The author is a doppelganger. Even better on the screen, lit up, big-time circulating word-wide, worldwide, s-i-m-u-l-t-a-n-e-o-u-s-l-y m-a-n-i-f-e-s-t-i-n-g. Illusion of coherence, this: neat and tidy on the screen, a well reasoned argument.

I sound my barbaric YAWP over the roofs of the world, and I remember Nadja.

Nadja, four-times removed: 1. Somebody—which is to say, some body, allegedly—female in Paris, purportedly mad, institutionalized, the object of Surrealist André Breton’s obsession; 2. the main character in Breton’s 1928 novel Nadja, and by that fact immortalized, big-time circulating, simultaneously manifesting; 3. the ghost that haunted (in bodily time) or haunts (in doppelganger time) André Breton—either in Paris, or in the novel, or both—after he breaks off their 10-day rendezvous because Breton can not live with the thought of her as some body; 4. an introductory trope to this reflection (on automatic writing) that took on a life of its own the moment I began to yawp over the roofs of the world.

Qui suis-je?

Who am I?

Who wrote that?

Breton—transfixed by Nadja’s stream-of-consciousness, allegedly irrational, thought-words/thought-worlds—as the opening sentence of Nadja—and now “I”, coming to here underneath this blinking cursor that no longer exists as you read about it now on the big screen lit up (once upon a time, which is to say before time as we now experience it, I could have written on the page—which is to say, on the way to nowhere in particular, or everywhere in general, but here we are now, whatever this might mean, exactly.)

Good question, this qui suis-je. And might we not add as well, où? Where are we, exactly, now, anyway, tossed about, swaying side-to-side, undulating in the midst of this chaotic sea of words, electronic information, simultaneously glowing gigabytes, white hot, magic discourse, published or perished or polished or not?

Here are our thoughts, voyagers’ thoughts,
Here not the land, firm land, alone appears, may then by them be said,
The sky o’erarches here, we feel the undulating deck beneath our feet,
We feel the long pulsation, ebb and flow of endless motion,
The tones of unseen mystery, the vague and vast suggestions of the
briny world, the liquid-flowing syllables,
The perfume, the faint creaking of the cordage, the melancholy rhythm,
The boundless vista and the horizon far and dim are all here,
And this is ocean’s poem.

But where was I? Breton likened his own fascination with Nadja to Dr. Theodore Flournoy’s infatuation with Hélène Smith (née Catherine-Elise Muller), that automatic writer (and Surrealist darling, and Spiritualist medium, and later Christian visionary) who left her body in flights to Mars, bringing back the Martian language to Earth, speaking to Flournoy in Martian, writing down the alphabet of Mars for scholars to ponder.

Advertisement from the August 1925 Popular Mechanics.

And who wrote that?

The psychologist Flournoy wrote about Smith and her Martian travels in his Des Indes à la Planete Mars—“From India to the Planet Mars”—published in 1900. No automatic writer he, Flournoy shielded us all from Smith’s madness by explaining the visions—i-n-f-a-n-t-i-l-e r-e-g-r-e-s-s-i-o-n—mercifully providing an illusion of coherence, which is to say a reason, for all of the babble. Thanks to Smith’s own magic, the wily Flournoy entered into the stream-of-printed-consciousness as a rational doppelganger-subject.

Cease now the endless flow of motion!

But it is far too late for that. The automatic writing has been mushrooming, fragmenting, overwhelming, and recombining for a very long time now. I remember John Ballou Newbrough, who in 1880 saw a strange light envelop his hands as he held them over a manual typewriter. The next thing he knew, a manuscript began to write itself. It was Oahspe: a New Bible in the Words of Jehovah and his Angel Embassadors [sic]. (A Sacred History of the Dominions of the Higher and Lower Heavens of the Earth for the Past Twenty-Four Thousand Years, together with a Synopsis of the Cosmogony of the Universe; the Creation of Planets; the Creation of Man; the Unseen Worlds; the Labor and Glory of Gods and Goddesses in the Etherean Heavens; with the New Commandments of Jehovah to Man of the present Day. With Revelations from the Second Resurrection, Formed in Words in the Thirty Third Year of the Kosmon Era.) I remember Andrew Jackson Davis, who in 1845 lapsed into mesmeric trance at the hands of his operator S.S. Lyons. Two years later, the paradigmatic made-in-America metaphysical text appeared in print, “by and through” Davis. It was entitled The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind (In Three Parts. Part First. Any theory, hypothesis, philosophy, sect, creed, or institution, that fears investigation, openly manifests its own error. Part Second. Reason is a flower of the spirit, and its fragrance is liberty and knowledge. Part Third. When distributive justice pervades the social world, virtue and morality will bloom with an immortal beauty: while the Sun of Righteousness will arise in the horizon of universal industry, and shed its genial rays over all the fields of peace, plenty, and HUMAN HAPPINESS!) I remember the Admiral of the Ocean Sea and the pre-1492 oikoumene cosmic-world-map before it exploded, supernova-like, into a multitude of worlds. I remember Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg and the Word before it erupted, Vesuvius-like, into a googolplex of words.

I write, “I.” Scribo ergo sum: the only way to be, coherently, worldwide, amid this raging molten meltdown.

Advertisement from the September 1926 The Rotarian.

You vapors, I think I have risen with you, moved away to distant
continents, and fallen down there, for reasons,
I think I have blown with you you winds;
You waters I have finger’d every shore with you,
I have run through what any river or strait of the globe has run through,
I have taken my stand on the bases of peninsulas and on the high
embedded rocks…

Neat and tidy on the screen, some semblance of form still remains, which is to say this glowing white rectangle, this body of yours slouched in a chair, my body nowhere to be found in this doppelganger-ether-ghost, automatic-Martian-author-voice, simultaneously-manifesting, which is to say, now is as good as any time to break from the stream, the other doppelgangers notwithstanding, and may automatic writing be praised forevermore.

A number of commentators have argued that in the last half century Christianity has declined in the West and a more generic belief in the supernatural has taken its place. According to this narrative, religion has declined and spirituality has increased.

Though there are problems with some of these arguments, in general I am persuaded by them. The question that arises for me, however, is this: If traditional religiousness is declining, where are these once-religious-now-spiritual people getting their ways of thinking about God, spirit, the afterlife, and related ideas? Out of what raw materials are they fashioning new beliefs about the transcendent realms of ghosts, gods or souls? One place, I think, is science.

At the turn of the twentieth century, many Europeans and Americans sensed that older traditions had failed them. That feeling accelerated during and after the Great War. When he filled out this survey in 1904, William James was helping one of his graduate students, James Bissett Pratt, who put this survey together as part of his doctoral research. James Pratt and many others were aware that older foundations for belief were crumbling and they experimented with ways of using psychology to understand what was authentically religious. Eventually they produced normative conclusions about the best ways to worship and the most healthy types of belief. Their recommendations were hard on traditional, institutional religions, and this became increasingly true by the middle of the twentieth century. They concluded that when old-time religious concepts were updated and made less superstitious, these concepts would become more believable.

