On September 10th, the morning of my 7th birthday,
I came downstairs to the kitchen where my mother was washing the dishes
and my father was reading the paper.
And I sort of presented myself to them in the doorway
And they said "Hey! Happy birthday!"
And I said "I'm seven".
And my father smiled and said "Well, you know what that means, don't you?"
And I said "Yeah, that I'm gonna have a party and
cake and get a lot of presents?"
And my dad said "Well yes, but more importantly being seven
means that you've reached the age of reason
and you're now capable of commiting any and all sins against god and man".
Now I had heard this phrase "age of reason" before
Sister Mary Kevin had been bandying it about our 2nd grade class at school
But when she said it the phrase seemed all caught up in the excitement of preparations
for our first communion and our first confession
And everybody knew that was really all about the white dress and the white veil
In any way, I hadn't really paid all that much attention to that phrase
"the age of reason"
So I said "Yeah, yeah, age of reason"
What does that mean again?
and my dad said "Well, we believe in the catholic church that god knows
that little kids don't know the difference between right and wrong
but when you're seven, you're old enough to know better!
So you've grown up and reached the age of reason
and now god will start keeping notes on you
and begin your permanent record.
And I said "Oh!"
Wait a minute... You mean all that time up till today
all that time I was so good, god didn't notice it?
And my mother said "Well I noticed it!"
And I thought how could I have not known this before?
How did it not have sunk in when they'd been telling me?
All that being good and no real credit for it.
And worst of all how could I not have realized this very important information
until the very day it was basically useless to me.
So I said "well Mom and Dad, what about Santa Claus?"
I mean Santa Claus knows if you're naughty or nice, right?
And my Dad said "Yeah, but honey i think that's technically
just between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
And my mother said "Oh, Bob stop it. Let's just tell her"
I mean she is seven. Julie, there is no Santa Claus".
Now, this was not actually that upsetting to me.
My parents had this whole elaborate story about Santa Claus,
how they had talked to Santa himself and agreed
that instead of Santa delivering our presents over the night of Christmas Eve
like he did for every other family who got to open
their surprises first thing Christmas morning
our family would give Santa more time.
Santa would come to our house while we were at 9 o' clock high mass, but only if all of us kids didn't make a fuss.
Which made me very suspicious.
It was pretty obvious that it was really our parents giving us the presents.
I mean, my Dad had a very distinctive wrapping style and my mother's handwriting was so close to Santa's.
Plus, why would Santa save time by having to loop back to our house, after he'd gone to everybody else's?
There was only one obvious conclusion to reach from this mountain of evidence.
Our family was too strange and weird for even Santa Claus to come visit.
And my poor parents were trying to protect us from the embarrasement,
this humiliation of rejection by Santa.
Who was jolly but -let's face it- he was also very judgmental.
So, to find out that there was actually no Santa Claus at all, was really sort of a relief.
I left the kitchen, not really in shock about Santa.
But rather I was just dumbfounded about how I could have missed that whole "age of reason" thing.
It was too late for me, but maybe I could help someone else. Someone who could use the information.
They had to fit two crieteria.
They had to be old enough to be able to understand the whole concept of the age of reason,
and not yet seven.
The answer was clear, my brother Bill, he was six!
Well, I finally found Bill about a block away from our house at this public school playground.
It was a Saturday and he was all by himself just kicking a ball against a side of a wall.
I ran up to him and said "Bill, I just realized that the age of reason starts when you turn seven
and then you're capable of committing any and all sins against god and man.
Bill said "So?"
And I said "So? You're six. You have a whole year to do anything you want to and god won't notice it".
And he said "So?"
And I said "SO? So, everything!"
And I turned to run so angry with him but when I got to the top of these steps
I turned around dramatically and said "Oh by the way Bill, there is no Santa Claus!"
Now, I didn't know it at the time but I actually wasn't turning seven on September 10th.
For my 13th birthday I planned a slumber party with all of my girlfriends.
But a couple of weeks beforehand, my mother took me aside and said
"I need to speak to you privately."
"September 10th is not your birthday, it's actually October 10th."
And I said "What?"
And she said "Listen, the cut off for birthdates for kindergarden was Sptember 15th.
So, I told them that your birthday was September 10th
and then I wasn't sure that you weren't gonna go blab it all over the place
so, I started to tell you your birthday was actually September 10th.
But Julie, you were so ready to start school, honey you were so ready.
I thought back on it and when I was four I was already the oldest of four children
and my mother even had another child to come
so what I think she understandably really meant
was that she was so ready, she was so ready.
Then she said "Don't worry Julie, every year on October 10th
when it was your birthday but you didn't realize it
I made sure that you ate a piece of cake that day.
Which was comforting but troubling.
My mother had been celebrating my birthday with me, without me!
What was so upsetting about this piece of information was not that I was gonna have to change
the day to my slumber party with all of my girlfriends
what was most upsetting was that this meant I was not a virgo.
I had a huge virgo poster in my bedroom.
And I read my horoscope every single day and it was so totally me!
And this meant that I was a libra?
So, I took the bus downtown to get the new libra poster.
The virgo poster was a picture of a beautiful woman with long hair
sort of lounging by some water.
But the libra poster was just a huge scale.
This was around the time that I started filling out physically
and i was filling out more than a lot of the other girls
and frankly the whole idea that my astrological sign was a scale
just seemed ominous and depressing.
But I got the new libra poster and I started to read my new libra horoscope
and I was astonished to find that it was also totally me!
It wasn't untill years later looking back on this whole "age of reason / change of birthday" thing
that it dawned on me.
I wasn't turning seven when I thought I turned seven.
I actually had a whole other month to do anything I wanted to
before god stared keeping tabs on me!
Oh! Life can be so unfair!
Not too long ago two mormon missionaries came to my door.
I lived just off a main thouroughfare in Los Angeles
and my block is a natural beginning for pepole who are peddling things door to door.
Sometimes I get little old ladies from the 7th day adventist church.
showing me these pictures of heaven
and sometimes I get teenagers who promise me that they won't join a gang
and just start robbing people if I only buy some magazine subscriptions from them.
So normally I just ignore the doorbell.
But on this day, I answered.
And there stood two boys, each about 19
in white starched short-sleeved shirts
and they had little nametags that identified them
as official representatives of the church of Jesus Christ of latter day saints.
And they said they had a message for me, from god.
I said "A message for me? From god?"
And they said "Yes"
Now, I was raised in the Pacific Northwest around a lot of mormons
and you know, I worked with them and even dated them
but I never really knew the doctrine or what they said to people when they were out on a mission
and I guess I was sort of curious so I said "Well please, come in"
And they looked really happy because I don't think this happens to them all that often.
And I sat them down and I got them glasses of water
and after our niceties I said Ok, I'm ready for my message from god.
But they had a question instead, which threw me a little bit.
I thought it would be more like a pitch at a studio
when I would hear their story and then if I were interested
I would have my people call their people, or something.
But apparently this was going to be interactive
and they said "do you believe that god loves you with all his heart?"
And I thought, well of course I believe in god
but I don't like that word 'heart' because that anthropomorphizes god
and I don't like the word 'his' either because that sort of sexualizes god
but I didn't wanna argue semantics with these boys
so after a very long, uncomfortable pause
I said "Yes, yes, I do. I feel very loved"
And they looked at each other and smiled like that was the right answer.
And then they said "Do you believe that we're all brothers and sisters on this planet?"
and I said "Yes I do, yes I do!"
And I was so relieved that it was a question I could answer so quickly.
And they said "well, then we have a story to tell you"
And they told me this story all about this guy named Lehi
who lived in Jerusalem in 600 BC
Now apparenlty in Jerusalem in 600 BC everyone was completely bad and evil,
every single one of them man, woman, child, infant, fetus
and god came to Lehi and he said "put your family on a boat and I will lead you out of here"
and god did lead them. He lead them to America.
I said "America? From Jerusalem to America by boat in 600 BC?"
And they said "yes"
Then they told me how Lehi and his descendants reproduced and reproduced
and over the course of 600 years there were two great races of them
the Nephites and the Lamanites.
And the Nephites were totally totally good each and everyone of them
and the Lamanites were totally bad and evil every single one of them
just bad to the bone.
Then, after Jesus died on the cross for our sins
on his way up to heaven he stopped by America and visited the Nephites.
And he told them, that if they all remained totally totally good each and everyone of them
they would win the war against they evil Lamanites.
But apparently somebody blew it,
because the Lamanites were able to kill all the Nephites, all but one guy:
this guy named Mormon, who managed to survive
by hiding in the woods and he made sure this whole story was written down
in reformed Egyptian hieroglyphics
chiseled onto golden plates
which he then buried near Palmyra, New York.
Well, I was so into this story I was just on the edge of my seat.
I said "What happened to the Lamanites?"
and they said "Well they became our native Americans" here in the U.S.
And I said "So, you believe the native Americans were decented from people that were totally evil?"
And they said "Yes"
Then they told me how this guy named Joseph Smith found those buried gold plates,
basically right in his back yard.
And he also found this magic stone back there that he put into his hat
and then buried his face into it and this allowed him to translate
the gold plates, from the reformed Egyptian into English.
Well at this point
I just wanted to give these two boys some advice about their pitch
I wanted to say "Ok, don't start with this story"
I mean, even the scientologists know to give a personality test.
Before they start telling people all about Xenu the evil intergalactic overlord.
Well then they said to me "Do you believe
that god speaks to us through his righteous prophets?"
And I said "No, I don't"
Because I was sort of upset about this Lamanites story
and this crazy gold plate story
but the truth was I hadn't really thought this through.
So, I back peddled a little bit and said
Well, what do you mean by "righteous" exactly?
And what do you mean by "prophets"? Like, could the prophets be women?
And they said "No"
And I said "Why?"
And they said "Well, it's because god gave women a gift,
that is so spectacular,
it is so wonderful, that the only gift he had left over to give men
was the gift of prophecy.
What is this wonderful gift god gave women, I wondered.
Maybe their greater ability to cooperate and adapt?
Womens' longer lifespan? The fact that women tend to be much less violent than men?
But no, it was not any of these gifts.
They said "Well, it's her ability to bear children"
I said "Oh, come on. Even if women tried to have a baby every single year
from the time they were 15 to the time they were 45
assuming most of them didn't die off from exhaustion
it still seems like some women would have some time left over to hear the word of god.
And they said "No"
Well then they didn't look so fresh-faced and cute to me anymore but they had more to say.
They said "Well, we also believe that if you're a Mormon and if you're in good standing with the church
when you die, you get to go to heaven and be with your family for all eternity."
And I said "Oh dear!"
"That wouldn't be such a good incentive for me"
And they said "Oh. Well we also believe that when you go to heaven
you get your body restored to you in its best original state,
like, if you'd lost a leg, well you'd get it back or if you'd gone blind, you could see".
I said "Oh, now, I don't have a uterus because I had cancer a few years ago,
so does this mean that if I went to heaven I would get my old uterus back?"
And they said "Sure"
And I said "I don't want it back. I'm happy without it"
Gosh, what if you had a nose job and you liked it?
Would god force you to get your old nose back?
Well then they gave me a book of Mormon and they told me "read this chapter and that chapter"
and they said they'd be back some day and check in on me
and I think I said something like "Please, don't hurry" or maybe it was just "Please, don't"
and they were gone.
Okey. So, I initially felt really superior to these boys.
and smug in my more conventional faith.
But then the more I thought about it the more I had to be honest with myself.
If someone came to my door and I was hearing catholic theology and dogma
for the very first time
and they said "We believe that god impregnated a very young girl
without the use of intercourse
and the fact that she was a virgin is maniacally important to us
and she had a baby and that's the son of god
I mean, I would think that was equally ridiculous.
I'm just so used to that story.
So, I couldn't let myself feel condescending towards these boys.
