Omnibus: The Know-It-All, The Year of Living Biblically, My Life as an Experiment

by A. J. Jacobs

  As with that first tithing back in September, I feel a mixture of God’s pleasure and my own pain. But I think, or hope, I felt less pain than before. It comes back to the idea of surrendering. I still haven’t been able to fully surrender my spirit or emotions, but I have at least surrendered some of my bank account. I have to embrace the surrender.

  But I won’t say another word about it. I’ve already violated Jesus’s teaching: “When you give alms, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by men.”

  Love…keeps no record of wrongs.

  —1 CORINTHIANS 13:4–5 (NIV)

  Day 270. There’s a passage in the New Testament that I keep coming back to. I think about it every day. It’s not nearly as famous as the Sermon on the Mount or the Good Samaritan parable. It’s mostly known for being read at weddings.

  In the passage, the Apostle Paul is writing to the Corinthians and tells them, “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.”

  I think this passage speaks to me because I violate this one so literally, especially that last part.

  I keep a record of wrongs.

  It’s in my Palm Treo in a file I’ve labeled “Stuff.” I figured the name “Stuff” was vague and dull enough that if someone found my Treo on the subway, he or she wouldn’t bother to look at the file. Because I know it’s not something I should be proud of.

  The problem is, Julie is always insisting that I have a terrible memory. She says I’m constantly getting things wrong. I respond that my memory is about as good as her memory—decent but not great. And that she gets things wrong a lot, too. Then she demands an example, and I can never think of one. So I’ve started to keep a list.

  I’m aware of the irony that I have to consult a list to prove that I have a decent memory.

  Here’s a sample from my list:

  Vichyssoise is a potato soup like I said, not a fish soup like Julie said.

  The animated android Max Headroom did commercials for Coke like I said, not Pepsi like Julie said.

  We saw an Irish movie called Waking Ned Devine on our second date like I said, not another charmingly quirky movie called Saving Grace.

  You get the idea. I’ve actually put my list into action only one time. This is because it’s kind of difficult to look at the list in public without exposing the secret of the list’s existence. During an unpleasant argument about who left the microwave door open, I sneaked into the bathroom, clicked on my Treo, then reemerged with an example of the time she left the keys in a rental car, and we had to call Avis.

  In short, the exact kind of thing Paul was preaching against. I decide that not only should I erase my “Stuff” file, but I should confess to Julie about its existence. So that’s what I’m doing.

  When I show Julie my list, she looks at it for a good ten seconds without talking.

  Then she laughs.

  “You’re not angry?”

  “How could I be angry?” she says. “It’s just so heartbreaking that you need this.”

  “Well, I have trouble remembering things in the moment.”

  I take the Treo back from her, highlight the “Stuff” list, then press delete. I feel good. I’ve cleaned the slate on my Treo, and I’ve cleaned the slate with Julie. I know it may seem like a small thing, but the “Stuff” incident made me realize my worldview is too much about quantification. It consists of thousands of little ledgers. Everything—people included—comes with a list of assets and liabilities. When I forgive, I file away the other person’s wrongs for possible future use. It’s forgiveness with an asterisk.

  The Hebrew Scriptures encourage forgiveness—Leviticus tells us not to “bear any grudge”—but it’s fair to say that it’s a bigger theme in the New Testament. Start over. Be born again. Become a new creature in Christ.

  Consider Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son. Here’s how the New Catholic Dictionary describes it:

  The story of the son who took his portion of his father’s goods and squandered it by riotous living. When reduced to the depth of misery and obliged to eat the husks thrown to the swine, he bethought him self of his father and resolved to return to him penitent. The father was watching for him, greeted him affectionately, and killed the fatted calf to make merry over his return. The elder son resented the father’s rejoicing. The father silenced him by the reminder that: “thou art always with me, and all I have is thine, but…thy brother was dead and is come to life, was lost and is found.

  When I first read the parable of the prodigal son, I was perplexed. I felt terrible for the older brother. The poor man put in all these years of loyal service, and his brother skips town, has a wild good time, then returns, and gets a huge feast? It seems outrageously unfair.

  But that’s if you’re thinking quantitatively. If you’re looking at life as a balance sheet. There’s a beauty to forgiveness, especially forgiveness that goes beyond rationality. Unconditional love is an illogical notion, but such a great and powerful one.

  The eyes of the Lord are in every place, keeping watch on the evil and the good.

  —PROVERBS 15:3

  Day 271. A spiritual update: Back when I was in seventh grade, I had this delusion. I thought that the girls on whom I had crushes might be watching me. Not at school, mind you. They ignored me there. But in my room, when I was alone, they were watching. I wasn’t sure how the logistics of this worked (psychic powers? Hidden cameras like The Truman Show?), but it put a lot of pressure on me.

  I had to make sure to act cool in case Kim Glickman was observing. I’d put on a David Bowie LP not because I wanted to hear Bowie but because I wanted Kim to think I wanted to hear Bowie. I’d brush my teeth in a rakishly nonchalant manner, just so she knew I was cool even when doing dental hygiene. Maybe she likes the tortured artists, I thought. So sometimes I’d channel Sid Vicious and do something crazy, like throw my three-ring school binder across my room and watch the pages splatter on the floor. (I’d then spend fifteen minutes cleaning up and putting the pages back into the rings.)

