I just finished A Good Life, 15 essential habits for living with hope and joy by Pope Francis. I decided to buy it last night after my weird day of feeling like I was wasting my life, thinking it could bring me some motivation, and I think it worked. I’m still blown away by how much that guy just seems to understand how life really works. The fact that I don’t believe in God in a literal sense, it’s like that doesn’t seem to matter at all. I still pull a ton of value from his writings. I wish that I had known about him years ago. He died just a couple months after I discovered his books.
But you know, I say I don’t believe in God but is that really true? I mean, I do believe in God. I mean, I do feel like I’m guided by God, I live for god’s mission, at least that’s the best way to describe it. It’s just that I don’t take these things to be literal. I agreed with practically everything Francis said in this book, with one exception, that in my life is quite minor: I don’t believe that prayer can directly influence physical events. It definitely can have positive effects on your mental health, and those positive effects can cascade out into your family and community, but you can’t literally pray away a disease or prevent something bad from happening. He tells this story of a guy who finds out his child is about to die, so he drives to a church or some holy place I forget where and prays like crazy then the next morning finds out his child was miraculously saved and the doctors couldn’t explain it. I mean, that’s just a coincidence, and I feel it’s dangerous to pretend that it’s not.
Taking spirituality literally is terribly terribly dangerous. I’ve seen it destroy a lot of lives, but at the same time, having a healthy spirituality is vital for a happy life, it’s just the taking of it literally that I have a problem with. For most of my life I’ve felt that that meant that there’s this huge gap between me and religious or traditionally spiritual people, and I realize now that that’s not the case.
I did have a roommate once who pulled a knife and put it to my friend’s throat in a fit of screaming rage because he took spirituality literally. I knew another guy who murdered six people because he took Jesus literally, thinking what God was telling him was literal truth. Another friend almost died jumping off a bridge because Jesus told him to take a leap of faith and he took it literally instead of looking inward and trying to see what was really going on in his own mind.
For the most part, Pope Francis doesn’t seem to want people to take things too literally and I respect that. He says at one point that any prayer that doesn’t lead someone to tangible action or a change in their behavior toward good is ultimately pointless prayer.
He also kept talking to “the youth” and saying that… “we”? I guess I’m kind of the youth compared to Pope Francis, but I’m 46 and starting to feel my age, but it still felt like he was speaking to me with those comments, about how we need to have the courage to go against the grain, to speak out when we see outdated and harmful moral values being pushed on us. He kept saying we must take risks, and speak truths.
There was a moment where he says there’s two ways to truly become a Christian or a part of Jesus, I forget how he words it, but one is to openly declare that you are a follower of Jesus, but the other is to live your life consistently as a seeker and defender of truth and honesty. That is my pathway. I found Jesus through my atheism, which to me represents my pursuit of truth and love of honesty no matter how uncomfortable it might make me or the people around me.
So I think about this on Memorial Day when people are celebrating soldiers and war and waving American flags in this sense of community that to me is so very surface level and dishonest, that ignores all the problems and suffering that patriotism causes, that ignores our friends, family and neighbors who live right here in our country who have been deeply hurt by military actions and attitudes. I want a holiday that connects us to the rest of the world, a holiday that celebrates peace and coming together with our enemies to build something that works for everyone, not just America. But it’s so rare to find people who also want this and are willing to speak out… I mean, to be fair, I do find a lot of people who agree with my anti-war, anti-military stance. In a lot of ways, I think folks like me may actually outnumber the people who identify as patriots and celebrate the military, but most of us are just too scared to speak out, or maybe we don’t have an avenue to speak out, like there’s no holiday for peace lovers.
There’s no huge money making industry around peace the way there is around war. Except for the rare few like Pope Francis, no one makes a career out of peace. But I’ve known more than a few who make careers out of war and violence.
I think about Bill Hicks on days like this and his stance on war, the way he was just kind of openly hateful toward the military and supporters of the military and how for a brief period he gave us something to hold onto, even if it was deeply problematic and maybe even counter-productive toward peace, since his comedy was so gross and nasty. I much prefer Pope Francis’ way of talking about war, but the problem is it doesn’t have the punch of Bill Hicks. Bill was direct and in your face in a way you couldn’t ignore the way I’m sure many people can ignore what Francis says. They can just like feel it for a moment, and say “Oh yeah yeah, I totally want peace,” for like a minute, then immediately go back to doing all the things that drive our war, violence and division culture.
And I’ve been in kind of a contradictory mental outlook lately. I found it funny earlier when I was playing Doom The Dark Ages on mute and listening to this Pope Francis book at the same time. This weird mix of simultaneous good and evil.
I also just finished listening to Tender is The Flesh yesterday by Agustina Bazterrica which is an actual fiction book. I so rarely listen to fiction but for some reason I wanted to listen to something really disturbing and fucked up, so I looked up a list of the most fucked up novels ever and this was at the top of the list. I didn’t find it super engaging, but it was definitely fucked up and twisted. And I didn’t realize until earlier today that it was written by a woman, and I think someone referred to her writing as “feminist horror” which, I don’t have any idea what makes it feminist. It was just a sick and twisted tale of cannibalism, rape and torture. So I went and bought another of her books, The Unworthy, which is about some sort of dystopian religious sect, sounds like it might be like Handmaid’s Tale but more fucked up.
But it got me thinking about my personality, where I am drawn to both the ying and yang, extreme violence and cold-heartedness in much of the fiction and games that I enjoy, but in real life I am absolutely devoted to peace and how I form this clear boundary between the two. But it’s like, when I was a kid that boundary didn’t exist, and I would fantasize about becoming a soldier and fighting for America, mercilessly slaughtering anyone who opposed the red white and blue, including women and children, and taking great joy in that fantasy of mass murder.
You know, I was “taken hostage” (I guess that’s the best way to describe it) once by a US Marine who had recently won a purple heart, and yeah, that experience was fucked up and traumatizing. He held onto me and fucked with me for several hours as I was coming down off mushrooms, just for the thrill of terrorizing a “bleeding heart liberal” as he called me. But it’s almost like the fantasies that I held as a child were even more upsetting to me in the long run. I had all these fantasies of torturing and killing the bad guys and the wives and children of the bad guys, except I didn’t care who the bad guys were. It didn’t matter. I thought we were at war with Britain, or Vietnam or whoever, I didn’t care, just so long as we were at war with someone and that would give me the freedom to join up with the killing machine and just slaughter and destroy. That guy who took me hostage, I told him about this and he explained that soldiers are just like me as a child, except they never grew out of those fantasies. He had been living out those fantasies through the US Military until an explosion caused his lung to collapse and he got an honorable discharge and a Purple Heart. Then he turned on people like me, his fellow Americans, to live out that pleasure.
That’s the truth that I know God put me on this Earth to speak about–not to condemn or seek vengeance or guilt trips–but to speak the deeper truth about why our military actually exists.