But the question they asked me when they first arived
was really stuck in my head.
Did I believe that god loved me with all his heart?
Because, I wasn't exactly sure how I felt about that question.
Now, if they had asked me
"Do you feel that god loves you with all his heart?"
I think that would have been much different.
I think I would have instantly answered "Yes, yes, I feel it all the time.
I feel god's love when I'm hurt and confused
and I feel consoled and cared for.
I take shelter in god's love when I don't understand why tragedy hits
and I feel god's love when I look with gratitude at all the beauty I see."
But since they asked me this question with the word "believe" in it
somehow it was all different.
Because, I guess I wasn't exactly sure if I believed what I so clearly felt.
Ok, my religious history in a nutshell.
I was raised catholic and for me it was all in all a good experience.
I know we can't stop reading about all of the horrific and abusive experiences
that people have had, growing up in the catholic church recently,
in the papers.
But for me, it was mostly wonderful. I always felt lucky to be a catholic.
My parents were both from catholic families that went as far back as anyone knew on either side.
My parents both went to all catholic schools.
Grade school, high school, college.
And then my father even went to catholic law school.
My father told us kids, that when he was in high school the Jesuits separated out some of the boys,
and they were on this separate advanced track
and he studied Latin for 4 years and Greek for 3 years
and out of the 16 of his special group, 11 of them became Jesuit priests themselves
When my father told us kids the story we thought
"He's gotta be like this genius who's been groomed for the priesthood.
But lucky for us, he chose to get married instead".
When I was old enough my father introduced me to his favourite writers,
which he pointed out were catholic writers.
G.K. Chesterson, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Flannery O' Connor.
They were in a club that we were into
and I felt lucky and privileged.
I think my favorite time to be a catholic was in high school,
my first two years of high school I went to an all girl school taught primarily by nuns.
and I befriended one sister in particular, sister Antonella.
And she often invited me over to the convent for dinner.
And maybe because it was such a contrast to my home life at that time,
I mean, I was the eldest of five children, in a typical busy Irish catholic home,
but for me, the life of the nuns just seemed like heaven.
The convent was really quite and calm,
and the women were dedicated to the education of their students
and dinner discusion centered on theological debate
or what I thought was theological debate
maybe they just talked about a poem that everyone liked.
But it was just so civilized.
I don't know, the convent seemed like books and incense and rosary beads
and meditation and like rationality.
The sisters lived in an order, but they sure seemed to have their lives in order as well.
Now, my adult self knows that I am definitely romanticizing these nuns,
but in the seven or so time that I ate dinner over there and in almost all my personal dealings with them,
that's how I remember it.
I became a little bit of a nun-o-phile.
My favorite show as a kid was "the flying nun".
I watched all those nun movies with relish:
"Song of Bernadette", "The singing nun".
After watching "Brother Sun, Sister Moon" I took the confirmation name Clare.
Because I, like St. Clare, was in love with St. Francis.
I memorized "The trouble with angels" and "Where angels, go trouble follows"
and I secretly wished that I were Haley Mills
and I practiced saying: "I've got the most scathingly brilliant idea"
Naturally, I wanted to be a nun myself for a little while in high school.
And I confessed my dream to sister Antonella,
and she told me that the church didn't really allow girls as young as me to enter the convent.
But she could arrange for me to spend the weekend at another convent to see if I liked it.
This other convent was not like the convent at Mary Cliff.
The nuns just lived in a house in some regular old neighborhood,
and they just wore jeans and plaid shirts and played guitar and sang "Kumbaya"
like, help the poor and the sick.
Ha!
I didn't want any of that hippy kind of nun life.
I wanted a habit and a cell
and I wanted to flog myself and wear a hairshirt.
And I wanted the gregorian chant wafting through the halls,
the halls that I would walk down right next to the wall
because to walk on the middle of the hallway was to be arrogant.
I wanted to be silent, and make all of those hand signals
that the contemplative nuns make during meals
that mean "more salt" and "thank you, for the salt".
And I wanted my long, thick hair to be cut off abruptly
like Audrey Hepburn in the "nun's story"
and then I wanted to prostrate myself before the cross.
But it wasn't just the type of convent that was a problem.
There were also boys. I was way into boys.
Even though for a while I really did think that it could be me and Jesus together forever!
I had this picture of Jesus in my bedroom
and he had this shag haircut and these big, beseeching, totally understanding eyes
and a sexy beard.
I will confess to you that that Jesus helped me discover the pleasures of my own body.
Anyway,
as I grew and matured
my understanding of god also grew and matured.
He really was sort of Santa Claus at first but then he became more abstract.
I had many experiences which I considered to be religious,
which confirmed my belief in god. I had religious experiences.
I had a few times. Maybe five or six times.
Felt the power of the holy spirit come over me and just shake me to the core.
In fact, just before the mormon boys arrived
I had my perhaps most visceral and profound religious experience.
You see, I had just suffered the traumatic end to a four-year relationship,
that, well, I had a lot riding on.
I was madly in love. And he was not.
I wanted us to raise children together. And he did not.
And then one day he went away, and I thought I would die, but I didn't.
Night after night I was waking up crying, barely able to breathe.
It felt like a knife was being plunged into my chest.
It seemed like the end of the road.
My dream of being a mother had met a fatal blow.
And then one night, I woke up with the familiar pain and shortness of breath,
and I could hear myself saying the words "heal me, heal me".
I must have been just out of my mind with grief
and suddenly, I felt this bright light in the room.
Or maybe it was just a feeling inside me, like something burst or released or something
but I felt a powerful presence.
A powerful force of love and transcendence.
For the first time in weeks I felt whole.
And I felt absolutely connected to everything.
And I knew that I would be healed
and that god had a plan for me,
and that my break up was just part of my divine destiny.
The next day, I was almost blushing to myself thinking about this incident,
and I felt close to god, closer than ever before.
And I did feel healed cause, you see, god had healed me.
So, now you can sort of see how, when a few days later
these two Mormon boys arrived on my doorstep
and said that god had a message for me, why I was stopped in my tracks
and actually let them in.
And I realized that I was kind of embarrassed that it had taken me so long to answer
that very simple question:
"Did I believe that god loved me?"
And I thought: "How dare they walk into my house and ask me such a personal, private question, so cavalierly?"
It made me kind of angry.
But I wasn't sure if I was angry at them or at me.
And I realized that I had really been getting a bit lazy about my faith.
In an odd way, the Mormon boys' dedication inspired me
and I think I glimpsed in them the girl inside of me who wanted to be a nun,
a person who was willing to go the distance in matters of faith.
So, I decided I would re-dedicate myself to the catholic church.
I went to several different churches and finally settled on joining one about 10 miles from my house,
near the ocean.
It was liberal, it was big, and it had this dedicated and enthusiastic congregation.
Their masses were wonderful, so emotional, so full of feeling.
I would have to choke back tears just to say the Nicene Creed every time I went.
"We believe in one god, the father almighty, creator of heaven and earth,
and of all things seen and unseen".
Oh, I love reciting that. The voices in church all together in unison.
But, I wanted to say with conviction,
not as a child who was just growing up absorbing all of these ideas
but with an adult's understanding. In my heart and soul, the way that god says we should.
Now, I noticed in the announcements that they offered a bible study class on Thursday nights,
and honestly almost on a whim I decided to sign up for it.
Now, you know the catholics don't really emphasize the bible all that much.
Their atitude is sort of "Leave that book to the professionals"
"Don't you worry your little self with that complicated book"
But of what little I did know about the bible, I knew there were parts I loved.
Often when I felt scared or confused I repeated the 23rd psalm:
"Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall not fear, because you are with me".
And I felt so much better.
Now, I was happy to see that the old testament starts out with two conflicting stories about the origin of the universe,
one where Adam and Eve are created at the exact same moment, and then a second creation story,
right away in chapter two, where Adam is created first and then Eve was created
out of his rib after he gets lonely. And I thought:
"Oh wow, for all those people who believe in the inerrancy of the bible
or that every single word of the bible is true,
I mean, they can't even have read the first two chapters of the bible".
I remembered that sister Charatina told us in 8th grade that Genesis,
Genesis was simply a poem on creation, we were not to take it literally.
I shared this with the bible study class and father Tom, this Irish priest who was leading the class said:
"That's exactly right, Julia. A poem on creation. Yes, nicely said, yes."
But then we got to stories like Noah and the ark.
And it was kind of funny, I don't really remember when I was studying this as a kid
Sister Mary Kevin highlighting the fact that Noah becomes an alcoholic after the flood.
And spends most of the time passed out and naked
to the point where his sons have to go back into a room with a blanket
just to go cover him up, cause "jeez, Dad" "Daaaad"
I realized I had always had the bible served up to me piecemeal and in sections
and it had been edited - severely edited.
It was quite different reading it as an adult.
As an adult, you could begin to see the whole puzzle.
As an adult, it was disturbing.
For example when I read about the flood as a kid I didn't think about the fact
that god killed everyone because he was angry
just drowned them all because he thought they were all bad.
Which you have to assume included a lot of kids and unborn fetuses
which I guess was OK with god
but then I was relieved to read that god actually comes to Noah afterwards
and he says "You know the whole flood thing? It might have been a big mistake"
And he promises he'll never do it again.
And that was another surprise. God has regrets.
And then we got to stories like Sodom and Gomorrah.
All I remembered about that story is that they were these two sinful cities
like Las Vegas and Reno or something,
and god got mad and wiped them out
and Lot's wife looked back when she was told not to and she got turned into a pillar of salt.
But the nuns in my grade school didn't explain to us what happens right before they flee.
Right before they flee, Lot is visited by these two angels, who are masquerading as two men,
and they come and stay overnight at his house
and this mob forms outside and they yell "Send out those two angel-like men to us
so we can have sex with them!"
And Lot yells "No"
which I think it's a basic rule of hospitality
"Don't give up your guests to be raped by the angry mob outside"
But then what does he say next? He says
"Why don't you take my daughters and rape and do what you will with them?"
"They're virgins"
Ok, so Lot is evil, right?
How is it that the story we know about him is about his wife getting turned into a pillar of salt?
Maybe that was her only way out.
Maybe being a big pillar of salt is preferable to being married to Lot!
Anyway, after Lot and his two traumatized daughters flee Sodom and Gomorrah
they all go to a cave in the mountains and hide out and during the night
Lot's two daughters get Lot drunk and then rape him.
Did they do this in revenge of what their father did to them? No.
The bible says it's because there aren't any other men around.
Even though the bible also says that they're not that far from a city named Zoar.
So, I guess, no men around for maybe a few miles?
And, wait a minute. So Lot's two daughters just had to drug and rape somebody
and then I guess if you're their dad and you're the only one there...
Ok. I knew the bible had nutty stories, I mean, I knew there were nutty stories,
but I don't know, I guess I thought they'd be wedged in amongst an ocean of inspiration and history.
But instead the stories just got darker and even more convoluted.
Ths old testament God makes the grizliest tests of people's loyalty
Like when He asks Abraham to murder his son Isaac. As a kid we were taught to admire it.
I caught my breath reading it.
We were taught to admire it!? What kind of sadistic test of loyalty is that?
To ask someone to kill his or her own child.
And isn't the proper answer "noooooo?"
"I will not kill my child, or any child, even if it means eternal punishment in hell"?
At then next bible study class, father Tom reminded us that
"Isaac represents what matters to Abraham most"
"And that's what God asks us to give up for Him"
I said "But protecting and loving and caring for the wellfare of your child,
is such a deep ethical loving instinct and act.
So, what if what matters to you most is your own loving behavior?"
"Should we be willing to give up our ethics for God?"
And he said "No, because your ethics... your ethics because your ethics...
your ethics is your love and faith in God."
That confused me a little bit, but I decided to just let that one go.
But then I found that Abraham isn't the only person willing to murder his own child for God.