James and his students also turned to psychological studies of religion to understand the nature and sources of belief and put its power on display. Attuned to matters relating to individual religion, these questionnaires themselves suggested that the essence of religion lay in the self. In the survey reprinted here, Pratt indicates that “personal experience” was more important than second-order “philosophical generalizations” that were removed from the vital sources of the religious self. In his earlier surveys of conversion, another student of William James, Edwin Starbuck, made the same move. And James also did the same thing in his 1901-2 Varieties. Pratt’s interpretive investment in personal experience is clear right at the beginning: he believes that religious institutions, rites and communities are less important. The essence of the thing to be surveyed—the essence of right religion—is inner experience.

James’s answers reflect some of the ways that religion was being torn down and spirituality built up in its place during this particular era. Did he believe in God because the Bible or some other more traditional source of religious knowledge told him so? Did he base his faith and life on the Bible? “No. No. No. It is so human a book that I don’t see how belief in its divine authorship can survive the reading of it.” Even prayer, a more traditional religious act, is forfeited here in favor of something else, perhaps study or discussion or analysis of religious experiences. Prayer made him feel “foolish and artificial.”

For James the most reliable source of religious knowledge was located in the inner stuff of emotions, will-power, and desire. He believed God existed because he felt a need for God. “I need it so that it ‘must’ be true.” He believed God existed because he needed a “more powerful ally of my own ideals.” He also believed in God (in a “dimly (real)” way) because he sensed the presence of a germ within him that responded to other peoples’ dramatic religious experiences. He didn’t have them himself, but he was thrilled to see that others did. The testimony of others he says here “is so strong that I am unable to pooh-pooh it away.” There was an emotional power behind the breathless way he and his students collected and shared thousands of these first-hand accounts. All of it was scientific proof for God and spiritual things.

James did not initiate the shift from religion to spirituality, though I think his life and indeed this questionnaire are emblematic of that shift in its earlier stages. After all, was not the shift from a robust institutional religiousness to a more individualistic spirituality inherent in Protestantism from the beginning? The older Protestant critique was a lot like James’s: get rid of inessential, outer religious forms and cling to inner, “spiritual” essentials—faith alone! James’s work was merely an extension of the paring down of religion that Protestants performed centuries before he came along.

There is another aspect of James’s purification of religion that is central to my argument, however, and it has to do with how he turned to an empirical study of experience as a new foundation for his spirituality. As older warrants for belief waned, as the Bible and even Jesus faded into a demythologized past, where could people turn to reestablish faith in God or immortality? The answer was science. When properly domesticated by religious believers, scientific procedures were ways of seeing spiritual things with certainty. With them we saw things truly, and seeing was believing. When James saw people around him falling into fits and trances, he believed. There was, he thought, something to it.

James wasn’t the only believer turning to science to appropriate its more certain ways of knowing, seeing, and believing.

 
John M. Watson’s starting point was similar to James’s in two ways. First, though he was willing to hold onto more of Christianity than James, he also believed that older ways of thinking about religion were superstitious, simple-minded and old-fashioned. Second, like James he believed that by studying the essence of religion in experience we could make religious experience more real to people and catch real glimpses of the divine spirit acting in these experiences.

But Watson also turns to other sciences to elicit another set of emotions that we might call religious: awe and wonder. In Watson’s Science as Revelation he insisted that a new vital faith might be had by studying not just human nature but also the beauty and lawfulness of nature in general. Science, in other words, was the alembic through which modern spiritual sensibilities were developed. “The new conception of God in the light of all the sciences as the intelligent energy, with many forms but with a single identity that fills the universe, is a thousand times more convincing than our former conceptions of Deity.” Watson used science to develop a new picture of God. “By the ladder of the sciences we may rise step by step, without the slightest break or gap,” Watson wrote, “from the simplest form of matter and energy and from nature at its zenith obtain the most sublime, beautiful and uplifting religious concepts.” God is energetic—a common belief among twentieth-century religious liberals—and the appropriate response to that God is openness, wonder, and astonishment.

There is a lot to be astonished about in Watson’s lecture tour of the universe, and participants evidently were appropriately awed. This is clear from the promotional pamphlet. Science was showing us that there was more to the world than meets the eye. Telescopes demonstrated that the world was more vast and wonderful than we had ever thought. And microscopes brought into focus another world within our world, a world of intricate crystals and microscopic ecologies. Both new technologies yielded “beautiful and wonderful revelations.” Both proved that there were things that existed beyond the range of our vision and both helped us see them. What else might be out there that we couldn’t yet see? Were there unseen dimensions where other creatures resided? You had to wonder.

Conversations about higher dimensions had already begun in the late nineteenth century, when scientists used higher dimensional math to understand better the universe’s laws. Beginning at the turn of the twentieth century, theologians and writers borrowed these ideas to try to “prove” the existence of heaven, explain the mechanisms involved in spirit communication or understand better the fate of dearly departed souls. Films and books about higher dimensions also made people wonder. This 1959 film was only one of the many imaginative narratives that depicted scientists with new powers and access to other worlds.

The 4D Man told the story of two brothers who developed an “amplifier” that enabled them to have fourth dimensional powers. (Basically, they could pass through walls.) In the fourth dimension, however, time moved more rapidly, and passing into the 4D therefore meant aging quickly. (There were downsides to wandering into other planes of existence.) The same themes were played out in a 1963 episode of the sci-fi TV show The Outer Limits, though here the 4D machine transported people (briefly) to a plane of existence that looked like a shadowy afterlife where scientists could call out for spirits of lost loved ones. This show began with the cast around a séance table. It ended with a successful journey to the 4D/heaven in a scientific laboratory.

The film and the TV show suggest ways that Americans borrowed scientific ideas about other dimensions to help them imagine the existence of unseen realms and recover an imaginative sense for the supernatural. Books about other dimensions—some theological but many sci-fi or fiction—did the same thing. In the last thirty years, with the rise of multidimensional string theory, there are more and more popularizations of science that religious people take up with enthusiasm and wonder. Science and science fiction point the way to uncanny, mysterious, and otherworldly realities.

That the universe is uncanny and mysterious is admitted even by more sober physicists today. Fred Alan Wolf is not one of them. He is a scientific mystic with a fantastic superhero alter ego—Dr. Quantum—who, like the 4D scientists in The 4D Man, found new powers and abilities in twentieth-century science.

Wolf received his PhD in theoretical physics at UCLA in 1963 and actively worked in the field until a 1971 sabbatical trip to India and Katmandu, where he had his first religious experience in a Buddhist temple. He left his academic position at San Diego State University in 1974 and set out with a few friends and left wing physicists to create the Fundamental Fysiks Group in San Francisco, a group that used quantum principles to explain ESP, psychokinesis, occult phenomena, and spirit communication. Since then Wolf has written popular books about spirituality, consciousness, and quantum physics. The image reproduced here is from one of these books.

