Category: Seeking, Finding

Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast

Post author By Michael Bevel
Post date 12 February 2019
No Comments on Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast

John David:

I’m going to start with the easy stuff before it all falls apart.

These are 10 important books to me:

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. I think her exploration of power, and its intersection with personal animus, is thrilling. Will she ever finish the trilogy? She is my generation’s George R.R. Martin. (I also appreciate her portrait of Henry, who too often is a caricature of a horny monster. Antonia Fraiser, who has written a lot about Henry and his wives, made the great point that while we know Henry is going to marry six women — and kill two of them — Henry doesn’t know this about himself. Each marriage was the answer in his head.)

Independent People by Haldor Laxness. It’s grim, and Icelandic, and is so achingly human about despair and disappointment. Zach recommended it to me when I was looking for non-English novels to assign to my group.

The Makioka Sisters by Jun’ichiro Tanizaki. Painfully, achingly human and blackly funny. It’s a grim Jane Austen novel with more diarrhea. It’s set in Japan right before World War II, and explores modernity in a country on the brink of being decimated by atomic bombs.

Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas. He’s looking at 15h and 16th systems of magic, and then how that is incorporated into traditional religious belief. Thomas doesn’t question people’s vocation. If someone identified as a necromancer, he calls them a necromancer and then doesn’t feel the need to whisper to us in the next sentence, “Of course necromancers do not exist.” He trusts his readers enough. I read a book about Madame Blavatsky and the guy writing it was so mean about her weight, and personal appearance, and sneered at everything Blavatsky did. I am not attempting, in a list of beloved books, to rehabilitate the life and career of Blavatsky. But I don’t need that guy in my ear being a jerk.

The Complete Flannery O’Connor by Flannery O’Connor. Her religious world view is singular and fierce and very Old Testament. (A mentally handicapped boy is drowned in a pond as a kind of baptism and that’s considered a happy ending for that kid.) My personal bible is engraved with this quote from O’Connor: “Grace changes us and the change is painful.”

The Complete Gerard Manley Hopkins by Gerard Manley Hopkins. His descriptions of nature — “skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow”, “my heart in hiding stirred for a bird”, “Goldengrove unleaving” — feel essential to me. My friend Steve gets so mad about Hopkins seemingly giving up his poetry for his life as a Jesuit, so anytime we talk about Hopkins, we talk about that. But I’d rather discuss the poems.

Dickens: A Biography by Peter Ackroyd. It is as long as two Dickens novel, and there are several sections where Ackroyd imagines conversations with Dickens and his comrades that can get a little smurfy. But for someone like me, with a fascination with the 19th century (my lectures tend to focus on Victorian society, culture, literature, morality), it’s such a densely rich package of information. And you can’t understand England in the 19th century without understanding Dickens.

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. About 20 years ago, I picked up a copy of The Woman in White at a used bookstore and was hooked from the opening line. (“This is the story of what a Woman’s patience can endure, and what a Man’s resolution can achieve.”) After finishing it (oh! One of my favorite reading moments in my life is being on the Metro to work and reading a scene in the novel where you find out that someone wicked has read someone else’s diary and how that is revealed was so shocking to me that I honestly gasped and put the book down and the woman sitting next to me asked if I was okay. “No, I am not,” I said. “Something scandalous happened in my book”) I wanted to learn more about Wilkie Collins, a man I’d never heard of until that moment. So I got a bio of him and that’s when I started to unravel a lot of bad, received wisdom about the 19th century. The Victorians are used as a strawman for prudery and repression, but reading the lived lives of those 19th century denizens really solidified my belief in Performed Morality (what we profess publicly so others will think we’re good) and Actual Morality (what we do in the shadows), and that we in the 21st century are not much different from our Victorian cousins except we dress for comfort and don’t die from cholera as often.

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. The first chapter book I remember falling in love with. I’ve read it countless times. I think it’s what defines me as a reader. When I taught it several years ago (I keep using the word “teach” and it occurs to me that I need to clear some stuff up and I’ll do that after this list), and really thought about the book and my relationship to it, I was surprised to realize that when I read it as a boy in, what? The 1980s? I had no idea it was an Old Book. Alice dressed differently than I did in the illustrations, but there was no sense that we were separated by 100 or so years.

Life of the Beloved by Henri Nouwen. It’s a spiritual book that didn’t make me feel cringey while reading it.

Now. More About Mike.

I am a college drop-out. I never finished. I tried, but I was both Too Poor and Too Mentally Ill in my late teens and early 20s. What I know, I know from self-teaching and listening to people smarter than I am. My day job is in financial regulatory compliance (I explain laws and regulations to people in the debt industry to make sure they’re on the right side of consumer law in their acts and practices), and I’ve cobbled together a side-gig as a teacher for adult continuing education. I didn’t want to leave you with the impression that I am something — a college graduate or some other sort of papered smart person — that I am not.

Now, to our Darker Purpose. I want to start by saying that I am about five steps behind you in all of this. I think you are incredibly well-educated in the language of rhetoric and philosophy, and I’m just very handsome and Trying My Best. This isn’t me asserting false modesty, or looking for some affirmations in return. I just want to be honest about where I am able to meet you w/r/t this conversation.

1) “we’re probably approaching the question of religion with two completely different paradigmatic approaches – mine seems to be more coldly philosophical, and yours seems more intent on finding meaning and happiness.”

