley-based blends–it’s like smoking a pipe again for the first time), and some quiet.
It’s been a crazy morning: the dog, less than twenty-four hours after being spayed, has returned to normal energy levels and is highly irritated about being stuck inside with an Elizabethan collar on. The Boy wanted to help, of course, but the difference now is that he’s able actually to help. He broke the dried bread into chunks for the dressing; he crushed crackers and mixed the liquid components for the casserole; he willingly taste-tested the pumpkin pie baklava; he kept an eye on everything. How did I listen to a story and talk to the Boy? Simple: his fits of helping merely punctuated his playing.
10:24
It’s always the same — Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, you spend all that time cooking and it’s over before you know it. Even when you slow down, even when you’re mindful, even when you want to stretch things out, you can’t.
You sit and listen to the Boy’s stories, plow through the food, and it’s done. Of course, when you compare the amount of prep to the time eating, even two hours would be “plowing through.” But you can’t complain: people aren’t eager to eat food that tastes mediocre at best, so I take it as a complement.
And go for a meandering walk afterward, the first quarter of it with the family. The rest head back because the poor dog, with her radar hat on, probably shouldn’t be out too long.
Pre-Thanksgiving
Pumpkin pie baklava and a post-operative dog.
Immigrant Day
Helping
Sunday Evening
Incense: A New Metaphor
I’ve always heard of incense being symbolic of prayer, and most formulations follow something similar to what Doug Eaton writes at Christian Theology, where he gives four ways incense is like prayer:
- Incense was beaten and pounded before it was used. Likewise acceptable prayer proceeds from a broken and contrite heart.
- Incense rises toward heaven, and the point of prayer is that it ascends to the throne of God.
- Incense requires fire for it to be useful, and prayer has no virtue unless is set on fire by the power of the Holy Spirit.
- Incense yields a sweet aroma, and our prayers are a sweet aroma to the Lord.
Today in Mass, watching the smoke waft up from the thurible into emptiness above it, I realized that, incense being smoke, there are a couple of ways a skeptic can continue to view incense as a symbol of a believer’s prayer.
Incense, being smoke, dissipates into nothingness
The priest swings the thurible and billows of smoke flow from it, but like the spidery line of smoke rising from a cigarette, a few feet above the priest’s head, it’s turned to haze. As it rises to the top of the church, it disappears, indistinguishable from the smokeless air.
So too, words mumbled in prayer dissolve to nothingness as soon as they leave the lips. They rattle around inside hearers’ heads for just a moment, producing a warm feeling if they are believers, to be sure, but if there is no god, they are just so much noise.
Incense, being smoke, is ultimately carcenogenic
Breath enough smoke and one risks cancer: we see that warning everywhere. The Mayo Clinic’s web site describes the process thus:
Doctors believe smoking causes lung cancer by damaging the cells that line the lungs. When you inhale cigarette smoke, which is full of cancer-causing substances (carcinogens), changes in the lung tissue begin almost immediately.
At first your body may be able to repair this damage. But with each repeated exposure, normal cells that line your lungs are increasingly damaged. Over time, the damage causes cells to act abnormally and eventually cancer may develop.
In my slow arc back from belief to skepticism, I’m reading again Sam Harris’s The End of Faith, and I think the idea of faith, and its outward expression through prayer, causing a brain to act abnormally — carcenogeically — is apt. The funny thing about prayer is that for the believer, even when it’s not answered, it’s answered. “God just said ‘No’” is the common response. Or “God has different plans.” Nothing counts against it. No evidence stands contrary to it.
That’s the very nature of faith, but that’s not how we work on a daily basis. We seek evidence for what we do. Teachers seek evidence for student mastery. Lawyers seek evidence for guilt or innocence. Construction workers seek evidence of a strong foundation before building higher. They all test, probe, ask questions, and ultimately, they might say, “No, there’s not sufficient evidence.” And faith is not enough. I don’t want to drive on a bridge that the engineers built on faith. I don’t want to get in an elevator that an inspector has inspected on faith.
Why should it be different with religious belief? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence asserted Carl Sagan (among others). To do otherwise is to think, in a sense, abnormally.