What happens when, as it says on the cover, “science meets spirit”? Wolf and other quantum mystics have identified several ways that scientific thinking has led to new religious ideas. I can enumerate three here:

1. Quantum science shows us that the natural world is mysterious, uncanny, and multidimensional. Nature dissolves into energetic forces that elude the epistemologies of measurement and control scientists have traditionally used. All things can look like particles or waves but at bottom are different forms of energy vibrating at different frequencies.

2. God is an immanent force in this energetic world, or perhaps is coextensive with this energetic world.

3. Mind or spirit is the source of all realities and things. If in former times it seemed true that mind/spirit was epiphenomenal and the material world was the only real reality, today the reverse is true: the material world is epiphenomenal and mind/spirit is the only reality. (Wolf and others reach this conclusion by interpreting the observer effect in quantum physics. Long story.) The preoccupation with the power of the mind or consciousness to shape or determine reality is a preoccupation that increases as the twentieth century wears on, though it is unmistakably present in James as well, who believed our intentions shaped reality and who argued that our consciousness contained mysterious powers of mystical perception.

My argument in this short piece has been pretty simple. It is that twentieth-century believers have appropriated ideas from the sciences (and especially from popular science publications) to fashion new ways of thinking about God and the transcendent. There is no doubt that Americans draw on a range of ideas and images as they reimagine religious concepts. But science has a privileged place in our culture. It is probably the most powerful source of certain knowledge. Why not incorporate its key metaphors and concepts as we try to understand where Americans get their ideas about the world, its mysterious qualities, ineradicable ghosts, and transcendent boundaries?

The premise of Laurence Cossé’s novel A Corner of the Veil is that someone discovers a proof of God’s existence—a real proof, finally, for good. A priest who has just seen it and grasped its amazing truth walks through the streets of Paris and looks at the people around him, imagining what it will be like when they too, soon, see what he has seen.

Probably, for a time, everything would come to a halt. People wouldn’t go to the office anymore. The children would be sent to school, but they’d stop along the way, caught up by great circles of orators in tears.

People would talk on sidewalks, in the Métro, at church doors. Ah, the priests wouldn’t know where to start! People would talk for hours in the rain. Neighbors who had always eyed each other with suspicion would be talking to each other. Couples ten years separated would phone each other from distant places.

The post office would stay closed. There would be a notice on the gate: hallelujah. On the other hand, the museums would never close again, nor the Métro, nor the public parks. The guards would never figure out where their caps had disappeared to.

For days it would feel like a kind of general strike, a huge drunken spree.

Isn’t this what we should rightfully expect of a proof? (The French yen for a general strike might be lost in translation for some American readers.) It’s what a proof should be, at least by the word’s most relevant definition: demonstrative, definitive. Nor are the other meanings entirely unrelated either, involving things like rising bread, inebriation, impermeability, and graphic design. I wonder how many thinkers through time have had a hope like this in mind for their own thoughts, especially their religious ones.

Plato, in his latter-life dialogue Laws, imagined that proofs of the gods might finally set his society right, and even that reciting them could reform criminal youths. Ibn Tufayl, a Muslim in medieval Spain, described a proof so powerful it could soothe away one’s will to live. Anselm of Canterbury wanted to share with others the burst of joy that his proof for God gave him one early morning in his monastery. Descartes and Leibniz thought their proofs might heal the rift that the Reformation had torn through Europe. And it continues today, as much as ever, if not more.

I’ve spent weeks driving around Southern California, from storefront to storefront, visiting all the organizations I could find devoted to promulgating one proof or another. There’s, for instance, the Institute for Creation Research’s old museum, tucked in an office park under a highway in Santee. I head north a while, past Saddleback Church and the Crystal Cathedral, and find Ray Comfort; he claims—alongside his ex-child-star sidekick Kirk Cameron—that there is 100% scientific proof for God’s existence in the design of a banana. I pause in downtown LA for a rooftop lunch with Sam Harris, the “New Atheist” who declared, in his surprise post-9/11 bestseller, The End of Faith, and then head back to the far suburbs to meet the scientists at Reasons to Believe in their converted Glendora strip mall. And back down along the Orange County border is Biola University—formerly the Bible Institute of Los Angeles. Today it’s home to the world’s largest philosophy graduate program, equipping master’s students with proofs before sending them off to the top mainstream, atheism-ruled PhD programs.

The dream of Cossé’s priest, and the joy of it, lives on. Craig Hazen, who runs Biola’s apologetics department, told me, “I still wake up every day thinking, I just can’t believe this thing’s true! You know?” I’m not sure, but I sort of do. Maybe. I usually wake up asking mercy or giving thanks, and rarely is it clear for what.

These things, these proofs, appear before philosophy students in textbook after textbook. They’re taught, argued about, and forgotten, sometimes saving a person’s particular faith, sometimes eroding it, and usually neither. There’s no surer way of knowing than proof, and it’s hard to imagine any more significant knowledge than that of a God. But what will count as proof, and for whom? On the world goes, in disputation, in belief and unbelieving and multitudinous forms of each. Meanwhile, some few—usually men, as it happens—keep up this search for what would really be proof of a real God, and for all that would come from finding one, in some form, or some near-enough approximation.

For most of us, it hasn’t happened yet.

I once had a landlord who was an arch Republican with signed pictures of various Republican figures (George W. Bush, Jesse Helms, Ronald Reagan) on his walls. He was also an avid dowser, past-life regresser, and astral projector. He cured the neighbor’s apple tree of a worm infestation, found people’s lost objects over the phone, and attempted to heal my terror of snakes through a visualization technique that involved repetition and tapping on my sternum (the last one didn’t work and can’t speak to the second, but there weren’t worms in the apples when I lived there). He was an aficionado of conspiracy theories, a veritable archivist. I have never had so much fun talking to anyone with whom I disagreed so much. He was a truly marvelous person. But every time I try to describe the man to someone, the story is met with wonderment that a person could be both a conservative and a new age mage. Some sort of inauthenticity is implied in the discomfort. Yet why should it be so? What is our anxiety about dissonance? What is the landlord out of tune with but our own conceptions of harmony?

Explaining the unexplainable is a favorite human pastime. Semi-regular emails appear in my inbox from individuals who claim to see things as they really are in relation to whatever issue they place at the center of their universes—the Bosnian Pyramids of the Sun (suppressed by Egypt’s Department of Antiquities so they can monopolize the tourist trade), the hidden evil of the Council on American Islamic Relations (a front for a variety of anti-American, terrorist entities), the scourge of Muslim population growth (set to overtake the 80% Hindu majority in India in a matter of fifty years), and so on. Today’s missive encouraged me to explore the Illuminati Bohemian Grove Freemason connection, which no doubt would reveal the complex system of puppet strings being pulled by a cabal of puppeteers hiding in plain sight. A paleontologist friend gets emails from dinosaur aficionados who believe the paleontological establishment is bent on repressing the truth about dinosaurs, the environment, coexistence with humans, and so on. Not to mention the creationist vision of Jesus cradling a baby T-Rex… those were the days.

