Bermuda Shorts - James Patterson [19]
Gordon majored in religious studies at a Southern university, got a summer job at a TV station, and has been working in television ever since. Twenty years have somehow elapsed. Keeping that in mind and by way of warming up to the subject, I point out that there is certainly a lot of public talk about God going on. Professional proselytizers, like angry little cartoon urchins banging away on kitchen implements thinking they are making music, are ubiquitous, and would be amusing except that they are intolerant of Gordon and I, and they want to rule the world.
Their opposite numbers in the secular spiritual movement, if that’s what it’s called, are filling bookstore shelves with manifestos—in some cases articulating a charming sort of ersatz-Buddhism, in others a refreshing and, I feel necessary, environmental revisionism—that sees the divine in everything. Gordon, I would have thought, is a prime candidate for this group. He is personally warm and generous, sincere, educated, and concerned about the quality of his inner life. But he is oddly oblivious to the entire alternative spiritual genre, perhaps because he clings to an inflexible Biblical definition of God, and perhaps, too, because his mainstream training in television has taught him to be suspicious of anything that can’t be pigeonholed. So he has avoided this highly self-involved industry for what it is, self-involved. He isn’t really in need of a support group, doesn’t really feel victimized, except, that is, by everything, so emotional and spiritual “healing” is not high up on his hierarchy of needs.
As for me, being a bit of a hell-raiser, I don’t care. Because some sort of authentic spiritual affirmation is missing, or is wanting definition in the culture at large, it’s a party I’m willing to crash. But for those who are skeptical of alternative spiritual movements and who feel that traditional religious organizations are missing their mark, there is a void.
As I tell Gordo to put his antennae up and his nose to the breeze, I can’t help but think that he is ripe for some Robert Bly, Margot Adler, or Joseph Campbell to come along and help him initiate the epiphany he so clearly yearns for. Gordo brushes me off, says he wants to get past all that, whatever that is. Gordo has faith and trust in our friendship and expects us to be on the same page when we start off using the G-word. But I don’t think we are.
At an airport bar in Toronto, not long before 9/11 and between the Bush Wars, I was sitting between a Kuwaiti gentleman and a born-again Christian from Texas. The Kuwaiti, a young college graduate, was gulping down Johnny Walkers at an impressive rate and lamenting that when he got home this drinking would have to end. He also gave an appreciative nod at some females at the bar, implying he was going to miss Western women, too. He ended his soliloquy with an admission that he would, eventually, have to atone for the sinful habits he had acquired here in the West and, now that he had learned the “evil ways of the world,” he was ready to return to his native land and take on “the responsibilities of manhood.” With a sigh, he conceded that now was as good a time as any.
I let the conversation meander. I got him talking about the separation of church and state here in the West, something that was achieved at tremendous human expense over hundreds of years—the Reformation, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, etc.—and whether or not he thought such a transformation feasible in the Middle East. Feasible, perhaps, but desirable? No. He thought a more tolerant society was ultimately what made all this Western hedonism and decadence possible, that by defining Western culture as undeniably hedonistic and decadent we had reached some mutually