At a Loss
There are some times in my classroom that I am positively at a loss, that I am standing there, looking at what just happened, listening to what’s being said, watching what’s going on, and I find myself wondering, “What in the world do I do about this?” I’ve been in the classroom for almost twenty years now, and I’ve come to realize that I will always — always — have these moments.
Last week, for example, in order to load a document I wanted the students to view on the projector, I turned my back on my most challenging class — challenging in that they are, by and large, not motivated and therefore not inclined to behave in a manner that produces the most efficient use of our limited class time — and in the few seconds that I had my back turned, this happened.
This, in fact, is a photo after I kicked some of the papers into a more consolidated pile.
Apparently, in a matter of seconds, a boy who sits in the back of the room stood up, ran to the front of the room, grabbed a girl’s binder, ran back to the back of the room, and emptied its contents on the floor with the girl in heated pursuit. This girl is not very popular, and she has a habit of antagonizing everyone around her and then playing the victim. In this case, though, she was the victim, but that didn’t stop the kids from hooting in approval at the boy’s actions.
I called them down; they stopped after a few seconds; and I didn’t have the slightest clue what to do. I removed them both from the classroom, but that’s hardly a preventative measure for the next time the kid gets an impulse to do something like this. Truth be told, the boy can be more antagonistic and disruptive among his peers as the girl.
These are thirteen-year-old kids. They’re not two or three. Yet their behavior belies their age, because this sort of thing happens so frequently. If it was a one-time occurrence, it would just be a question of youthful hi-jinks, but something similar happens on a regular basis, and I never really know what to do to prevent it.
Crash
Within the last few weeks, it’s all crashed, all caved in on itself like a house being remodeled by amateurs who know no better than to knock out a load-bearing wall in order to let more light in. At first, everything seemed alright. The light from the kitchen in the morning passed through and lit the living room, and the evening glow in the living room passed into the kitchen just as dinner was served. But if anyone had cared to look up, they would have noticed that it was already sagging. No extra weight necessary. No snow accumulating. No high pressure system moving in. Not even a leaf landing on the room. The weight of the support system itself was pulling everything down, as if it were betraying itself. The collapse itself happened in the middle of the night, when the light of the morning and afternoon had moved to the other side of the globe and thus was completely irrelevant. There was a cracking of timber, a moaning of nails being bent and wrenched out of place, and then an incredible implosion of drywall, insulation, joists, and shingles, a noise so loud that it jolted everyone in the house into a hyper-alertness immediately, foregoing completely the drugged, heavy-brained feeling of a morning come too soon.
The problem of evil began haunting me anew a few weeks ago, though I really don’t know what was the catalyst. Perhaps the story of the child left dead in a swing for a week: “Authorities have charged an Iowa couple with murder in the death of their 4-month-old son, whose maggot-infested body was found in a baby swing in the family’s home” (source). A horrible story, but not as incredible as the story of the child left dead for two years: “The decomposed remains of a small boy still dressed in a baby-gro were found in his mother’s cot almost two years after he starved to death, a jury was told today (source). Or the story of Declan Hainey , who “was left dead for up to eight months is filled with waste including empty bottles of Irn-Bru, 3 Hammers cider, Lucozade, vodka and crisp packets” (source).