I think, embarrassingly, this could also be described as, “You, John David, have given this all much more thought than I have; I’m just making my way through by feeling.” Because I don’t feel the pressing need to proselytize or convert, I also don’t feel the need to defend my faith from anything other than gross simplifications and lazy talking points. (This is ironic, of course, because I just got finished suggesting that I am a lazy, unthinking believer. We’ll just have to embrace this mystery!)

I approach religion as something I want to live with (and you will say, “No, I get it, but why?”), and you approach it as something you want to make sense of. You bring up Kierkegaard at some point and I raised both hands above my head in the universal sign for “this child needs help” and Zach kind of explained it to me, but I guess what I’m saying is, “Meet your new best friend Mike Bevel who takes Leaps of Faith all the time!”

2) “if you’ll grant me the liberty, I wanted to ask some deep and probing questions about what you said in your last e-mail. As I hope you know, absolutely nothing has the purpose of offending you. I’ve been really delighted to share in this correspondence with someone so kind and thoughtful, so I’m genuinely interesting in learning something about how you might approach these questions other than what you might consider to be my cool, objective, distant approach.”

I have only been delighted with every interaction we’ve had, and at no point do I feel you’ve been offensive. You can ask, and argue, and push back, and even express frustration. You are at 100% trust right now.

3) “I’m assuming that you’ve heard the saying that ‘anecdotes do not constitute data.'”

I didn’t list this with the other books (I don’t think the whole book is as strong as its thesis), but have you read Wendy Kaminer’s Sleeping with Extraterrestrials? She argues that, somewhere along the way, this deformed sense of propriety infected discourse and we have stopped asking follow-up questions to extraordinary claims. If someone says “I was taken aboard an alien spacecraft” or “Jesus appeared in my room last night” we (the universal “we”) worry that we’re rude if we say, “I don’t know if I believe that.” Kaminer wants us to ask more questions.

4) “What about your mystical experiences, if anything, led to you in the direction of a different conclusion – keeping in mind of course, that when someone tells you they were abducted by aliens, you would be likely to question their sanity, not engage them in rational discussion…”

Because I wanted it to be God. I think that’s probably a frustrating answer. I’m not using rationalism — and I think you are much more developed along that line. Because it felt like what I had always imagined God would feel like. (Have you seen Russian Doll on Netflix? One character attempts to bring up morality as a cause for the time loop they’re in, and another says, “The universe is moral and just happens to have your ideas about morality?”) But there isn’t anything rational about the experience.

Language fails me a little when we get here. I don’t believe that God is a person. I don’t believe that there is a place we go after this life that matches the artistic ideals of Heaven. I think God wants us to live this life here, and live it as well as we can, doing as little harm to those around us and trying as much as we can to love everyone, or at least to respect the belovedness in them. I don’t believe in miracles. I don’t believe intercessory prayer works. I think there’s a force in the universe that is good, and I want to align myself with that goodness in the universe.

(But man would I love an afterlife. It’s my narcissism. I think that I am so important that of course I should continue to live, just as I am, for all of eternity. I know it’s not true, but I want it to be true.)

5) “You said in your last email that the connection ‘with what I’ve decided to experience as God … has encouraged me to continue as a believer. Specifically, I’d like to ask this. What about that experience led you to believe that it was God?”

This is question 4 again, and I remain just as unable to describe it to you. I always get anxious in these situations because I don’t want to give the impression that my not being able to answer it means that it’s unanswerable. (It might very well be unanswerable.) It just means I am not yet smart enough to explain it. (And I may reach a point where I am smart enough and then the answer will be, “Oh, you did all this for nothing.”) And maybe that’s why faith is: the belief that you’ll eventually be able to explain the unexplainable.

“But why do you love carrot cake so much?” you could also ask, and I could only answer, “Because it tastes incredibly delicious and I am not a monster.” Why do I think it was God? Because it checked all my boxes for what God would feel like. The experience felt large and ineffable, but also suffused with love. I’d never experienced it before.

I’ll show a chink in my Armor of Faith: There are times where, especially when I dip into a depressive state, and I don’t feel that experience of God, where I begin to doubt, well, a lot of things. I doubt God. I doubt myself as a believer. I doubt the experience itself. I don’t know if I’ll ever live a comprehensive life of untroubled belief. That doesn’t worry me.

6) “If it was really a God, why doesn’t It/He/She want everyone to know that It exists, and why does It so readily reveal itself to some people and hide itself from others?”

I have two answers for this.

Mike Bevel: Christian — God reveals himself* to everyone, all the time, and is always talking to us and making himself known. We just don’t listen. God is love, and that gets in the way of our selfishness. There was a parody ad Y E A R S ago, with a woman on screen, showing a face of distress, with an anvil on her head. She says to the camera, “The pressure is unbearable. I feel it here, and here, and here. I struggle with how to deal with this pain.” And an off-camera voice says, “Have you ever thought about taking the anvil off your head?” And she says, “No, I hadn’t. But I’m willing to try anything.” There’s a screen-wipe to show the passing of time, and the woman is back on screen, this time looking calm and happy, and with no anvil on her head. She says, “It’s gone. The pressure’s gone. The agonizing pain. All of it. Gone.” And the off-camera voice says, “Would you try taking the anvil off your head again?” And she says, hopefully, “Yes! Yes I would take the anvil off my head.” It’s a parable, John David.

