Conclusion
I would like to conclude with a few closing comments and then a reading from Douglas Coupland’s Life After God, which I hope will resonate with at least some of what I have been saying.
History is important. We ignore it at the risk of repeating the mistakes of our predecessors and of making the false assumption that contemporary is necessarily better. Furthermore, the incorporation of history into our understanding of Christian spirituality adds a richness and can introduce new ways of looking at concepts and imagery that we might not have otherwise considered. This is of particular concern at present is, I believe, because we are entering a period of anti-intellectualism, in which structured thought risks being rejected in favour of a more “raw” spirituality. Such pendulum swings are rarely healthy.
Finally, we have considered an example of the richness that can be gained from using not just an ancient-contemporary model of spirituality, but one that incorporates illustrations from 2,000 years of history of God’s pursuit of us, and our reciprocal efforts to know Him better.
I would like to finish then with a reading from Life After God. This section, titled, “In the Desert” and dedicated to Michael Stipe, opens with the comment that, “you are the first generation raised without religion,” and describes what might be considered a non-religious contemporary desert experience.
It was also my birthday – I remember that – 31, and I also remember that I wasn’t feeling lonely even though it was my birthday and I was alone and I was in the middle of nowhere… . loneliness had of late become an emotion I had stopped feeling so intensely. I had learned loneliness’s extremes and had mapped its boundaries; loneliness was no longer something new or frightening – just another aspect of life that, once identified, seemed to disappear. But I realized a capacity for not feeling lonely carried a very real price, which was the threat of feeling nothing at all. Perhaps the nothingness outside was trying to seep into the car in whatever way it could …
I was wondering what was the logical end product of this recent business of my feeling less and less. Is feeling nothing the inevitable end result of believing in nothing? And then I got to feeling frightened – thinking that there might not actually be anything to believe in, in particular. I thought it would be such a sick joke to have to remain alive for decades and not believe in or feel anything.
The narrator then listens to radio stations, including Christian, and finds them all depressing. In case of latter he sees no more than a projection of people’s needs onto Jesus. After a while his car breaks down and he is forced to walk home through the desert at night:
This went on for some hours, by which time the sky had long been fully dark and fully cold. And on top of the … discomfort, the boredom and the endlessness of the walk, I was spooked by the basic darkness of night. I was considering all sorts of scenarios one might encounter in the desert – rampaging bikers cartooned on angel dust; snuff movies in progress, being filmed with shotguns pointed at unwanted visitors; rattlers slithering over abandoned heatless murdered bodies. I thought of what an unglamorous end to my life to simply be terminated out here in the emptiness. I wanted to be in a city or a town – a community – any community. And so I was in this woeful state, when an event occurred that made me lose my breath – I became aware that there was another person walking behind me.
At first I thought the footsteps might be echoes of my own, but then my subconscious realized the steps I heard were out of synch with mine… . The steps I heard were, I figured, about a stone’s throw away, faintly crunchy like the sound of Cocoa Pebbles being chewed across a table. And because the steps were faster than mine, I know The Stepper was gaining on me.
And so the shadow grew larger, almost to full size. I saw a hunched man’s figure with a backpack of urethane foam battened down with bungie cords and flattened McDonald’s white paper bags. He had a white Spanish moss beard and a plaid shirt and green Dickies work pants that were so worn they were shiny. He was a drifter - a desert rat … visibly frighteningly suntanned even in the dark of three-quarter moonlight, with skin like beef jerky, pores like a salt and pepper shaker and milky hints of cataracts in both eyes. He walked toward me and I guardedly said, “Hello” once more. He then stopped short of me, as though we had met casually outside a Radio Shack or something. He said in a voice rich with phlegm and years of desert monologues: “I walk out here almost very night, but tonight there won’t be rain, and so we’re fine.” His breath was like fire; like pepper.
My relief was great; he was mad but not harmful – too poor even for weapons. Even in my dilapidated condition, I could take him in a scrap. It was my turn to talk. I said, “Rain? No – I guess not.”
In retrospect it was quite idiotic. I was trying to be casual about this decidedly odd encounter and he was simply too crazy to perceive it as even being odd. I was trying to pretend we were meeting each other under sunlight, not moonlight; I was trying to give our situation a comfortable guy-like dignity, like two models chatting in a J. Crew catalogue.
My drifter pal then made a shrug with a dirty left shoulder, spat a gob and indicated that we continue walking. My legs now wobbled, mainly from my lack of blood sugar. Walking together quickly erased much of what fear remained. The drifter didn’t even question the fact that a person might be walking lost in the desert at night – as though lost strolls were the most natural activity on earth.
