In the years since, my satisfaction with it has only deepened. Not because it convinces me in the literal sense it once did, but because there’s such humanity and imagination in the image. What moves me most is that he bothered to answer my question at all. In a society where relationships between generations are increasingly rare, here was a grown man who was neither relative nor paid supervisor giving his full attention to a young boy. At his funeral a few years ago I thought about that precious encounter. I wondered how I’d measure up in such a situation. Should ever a questing child come to me with a similar question, how would I deal with it? After all, it’s a real googly and I’d have no better explanation than the one George Smith came up with. Perhaps the answer itself isn’t paramount. I’d be grateful if I could summon the kind of grace he found in the moment, so as to offer a child half the gravity and good faith he showed me.
V
Being a full-immersion sect was one of our distinguishing tenets, but it wasn’t only on the day of baptism we were fully immersed. Parish life was all-encompassing; it took in everything from cosmic wonder to sport and romance. In it I rose to adulthood on a tide of story, and having lived in an era of social atomization I will always be grateful for the communal existence it provided. But like all countercultures, ours was an enclave, and its limitations could not go unfelt forever. There were a lot of decent people in our parish, folks who had, thanks to their faith, striven for their higher selves. Of course there were episodes of mean-spiritedness within the congregation, outbreaks of gossip, clashes of ego, grudges barely suppressed. Mostly, though, I saw care and kindness, and an impulse toward mutuality. The default setting people aimed for was some sort of loving self-control and it resulted in a civility that would be the envy of any community. But in the face of growing social complexity, that discipline seemed to stale and then curdle.
The seventies were an unprecedented challenge for our church. Overnight the lives of parishioners became less predictable and more problematic. In the world beyond the pale an explosion of ideas and new trends had arrived and suddenly it was a struggle to meet the needs of believers, let alone match the concerns of those outside the fold. What did we have to contribute to the nationwide debate over Vietnam? What was our position on gender equality? The new no-fault divorce laws had begun to produce what felt like an epidemic of marital dissolution. And for some reason, nothing could now exercise us so much as the sex lives of others. Our pietist theology sprang from a simpler, more static world. Our thinking was cautious and faithful but hopelessly flatfooted. Confronted with the upheavals of the time it was quickly exposed as insufficient.
Overtaken by an anxious nostalgia, parishioners began to look back to an imagined golden age, or forward to Glory. What they didn’t want to look at was what was happening beyond the ghetto. So the communal mindset shrank and hardened. Some reverted to an incipient millenarianism and became obsessed with prophecy and conspiracy. At fourteen, under the careful supervision of youth leaders, I was parsing the chiliastic lunacies of Hal Lindsey’s The Late, Great Planet Earth and crunching the numbers on the imminent Rapture. It was exciting in its way, reefing through the Scriptures to uncover secret codes as history’s clock ticked toward the End of Days. Nixon was in disgrace. Oil shocks and wars had broken out. It felt for a while as if the wheels were coming off our earthly wagon. The church thought it was safe from all this frenzy and hysteria, but it wasn’t. If anything it was especially vulnerable.
Where once it had been a beacon of community, engaged in the affairs of the neighbourhood, the parish became insular and its siege mentality grew oppressive. At the age of six my coltish curiosity was honoured and welcomed, but by the time I was sixteen a spirit of inquiry was a threat to moral hygiene. The civility and empathy within the group grew thin. In Bible studies I began to be chided for being obtuse. Apparently I’d become a ‘stumbling block’ to others. In fairness, this accusation wasn’t simply a result of the new mood in the congregation. During my adolescence I’d mislaid my old compliance. Less creditably, I’d lost my manners as well. Now that I was reading widely I was charged with excitement. Compared to thinkers like Bonhoeffer, Barth, Tillich, Hans Küng and Jacques Ellul, the homely devotional guides we still cleaved to were backward and myopic. But I was painfully clumsy in my new enthusiasms, and bewildered by the reactions of my comrades. The sophomoric thought bubbles I let off during group discussions were hardly as objectionable as the farts I’d let loose as a boy in church, yet it was a marvel how quickly I could empty a room by simply brandishing a new idea, a fresh metaphor. As theological propositions these notions were old news but the brethren recoiled from them in fear and disgust, calling them heretical and worldly, and by worldly they meant dangerously profane. Concerns were expressed about my spiritual welfare, but when push came to shove it was the health of the group that counted most. Fear of contagion overtook any distress about my personal trajectory.
Frightened by the spirit of the times the church did what it could to quarantine itself against change, but an epidemic of anxiety had broken out. Many younger members of the congregation nursed misgivings but only a few openly rebelled and rejected the faith of their fathers. More lapsed discreetly but continued to pay lip service for the sake of status, family harmony or tribal safety. During these years I was a mouthy youth and a know-it-all, but I remained a passionate believer. It stung to know that my belief was more offensive than the sly apostasy of others, for some parishioners toed the line without a shred of sincerity. Under the ancient mantle of political correctness, they prospered while I became the wayward son.