[* I am not great at un-gendering my language around God. I don’t believe that God has a gender of any kind; but I think of him in male terms because that’s what I grew up believing and hearing. It’s not great.]

Mike Bevel: Doubting Thomas — Yeah. I don’t know. That’s a good question. God is a Chatty Cathy throughout so much of the Old Testament*, and now we seem to have more silence than anything. It can feel devastating.

[* I am a Baptist. But I have a LOT of affinity for the Gnostics. And I’m more Marcion in my reading of the Bible than not.]

7) “You’ve said something that I’m afraid not many Christians are willing to admit: ‘I believe God exists not for any tangible reason.’ Is there any other arena of decision-making or thought aside from the spiritual/theological where this assertion would not be scoffed at?”

I guess I’d ask back how do you handle personal preferences in your worldview? Because that seems to be an irrational exception rationalists make. Here, for instance, is a list of foods I hate:

Cantaloupe
Eggplant
Celery
Cooked Celery
Cooked Carrots
Hominy
Green Peppers
Any Cooked Peppers
Chocolate
Unidentifiable Chunks of Things That Cause the Texture of a Dish to be Upsetting

8) “Your assertion that ‘I believe evolution is wrong not for any tangible reason’ is going to be met with utter bewilderment by scientists.”

I was VERY worried that at some point I expressed some creationist sympathies. I think you’re making a hypothetical point here. And I just want to go on the record to you, friend to friend: I 100% believe in evolution.

But.

I don’t understand at all how it works. I accept it on faith. I accept that smarter people than I am have a handle on it. I think we’re refining our ideas about it all the time because our science gets better and better. (We can’t really say that about religion, though, can we? Religion more often than not wants to firmly entrench itself in dogmatism and doesn’t take kindly to, “Well, here’s some new information you may want to incorporate.”)

I sometimes find myself deeply depressed and embarrassed that so much of how the world works is as much an article of faith for me as my belief in religion. I am not saying that religion and science themselves are two sides of the same coin; I’m just saying that in my thieves’ pouch, they are. (I will watch the fuck out of a science documentary, btw.)

9) “I think you have said perhaps one thing that is incorrect, and I want to see what you have to say in response. You said, ‘I’m making choices toward belief because my years of disbelief left me sad and depressed and empty.’ I’m certainly glad that you’re no longer experiencing those emotions anymore. However, in the very sentence before that, you said ‘God may or may not exist.’ Do you think that your psychological state was so vastly improved by the existence of something you haven’t even convinced yourself of? If you’d had said ‘God exists, I know him, and I can feel him,’ then I would be much more convinced of that feeling being responsible for your (what I hope is now non-existent) sadness and depression. However, how can that sadness and depression be conclusively gone if you haven’t even fully convinced yourself that the cause of your happiness even exists?”

This is a complicated question. They’re all complicated, actually, as far as I am concerned. But this one. Whoo-boy.

I am mentally ill. I am mentally ill and treated, right now, and it’s going great, thank you for asking. I am prone to:

Depression
Anxiety
Intrusive violent thoughts
Obsessive-compulsive ideation

Some of that might be genetic. Some of it might be nurture. (My childhood Wasn’t Great.) And it’s so easy (whether it’s correct or not) to write off my experiences as “Ohhhhhh. [makes spiral gesture around ear] Got it.” God didn’t take any of that away — that was all Western medicine and talk therapy. (Psychiatry, by the way. I mean, talk about taking things on faith. “Let’s just see what happens when this medication originally developed for avian diabetes gets into your brain” is as nutty as any religious belief.)

When I say that God may or may not exist, I think what I’m trying to do is provide a space for the other person to feel safe in their disbelief. I don’t want to convert someone through conversation. So, I believe God exists, but I am not troubled at all being fully in communion (heh) with someone who doesn’t believe in God at all. Like, for instance, Zach. He’s an atheistic Buddhist. He does not share any of my religious beliefs. I love that guy so fucking much.

My sadness and depression may never truly be gone, because I may just not have a brain that makes the typical amount of whatever, we’ve established I’m no scientist. But what I’m getting better at, both with my belief in God, and just through trusting myself, is not blaming myself for my feelings. That’s a fun game I run: Oh, I am sad, must be because I did something super shitty and this is the way the world works. Why I’m not a Calvinist I don’t know. If I ever start talking like a Calvinist, that should be your cue that I’m on the road to Self Harm.

John David: I love these emails with you so much. Thank you for your kindness, patience, curiosity, and deep intelligence. This continues to be such a pleasure. I’m so glad we met.

Baptist Finding Gnostics God Introductions Seeking Seeking, Finding

Some Things What I Believe

When I tell you that I am a Gnostic Baptist, it’s not a lasting label. I haven’t been anything long enough to safely (and sagely) say, “THIS I BELIEVE,” with any sort of lasting conviction.

In a back-and-forth with my friend Steve, after calling myself a Gnostic Baptist, he wrote, “Gnostic Baptist suits your eccentricity. Would that mean the same thing as Know-it-all Fundamentalist?” And it a little bit hurt my feelings because it sounded dismissive, or that I had been caught in some sort of Divine Contradiction. Any time I feel challenged, I tend to respond negatively. I tried, though, this time, to be matter-of-fact:

(I can handle a little ribbing about my conversion. But I’d prefer it not to be entirely dismissive? My being a Christian is as weird to me as it must be to you, but I’m working on not rising to defensiveness and, ironically, I’m asking for you not to help me practice so much.)

