Wednesday, September 14, 2005

 

ENTRY 911 191: AMEN


We knew all the answers
And we shouted them like anthems
Anxious and suspicious
That God knew how much we cheated

--Scissor Sisters


September 11 is invariably a beautiful late-summer day in New York. I've wondered whether the terrorists wanted to make the journalists' jobs easier, whether they anticipated that, for years, the Times and the newsmagazines would recall 9/11 with trite phrases like "a brilliant blue sky scarred by sudden smoke and fire" and "a beautiful morning marred by madness."


I recently responded to an online posting that said all the right things. The guy was looking for a dating situation leading, hopefully, to something long-term, and our email correspondence was promising. Our tastes seemed fairly in sync in a number of ways. We agreed to meet for lunch at the Shake Shack in Madison Square Park on the 11th.


He was more than 20 minutes late, and the story he gave me was both reasonable and too detailed, which means it might not be true. But I shrugged it off, not wanting to scar or mar a beautiful day.


My initial feeling was that we didn't really have much chemistry, but I tried to withhold judgment and see how the conversation went. He was pleasant, reasonably intelligent, and not really fascinating or vitally intriguing. These days I find myself uninterested in, and even impatient with, averageness. Maybe it is the result of living in a city of extremes. He was no Zeke, and no James.


I continued to peer closer to try to find elements I'd missed, anything that might tip the balance, but came up short. We walked through Central Park, chatting some more, until late afternoon. We saw Tony Danza on inline skates, and laughed, and parted ways. He was friend material, perhaps, although I knew he had posted a dating ad, so I didn't really expect anything platonic to come of it. But I know better than to freight such encounters with unreasonable expectations anymore, and the company was largely irrelevant. I'd simply wanted to get out and enjoy a nice day. But I didn't feel any closer to forging stronger ties to this city and its inhabitants.


For me, 9/11 has come to represent the end of what I consider the happiest phase of my life so far, and the beginning of the most challenging one. The earlier phase was one in which I'd emerged from my relationship with Neil with considerably more perspective and self-awareness than I'd ever had before, and in which I'd met Peter, the only true best friend I've ever had as an adult. I was really exploring the world for the first time, and life seemed so full of fresh possibility.


Then this country was fucked to hell, and you all know the national drama of the past four years; I don't need to rehash it. I miss the time when the newspaper didn't anger and nauseate me every fucking day. I'm tired of the fury and the deep disappointment and the depression and the fear, but I'm even more tired of commiserating about it and wondering what to do to make a meaningful difference. I mourn the loss of my ability to embrace frivolity.


For an agnostic, I seem to think a lot about God. It surprises some people who know me in real life, who see me as rational and intellectual and unconcerned with religion, to learn that I was once pretty devout. My religiosity reached its peak when I was in the depths of my adolescent despair, between ages 13 and 15. When I was even younger I read the entire King James version of the Bible--a page a day for two years. (There is a fine book about the making of that famous translation.) At the height of my self-loathing, I planned to become a monk so that I wouldn't have to grapple with my same-sex desires.


At some point something turned in me, and I realized that I no longer believed. I don't think it was about being angry at God for anything that had happened; I just realized how unquestioning I had been, at an age when one naturally begins to question everything.


My agnosticism endures to this day, and I don't really see how I could ever be a true believer again. But I have always insisted on not defining myself as an atheist, both because I see atheism as an anti-religious "religion" that protests too much, and because I want to acknowledge my belief that there are things in this world that may be beyond the power of rationalism to explain. And I have always respected the right of others to believe and worship as they like.


Despite the fact that I'm comfortable with being an agnostic, with acknowledging that I can never really know whether a higher power exists, I feel a certain sadness sometimes at the way this sets me apart from my family, each member of which is to some degree appalled by my lack of belief. Sometimes part of me wishes that I hadn't lost my faith. But these are not things I can tell my parents, because they have always been on the alert for any chink in my agnostic armor so that they can proselytize me ad nauseam. They prey on doubt with an almost chilling frenzy, and when I'm around them I suppress whatever doubts I might have--even though, to me, expressing doubt even while pressing onward through life is a sign of strength, and not a vulnerability to be exploited. I have told my parents that, whatever my own beliefs, I'm glad they find something meaningful in their own Christianity and that it works in their lives. But somehow that isn't enough for them.


Faith is something you either have or you don't. I don't think it's something you can will yourself to have, or reclaim through diligence, especially if you've already heard the sermons and read the Bible and rolled your eyes through shallow Christian parables sent via mass email. I'm not sure faith is so much a choice as a natural state of being, which, I suppose, might make me an unwitting subscriber to the Calvinist doctrine of predestination.


Much evil has been done in the name of God, and so has much good. At this point my own philosophy is to do a minimal amount of harm and a maximum amount of good, to tell the truth because it's cleaner than the alternative, to make choices that honor me. And I'm okay with the fact that life on Earth may be all there is.


I would still recommend the Bible as a lovely and major literary work with thought-provoking ideas about life and history, just as one can learn much from Tolstoy and Cervantes, Shakespeare and Nabokov. But I cannot view it as a literal history text or a rigid instruction manual, and I do not fully understand why anyone would.


Or maybe I do. Maybe I understand the fear of ostracism and chaos and mortality, of being unholy and different and uncertain, of having to make one's own trailblazing way. In my mind's eye I can still see the back of my dad's wool blazer, the one that hangs in my own closet now, as he preceded me into the little church on those cold winter mornings 15 and more years ago. I can feel the uncomfortable wriggliness in my little body as it reacted against my starchy collar and itchy sweater and stiff black shoes. And I can hear the unsteadily warbling voices merging in a primally familiar hymn, telling me implicitly that grownups would always do what was right and that there was a God up there, perched far above the vaulted ceiling, soothing me with his knowledge of my blackest sins and my darkest fears. He would nod invisibly at my youthfully naïve certainty about a world of black and white, the absence of gray, the whole comforting world going on and on just as it was then.

6:30 PM

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