In the Bible, they're actually all over the place!
For example, in the book of Judges
this guy named Jephtheh tells God that if he can win this battle
he will kill the first person who greets him when he comes home
as a burnt offering.
And who is the first person he sees? His only child.
His beloved daughter, who runs to him playing with tambourines and singing.
"Hi Daddy! Whaaat....?"
And is God saying "No! Don't kill your only child as a burnt offering to me"?
Or even "Jephtheh, who did you expect to be the first person to greet you when you came home?"
No, it appears the most important point of this story is that Jephtheh allows his beautiful daughter
to go off into the woods for two months to mourn her virginity
I kept thinking "Run, run!"
before she comes back and he kills her. By lighting her on fire.
Even if you leave aside the creepy sacrifice-your-own-offspring stories
the laws of the Old Testament were really hard to take.
Leviticus and Deuteronomy are filled with archaic, just hard to imagine laws.
Like, if a man has sex with an animal, both the man and the animal should be killed.
Which I could almost understand for the man. But... the animal?
Because the animal is a willing participant?
Because now the animals had the taste of human sex and won't be satisfied without it?
Even things that I thought were set in stone like, literally "set in stone",
like the Ten Commandments, weren't.
The Ten Commandments that we are almost familiar with are these rules that God simply told Moses on Mt Sinai
without referring to them as commandments, without even setting them in stone.
It's only later in Exodus when Moses goes back up to Mt Sinai
that God gives him a set of two tablets of stone with these rules chiseled on them.
When Moses gets back down of the mountain he sees the people worshipping a golden calf
and he has a tantrum and he smashes the stones before he reads them.
So then Moses goes back up to Mt Sinai and God gives him another set of stone tablets.
And this is the first time at this point that they're reffered to as "The Commandments".
And they're chiseled into stone.
So, you'd sort of think that God's gotta be pretty firm on the subject of commanments by now.
But the rules are significantly different than those other rules.
Like, how all male children have to appear before God three times a year,
however that's supposed to be acomplished.
And how you shouldn't cook a baby goat in its mother's milk.
And how every domestic animal's first born male should be sacrificed.
But then the commandment goes on to say that if you don't wanna sacrifice your donkey's first born male,
you can go ahead and substitude a lamb's, if you really needed to.
Some people think that without the Ten Commandments, morality in society would be relative and wishy-washy
but in the Bible morality is relative and wishy-washy.
In fact, it sure seems like our modern morality is much more loving and humain than the Bible's morality.
Well, father Tom saw me outside of church after mass one Sunday
and he said "Julia, you know you always look so very sad in Bible Study Class".
And I said "I'm sorry father. It's just that God is so offensive in the Bible.
Really, it's like he's bipolar.
He said "Well, you know the Old Testament.
Just remember that the people who wrote it were an ancient Bronze Age civilization.
I mean, the stories are legends, they're tales of trickery and deception that were told around the campfire
by sheiks who made God impressive by their very ancient standards."
I said "Oh, wow! Looking at the Old Testament that way, it actually makes a lot of sense now, father."
"Looking at the Old Testament that way it's quite interesting.
But, Homer was also an ancient Bronze Age writer, writing about Gods.
I mean, how much are we supposed to believe is actually true?"
He said "Well, there's no evidence that Abraham is anything either than legend, or Isaac,
or Moses, or even the whole Exodus story.
I said "The Exodus story is a myth?"
And he said "Well, myth-ish"
And I said "How can something be myth-ish?"
And he said "Well, the Exodus story is a myth, in the sense that it never actually happened.
But it's not a myth in the fact that people who believed the story was true
and shaped their identity as a culture based on thinking that.
But Julia, you can't read the Bible with modern historical eyes, you've got to read it with the eyes of faith.
Because this is the story that God wants us to know."
I left the church thinking: Ok, calm down! This is the Old Testament, Old!
"Old" is right in the title.
A new, a newer Testament is coming up and that's why God must have sent his Son Jesus
because we clearly hadn't gotten the message right, right?
Jesus was all about tearing down those old archaic ways of worship
and reminding people that what mattered most, was what we were like on the inside.
I could hardly wait to meet Jesus again, as if it were the first time.
But Oh, dear!
Well, first of all Jesus was much angrier than I expacted him to be.
I mean, I knew he got angry with all those moneychangers in the Temple and everything
but I just had no idea that he was so angry so much of the time.
And very impatient.
Jesus says that he speaks in parables because the people, they just don't understand anything else.
But the parables are often foggy and meaningless
and Jesus is snippy when even the disciples don't get them.
He says to them "If you don't understand this parable, then how can you understand any parable".
And "Are you incapable of understanding?"
I kept thinking "Don't teach them parables then. It's not working."
"Even your staff doesn't understand them."
"Why don't you just say what you mean?"
Ok so, Jesus isn't so patient and I think he picked a very ineffective lesson giving technique
and he's angry most of the time but that doesn't make him bad.
It's just, wow. I really expected someone else.
Some of the parables are not just foggy, to me they're sort of offensive.
Like, in Luke, Jesus helps us understand God's relationship with humans
by telling us a story about how God treats people, the way people treat their slaves.
They beat some, more than they beat others.
Ok, I know this was a different time and everything
and I really try to keep that in mind as the Bible refers to slavery all over the place.
And not only does it not say it's wrong,
I mean, the Bible gives you advice about how you're supposed to keep your slaves
and how slaves should behave obediently at all times to their masters.
But I don't know. I guess I sort of thought the Son of God would say slavery was wrong.
But no. Jesus does not say that.
In fact, he uses slavery as an example of how God treats people.
It was really hard to stay on Jesus's side when he started saying really aggressive
just hateful things.
Like, in Luke chapter 21
Jesus says that he is like a king who says "Anyone who does not recognize me,
bring them here and slaughter them before me."
On John chapter 15, Jesus says "Anyone who does not believe in me,
is like a withered branch that will be cast into the fire and burn."
In Matthew he says "I come not to bring peace, but a sword."
And in Luke he says that if you don't have a sword "sell your clothes and buy one!"
Then Jesus just starts acting downright crazy.
Like, in Matthew chapter 21, when this fig tree doesn't have a fig for Jesus to eat
he condemns the fig tree to death.
That's right, Jesus condemns... a fig tree to death.
Not a parable, by the way, just Jesus pissed off that the fig tree didn't have a fig for him to eat, when he wanted one!
Not exactly the prince of peace who taught us to turn the other cheek...
And then there's family.
I have to say that for me the most deeply upsetting thing about Jesus
is his family values.
Which is amazing when you think how there's so many groups out there,
who say they base their family values on the Bible.
I mean, he seems to have no real close ties to his parents.
He puts his mother off cruelly over and over again.
At the wedding feast he says to her "Woman, what have I to do with you"
and once, while he was speaking to a crowd, Mary waited patiently off to the side to talk to him.
And Jesus said to the disciples "Send her away, because you are my family now."
Matthew, Mark and Luke all tell this exact same story
but Mark actually tells us why Mary was there to see Jesus.
He says Mary came to see Jesus to restrain him, because
the people were saying he's gone out of his mind.
I kept thinking "Yes, let's go get Jesus and get him some help!"
Anyway, Jesus discourages any contact his converts have with their own families.
He himself does not marry or have children
and he explicitly tells his followers not to have families as well
and if they do, they should just abandon them.
Now, mostly Jesus says this because he believed the end of all time was imminent.
Jesus said over and over again that the people who were alive when he was alive
would not die naturally, but see the end times.
He tells us this in Matthew, Mark and Luke.
So, ok, Jesus tells us not to have families because he
(mistakenly)
believed that the end of all time was imminent,
but then he tells us not to take care of the families that we do have already.
Like, in Luke chapter 14, Jesus says "Anyone who comes to me and does not hate
father and mother, brothers and sisters, wife and children
cannot be my disciple."
I mean, isn't that what cults do?
Get you to reject your family in order to inculcate you?
So that's the New Testament family values for you.
The supposed big improvement over the Old Testament family values,
which seemed to me to be mostly about incest and mass slaughter
and protcting your own specific genetic line at all costs.
After the gospels, there's a bunch of letters written by the early christians
the most important of which are written by St. Paul
Now the Bible's view of women is dreadfull, in general.
And you know, I know that this was a different time and everything
But St. Paul, man, he really gets just right to the point.
St. Paul writes "Man is the image and glory of God, but the woman is the glory of man"
"A woman should learn in quiteness and full submission."
"I do not permit a woman to teach or have any authority over a man. She must be silent."
"If there is anything a woman desires to know, let her ask her husband at home,
for Adam was formed first, and then Eve."
"And it was not man who was deceived, it was the woman who was deceived, and became the sinner."
The Bible, the Bible! The good book! The good news!
I was so disillusioned with the Bible, by the time I finished the epistles,
I just didn't think it could get any worse.
But it did!
We were just about to read the last, and most odball book of the Bible: Revelation.
Now, apparently, Revelation was written by St. John,
the same person who wrote a Gospel in some of the epistles.
The biblical historian Ken Smith says,
that "If his epistles can be seen as John on pot,
well Revelation is John on acid."
It describes the end of days with a little too much gruesome enthusiasm.
Revelation tells us, that in Heaven "There is a throne."
"And the One who sat there had the appearence of a Jasper."
"Around the throne are four living creatures, and they're coveres with eyes front and back."
Day and night, they never stop saying
"Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come."
In Heaven, Jesus resembles a dead lamb, with 7 horns and 7 eyes,
and when the gates of Hell are open, locusts pour out, with human faces, wearing tiny crowns
and they sting people with their tails.
Reveleation tells us that only 144,000 people will be saved and even get into Heaven,
and that none of them will have quote: "Defiled themselves with women."
Which I guess excludes most heterosexual men from Heaven,
and depending on how you interpret that word "defiled",
I dont know, I would say it excludes all women too.
After we finished Revelation,
the entire Bible study group sat there, dumbfounded.
Our Bibles on our laps, Father Tom said:
"Revelation is a poem about the end of the world??"
I said "Father Tom I am having a really hard time with this book"
And he told me to "pray for faith".
I left the church thinking "Is this one big practical joke!?"
Where is my God? The Jesus I know, the one that I love, and the one who loves me?
I was driving home when I was stopped at this red light on Crenshaw and Wilshire
and it was a Sunday, and all these people were walking to church and holding their Bibles,
and I wanted to roll down the window and say
"Have you read that book?"
"I mean really?"
I felt like I was in a horror film,
and the clue to the insanity was not some secret document,
it was a book that everyone was holding,
that was on every coffee table,
the biggest bestseller of all time.
The key to the underpinnings of the faith,
in every single hotelroom in the land,
and yet if you cared enough to just glance inside
you'd find you opened the door to an insane asylum,
with a bunch of crazy people, dancing around saying
"Yippitie, yippitie, yaaaaaaah".
And now I've shut that door,
and how could I pretend that I hadn't opened that door?
My mother said "Julie, I just ignore what I don't like".
"Why would you do something honey, like go read the Bible cover to cover,
if you you weren't just looking for reasons to get upset?"
"You make your life so much harder than if has to be, honey."
Well, I went to Book Soup, and I wandered around
and I saw this book "The History of God" by this woman Karen Armstrong.
Karen Armstrong is this amazing British religious writer,
who was a nun for 7 years, and then she left the convent,
and now I believe she teaches religious history,
at a Rebbinacle Institute in England.
In my mind, the Haley Mills character in "The Trouble with Angels",
well she grows up to become Karen Armstrong.
Karen has all sorts of "scathingly brilliant ideas".
I loved the "History of God"!
And in it Karen makes a good point:
She says the stories of the Bible are not literally true, everybody knows they're not literally true,
and it's not even important that they're true.
What's important, is that they're "psychologically true".
And that was a big revelation for me.
I felt like I finally understood.
As if, at long last, I was in on the secret.