* * * * *

As I’m prepping for my Wolf Hall lecture series, I’ve been thinking a lot about historical claims and what is “true” in history. I revere Dame Hilary Mantel above all other writers in the known/unknown universe, and I agree wholeheartedly with her stance: Historians tell us what we have — a book, a letter, a speech, a brooch — but that’s about all they can definitively tell us. They can’t always tell us why we have it. We’re all liars. We lie in letters, we lie in our diaries, we lie to each other. Any sort of looking back is done with an agenda more than with any hold on the slippery truth.

I’m still working on how to describe myself, religiously, if I’m ever asked. I haven’t broadcast this New Mike very widely. (I’ve stopped posting to social media. I found that I was using Facebook as a means of emotional gratification, so that I had, in a sense, trained myself to go to Facebook to feel good about myself and that seemed…unhealthy.)

Zach has been wonderfully supportive. He just wanted me to feel spiritually connected/whole in the way he does, and had no care at all how I got there. (He did reveal to me, later, that there were some anxiety attacks when he thought I was going Catholic, only because of his own experience with that church.) He’s also been really good at asking questions that help me better define things.

* * * * *

I thought I’d share some of my beliefs here:

I call myself a Gnostic Baptist because I’m pretty against orthodoxy. Were they kooks? Sure. They all were. But I like the communal practice that gnostics encouraged. I like that there is some heavy leaning on Eastern traditions. (One part of gnostic belief: the resurrection simply referred to Jesus’s experience of enlightenment, and that we all can be resurrected as each of us, in our own way, reaches enlightenment.)
I don’t believe in sin. Or, rather, I think we can sin against ourselves and each other by causing harm, but I don’t think God keeps any sort of score card that he balances when we die. I believe salvation is already guaranteed (and didn’t require Christ’s crucifixion; but more on that in another bullet), so our job on earth is really to care for each other. We do this not because if we care enough, or more than someone else, we will end up in a better part of the afterllife. We do it because it eases our own sense of suffering to do good for ourselves or someone else.
I don’t think Christ was crucified for us to be saved. I think he was executed for practicing radical politics that centered all the “others” rather than the status quo. (When I see you next week I’ll tell you about an EXHAUSTING Quaker Bible study I went to. I tried to explain my idea about sin and the crucifixion, and I tried to explain how I don’t believe sin exists. “No, sin exists,” I was told by a Very Young Woman who performs her faith more than she seems to live it. By the way, I was told a lot of things, but listened to rarely; it was as if two Wikipedias had trapped me in a Starbucks in Adelphi, Maryland, and I alone was there to hear too much. “It is translated as ‘missing the mark,’ like in archery.” And I said, “You can’t believe that Christ died because we kept not hitting the target in archery, right?” And she said, “That’s not what I said at all.”)
I think God is just an aspect of some sort of divine experience in which we all participate. My beliefs are no more correct — or wrong — than any other belief. It’s all ways of trying to understand and grapple with the ineffable. All beliefs are valid, but not all beliefs work for all people. I’m not a Catholic. I’m definitely not a Quaker. I like my radical Baptist pastor a lot.
I think the Bible shows a deity that is learning how to be a deity. Is learning how to love and be loved.

Tags Belief, Gnostic Baptist, Hilary Mantel, History, Lists, Wolf Hall

Belief Finding God Seeking Seeking, Finding The Bible, KJV The Bible, NIV

Suffering, Part 1: Margaret

Post author By Michael Bevel
Post date 29 August 2018
2 Comments on Suffering, Part 1: Margaret

Who were the homestead wives?
Who were the gold rush brides?
Does anybody know?
Do their works survive their yellow fever lives in the pages they wrote?
The land was free, yet it cost their lives.

— “Gold Rush Brides,” 10,000 Maniacs

A lovely woman whom I don’t remember meeting emails me periodically to check in on my faith. She’s Catholic, and named Margaret, so I probably met her at the one (1) catechism class I attended before I realized with the deep sweetness of unerring certainty that I was Not a Catholic.

We started emailing because I asked her not to email me any more. She organizes Dorothy Day Dinners (I imagine I’ll write about Day at some point in the future. I find her fetishization of the poor to be…worth writing about) and had sent an email to a group asking for people to contribute ingredients. It’s stone-soupy, if you will, if stone soup is a reference you’re familiar with.

I wrote to Margaret in early August, saying, “Please take me off your email list. I am so glad of the work you’re doing, and admire everyone. But after a lot of searching, I feel that my spiritual home is with the Quakers.”

So, as it turns out, my spiritual home is not with the Quakers, but that’s not the point of this story.

Margaret wrote back, “I have a sense of loss in reading that you are leaving our Communion and wonder if you would honor me with some details about what we are missing that you find attractive with the Quakers.”

So I did.

Margaret:

When I came to the Church, it was at a time where I finally was able to stay out of my own way about faith and God. Before, I worried that I was being intellectually disingenuous; I had always identified as an atheist, and thought that made me smarter than everyone who was a believer.