Come to think of it, I know exactly what it was: I reread The Brother’s Karamazov this summer, and Ivan’s words haunted me just like they did the first time I read them, twenty years ago:
A well-educated, cultured gentleman and his wife beat their own child with a birch-rod, a girl of seven. I have an exact account of it. The papa was glad that the birch was covered with twigs. ‘It stings more,’ said he, and so be began stinging his daughter. I know for a fact there are people who at every blow are worked up to sensuality, to literal sensuality, which increases progressively at every blow they inflict. They beat for a minute, for five minutes, for ten minutes, more often and more savagely. The child screams. At last the child cannot scream, it gasps, ‘Daddy daddy!’ By some diabolical unseemly chance the case was brought into court. A counsel is engaged. The Russian people have long called a barrister ‘a conscience for hire.’ The counsel protests in his client’s defence. ‘It’s such a simple thing,’ he says, ‘an everyday domestic event. A father corrects his child. To our shame be it said, it is brought into court.’ The jury, convinced by him, give a favourable verdict. The public roars with delight that the torturer is acquitted. Ah, pity I wasn’t there! I would have proposed to raise a subscription in his honour! Charming pictures. But I’ve still better things about children. I’ve collected a great, great deal about Russian children, Alyosha. There was a little girl of five who was hated by her father and mother, ‘most worthy and respectable people, of good education and breeding.’ You see, I must repeat again, it is a peculiar characteristic of many people, this love of torturing children, and children only. To all other types of humanity these torturers behave mildly and benevolently, like cultivated and humane Europeans; but they are very fond of tormenting children, even fond of children themselves in that sense. it’s just their defencelessness that tempts the tormentor, just the angelic confidence of the child who has no refuge and no appeal, that sets his vile blood on fire. In every man, of course, a demon lies hidden—the demon of rage, the demon of lustful heat at the screams of the tortured victim, the demon of lawlessness let off the chain, the demon of diseases that follow on vice, gout, kidney disease, and so on.”
“This poor child of five was subjected to every possible torture by those cultivated parents. They beat her, thrashed her, kicked her for no reason till her body was one bruise. Then, they went to greater refinements of cruelty—shut her up all night in the cold and frost in a privy, and because she didn’t ask to be taken up at night (as though a child of five sleeping its angelic, sound sleep could be trained to wake and ask), they smeared her face and filled her mouth with excrement, and it was her mother, her mother did this. And that mother could sleep, hearing the poor child’s groans! Can you understand why a little creature, who can’t even understand what’s done to her, should beat her little aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark and the cold, and weep her meek unresentful tears to dear, kind God to protect her? Do you understand that, friend and brother, you pious and humble novice? Do you understand why this infamy must be and is permitted? Without it, I am told, man could not have existed on earth, for he could not have known good and evil. Why should he know that diabolical good and evil when it costs so much? Why, the whole world of knowledge is not worth that child’s prayer to dear, kind God! I say nothing of the sufferings of grown-up people, they have eaten the apple, damn them, and the devil take them all! But these little ones! I am making you suffer, Alyosha, you are not yourself. I’ll leave off if you like.” (source)
Ivan of course saves the greatest horror for the end:
“One picture, only one more, because it’s so curious, so characteristic, and I have only just read it in some collection of Russian antiquities. I’ve forgotten the name. I must look it up. It was in the darkest days of serfdom at the beginning of the century, and long live the Liberator of the People! There was in those days a general of aristocratic connections, the owner of great estates, one of those men—somewhat exceptional, I believe, even then—who, retiring from the service into a life of leisure, are convinced that they’ve earned absolute power over the lives of their subjects. There were such men then. So our general, settled on his property of two thousand souls, lives in pomp, and domineers over his poor neighbours as though they were dependents and buffoons. He has kennels of hundreds of hounds and nearly a hundred dog-boys—all mounted, and in uniform. One day a serf-boy, a little child of eight, threw a stone in play and hurt the paw of the general’s favourite hound. ‘Why is my favourite dog lame?’ He is told that the boy threw a stone that hurt the dog’s paw. ‘So you did it.’ The general looked the child up and down. ‘Take him.’ He was taken—taken from his mother and kept shut up all night. Early that morning the general comes out on horseback, with the hounds, his dependents, dog-boys, and huntsmen, all mounted around him in full hunting parade. The servants are summoned for their edification, and in front of them all stands the mother of the child. The child is brought from the lock-up. It’s a gloomy, cold, foggy, autumn day, a capital day for hunting. The general orders the child to be undressed; the child is stripped naked. He shivers, numb with terror, not daring to cry… ‘Make him run,’ commands the general. ‘Run! run!’ shout the dog-boys. The boy runs…’At him!’ yells the general, and he sets the whole pack of hounds on the child. The hounds catch him, and tear him to pieces before his mother’s eyes!…I believe the general was afterwards declared incapable of administering his estates. Well—what did he deserve? To be shot? To be shot for the satisfaction of our moral feelings? Speak, Alyosha!”