In a letter to the early Christian community in Rome, Saint Paul gives an impassioned account of the fervour of his conviction: ‘For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.’
At our church this passage was a perennial favourite. I loved the chanting repetition, the lofty chain of negatives. There was a whiff of greasepaint and footlights about it, a bit of Elizabethan ruffle that I couldn’t resist. But what moves me now is the desperation in it; Paul is brimming with devotion and defiance. As a boy I knew those lines by heart: I could never have foreseen a time when the principality most likely to threaten my faith was the church itself.
I’d always been a natural believer in more than one sense. Although I treasured Scripture I didn’t need to be convinced by it. Similarly, the church enriched my instinctive apprehension of a divine element at play in the world, but I didn’t require the parish organization to inspire faith or sustain it. Like the twelve-year-old mystic Ort Flack in my early novel That Eye, the Sky, I felt from infancy that I belonged and was known to more than just the people about me. Even in solitude Ort feels accompanied, as if observed and sustained by something larger. I, too, felt a benign force in the natural world; I saw it in the higher instincts of people. Creation wasn’t some kind of cruel divine experiment, the world was the body of God, the life force expressing itself. I still couldn’t say what God was, but I had an inkling as to what He was about, and that was love and liberation.
As a teenager I struggled to break free of the smothering codification of this mystery; everyone seemed determined to domesticate it beyond all recognition. I know my resistance puzzled and hurt some members of the community. At times my parents were embarrassed and dismayed; it appeared their eldest child’s membership of the congregation often hung by a thread. And I didn’t want them to fret. I knew what a deliverance their conversion had been; it truly was the making of them, raising their sights beyond suburban self-interest. They’d said yes to life, yes to love, and the fruits of that assent were what distinguished them at work, within the neighbourhood and in their own families, and I had no intention of spurning it.
Amidst the church’s growing obsession with right thinking and self-censorship, one thing a
bove all others drove me wild. Not the sad reversion to tribalism, nor even the neurotic preoccupation with sex, but the contention, as many a chorus had it, that this world is not my home. This phrase left the confines of churches a century ago. You can hear it, sprinkled in like a noxious seed, in many bluegrass songs and country tunes. Once or twice we’ve heard its nihilistic echo in an American presidency.
There were plenty of things to kick against at church, so why rage at this particular idea?
For one thing, I’d grown uncomfortable with the repudiation of human life implicit in it. The contempt for creation bothered me. It was as if the natural world were either inconsequential or insufficient. This seemed profoundly dismissive of the great gift of life, and for humans to be pining for a superior existence beyond the world of matter – well, that struck me as absurd, especially in a subculture like ours where no one went hungry and our sufferings were not exactly of the highest order.
I suppose what intensified my repulsion was the spectacle of fellow parishioners who’d drunk so deeply from this poisonous notion that they were now thirsty only for death. Some were anxious to see the End of Days. During the Cold War they welcomed the eve of destruction as an opportunity to ‘go home’ and as a result they turned their backs on temporal concerns. The poor and all structural injustice could be ignored. So too the planet’s ailing health. Tough luck – not our problem. It was bitterly ironic, given how often we all intoned our favourite Bible verse. Even the little kids could recite John 3:16 by heart: ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.’
But in their rush to greet the apocalypse, some of their parents had forgotten, as Marilynne Robinson reminds us, that ‘God so loved the world, this world, our world.’ I didn’t see the point in feigning virtue in this sorry existence only so as to prosper in the next. As W. H. Auden writes, ‘Eternity is the decision now, action now, one’s neighbour here.’ I wanted to live in a community where matter still mattered, and I was saying so, but I was doing it without elegance or diplomacy.
Initially the elders humoured me. When I kept pressing this point and others, they politely declined to engage. At first this tactic puzzled me. In time it made me furious. To generate discussion I provoked them, but they grew defensive and high-handed. Some questions seemed to strike them as improper. Eventually they barely spoke to me at all, and I read their retreat as spineless evasion. Although I was accused of being variously a communist, a pantheist, a humanist and a lukewarm liberal, I was never formally shunned. No one saw me off in a blaze of anger. There was no fire and brimstone. I kind of slunk away and that was that. Hardly even a whimper. My exit from the community was neither sudden nor dramatic. I was never denounced from the pulpit as friends from similar traditions were. There was no excommunication and thankfully no hideous ordeal of exorcism like the one Jeanette Winterson depicts in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.
But for years I remained perplexed by the behaviour of the elders I’d tried so hard to confront and convince. With the benefit of hindsight I see that I was completely blind to a crucial dynamic we were all at the mercy of but unable to express. From a position of generational privilege that I couldn’t even recognize, let alone acknowledge, I was arguing with men dragged out of school at twelve or thirteen to drive horses and ride tractors. There I was, a university undergrad, pounding these old geezers into rhetorical corners, hurling all my ten-dollar words and half-digested book learning at them, thrusting and parrying excitedly, oblivious that every challenge was a judgement of them and the poverty of their origins. I don’t resile from the youthful instinct to question and dispute, to call bullshit on ideas that are unexamined or oppressive, but I do regret the fact that every time I argued my corner I shamed them for things over which they had no control.
