Prayers of an Atheist

I wouldn't have expected it the day I dotted the last "i" of Faith, but Sunday morning I told a story about prayer to a group gathered for a book discussion at Trinity Episcopal Church in Concord, Mass., not a far drive from Peter's house in Cambridge. Before our presentation, the associate rector Nick Morris-Kliment offered a prayer -- something he seems expert at -- that put the group in the right mood; he asked for God's blessing on our talk, and hoped that our friendship might be somehow useful, a reflection of God's will for his community. A little embarrassing, 100% flattering, and, we hope, at least somewhat true. The rector, Tony Buquor, whose son was married by Peter in a civil ceremony that, he noted, was remarkably religious, introduced us just as kindly.

Before taking questions, and before I told my story about prayer, Peter and I read two short essays about our friendship and the process of writing the book. (These will soon appear on Jbooks.com.) I stumbled over myself for a moment -- blurting quickly, "ah, you'll excuse me for this" -- when I mentioned that seminary had seemed a terrible cockblock during my early days in New York. (This seemed less bad, somehow, than reading the phrase "handjobs on floors" from the book at a Lutheran church in Chicago a few months ago. I remain somewhat prudish, I guess.)

I forget exactly the question that brought my story to mind, but the moment it was asked, Peter turned to me and said, "Tell them about your prayers." So I did.

In Faith, I write, "[E]xcept when they come to mind involuntarily like all-time favorite pop songs, I've more or less stopped saying personal prayers. The transition's been slow. Since those early, comforting night improvising prayers that always began with "My dear Lord God" and ended with the affirmation "Amen" -- meaning basically "Yes, I believe You can do anything" -- I've run the gamut. ... Nowadays, though, the Father isn't there to listen to me silently meditate on the Lord's Prayer, and the Holy Mother doesn't intercede with her Son each time I call her to mind with a Hail Mary. I'd always really understood church petitions to be prayers for miracles. Now, outside of its context within a community able to act on it, a prayer asking God to care for the poor floats away unheard. Kept to myself, any prayer for the sick is just as ineffectual."

In a sense, this is just as true as ever. I still can't imagine praying for miracles. Yet, this, I've learned is a severely limited conception of personal prayer, and not at all what Peter ever means when he talks about his own devotional life as a theist.

So, finally, the story: About a month ago, near the end of research (if that's the right word, which it really isn't) for a new book project, I hit what I considered then to be a snag. Like "research," "snag" is certainly the wrong word, but for our sake here, imagine it as a really big, really painful snag, something really damaging. Consider it a heartbreaking snag. (I provided more details to the community at Trinity. I'm being less forthcoming here, for my own reasons. It's important to know, for our purposes, that I was heartbroken.)

What happens in my life when heartbreaking things happen -- when a dad dies, when a relationship ends, when I hit a snag -- is that I call Peter. (The book contains a moment when the reverse happens: Peter's heart is broken and he calls me. Why am I being so mysterious?) So that morning I did. He'd never heard me so crushed.

He knows very well -- better than anyone else -- that I've given up prayer. He knows very well how horribly it went the last time a friend recommended I pray. But he said it anyway: "Maybe you should pray about it. You know, at a moment like this, you really have to go into the belly of the beast." This is how Peter sounds when he really means something. And he never means that a miracle can happen, or even that God is looking out for me.

The belly of the beast, where we go when we pray, it turns out, is within me, within all of us. It's the unselfconscious place where, as they say, you turn your life -- your heartbreaks -- over to God. You stop being embarrassed and stop, if only for those meditative moments, being self-critical. It's the irrational place in us, where we feel. It's where we hope from. And probably also where we love from. This is not how I usually sound when I really mean something. But that advice was the best Peter had for me, and actually the very best in the world.

It's not easy to pray when you don't believe in God. Fortunately, from what Peter tells me, it's not easy to pray when you do, either. But it seems worth trying.

Listen, a New Year

It's a new year. Peter and I have been back and forth from our respective hometowns to Vermont, where we discussed Faith with the congregation of the First Unitarian Universalist Society of Burlington. Thanks to all who attended. It was our real pleasure to meet you. We hope to continue the discussion.

On the way from Boston to Burlington, we listened to the new Radiohead album, In Rainbows, which, if you haven't heard it, is amazing. It creates in you what Peter calls in the book, and what we'll start talking about soon at Bustedhalo.com, the ache. On the way, we bought the latest Spin magazine and were dismayed to see that IR was not listed as their album of the year.

For those of you who haven't heard us talk about or read from Faith in person, we have this for you. On Sunday, November 18, we led a book discussion for a very large and enthusiastic audience at the historic Trinity Church Boston, which, if you haven't seen it, is amazing. Listen here.

