THE DOOR
Alas, it was New Year's Eve and, against my keen hermit instincts and all logical reasoning, I had agreed to go out and “party”, whatever that meant. Normally I wasn't inclined to “go out” and was feeling even more like a recluse this season, if that was even possible.
My stepmother, Jane, had just died. ("Mom-three" as I privately referred to her. "Mom-two" being my ex's mother, and, naturally, “Mom” being my birth mother.) Unlike my mother, who died very suddenly and unexpectedly – killed by a freakishly rare and unforgiving virus – Jane took three long years before being overcome by her many cancers. Her illness, as is often the case, was overwhelming for everyone involved. Somehow I assumed that Jane’s death would have been easier my mother’s death on everyone: knowing that she was going to die, having gone through that before, having had time to say our goodbyes, having everything planned and organized… Of course, I was wrong. Being intimately involved in a prolonged death was its own special kind of agony: the years of worry and anxiety; watching her soul being crushed, again and again, in an endless series of false hopes; watching as her confidence and grace evaporate with the deterioration of her body and mind; watching her try to condense her dreams and desires into a rare afternoon of drug induced “feeling well” that would inevitably be, as ever, cut short by the a sharp and sudden “feeling unwell;” watching her endlessly optimistic and painfully positive manner transform into a persistent state of manic mood swings; and then watching those mood swings evolve and settle into a unique melange of incredibly uncomfortable, terribly sad, and totally pissed off (of course, all swimming in a cool and murky pool of opium derivatives); hearing countless people console themselves in an endless recitation of hollow clichés; getting to watch my father (not) fall apart, again; and then, after all the struggle and holding on, being left waiting, demoralized and corrupted – wishing privately (but no doubt collectively) that she would just die already... And, in a particularly tragic irony, as Jane was drawing her memory to a close my grandmother (who became distraught by all this and her own care home mortality) died almost simultaneously with Jane – having choked on her anti-anxiety medication (I kid you not) and then been do-not-resuscitated to death. So it was with this in my being that I head out for New Year's celebrations.
But, again, alas, I wasn’t dying and it was New Year's Eve. So, at eight-thirty I shot a quarter jam jar of Grandpa's favourite whiskey; after all, I was going to have to interact with other humans and, if nothing else, it might make me more talkative, which should make others more comfortable. Nine o’clock came quickly and I threw on what resembled a clean shirt. I dragged my sufficiently well-irrigated self out of my bedraggled apartment and seeped out onto the street. I sauntered up the wintered sidewalk, past the perpetual pile of junk at the top of my street, and through the crow-strewn contents of someone’s fouled kitchen garbage. I headed past darkened storefronts and the loitering indifference of familiar strangers. Reaching my bustling neighbourhood transit hub, I entered the skytrain station and my feet found the escalator.
As I crested the moving staircase to the above landing I found myself face to face with a pair of over-dressed, over-groomed, and remarkably underwhelming young men. They looked on with a kind of vacant anticipation. Their faces stern but friendly, each stood clutching a small black book with red pages under his arm.
I had never really interacted with any of these folks, but something about these two got under my skin – and I was compelled to say something. Maybe it was the anti-abortion guy with the inflammatory placard earlier in the week, or maybe it was that I spent a inordinate amount of time in churches lately, or maybe it was just the alcohol; either way, I went opened my big mouth.
“What if everyone acted like this? What if Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists all acted like Christians: crowding street corners and demanding our attention? It would be madness! But you, you feel that you’re special, that you have some sort of duty or authority or something. In the same way that this is a public space and you have the right to be here I should have a right to not be accosted by you. What, you don't think the cacophony of visual and acoustic noise out here is enough and needs to be notched just a little higher, and with a tinge more politics?"
The taller one scornfully retorted, “Nobody's making you stop and talk to us.”
“You’re right, but the only reason you get away with it is because everyone else doesn't take the same liberty. You know what I mean? How would you like it if everyone who had a belief of some sort showed up at your door, or put ads on your television, or stood behind a placard forcing their opinion on people – all while suggesting that anyone who doesn’t think like them is evil? I’ll tell ya, it’s a real piss-off.”
