© 2006, UrbisMedia
Ron reached across the table and grabbed my hand. “I know there aren’t many things we agree upon,” he said, also taking his wife’s had in his left, “but I would like to end our discussion with a prayer.” I reached across the table and took his wife’s other hand. Out spirits were joined.
Ron closed his eyes and lowered his head and his voice. “Lord Jesus, who suffered and died upon the cross so that we, who are born and sin and continue to sin, might be saved, we pray that you enter the heart of our friend, Jim, and take him into your loving embrace. Amen.”
What a hubristic little bastard, is what I was thinking. The same superior attitude in an inferior mind I had encountered the previous day when that porcine mound of piety with the huge bible and a smarmy smile said, “You should come back, maybe we can help you.”
Joining a “non-denominational” bible study group was about the last thing I thought I would do when I signed on for this long cruise from South Africa to Eastern Australia. I didn’t even know that the cruise line offered this opportunity among its diversions on long sea days such as napkin folding and bingo.
But religion, always a haunting subject of interest had insinuated itself into my activities from my very preparations for the trip. In my readings about the forces that forged the nation of South Africa religion turned out to play a significant role, perhaps a greater role that geography and diamonds and gold. As is often the case in exploration, conquest and colonization, and the subjugation of indigenous peoples, God, or scriptural injunctions and prognoses are prime motivations.
Donald’s’s bible study group, announced in the little newspaper that the ship puts out each day, had about twenty people in the circle of chairs on the dance floor of the lounge on Deck 10, and a few fringies hanging outside of the circle. It was billed as “non–denominational” and open to all, but was, de facto , a Christian group, with several of the “saved” and “born again” variety. I don’t think its putative ecumenism expected apostate Roman Catholics, Buddhists, Hindus, Animists, Muslims, or even Jews. All the references in the first day “lectionary” prepared by Donald, an American in about his mid-fifties, were from the King James Bible. There were no people of color (although an African-American man joined the group later on), just American, British, South-African, Aussie and Canadian whities with their bibles ready to hunker down and squeeze some faith confirming interpretation from some obscure passages from the chronicles of nomadic Hebrews dead for thousands of years.
My intent was to be a “fly on the wall,” to sit there quietly and observe the kind of people who are reputed to be 27 percent of the American electorate, and the keystone of George Bush’s “base,” doing their thing—the base his own political advisors are reputed to refer to as “useful idiots.” For me they were more exotic than the giraffes and lions of the Durban gamed preserve I had visited, or the lemurs on Madagascar, where we had just called. These were the kinds of people I read about and talked about, but with whom I had virtually no meaningful social contact. In metaphysical terms they were the credulous ones, but in recent years, in political terms, at least in America, they had become the “enemy.” They were not as dangerous a mob of zealots as the Taliban, but not too far from becoming their mirror image if they got the political power they craved. And they had invited me, Jim the Apostate, into their spiritual game preserve.
If only I could keep my mouth shut. That lasted until the microphone was passed around for comments in Donald’s exegesis on some passage from Deuteronomy and I asked “why is there so much seemingly approved violence in these passages?” I was no longer an observer, but a participant, and they could smell blood on my soul. There were surprised looks at my impertinence and I was almost immediately recognized as a potential troublemaker. The woman who later suggested that I might be “helped” by remaining in the group reminded me that this was bible study, not a forum for posing those sorts of questions. But apparently her view did not prevail and she herself stopped attending.
Maybe this is what I was seeking in the first place—a good, old, Inherit the Wind , mind-whacking metaphysical punch-up with the evangelical fundamentalists. Who were these true believers I was floating around with in the middle of the Indian Ocean? What did they think about the pressing issues of the day; no not whether to take dinner in the dining room or at the buffet today, but abortion, AIDS, globalism and global warming, stem cells, gay marriage, creationism in schools, and Bush’s war and Islamic fundamentalism. And where would they be if this “Titanic” hit an iceberg? Singing “nearer my God to Thee” as they went down with the ship, or the first in the lifeboats because they aren’t quite ready for the “rapture.”
But they could just drift along comfortably, diddling with their scriptures, teasing out whatever interpretation suited their notion that the fate of the world was “written” in the gospels and in the mad ramblings of the book of Revelation. It occurred to me that perhaps the only way to move the discourse from chapters and verses to topics more germane and contestable, would be to offer myself as “bait.” And there is no more tempting bait for evangelistic Christians than what they might perceive as a soul in distress.
There is a grain of truth to that. Not that I regard my soul as being in distress, but in quest. It may seem contradictory, but I think that I have become, in some sense, more “religious” since I dropped out of the Roman Catholic Church decades ago. Unmoored from its dogma and liturgy, I became a solitary traveler among the faiths and philosophies. Doubting proved not only more interesting, but also more metaphysically “honest.” If there is a God, it seemed, “He” would be more accepting of someone who had come to believe in “Him” by the application of his own mind, not the swallowing of some pre-packaged formula of belief. And, even if he never came to credulity, the Deity would be have to more pleased with someone who used the mind he provided us for that quest, by way of science, philosophy, history and art, to reach out for metaphysical understanding, than He would be with someone who took their indoctrination uncritically. How can one believe, if one dares not to believe? In a way then, I never left the Church; it just became my null hypothesis.
[To Be Continued]
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©2006, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 11.18.2006)