Everything That Rises Must Converge, or, How I ‘Got’ Religion on a Friday Afternoon
When you’re not a Mormon in Utah, you are literally and figuratively a “non-Mormon.” Your identity is derived from your stark contrast, real or invented, to the dominant culture. You are everything that they are not. You may be an “A” student, but you are also a “rebel.” You may be well-adjusted despite being raised by one parent, but you are always a sinner bastard. You wear your status as both a badge of honor and a yoke of shame. You convince yourself, thanks to a crabs-in-a-bucket mentality among the nons, that everything you are not, and everything you cannot do, is because of the Mormons. “Fuckin’ Mormons,” my friend’s roommate used to joke whenever something didn’t go his way. Can’t buy a shot of tequila past 1 a.m.? Fuckin’ Mormons. Saturday Night Live shuttled off to a UHF station at midnight because it’s too risque? Fuckin’ Mormons. Got a parking ticket? Fuckin’ Mormons.
I, despite being of the most privileged race and gender, grew up acutely aware that I was culturally marginalized. I’m not crying about it — just stating a fact. And yet I also grew up acutely aware that, outside of Utah, it was the Mormons who were marginalized. Even among Christians there is widespread distrust and prejudice. Think about how Mitt Romney had to prove he was a Christian to the religious right and it still didn’t matter. Or think about all of the Mormon polygamist jokes you’ve heard (or told) over the years despite the fact that the practice was officially banned by the Church more than a century ago. It’s an odd sensation being marginalized by a marginalized group — in theory, though not at all in practice, it’s not unlike being a Palestinian in Israel — one that fostered, in me at least, a combination of extreme defiance toward dominant cultures combined with a great kinship toward those Mormons who were raised away from Utah — Mormons whose marginalized status was, ironically, much like my own.
Given that reality, my relationship with religion has always been tumultuous. At 7 years old, I got in the habit of telling Mormon classmates that I was Catholic because, even at that age, it appeared to set them off more than when I stated the truth, that I didn’t go to church and never had. It was also a defense mechanism: Proselytization is one of the key tenets of the faith, so a godless soul, especially a young one, must be saved so it can enjoy all of the benefits of heaven. Catholics, I suppose, weren’t worth saving.
By age 11, I’d grown weary of my own lie (guilt has been my greatest motivator since I became upright), so I asked my mom to drive me to the nearby Catholic church on Sunday mornings so I could give it a go. I had fun tying my own tie and putting on a belt. I also enjoyed receiving the sacrament — although the looks I got told me I was doing something I shouldn’t have been doing. Could they have known that I wasn’t baptized by the way I acted as if I had no idea what was going on? That and the dull sermons ensured that my Catholic experiment didn’t last more than two months.
When I was 15, I started praying every night before falling asleep. Mind you, I was a drinking, smoking, class-cutting heathen like the next non-Mormon, but I still prayed. These were nondenominational prayers that really went more like rambling, one-sided conversations, and most of them had to do with seeing my mom through some tough financial and emotional times (again with the guilt). But, just as statistics have proven time and again, they did have a way of calming me down. If nothing else, I slept a lot better.
Then came college philosophy. My praying ended, no lie, the day we discussed St. Anselm and the ontological argument for the existence of God. It wasn’t the infuriating circularity that did it for me so much as it was other students, many of them returned Mormon missionaries, who refused to present anything in the way of input beyond “GOD JUST EXISTS!” I took a look at my praying and thought, y’know what? Whether there’s a god or not, I’m just talking to myself — I don’t need that shit anymore.
Yet, when you’re surrounded by religion — aren’t we all anymore? — the topic of faith finds its way into virtually every thought you have whether you want it there or not. Some people can just shut it off, convince themselves that there is no god, that because what they see in the day-to-day of the faithful is hypocrisy and lies, then it must be bad all the way through. Or that, scientifically, religion has no leg to stand on, so why “believe” any of it?