“They’re welcome to, and they do”, piped the more timid of the twins.
“But they don’t. That’s plainly obvious. There are some four thousand religions in the world, man. If every believer took to the street as you do there would be no room for pedestrians or fire hydrants. If every Amish, Bulgarian Orthodox Catholic, Wesleyan, and Zwinglian turned out I have little doubt it would devolve into a kind of crazed, believers' arms race.”
“Well, I for one would be happy to hear what they had to say,” he chirped back.
The conversation had been quite mellow, in tone at least, until I blasted back in a manner usually reserved for elementary school playgrounds, “No you wouldn’t! You’re in the business of being closed off to new information.” Pausing just long enough to read that he'd taken offence I then asked, “So, why don’t you give me your best line.”
The tall one replied sharply and coolly, “We don’t have lines, we have beliefs.”
I laughed mockingly, “You don’t have beliefs, you have hopes. And the difference is tremendous."
Heads cocked, eyebrows rose, and smiles emerged sportingly, inviting continuation.
"Beliefs crystallize out of evidence. And after thousands of years of active searching, both inward and out, sums to the total absence of anything even approximating evidence. So, instead, what you have are a series of hopes. And that would be fine if they were your own hopes, but they're not even your hopes: they're the inherited hopes of a people making their first attempt at philosophy.”
The pair reassured me that, despite my arrogance and ignorance, Jesus loves me and is willing and waiting to accept me. It was then that I heard my train coming. I smiled and turned away, as though I'd accomplished something, and walked down the overpass. When I reached the boarding platform the train I’d heard came squealing to a halt. As soon as its doors slid open my fiery comrade Ada hopped out to greet me. Her bright red wool coat, rusty red hair, and giddy grin were a pleasant sight. Ada was the one who had convinced me to come out and “party.”
Ada was the only friend I had who would regularly, openly, and unabashedly disagree with me; and, critically, she was always willing to argue why. I loved that. We had met in a college biology class and quickly discovered a mutual curiosity in, well, just about everything. Despite our abundant and varied interests, somehow, we always ended up talking about religion; and, of course, tonight would be no different.
Upon boarding the train with Ada, I was introduced to her friend Stephanie, who was sitting just inside the doorway. I said hello and was introduced to her as, “Chris, the Atheist.”
Oddly, the label felt abrasive. It occurred to me that I had never labelled myself as such and so it felt odd that someone was doing it for me. Moreover, the whole idea struck me as kind of strange: being labelled not something. It seemed to me that we usually give labels for something, telling us what something is, not what it is not. Canadians, for instance, when travelling abroad don’t proudly display an un-American flag sewn to their backpacks; and we don’t refer to people who don’t have children as reproduction deniers; and of course you wouldn’t label the peanut butter "not jam". "Atheist", in this case, felt like "not jam".
Stephanie and I smiled at one another, shook hands, and offered one another pleasantries all the same. As the train chimed at us, closed its doors, and gently rocked its way along the elevated track toward downtown, the girls talked cheerfully about their travels. Stephanie had just returned from visiting her family in California, or something (I was half listening, thinking more about my newly garnered label.)
