Where We Find Ourselves

I once journeyed to the graveyard where some of my relatives are inurned and stood at my grandmother’s headstone. In one hand I held a photograph of my adoptive mother tending that grave 55 years earlier; in the other I held a picture of my grandfather attending his wife’s interment 75 years past. Standing on the same plot of land where they had once trod gave me an epic, mystical sensation … until it occurred to me that every space within which I walk, sit or stand in everyday life was once occupied by countless individuals, both living and deceased. Why do we attach special significance and reverence to patches of earth bearing etched stones? Because beneath each and every rock lies a primordial question: Why? It has been said in countless sundry ways that how we face death determines how we conduct our lives. Because the realization that one’s physical body will sooner or later expire is an excruciating experience, the question of whether a spiritual existence awaits is a most fundamental and ubiquitous concern – it quite literally strikes us where we live and breathe. To answer the question – Yes, there is an afterlife or No, there is not – is to announce at the cosmic poker table I’m all in. So consumed is the world at large with the issue that, in April 2010, Amazon.com offered no less than 595,902 books on the subject Religion. To appreciate the contextual magnitude of this number, let us compare the following: Subject Matter Books in Print Biography 488,209 Psychology 305,192 How To 295,356 Sports 224,710 Self-Help 100,464 I was born and raised in Oklahoma, which is often referred to as the buckle of the Bible-belt. My earliest memories include storybooks about David and Goliath, Sunday school lessons about Jesus and, fondest of all, juice and cookie breaks in the church gymnasium. Unlike the Catholics, we didn’t just attend a monotonal, ritualistic service once a week and on holidays – we put some old-fashioned blood, sweat and tears into our observance. We Southern Baptists prided ourselves on our capacity for overkill, practicing our truer faith by attending both Sunday school and the congregational service on Sunday morning (the latter of which our preacher offered twice, with the truncated program at 9:00 followed by the expanded repeat performance at 10:30), then returning mid-afternoon for age-assorted Bible-study, after which we would flock to the auditorium for the evening’s prayer meeting. Those of us between the approximate ages of 13 and 18 would then stampede to the local pizza parlor to stuff our faces with transfats, suck down gallons of high-calorie soda and incite such teenage mayhem that our favorite haunt (Shotgun Sam’s) was eventually forced to ban church youth groups altogether. We would return to the auditorium on Wednesday night for another fix of sermonizing and hymning, after which the most committed among us, armed with tracts and pamphlets and miniature Bibles, would descend upon peaceful neighborhoods, ring doorbells and sell our recipe for salvation to the heathen (this we euphemiously termed Visitation). In the same way animals are born with innate behavior patterns imprinted by countless generations of environmental adaptation, so Homo sapiens is biologically preprogrammed with certain fundamental instincts. One of these instincts is integrity – at the moment we draw our first breath, the human being’s every word and deed is coherent with his inner thoughts. In other words, the newborn infant is incapable of thinking in one way but acting in another. While some of us retain this primal bent throughout our lives, many of us surrender it amidst the relentless assault of teachers, preachers, parents, movie stars and a host of other “authority figures” we encounter along life’s journey. He who lives with integrity does not just pay lip service to his chosen ethos; he lets it perfuse every aspect of his daily life. Thus, in addition to the above described regimen, I taught Vacation Bible School in summer and attended an early morning Bible-study on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But living the Christian life was far from drudgery. In fact, just as the middle-aged and elderly rue the passing of the vitality of their youth while they concomitantly despise its naiveté, I sometimes miss my heady days of godly belief. Having been more contemplative than my peers from an early age, I grew especially enamoured of prayer. As I interpreted prayer, my task was to explore the depths of my soul, to uncover my deepest thoughts and feelings, while at the same time freeing my psyche to receive divine revelation. (Though I would not study various forms of meditation for years to come, I unwittingly became quite adept at the practice under the guise of praying.) Prayer for me was at once a vehicle for self-exploration and a conduit to the infinite. I vividly recall one night when I was 16. As I lay in bed long after parents and sibling had succumbed to Morpheus, unearthing layer upon layer of self, I suddenly felt transcendent, as though my mind had broken free its crude corporeal moorings and was soaring miles above my bedroom. No less regarded are my memories of church camps. So intoxicating was this experience that my entire middle and high school life revolved around this annual retreat. For the typical southern child of the 1970s, church camp was his first opportunity to spend an entire two weeks away from the overprotective (and seemingly omnipresent) parental eye. Naturally, a boy’s attention turned to the fairer sex, and nooks and crannies abounded in which to find privacy for the sacrifice of virginity and lesser modesties. (To our pubescent minds, the fact that we were at a church camp rather than a secular one preemptively absolved us of all the mischief we wreaked.) While I was no less immune to my hormones, I kept foremost in my mind the primary reason we were there – to grow closer to cousin Jesus and father God. While most of my friends busied themselves with schemes to cop carnal thrills, I was preoccupied with the pursuit of spiritual enlightenment. I wanted to see God. I wanted to touch God. I wanted to taste God. I approached every Bible-study with the expectation that this would be the golden hour of my quest for the ultimate guarantee that God would admit me to his ethereal afterparty. And from every successive gospel verse I pondered, I extracted a revelation that seemed to bring me one rung closer to righteousness. But the piecemeal inspiration of the daytime devotional paled in comparison to the mountaintop adrenalin rush of the nighttime revival meeting. Get the picture: Up with the sun, I have spent my morning in Bible classes and my afternoon either participating in organized sports or exploring the dry riverbed at the outskirts of the camp. Everywhere I went, I found new people to greet. Like a dog at a dog park, there were so many stimuli in my midst that I dared not slow down. A sizeable dinner then turned my fatigue into tranquility. Now, as the sun chases foreign horizons, I join a thousand comrades who have come to the big tent with a common goal – to revel in the anticipation of an eternal life that will be free of hunger and its satiety, free-flowing dreams, ambition, sexual urges … virtually everything that makes us human. Survivors of an ontological shipwreck (original sin, which somehow tainted us by proxy), we cling to this lifeboat (the church community) as it sails ever closer to our true home (heaven). Our captain and cheerleader for this week is a phrenetic evangelist with seemingly bottomless lungs named Michael Gott. Like a rock star, he enlists cadence and volume and arm gestures and facial expressions to not only encourage us to stay our course but teach us how we might become better spiritual mariners.