“Do you?”
“Yes.”
“What brings that question up?”
“Religion seems to be at the center of various controversies lately: there’s debate over the freedom to practice it; over what is incontrovertible religious mandate; over the definition of sin; and what is valid biblical injunction—almost everything but about God, as in belief, or no. What do you make of it?”
“You’ve come up with a question maybe more complex than the answer,” Dr. Phield says, then pauses before saying,” because through the course of man’s existence, he has come to meld ‘belief’ and ‘faith’—the bookends of religious text—as a single entity, but by the same token, he separates ‘mind’ from ‘heart,’ the one which demands proof, and the other which accepts spiritual things unconditionally without it.
“Because it’s also his nature to question the conditions under which he survives. The Bible was open to interpretation from the start: In the beginning, if you will. As were the Vedas, the Analects, the Dao, and so on. As man identifies with the godhead physically and spiritually, he joins and becomes ‘God.’ He’s calling the shots now. Scripture is his cliff notes, carefully selected for self-worship, for autonomy, no longer responsible to an extraneous god.”
“That sounds like Nirvana or Satori or one of those conditions.”
“Sure, except that man assumes that he has acquired the privileges of God: like jealousy, prejudice, ethnic cleansing, and outright appropriation and murder. Even if man believes he can make those things right in the end, in his heart he knows that only God can.”
“You didn’t learn that in Sunday school.”
“Judging from the shape the planet’s in, nobody learned much in Sunday school.”
“Once, I thought you could. I sent my kids to church. I thought religious education was indispensable.”
“And?”
“My youngest son says he doesn’t think he believes in God.”
“He’ll wrestle with that self-argument his whole life. You seem to be having a related mental issue of some sort.”
“Well, the benefits of faith are sporadic and maybe clear only to a few. The end-game is apocryphal, to coin a phrase.”
“You mean, like heaven or hell?”
“Well, yeah. It’s not clear to ordinary mortals how heaven’s going to be ‘heaven’ without carnal fulfillment. And how can hell be any worse than what goes on here?”
“Well, humans tend to identify hell mostly with physical pain, or disfigurement, or torture; but people who are deathly ill or are being victimized under horrible circumstances weather that type of torment with hope and a paradoxical cheerfulness. Obviously, there are various types of hell. What’s your version?”
It’s hard to reveal yourself to someone else, especially when you don’t believe in open confession. That’s not “pick and choose” religion: Christ said, “Confess to the Father in secret.” But Phield is not a rock—he’s iron. For those of us who will never meet the Pope, or Billy Graham—or Jimmy Carter, for that matter, Phield will more than do.
“I tried to undo the wreckage of my marriage. Divorce was painful. But even in the wake of all that antagonism and betrayal and condemnation, neither one of us could let go. We talked about re-marriage.
“I went to see her one day and she was on the sofa crying. She did all the talking. She described—in tears and near-hysteria—in graphic detail, the abortion that she’d just gone through that morning. A friend took her. I hadn’t even known she’d been pregnant.
“The ensuing days were hazy. It was hard to face her, as it must have been for her to face herself, or me. I used to pride myself on never having been floored by a punch until that day. It didn’t help that at that time I was drinking more than I should have. I procrastinated. Distance between us widened. One day I went to see her and she was gone. The house had been sold. And nobody knew, or would tell me where she was. The saleslady at the real estate office gave me a note in an envelope that said,
‘I’ll be in Texas waiting. I know you’ll go back some day. It won’t be any trick to find me. We’ll probably both be dead.’
“And I never did find her. I tried. But she was even smart enough to know where I’d begin to search. The kids told me that she reassured them in a letter to each one of them, that she was fine. They drifted away from me little by little, too. I’ve always felt that there is something I missed: something I should have said or done, and that someday I’ll step into an empty hole and disappear, too.”
Phield cups his hands and looks out the window with a wistful look on his face. No one is exempt from Job’s lot. He says, "How long has it been?"
"Twenty-five years."
"At this point, what pains you the most?”
“Not knowing. Not knowing she was pregnant. Not knowing about the abortion until I had been left out of the decision. Did she want to be free of the responsibility, or did she want me to be? What choice would I have made if I’d been asked to contribute? Was there a correct choice? Did I care too much or not enough? Did she? Where did she go?”
“Maybe to the same hell you’re in.”
“How can I make things right if I don’t even know what I’m guilty of?”
“You can’t, even if you know. You’re not God.”
Noe.