And finally, for the record, I've been meaning to say something about an essay I read several weeks ago that a reasonably liberal friend of mine said made her "retroactively go back and vote for Bush, twice": Brian Goedde's piece "Staying Home," published in the Dec. 12 New York Times Magazine, which featured Mike Huckabee on the cover. I have to think that the NYTM needed something just as unsettling from the opposite side of the political spectrum near the back of the magazine, just for balance. The piece takes place on New Year's Eve, several years ago, and I guess my mentioning it here, in our first post of the new year, is appropriate.

A Believing Reader

I have been back in the Midwest for Christmas, which is where I normally spend this time of year. By now, some of my old friends and relatives have read Faith, and some have liked it quite a lot. Others aren't sure what to make of me, the Catholic atheist. Still others, including some people very close to me, worry that I'm doomed. It is in that context – at home, worried about this book, surrounded by friends and family – that I reflect on growing up as a reader, and significantly, a believing reader.

Looking back, I see now that my belief in God, like a great many of my beliefs, was shaped by the fact that important people in my life, most notably my father, died when I was young. Once they’d died, God provided them a place to live forever. And from the Catholic services that accompanied these deaths, to the consolation dished out by friends and relatives – often literally by way of endless casseroles – everyone had told me that I could join them some day if I was good. So growing up I was good. I was well behaved. I prayed hard in church. I did my chores. And, perhaps most importantly, I did well in school. I lived believing that God had my life, and eventually my death, safely under his control.

In those days, there was little about God that was particularly amazing. While significantly better, for all its reality Heaven was hardly more of a miracle place than the local grocery store in the middle of my small town. Instructed in Bible stories in the same way I was taught about the American Revolution and the Civil War, I considered Moses and Jesus, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, as historical equals, heroes of the very same kind: liberators, great and valuable leaders, wise men. It mattered to me as a child that upon entering Heaven someday, I’d see my father and grandparents again, yes, but after those reunions I’d also be able to pay visits to all my childhood heroes. This all made sense to me. Good people who died went to the very same Heaven I would go to. God was there with Jesus at his right hand and people like my dad and Thomas Jefferson and the Challenger astronauts all rubbing elbows in the clouds. And while this may sound very fanciful now, I assure you it took no imagination at all back then.

It makes some sense, then, that while I read a lot as a child, I had few, if any, literary heroes. I never followed the Pevensie children through the wardrobe into Narnia or Frodo Baggins all the way to Mordor. Reading was, in one sense, just another thing that I could be good at. If reading made me smart, reading more made me smarter. For boys like me raised on Encyclopedia Brown and The Hardy Boys, reading expanded the mind in the same way a math problem did. In terms of problem solving, 2+2=4 is just as true as The Butler Did It. Yet, since I knew the difference between fiction and non-fiction, The Butler Did It could never be as important as Lincoln Freed the Slaves. And because God controlled it all, every other truth paled in comparison with the one Truth that Jesus Saves – just so long as we believed in him and were good.

I no longer believe in God, or certainly not in any way that I would have recognized as a child. Most of the people I grew up don’t even recognize it now. There is no more Heaven. God has no control over anything. God exists only in our imaginations, which is no little thing. As far as I can tell, it’s where God has always existed.

And in some ways, believing this affects my reading. For one, I’m hardly as voracious as I once was. Like most people I know, I tend to have a few books going at a time – right now, Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, and Ted Kerasote’s Merle’s Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog – but with my growing obligations, it sometimes takes me a month on the subway to finish a novel. It’s not unheard of that I’ll go a week without cracking a book at all.

And while I still like Jesus way more than Frodo, nowadays they live in very much the same world. I’m not denying that Jesus walked and talked and was an important and radical teacher. Through the stories told about him, he remains for me that model of ethical living: Love God and love your neighbor as yourself. Turn the other cheek. Blessed are the poor. Judge not, lest you be judged. But he lives today, again, much like those literary heroes I ignored as a child, through the stories told about him.

And as for God, as I see it now, God is nothing – really nothing­­ – but the demand that we live well in this life. And in the Gospels, it seems Jesus often knew this as well as anyone. You love your neighbor and your enemy in the here and now. You bless the poor for their sake. You write in the sand – as it was written Jesus did – to reveal to each of us our common humanity.

Christmas: The Jewish Kryptonite

For a time, Christmas felt like a kind of kryptonite, in all its various colors and effects. Christmas carols, lights, Santa Claus, and even the inexplicable Stollen, produced in me various levels of discomfort, confusion, and even a little misplaced nostalgia. I grew up a very secular Jew, and while we acknowledged that Christmas had come and gone, like most Jews we basically kept our heads down until it was all over. I watched the surreal animated puppets in Santa Claus is Coming to Town with the same hunger that any child watched the annual television show that let him stay up late. I once even sat on Santa’s lap in the mall. But even then I knew I was only a visitor in a foreign land. Santa was a Christian, and his workshop didn’t employ any Jews.