I definitely didn’t believe in God so the word was probably a reasonable descriptor. Other people seemed happy with the word, but to me it felt wrong somehow. I thought that I was just fine without a label. That I could recall, I had never needed such a label in the past, and its absence wasn't an issue. I felt that I knew something about people’s different beliefs but, to be honest, none of them had ever made any sense to me. As a kid I had read much of the Bible, and bits of the Koran, trying to make sense of what all the fuss was about. In eighth grade, my Social Studies teacher took us to talk with representatives of several of the most popular faiths in the city; and, coming from a non-religious background, I found the experience eye opening. In my mid-teens, as a student of Terence McKenna, I had stumbled into and read a fair bit about Buddhism, Shinto, and Taoism. And in college I even took courses in Eastern Philosophy and the Philosophy of Religion. With interests in history, sociology, anthropology, and psychology (and just life generally) I spent the better part of my twenties learning about and trying to understand different ways of thinking and being. As well, Mom-three was a fervent Anglican (and my father, a quasi Agnostic) and I’d browsed a great number of books in her vast collection of Christian literature. All were remarkably unremarkable. At different times in my life I'd had friends belonging to every religion I could think of. I even lived in some far-flung fanatical corners of Indonesia and in some blindly believing backwoods of Australia, exposed to all sorts of creative (mis?) understandings. Despite these experiences, I’d never found any form of popular spirituality very helpful or even appealing. For as long as I could remember I sought answers from those who seemed most honest. And the people most open to skepticism, most concerned with accuracy and intellectual honesty, and thereby wholly forthcoming about their ignorance were scientists. As a result, for my whole life The Nature of Things, Quirks and Quarks, and David Attenborough documentaries trumped all other regularly scheduled programming and were the daily, weekly, and seasonal rituals of my life. And I was fine with that…
Within two minutes, our train was shuddering into Main Street station. As it did it occurred to me that I didn’t know where we were going. I inquired. “Erik’s,” Ada offered gleefully, as she jumped to her feet and moved to the door of the train. Erik was her delightful Swedish boyfriend. (He was a perfect Swedish stereotype: tall, skinny, and with long blonde hair.) They’d met in Paris. They were in love. It was disgusting. It was that sickeningly cute, painfully romantic, adolescent love that was destined to end tragically. (A certainty that didn’t stop me from constantly encouraging them to have children.) Erik was in Canada on some sort of work visa and lived in a dilapidated, low cost, student housing situation at the corner of Union and Main streets. The location was one of those neighbourhoods home to a porn shop, a couple of dive bars, and a skate park – the kind of inexpensive, unpretentious place that was on the verge of hyper-pretentious, yuppie gentrification as the new vegan restaurant/yoga studio attested to.
As we reached the gated door of Erik’s building, immediately recognizing Ada, one of the students entering the building held the door for us. We all walked into the warmth and greeted a gaggle of young Korean ESL students who were mingling just inside the door. We took a creaky staircase to the third floor. The hallway was bright and cool, its walls thickly painted in a minty toothpaste hue, which gave the place an institutional feel. Ada and Stephanie stopped and knocked on Erik’s door while I walked further down the hall, nosily checking out each uniquely adorned apartment door, the communal washroom, and the fire escape at the end of the hall. This was the kind of place that had its windows nailed shut; after all, fresh air didn’t bother entering the alley to compete with the stink and, of course, the nails helped to keep the windows firmly in place (which kept the binners and junkies out of one’s underwear drawer.) Yeah, it was the kind of place I wished I was living.
Erik greeted us warmly at his door and enticed us into his quarters. His apartment was cozy. ("Cozy": a euphemism for "too small." It was a little wider than I am tall – the kind of room you might just be able to park a car in, if it was a small car and you were a seasoned valet.) We settled onto his floor and opened several bottles of I don't know what. The four of us yakked for almost an hour, drinking assorted alcohols from mismatched thrift store coffee mugs, as is fashionable. We talked about the weather and about the characters we could hear in the alley below us. We talked about Sweden and France and the United States. They talked about music while I drifted away plucking and poking at Erik's guitar. Again I was distracted by my irreligious thoughts. And, as the thoughts coalesced into something concrete, I hijacked the conversation.
"Ada, I don't associate with other people who call themselves Atheist; I don't go to Atheist meetings or belong to an Atheist organization; I don't read Atheist books or watch Atheist movies; and I wasn't raised Atheist, or educated into Atheism; at no time did I discover Atheism, and I certainly wasn't converted into it; I don't wear an Atheist badge or have an Atheist tattoo; and, I mean, there may be people who do all of these things, but I don't think that would even make them any more Atheist than me. So it makes no sense. As an Atheist, what am I?"
Ada laughed while responding, "Chris, you're a provocateur, a heathen, an infidel!"
Stephanie looked on, amused or possibly drunk.
Erik quickly and thoughtfully interjected, "You're nothing."
