On Being the Anti-Job

I think I need a new schtick. I've been involved in a couple of internet arguments debates conversations lately in which I'm the resident skeptic/cynic/naysayer. Usually I'm trying (in vain) to point out that none of the things we say about God -- whether God exists or doesn't, what God might be like if God does exist, what might exist if God doesn't -- ever really touch the ground. Or maybe they never really touch the sky. Anyway. It's just so much shooting in the dark, and this seems really, really obvious to me in a way that almost makes me surprised that people argue so vehemently against it.

There's an extent to which you either get this or you don't. You either see it or you're allowed to persist in thinking that somehow your speculations about the divine touch something on the other side. Maybe that's a kind of blessing. Maybe that's one of those lies we're allowed to believe as a hedge against madness, and I'm the weird one for thinking I see through that, blinded -- as I must be -- to the lies that I believe that keep me from going mad.

But I'm tired of yammering on about it. My cultivated curmudgeonliness masks the joie de vivre remarked upon by people who know me in person. My resounding and defiant "NO!" to metaphysical speculation hides my consistent "Yes!" to life in all of its mottled glory.

I'm not really a stranger to faith, or an enemy of faith. I have stories to tell of abundance and provision, of stepping out and being buoyed by an unseen hand. Stories that continue to unfold long after I've stopped believing in a hand there to buoy me. I persist in thinking that my life is guided by something, I know not what, and this intuition is confirmed with remarkable regularity even though I claim no metaphysical commitments that might render it intelligible. If we listen to what my wife and I just call "that voice," things seem to work out for us; I've lived, and continue to live, what seems like a charmed life.

I can't reconcile that charmed life with the suffering of others, with the stories of my friends who do not seem to share that experience and yet possess what would seem to be a much stronger faith in the conventional sense. I don't know why we get to be happy while one of our friends was abandoned by a man who turned out to be a manipulative, lying snake, and while she now faces a custody battle as she struggles with cancer. I don't know why we, both introverted agnostics, get to stay together with a big family while another friend -- an extraverted evangelical -- lives alone, unable to find love after his wife left him.

As much as I might believe that things will be okay for us -- and I do believe that -- I find it hard to offer the same comfort to a third friend who has suffered permanent brain damage from a work injury and is trying to finish a college degree as his mind and body betray him and his disability income dwindles. He lives with a perpetual migraine and can only get relief by running cold water over his head, which lasts anywhere from a few minutes to an hour, or large doses of Vicodin, which leaves him incoherent. He also happens to be in one of my classes, though I think he's my age or older, and the other day he asked me: "Was I in class on Tuesday? I lost a day."

And it's not like our life of relative blessing is enough that we can offer significant material help. We don't have the clout or the resources to offer much except our friendship and the stalwart refusal to trivialize their pain. That's not nothing, and that we offer it is, in a very real way, our faith. We give what we can -- sometimes more than we can, or think we can -- to our friends because they're our friends. To those who would say this is not faith because it's not accompanied by the right kind of intellectual assent to theological propositions, well -- fuck you.

I'll continue to listen to "that voice," and I'm sure I'll persist in the notion that things will be okay for me. I'm not much of a worrier, to be honest, a character quality that I think frustrates my wife. But I refuse to make my experience as one of the lucky ones normative for others, or try to explain their life in light of mine. I won't do it. I can't say that there must be a God, and this God must be good, simply because my life happens to be okay, or because even when it's not okay I happen to have the wherewithal to bear up under it (okay, I have had my moments). Much less would I suggest that God exists and is merciful simply because my friends' spirits have not been completely crushed -- yet.

Instead, I'll celebrate their goodness and resilience. We will mourn with them when we need to. And I'll plead their case to the skies, just in case someone is listening.