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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