Of course, then God comes along and quietly reminds me that I’m not smarter than anyone at all. I’m just loud. 🙂

I knew I needed a spiritual home. I really thought it was going to be Catholicism. But I think there is so much culture there — being Catholic is more than just going to Mass. And I didn’t feel Catholicism in my heart at all.

Growing up in a faith tradition is easier than converting; and I feel maybe one should convert only if one cannot find what she needs in her own “home.” And I was starting out too late in the evening, as it was, to be an effective Catholic; I would have felt very behind all the time, and my disbelief would be heavy.

I found the Quakers because my husband said, “What about that?” He’s a Won Buddhist, a Korean-form of belief. (He’s not Korean, by the way.) His conversion was also circuitous. He had gone to a Quaker school in North Carolina (Guilford), which, by virtue of being a contemplative religion, made stretching into Eastern traditions less jarring, I’d guess. I went to my first meeting, and was sort of overwhelmed with peace and love. I could start there, from the beginning; whereas, while everyone was lovely and welcoming to me when I came to my one (and only) catechism class, I didn’t feel like I was starting from a place of love. I felt like I was starting only from a place of struggle.

I now identify as a Quaker with a sense of Flannery O’Connor about myself, and an appreciation of Gerard Manley Hopkins. So I’m not completely hidden from Catholicism.

Again, I can’t stress enough how much I now do not identify as a Quaker, though I admire them greatly. Our breakup was not the never-speak-to-me-or-my-good-strong-sons-again type. I just need more religion in my religion than unprogrammed Quakerism provides. I need the Bible. I need God and Jesus. I need pews and awkward hymns and a sermon because, as it turns out, I really need structure. I didn’t grow up feeling necessarily safe and secure; when I feel like things are too come-what-come-may my anxiety spikes and I’m left chewing the skin around my fingers and counting my steps to soothe myself.

My friend Steve, through a teacher he had, explained to me once that one is probably best served within the religious tradition in which they were raised. Those cultural groundings are important. It’s not a necessity — clearly, as Zach is incredibly content and thriving in Buddhism. But, as I learn more about myself and my relationship to faith, it is a necessity to me.

I later sent Margaret an email with a link to an essay I wrote. I titled it “of possible interest” and she very graciously said, “I probably will not be able to check in on your web site but things change and I may find time to do so in the future.” I love Margaret very much, and her honesty. I probably wouldn’t have time to read my own writing, too, but would lie to me and say, “I can’t wait to read this tonight.” But I’m trying not to be like that. Margaret went on to write, “My ex-husband’s health is declining and very soon I am going to need to give more of my time to him.” She also said, “Today, I am going to try and get through the heat, cook and can spaghetti sauce and make an offering of my day to God.” And she closed by asking for prayers for her and her family.

(The thesis of this post, by the way — suffering — we’re getting to it. I promise.)

A few weeks ago I completed hospice training. As part of my religious focus, on myself and the world, this felt like something I could give that also needed giving. Right now, it makes me feel useful. My hope is that it will make me humble. There’s something self-serving in announcing, “I PROVIDE HOSPICE CARE.” And it’s there because we’re humans, with human feelings and emotions. Even Christ let slip he was the Son of God every now and again, and he was both wholly human and wholly divine.

“You sound dead-set on turning your stove on today, so I won’t counsel against it. I baked cookies on Sunday and thanked God for air conditioning,” I wrote her back, among a bunch of other things, including how now, at 40, I’m better able to hear the Still Small Voice of God. When I was younger — in my 20s — I expected, or, rather, demanded, that God speak to me in a Giant Booming Voice. And when He didn’t, I told myself, ‘Well, that proves it. He doesn’t exist.’ But none of us are smart in our 20s. Now, in my 40s, I hear God in the still small voice from 1 Kings. I think about the Parable of the Mustard Seed, and how a very small faith, if well-tended, can provide safety and shelter. It is incredibly humbling. And such a great rejoinder to Twenty-Year-Old Mike, who didn’t know how to listen.

Margaret explained the stove thing to me:

The stove thing is because my garden had produced a nice crop of tomatoes and I must “do” something with them and not let them spoil. I often think, at this moment each year, about the pioneer women, or even early 20th c. women who slaved over a wood heat stove to can. They died young but at least I have made it to 70 and have fans. If I make the heat today a prayer, it is called the prayer of the body. What I mean is this: I pray aloud or silently and this is pleasing to God. If I offer my whole day to God, my prayers, works, joys and suffering, and I unite myself to His passion and death, then suffering the heat of the day IS a prayer.

And we’re where I need us to be, now. Thee and me, we are all caught up. Because I want to think about religious suffering for a few more words.

I want to make this clear at the start: my religious beliefs and practices are very much mine. They’re influenced by what I’ve read, what I’ve heard, whom I’ve met, and what feels right to me, which is ever changing as I’m influenced by the aforementioned three other things. (“I’m new in town…” — John Mulaney) I’m sure this is true for a lot of my brothers and sisters in Christ. The idea of God requiring suffering from me is so foreign, so unutterably alien, that I am actively compelled away from the idea of lovingkindness when considering it. Faith that values suffering is a faith that I don’t wish to have. It is a faith that is alien to me. It’s a faith, nonetheless; it’s just not mine own, mine own, mine own.