"Exactly!" I expelled, propelling myself onward, “This ‘Atheism’ of mine is nothing. It’s not a belief. I mean, I didn't choose Atheism any more than I chose to be Canadian. I can see how a person who has faith might feel that someone without faith is missing, denying, or has somehow subtracted something; but that’s not true at all. Non-belief is the default state to which we’re all born and taking on a belief system is an addition. We’re enculturated into a worldview: the Upanishads, the Gospel of John, Dianetics – they don’t come pre-installed as genetic bloatware. I mean, if I was raised Jewish and lost my faith as an adult that would be a subtraction, sure. And, in which case, I might be inclined to declare that I am 'no longer Jewish,' that I am now 'Atheist,' just to drive home the point. But that’s not me.”
After sitting in silence a moment, squinting in thought, Ada remarked, “But you don’t believe in God.”
The thought caused my face to scrunch. "Well,” I said, “what's being established with the label Atheist?” I brought the mug in my hand to my mouth, giving myself a second to think. My lips let too much scotch passed, which, as I gulped gave me the rest of what I wanted to say. I thought to myself, “too much, too many, and overwhelming,” and grinned contentedly. With an eighty proof exhale and retorted by misquoting Richard Dawkins, “I mean, if you're Catholic, you don't believe in nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine Gods, all of whom existed for those who believed in them. Catholics don't believe in Zeus, Maui, Ganesh, Quetzalqua-”
“Thor,” Erik chimed in.
“Yeah. I mean Jews, Hindus, and Scientologists alike have a problem with the existence of Osiris. And Muslims, they would laugh at the idea of making sacrificial offerings to Poseidon in the hopes of preventing a marine disaster.”
Erik laughed out loud and Ada nodded with agreement but with pursed, conflicted lips and searching eyes.
“However,” I offered in an unintendedly jovial tone that I quickly retracted. “However,” I resubmitted sternly, “when the tsunami wiped out one hundred thousand Acehnese in Northern Sumatra, in the world’s most populous Muslim nation, the resounding local and national sentiment was that it was an act of God. This truth was splashed across newspapers, on the radio, on television, and on the lips folks all over the country. There was an almost unanimous understanding that the people who died somehow deserved it, having angered God by being bad Muslims. You know, I really don’t see the difference between people’s Gods. Why wasn’t this Poseidon’s fault, or Samundra's or Tangaroa's? After all, clearly nobody had been making the requisite offerings to them. Do you see how ridiculous this thinking is? As everyone has pointed out a million times, the Atheist takes it only one, no less substantial, God further than the avowed Theist. You see,” I declared loudly, shaking my arms, and using my hands to help enunciate the words, “there is staggeringly little difference in sheer volume of disbelief," I flung my arms wide, "between, the Catholic, who is largely a non-believer, and the Atheist non-believer!” I squeezed all that I knew the Catholic God to be down into the thinnest gap I could sustain between my thumb and index finger. I looked at Him and squinted and slowly raised my hand closer to my eye until my fingers contacted my eyelashes. I then expelled "See!", and held Him out to show the room. "Just one more god!"
Ada raised her eyebrows and offered a goofy grin, snapping back, “But you can’t say that you know that there isn’t a God.”
“Well, of course. In fact, that’s how you know that you’re not dealing with a reasonable person: if they say that they know 100% either way.”
“So you’re Agnostic!” she pronounced with some excitement.
I grunted back, while rolling my eyes and adjusting my seating, “I’ll pick a label when I find a good one. Agnostic doesn’t work because I’m not agnostic about Tezcatlipoca, Hercules, or Odin. For me, evidence matters; and the evidence for the existence of any one God is as good as it is for any other. So, I think if you’re going to be agnostic about one you’ve got to be agnostic toward them all – just to remain coherent.”
“But you said you’re not certain! Being Agnostic means that you’re on the fence.” Ada retorted with a touch of agitation and scorn.
“I think Agnostic works if you’re on the fence with your faithful feelings. But, if you’ve read the Bible, I don’t see how you can be so uncertain. I’m as certain that the Judeo-Christian God doesn’t exist as I am that I will fall if I leap out this window. Which is not to say that I'm 100% certain, only that our species is in its infancy and we are on the road to understanding and so I’m as certain as possible while remaining open to further evidence. And, to be honest, this feels to me like the only reasonable position to take. I mean, we’re probably a thousand years, and several Isaac Newtons, from even understanding how things work, in any deep and meaningful way, even here on Earth. There could be a God, a Prime Mover, a Creatrix, of some sort but such a greatness is unlikely to be something that any human, with our extremely narrow bandwidth of experience, has meaningfully conceptualized to date.”