I thought "Oh, yeah, that's what everybody already knows
only no one says it.
Maybe this is what father Tom was trying to tell me when he said "myth-ish".
He meant that it was psychologically true.
I walked around thinking "Of course, of course" and I remembered the nuns teaching me dogma in grade school
and how exasperated they would get if I asked too many questions.
And now I knew what they were thinking.
They were thinking "Don't you know it's just psychologically true?"
"Everybody else seems to get that!"
So when I went to mass on Easter Sunday that year, I felt I had this new positive attitude.
I knew the correct way to look at the stories.
Historical acuracy was not important, that poeple built cultures around them wasn't even important.
What was important was that they triggered us somehow deep in our psyche.
Because they were psychologicaly true.
But as I sat there in mass, I thought
What does that really mean, "psychologically true"?
I mean, Jesus's death and resurrection, death and rebirth, ok I get it,
psychologically true enough.
But what about other stories on the same theme?
I mean, what about Persephone going down into the underworld
I mean that's psycologically true too then, I suppose.
Or what about stories from the Iliad? Or Darth Vader? Or the Little Engine that could?
I mean those are psychologically true stories, aren't they?
And what's so psychologically true about atonement?
We were taught that Jesus died for our sins, based on this idea of atonement,
or that somebody else can pay for the sins of other people.
For the first time, after going to church basically my entire life,
I considered the idea that God sent his Son to Earth, to suffer and die for our sins.
Why?
I mean, first of all you can say that Jesus suffered,
but, you know, he didn't suffer any more than a lot of people have suffered.
I could think of examples in my own family.
My brother Mike who had cancer, he suffered unspeakably for a very long time.
Eye lids freezing open and his eyes drying up,
canker sores all over his throat and he couldn't swallow,
weeks and then months of gut wrenching, vomiting and nausea,
before he finally died.
So ok, Jesus suffered.
I mean, he apparently suffered terribly.
For one, maybe even two days.
I heard someone say once "Jesus had a really bad weekend for our sins"
I thought why would a God, create people, so imperfect,
then blame them for their own imperfections.
Aha! Then send his son to be tortured and then murdered by those imperfect people,
to make up for how imperfect people were,
and how imperfect they inevitably were going to be.
I mean, what a crazy idea.
I looked at the Crucifix,
and for the first time, instead of seeing a symbol of transcendence and compassion,
I saw a horrible execution device.
What kind of God sends his son to be tortured and killed like that?
Oh, I guess it is the God of the Old Testament. That's exactly who would do something like that.
But then, when I looked at Jesus as just a guy, just a human, just an impassioned young idealist,
who sure lost his temper a lot,
but who could also go on teary eyed about loving your neighbor and helping the poor
and because his ideas were so outspoken, it threatened those in power,
who ordered him to be tortured and killed
and then reading how Jesus died, astonished and heartbroken
that his own God abandoned him.
His story became so tragic.
Jesus's life and death,
made me want to go out and campaign for free speech,
not sit in a church and worship him!
So I tried to concentrate on what I did like about the church.
The stained glass windows are pretty,
the light in the church, the religious art,
the songs, not the words to the songs exactly
but the melodies are nice,
especially at Christmas
it was all so pretty in the church then.
Well, father Tom saw me outside the church. He said "Happy Easter, Julia"
I said "Happy Easter, Father"
He said "You know, I can see you frowning from the pulpit."
"I'm sorry, Father, but will you please help me?
Because I'm just finding this all just impossible to believe"
He pulled me over to the coffee and donuts table.
He said "Listen. I've been speaking with some of the other priests about your... predicament."
I loved how he said "predicament". I felt like I was 16 and knocked up.
I said "Yeah?"
He said "Listen! We all strugle with doubt."
"But we all come back."
"Just remember proverbs 3:5. Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding."
So God gave us the gifts of intelligence, and curiousity, and rationality,
but then we're not supposed to use them?
Then Father Tom sighed. Like he was so tired of me and my struggle.
And I was so angry that he used that particular proverb.
But really it felt like was just slamming the door in my face.
Then all of a sudden Father Tom started to bless me.
It was sort of awkward, he just started moving his hands over me,
and chanting this phrase in Latin.
Not that this is so out of the ordinary or wrong or anything like that.
It's just in this moment it felt like he was trying to perform an exorcism.
Afterwards, I went back into the empty church and I sat down and I stared at the altar.
When I was 10 or so, the sisters at St. Augustine's announced that anyone who was
interested in becoming an altar boy were to go see Monsignor at the rectory.
And I thought "I wanna be an altar boy!"
And my best friend Janie Parker and I went up to the rectory
and we knocked on the door and Monsignor answered and I said
"We wanna be altar boys or altar girls or altar people or... whatever"
And Monsignor said "Don't be ridiculous!"
And he slammed the door on our faces as we stood there.
Janie and I were so angry. We were so mad.
We just went right back over to the church and we went where they'd always told us we should never go,
up to the sancturay
and we knew that is was a sacrilege to touch anything
on the altar if you weren't a priest or an altar boy,
and we ran around an we touched everything.
We touched every little thing!
We got our girl cooties all over that altar!!!
And suddenly, remembering that like a big ocean wave
the force of all that I really hated about this church welled up in me.
All the pompus, numbing masses,
the unabated monotony of the rituals,
all the desperate priests trying to tease something meaningful out of very flawed, ancient text.
I was driving home going East on the 10 and I was near tears thinking
"I tried so hard! I tried to learn more about my church and it just made everything a lot worse"
I thought they knew something I didn't know, like they had to have,
because there's this whole hude institution built on it!
And I thought "I feel like I am lying under this great huge cow of the church
sucking on a teat, trying to get some milk of meaning.
And I am sucking and sucking and then,
I usually do get a teaspoon of milk and I thrill to myself
"A teaspoon of meaning! A teaspoon of meaning! Hallelujah!"
And now my neck is so exhausted and even the muscles in my shoulders and back are starting to ache.
And I prayed to God "What am I gonna do? I can't go back there again."
We could go to some other church together, me and God, or find some other way,
but this is not the right way for me, I will not make this drive again.
It is finished. And then I did start to cry.
And as if God were crying too, it began to rain.
And could almost feel God, sitting in the passenger seat next to me
and we were ripping down the freeway together.
And I could practically hear God say
"I can bearly stand it at that church myself. Let's get the hell out of here!"
And so we did.
I came home and it felt remarkably quiet.
Sort of like God and I were empty nesters, and now we had no church
or rituals or special prayers to distract us from each other.
Just me and God...
Not saying much, just sort of pondering.
Not a big conversationalist, God.
In retrospect, I could have easily become an Episcopal at that moment, but I didn't.
Instead, I went to Rocket Video and I rented all those Bill Moyers - Joseph Campbell tapes
and I re-watched them and I reveled in the common themes that all religions share.
But it was different than the first time I watched them back in 1988
Back then, all I really remembered was "Follow your bliss, follow your bliss!"
"Follow your bliss!"
And I thought "Ok, I'm following my bliss, that's good advice"
But this time I thought "You know what? I believe in everything"
All of religions worship the same God, they just all do it in different ways.
I began to drift East, spiritually speaking.
I took a meditation class, and I began to meditate rather regularly.
And I found it challenging and it really sharpened my concentration.
I got Huston Smith's guide to the spiritual classics and I read them all.
The Tao Te Ching, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Tibetan book of the dead,
Rumi, the Essential Kabbalah.
I was on a spiritual quest!
Fortunately around this time on the work front,
I had been cast as the mother in two direct-to-video family dog movies.
Beethoven 3 & 4
I know, I hate to throw my credits around in these shows, but... sometimes I have to.
Anyway, in one of the scripts it had this nightmare sequence,
which involved a bunch of drooling St. Bernards licking my terrified face.
And this was acomplished by, well, by taking a whole bunch of St. Bernards
and not feeding them for a very long time.
Taking me to the beach and burying me in sand all the way up to my neck
rubbing a bunch of dog food in my hair and then releasing the hounds.
And as the dogs galloped towards my fragrant cranium
I thought "Maybe I'm a Buddhist.
In a way it seems inevitable. I mean, I live in California, it's practically Buddhism's second home."
I was so excited about Buddhism, that I decided I wanted to travel in countries predominantly Buddhist.
And go to the East and see the places where it all began.
And the money from these two movies allowed me to do it.
I took off and travelled for several months.
I went to China and hiked along the Yangtze, and then I went to Tibet
where I went overland from Lhasa to Katmandu.
And then I spent some time hiking in Bhutan, this little Buddhist monarchy,
high up in the Himalayas. It's sort of sandwiched between India and China.
and as I hiked up and up to a monastery I could hear the monks chanting and singing in the distance,
prayer flags whipped in the wind and the giant mountains hovered.
And it was all so otherworldly and exotic.
It also happened to be my 40th birthday.
I kept thinking "40...wow, 40"
I always thought that by this age I'd be married and have kids, maybe even grown kids.
I could almost hear God laughing in the wind at how differently everything turned out for me.
Ahead of me on the trail was this old man, carrying a prayer wheel
and one of those rosaries prayer beads, that has the same number of beads that Catholics use
a mala, I think it's called. And I thought "Wow,
see he looks like he can almost be my grandmother walking to church.
I got closer to the monastery, but as I got closer I could see how young some of the monks were.
It's a tradition in places like Tibet and Bhutan that the
second son just automatically goes into the monastery.
Some of the boys were as young as seven, the age of reason,
but hardly an age where someone can make an informed decision about their life purpose.
I mean, they would only get a religious education,
they would never get to experience, well, a heterosexual relationship with its particular joys and sorrows
or a family of their own
and instead of being inspired by them, I wanted to free them.
And as I hiked back down I thought "Maybe I have it backwards, maybe we don't all worship the same god"
"I mean, after all the Buddhist Gods are so different than the Judeo-Christian God.
But we all sure seem to worship them in the same ways.
We recite prayers, we make sacrifices,
we wear special garments, we use special objests.
From there I went to Thailand, where I happened to talk to this woman
who was taking care of a terribly deformed boy who was an orphan
and I said "It's so good of you to take care of this poor boy"
And she said "Don't say 'poor boy'
he must have done something terrible in a past life to born like that."
When I got back to Los Angeles
even though there was still a lot about Buddhism that truly did intrigue me
I had to admit I was less interested.
I kept thinking "Wow, the Buddhism we get in California, is all cleaned up for us."
And I wondered what enlightment really meant.
I felt pretty good about my levels of attachment and detachment to the world.
To me, life was not all suffering.
In fact, what I mostly felt was this growing sense of outrageous luck.
I realized that I wasn't just looking for inner peace
so that I could feel happier or more content with my own life
I was trying to figure out why I was born, who God was
and I guess what the ultimate meaning of life was.
Well, Bill Moyers was to appear once again on my quest.
Not exactly as a spiritual guide showing me down the right road,
but more like a friendly gas station attendant
who had some pretty good maps for sale next to the cash register.
He did this interview with Sister Wendy
Do you know Sister Wendy? She is that nun who was on PBS all the time,
walking through museums, talking "rapturously about art"
I love Sister Wendy!
To me she has the perfect, dream life.
Half the year she spends in a silent monastery
and the other half she spends being a television star.
I've watched all of her videos and Bill Moyers did this special interview with her
he did ask her question, after quesion after question
about her sexless existence,
which got to be rather annoying and the even a little disturbing...
but at one point he said to her
"Sister Wendy, when you're at the monastery what do you do all day?"
And Sister Wendy said "Well Bill, I pray a lot"
"and I live in the sunshine of God's presence. It's absolute bliss"
And I though "The sunshine of God's presence, huh?"
Thr SUNSHINE of God's presence!
Maybe I'll spend more time in the sunshine!
Maybe for me God is nature. The beauty and harmony of our natural world.
And as soon as I said it, it felt so right.