Within my faith practice, suffering is something I commit against myself. When I push against the mystery of God, when I give in to harmful/uncaring thoughts against my self (cf Cheri Huber, e.g.), I cause suffering. I can also cause others to suffer, too, which is reflected back on to me like rubber and glue. There is no good in suffering, as far as I can see. And Christ, of all people, certainly does not need my suffering to weigh the love I have for Him.

But it’s Margaret’s, and not mine to take from her, or disavow to her.

“Ok, I begin,” she ends.

Tags 1 Kings, 1 Kings 9:9-13, 10000 Maniacs, Catholic, Catholicism, Cheri Huber, Dorothy Day, Flannery O'Connor, Gerard Manely Hopkins, Gold Rush Brides, Hospice, Margaret, Prayer, Quakerism, Quakers, Stoves, Suffering, Won Buddhism

Belief Seeking Seeking, Finding

Mystery

“I was here and this house was here, you and I and this evening were here, and they had always been here.”

— John Fowles, The Magus

I am halfway through my second try at The Magus. Assume that until I tell you otherwise I’m still in media res, and do not spoil the end. I’m halfway through The Magus; I’m technically nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita; but I’m at the beginning of what feels like a spiritual journey — but a journey I’ve started before, with little success. One worries one starts too late in the evening to return home before dark; but maybe one isn’t supposed to return home, and maybe one shouldn’t mind the night.

I read The Collector by Fowles first. If you’ve not, I’m definitely going to spoil things and your journey is your journey and maybe you don’t care about endings but maybe just this once, for this, give yourself the gift of Mystery. Anyway, any book worth reading is worth reading twice.

Fowles is…I’m not sure what he is w/r/t religion. We’ll say he’s atheist until someone tells us different but please never tell me things because I am far too handsome at this point to learn. And yet, he’s deeply interested in concepts of free will and fate, of determination and destiny. Can they be reconciled? Should they? What if I finished this post in nothing but rhetoricals?

In The Collector, a man named Frederick abducts a woman named Miranda so if you were saving The Collector because it sounded like a cozy Charing Cross Road-type novel it is almost entirely the opposite except the room Miranda is kept in actually sounds pretty nice. She is ineffably beautiful to Frederick, whom she calls Ferdinand, because Fowles has read Shakespeare and wants you to know it. (He wrote it when he was 37, which is a little long in the tooth to be preening for praise with your allusions and et cetera but also notice how seamlessly I worked in a reference to Dante yes I am 46.) (Having made my jab at Fowles I want to go on record as saying the book is upsettingly perfect and you should read it and if you haven’t and you’re reading this then how dare you ignore my Very Good Advice.) While Miranda certainly despises Ferdinand for the kidnapping — as well she should — she also despises collectors in general. She sees art, in all its forms, whether manufactured or the art of nature, as communal, no more yours to do with as you want as it would be hers. Collectors keep things hidden away, or grandly allow what should be humbly proffered.

The main character of The Magus (I have no idea how to pronounce the title of the book, by they way, and neither do you, so don’t get those typing fingers ready to tell me. My friend Steve says it’s may-gus, which I hate. Someone else said it’s may-jus. I say maa-jus both because it doesn’t sound like maggot at all and because if it’s the plural of magi, then it should sound like magi and don’t you dare tell me how to pronounce magi either. Really: I am simply too attractive to know one more thing that I didn’t already start with) is a man named Nick and you can come to your own conclusions about him as a human being, because you were granted the gift of discernment by Hashem Himself, but if it is at all positive then I’ll need to rescind your gift because that’s my purpose on Mother Gaia. He’s entitled, much like Ferdinand in The Collector in the way both want to own women’s bodies. Though Nick is less kidnappy, that’s honestly damning him with faint praise. Nick falls under the spell of a man named Maurice (pronounced the French way, moor-reese) Conchis (with a soft, rather than hard, ch so it sounds like conscious which is clever but I only figured it out when I was saying his name aloud to my friend Steve on the 25th day of August in the Year of Our Lord, 20 and 18). Conchis lays out elaborate mind games for Nick, and Nick, when not being physically abusive to women, spends his time trying to peek behind the curtain.

It may be that, reading the books this close together highlights things that aren’t really highlightable, that I’m seeing connections where there maybe wouldn’t generally be.

I’m struck by the similarities between Miranda in The Collector and Nicholas in The Magus: both are in environments tightly controlled by someone else — Frederick and Conchis respectively. Both resist the opportunity to participate in the mystery before them. Both suffer. Miranda dies in the end, and Nicholas’s fate is still unknown to me and a man at Bible Study this morning was well on his way to spoiling the whole thing for me until I shushed him, but politely, because we’re Baptists, and shushing is next to holiness.

There’s an element of Flannery O’Connor* to this reading — the idea that there is something important and transformative in Miranda’s captivity — but I think it’s there. She is on the way to understanding herself and her relationships, with her family and the older artist with whom she had had an unsatisfying affair, and it’s the situation — her abduction and confinement — that is encouraging her self-reflection, which is something she had not done much of before. I mean, was she going to be magically let go if she had stayed and found herself fully actualized? Dude’s a kidnapper, so probably not. But then, maybe the answer key to this philosophical test says that if she truly understood herself and her decisions and her past, she would stay with Frederick regardless. But that also means that we’d have to see him, at the end, looking for another acolyte rather than another victim. Tomayto/tomahto.