And he wasn’t really talking to me, either – he was broadcasting – like a cheap AM radio station that had come through on the SEEK button. I wish I could say that we talked about simple things while we walked, too – that he offered me salt-of-the-earth insight into life – wisdom garnered from all his years of drifting. But he didn’t. He never even volunteered his name and I never volunteered mine. He talked some more about the evening’s rainfall that was never to arrive. He talked about a Republican conspiracy; about the Colorado River; about Princess Caroline of Monaco. I only half paid attention to his words, as though I was driving. He told me he was walking to Indio. He asked me, "Now where’d you be headin’ for a stroll?"
I replied without much energy that I was trying to find one of the roads back to Desert Hot Springs, Bermuda Dunes or Palm Springs.
"Well if that’s your case," he replied, stopping us in our tracks, "you’re walkin’ the wrong way."
“It was jarring that he actually connected with me here, that he had actually heard my words. I tried to react casually to this. "Oh?"
He stopped and I stopped and he said to me, "Look, whatever you’re doin’ out here, that’s okay. Maybe you didn’t want to see me and," he smacked his lips, "maybe I didn’t see you. But that there’s the road you want to be walkin’." He indicated a small "Y" in the road a stone’s throw back." And it’s maybe an hour to Dillan Road. Not that you’ll be closer to much. Hot Springs, maybe. It’s a two-hour walk from there. Capish?"
His tone of voice made it clear that it took a strong act of will for him to be able to connect with me as much as he already had. I nodded, and his face dissolved back into its previous craziness.
The fact of the matter was that he was simply a very far-gone desert rat. I felt naive and middle-class for having hoped – even briefly – that I could bond with the unbondable, for thinking that all it takes to make crazy people uncrazy is a little bit of hearty attention and good sense.
And then I felt sad because I realized that once people are broken in certain ways, they can’t ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one. You wonder when your turn is going to be, or if it’s already happened.
And so I stood by him rather dumbly and he twitched. I stared at his backpack like a Labrador dog staring at a dinner table and then I felt badly; I realized I was menacing him with this stare. For the first time, I think he was a bit frightened of meeting me – a stranger – in the middle of nowhere. He reached into the pouch on his back and pulled out two lumps and handed them to me: a microwaveable plastic container of Beefaroni and a cold Baked Apple Pie from McDonald’s
"The macaroni’s swiped from a 7-Eleven," he said.
I said, "No, no!" I wanted to let him know that I wasn’t planning to rob him, so I handed him a fifty dollar bill from my shirt pocket which he stuffed, unfolded, into a grubby front pocket. Having done this, he darted away without even saying good-bye, off down the road, vanishing all too soon into the night, leaving me there near the “Y” in the road, scraping the Beefaroni out of a plastic cup with dusty fingers, eating the baked apple pie without even chewing, knowing that, bad as my situation was, at least it would not be forever.
Now:
There is so much you don’t know about me – things I haven’t told you – for instance, that I do have a family, that I believe there is a God, that I was once a child – and that I have fallen in love twice and that neither time lasted. But how much of this matters in the end if you are alone. What is our memory? What is our history? How much a part of us is the landscape, and how much are we a part of it?
My body grows old, it turns strange colors, refuses orders, becomes less and less a part of the me I remember I once was. I read what I have written here and realize that I am not a happy person and maybe I never will be.
My night in the desert was a few years ago now. Since then I have seen more of this world - I have lived in Los Angeles and seen the fires burn there; I have seen the glaciers in Alaska fall apart and float away into the sea; I have seen an eclipse of the sun from a yacht floating on an ocean thick with crude oil. And with each of these sights I have thought of the damaged face of the drifter in the desert, gone, untraceable, vanished into the wastes outside of Indio, Scottsdale, Las Vegas - his own private planets in his own private universe.
But I talk too much here. Yet how often is it we are rescued by a stranger, if ever at all? And how is it that our lives can become drained of the possibility of forgiveness and kindness – so drained that even one small act of mercy becomes a potent lifelong memory? How do our lives reach these points?
It is with these thoughts in mind that I now see the drifter’s windburned face when I now consider my world – his face that reminds me that there is still something left to believe in after there is nothing left to believe in. A face for people like me – who were pushed to the edge of loneliness and who maybe fell off and who when we climbed back on, our world never looked the same.
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