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| April
1999 Volume I, Number 5 |
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Faith
and Doubt at 40 Below
Easter Morning Excerpt
from After the Absolute
How Not to Meditate Shots
of Changing Faith From
the Editor To
the Editor |
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 Easter Morning (top) Benjamin Seo Benjamin Seo is a member of the Duke SKS The last time I visited my home in Greensboro, NC, I paused while folding my laundry and looked up to see a familiar photograph taken of my sister, brother, and me, when we were all children. I could not have been more than three or four. My big brother beamed with abandonment in his stylish butterfly-collar denim suit (this was the late 70's, after all). My big sister smiled sweetly revealing missing baby teeth. I, on the other hand, looked a bit bleary-eyed as if I had been crying. I sat there with a look of profound distress on my face as I clutched one of my feet with one hand and grasped a table leg with the other. I had seen this particular photo many times before but had never stopped to consider why I looked so angst-ridden. I mean, jeez, how much angst can a four-year old possibly have? Then I remembered that the picture was taken on Easter Sunday. I was wearing this fantastically absurd blue felt suit complete with knee trousers and round collars that made me look vaguely like Little Lord Fauntleroy's funky, long-lost cousin. Back then, Easter was an eagerly anticipated event because I knew I would wake up to find a garish, pink woven basket full of goodies. Nestled among the crinkly cellophane and shiny fake grass would be the objects of my heart's desire: candy, glorious, beautiful candy. Ah, yes. Such joy from the simple sight of yellow, sugary ducks, chocolate rabbits, and round, smooth jelly beans. I remembered jealously guarding my precious cargo, my very own Treasure of the Sierra Madre. All I had to do was look at that abundance, and my heart felt glad. I sat squirming in church that morning while the preacher droned on about the promise of the kingdom of heaven and how it could not be lost or taken away. Meanwhile, all I could think of was my hoard of beautiful, sweet delights waiting for me in the car. When my parents had insisted that I needed to cover the candy from the sun with paper towels, I protested with righteous indignation. They simply did not understand the logic which seemed so clear to me. The basket must remain untouched, its glory unobscured by the obscene paper. In my mind, it was absolutely imperative that the vivid colors of my collection be left free to sparkle and entice in the open air, that it remain immaculate and waiting with open arms. Faced with such vehement opposition, my parents simply looked at each other and silently agreed to allow me to learn the hard way. When we returned to the car after the service, my pulse quickened at the impending reunion with my hoard. Upon opening the door, I was struck with horror to see that much of the candy had melted, and ants were gorging themselves on the sticky mass. Calamity. Disaster. The-End-Of-The-World. I howled with outrage and dismay. My parents tried to console me as best they could while my brother and sister offered to share their baskets with me. It was no use. My basket, the one I identified as belonging to me, had been corrupted, defiled, and ruined. And it just didn't make any sense. I wondered why this terrible thing had to happen to me. It was tough to reconcile with a four-year-old's certainty that I lived a charmed life free from such misfortunes. When I think back on this episode, I cannot help but wonder what I was so upset about. After all, every Easter I was overjoyed to receive the candy, but I never intended to actually eat any of it. I always held onto those candies till they were almost too stale to eat any more. My siblings were a bit more sensible about such matters, reasoning that as long as I wasn't going to eat any of it, I might as well let them eat it (their baskets having been eaten long ago). Ah, but if I wasn't going to eat the candy, no one was. Occasionally I would dole a little portion out, but the main collection would remain intact until it had lost its luster. What I was not consciously aware of then was that those candies were not just bits of manufactured corn syrup and artificial coloring to me. They had taken on a character and meaning altogether different: they were symbols of my parents' love and devotion to me. I associated the candy with the wonderful feeling of oneness with my family and the security and warmth of that unity. They were the material manifestations of life's riches and joyous experiences; they had become glittering 'jewels of the soul.' I couldn't bring myself to eat them because they were just too precious. I cheated myself out of the full enjoyment of their pleasure through my anxiety and possessiveness. I realize now how often I have made this same mistake. The moments that kept me going – the happiness, the excitement, the wonder – were punctuations of colorful candies amidst a steady stream of gray existential meandering. I lived for the moments of the excitement from a new challenge or discovery, for the warm feelings of friendship and love, and the rare moments of undefinable joy that would hit me without warning. The last is what C. S. Lewis used to describe simply as "magic" – the magic of life and of being. I yearned for this magic through my daydreams and imagination, and these spaces of my life have been occupied by a neurotic chase for the things that I hope will bring this joy, these jewels of the soul. But the chase is one that can never end, because, once found, these glittering jewels have an annoying habit of turning out to be anything but what I expect. They entice with their splendor but melt away leaving only desire. In a way, my creative urges, my passion for writing, film-making, and other forms of expression, have been informed by this wish to encapsulate the magic of being in a tangible, polished, glassy trinket that I can keep in my pocket - something I can