This man, our judge and our Zeus, once answered my query about whether he believed in God with a thunderous Hell no! and would never consent to accompany us to services, despite the truth that in order to win his town bride he had promised always to do so. Such an arrangement might have bred strife in lesser couples, but between these two it made for a kind of pact, whereby my father would sleep in on Sundays so as to regain what strength he needed to work his children to death upon their noontime parole from the Lord, at which point my mother would partake of the sleep she had surely earned by ratting us out to the Lord in the first place. I cannot imagine what He got out of this, and we were not anywise the richer for it, but the adults seemed almost pleased with the arrangement, and they pressed on with it until I was nearly grown, by which point whatever idea had caused my mother to believe that there was a God to begin with, and had caused my father to insist that there was none, had worked its way far enough into the wood of their lives that it could no longer rot out the fruit of mine.
How my brother’s or sister’s walk with Jesus was then, or has been ever since, I am unable to say, but my own was not helped along any by my first trip around what our mother had picked, or been forced to settle on, as our new place of worship: a no-frills wood and tin chapel in a failed riverside hamlet in the next county over, Goochland itself being lousy with the descendants of Huguenots and so inhospitable either to Catholic symbology or to Catholic buildings. Catholic people the place did not seem to mind so much, though I suspect this was due less to an understanding of the dispute between the creeds than it was to a thoroughgoing ignorance of it. Certainly no French-named Goochlander I met ever displayed more than a small awareness of what had denied the Catholics a purchase on their land; I myself learned something of it only because I happened to be born on the Feast of Saint Bartholomew, who was relieved of his skin during the first century AD, in Armenia of all places, but whose name would forever be linked with the day in 1572 when the Parisian Huguenots lost their own skins by a refusal to renounce a newer corruption of the spirit in favor of the old.
All this was to the detriment of my mother’s plan, for had the American descendants of these people, misled at least as badly as my own kind were, not been driven by my day to consider all history bunk, and all knowledge of history pretension, and to offer up this attitude as proof of their patriotism when in fact it confirmed only their sloth, I might have been availed of some opportunity to defend my particular Jesus against informed attacks, and to develop an honest affection for what it was I defended, rather than being left to resent the exile of my faith as a poorly dressed schoolgirl will resent the fact that she is not more popular. I might have had means to declaim my way out of a situation in the fall of 1978, wherein I was removed from a classroom, to emboldened snickers, by an administrator who thought herself thoughtful, so that I could watch, by the miracle of television, and with too much time and space given over to what mysterious ablutions I might be required to perform, as if I were a Moslem or a Hindoo, the crowning of a brand-new pope. Mindful of this woman’s curiosity, and probable idiocy, I made a deep bow toward the screen, and did a very large sign of the cross, hoping to satisfy her expectations and also to poke some fun at them, neither of which seemed to get through, after which I indicated with a nod that it was now allowed for me to depart from the television set, and in a condescending silence she walked me back to my classroom, where I sat thereafter in a state of irrelevance and rage.
Was my Jesus not the same as hers, except older and more experienced? Could He not have kicked the ass of hers or any other but for His being settled here late and in chains, a bitched-out serf of the Protestant pretender? Had His first visit to this continent not been as an honest gold- and bloodthirsty tyrant, rather than a slave to the humorless hypocrite who followed? I ask you: Of these two godheads, which was the more forthright in His motives? Is my Roman, Spanish Jesus, earlier arrived and no less cruel, not rightfully to be thought the sovereign here, or at any rate something better than a poor Irish parody of a crude English forgery of a dull German oil? Has He not since been screwed by unfair business practices in the states, which have granted to Protestant adherents all the decent real-estate money, and all the listened-to votes in Congress, and all dominion over the means of war, and all the multiform franchises of usury, until no one but a moron, or else a town-bred fan of medieval folklore, could possibly think to back the original?
Yet this is precisely what my mother chose, or was convinced, to do. She sickened herself on a lesser American Jesus, as I did to the aforementioned degree, and as my brother and sister did to an unknown extent, and as millions of others have besides, and I tell you this: that particular Jesus, with no influence whatsoever in the provinces (and only enough in town, really, to save for His faithful a seat at the kiddie table in Rome), might as well have been an Ali or a Vishnu for all the happiness He won us out there, and for all the help He was with the corn, and for all the good He did us as we attempted both to grab and to avoid the notice of smug Protestant neighbors too stupid to understand what ritual gave rise to their own, or whence sprang their perpetual state of kindly contempt.
As to God
As to God in general, I will assent to the trope that says there must be some mystery to His ways, seeing as no one would possibly lend Him money otherwise, and I will temper this only with the thought that I might therefore do well to inject a little mystery into mine. Like any child engaged in the effort to ignore the birdsign of disaster all around him, and to show himself a good enough egg to be allowed around the shotguns again, I learned early on how to split the difference between a country boy’s atheism and a town girl’s faith, and although by this formula I earned the approval of no one, and did not help my ass out any in the meantime, I insist that I worked the numbers correctly and that my answer was at least as good as yours.
The God I arrived at was not the inhabited absence my father always held to (for most atheists will not theorize a true lack of God but will instead make a bold gambit in the negative column, so as to balance out better the annoying belief on the positive side), nor did He at all resemble the abundance of goodliness my mother always prayed to (so that she might hope, in the fullness of time, to fail it), nor was He anything so plain as a mere compromise between the two, which would have left me only at the zero sum, too clever by half, that most Americans now unwittingly and unwisely promote.
And Who would that God be? Why, He would be the God we have worshipped all our lives: He would be the omnipresent God Who has licensed the use of His name to all comers, as if He were the worst sort of whore, but Who, as any Republican or Democrat will tell you, would never consent to a personal appearance down here. He would be the omniscient God Who renounces all knowledge because He has apparently risen above it, as plenty of the hippies will contend (not knowing that they do), or because He has come to see knowledge as a terrible weapon used by college-trained “elites” upon His innocent Christian soldiers, whose attendance at these very same colleges is safely mitigated by the fact that they bravely refuse to learn anything there. He would be the omnipotent God who was tamed long ago, either by the majesty of our own aesthetic and political achievement, as the artist and the philosopher might have it, or because He was recently invited to waive, out of a fairness that pleases both the neoconservative (still hoping that his rhetoric sways God) and the neocommunist (still hoping that his rhetoric slays God), any further intervention on behalf of any person at any time for any reason. What fun.