I could almost hear God saying "Duh!"
And I walked around saying "God is nature, God is nature, that's the way for me to connect with God,
by spending time in His masterpiece: Nature
Now you know, Catholics don't push nature all that much, either.
I think there's something almost pornographic about the whole idea of nature to Catholics.
I don't remember a lot of hiking growing up,
we weren't like those crazy Protestants who were out camping all the time.
I guess the idea was that nature was just so lush and unabashedly ripe,
you just didn't know what you were gonna get tangled up in, out in nature.
So, I decided that I would try to experience God while I was on a hike or on a bike,
and it was fun, it was really fun, and I began to notice the smallest leaves
and what a web of life there was out there, so intricate and beautiful.
I was able to continue my travels and this time I headed to South America,
and I went to Ecuador and then went to visit the Galapagos Islands,
I went on a week long boat trip with the naturalists and eight other people.
And in the common area of the boat was Charles Darwin's 'The Origin of Species'.
And I laughed when I saw it because I thought
"Either you would be someone who would have already read 'The Origin of Species'
and that would be why you even came here to the Galapagos
or you would be someone who would probably never read 'The Origin of Species'."
I mean, how supremely dorky would it be if someone saw this book here and thought
"Huh, I wonder what this is about"
and started reading it here of all places, that would be so ridiculous!
And in a few moments, I basically was that person.
Now, of course, I accepted the theory of Evolution.
I mean, I remembered Sister Charatina telling us all about it in 8th grade,
how we, as Catholics believe in Evolution.
We weren't like some of those... uneducated Protestants
that believed that God literally plopped people onto the Earth,
in one fell swoop.
She said "This is the way it happened:
God set everything in motion in order for humans to evolve.
Then, there was this special pre-ordained moment when there was a very very first
human man and woman, because think about it,
there had to be some moment when there was the very very first
human man and woman, and that was Adam and Eve.
And that's when God put a soul in us.
And then everything else happened exactly as it says in the Bible.
And then she sort of encouraged us not to think so much about evolution any more
because, after all, she had just explained it!
Right?
In any case, the idea of evolution wasn't threatening to me in any way, it's just
I didn't really understand that much about it, except over time animals change?
I thought 'The Origin of Species' would be way too scientific of a book for a person like me to read.
Personally, I had avoided science at all costs in school.
In fact, I even had this prejudice, this idea that doing well in science was somehow
an admission that you didn't have the comlexity of character
or the subtlety of mind to take on the humanities.
Science was for people who couldn't handle ambiguities
who needed black and white answers.
Probably people who couldn't really get in touch with their feelings
and had nothing left to think about.
But to my surprise, 'The Origin of Species' was very easy to read.
And truly a page turner.
And Charles Darwin, he described evolution in ways that Sister Charatina had not.
It was a lot more scary and chancy the way Darwin described it.
The next day, we visited an island were the Blue-footed Boobies were tending to their new babies.
Now the Blue-footed Boobies are just the cutest animals in the world
I think almost to the level of absurdity.
They have this bright white fur that sticks out all over
and these big blue beaks and feet and these huge plaintive eyes.
Now usually the Blue-footed Boobies have just one baby per pregnancy.
But every once in a while they have two,
and when they do, usually the stronger of the two pecks the brains out of the weaker one.
So we were all looking at these adorable little Blue-footed Booby babies
and then we came upon one pecking the brains out of its weaker sibling.
And the naturalist was telling us that this was routine.
That now the frigate bird would fly in soon and carry the dead baby off to feed its family.
That's the way it went.
And I looked at this poor, doomed Blue-footed Booby baby with his brains just hanging out of his head
and we looked each other in the eye for a moment
and he looked at me like
"What are you gonna do?
I'm the weaker Blue-footed Booby baby"
Oh God!
God is not nature.
Nature is floods and famines and Earthquakes and viruses and
little Blue-footed Booby babies getting their brains pecked out by their stronger sibling!
God, the God that I know, the God of love and compassion
that isn't exactly found in nature.
We went back to the boat,
and clouds formed overhead, and I decided I would just
lie in the fetal position for a while and consider nature.
So, God and Nature are separate...
Oh, it so obvious that that is true.
I mean, God is a moral force and nature is utterly immoral.
I mean nature doesn't care about me or anybody in particular.
I mean, nature can be terrifying.
Gosh, why do they even put words like 'natural' in products like shampoo,
like that's automatically a good thing?
I mean, sulfuric acid is natural.
I could almost hear God saying "Dud!"
But then, God, who are you?
Because I can't stop thinking "Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!"
Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I shall not fear, because you are with me...??
Maybe God is love.
I mean, could it be that simple for me?
You hear it all the time "God is love".
Ok, God is love.
God... is a force of love.
God is a force of love in the universe.
When I was in high school at Mary Cliff the Cathilic girl school
there was this lay teacher who taught P.E., named Ms Roberts.
And she was gorgeous.
She walked like an athlete, her head held high, she was tall and blond and muscular.
A goddess in our midst.
One day the nuns had all of us girls in the gym
and we were sitting on the floor listening to this guest musician,
who I think may have been a friend of Ms Roberts.
And he was playing his guitar and singing,
and at the end of his set he began singing this song "Vatican Regg".
which is very irreverent and has lyrics like "Bow your head with great respect and then
genuflect, genuflect, genuflect"
Well the nuns reeled.
Sister Mary Howard stood up in the middle of his song and asked him to leave.
He stopped, took his guitar and left.
Then I remember just sitting there in the gym for a while
just sort of decompressing, you know, just talking about God.
When all of a sudden Sister Mary Howard turned to this Ms Roberts and said
"Do you even believe in God?"
Well, I'd never heard anyone ask another person a question like that before.
Ms Roberst stared right into the eyes of Sister Mary Howard.
And Sister Mary Howard stared right into the eyes of Ms Roberts,
who, after an eternity said, "I believe in a force of love in the universe"
All of us girls nodded in agreement.
'Force of love in the universe'? I mean, sure who could argue with that?
And then we all looked back at Sister Mary Howard whose eyes narrowed like
"That is the wrong answer!"
Only two years later the attitude of my church towards
God being simply love had completely changed.
Gonzaga Prep, the Catholic boys school, had gone co-ed
and that's where I spent my last two years of high school.
Everything seemed to be changing. Folk masses where slipping into the mainstream.
Some of the priests used chalices made of thick, hand made pottery.
And their vestments were made out of unbleached fabrics, coarsely woven.
And instead of the pre-made communion wafers we all just started breaking a loaf of bread,
into little pieces, like Jesus did.
In the Spring, Father Fitterer started teaching us all transcendental meditation.
Suddenly there where guitars in mass and a drumset right up on the altar.
Transubstantiation was never like this before!
In my senior year of high school, they had us all go on this special retreat called 'The search'
and they took us off to this retreat house for a couple of days up in the mountains,
and they put these big blankets over the windows, so we didn't know what time it was
and then they didn't let us sleep for two entire days
and of course everyone kept breaking down and crying, saying "God is love, God is love".
Only we were actually saying "Fred is love, Fred is love".
Because they asked us to call God 'Fred' insted of 'God', while we were on the retreat,
because they felt the name 'God' was just too off-putting for so many people
and 'Fred' felt so much friendlier.
So we were saying "Fred is love, I am walking on Fred's path".
I remember after The Search, all of us seniors were going back to school on this bus,
down these really scary, winding, switched-back roads.
And another senior, Larry, who a few years later would leave
the Catholic church to become an Evangelical christian,
turned to me with this big beatific grin on his face and said
"Just think, if this bus got into a big accident right now and we were all killed
we'd all probably go straight up to heaven."
We all nodded like "Yeah!
Our souls are so clean and pure at this moment.
How wonderful would it be if we were all killed in a big bus accident right now,
because we'd all fly straight up to Fred!"
This is how I danced in high school.
I didn't really date in high school.
So, here I was, years and years later saying "God is love" again to myself,
but what did I mean exactly?
I decided I would think more about this whole idea of God being love.
The feeling of love.
Did I think there was a God behind it? Or in it?
I mean, there seemed to be a lot of incentive to feel love, just for its own sake.
Without God, would there be no love?
In my confusion, I found someone who made it clear,
someone who had thought about this topic a lot.
Now, at this point, I knew a little bit of science, but not a lot
and that made me the perfect candidate for Deepak Chopra.
I read 'The way of the Wizard', 'Ageless body, Timeless mind: the quantum alternatve to growing old'
'The seven spiritual laws of success' and 'How to know God'.
I basked my way through Deepak's books.
I thought I get it. God is energy and intention in the quantum field or... something.
Deepak says that by perceiving changelessness,
time ceases to exist.
I loved Deepak.
I did an interview on 'The view' on ABC
and Deepak Chopra also happened to be a guest on the exact same show
and I gushed all over him in the green room, telling him how wonderfull he was.
I did notice that he looked a little older than he looked on his book jacket.
And I wondered if his perceived timelessness was working on his own body.
I told him how his books were helping me understand
what and who God was, what ultimate reality was,
and also, I just had to tell him that I appreciated that he also had books about
how to create spontaneous wealth and how to lose weight.
Deepak says "The world is the creation of the observer
and the body is information and energy spanning the universe.
Consciousness is the ground of all being. It created us and we are part of it."
Deepak believes that we can tap into this big consciousness, with our awareness,
and that it is the source of all creativity and intention and synchronicity.
And if you want proof? Well, the exotic field of quantum mechanics, proves all of it.
I was really enthralled with how Deepak was using science,
the cutting edge science of quantum mechanics.
This was so much better than using myths and superstitions to find spirituality.
I mean, this was using physics and science to find spirituality.
I was so intrigued with this 'quantum mechanics' that
Deepak refers to over and over and over again in his books
that I decided, I would take a class in it.
And what I found is that Deepak Chopra
is full of shit!
Oh!
I wanted to go back in time and instead of gushing at Chopra
I wanted to say "Deepak, what the hell are you doing?"
"There is no universal consciousness that can be demonstrated with quantum mechanics.
There is no healing of the body or arresting of the ageing process through telepathy.
I mean, sure, subatomic waves and particles do behave in perplexing and strange ways to us,
-especially when we try to measure them, apparently-
but that doesn't mean that there are angels or that the universe
wants me in particular to make more money!"
I mean, I know this and I took one measly class!"
I turned on the TV one day to find Deepak back on his beloved show 'The view',
promoting his new book: 'Golfing to Enlightment'.
And all the ladies were so thrilled "Who knew you could achive enlightment on the links?"
I started feeling so angry at the new age movement.
So arrogant, so clueless!
I mean, here was the generation that was supposed to be the best educated,
the ones who threw off the shackles of superstition and traditional religion
and then what did they do?
They just gravitated towards chakras and auras and crystals and "quantum consciousness"
I mean what is the matter with people?!
And then I thought "Oh God, what is happening to me?"
I'm becoming so cantankerous.
I'm gonna become one of those angry, retired people
who just keeps writing "letters to the editor!"
And I realized that the class I took didn't just give me a very
rudimentary understanding of the very basics of quantum mechanics.
I actually learned something much more deeply disturbing about myself.
Which was, I'd never really been taught critical thinking skills before.
I never really considered how to evaluate evidence.
I always thought that being smart meant that you knew a lot of things
or that you did what the teacher told you to do really really well.
not that you have this mechanism for filtering information.
Cause the truth was, I was starting to get nervous about my realtionship with God.
I felt like we were this married couple in trouble, just trying to find some common ground.
I began to wonder just, who I was married to.
How defined did it really need do be for me?
Because the truth was God worked for me.
Williams James said "It doesn't work because it's true, it's true because it works."
When I prayed, I felt calmer, more focused.
It really changed my state of mind.
But, just because the idea of God worked so well for me,
it didn't necessarily mean that he existed.
I felt suspicious.