Grand explanatory schemes share certain qualities with conspiracy theories. Both seek to fulfill both our need to understand and our need to be mystified. I was in India, living in a Muslim majority community, when the World Trade Towers were brought down on September 11, 2001. Or were they? Shortly after the horrifying spectacle began to unfold, people of all faiths, all classes, all sorts began to approach me, suggesting various alternative explanations for the unimaginably terrifying collapse of the huge structures and the devastatingly tiny bodies that showered down in an endless loop on every channel. Many conspiracy theories emerged (it was all staged, no Jews showed up to work that day, the US government was the real culprit, Muslims were framed, Muslims hate freedom, etc. etc.), all transcending the evidentiary but fulfilling a need to try to explain. I don’t believe that the WTC and Pentagon attacks of 2001 are unaccountable at all, but it is clear that for many the simple is insufficient, the self-evident is inadequate. Reality is just too, well, real. Or maybe it is as Clifford Geertz suspected, that in situations that defy human experience or conception, speculation reassures us of the human capacity to eventually arrive at understanding. If we can propose solutions to a riddle (and what is more puzzling than the way things actually are) then we are also asserting our ability, maybe as yet unrealized, to comprehend all phenomena perfectly. But speculation can go awry, re-enchanting the disenchanted.

Does one reduce the pervasion of conspiracy theories to the need to understand and control a seemingly meaningless and random world? Yes and no. Or maybe. Of course reductionism is anathema to the scholar, but it is tempting to the citizen baffled by the absurdities that pass for explanations and the number of people who seem confident of President Obama’s foreign, Muslim birth. Where do “they” come from, these people… how did they get that way? And so we concoct our own conspiracy theory about the conspiracy theorists—they are crypto-racists, birther-xenophobes, libertarian technophobes. Ostensibly in search of rational explanations, believers may fix on the most illogical, most improbable available. It calls to mind Hume’s view of the perversity of most religious believers who ignore the rational beauty of nature and choose instead to construct religions that depend upon fear, superstition, and capriciousness, “Survey most nations and most ages. Examine the religious principles, which have, in fact, prevailed in the world. You will scarcely be persuaded, that they are any thing but sick men’s dreams.” But through these dreams the rationalized world is re-enchanted. A conspiracy provides a key to a mystery that, even as it unlocks, obfuscates. Contradictions both acquaint us with the stable, familiar episteme in which we are comfortable, and reminds us of how tedious it would be if we existed in absolute purity. Indeed, contradictions are in the eyes of the beholder. My landlord was not riddled with anxiety about being a conservative and a dabbler in occult sciences—I was. I was the one who had to explore my own confusion and interrogate my own surprise. The instinct to seek a key to unlock the mystery is a reflection of an inability, closer to home, to account for his hybridity, eccentricity, and imaginative playfulness. The more we dismiss such lifeways as kooky, the more we impoverish our ability to actually make such accountings of the unexpected. Check your inbox.

Though I am free and belong to no one, I have made myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible. To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law. To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law), so as to win those not having the law. To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some.

1 Corinthians 9:19-22

A few Sundays ago I was in what I suppose passes for my church: an activist space in an old warehouse on the edge of the city. I was there with my partner to train a group of veteran organizers on how to employ creativity and the arts in their activism in order to become more effective political players in our media-saturated, culture-rich world. Standing in front of the organizers, I got to a point in my stock presentation where I introduce Jesus as an example of a creative activist. My proselytizing was of a secular rather than religious nature: it wasn’t the spiritual figure of Christ I was interested in but the purely historical Jesus, a radical Mediterranean Jewish peasant building a revolutionary movement two millennia ago. Jesus, I explained, understood the fundamentals of using story and spectacle, signs and symbols as means to criticize the status quo and offer up an alternative vision. When, for example, he entered the main temple of Jerusalem and overturned the tables of the money changers and sellers of ritual objects he was staging an effective political performance. He could have stood outside and harangued the passerby with his opinions, the ancient equivalent of the activist on the soapbox, but instead he demonstrated his politics though a spectacular act of civil disobedience. Through such an action he not only demonstrated visually and bodily his political ideals, but did it in such a provocative way that news of his deed, and therefore his message, was sure to travel. In modern parlance: Jesus went viral.

I then spoke of Jesus’ use of parables and how, by employing these often oblique stories, he created an opening for his audience to make the message their own. Unlike a list of grievances or demands, easily understood and just as easily ignored, the parables asked listeners to puzzle through the mystery of the stories and their meanings. It was an “invitational form of speech” to quote the Bible scholar Marcus Borg, which does not command, but instead works in its “ability to involve and affect the imagination.” One can almost imagine the scene following an impromptu teaching by Jesus: people walking away, debating amongst themselves exactly what this crazy holy man meant by comparing the kingdom of heaven to a mustard seed. But with every argument and counter-argument, Jesus’ words ceased to be his alone and became the common property of his audience.

Finally, I discussed how Jesus was able to prefigure his vision of a better world tomorrow though creative actions situated in the present day. By sitting down to dinner—a deeply meaningful ritual in Biblical times—with women, tax collectors, sinners and the ill, he enacted in the here and now the egalitarian community he prophesized for the future. Similarly, by entering Jerusalem on a donkey, the titular “Son of God” seated upon a lowly ass, he acted out his ideal of a world turned upside down in which “the last shall be first, and the first last.” Jesus, I concluded, took the ideal of a political “demonstration” quite literally… and thus employed it very effectively.

I was done with this lesson and ready to move on to a discussion concerning the use of creative tactics in the American Revolution when one of the participants raised their hand and asked me if I was a Christian. The question threw me, and I had to think for a moment. I was raised Christian and I know my Bible, my father and grandfather were both ministers and, most other Sundays, I attend a “real” Church with my family. But am I a Christian?

By way of an answer I explained that a large majority of Americans—anywhere from 76 to 83 percent, in fact—identify themselves as Christian and that many of the guiding myths, symbols and ideals of the United States have their roots in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles. I argued that religion, as a compendium of stories, a system of ethics, and a model of behavior could be drawn upon as a popular alternative to norms and ideals of competitive consumer capitalism. I admitted that there’s much to condemn in religion, its bigotry and intolerance for starters, but also pointed out that most religions also extol such virtues as love, community and responsibility for others. Good material for an astute organizer to work with.

I also reminded the activists in the room of the first rule of guerilla warfare: know your terrain and use it to your advantage. Whether we approve of it or not Christianity forms the contours of much of American life and consciousness; it is a, if not the, lingua franca. If you want to be an effective activist in the this country you need to be able to talk the talk, even if you are uneasy walking the walk. We might profit, I concluded, from the words of the Apostle Paul, the crackerjack community organizer of the early Church, who wrote: “Though I am free and belong to no one, I have made myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible… I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some.”