[* I am going to write two Flannery O’Connor-based short stories. The first will be called “Flannery O’Connor’s Grand Day Out” and it will star my husband, Zach, who will take O’Connor on a pilgrimage of hedonism. The other will be called “Flannery O’Connor as Calvinist” and it will be short vignettes of domestic life where the protagonist dies in the end after either having a wonderful time at the party, or murdered while not thinking about how unworthy he is of God.]

20171115_212123 — Zach, drinking fondue chocolate through a makeshift straw. I love him so goddamned much you guys.

Nicholas also fights against the mystery, and wants to be in control. Fowles is working back and forth between arguments for free will and arguments for destiny. This is encapsulated in that marvelous passage delivered by Conchis about 100 pages into the novel, and which I quoted above:

“I was here and this house was here, you and I and this evening were here, and they had always been here.”

This is echoed in other places throughout the book — most recently in the section I just finished where Nick and Alison are hiking the mountain. Nick feels, for a moment, as if he was always supposed to be on that particular mountain with this particular woman. He’s also hella horny and they fuck after swimming in a small lake and the thing about that is: it’s really none of my business.

Flannery O’Connor says, “All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.” Miranda is transformed, in the end, in her death. Will Nick be as gracious to the mystery?

Don’t tell me.

Tags Charing Cross Road, Dante, Ferdinand, Flannery O'Connor, Grace, Inferno, John Fowles, Miranda, Shakespeare, The Collector, The Divine Comedy, The Magus, The Tempest

Belief Finding God Mental Health New Testament Old Testament Seeking Seeking, Finding

“I battled the Holy Ghost once on the laundry porch”

Post author By Michael Bevel
Post date 16 August 2018
3 Comments on “I battled the Holy Ghost once on the laundry porch”

Truth is a Gentlemen’s Agreement between two people, neither of whom are gentlemen, neither interested in honesty. Instead, these people are simply polite fictions dressed up in spats and a pince-nez, only half-listening because the other half of their attention is focused on how much damage can be caused by what is being shared.

My mom is 73 this year, pocked with Alzheimer’s, haunted by ghosts and it can be tough to suss out from her various descriptions how many are phantoms of the mind, how many are figments of her imagination, and how many, if any, are visitors from some past Other Side. If they have a message for her, it must be frustrating. She won’t remember it. “Well, your brother Michael’s dead,” she explained to me. This was after she and I had talked on the phone earlier that day.

I’m going to tell a story about her, and it’s a Gentlemen’s Agreement story where we’re going to agree, thee and me, that I am telling you the truth.

Deal?

* * * * *

My mom was born in 1945 in Leola, Arkansas, and you’re right, you probably have never heard of it. As of 2010 it had a population of 501. It’s known, if it’s known, and it’s not known, so I’m only using an idiom, for Cox Creek Lake, created in 1964 by damming a tributary of the Saline River. According to my mom, an uncle molested her in that river, holding her afloat with one hand and threatening to drown her.

That sounds terrible, I remember telling her, and she said, “Eventually. I didn’t know how to understand it.” She was six.

* * * * *

My maternal grandparents were (are?) (no, were, they’re both dead) a man named Edward Clinton Kelly and a woman named Flossie Laverne Badgett. He was Irish, with seven sisters who lived in a rundown house on the outskirts of Leola, which is already on the outskirts of Malvern, itself an outskirt of Little Rock. It’s like sinking into the Saline River. The sisters refused both indoor plumbing (“not safe”) and electricity, even when the electric company came through to wire every house with incandescence. They lived simply, by candlelight and oil, firelight and the sun. Come evening, the house would curl itself catlike into the darker undergrowth that surrounded it.

I asked my mom once why the sisters didn’t have electricity. “It’s so the Devil wouldn’t be able to see them at night,” she explained. “But what if he brought his own light?” I asked. “He doesn’t have his own light. He lost that when he fell to earth.” Now he preys on us here, in this world, she continued, always looking into windows to see who had a light, like we did. “That’s how he finds you. The sooner you turn the light off at night, the sooner you won’t be visited by the Devil in your bedroom.” I was six.

* * * * *

My mom grew up Southern Baptist because it was Arkansas and everyone in Arkansas was either Southern Baptist or dead. Her grandmother was a Pentecostal named Chloe Badgett. Her church didn’t meet always in a building. It met by the Saline River often throughout the summer, baptising members and non-members, each dunk as sweet as the one that came right before. It was as if they were aspersoria, hoping to fill themselves to the cap with duckweed and Christ’s power.

(My Uncle Thurston told me, when I was 11, about a dam built on the Saline River, in 1964, the one that ultimately created Cox Creek Lake. I was too young to notice any wink in an adult’s eye; never knew lies could be funny. “There are catfish at the bottom of that dam big enough to swaller a man,” he said, gravely, and I have been terrified of water ever since and yet one must be baptized, I guess, if one is to be truly saved. Washed clean of sin, held down by enormous catfish until I drown.)

These Pentecostals also handled serpents and drank — or, rather, sipped — poison, based on the Good News revealed in Mark 16:17-18,

And these signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up serpents with their hands; and if they drink any deadly poison, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover.

