Khristos voskres! Today is Easter! An excerpt from Blest Atheist



Excerpt from the beginning chapter of Blest Atheist (a repeat and more from Easter 2017, never loses its significance...)


Siberia on Easter Morning

 “Khristos voskres” (Christ is risen). One person after another greeted me with these words as I climbed the stairs of the little, wooden church in Akademgorodok, a tiny town at the end of the man-made Ob Sea, bejeweling the Siberian steppe 45 minutes south of the city of Novosibirsk. The intertwining snow-covered birch and kedr (Siberian pine) trees created an illusion of a land of fantasy, made more so in the late evenings by the moon reflecting off the naked silver-white birch bark onto the dark red-brown trunks and evergreen branches of the pines. This was not yet the inhospitable taiga; it was somewhat south for that, but nonetheless the birch and kedr trees stood closely side-by-side like brothers-in-arms against a hostile white and cold universe.

            “V istinu voskres” (truly, He is risen). If my words of response rang hollow, there was a reason. They came from the lips of a bona fide atheist, convinced that religious congregations were delusional. Certainly, they contained well-meaning folks, ones often filled with great compassion, but nonetheless, in my opinion at that time, delusional. Raised in a so-called Christian home and an attendee, but not engaged participant, in Methodist and Baptist churches in my early years, I found no sense in the sermons of the ministers who were often more interested in large donations than in holy deeds, no examples set by the deacons who were often bedding the wives of their friends, and no love of God in the forsythia switches wielded by my parents that demanded their few ounces of blood every Sunday morning before we marched into church as a model family. God, to me, was a fantasy, created by evil-doers to make themselves feel better. When given a chance at the age of 16 to preach the Youth Sunday sermon, the topic of which was “The Christian Home,” I pointed out all of these things, to the great discomfort of the congregation. “If this is the way you intend to live your lives,” I challenged the adults sitting in front of me, “at least do so without the self-deception of ostentatious holiness.”

            Ignoring their looks of disbelief that slowly turned to anger, I continued with a freeing sense of abandon, asking “Why do you feel the need to carry on this charade each week?” I asked. “Is it to feel worthy of something you do not deserve? To justify the unjustifiable?”

            I pointed out books and articles written by children of religious leaders who described how their parents emotionally traumatized them. Their expectations for their children to be paragons of perfect, to be models of a concept of holy purity that they themselves concocted, was unachievable, according to these self-reports and led to feelings of inadequacy that haunted some of them long into their adult lives.

            I concluded that sermon with the suggestion that considerable thought be given to the advantages of raising a child without hypocrisy, i.e. in an atheistic environment. “Accept a world without divinity,” I urged them. “Raise your children honestly, in an atheistic home.”

            Whence came the audacity of a child to make such statements from a pulpit? I don’t really know. Perhaps I envied the lives of my peers who were not abused each and every day and in resentment needed to point out something wrong with their lives, too. Perhaps I had expected the church community to rescue my siblings and me from our physical and sexual tormentors and blamed the people in the congregation when no one stepped forward. In any event, that sermon had ended my churchgoing days. My family had been asked to leave the church, and I had not been punished by them in any way. I suspect that my parents had feared that after such a sermon, were they to have hurt me as a result, I would have flounced into church with that announcement as well, completely destroying their reputations. Or perhaps their sense of the awfulness of what I had done paralyzed them into inaction. In any event, there being no other church within reasonable travel distance, I spent the rest of my growing-up and adult years in the atheistic environment I had exalted.

            My parents never lost their faith as a result of their excommunication, but they never again talked much about it in front of me. We no longer were forced to listen to grace at meals. Bibles disappeared from our bedsides onto the crowded bookshelves in our library. Although they never mentioned anything to me, looking back, I imagine that my parents felt that something became very broken in their lives that Sunday morning. At the core of their lives festered a desperate need to be respected by the community, perhaps fostered by childhoods in which neither had experienced much respect. Dad’s unusually high level of intelligence brought him only a sense of disappointment and failure when, in keeping with the social norms of the time and my grandfather’s thinking that eight grades of school were more than enough education, he found himself forced out of school in the eighth grade and turning over to his father his weekly pittance from work as a shoe cutter, a trade he plied, along with farming, his entire life. Ma had always been the little doll of her family, if my great-aunt’s assessment is accurate, but had found herself rejected and ridiculed by classmates while her brother, who was in the same grade, served as class president. As adults, my parents became community leaders, my father serving on the school board and my mother becoming actively involved in one social cause after another, looking for approbation from peers long ago grown up. We children suffered their anger when we failed to make up for their dissatisfaction with their own lives and their sense of underachievement, Dad intellectually and Ma socially. Their church activities provided them the lifeline with which they had clung to the community respect that they so desperately desired. I had cut that lifeline with one sermon.

            As for me, I felt that something got fixed in my life that morning. No more hypocrisy. No more pretending to be a pew-filling, perfect family. No more Sunday morning races when I would refuse to get dressed for church, Dad would want to beat me into compliance, and I would run. As young as the age of eight, I could outrun Dad. I could also run far. Neighbors enroute to church pretended not to see the two of us running—around the front yard, across the street, through the tall grass of an abandoned field, and into the nearby woods, my long hair flying straight back into the wind and my father flailing a switch, usually broken off from a forsythia bush, large but supple, perfect for leaving welts just long enough to remember the pain and occasionally sharp enough to rip flesh but in such a way that the marks could be passed off as having tumbled into the bushes. I could feel the wind brushing past my face, the adrenalin coursing through my veins from fear of the whip, and nerve endings on fire with the thrill of the race, my legs fueled by competing thoughts: the stubbornness to do what I wanted, the fear of a dire outcome should I slow down or stumble long enough to be caught, and exhilaration at the thought that just perhaps I could run away from all of it, from the switchings, from the demeaning name calling, from the hypocrisy of pretending that we were the picture-perfect family, and especially from pretending to love and obey a God who for me did not exist and whom my parents used as a threat.