By the end of my jeremiad I realized I had my answer. I am a Christian, but only because I believe it makes me a more effective political activist. In a word, I am an opportunistic Christian. (A public admission made more awkward by the fact that the minister of my—albeit activist—Church was participating in the workshop). So much for the authenticity of my faith. But sitting down to retell this story now I realize something else. I do have faith in Jesus, but a particular and perhaps peculiar faith. Do I believe that Jesus walked on water? No. Do I believe in the divinity of Christ? No. Do I believe in God? No. But do I believe that Jesus cared about those who are used, abused or forgotten by society? Do I believe that Jesus wanted to radically transform the world? Do I believe that Jesus can teach me something about how to be an effective political organizer? The answer is Yes, yes and, again, yes.

I believe. I believe that all history, to paraphrase Marx and Engels, is the history of social struggle. It is a bloody and brutal history of those who use their power and privilege to kill, oppress, demean and regulate others in order to maintain and increase their own power and privilege. But there is another history too: a long tradition of people who have stood up to those in power and teached and preached and organized and demanded the redistribution of power and privilege. And there is an even more radical history of those who have envisioned and demanded a world in which power and privilege are abolished altogether.

Jesus is part of this history, as is Moses and Buddha and the Prophet Mohammed; Karl Marx, Emma Goldman and Martin Luther King too. This is my community of faith. I may be opportunistic in the material I draw upon for inspiration and lessons. I will readily become a Christian amongst the Christians, a Jew amongst Jews, and a Muslim amongst Muslims, not to mention a Communist or Anarchist amongst Communists or Anarchists—“I have become all things to all people.” And while this sounds coldly instrumental, I can assure you it is not; it’s something deeply spiritual. I feel impossibly yet intimately connected to those who have fought, and continue to fight, to radically transform the world. Their history is my history and mine theirs. Together we share a faith that we can make heaven here on earth.

In a sparse, basement-level room of the Unitarian Church in a small Midwestern city—let’s call it Clifton—the fifteen or so members of the Clifton sangha gather on a Wednesday evening. There is no authorized teacher, though some members have studied with Zen or Tibetan teachers. Elaine, who convenes the weekly meditation session, pulls a ten-inch bronze Buddha statue out of a cabinet and places it on a small table. She leads a short Zen chant, and the group sits in meditation facing the wall for thirty minutes, followed by a reading, then ten minutes of walking meditation. After another brief chant, the group turns toward the Buddha image and bows deeply.

O  Shariputra, form is emptiness, emptiness is form

Form is no other than emptiness, emptiness no other than form…

Across the globe, there are countless images similar to the one to which these Midwesterners bow. This one was purchased in Lhasa, Tibet, at one of the dozens of open-air vendors on the circumambulation circuit around Jokhang Temple. Pilgrims come from all over Tibet to walk or prostrate around the circuit, spinning prayer wheels and chanting mantras. During a two-week trip to China, another member of the sangha, Carl, chose this statue from hundreds of others available. The vendor tried first to offer Carl a new factory-made buddha, but he asked for one that looked older, more antique, so the vendor dutifully mussed one up a bit and brought it back the next day. Finally they settled on an older figure that, the vendor claimed, was once used in a Tibetan monastery. After the monastery was dismantled by the Chinese during the Cultural Revolution, it stayed in a devotee’s house for a few decades and then found its way to the open market. Carl wanted an “authentic” image rather than one made in a factory, one that was made for a spiritual purpose rather than just to sell to tourists.

According to the vendor, the image was crafted by an artisan over sixty years ago. If this is accurate, it would have sat in limbo when completed alongside the other bronze buddhas in the studio with scarves wrapped around their eyes. When they were installed in a temple, a monk would have performed a consecration ceremony that has been going on since before the common era in which the Buddha is invited to take up residence in the image. In the final stage of the ritual, the scarf is removed and the eyes are painted in. Then the Buddha can look out at the devotees who come and prostrate themselves before it, praying for a better rebirth in the next lifetime, alleviation of sickness, or success on exams.

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Carl’s buddha now finds its home in the basement at the Unitarian Church, where it is kept most of the time in a dark cabinet. On Wednesday evenings, Elaine brings it out, sets it on a makeshift altar and lights a stick of incense before it.

A few in the sangha admit that they think there may be a special quality to items that have had intimate interaction with advanced practitioners—a kind of spiritual “energy.” But no one in the group thinks that bowing before it will give them karmic merit, success in business ventures, material prosperity, or a better rebirth. They are happy that it is old and consecrated, but they don’t believe that the Buddha dwells in the statue. Its eyes are as blind as metal deep in the cold earth.

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The image’s status in Clifton, therefore, is somewhat demoted from the one it enjoyed in Lhasa. Before we invite Max Weber in to declare it disenchanted, though, let us note the new kinds of enchantment it picks up in its new home at the far lower elevations of the Midwestern prairie. The biblical prohibition against idolatry, and its cousin, the scientific naturalist prohibition against naively attributing conscious life to an inanimate collection of atoms and molecules, demarcate certain limitations to this sangha’s reverence toward any statue. But there are deep currents of western culture that predispose these modern Buddhists toward disillusionment with the promises of modernity, its technology, its factories and corporations that promise to manufacture happiness for the masses. An old bronze statue from Tibet embodies the imagined antithesis of the failed promises of techno-rational-consumerist modernity. Tibet, in fact, has held such a place in the western imagination for well over a century—the last bastion of pre-modern wisdom, isolated beyond the Himalayas, its society devoted to spiritual wisdom that some even today hope will save modern humanity from itself. Coming from the land of the snows gives it the charisma of the mysterious, the lost, the authentic. And authenticity, as Walter Benjamin noted, is only possible after it has been replaced by the regime of mechanically produced commodities (after which, it is itself offered as a commodity).

The charisma of the lost Other of modernity only goes so far, though. The Clifton Sangha, after all, is an educated bunch. Of the fifteen, four are college professors (two in the sciences), three are engineers, and all but two have college degrees. Most are not content with dreamy, New Age longing. And some are a bit uncomfortable bowing to a statue. But they have agreed to continue the practice, insisting to anyone who asks that this is not idolatry and that the image is entirely symbolic. This object is ultimately a piece of metal, like any other. Nevertheless, for them it has its own kind of enchantment because it silently speaks of the possibility that beneath or within atoms and molecules—and especially within the mind itself—there is a cosmic spirit, a consciousness infusing the whole of things that connects everything with everything else, a vast interconnected network of life that weaves everything together into unity and harmony, over-riding the countless fragmentations and contradictions of the modern world. Buddha-nature, says 13th century Zen master Dogen Zenji, is neither east nor west, north or south. It pervades everything—is everything.

One bit of matter is, therefore, as good as any other for representing this cosmic truth. Thus, Elaine says, we choose a bit that represents someone seeing into that truth—the Buddha sitting under the tree of enlightenment. Spirituality in this sense does not oppose materiality—it encompasses everything—but it disposes of local gods, gods of a particular culture, place, and time. The Buddha can be in everything but not one particular thing.

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When the Taliban blew up the Buddhas of Bamiyan, one of the sangha members insists, Buddhists weren’t bothered at all. “They’re just pieces of stone,” he says with a shrug.