I spent my twenties in other, somewhat more progressive church communities, determined to find a synthesis of ideas that was watertight and definitive, but in the process I wore myself to a theological standstill. In the face of mystery, it seems no language is sufficient. Every expression is partial, contingent, as if written in sand. If I discovered anything it was that theology is speculative, not descriptive. At its best it’s poetic, for any discussion of the divine rests on metaphor, but what a peculiar task it is to try to describe silence. Even the grandest poetic language is hard-pressed to contain or carry an intimation of grace. Language is not experience itself. Reminding the faithful that the great mysteries of life cannot be brought to heel by theological assertion, Dietrich Bonhoeffer said: ‘Where God tears great gaps we should not try to fill them with human words.’ In matters of the spirit words are poor cousins to music. At best they remain muted echoes.
I still hear from stalwarts of my childhood church now and then. Old folks I fought with as a youth send cards and letters prompted by fond memories and abiding concern. When I see them at football games or asylum-seeker rallies they discreetly ask about my ‘walk’. At their funerals when I stand to sing the doxology in the company of their dwindling peers, the hair stands up grey at the back of my neck.
Nearly all my best friends are refugees from evangelical fundamentalism. Some are atheists, more have become agnostic, but the closest are still believers and some wear dog collars. I hasten to say this is not the result of any policy; it’s actually slightly mortifying. But it’s as if, when we first met as strangers, we recognized something familiar: a turn of phrase, a musical reference, the same queasy fascination for the work of Paul Schrader or Stanley Spencer. Perhaps it’s the do-gooding energy so carefully cloaked in irony – it can’t simply be the cardigans and the dissenter’s posture. Whatever it is, it’s kept us entertained. Our common pasts provide a reservoir of jokes and horror stories that soften our middle-aged bewilderment.
Like some of my post-evangelical friends I seem to have developed an irrational fondness for liturgical worship, and the more bells and smells, the better. Oddly enough the fixed forms are liberating and the repetition something I can lose myself in. Following along with the crowd, incanting what is essentially a long poem, I find a rare privacy. I do this, to misquote Auden, ‘in company, for solitude’. The sacrament of the Eucharist has become the central focus, the still point, if you will; I receive it on my knees and cross myself like a papist – spectacles, testicles, wallet and keys – but there’s no magical thinking in it. Sometimes the music is lovely, though a sung mass, like a musical, makes me fidget. I quite like a choir. I just wish the solemnity of choral music wasn’t so relentless. In truth I miss the brawling choruses and supercharged hymns of my youth. There’s nothing quite like the mad, joyful, erotic abandon of evangelical singing. The genteel wheezing of Anglicans and Catholics will never do. So used to being sung for, they seem to lack faith in their own voices. And the white-bread bump-and-grind of the charismatic mega-churches is just showbiz in the temple, the sound of money being made. My mother was right all along, there’s no pleasing the likes of me.
Which brings me to the point I’m always avoiding, the question strangers and some friends continue to ask: What brand of believer am I now? You’d think I’d have worked up an answer beyond the admission that I’m still a practising Christian but clearly getting no better at it. The thing is, I’m worn out with the labels and definitions people seem to be expecting, bored by the forensic nitpicking I was caught up in for so long. Besides, I’m no good at this stuff anymore, a feisty teenaged doorknocker can snooker me inside ten minutes; I’ve come to learn that matching a perky fundamentalist requires the certainty, memory and bladder control of a much younger person. To me, the rhetorical detail is no longer paramount, and like the poet Christian Wiman, I’ve come to see that ‘so much of faith has so little to do with belief, and so much to do with acceptance’, by which he means the acceptance of grace.
In the company of Protestants I feel rather Catholic, and a roomful of rockchoppers certainly brings out the Calvinist in me, even th
ough, with the exceptions of Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King, all my heroes ‘belonged to Rome’: Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Julian of Norwich, Leonardo Boff. My politics tend toward the collectivist, but like a lot of former fundamentalists and survivors of totalitarian regimes, I’m leery of conscripted solidarity. The bad faith of political correctness, what John Updike calls ‘coercive self-righteousness’, is too horribly familiar. And, having been so comprehensively inoculated in childhood, I find I’m immune to sermons, or maybe just allergic, though that’s not something I’m proud of.
I remain a believer and even a churchgoer, though I am in more than one sense irregular. Church was my village, but I doubt I’ll ever be truly at ease there again. All the same, on a Sunday evening, wherever I am, I feel that tidal pull, the old melancholy descends, and it’s as homely and as unsettling as the smell of the sea.
High Tide
Late in the day we step out into the withering heat. Most of the sting has gone from the sun but the air is still so hot it’s like trying to inhale a fluffy towel fresh from the tumble dryer. The hard red dirt is radiant. The spinifex sweats its oily musk. At noon it was 53.3 in the sun and 49.9 in what little shade there is out here on the floodplain. Even now it’s hellish but both of us are half wigged-out with cabin fever and we can’t sit in the aircon another moment; time for a swim.