“Even some Yogi tripping out?” Erik posited.
“Yes, even Yoda on peyote. I’m willing to say that even in our finest moments of ecstasy, our most transcendent moments of out-there-ness, we’re mostly getting feedback and reflection. And I think it’s probably quite safe to suggest that it, whatever IT is, the Unknown, the Omnibenevolent Software Engineer who instantiated in the source code of Space-Time the Great Attractor at the end of History, won’t come anywhere near anything you’ve ever read in any of our wildly varied and aged texts." I then poked up a pair of fingers on each hand and added, "'...the universe is queerer than we can suppose', or haven't you heard? And I get why we have such trouble being honest about all this, about how little we know and how slow and recent and shallow our wakefulness has been.”
Content, and realizing the performance was over, Ada slowly looked at each of us and then to the bottom of her mug. She jumped to her feet, looked each of us in the eye in turn, and told us that she loved us. We all exchanged long firm hugs and, having decided that we were sufficiently intoxicated to move on to our next venue (a house party somewhere on the West Side), we gathered our things and filed out the door. We staggered, flopped, slithered, and pranced down the stairs respectively, back out into the night.
It was colder than when we arrived and there were more people milling about. Across the snowy street we loitered, waiting for the bus. Our public party shuttle appeared shortly and we were noisily whisked off. We all remained standing, anticipating our transfer. The bus was loud, louder than usual. It was full of intoxicated folks taking advantage of the free New Year's Eve ride. There was also that unique combination of soggy, smelly, and stuffy – they'd obviously really attempted to captured that classic winter bus feeling to give anyone unaccustomed an authentic public transit experience. The mood was very relaxed and jovial too. Everyone was dressed up, feeling good, and anticipating the fun evening ahead. A girl seated next to Ada declared loudly, “I haven’t been this drunk since the last time I was this drunk.” Sideways glances were followed by smirks.
Soon the bus declared our transfer point and again we were waiting in the cold. We watched on with amusement as Ada talked to all passers-by. She wished everyone a happy New Year and remarked favourably about different elements of everyone’s appearance. Erik, who'd been silent asked me suddenly and frankly what I thought would happen to me when I died. I told him that we pretend death is distant and that I feel certain that it’s not. “It’s right there behind your eyelids,” I said in an oddly cryptic attempt at clarity while pointing at his face with my chin. I don’t know if it was the alcohol or my mood or what but as our bus roared up I added, “There is no ‘Other.’” I meant to suggest that I didn’t think that there was another life, an immortal soul, or a heaven to transcend to. I thought to clarify, but he looked charmed and amused, so instead I just enjoyed it. The four of us scuttled to the brightness of the open door, climbed in, and sat in the only vacant seats. Erik and I briefly made small talk, but mostly we sat in silence watching the girls chatting in front of us.
After some time I found myself gazing out the window watching the cars race by, their lights hypnotic. My mind drifted away from the bus and our New Year's adventure. I thought about time and distance, about being born and about what it would be like to have a child. At some point an ambulance turned on its lights and sirens right next to us and, blaring right past my face, stirred me from my trance of random thoughts. I wondered where they were going. I thought about a faceless agony. I relived anxiety. I thought about a kid on his bike being hit by a car. I thought about a flash of light and being dragged then trapped under a bus. I thought about someone being at a New Year's party and being stabbed in the neck with a paring knife in some stranger's kitchen. I thought about drowning. I thought about suicide. I thought about AIDS and I thought about cancer. I thought about lying in a hospital bed knowing that I was going to die. I thought about my family and about the forest and about an unimaginably vast ocean teeming with life of every sort. I thought about sitting in a sea of tall grass and about swimming in the lake. I thought about experience and about learning. I thought about stasis and about change. I didn’t think about religion, and I didn’t think about God.
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