A few weeks later in my Buddhism class, I discuss the image of the Buddha and its role in various Buddhist traditions. At one point I pull a small Buddha statue out of a bag and begin to place it on the table, but it slips a bit and almost falls over, clunking heavily onto the surface. The young Thai women in the front row gasps in distress.

…form is no other than emptiness, emptiness no other than form…

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When Carl went to Tibet, he couldn’t help feel somewhat disappointed at the amount of ritual, liturgy, image-worship, and “superstitious” practices that he witnessed. He saw no one meditating. The reverence they seemed to show for the large buddha statues in the temples disconcerted him. Many Tibetans, he concluded, practice a kind of “cultural” Buddhism. It’s just a part of their culture, so they do it. Spirituality, as Elaine, Carl, and many other Western Buddhists understand it, transcends “culture.” It is the encounter with the universal. This puts them in an ambivalent relationship to even Buddhist culture.

Many western practitioners in the twentieth century have understood Buddhism as a matter of transcending cultural conditioning. Alan Watts insisted on a distinction between the “acquired self” and “your genuine, deepest self, not the self which depends on family and conditioning, on learning and experience, or any kind of artifice” but on Buddha-nature itself—the “original face” of the famous Zen koan. For Watts, Zen requires a person to realize that the “ego, the self which he has believed himself to be, is nothing but a pattern of habits or artificial reaction.” As Buddhism has been enfolded into western spirituality, it has often operated on some version of the idea, derived largely from Romanticism and modernism, that:

within each human being there is an individuality lying in potentiality, which seeks an occasion for realization but is held in the toils of the rules, beliefs, and roles which society imposes . . . that the real state of the self is very different from the acquired baggage which institutions like families, schools, and universities impose. To be “true to oneself” means . . . discovering what is contained in the uncontaminated self, the self which has been freed from the encumbrance of accumulated knowledge, norms, and ideals handed down by previous generations.

The East Asian conception of Buddha-nature—all-pervasive and embedded in each individual—is drawn magnetically to this indigenous western notion of transcendent selfhood, sometimes intertwining indistinguishably with it. Buddhist societies in East Asia, however, have generally been decidedly non-individualistic, seeing individual selfhood as deeply embedded in and dependent on social relations. Freedom from conditioning doesn’t mean freedom from society and its influences but from past karma. Universality doesn’t always override particularity.

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The Buddha statue of the Clifton sangha, therefore, displays the antinomies of its new function in its new home. It is an undeniably cultural product of another culture, deployed to symbolize the transcendence of one’s own culture toward a universal spirituality that overcomes, yet includes, all cultures.

The space for this particular articulation of Buddhism is created by specific cultural currents in the modern West: Romantics, Idealists, Transcendentalists, and their mid-twentieth-century counter-cultural successors, all of whom emphasize exploration of the deep interior of the mind, God as an all-encompassing spirit in nature, spontaneity, creativity, and suspicion of mechanized reproduction; Protestant Christianity, which eschews idolatry, privileges texts, looks askance at priesthoods and hierarchies; Enlightenment rationalism, which promises insight into the nature of things through careful observation and thought; psychology, which encourages introspection and exploration of the mind; and global capitalism, which allows for the flow of commodities newly valued in the West, like our Buddha image, by those who can afford them.

Thus Buddhism takes on yet another incarnation, blending with the indigenous cultures of the West, the United States, the Midwest, and Clifton. Even here, though, it turns out to be one incarnation among many. For our Buddha image unexpectedly finds its own kin scattered about—down the street in a temple where Vietnamese immigrants and their children bow and pray for good grades; in the backyard garden of a house in the suburbs; on a poster on the wall of a head shop downtown. The buddhas proliferate, mingle with the local gods, invite reverent or suspicious gazes, and take unexpected places on shelves, altars, and nooks throughout North America.

Vern: What does it look like?

Davis: Well, like nothing actually.

Vern: I can look at the lake and our Chicago skyline while I walk. Isn’t that enough?

Davis: I’m glad I ran into you. My four-year old heard someone mention the spiritual and asked me what it was, I mean what it is.

Vern: Tell him it’s the wind through the trees.

Davis: I don’t think he’s going to buy that.

Vern: You’re a lawyer, you should be able to come up with something persuasive.

Davis: You would think so, but he just doesn’t let it go with my vague declarations. It’s like he can smell uncertainty.

Vern: What did you try?

Davis: Something about the trinity…

Vern: And you didn’t get very far?

Davis: Then I tried something about a state of mind…

Vern: I’m not sure that this was just a communication problem.

Davis: I know, that’s why I’m glad I ran into you.

Vern: I’m no guru.

Davis: Still, you get paid to think.

Vern: Let’s start there, then.

Davis: Where?

Vern: Getting paid. No, with thinking. And let’s walk. [pause] What do you think spirit, or spirituality, is?

Davis: Some kind of awareness of the ineffable, I suppose. Spirit can’t be known, spirituality is our awareness of something that can’t be known.

Vern: That’s a funny thing to say. It sounds like an inability, something mute.

Davis: I mean, if you could communicate it, it wouldn’t be what it is. There wouldn’t be any point to the word spirit if it were some object like any other.

Vern: But if we’re talking about it, we aim to understand. There are limits to what we can understand, but we can talk about these limits, and experiment with them. So you think spirituality is a kind of consciousness, something in you?

Davis: It’s like we’re the access point, but there should be something outside us that stands against us but speaks to us.

Vern: I mean, you can always point beyond yourself. There’s the horizon, right there, beyond which I cannot see. You say, I’m not the one, there’s something bigger than me, bigger than any one of us. But you’re just negating something, most likely yourself. You’re judging, doing something, not receiving.

Davis: But the spiritual is different. We already know Michigan is out there. But we don’t know what’s beyond us, the material.

Vern: Okay, that’s our opposite then. We might define the spiritual against the material. That’s one of the main lines in history. Turn against the material, fasting and abstaining, mortifying the flesh and all that. There’s the worry though that you’re actually obsessed with the material in trying to escape from it. But I don’t suppose you have much sympathy with the anti-body, self-flagellation idea, do you?

Davis: I wouldn’t teach it to my kids, anyway.

Vern: How about the Great Father idea, then, if you’re so worried about the little ones?

Davis: They already have a father. And a mother. Let’s not go there.

Vern: So you want the wonder, the mystery, the awe, and you also want to say something memorable, without too much double-talk. Let’s take a step back. How do you say anything about anything?

Davis: Uh-oh.

Vern: You asked for it. And I mean it.

Davis: I was looking for something that could appear on Elmo, not a seminar on semantics.

Vern: That’s a cop-out. Go back to what you said about materiality. You said it because you need some kind of limit or wall. Your kids know this—if it’s not a square, not a circle, it’s a triangle. Everything is a contrast, or a negation. That’s how you mean anything.

Davis: What?! I see things that are ugly, like the Borg Warner building on South Michigan. I don’t need anything else to see it, or to say what I mean.