Over the years I took on more Jewish observance, and surprisingly my relationship to Christmas changed, even deepened. I looked forward to Christmas Eve and Christmas Day as moments to define myself against what I wasn’t. I sat in empty coffee shops, went to the movies with friends, and had Chinese food. The cold air and the deserted streets were glorious. I loved the lights in the trees and the darkened windows of the stores. Christmas meant lovely isolation and I felt deeply Jewish.

I would give my friends Christmas presents, but none of those people were really Christian. The obligation felt weird. If they didn’t believe Christ was really born on this day, why weren’t they all in Chinatown with me? My only devout Christian friend eschewed really owning anything. Whenever I gave him a gift he looked at it with the discomfort of a man struggling with a live fish He seemed to worry about it flopping on to the floor. I secretly hated his devout Christianity that was ruining Christmas. What else was I supposed to do for him on this day? There was no way I was going to eat Stollen.

Hanukkah, on the other hand, was always a letdown. The attempt to match Christmas in spirit seemed contrived. I would feel irritated when the local mall would put up the obligatory menorah next to the Christmas tree. I didn’t want Hanukkah to have to compete with Christmas. It couldn’t. What is winter without Christmas, without the blinking lights, without the giant plastic peppermint sticks covered in snow? Like this year, Hanukkah sometimes comes so early it doesn’t even feel like winter yet.

But then I married a gentile and everything changed.

My wife came from a family even more secular than my own. They never talk of God or Christ, and I have never heard them mention the Virgin Mary or the manger. But they celebrate with the fervor of postulants.

I grumbled my way through the first few years. I would read The Forward while they busied themselves with wrapping presents and keeping the fire going in the fireplace. I looked out of the corner of eye for any sign of a baby Jesus so I could leap up with an “Ah-Ha! I knew it!” Eventually Johnny Mathis and the smell of the tiny pine cones used in decorations got to me.

What finally undid me, however, was the joy they took in giving. Stockings stuffed to overflowing, the old family photos lovingly framed, just the right sweater, all the perfect books. I would have called it out as obsessive consumption and ugly consumerism, but they always had wonderful things for me. (On Hanukkah, my non-Jewish friends always gave me “Jewish” things, as if Hanukkah presents are supposed to be about Hanukkah.)

As I began to embrace Christmas as part of my wife’s tradition I realized that Hanukkah was also special for me as a Jew. It’s just a coincidence that Hanukkah and Christmas fall around the same time of the year. My mistake was thinking that since Hanukkah is really a minor Jewish holiday and didn’t have anything about it that was distinctly seasonal, it wasn’t worth making a big deal about it. But Hanukkah is a Jewish day, and it marks, like so many other Jewish holidays, the sheer fortitude of the Jewish people. Over and over again we survive. Our lights keep burning, even when they are not as nearly as bright as my neighbor’s giant automaton reindeer.

And so for the last few years, Hanukah has been another time to mark being Jewish. In my home, we don’t celebrate the two holidays together, but go by where land on the calendar. And secretly, I hope when I light the shamash and the first candle of the menorah that it will start to snow, and that it will be snowing all winter, especially when one year I take my family to Chinatown, and show them how Christmas is really done.

[Cross-posted at Jewcy]

Tonight's Event 12/13 Cancelled

Due to inclement weather, the event tonight at the Cambridge Public Library has been canceled. We are hoping to reschedule for January. We will keep you posted.

Light those Lights: Update

Just a quick update to say that Busted Halo posted their discussion with us today. They call us a "Spiritual Odd Couple." Thanks again to Bill McGarvey and Robert Siegel.

Light those Lights

Peter and I read from the book this past weekend at The Church of the Ascension, NYC, in an event co-sponsored by the church and the NYU Episcopal chaplaincy. A handful of my students attended. I got some thumbs up. I discussed my facial tic -- technically, atypical trigeminal neuralgia -- which I think at least some of my students were dying to hear an explanation of. They've often looked at me funny after my face dances under the pressure of this untreatable neurological disorder. After the reading itself we held a small-group discussion with Fr. John Merz, the NYU chaplain. He seems like a very good, very smart priest.

One of my students approached me this afternoon after class. She'd enjoyed herself at the reading, and was happy her boyfriend had attended the event with her, as well. He'd commented after the reading and the small-group discussion that he hadn't ever encountered smart conversation about God. (The flattery is encouraging, but I'd say he needs to go to more churches, in general.)

His point, though, is well taken, and largely motivated the conversation we reproduce in the book. The loud religious talk these days doesn't seem so smart. It's good to lean back in a room and hear a collection of nineteen-year-olds -- some religious, some not -- talk with a priest who seems, while perhaps better versed in the possibilities of what God may or may not be, no more sure about of the answers.

Happy Hanukkah. Light those lights. And thanks to the Velveteen Rabbi, rabbinic student Rachel Barenblat, for her kind words about Faith.

And look for our discussion with Bill McGarvey and Robert Anthony Siegel at Busted Halo, coming soon.