the god thing (on good friday)

Music: Mark Hollis: Mark Hollis (1998)

When I was a junior at GW, I remember (and perhaps erroneously) . . . I remember I had a shocking meeting with my advisor. She was an expert in the rhetorical theories of Nietzsche and I was in awe of her knowledge. As a graduate student she had received a Fulbright to travel to Germany to translate a number of Nietzsche's lectures, which she shared with me. I read them eagerly (I also thought they were rather pedestrian, but figured I was probably missing some secret subtlety). At that time in my life---22, I think---I thought I understood Nietzsche. Now, especially having a best friend that's finishing a book on the subject, I realize I didn't understand it at all---except, perhaps, at an affective level. Nevertheless, my advisor had convinced me "rhetorical studies" was a place I could pursue my interest in philosophy, and I looked to her for guidance. She was, and remains, a formative influence.

Anyhow, knowing her expertise in all things Nietzsche, I remember I was surprised and confused about why she chose to tell me about her religious conversion experience years before I had taken my first class with her. "Is this appropriate?" I thought. And I remember being shocked that someone so influenced by Nietzsche's philosophy would be espousing the grace of Christ. Because of my so-called religious upbringing, I recognized immediately she was witnessing to me from her religious conviction ("it's an evangelical thing; you wouldn't understand," the t-shirt might read). Intellectually I was thrown by her confessions as a glaring contradiction. And as my advisor, I thought she had crossed some sort of invisible boundary.

Of course, I had drawn the boundary myself. There is no official boundary that says advisors cannot confide in their advisees about issues of faith.

I think I was shocked by her witness because I had been wrestling, for some years, with my own loss of faith. In the middle of my first year of college---the first year I had lived away from my family and from Georgia, a year in the fast-paced, markedly class-based world of Washington, DC, a year in which I was frequently ridiculed for my suthern accent---I raced via Greyhound bus to be by the bedside of a powerful father figure in my youth. He was a close boyhood friend's dad, a neighbor, and eventually my Scoutmaster. He was the man who modeled for me what it was to be a good person---a good man. After 16 hours on a bus I ended up watching him finish a slow and painful death from cancer; I sat horrified as his wife fed him morphine with an eyedropper. And when I arrived in Statesboro he was dead within four hours---by the time we had all got there, his "family." I'll never forget the sound of his labored breathing, like there was gravel in his lungs.

It was a formative event, when he died, because I decided then that I no longer believed in "a God." I have known grief and despair since that moment in my life. But that moment was the benchmark. I am still not over it.

So here I was, in my professor's office, and she was witnessing to me about the saving grace of Jesus. She told me about her horrible car accident. While in the hospital clinging to life, she said she read the bible and for the first time she said she felt the presence of deity. Since her recovery, she dedicated her life to Jesus.

She also advised me, in the same meeting, that as a scholar I didn't need to buy books and that I should really take advantage of interlibrary loans.

I'm sharing this story for a number of reasons. The most obvious is that I'm currently teaching a course titled "Rhetoric and Religion," and I sense my students wanting me to disclose my religious beliefs. But because the class is about the interrogation of faith in a way that does not close any doors or offer any answers (the skill of asking the questions is stressed), I resist telling them. When a student asks me a question that I sense is testing my faith, I always counter, "well, what I think is not as important as what you think. What do you think?"

So, the question of faith has been on my mind. I've been having dreams about the apocalypse (these were common in my teen years, and often make an appearance when I teach this class).

Yet the "god thing" also strikes me as especially important to my line of work. The question, "do you believe in god?" really strikes to the center of what many in my line of work do. That's because it's simply another way of asking "why does evil exit?" or "what is evil?" And if you think about evil, what it is and why it happens, then you're talking about the question of the academic humanities: what and whence evil? Alternately stated: what is the cause of suffering? and what is the best way to end suffering?

It used to be the case I was surprised to learn that such-and-so a big-name scholar was a devout Catholic, or that an expert in, say, the work of Jean-Paul Sartre attended synagogue every Saturday. This surprise was born of a certain stupidity and way of thinking: that somehow consistency was the foundation of conviction. I no longer think this way.

And I am no longer an atheist.

I could go on (and on and on) for some pages about my thoughts about deity, but I'll spare you. And, there are some things one needn't blog about. In retrospect, however, my advisor telling me about her faith in Christ was a good thing for me to hear, especially in the moment that I heard it. It showed me that to be a thinker, to live the life of the mind, meant that one did not rule out this or that. Quite the opposite.

I will note that I am agnostic. To paraphrase Shaw, an agnostic is an atheist without the conviction. And I think that absence of conviction is precisely it---I cannot dig my heels into resolution about something beyond my ability to comprehend. That is to say, I am convinced now, more than ever, of my limitations. It seems to me awfully arrogant to assume I can make pronouncements about something that is, by definition, unknowable. (Kant is fiendishly persuasive on this score; Adorno even more so.) I find myself at the moment in the place that Burke seemed to center himself, uncertainly (and therein, I think, is the appeal of his later work).

It's quite funny to read that last paragraph, however, and to think about where I was ten years ago on the question of deity.

But I hope, at the same time, that is the point. Conviction should be a matter of life and death. I am convicted that hurting others is wrong---and I can find a place for solidarity in that. I just cannot find a place for conviction in a projection into the unknown. I don't, however, think badly of those who do (er, summarily, anyway).

I don't think I could teach a class titled "Rhetoric and Religion" if I was convicted in matters of the ineffable, or if I had a firm belief in issues of spirit. And I don't think I could research the things I'm interested in researching.

I'm also amused---even pleased---that I no longer react to the religious righteousness of others as I used to. When witnessed to, I used to get angry. I'd tease the Mormons at my door. I'd get angry at family funerals when the preacher would turn the eulogy into an alter call. Today it just doesn't bother me. Sure, I get troubled by the religious tincture of politics---of excising Jefferson from our Texas textbooks (and lets face it, because of his doctrine of the separation of church and state). But I'm not outraged. At this point in my thinking, it just doesn't make sense to be a butt about a public prayer at an event I'm attending. So the PTA wants to pray before meeting? Well, ok. That prayer is really about our community, in the end. It's about us.

I'll also confess that reading Levinas has really changed my thinking about deity in the last few years, too. More about that in another post, perhaps.

I'm 37. I wonder if ten years from now I will have identified myself with a religious belief system. I've always thought if I "got the fear," to paraphrase the immortal Jack Dangers, I'd be a Quaker. We all seem to have a desire for ritual comforts, and I like the Quaker's politics.

But, I guess, the point of this post is that I don't know. And I think finding conviction in the not-knowing, a conviction in not finding conviction in this-or-that Ultimate Stop, is perhaps the best policy for me. Caputo describes this (of Derrida) as "religion without religion." The convicted would say it's atheism. I would say it's open-ism. Atheists are fundamentalists, in---or about--the end.