For the first time I wondered if God, wasn't just my imaginary friend.
As they say "The invisible and the non-existent, often look very much alike"
Then I thought "Well, wait a minute, God requires faith and faith does not require evidence, right?"
But the more I thought about it the more I had to admit, that my faith...
my faith really was based on evidence.
The evidence of how I felt when I prayed,
the evidence of everyone believing in God, almost
everyone I ever met from the time I was a kid.
The evidence of what I had been taught by people that I trusted
and admired and people who ultimately had authority over me.
So my faith and God really was based on evidence.
How could I not examine that evidence?
But then, how did I examine anything?
How did I even know what I knew?
I had to know!
One day I was thinking about these things,
when I was wandering around Auntie's Bookstore, in Spokane, Washington
and I glanced up and I saw this book called 'How the mind works' by this guy Steven Pinker
And I thought "Wow, how does the mind work anyway??"
Turns out, dendrites.
Ane neurons and glial cells and spindle cells.
I mean apparently the nature of consciousness is still mysterious in some respects,
but basically we're talking about neurons firing through dendrites,
often releasing chemicals in our bodies.
Reading how the mind works triggered this appetite
inside me for understanding how we understand,
how we function and what we really know.
And I was surprised to find that all of our brains are on drugs all of the time!
We give ourselves hits: dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, vasopressin.
The next time all of you laugh, I'll get a little shot of adrenaline through my veins
and if you don't when I expect you too, I'll get cortisol instead and feel anxious.
Thank you, by the way!
Woooooo!
I always thought that I was a person who had escaped addictions
but I realized that I am up here on this stage right now, partly because I
am an addict.
Also, I learned that memory, memory is very very unreliable.
Even when we think we remember for sure,
it turns out our memories are not automatic video playbacks,
but instead reconstructions.
Our memories get filtered by our prior prejudices,
and then mixed up with things that happen later.
And that was a very scary thought for me because my memories,
I mean, that makes my who I am.
When I think of myself as my innermost being, I don't think of ot as a body function.
My brain creates this idea that myself is not 'itself'
I think of myself as something separate, looking out from my eyes
listening through my ears, pulling the strings that make my body move.
And that is because the brain is not able to perceive its own functioning.
And this is true for all of us, by the way, right from childhood,
when a child is told that it's their brain that thinks, they don't think their brain is them.
They think their brain is this thinking, computing machine
something that is added to theirself, to help them understand things.
And yet, the mind is what the brain does.
Just like pumping blood is what the heart does.
Reading about the brain oppened this door in my interest
that I never even knew existed.
I was catapulted into a binge of reading.
I was voracious. It was like I had been starved my entire life for science.
Like the Cambrian explosion happened in my own brain.
And I liked it. It was challenging.
And unlike every other knowledge quest,
this one actually got better the closer you looked.
For the first time, knowing too much didn't ruin it.
I always thought that science was this set of immutable facts
revealed to us by nature.
And then when I would read, you know as a lay person, about how
say, a planet was now not a planet anymore
or gravity wasn't like we thought,
I always thought that was a failing of science,
another sign at how completely unsure science was.
But I realized these examples were not signs of weakness,
they were signs of strength.
That the method was working, constantly filtering new and even better information.
I had it all backwards when I was younger.
It's actually the scientists who are good at dealing with uncertainty.
Well, I was dating a guy at this time who was a big believer in intelligent design.
Intelligent design is this idea that the world is so complex,
especially the conscious,
thinking, feeling human being,
who is so complicated, that it just couldn't have happened by chance.
Someone or something had to have a hand in creating us,
and that someone or something, is God.
I mean the watch requires a watchmaker.
Well, one morning, my intelligent designer boyfriend and I were waking up
and he glanced at the books on my side of the bed
which were becoming increasingly more biological rather than religious.
And then we gazed into each other's eyes...
deeper than ever before...Ah!
"It's the human eye, you know" he said.
"That's the proof there must have been a designer."
You can't have half an eye. Half an eye is no good at all,
either you have an eye, so you can see, or you don't.
How could you possibly evolve an eye?
"Yes", I said. "That's probably true."
"The eye, the eye is very complex, after all it's the window into the soul."
So, I began to read about eyes...
I learned a lot more than I ever dreamed about eyes.
Turns out from an evolutionary prespective the human eye is perfectly explainable.
What began as a patch of skin more sensitive to light than other skin
offers some advantage.
Those that have it live, those that don't, do not.
Turns out half an eye actually is pretty valuable: about half as valuable.
Now, if an intelligent designer or God designed our
eyes, he would not get such a very good grade.
Because he put the blood vessels and nerves that carry all the visual
information to the brain, on top of the retina.
Imagine, that's like putting all the wiring of a video camera on top of the lens.
And where the blood vessels and nerves go through our retina into our brain,
it causes us to have this blind spot that we all
compensate for by, basically, hallucinating,
which is bad, bad, bad, bad!
Not a good design for an eye.
And, it doesn't even have to be that way.
Octopus and squid, they evolved their eyes separately from us and
they don't have those annoying features.
The wonderful biologist, Massimo Pigliucci, he wrote
"The only possible conclusion that we can come to from this evidence
are that God didn't design the eye,
or he did and he's pretty sloppy and not worthy of our unconditional admiration,
or God likes squids a lot better than humans."
Intelligent design get everything backwards.
It's like saying that our hands are miraculous, because they fit so perfectly into our gloves.
Look at that, four fingers and a thumb! Now that can't have been an accident!
My old cat Rita lumbered onto my lap while I was reading about eyes.
She was about 15 years old then, and had gotten too
tired and bothered to go through the entire "meow".
She just started going "me...ugh"
We looked each other in the eye. Instead of noticing the differences,
I noticed the similarities.
We inherited our eyes from our common ancestor,
who probably lived around 100 million years ago.
Our eyes are forward on our skull, because we are hunters.
Except, well, Rita wasn't much of a hunter,
and I realized neither was I.
Not if I was dating a guy who was so into intelligent design.
Rita meowed at me like "Who needs to hunt, when I have domestic help?"
Then, I started reading about of all these experiments
on the function of the temporal lobes.
These doctors figured out a way to stimulate electromagnetically
the right temporal lobe.
People who wore this helmet experienced a transcendence sense of understanding,
an overwhelming connectedness and peace,
and sometimes the presence of God
or of aliens...
This was often accompanied by a bright white light.
Everyone has a certain right temporal lobe sensitivity
we're all susceptible to these types of experiences.
So this could have been what was happening to me,
when I had that whole "Heal me, heal me" experience.
Of course this doesn't mean that God doesn't just use
this physical way to allow us to experience Him,
or Her,
or whoever.
But that sure was interesting.
I learned that because the brain is in some deep, fundamental ways anaware of itself
hallucinations like I had
or like the people have
of angels or ghosts, or out of
body or near death experiences
are perceived or real events or actual encounters.
And so most people, including me
just instinctively think of the mind as something separate from the body,
even though there's no evidence that they are separate.
It turns out, we are organic beings in essence,
our minds living and dying, along with our bodies,
and sometimes even before our bodies,
as it takes just one visit with a person with Alzheimers to realize.
So my common sense view of the world can be very mistaken.
My instincts tell me one thing
like that the Earth is flat, because you know it
basically seems to be, while I'm walking around on it.
But the Earth isn't flat as the facts show us.
I suddenly realized that there were implications to everything that I was learning.
My assumption about God's role in our lives was really getting squeezed.
I didn't think he intervened in our lives.
I didn't think He was necessary for us to evolve.
I tried not to think of the implications,
but come on,
it was impossible not to.
Then one day, I was Cometing out my tub
and I thought "What if it's true?"
"What if humans are here because of pure random chance?"
"What if there was no guiding hand,
no external regulation, no one watching?"
"It's clearly possible that this may be true."
"In fact, this is what our scientific evidence is pointing towards."
"But if it were true, what would that mean?"
I realized I had spent so much time thinking about what God meant,
that I hadn't really spent any time thinking about what not-God meant.
A few days later,
I was walking from my office in my back yard into the house,
and I suddenly realized that there was this teeny-weenie voice,
whispering inside my head.
I'm not sure how long it had been there,
but it suddenly got just one decibel louder and it whispered:
"There is no God"
I tried to ignore it. But it got a little louder.
"There is no God, there is no God"
"Oh my God, THERE IS NO GOD"
I sat down under my barren apricot tree,
I didn't realize, by the way, that trees are like people
they stop reproducing when they get older.
Maybe that fig tree that Jesus condemned to death was just menopausal.
Anyway, I sat there and I thought "Ok, I admit it!"
"I do not believe that there is enough evidence to continue to believe in God."
I mean, the world behaves exactly as you would expect it would,
if there were no supreme being, no supreme consciousness.
No supernatural.
So, my best judgement tells me
that it is much more likely that we invented God,
rather than God inventing us.
And I shuddered. I felt like I was slipping off the raft.
I thought "But I can't not believe in God. I need God!
I mean we have a whole history together!"
And then I thought "Wait a minute.
If I look over my life, every single step of maturing for me,
every single one, has really had the same common denominator.
And that was accepting what was true.
Or what I wished were true.
I mean this was the case about guys,
about my career,
about my parents.
So how I could I come up against this biggest question,
the ultimate question, if I really believed in God or not,
and then just turn away from the evidence.
How could I believe just because I wanted to?
How would I have any respect for myself if I did that?
I thought of Pascal's wager,
Pascal argued that it's better to bet there is a God,
because if you're wrong there is nothing to lose,
but if there is you win an eternity in Heaven.
But I can't force myself to believe just in case it turns out to be true.
I mean the God I've been praying to, knows what I think,
He doesn't just make sure I show up for church.
How could I possibly pretend to believe,
I mean I might be able to convince other people but surely not God.
And plus, if I lead my life according my own deeply held moral principles,
what difference did it make if I believed in God or not?
And why would God care exactly, that I believed in Him?
And then I thought "But I don't know how to not believe in God."
I don't know how you do it. How do you get up? How do you get through the day?
And then I thought " OK, caaalm down"
"Let's just put on the not-believing-in-God glasses, for a moment, just for a second."
"Just put on the no-God glasses, take a quick glance around, and then immediately throw them off."
And I put them on, and I looked around.
I'm embarrased to report I initially felt dizzy.
I actually had the thought "How does the Earth stay up in the sky?"
"You mean we're just hurdling through space?"
"That's so vulnerable!"
And I wanted to ran out and catch the Earth as it fell out of space into my hands.
And then I thought "Oh, yeah, gravity and angular momentum
are gonna keep us revolving around the Sun for probably a really long time.
And then I thought "Well, what's gonna stop me from rushing out and murdering people?"
And I had to walk myself through it. Why are we ethical?
Well, because we have to be.
We are social animals.
We are extremely complex social animals and we evolved this moral sense,
like, an aversion to random murder
in order for communities to exist.
because communities help us survive better and in much bigger numbers.
And then, eventually we codified these internal ethics that evolved inside of us
into laws against things like wanton murder.
So, I guess that's why I won't be just rushing out and murdering people!
And then suddenly, I felt so guilty like
I'd cheated on God somehow, just by having all of these thoughts.
And I ran into the house and I prayed and I asked God to please help me have faith.
But already it felt slightly silly and vacant
And I felt like I was just talking to myself.
And I thought "Ok, I'll just not believe in God for one hour a day and see how things go."
So, the next day I tried it again.
And I thought "Wait a minute, wait a minute!"
What about all those people
who are like, unjustifiably jailed, somewhere horrible
and they are like, in solitary confinement, and all they do is pray,
this means, that I... I think those people are praying to nobody?
Is that possible?
And then I thought "We better get those people out of jail"
Because no one's looking out for them but us, there is no God hearing their pleas.
And I guess that goes for really poor people too.
And really oppressed people who I had this vague idea that they had a God to comfort them.
