Uncomfortable, uncertain, and unarmed - an artist's view on religion

"On ne va jamais si loin que lorsqu'on ne saitpas ou 1'om va."

French Proverb

We never go so far as when we don't know where we are going--or so says an old French proverb. An abiding truth about being a writer or an artist is that if you're really doing your work--trying to do it as well as it can be done--you can never be certain about it. You can never be certain because you are always aware of your shortcomings. Aware of your failures. Aware of what the work could be, if only you were better at it. Aware that your ideas are only your puny ideas--and this immediately casts a long and dark shadow against the possibility of there being eternal verity or deep truth in the work.

Yet it is veracity that we are after in our work--as elusive, transmogrifying, and undefinable a quarry as that is.

My friend Ethel Pochocki wrote me a while back and suggested that the question, What is truth? was "probably the first question scratched into the sand...after What's for supper?" She said that God, our "God of jest and irony," knows that our innate spirituality needs satisfying. Wants answers. Graves answers. Wants to know what the real story is. What was Christ really like? What is God? "Who is he, or is it a she or not nobody but a force...?" We humans want neatness and order, she said. Want exactly right and satisfying answers. Want perfect solutions so we can say, "Ah, that's it!" And no matter how hard we try, we fall on our faces. Fall on our faces because we are human--and humans fall on their faces. Humans are flawed and imperfect beings. We scramble around trying to find meaning, listening to other flawed and imperfect humans telling us this is the way, the only way. It all boils down to mystery. And, she concluded, "truth is a mystery, [that we'll not] know on earth."

I don't think any of us has a choice but to follow the truth as we see it and as our conscience dictates, hoping that we're not too far off base. And therefore I had no choice but to go with the truth as my eyes see it. As they have seen it as a witness, both through my own lenses and the borrowed lenses of the photographers and limners of other times and places have seen it--Soldago and Evans, Goya and Bosch, Breughel and Witkin. And the truth I see is that the Bible is populated with people like you and me. People who are flawed and imperfect. People who have crooked teeth and bad skin. Who have stinky breath and dirty feet. Who don't always know the difference between right and wrong. Who are self-serving and capricious. People caught in the conflict and dichotomy between good and evil, between the sacred and the profane, between beauty and ugliness, and between the bright and the moronic. People who hope--and many believe--that they are made in the very image of God.

My biblical journey was long and circuitous and it embraced, at one time or another, all these conflicts. It began, I think, in childhood, possibly with my aunt Velma's giving me a copy of Mary Baker Eddy's Science and Health with Key to the Scripture for my eighth birthday. I carried it to school with me in the back pocket of my corduroy knickers. It was bound in limp suede and shaped itself to the contours of my small backside. I thought it was a Bible for the longest time--and that's reasonable given that I never read it. I probably assumed that having God's Holy Word so close to my butt it would somehow protect me and transfuse into me by some sort of miraculous osmosis that didn't require reading, an activity at which I did not excel.

A few years later, when I was in military school and coming full into my testosterone, I started going to church for the express purpose of meeting girls. To qualify for church-sponsored hayrides and, summer retreats I went to Sunday morning services and to Methodist Youth Fellowship meetings on Sunday nights. And in so doing I discovered that a young man can't keep exposing himself to that sort of thing, week in and week out, without promises of salvation and redemption making inroads into his psyche--no matter how hormone-laden that psyche might be, nor how uncertain as to what, exactly, salvation and redemption are.

I was particularly susceptible to salvation and redemption during summer revival meetings where girls wore demure, lightweight cotton dresses. I am here to tell you that cotton dresses with tight bodices got me saved two or three times before I turned seventeen.

But then, during the Christmas break of my first year in college, I had an experience that took these considerations to another level.

It happened when my brother and I were hunting. We were hiding out among the branches of a big, uprooted hackberry tree in the middle of a grassy field out near the airport. It was a warm, sunny day and letter jackets and tee shirts were fine for warmth and protection. My brother had a crow call and was trying his best to hoodwink some birds into coming close enough so that we could shoot them. Of course it didn't work. The crows stayed their distance--as they always did.