The Face of the Deep

Right now I am eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for breakfast. Its constituent ingredients are sourdough bread, creamy-type peanut butter (none of this reduced fat ridiculousness) and a jam marketed as "spreadable fruit."

Spreadable fruit. Providing you an identical experience to prole "jelly," without the associations of sugar and overprocessing and unhealth. The exact same product, repackaged, muted, an illusion of newness and betterness bottled for consumption by a public too nervous to Just Eat.

Clearly, I find euphemisms odious. And sometimes dangerous. My current least favorite is the word "spirituality." I guess it might have meant something at some time, but right now, it means the opposite of something. It is akin to opening my bottle of spreadable fruit to find it full of topsoil. Not that I most certainly live in a glass house, but I have to throw a couple stones here. My generation's spiritual bearings can be gauged somewhere between Dances With Wolves, that one book on Urban Taoism read in 8th grade and "Which Harry Potter Character Are You?" MySpace quizzes. I'm being snarky. But too often I think our self-description in this regard boils down to "I don't need to confront this," or, "I'll deal with it later."

The alternative is the word "religion," which provokes images of zealots with bloody swords, Pentecostals dancing catatonically in tents, witch burnings. So we find ourselves at an impasse: our dialogue is reduced to an exchange of only the grossest, most extreme generalizations. We concern ourselves with worst cases and unattainable fantasies.

For lack of a better term, I am siding with religion for now.

My supervising professor for this project, an old-guard Marxist and unlikely religious sympathizer, said of secular liberalism, "There's nothing there. There's not even a there there." I agree. We don't really construct ideological frameworks anymore, we just react to those of others. Being constantly on the defense against dogma has scooted us into a dialectical nether-corner where all we can really offer is universal anxiety, a default assumption that fervent belief in anything is suspect.

At some point between the rise of Elvis and the first time Ginsberg recognized the despot-toppling spiritual potency of Getting Blowjobs All The Time, we were all supposed to just…move on. Regarding our history as a religiously motivated world, we are meant to believe that the baby deserves to be thrown out with the bath water; it has, they claim, been wearing Jerry Fallwell’s blimpy face for the whole of history. But the churches are here, and the churches are important, and all of those empty seats left by our enlightened parents are filling up with people who think gays are evil and Jesus endorses smart missles. I refuse to turn my back on our religious tradition just because it's hard to talk about at parties; in the face of a culture increasingly divorced from any kind of self-identifying narrative, I'll take what I can get.

And regardless of religion's political baggage, it's still worthy. I can't pretend to be a true believer, or even an adherent to a particular faith, but I do feel that the Whole is greater than the sum of its parts, that it can be touched, and that doing so requires discipline, devotion and practice above all things. I also know that when we probe the bottom of American mythology’s spiritual change jar we encounter only baubles, shards, Doctor Phil. I can't believe that everyone having seen Star Wars is the same as living in a community that explores, together, the most fundamental conflicts and yearnings of the human soul.

I admit that this interest is fairly new. My childhood experience of religion was pretty identical to what I imagine other kids of secular, liberal families went through. I was dragged to the occasional Christmas mass, digging at my buttcrack, watching my feet swing over the edge of the pew while my mind pored over the strategic nuances of upcoming games of Pogs. I was once sent to a single session of Sunday school at a Presbyterian church, where my boredom was alleviated only when undigested spaghetti came rocketing out of my friend’s mouth halfway through dinner. He was, he joked, “allergic to Jesus.” I didn’t get any of it. The extent of my religious conviction was the occasional prayer for Brooke from 4th grade to notice that I was her eternal admirer and guardian. She never did.

Then, at some point at the end of last year, when I was sleeping on a couch in the living room of a house that bragged festering pots of uneaten rice, all-Goodwill ironic decor and carpets that had to be replaced by the landlord after we moved out, I decided to read the Bible. I bought a copy of the King James Version and got six books in before getting bored. It was back to a life of debasement.

Then, a few months later, I bought, on impulse, a DVD set of interviews with Joseph Campbell, the legendary mythologist. In between the hilarious blue-screen sequences superimposing Bill Moyers over a an image of the night sky with spooky masks floating around behind him, Campbell explains in very eloquent terms the social necessity of myth. It caught my imagination in the way that keeps you from falling asleep at night. It made me eye The Book over and over again.

So now I'm going in for the kill. Armed with a more user-friendly and translationally faithful edition (New American Standard), I am reading the Bible in its entirety. And then the Qur'an. And then I'm taking a nap.