Nevada Barr - Seeking Enlightenment... Hat by Hat: A Skeptics Guide to Religion

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Table of Contents

The mountain is for finding and adoring God in the wilderness. Church is for finding and adoring God in community: with others, through others, because of others, in spite of others ... When we work together for what we sincerely hope is good, worship together in the belief we will touch God, sing together in the hope He hears our praises, the spark is fanned and God becomes as visible in us as in new snow or mornings on a mountain lake.

from Seeking Enlightenment... Hat by Hat

also by nevada barr

Hard Truth
High Country
Flashback
Hunting Season
Blood Lure
Deep South
Liberty Falling
Blind Descent
Endangered Species
Firestorm
Ill Wind
A Superior Death
Track of the Cat
Bittersweet

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For Molly and Mari, Sharon, Debra, Debbe, Joan, Bobbi, Linda,
Marty, Barbara, Sylvia, for Polly and Martha, for all the
women with whom Ive talked and cried and talked
and had marvelous times discovering
the pathways of our lives.

introduction

In Mississippi, where I now live, people still talk about God in everyday conversation. When the name Jesus pops up (and not in the context of taking names in vain), nobody squirms or rolls their eyes. One of the getting-to-know-you questions asked at picnics and bar-b-ques is: What church do you go to?

People not only talk about God, they talk to Him. And then they tell you about it. When I moved here, I was a godless heathen, and proud of it. According to the priest at the Episcopal church, I am still a heathen but no longer godless.

I doubt a trip to Dixie would bring God into everybodys life but, when I arrived, I had pretty much exhausted all other avenues. Id failed me and, in the process, managed to screw up everything around me. My marriage had gone down in flames; Id been rightly tossed out on my ear with little more than a suitcase full of paperback books and my clothes. I was clinically depressed, haunted by nightmares, broke, and, at forty-one, embarking on my third career, this time as a law-enforcement ranger for the National Park Service.

Now that I have weaseled my way back to life through grace, it seems to me that despair is one of the greatest sins. Even Judas probably would have been okaymaybe even become a model citizenhad he not despaired of being forgiven and hanged himself. I was as Judas; I despaired. Its entirely possible that I would have hanged myself had I not known my sister would kill me if I did such a thing. To wax poetic, with imagery fitting such a divine concept: I more or less ran into God at the bottom of the barrel.

At first, when I heard folks drawling the words God or, worse, Jesus, I heard them through the double filter of misery as lonely and bleak as the Smoke Creek Desert in January and a background that scorned organized religion.

My upbringing provided no education on how to interact with the divine and no sense that God, if there were a god, which was suspect in itself, would deign to reside in people. With all the places to be when one is omnipresent, surely nothing less than a cat would do for Him. My family attended no churches, read no spiritual books and, by unspoken decree, the discussion of sex, religion, and politics was banned at our dinner table. Biblical terms were used exclusively for swearing. As oaths, they were moderately acceptable, certainly more so than scatological obscenities when it came to expressing strong emotion.

As an adult, from remembered scraps of conversations with my dad, I realized that my paternal grandmother had been the sort of Christian who used the Bible Belt to beat the fear of God into her children. It left Dad, and so his offspring, with a sour taste in their mouths when it came to naming the divine.

God helps those who help themselves, was the extent of my belief system. And I helped myself to pretty much everything. Finally I helped myself right out of a marriage.

In my post-divorce months, between drinking too much and playing with sharp objects, I had a brief go at God. Cursing Him, screaming at Him, beggingthe usual one-sided conversations of a very nearly terminally selfish personbut that was as far as any connection with a higher power evolved.

When Mississippians first started Jesusing and Godding right in front of meand in broad daylightI was most uncomfortable. I didnt quite know where to put my eyes or whether or not to laugh, sort of like when somebody tells a joke that you suspect might be in bad taste but arent entirely sure. It made me nervous. When people talk to God, it makes everybody nervous. At least every Yankee. Theres the creepy feeling that those who talk to God actually think Hes listening; that they believe theyve got an edge you lack.

Its worse in the South. Not only do people talk to God on a regular basis, but God talks to them and they tell you about it. Its common to hear someone down here say, I prayed about it and God told me to... or, Im just waiting for a call from God before I decide what my college majors going to be.

I never got a call from God. Not a call, not a fax, not an e-mail, not a message in a bottle. My prayers positively echoed in the celestial silence. I occasionally heard voicesstill do when it comes to thatbut they were mere whispers, sentence fragments at the edges of my mind out of the dusk between sleep and waking. Surely not even the God of the shining countenance would choose to be as cryptic as my whispers. I didnt like it that He talked to everybody else. It made me twitchy to think they thought they were that right, that special. My voices, the mutterings in my mind, are fairly anonymous. Might be God, might be me. On a darker day, it might be Beelzebub. Hes supposed to be a clever fellow.

Since God was out of the bag, socially speaking, here, I asked people how they knew, to quote Guy Clark, if it was an angel or a ghost. I got no answers that satisfied. I asked how people came to be called to God. The answers to this were less vague: handwriting on the wall of a room at the Comfort Inn, a direct intercession from St. Michael to change the outcome of a civil suit, a full-blown vision of the Virgin Mary on the front stoop of a home office, near-death experiences, a sense of Jesus coming into the heart.

I was not unduly disappointed to be out of the loop. Having God talk to me was not an idea I was all that crazy about. Sure, it would indicate He existed, but what if He decided to tell me to do something wretched like give away all my stuff and work with lepers in Guatemala? No, I did not particularly want to hear directly from any deity. I did envy the divine manifestations, however. How much could it cost Him to burn one lousy little bush for me?

I resented the fact that miracles were said to abound in the early days but no longer. The faithful are quick to tell you that miracles do happen, the miracle in a babys smile and so forth. What a crock. They know precisely what we mean: real miracles, smoke and mirrors, sleight-of-hand, drop-your-jaw sorts of stuff. Ive also been told: Youve got to have faith. To that, I say: Pshaw. If you already have faith, you dont need miracles. Old Testament magic was used to amaze the unbeliever. Whatever happened to that?

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