Vern: That’s a comparative judgment. Of course you’re contrasting it at some level. I can always ask why you made this or that judgment, and the content of your answer negates some other possible contents.

Davis: Even if it is a judgment, I don’t have to deliberate. It’s more like a conviction, an intuition.

Vern: You can’t appeal to brute feeling. That’s just to refuse the question. To me that refusal would be the denial of the spiritual.

Davis: So spirituality is just a willingness to answer why? Or do you have to do it well?

Vern: I’m not talking about something subjective.

Davis: A refusal is something done by a subject.

Vern: It’s not just you who reasons, though. There’s reason all around you.

Davis: Reason? We were talking about spirituality. When did you change the subject?

Vern: I didn’t. That’s what I’ve been getting at. They’re the same.

Davis: Reason and spirit? Rationality and spirituality? Another pair of opposites, if you ask me, or anybody else.

Vern: Why? Since you don’t know what spirit is, it must be reason that’s confusing you. It’s nothing mysterious.

Davis: I know, that’s exactly what I’m worried about. It’s cold, exact, hygienic.

Vern: That sounds like formal logic, not reason. It’s not mathematical, or even like your LSAT games.

Davis: What is it then?

Vern: No, how not what. When you say something follows from something else, you’re reasoning.

Davis: Who says “follows from”? Even lawyers don’t talk like that.

Vern: You don’t literally have to say those two words to do what they say.

Davis: But where’s the power, the force?

Vern: It’s in us. Where else would it be?

Davis: Sometimes, Vern, you want to interrupt aggression with reason, logic.

Vern: That’s interesting. In my business, we’re often accused of masking power plays with reason, assuming reason is something other than power when it is just used to hide the real interests behind it. So I’m surprised, though I guess I shouldn’t be, that you want more power than I’m giving you with the word.

Davis: At least give me something I understand—a binding law.

Vern: God-given, you mean?

Davis: That would be a good start. But you don’t have to put it like that. Something like addition, or mathematical proof, that people can’t deny without being called insane.

Vern: That works in math class, but it’s not much good off campus. And anyway, spirit can’t be clean-cut, or the kind of force that’s one-way. If everything worked by mathematical equations, the meaning might go missing.

Davis: All right, go back to Church, then. Whatever definition we give would have to at least cover those worshippers.

Vern: Some of them, anyway.

Davis: Well, what do they have to do with reason?

Vern: Don’t think of them as just bowing to an idol.

Davis: Who says I was?

Vern: Well, the preacher in the pulpit is giving reasons, revealing reason. The stories you hear in Sunday school tell of reasons.

Davis: It’s more about ethics… and love is not reason or some sort of negation.

Vern: There wouldn’t be jealousy if love wasn’t a negation.

Davis: But I’m pretty sure jealousy is a sin. Think Jesus, love of your neighbor.

Vern: No one has ever loved everyone. Our ethics have to be more personal, even if we do believe in the incarnation.

Davis: I suppose you’re going to tell me that self-sacrifice is just another opposition? That even if we think we are going against reason, it’s still got us cornered.

Vern: Here I stand. I can do no other, nothing else. I negate every other option. That’s an ethics of reason.

Davis: And God?

Vern: The last reason.

Davis: That’s it?

Vern: No. That’s it. What more do you want?

Davis: I don’t know. Should it matter what I want?

My throat hurts. If I tried to hum with the muezzin or call with the cats, it would hurt. I get up and take eight tablets of yin chiao from a friend who does acupuncture. It will, as she puts it, push the sickness back out through the skin. It worked the last time.

Later, I go out for more provisions, past the Baptist church with minarets; it used to be a Masonic temple. At Tony’s health food store I greet Khan who, like several sons of the owner, works there six days a week. I compliment him on his Om tattoo and he is delighted that I know about Shiva. I tell him that Shiva is actually very important to me and that Shiva Natajara is on my mantel and another Shiva adorns my Christmas tree. His face clouds over. “Wait,” I quickly explain why I think Shiva would be okay being a Christmas ornament. I redirect the conversation to finding broth. But now Khan follows me around the store, entreating me to take that ornament down. He keeps moving to front shelves in my vicinity and is now frankly warning about disrespecting Shiva. I feel like a total idiot religion professor.

On the way home, I pass churches of Pentecostals, Adventists, and Daddy Grace, as well as another masjid. It is February 3, 2011, and no one is surprised that someone walking around in Brooklyn would run into so many brands of religion. What might surprise is that the run-ins pierce and balm in so many ways. The neighborhood does this to some bodies and not others, I guess. But if you have a body that feels like the skin does not hold things in or keep them out, if you are made partly of memories of cuts and sutures, it might do this to you.

Religion is a chain of memory, says the sociologist Danièle Hervieu-Léger, and catholicité is a palimpsest. Bedford-Stuyvesant used to be all Catholic, and still the most and biggest churches are Catholic. Seven within ten blocks of my apartment. Now I pass one where a few women enter through the side door, the main door being locked on weekdays.

Thirty years ago, I lived far from Bed-Stuy, in a place where every town had a view of cornfields. Thirty years ago, I was going to school at St. Mary’s in Lebanon, Pennsylvania. Probably standing in a line. We were always in lines. Lines for changing classes, lines for going to lunch, lines for visiting the lavatory, lines for school assemblies, lines for going to Mass, lines for waiting for the bus at the end of the day. Lines on weekends, too. Line up for your heat at the swim meet. Line up for Rice Krispie treats at the bake sale table. Line up for confession. Line up for communion. In lines, you waited. Waiting was normal and so was the transaction at the end of the line.

But some lines were different, and you anticipated unusual things while waiting. In line to get ashes on your forehead, for example. There was always an emotional chill as the priest spoke mortal words about dust, and a physical flinch to feel fine black palm ash fleck the bridge of your nose. Or, in line to kiss the cross on Good Friday. Making sure to get behind Mrs. Viozzi who is ancient and four feet tall but still kneels on both knees and grasps the cross with both hands and kisses the wood with two full lips, a juicy smack that sounds across the whole nave. In line to have your throat blessed on the feast of St. Blaise…

Crossing Marcy Avenue now, I catch native son Jay-Z’s music blasting out an apartment window three stories up.

Can I hit it in the morning without givin you half of my dough,

and even worse if I was broke would you want me? …

If I couldn’t flow futuristic, would ya

put your two lips on my wood and kiss it, could ya…

I don’t know. Is love deeper than deep pockets? The neighborhood that used to be “Bed-Stuy/do or die” is now “Bed-Stuy/too late to buy” and churches turn into yoga studios at Washington Avenue.

Line up to go to the auditorium to see Jesus Christ Superstar. It was the monthly school movie some winter Friday in 1977. Eight years old, watching girls in sequined hotpants gyrate as the heavenly host, watching Yvonne Elliman as Mary Magdalene drag herself after wooden beams as if she herself were lashed to them, I wanted to dance, I wanted to be lashed, I wanted to kneel and kiss that wood.