            Teachers who wondered why the shortest kid in the class (me) would win the school races every year had only to ask our neighbors who watched my every-Sunday-morning running practice. That running practice later stood me in good stead when I had to keep pace with male Army officers a foot-and-a-half taller than I and even today when a late-arriving aircraft dumps me a ten-minute flat-out race from the departure gate of my connecting flight.

            Only when Dad lost the switch and was too spent to care anymore about hitting me would I run home. Running back into the “burning house,” as my future brother-in-law would later call it, was the only option that ever entered my head for any neighbor in northern New England of those days would have brought me back to my parents. Having run home, I always ended up in church. There, sitting in a pew, watching Dad and Ma acting devout and being viewed by the church community as ideal parents, my anger toward them would reach a quiet but full zenith. After the church service concluded, my parents would accept the sympathetic comments of my friends’ parents, especially those who happened to catch a glimpse of our Sunday morning marathons. These people would knowingly smile, nod, and assent as to how difficult I must be to raise—and my seething frustration at the unfairness of it all made me want to run again—far away from my parents, the church, and the complacent people in the church pews. I resented being abused, and I trapped the church and its people in the web of angry emotions that encompassed my teenage years. I never asked how others in my family felt about being alienated from the church. I did not care. I had been freed.

            Until now. Now I was about to address another church congregation. It was the first time in 30 years I would speak to such a gathering.       

            Uttering the expected words of greeting as I mounted the steps to the vestibule of the church was not uncomfortable. They were, after all, meaningless to me. While I would have preferred another form of greeting, I had somehow managed to end up at this humble Russian Orthodox Church on Easter morning. So, the greetings were to be anticipated.

            When I reached the top of the stairs, a priest extended his hand. As I had been taught in advance to do, I kissed it. The priest smiled and said, “There is no need to follow our customs. I have been told that you are an atheist. I’m Father Boris, and I am very happy to meet you at long last. I do need, though, to find some way to introduce you to the congregation. I have given this some thought and wonder if I may introduce you as a Good Samaritan?”

            I knew the parable. Is there anyone who does not? It was one that we learned at school and at church although all too infrequently had I seen the people who thought it a wonderful story follow the example themselves.

 

            On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. "Teacher," he asked, "what must I do to inherit eternal life?"

            "What is written in the Law?" he replied. "How do you read it?"

            He answered: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind,” and “love your neighbor as yourself.”

            "You have answered correctly," Jesus replied. "Do this and you will live."

            But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?"

            In reply, Jesus said: "A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho when he fell into the hands of robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead.

            A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side.

            So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side.

            But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him.

            He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, took him to an inn and took care of him.

            The next day he took out two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper. 'Look after him,' he said, 'and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.'

            "Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?"

            The expert in the law replied, "The one who had mercy on him."             Jesus told him, "Go and do likewise." (Luke 10: 25-37)

 

            I agreed with Father Boris that my introduction as a Good Samaritan would be appropriate. Apparently, others had passed through this remote village in Siberia, had even met young Aleksandr Ivanovich, affectionately referred to as Shura, a teenage artist dying from complications of spina bifida (a congenital malformation in which the spine does not fully close during the first six weeks of gestation). These passers-through had expressed a desire to help him, but they did nothing. They were like the beaten man’s countrymen who passed him by. Perhaps they thought they could not help. Perhaps they initially thought that they could help but ultimately could not. Most were from Russia, and Russia in the early 1990s, just emerging from 70 years of a failed experiment in communism, was an impoverished nation—except, of course, for the oligarchy and the mafia (often an intermixed group) that held the purse strings and power in the new “democracy.” Others were from foreign countries, and perhaps the complicated immigration laws gave them pause. The only fact that matters, though, is that they did not help, and not helping, regardless of circumstances, in my opinion at that time and now, is a choice. One can choose to pass by those who need help with the excuse that one does not have the needed resources, whether those be money, time, or skills, or one can stop and try to help, looking for the resources when they may not be in hand. I chose to stop. And now here I was at Shura’s church with him to share his recently restored life with his neighbors on the day known as the Resurrection.

            On wobbling prostheses, which he had not yet learned to control completely, and clinging to the railing, Shura, the pride of this tiny community, had triumphantly led me up the stairs of the wooden church, his church. There he had been raised in a faith that carried him through the torments of a physically handicapped childhood, during which he had spent nearly 75% of his life hospitalized, the agony of waxing and waning hope that he would be able to come to the United States for treatment as he lay again in a hospital with waxing and waning life, and the difficult decision to amputate both gangrenous legs at the University of Virginia Hospital and replace them with prostheses. It had been the kind of life that could challenge the faith of a saint. Yet, he was but a teenage boy, one with resilient faith that God would find someone to help him.

            And now we both stood in front of a hushed congregation of Russian Orthodox believers, all of them wrapped in the swaddling fur coats commonly worn during Siberian winters, thick head and neck scarves for the women and fur hats with ear flaps for the men, and the warm felt boots worn by all from childhood through old age. The unheated, dimly lit vestibule, where the lack of pews made the room look empty in spite of a crowd that filled it to overflowing, exuded a different kind of warmth and a different kind of light, that which comes from inside, not outside, from natural sources, not artificial ones.

            Father Boris introduced me as the Good Samaritan who had rescued their Shura, the young man they loved and for whom they had despaired and now hoped. The crowd looked at me in eager anticipation. What was an atheist to say to this expectant gathering of believers? 




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