And then an even vaguer idea, that God had orchestrated
their lot for some unknowable grand design.
I walked around thinking "No one is minding the store!"
And I wondered how traffic worked, how we all just weren't in chaos all the time.
And slowly, I began to see the world completely differently.
It's like I had to re-think what I thought about everything.
It's like I had to go change the wallpaper of my mind.
Eventually, I was able to say goodbye to God.
And I imagined this old guy, this old man,
more like a broken down version of the God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
But if you look closely, you could even see the Jesus
from the poster in my high school bedroom.
But older, much older, with long gray and white hair,
and lots of lines on his face, an old hippie who still smoked.
And at one time he seemed so all powerfull and all knowing and all protective,
and now He just seemed a little stinky.
I could just see Him, sitting on the suitcases near the front of my house.
and I went to him and said: "I'm sorry God. It's not you... it's me"
"It's just, I don't think you exist."
"I mean God, look at it this way."
"It's really because I take you so seriously, that I can't bring myself to believe in you."
"If it's any consolation, it's sort of a sign of respect."
"So sit here for a while if you want to.
Stay a little bit if you need to, there is no big hurry."
And slowly over the course of several weeks, He just dissapeared.
Looking back on it, I think I just walked around in a daze for a few months.
My mind became such a private place.
I realised that I had shared my mind with a God, my enrite life
and I suddenly realized that my thoughts were completely my own.
No one was moniteoring them.
No one was compassionatelly listening to them.
My thoughts. My thoughts were my own private affair.
And something no one but me knew about.
I had so much thinking to do.
One day I was walking along Larchmont boulevard,
this busy shopping area near my house.
And I was lost in thoughts thinking "So then I guess, I don't think anything happens to us after we die."
"Consciousness fades and stops, like every other organ."
"So people just, die."
and I thought "Wait a minute."
"So Hitler!? Hitler just died?"
"Nobody sat him down and said: You screwed up buddy, and
now you're gonna spend an eternity in a fiery hell!"
So Hitler just died!
Uh, We better make sure that never happens again.
And my brother Mike, oh.
This means that he just died.
I always had this idea that Mike's death, while premature,
was his devine destiny somehow, and that his
spirit didn't really die, but it lived on.
And not just in the memory of those that knew him, but in a real tangible sense.
And I realized that I now thought he died. He really died.
He was gone forever.
And then I realized I had to go back, and basically kill off everyone I ever met,
who died, who I guess I didn't think really died.
And the I thought "Oh... I get it."
"So, I'm gonna die."
And I sat down on a bench, and I wached people bustling by, and I thought "Wow...
Life is so cheap, and so precious.
So I'm just another animal on Earth, just a type of primate,
the third chimpanzee, better at using tools and able to talk.
And then I am gonna die.
And there will be eons of time, where I will not exist.
Just like the eons of time before I did.
I'm in my fourties.
About half way through my life. I hope.
At this moment, the Sun and the Earth and I, are all middle aged.
Just an animal on a planet, in a solar system,
nothing special.
But then, I think about it this way:
The Earth is 4.5 billion years old,
and for the first billion years on Earth there was no life at all, nothing.
And for the next 3 billion years there was just algae and archea-bacteria.
Dull green and brown, primordial slime.
For 3 billon years!
and then just 500 million years ago or so, boom, complex life came on the scene,
plants and animals,
including us, who've been around for what,
a 100.000 to a milion years or so, depending on what you consider to be human.
I mean if Genesis is a metaphor for creation, that metaphor is way off.
God would not be creating man on the 6th day, but like the 6.000th day.
And all of humanity would have been here for less than a minute.
Actually less than a second.
Adam and Eve were just blinking their eyes, barely awake.
So if you think about it, even if simple life exist readily all over the universe,
it could be that ant type of complex life is fairly rare.
And then when you think like how eyes have evolved over and over again,
or how like flying, flying has evolved over and over again,
but it's species with a brain like ours, able to use language and tools the way we do,
well that's happened only once, in 4 and a half billion years on Earth.
I mean it's not so improbable as to be impossible given all the time involved
and all the different ways that species have come up with to try to adapt.
But still, it's gotta be pretty rare for animals like us to turn up.
And in my DNA is a history of this life on Earth.
Not just back to the African Pliocene,
but even farther back to when we crawled out of the pond.
And then even farther back from that, when there were only single-celled organisms.
All told in the cells of my own body.
And to think that I get to live at a time,
when I can know and understand that...
It makes me feel so lucky.
Then, I started thinking about all the little happenstances
all the random little moves, which resulted in me being alive
me in particular, at this very moment.
Not just of my parents meeting,
but even of the millions of sperm
against the hundreds of possible eggs.
I thought about this randomness multiplying,
my parents, their parents:
Tom meeting Marie in Yakima, or
Henrietta meeting Will on that cruise to Cuba,
and then their parents, and their parents, and their parents.
And all the ways it could have gone one way,
but it went the way it went.
And all the possible people who could,
just as easily, be here in my place.
Richard Dawkins wrote,
"Certainly those unborn ghosts include poets greater than Keats,
scientists greater than Newton.
But in the teeth of these stupefying odds,
it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here."
I suddenly felt very deeply that I was alive:
Alive with my own particular thoughts,
and my own particular story,
in this itty-bitty splash of time.
And in that splash of time,
I get to think about things and do stuff and
love people,
and walk along Larchemont Boulevard with my coffee if I want to. And then that's it.
I walked to my car and I had a ticket. My time had expired.
And I got in the car and
I turned on the radio and there was that old Peggy Lee song.
It used to be my Mom's favorite.
And I suddenly had this memory of us in the kitchen
and that song coming on the radio.
And my mother was flipping hamburgers and
dancing around the kitchen,
taking care of all of her kids.
"If that's all there is, my friends, then let's keep dancing"
"Let's break out the booze and have a ball"
I went to Spokane to visit my parents.
My Dad walked to church every single morning,
to Lourdes Cathedral for the six thirty a.m. Mass,
and then he took the bus back home.
On days that I was in town, I always went with him.
My dad was always fun to walk to church with.
He had this special way of walking downtown
that took him past his favorite store windows and
he could see if they changed things.
On the bus ride home,
we would usually muse over the wording of certain prayers
or recitations in the Mass.
My dad loved it when the priest said,
"Satan, who prowls thru the world, for the ruin of souls."
We both agreed that it was that word "prowls"
that made that phrase just perfect.
Later that day, I told my parents that
I had stopped believing in God.
They just looked at me blankly.
Sometimes I feel so sorry for my parents to have me as a kid.
Sometimes I feel so thankful that my parents had a lot of kids.
My mother said,
"This doesn't mean that you've stopped going to church now, does it?"
I suddenly felt so guilty about this religion:
my parents' religion, this religion that they had given to us kids,
which I was now basically handing back to them.
I went to a conference in Washington D.C.
put on by the Center for Inquiry,
this non profit group that promotes science and critical thinking.
A lot of people spoke at the conference,
and I got to give a speech too,
which included my views on God.
And the associated Press covered it.
And the wire story was picked up by my hometown paper, Spokane!
Where I resently had hosted the the Catholic Charities luncheon,
where I had spoken repeatedly at my Catholic high school,
and where my parents took such pride in their Catholicism,
and in their children and, who I believe now in retrospect,
felt that my Catholicism was what connected me to my hometown,
to my social class, and to them in spite of having moved so far away.
So one day, weeks and weeks after this speech,
and without me even knowing this article even existed out there,
my parents got up and went out to get their morning paper.
And there I was on the back of the front section,
and a big picture of me, and in bold letters, and huge type, that said: "Sweeny loses her religion."
And the first 2 sentences of the article were:
"Julia Sweeney has come out of the closet. Period. As an Atheist. Period."
It was the local angle, and they led with that.
And then the article went on and talked about the conference in general
and barely even mentioned me again.
Well, the first call I got from my mother was really more of a scream.
"Atheist??? ATHEIST??"
My father got on the phone and said
"You have betrayed your family, your school and your city."
It was like I'd sold secrets to the Russians or something.
They both said that they were not gonna speak to me anymore.
My dad said "I don't even think you should come to my funeral."
After I hung up I thought "Just try and stop me!"
Now, I think my parents had been mildly dissappointed
when I told them I didn't believe in God anymore
but being an atheist was another thing altogether.
Frankly, I had not even decribed myself as an atheist, but
I suppose I am one.
I don't live my life under the assumption that there is a God
so I guess that makes me an atheist.
A-theist. Non-theist.
But I like the word 'naturalist' more.
To me 'atheist' describes me on religious turf.
I believe in a holy natural universe, and that
makes religious people in my mind 'a-naturalists'.
Anyway, several weeks went by and there was no contact at all from my parents.
Now, this was a huge deal, I mean I usually spoke to my parents several times per week.
And then one day, out of the blue, I got this phone call from my mother on her cell phone.
And she said "Julie, I just got out of the foot doctor and he..."
"Oh, ugh..." There was a pause. She'd forgotten she wasn't speaking to me anymore.
That began a series of sporadic phone calls that I would get
from my mother sometimes in the early hours of the morning.
Once at like 5:30 in the morning the phone rang and I picked it up and my mother said
"Why can't you just say, you're still searching?"
I said "Well, I am searching, if what you mean by 'searching'
is a continual yearning to understand better."
But, when it comes to God, don't you just have
to decide for yourself at one point or another?"
I mean, the way you look at the world if you believe in God,
is so different than the way you look at the world if you don't.
And she said "Well, then why do you have to tell people about it?
Everybody knows that there are those few people out there who don't believe in God,
but they keep it quietly to themselves.
Last night your father said he even wishes you'd announced you were gay.
At least that's socially acceptable!!"
To my parents it was like
I was rejecting them personally,
or like saying that I wasn't Irish anymore --
or worse, that I wasn't American anymore.
Once, I picked up the phone and my mother said,
"Where do you get your peace?"
And I repressed the urge to be sarcastic.
I said, "Well, I guess I do have less peace.
I mean, I don't think everything works out for the best,
or that some big grand plan.
I don't think everything happens for a reason
other than a tangible, actual reason.
The sad things in life... well, they seem even sadder.
But I don't know, I guess I've just learned how to live with it."
My mother said, "Oh, Julie, I just want you to be happy.
Aren't you just depressed all the time now?"
And I said, "No. It's kind of turned out
to be the opposite for me.
I'm kind of astonished that I'm even here at all.
The smallest things in life
just seem astounding to me now.
I'll look at a bridge and I'll think,
"Hey, we figured out how to make that bridge."
Look at all the knowledge that we've accumulated!
Or like, I used to think, "There are no coincidences."
And now I think there are coincidences!
Wow, coincidences!
I mean, mom, if this is all there is,
everything means more, not less, right?"
Eventually my dad called me and he said,
"Listen, it's all right. I disagree with you,
but I am proud of you for saying what you really think.
Even though I think Satan might be prowling the world,
for the ruin of your soul."
And I said, "Oh, maybe he's just sauntering."
And he said, "Lurking."
And I said, "Meandering?"
And he said, "But with a sinister intent."
And I said, "Oh, dad, now I need to tell you and mom
something truly important.
Can you get mom on the other line?"
And my mother got on and said "Now what? I'm afraid."
And I said, "Mom and dad, I'm about to have a baby."
And my mother said, "But you can't have children!"
And my dad said, "And you aren't married."
I said, "Mom and dad, it's a miracle!"
I adopted a little girl from China.
Her name is Mulan.
Lots and lots of people told me
how she was destined to be my daughter by the Universe
and how God had planned our union.
But frankly, it's a lot more meaningful to me,
that out of all the kids just as easily who could have been mine,
it was us who ended up together.
Here she is, in the vastness of all of space and time, my kid.
Mulan just so happens to be beautiful.