I asked my mom if she ever saw Great Grandma Badgett cast out a demon. I was fascinated with the idea. Would you see it ricochet out of the soul of the possessed? Would some furry, cloven-hoofed monster crawl out of the throat and scuttle crablike across the floor? “No,” mama said, “she never cast out demons.” Grandma Laverne, who was still alive then, nodded. “She could have, but she ain’t.” I think Grandma Laverne was in her own kitchen at the time, grinding up ice for iced tea. “I did battle the Holy Ghost on the laundry porch once,” she said. Mama looked at me and then past.

* * * * *

When my mom was born, my grandma was 29 and my grandfather was 70. This’ll be more important in a second only just now I’m going to correct the record.

For years, when I’ve told this story, about my mom, and religion, and why my brother and I didn’t have much of it growing up, in my version of this Gentlemen’s Agreement my grandpa was in his mid-80s when my mom was born, and my grandma was in her mid-20s. While doing only the barest of research for this piece, I learned a bunch of other dates, like that Grandma Laverne was born in 1916, that her husband, Edward, with the weird sisters, was born in 1875. I had thought he came here from Ireland, but according to Ancestry.com he was from Arkansas. His father, however, was Irish, and those Kellys became farmers here, or sharecroppers, rather, and carpenter assistants. I also learned that my grandfather was married before, to a woman named Lizzie, who died the year after Laverne and Edward had their first child, a son named Hubert.

Family stories aren’t ever for true. They’re for instruction, or comfort, or explanation. What does it mean to know anything anyway? There’s what’s true, and what works, and we aim for the middle, or we don’t aim at all.

* * * * *

Because my grandfather was 70 when my mom was born, and because Great Grandma Badgett had been ordered by God to handle serpents, drink poison, cast out demons (even though she ain’t’ed yet), and heal the sick, she decided that my mom must be a product of the Devil, that it wasn’t the Holy Ghost her daughter battled on the laundry porch. In her heart, 70 was too old for a natural child to be born. There was something unnatural about my mom.

“Did you ever feel unnatural?” I remember asking her. Most stories about her past were slurred to me late on school nights, when she’d have too many cans of Coors and no one else to talk to. That’s how I learned about the river molestation. Or the first of her three marriages. I learned that I wasn’t a wanted child, and that she had tried a bunch of ways to abort me without, you know, aborting me. She would tell me, “Michael, when you boys are out of the house I will kill myself. I won’t be needed any more.” And I believed her, because we’re supposed to believe our parents. And now, mid-70s, she doesn’t remember this plan at all because she doesn’t remember anything. A little girl cries sometimes in the bushes, she says, outside her bedroom.

“Did you ever feel unnatural?” I ask, and she says, “No. I knew I was, but I never felt I was.” How did you know? I asked her. “Because Grandma Badgett told me,” mama said. “She talks directly to God.” Isn’t she dead now, though, I ask? “It would take more than death to keep her quiet,” mama said, and she shuddered.

* * * * *

My Great Grandma Badgett tried to kill my mom the summer my mom was three. There was a large cauldron for boiling blood when the hogs were slaughtered, I’m told for puddings and sausage and if it turns out that none of the Ireland stuff is true then I will have dodged a bullet because Irish food sounds terrible. Great Grandma Badgett filled it with water, built up a fire, and read from the Book of Acts and the Book of Revelations. (This part is the Gentlemen’s Agreement; I don’t know what she read from the Bible or if she read from the Bible. The rest is true, if also gentlemanly agreeable.)

Great Grandma Badgett’s plan was to boil the Devil out of mama. He could not be cast out or frightened by snakes. Poison and the laying on of hands was no good, either. The smell of meat, mama would say, is pleasing to the Lord. “That must be where she got it.” Sometimes when she talks about it, she is talking about it to explain forgiveness: What if the Devil had been responsible for her birth? What if Great Grandma Badgett was all that stood between the righteous and unrighteous. The Bible itself is filled with iron-willed women; couldn’t there be room for one named Chloe?

Other times, though — and, actually, most times — what I’m hearing is a survivor who didn’t make it. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a short story, “The Wall,” in 1939. Several men are condemned to death, to be killed by firing squad. What Sartre wants to explore is when do we die? There is an easy answer: when something kills us. And then there’s the uncomfortable answer, which is: any time at all.

I believe mama died in that pot. I believed any sense of care and safety and protection and love were plunged out of her. I think she was three, and afraid, and in thrall to a woman who was also far too young for the task she assigned herself, and also, too, afraid.

* * * * *

What happens next changes. She’s never told me the same story twice. So I’ll tell my Gentleman’s version, and that will have to do.

* * * * *

The mailman, on his daily route, passed by and saw a woman in her early 50s struggling with a child not yet not a toddler. He saw the older woman pick the child up, and saw that woman carry that child, kicking and crying, to a pot, suspended over a fire, by chains. He saw all this and he…did nothing. He tipped his cap towards Great Grandma Badgett, and my mom watched him leave.

Where Grandma Laverne was in all of this is never clear. Sometimes mama says she had gone to town for supplies. Sometimes, she’s just sort of not there, until she is, until she comes home and sees her own mother trying to boil her own granddaughter to death.

I want to the story to end heroically — Grandma Laverne tells Great Grandma Badgett, in no uncertain terms, that she’s to take her hands off of her daughter, and to leave that house, and to never return. I want this to resurrect my mom from the death I imagined for her at age three. I want my mom to only feel love and know safety after this.

* * * * *

I want.