When we lined up to get our throats blessed on the feast of St. Blaise, this too was different waiting for an unusual transaction. Frankly, it was scary. At the end of two lines advancing up the auditorium center aisle stood two priests. They each held a pair of thick white candles, tied together at a right angle to make a cross, and secured at the crux with red ribbon. When it was your turn, you stepped up and the priest held the crux at your throat and said, “Through the intercession of St. Blaise, bishop and martyr, may God preserve you from ailments of the throat and from every other evil.” Then, making the sign of the cross, you peeled away.

Scary. First of all, the wax against your neck was scented and tacky-cold and felt like a funeral. Then, why was this saint’s day of all saints’ days so important to take time out? Was there imminent danger to all human throats, as opposed to other body parts? Shouldn’t we also have blessings for eyes and brains and hands? I asked this. No. Only the throat. It made you think of things that could crush or slice you there. It made you pay attention to movies where after a quick yank and flash, someone’s jugular was spurting. It made you retain a vocabulary word like garrot. It made you notice when you had a sore throat.

Many years later, when I wasn’t in school and wasn’t going to Mass and the millennium turned and I just wanted to get through my first year of teaching, I still noticed in particular when I had a sore throat. In fact the one I got during finals week of that fall semester soon turned into a cough. But I was busy. And homesick. No time for a doctor’s visit. I left Texas for a trip back east. I wanted to see my family in Pennsylvania and my love in North Carolina. I packed it all into a mad visit with lots of long-distance driving. When I got back to Fort Worth, I felt much better.

Except I still had a cough, and swallowing had started to feel funny. Spring teaching commenced and I coughed through the first class. Finally I visited the doctor and was sent home with antibiotics. But that night my chest exploded with pain and my throat hurled back anything I tried to swallow. The next morning I presented at the doctor’s again. A more thorough exam revealed that some unknown problem had already resulted in severe pneumonia, one collapsed lung, a swollen heart lining, and infection blooming throughout my chest cavity. I was taken by ambulance to All Saints Hospital and did not leave for over a month.

The first two weeks, nothing happened. My sister Mary flew in from Atlanta and virtually moved into my hospital room. The chair of my department, Daryl, visited every day. Tests were run but no one could find the problem. Antibiotics slowed the infection but didn’t kill it off. A brown bacterial stew that smelled like raw sewage had begun to burble up into my mouth. One day, finally, it started to drown me. Mary and a friend, Leah, frantically alerted the nurse. I lost consciousness as doctors cut notches between my ribs on both sides to insert chest tubes. When I woke up, I was in the ICU, lung fluid still draining into canisters on the floor.

My doctor would come see me and talk. His name was Noble. Noble Ezukanma, internist, point person for an array of specialists. Nigerian, Christian, married with three kids, beautiful and wise. I asked him all the questions I could think of. “This diagnostic process, we are trying things, you know, but it is really more an art than a science,” he would say. “We have to wait.” He didn’t know how things were going to turn out. He said so. He was an artist in process. It was comforting.

But it was another doctor who arrived early one morning, when I was alone, to tell me that one test had finally nailed it: prolonged coughing—or a fishbone accidentally swallowed, or vomiting, or chance?—had torn a hole in my larynx. Everything I ate or breathed was feeding the infection. They required my signature for surgery. Immediately.

What happened next, I am not sure how. I was frightened and teary plus high on morphine. Did I remember what day it was? Did Daryl somehow know? Did the hospital chaplain staff piece it together despite no checked box on the intake form? I don’t know. But within a few hours, Daryl had brought the campus priest to my bedside. Fr. Charlie carried two white candles, crossed and tied with red ribbon. It was February 3, 2001, and I got my throat blessed.

So, as you see, were it not for St. Blaise, I would not be here to tell you this story. I would not have returned to my classes that semester, would not be chewing over the meaning of spirituality for an online collection, would not be remembering waiting in lines, would not be walking home from Tony’s in Bed-Stuy with good broth for a sore throat.

But wait … this is no way to end the story. Don’t mess with people, people in the guild, my guild, my people. Don’t mess with my head. Leave out suggesting that St. Blaise was actually involved. Leave out hinting that without St. Blaise I would be dead. It was doctors who operated and sewed me whole. If St. Blaise supposedly saved my life, then why didn’t all those blessings years earlier work? If I am having a fit of wanting to thank a saint, I can do it on my own time. Would I say this stuff in the classroom? Do I really believe … ?

I do believe … in religion as a social construction with a long history, and in spirituality, too, begotten not made, one in being with religion. And in experience, and the self, and pluralism, and God, and any story any of us could possibly tell, all of them truly assumed, asserted and produced in very complex genealogies. Credo.

But sometimes I forget to care. My skin does not hold things in or keep them out. And having this kind of body—a body of memories of cuts, not all my own—goes back long before the hospital, long before I was born, long before St. Blaise himself. Still, I have faith. Tell the children that they can see through the powers that be. Tell the children that they can choose to believe this and not that. Tell them that their bodies are theirs for the making. That if something goes wrong the doctors can slice through layers and suture back out and then you are whole again.

Yet I keep bumping into religions and they don’t bounce off. Why live? Why sicken? Why call for ravishment? Why calm at the touch of red-ribboned candles? I have nothing against stitches. The rows run across my neck and over my heart. There are little crosses that closed chest tube holes and a big stripe under each shoulder blade. They saved my life. But some bodies are pounds of flesh with oozing edges and no fix for that. Meanwhile, I teach, I write, I walk around and see what happens. “This process, you know, we are trying things, but it is more art than science,” the good doctor said. “We have to wait.”

Deathbed Conversion

I am not a secular man, but in moments of crisis I turn to agnosticism for the comfort it gives in freeing me from superstition. Once, when gravely ill and sure I would die at any minute, I embraced agnosticism, and, with Nietzsche in hand, swore I would remain an agnostic even if I recovered. But once I did recover, I lapsed again into religious belief, feeling the danger was over and it was safe to return to my old ways. Still, the fear of dying under the veil of dogma still grips my soul late in the night and I yearn for the courage to embrace reality without prophylactics.

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Flawed Design

The Theory of Flawed Design is not a scientifically proven alternative to evolution. It is based on the everyday life experience that natural selection could not have produced such a catastrophic outcome. Optimists and the religiously inclined will naturally prefer evolution as an explanation, since ascribing design to the state of humanity is almost unbearable. For the rest of us, we must continue to insist that the Theory of Flawed Design be taught cheek and jowl, neck and neck, mano a mano, with Mr. Darwin’s speculations.

The Theory of Flawed Design postulates a creator who is mentally impaired, either through some genetic defect or because of substance abuse, and is predisposed to behave in a sociopathic manner; although some Benign Flawed Design theorists, as they call themselves, posit the radical alternative that the creator was distracted or inattentive and the flaws are not the result of malevolent will but incompetence or incapacity.

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Observant Jew

I’m an observant Jew. I look closely at the things around me, as if they were foreign.