After one party when people were just fawning all over her,
as we drove home, I said, "Well, well. You're very pretty.
You're not going to have to develop a personality
like your mother had to." One person said,
"She's so beautiful.
When you look at her you just know there is a God."
And I thought, "Because, if she were ugly,
then there would be no God?"
Of course, my parents were immediately in the thrall of Mulan,
and having her allowed us all to have this whole other wonderful,
relationship together.
My father started calling Mulan his "little pal,"
just what he'd called me when I was a kid.
And the two of them would take naps together on his bed
and it was hard to tell which of them was snoring louder.
My father was ill.
He had emphysema and as the doctors predicted,
it was getting worse and worse.
He also had heart problems and diabetes.
A lifetime of smoking and drinking were finally exacting their price.
At the same time,
although admittedly not on the same level of concern,
my cat Rita was also very ill,
an old-age thyroid condition had
whittled her from her high weight of twenty one pounds
down to six. She stopped grooming herself,
and started to lie around all day in just one little spot [].
It was like she was an old lady in a stained housecoat
with curlers in her hair saying,
"I don't give a shit how I look anymore. It doesn't matter."
My father got weaker and weaker and
eventually he had to be on oxygen 24 hours a day
at the highest potency.
Mulan and I started to fly to Spokane every single month to see him.
Soon he couldn't leave the condo at all.
And his whole world became about
listening to his old Bob and Ray tapes,
listening to NPR,
and watching reruns of "As Time Goes By" on PBS.
It was hard to tell if
it was truly near the end or not.
In fact, we had been expecting my dad
to be going at any time for years and years.
The doctors had predicted that
my father could not possibly live past fifty
and here he was: seventy-four.
Countless Christmases all of us kids
would huddle together and get teary eyed
because we just knew this was the last Christmas with dad.
Only to find ourselves crying again the next year
because surely this would be the last Christmas with dad.
And we adored him.
Finally, a couple of weeks after one visit my mother called
to say that my father was unconscious.
When I got back to Spokane,
my mother and the hospice nurses were caring for my father
in his hospital bed in the middle of the living room. It was basically a deathwatch.
The family was starting to arrive,
my sister Meg was flying in from Japan
with her husband, Tsuyoshi.
My brothers, my aunts, my uncles.
The hospice nurses were wonderful.
One of them was particularly religious, and she kept saying,
"I think your father is seeing the others
who have passed over before him."
My mother told me that a couple of days
before my dad lost consciousness,
the same hospice nurse said to my dad,
"Who will you miss the most in this life, Bob?"
Which really irked me,
just the automatic assumption that
someone is capable of missing someone
after they're dead and then be asked to rank them, in order.
But for my mother and the hospice nurse, and my father,
that's actually a reasonable question.
And my father gestured to his right side,
where no one was standing, and said, "Janice."
We don't know any Janices. My mom was pretty sure that my dad doesn't know any Janices either. Janice.
Well, there are two things I remember about my dad dying.
And one thing I remember not being able to remember.
I remember how quickly his body got cold after he died.
I was so shocked at what heat we always generate.
Everyone else I've been around at or near death, my brother Mike, my dear friend Judy,
their bodies were just whisked away right after they died.
But my dad's body just stayed in the living room
for about six hours after he died,
and we all just got to be with him:
pet his head and kiss his cheeks,
and laugh and cry and reminisce.
And then I remember later that night,
suddenly being aware that
I couldn't remember the last time my dad and I had hugged.
What was the last time? My last trip, I suppose?
Where were we? At the coat closet?
What did I say?
"See you later." "Take care."
I can't remember!
But I do remember a couple of days before he died,
when my dad was unconscious and I was alone with him on the night watch.
And he suddenly opened his eyes and focused his gaze right at me.
I asked him to squeeze my hand. He didn't.
His eyes were bright and blue and
it looked like the Universe in there.
We held each other's gaze and
it still seems to me like time just stopped right then.
And then his eyes unfocused and his lids closed.
Well, my mother wanted to
set the date of the funeral right away
-
which we couldn't delay because
so many people were in town already from such far away places.
So my mother gathered me
and my sister and my brothers
and we all headed down to Lourdes for
Saturday's five thirty p.m. Mass.
About thirty people were waiting
in the pews for Mass to begin.
We were standing on the side of the altar
looking into the sacristy
where we could see Monsignor Ribble putting on his vestments.
To me, it was too late to interrupt him before the Mass,
but my mother said, "Follow me."
And she started to walk right across the altar,
right across where you aren't supposed to go,
towards the sacristy, with her head held high.
I followed her and so did our whole family,
heads bowed, shoulders hunched, coats dangling.
Walking across that altar, I never felt so shanty Irish,
my mother never looked so determined,
and I never loved our family more.
Monsignor Ribble was very sad
about the news of my father's death
and did not in any way seem to be upset that
we all just descended on him right before Mass.
Not only was my father in his 6:30 a.m. Mass every single morning,
two of them had actually taken an exercise class together
for survivors of heart attacks that
Sacred Heart hospital put on.
I remember picking up my dad one time,
and being so surprised to see Monsignor Ribble,
without his collar and in these grey sweats,
doing step-ups and step-together-steps.
Monsignor asked me
if I was going to be speaking at the funeral.
And I said "I suppose so",
and he took me aside and he said,
"I will ask you to refrain from speaking
about your knowledge pilgrimage."
It was like he said "your sexual orgy, drug induced" pilgrimage.
And I said, "Oh, I wouldn't, I wouldn't."'
We went right into the Mass,
and Monsignor's homily
was all about the need for priests in the Catholic Church.
He described the situation as desperate.
I looked down the pew at my brothers and sister.
None of us are Catholic,
except my sister Meg who is, so far at least,
choosing not to have children. Are we typical?
Monsignor went on and
talked about the mystery of the Father and the Son
and the Holy Spirit being one,
and the mystery of how God loves us
in spite of our faults.
And before I knew it,
I was sitting in my father's funeral
in the exact same pew.
I looked around the church
at all my friends, my father's friends,
our families' friends,
my family
and I got caught up.
I looked at the altar through my father's eyes.
And it was rich and beautiful.
I was baptized in this very church
when I was one week old.
In so many real ways, I'll never stop being a Catholic.
I mean, Christianity helped shape my brain.
Suddenly it seemed inevitable to me
that after all this "searching,"
I would now return to the Catholic Church.
I unexpectedly felt right back where I started,
surprised like Dorothy back from Oz.
After all, when I left the Catholic Church I didn't realize
I was going to be giving up on God altogether,
I just thought I would find some other church that
made more sense to me.
Maybe this time it would be more meaningful somehow
because I wouldn't be debating all the time over
what I believed or what I didn't believe,
I would know that I just didn't believe in any of it.
I mean, after all, maybe objective reality isn't always
the most pleasant prism through which we can view this world.
And maybe by using fantasy we can allow ourselves
to glimpse something even greater than
we otherwise would be able to.
And let's face it: truth is such a poor competitor
in the marketplace of ideas.
And the love and the community in this church
are real and potent, even if God isn't.
Well, we had the wake
across the street from the Cathedral, at the Spokane Club.
I got up and said, "I wish my dad could be here tonight
to see his family and friends,
he would have loved this party so very much."
I had no idea that I had just said something quasi-controversial,
and over the evening several people came up to me and said,
"Y'know, I think your father IS here, right now.
Right in this very room."
One person came up to me and said
"You know, you're Jewish, right?"
And I said, "What?! Do you know something about me that I don't know about me?"
And he said, "No, it's that
Jews are sort of expected to wrestle with the idea of God.
Even if you don't want to, it's almost like an obligation.
You would fit in perfect!"
Well, I went outside and
I looked at the Lourdes Cathedral in the moonlight.
And I thought, "I can't rejoin this church.
I would start listening to the words again and
it would just drive me nuts.
But I do wish there were a beautiful building
where I could ritualize the transitions in my life
and in my daughter's life with great music and great art,
but where what we know about the world just isn't blatantly ignored."
You know, a few months ago,
Stephen Hawking came out and said that
his theory that Black Holes
obliterate anything that falls into them,
probably his greatest contribution to science,
the theory that much of his particular fame and reputation is based on,
probably is not right.
Wouldn't it be great if the Pope could just do the same thing?
If he could just come out and say,
"Oh my, I've been reading what science shows us
about our spectacular but very humble place in this universe,
and it is thrilling
and mind-boggling beyond all imaginings!
It makes the Bible so puny and uninspired,
and even less poetic by comparison.
I'm terribly sorry.
I sincerely misunderstood so much.
I almost wish there were a God
so that I could be punished for all of the suffering
that I have caused in human beings.
But since there will be no cosmic punishment for me,
I think I'll spend the rest of my life
working in a family planning clinic in Latin America.
Good day." Oh!
Well, Mulan and I came back to Los Angeles after my father's funeral
and two days later our cat, Rita, died.
Mulan understood death at this time
like a four-year-old understands death.
Which means not really getting it.
It's like people and animals are suddenly gone,
but, you know, they got to be somewhere.
Sometimes she'd say to me, "Why didn't grandpa come to his big party?"
And I resisted the urge to say,
"Some of the people thought he was [at the party]."
A couple of weeks later,
there was a knock at my front door
and who was there but two Mormon missionary boys.
And they said they had a message for me, from God.
I said, "Oh, um, I actually already got my message from God.
About three years ago or so, a couple of Mormon missionaries stopped by here
and, you know, they basically changed my entire life."
And they said, "They did?"
And I said, "Yeah. Because of them,
I don't believe in God at all anymore!
I mean, they probably didn't effect me
in exactly the way they might have hoped,
but for me, it has been a very exciting journey."
They didn't seem nearly as excited as I was.
On Father's Day that year,
Mulan and I and our new dog, Arden,
went hiking in Runyon Canyon,
which for us means walking very slowly uphill
with a lot of rests.
And we got to this one place called Inspiration Point
that looks out over the city, and Mulan ran up and said,
"Mom! Look! It's the whole world! Where's China?"
And I said, "Oh, honey, you can't see China from here,
but if you look way out there you can see Santa Monica."
We started up the hill again, this much steeper part,
Mulan was just ahead of me.
And she said, "Who's Santa again?"
And I said, "Oh... You remember, honey, he's that guy, Christmas-time, that made up... pretend... mythological guy"
She turned around on the hill, so she was at eye level with me.
She said, "Mom! Santa lives at the North Pole
and brings you presents on Christmas if you're good!?!"
And I said, "Yes. Yes. That's exactly right."
My mother says Mulan is going to grow up to be a nun,
and that's how God is going to get his revenge on me.
Who knows, maybe Mulan will be a nun,
but I hope I can teach her that true mystery is really all around her.
Because you know,
the Church really has it all backwards when it comes to mystery.
In fact, it trivializes the very thing it claims to represent:
the awe-inspiring grandeur of true, deep mystery.
We live on a planet,
spinning about in a wondrous universe
without any apparent purpose.
And the mystery of why there is something rather than nothing
is a question we'll probably never know the answer to.
Well, I looked down at Mulan
who was brushing the bangs out of her eyes
and I thought, "Wow.
If even our memories are so transient
all any one of us truly has is this very moment."
And Mulan looked up at me and said, "Are grandpa and Rita together?"
And I said, "No. They died.
But it's nice to think about them together, isn't it?"
And she said, "Well, I think they are together."
And I said, "Well, what do you imagine they're doing?"
And she said, "Rita is sitting on grandpa's lap and she's purring."
And I said, "Isn't that nice to think that?
You see, people do live on after they die,
inside of us, just thinking about them."
And she said, "What I think about is in my head?"
And I said, "Yes! That's your brain.
Anytime you want, you just think and think and think,
about whatever you want."
And she said, "Well I'm thinking about Legoland."
And I said, "Legoland?" And she said, "Legoland!"
And I said, " All right. Sounds like a plan."
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