That’s not me. For one, ever since I can remember, I’ve had a healthy respect for the ideas destiny and fate. It’s probably most tied to my love of a great story. Doesn’t matter if it’s written, filmed, or told — give me a great allegory about humanity, the world, and me, and make it seem like there could be no other outcome, and I’m yours. My thoughts on fate have evolved over time from a mystical affirmation of destiny, that things happen for a reason, to something more like Chaos Theory, in which the sum total of our actions, as with the actions of the universe, determine our fate — essentially, that things happen for scientific, provable reasons. It’s hardly a spiritual doctrine to hang your hat on, but it gets me through most days.
What got all of this swirling around my noggin right now has to do with that title you see up there. “Everything that Rises Must Converge” is a short story by Flannery O’Connor, a Catholic who was born and raised in Georgia at the time when the Ku Klux Klan, which lumped Catholics in with the Jews and the blacks, was a powerful force. She was a marginalized soul. Her fantastically vivid stories are often cited as showing how cruel and stupid people can be, though I always saw in her lively descriptions something deeper and more respectful, a glimmer of hope even in the worst our species has to offer.
The title of that particular story is from the writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit priest who got in occasional trouble for attempting to, broadly speaking, merge the reason of science with the spirituality of religion. I’m far from an expert on the man, but the Internet tells me that the exact quote comes from The Future of Man, published some time after his death in 1955. It’s a long quote, but the context is revealing:
Take the two extremes confronting us at this moment, the Marxist and the Christian, each a convinced believer in his own particular doctrine, but each, we must suppose, fundamentally inspired with an equal faith in Man. Is it not incontestable, a matter of everyday experience, that each of these, to the extent that he believes (and sees the other believe) in the future of the world, feels a basic human sympathy for the other — not for any sentimental reason, but arising out of the obscure recognition that both are going the same way, and that despite all ideological differences they will eventually, in some manner, come together on the same summit? No doubt each in his own fashion, following his separate path, believes that he has once and for all solved the riddle of the world’s future. But the divergence between them is in reality neither complete nor final, unless we suppose that by some inconceivable and even contradictory feat of exclusion (contradictory because nothing would remain of his faith) the Marxist, for example, were to eliminate from his materialistic doctrine every upward surge towards the spirit. Followed to their conclusion the two paths must certainly end by coming together: for in the nature of things everything that is faith must rise, and everything that rises must converge.
Notice how he’s not talking about religion — he’s talking about faith. It is the most human of the distinctly human trait of “impulse,” and what he’s saying is that, whether you’re a religious person or a non-religious person, the simple act of believing something, anything, beyond your understanding ties you to those whom you feel are your born opposites. And since your way of *believing* is like everyone else, then in the end we are all moving toward the same outcome.
Now, mind you, these thoughts aren’t something that’s been percolating in me for years and I’m just now writing it down. Despite having read O’Connor’s short story a decade ago and having heard the great song of the same name, inspired by her story, by Shriekback more than two decades ago, I just discovered the source last Friday while I was looking for something else. Because I’m always looking for something else on the Internet. But, as fate may have it (sorry, couldn’t resist), I discovered it the day after visiting the Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial in Atlanta.
When I was in high school, King was first among my personal idols. I read all of his books and speeches. It was an odd experience because, save for my stint as a Catholic when I didn’t fully grasp Christianity anyway, I’ve never thought of myself as a Christian. But I loved King’s faith in humanity against all odds and his eloquence in stating why things had to change. More realistically, the African-American experience was about the furthest thing from my own experience I could find, so its gravitational pull was undeniable.
And yet, it wasn’t until last Friday, 20 years after I first read King, that I realized what had drawn me to his vision without being turned off by his Christianity: when he spoke of God, it was usually just that — God. He was a Christian but for him Jesus was a messenger, not the sum total of the message. There was still this huge question mark hanging out there about the nature of God himself (yes, he did assume that God is a man — nobody’s perfect), and that was a question that deserved the rigors of religion and science. In King’s words:
Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge, which is power; religion gives man wisdom, which is control. Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values. The two are not rivals. They are complementary.
