I've been asked to read a friend's manuscript. I'm flattered, really, but WHY NOW just when I'm finally ass-deep into finally writing a book I've been carrying around in my head for years. Really, dewd, the timing sucks. But he actually is a gifted writer, and he will in all likelihood see publication soon. So, yes. I'll finish reading it tonight.
Meanwhile, I managed to get another thousand words about that weird period when my mom married my stepdad, Leon. Don't get me wrong, he was a great guy, and it was the right move. But my step dad was already "born again" when we found him, and staunchly enlisted in the Lord's Army. I think it's part of what appealed to Mom. She'd had her share of worldly men by the time Leon came along, and if he was a true believer, then so be it. She went along. But as time went on, her faith strengthened, or so it seemed to me then.
I realize now the deal she'd been forced to make. She needed a man to help her raise her boys, a good man who didn't drink or chase women. She'd found that in Leon, and if it had been easy to "go along" with his religious convictions early on, eventually "just going along" became more difficult. Over time, the church became more and more central to our lives and livelihoods, touching virtually every aspect of our existence. It became harder to be a fence-sitter, or a once-a-week Christian. The pressure was enormous: You must believe.
I don't want to imply that there was anything particularly dark or coercive or overtly cult like about our lives. There was no coercion in their faith, at least no more so than in any other congregation or faith community. I tell it now only because it helps explain other key points that happen in the story later. I have miles to go on this, but so far the words are coming.
* * *
Perhaps it's timely that my friend send his manuscript now, as I ponder my parents' faith and the credulity that eventually led to their deaths. I am myself a strident disbeliever in magical beings, and baffled that anyone could literally believe in gods in this day and age. I see religion as a means of self comfort at best -- harmless enough, until it morphs into what seems an insidious form of madness that's hard-wired into our species. I comfort myself that not all of us are so stricken.
But my friend, who sent me his written words, and which I now hold in trust, is a devout Catholic. I know him through other channels, we were former colleagues in DC. I'd had no idea, until he sent me his draft, that he'd actually gone to seminary.
What I like about his writing, the bits I'd seen prior to this, is that he's very good at taking traditional christian canon and turning it on its head in such a way that the reader -- devout, or not -- is forced to reexamine his assumptions. What he sent me, an early draft, granted, fails to do this. It reads like a dissertation written by a seminarian, for other seminarians. It's fine as it is, for what it currently is. But it could be so much better with one last rewrite to spotlight the gems this writer is so adept at illuminating. He has a jewel in the rough; with a little more work, it could be the Hope Diamond.
I'm not sure this feedback will be welcomed, but I feel his work is consistently strong enough that he deserves to be confronted with the fact that he's a bit of a genius, and he can take this good thing, and make it excellent.
* * *
I wrestle with faith. Not my own, since I have none. But other peoples' faith. Where does it come from? Why do we believe these outlandish things, these gods and devils and spirit and saints? I may enjoy that my friend may be good at taking Christian theology and forcing adherents to rethink their interpretations of scripture -- there's something wonderfully subversive about challenging long-held doctrines with the very words from which they're written -- but in the end, he still absolutely, literally, truly believes that Jesus is "up there" somewhere, interceding on our behalf to his sociopathing father-god. I don't get it. I will never get it. He's an otherwise sane man.
I've never had faith. Never understood why anyone would suspend their disbelief in a world where credulity can get you killed. I know this, because I saw it happen again and again with my own parents, the reflexive willingness to believe whatever is told them, the consistent pattern of acting against (and voting against) their own economic interests in the belief that doing so was somehow helping Jesus complete his mission on Earth. That same credulity led them to believe a clownish buffoon and his media henchmen when he told them that Covid was a hoax, and the vaccine was dangerous. It could be argued that their lifelong pattern of listening to religious nonsense had primed them to listen to political nonsense -- and it killed them.
* * *
I won't say this to my friend. I'll give him editorial feedback, share some thoughts on how I think his project can be made stronger. I'm not interested in shattering anyone's illusions, or telling them how to think, what to believe. I make the point in my book more than once that for my parents, their faith was probably a net gain. It provided them with a community and a framework for living that had never been modeled in their lives before they found the Lord. But they never broke free, and I daresay they never really understood how they'd been used.
No comments:
Post a Comment