And then the news of the child left in a swing for a week. And the discovery of all the other stories while searching for details about the swing death. Death upon death, all of children, piled one on top of another, and like Ivan, my thoughts return to the question of what kind of god would allow such barbarism.
The ceiling was sagging.
With all this on my mind, I watched a Bill Burr routine, and he began talking about leaving religion.
“Everyone else’s religion sounds stupid,” he says. The obvious conclusion: “Why does that make sense and that shit doesn’t?” Why does Scientology sound ridiculous but Catholicism doesn’t? Why does Islam sound barbaric and Judaism doesn’t? Why are Jim Jones or Heaven’s Gate any different from Masada?
Burr explains that Scientology seemed stupid to him but Catholicism didn’t because “I heard my story when I was, like, four years old.”
There was more. Reading, thinking, watching videos debunking silly creationism.
All this sat in my head, just sat there swirling around, and because I’d lulled myself into a wishful Catholic sleep, I wasn’t ready when it all came crashing down around me. When I was standing in Mass and found myself unable to say the creed.
I believe in one God,
the Father almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all things visible and invisible.
No, I’ve been deluding myself and wanting to believe this, but I don’t. Not in this sense. Not in the dogmatic sense of the Church.
I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the Only Begotten Son of God,
born of the Father before all ages.
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father;
through him all things were made.
Nope. That doesn’t even make sense: the “Only Begotten Son” who is “consubstantial with the Father”? They’re supposed to be spirits — how in the hell can they even be Father and Son, and yet still the same being? From no perspective can that make any sense, not even when you try to throw in that quantum uncertainty nonsense: “Well, if light can act like a wave and a particle…” No. It doesn’t work.
I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son,
who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified,
who has spoken through the prophets.
Why do they all want to be adored and glorified? That doesn’t make any sense. What kind of insecure being makes an entire universe in order to create a small rock on which hairless apes live and work and kill and create vaccines and nuclear weapons and who are so stupid that many of them end up disbelieving in the effectiveness of the former and accepting the necessity of the latter — what kind of pathetic being would create such a pathetic thing just to have it praise him? Just to have it adore him? To worship him?
I’ve known that these are my true thoughts ever since I began attending RCIA five or six years ago. I heard the priests explain their self-contradictory, illogical theology and had all the counterarguments popping up in my head, and I just stuffed them down and tamped them away and said, “Nope. This is more important.”
Important to what? Why did I cling? I have no idea. It was stupid, wishful thinking, and I simply can’t keep the charade up any longer. And yet I must. I can’t bring this up to my wife: it would crush her. I certainly can’t bring this up to my parents: it might kill them to think I’ve reverted again. “Your mother thinks it’s just a phase” my father once said to me in a letter, referring to my atheism. It turns out, my silly dalliance with theism was the phase.
And I can’t bring it up to my children because they would necessarily mention it to my wife: “Daddy says…”
And that’s what haunts me. “What harm can it do?” some might ask. For fuck’s sake, I’ve said that myself: Even if it’s wrong, what harm does it do? Well, my son sometimes can’t go to sleep because he’s so scared about devils and demons. I haven’t said a word about that, never taught him anything about devils or other superstitions, but the environment I’ve put him in teaches him that shit every Sunday morning, and so now he doesn’t want to go to sleep alone. And I did that to him. I put the shackles on his mind myself. I put the chains on my daughter’s thoughts. I betrayed them.
What would happen if I just said to my wife, my lovely cradle-Catholic wife, “Look, I know it was a wonderful surprise to you when I started reconsidering my atheism, and it was an unqualified joy for you to see me enter the Catholic church, but I just don’t believe it. I just don’t buy it at all.” What would she say? I can see the disappointment in her eyes, but what damage would it do to our relationship, that kind of hurt? She would feel just as betrayed as I fear my children would feel if I hadn’t shackled them and they had a chance to look at this alternative life that I could have given them but didn’t.
So now I sit in the rubble, wondering if I can hide it from my wife, wondering if I should even try, feeling dark and empty at the center of my being. “That’s just the god-shaped hole,” some might say. No. That’s just the emptiness of realizing you’ve been lying to everyone, including yourself, for the last few years.
Blowing Leaves
Book Character Day
Homework and Playing