That is the opposite of what’s happened over the past 30 years. Somewhere in the course of Christianity, and arguably religion in general, it was was decided that A) Jesus is God is far more literal than we may have thought for hundreds of years, and that B) science is a destroyer of faith. In all fairness, scientists themselves have perpetuated that second myth by arrogantly asserting that it is the true keeper of The Answers rather than religion, the same way the Marxists did in Teilhard’s. Yet, everything that rises must converge. Paul Tillich, the German theologian and philosopher who was fired from his University of Frankfurt professorship by Hitler, put it this way:
Faith consists in being vitally concerned with that ultimate reality to which I give the symbolical name of God. Whoever reflects earnestly on the meaning of life is on the verge of an act of faith.
King, Teilhard and Tillich were all fighting what was, between anarchists, Nazis, Marxists, Communists, and nihilists, the largest atheistic shift in history. Close to half of the world’s population had been convinced, coerced, or bound into godlessness. In the United States, seemingly godless acts of racism were not only being perpetrated but had been institutionalized, in the form of Jim Crow laws, against millions of human beings whose ancestors had been slaves on the same soil less than a century earlier. Twenty years prior, millions of Jews were killed for their combined faith and cultural identity (also, others for their “choice” of sexual orientation, and others for their politics and nationality). It wasn’t the time to be beating your chest with religious pride. But it was also a different mindset. The ultimate quest, as these philosophers knew, was to ask a question that can never possibly be answered without losing faith in that quest. It was to ask why we’re all here, knowing that we’ll never truly know but that we can at least figure out a lot provided we are intellectually vigilant.
I am speaking primarily of Christianity because it’s what I’ve mostly experienced, But I would imagine that similar struggles happen in virtually any monotheistic religion for which there are human prophets.
Why does this all matter now? Why is it consuming so much of my headspace? Well, because religion is becoming less and less this way. Not that there hasn’t thankfully been more cooperation and understanding between religions in the past than there is now, because that’s certainly not the case. But the extremes appear to be gaining steam. Evangelical Christians have won the public-relations war in the United States. They’ve sought to infiltrate the court system (and largely succeeded) and swayed popular votes against basic human rights. Now they’re going after Islam in a manner that is one part religious intolerance and one part racism. Yet, the irony is that they’re going after a version of Islam that mirrors their own version of Christianity, one that elevates the prophet to the throne that used to be reserved for the thing we didn’t know and never would in this life, which is God. It’s so stereotypically a house divided, The Montagues and Capulets, the Packers and the Bears, that it would be laughable if it wasn’t so tragic.
While there are many thoughtful people who are railing against these differences and their disastrous consequences, they’re losing the popular vote. Back in the middle of the last century, there at least seemed to be a group of serious religious thinkers who captured the public imagination. Now we have Rick Warren. Now we have people who are turning in their religion altogether for virulent racism and prejudice — mixing up patriotism and their “embattled” version of “the American Dream” with faith and then using that as an excuse to hate. Or making Christianity far more about Jesus and Islam far more about Muhammed or Judaism far more about the place (Israel) than the scriptures in order to make it far more about the self. After all, Jesus was one of us who took it for the team, and Muhammed suffered for his faith, and Moses wandered in the desert for 40 years, so why not try to live a life according to that kind morality knowing full well that we’ll never come close?
Because, as King said, “Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
Or, on the flipside, why not just be an atheist? It’s all bullshit — there’s no way we will ever know if there is a god or why we’re here, at least not on a faith level — so why not unsubscribe from all of it and become “non-religious”?
For me at least, it’s like Tillich said: “Astonishment is the root of philosophy.”
I like being surprised. I like not knowing where I’m going but knowing that I’ll learn a lot along the way. Faith, for me, is an intellectual pursuit and always has been. I don’t see “faith” in most religions — or at least not in most religious people — but I don’t subscribe that lack of faith to the institutions but rather to the people who run the institutions. For that reason, I am faithful and optimistic in spite of the hate that I see. I am cynical and wary despite the promise of a beautiful eternity in some version of life that we’ll never be able to confirm or deny. But since there’s not always something on TV, we may as well keep coming up with stories of our own.