admire and hold at any time. But I realize that this, too, is a chase for shadows and ghosts. Why try to encapsulate it and thus diminish it? It is far better to live within it, to breathe it, to become the magic. I am thankful for those ants which I so hated on that Sunday morning. I am thankful that I was allowed to learn from my own mistakes that morning. I am thankful for all the little hitches, setbacks, failures, and disappointments which, like a legion of ants, have conspired to disabuse me of my childish notions of right and wrong, fair and unfair. Today, I strive to partake of life freely, enjoying taste and texture. The morsels that nourish me are simply fruits from the true abundance in life. Shots of Changing Faith(top) James Todd James Todd is a member of the Duke SKS At age sixteen when I concluded that Karl Marx was right, "religion is the opiate of the people," I never thought that my search for truth would turn out to be an exercise in faith. As a sophomore at Concord Academy, I did my ethics class final project on, "the dangers of faith." In my paper I made such sweeping points as: God does not exist, church is a waste of time, and religion obscures the truth. When I was done with my presentation, I had successfully alienated myself from most of the rest of the class, most of whom held religious beliefs. Even Asher Millan, the one other avowed atheist in the class told me, "After your presentation, I don't think I want to be an atheist anymore." My teacher, Mike Pardee, returned my "Dangers of Faith" paper with the usual smear of red penned comments and corrections, one of which has remained with me ever since: "It seems that your faith lies in doubt." In hind sight, I can see that Mike Pardee was right: my faith was in my ability to doubt, or more precisely in my ability to explain anything intellectually. I had complete faith in my burgeoning power to reason, attested to by the A's I received in Calculus and AP Chemistry. I stood firmly by my intellectual, atheistic convictions until I came across something that my intellect could not conquer: Nancy Haas. Laying on the couch in Nancy's basement under a fuzzy, wool blanket and watching David Letterman on Saturday night was simply more real than any paper I had written or any argument I had made and much more tangible than the convincing but airy essays I had read in the American Atheist Magazine. In the face of an ocean of new, terrifying, and exhilarating, emotions brought on by this relationship, my intellect was a sinking ship which I desperately tried to repair in vain as it was swallowed up by waves of feeling. Even though it may not be chronicled in any religious study, I experienced a conversion: the capacity of my intellect became finite, and this strange new force called love took its place in my life. Although I didn't see it at the time, this was my first lesson in faith. Previously I believed that faith was a strained emotion that people cooked up to please their parents or avoid their problems. I later discovered that faith is what we rest our lives on. By definition we have faith in those things we base our lives on regardless of whether these things are stated explicitly or implied. Whether I acknowledged it or not, at age seventeen my faith was in financial security, a stable family, citizenship in the most powerful country in the world, a network of friends, social prestige, a healthy body, and the power of my new found compassion. Two years later at 9:46 am, I was getting off the #49 Washington St. bus at the City Hospital stop for the one-hundred-thirteenth time and stepping out onto the snowy streets of Boston to face the cold, crisp air of New England winter. My eclectic teammates filed off the bus behind me in their bright red City Year jackets and standard issue Timberland khakis. I was six months into City Year, the nine-month long community service program I signed on for after leaving high school. The sense of compassion I had gained from my relationship with Nancy had merged with the liberal sentiment of Concord Academy to produce in me a healthy, young idealism that lead me to commit the prep school sin of deferring college in order to work in inner-city Boston to help the "less-privileged" and meet people from diverse backgrounds. Now that I was working side-by-side with Jaime Gonzalez, who was more afraid of raccoons than pistols, doing the type of community service work that was revered at Concord Academy, I was sick of Jaime and the dreary City Hospital. I was sick of reviewing vaccination records in a tiny room with no windows in the basement of Boston City Hospital alongside my all-too familiar teammates. The possibility that some child in a poor neighborhood might be unvaccinated seemed remote and unimportant in the face of my growing fatigue and personal discontent. At age nineteen my faith was simultaneously being made conscious and being taken away. While I poured over hospital records, painted a homeless shelter, and poured concrete in a church basement, no one around me was impressed that I could integrate complex functions, nor did they care that, as one of the captains of the Concord Academy varsity soccer team, I used to make announcements at school assemblies about upcoming games. Once again my ship was sinking and my faith was changing; this time my faith in the goodness of humans to alleviate our collective suffering was falling into the ocean of an apparently impersonal, cruel, and overwhelmingly apathetic world. And once again the tip of an island emerged, this time in the form of religious and philosophical inquiry. My latent interest in philosophy had resurfaced with a new openness to push beyond the bounds of logic and reason. If I had to give my high school ethics program presentation again I would still call it the "Dangers of Faith," except this time I would say, "The biggest danger of faith is that your faith will inevitably be jarringly taken away from you, leaving you simultaneously terrified and amazed. This is not a danger that can be avoided because you have to have faith in something—even if your faith is in doubt." |