  Sad, I know. Luckily, I got over that in ninth grade. But now I’m starting to have a similar feeling. Kim can’t see me. But maybe something can. Something is keeping track of my life, of all of our lives. My existence is not a meaningless collection of actions, so I should take seriously every decision. I don’t know what the payoff will be, if anything. But someone is writing this all down in the Book of Life.

  When they had rowed about three or four miles, they saw Jesus walking on the sea and drawing near to the boat.

  —JOHN 6:19

  Day 272. My brother-in-law Eric does not embody the biblical virtue of humility. He’s a prideful man.

  He’s Harvard educated, as he’ll remind you not infrequently, and he’s distressingly smart, as he also makes clear. He’ll lecture you on everything from SALT II treaties to the symbolism in Zola’s novels. I’m sure if Eric were around in biblical times, he’d have been chief architect of the Tower of Babel.

  These days, Eric is getting his PhD in social psychology at Columbia, which means he says things like this: “Humans are a fascinating species.” As if our struggles are all for his intellectual amusement.

  When I went on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, Eric was my phone-a-friend. It seemed the most obvious choice. But when I called him at the $32,000 level, he choked. It was one of the most bittersweet moments of my life—bitter because I lost $32,000, but sweet because I thought he’d get taught a lesson: Pride goeth before the fall.

  That lesson didn’t quite pan out. The Millionaire fiasco didn’t seem to dent his ego one bit. He still enjoys tormenting me with his superior knowledge. And the unfortunate thing is, the man reads everything.

  Today, he’s over at our apartment and gleefully telling me about the latest religion-themed article he read:

  “So, did you hear a
bout that study about Jesus walking on water?”

  “No.”

  “This scientist says it’s because the conditions in the Mediterranean at the time caused ice floes on the Sea of Galilee.”

  “I see.”

  Eric chuckles. He actually doesn’t think that scientific explanations of miracles are worthy of serious discussion. They are, he says, more like crackpot science that tries to explain the physics of Road Runner cartoons.

  But for me, such studies do present a problem.

  The rivers of Egypt turning bloodred? It could have been red algae or volcanic ash. The darkness sweeping over the land? It might have been the khamsin, a hot wind of the Sahara, churning up the sand. When Moses sweetened the bitter desert water at Marah with a tree? He could have been using an ion exchange resin. Not that I know what that means. But it sounds convincing.

  I don’t need to hear scientific explanations of miracles. It plays too perfectly into my innate skepticism, which still runs deep.

  I know plenty of religious people who see miracles as myths, not literal truth. They say that we don’t need to believe that Joshua actually stopped the sun in the sky so he could finish a battle; the story can still have beauty and resonance even if Joshua didn’t get a divine extension. And I imagine that, if I go religious at the end of this year, that’s the camp I’ll belong to.

  But if I’m going to be literal, I must at least try to believe they happened and that God overturned the natural order. It’s a heck of a mental hurdle and, as with creationism, one I’m not sure I can clear.

  I take some measure of consolation from a book I just read. It’s called The Battle for God by former-nun-turned-religion-scholar Karen Armstrong.

  Armstrong makes the intriguing argument that people in biblical times did not believe the miracles happened. Or not in the same way that fundamentalists today do, anyway. Armstrong says that the ancients viewed the world simultaneously in two different ways. One was logos, the other mythos. Logos was the ancients’ rational and practical side, the factual knowledge they used in farming or building houses. Mythos was the stories that gave their lives meaning. For instance, the story of the Exodus was not to be taken as factual but as a tale filled with significance about freedom from oppression. The ancients didn’t necessarily believe that it happened exactly as told—with six hundred thousand people trudging through the desert for forty years. But it was true in the larger sense, in the sense that it gave context to their lives.

  Fundamentalism, Armstrong says, is a modern phenomenon. It’s the attempt to apply logos to mythos, to turn legend into scientific truth. I don’t wholly buy Armstrong’s thesis. It smacks of wishful thinking to me. I don’t think the distinctions in the biblical minds were that black and white. But given the choice between her theory and fundamentalism, I’ll take hers.

  “Whoever strikes his father or his mother shall be put to death.”

  —EXODUS 21:15

  Day 273. When Jasper wakes up from his nap, I go to retrieve him. He is standing at the edge of his crib, his hair sticking up in back, Alfalfa-style. In his hand he is clutching a plastic bowling pin, which is his version of a security blanket.

  I lift him out. Jasper grins. It is a grin meant to convey that he is about to do something spectacularly witty—and then he hits me in the face with a bowling pin.

  “Don’t do that,” I say. I have on my stern James Earl Jones voice.

  He takes that to mean “Do it again, but harder.” So he winds up and delivers another blow to my face. And another. These ones were powerful leave-a-red-mark-on-my-forehead hits.

  “Jasper!” I say. “Say you’re sorry.”

  Jasper just grins.

  “You do not hit people in the face with bowling pins. It’s very dangerous. That’s a no-no.”

  He looks at me bewildered, then angry. How could I not see the humor in a flawlessly executed bowling-pin-to-the-face maneuver?

  “Apologize to me, please.”

  “No.”

  “Apologize.”

  “No.”

  This is going to be ugly.

  The Hebrew Bible says that hitting your parents can be punishable by death. Instead I turn the other cheek. I ignore my son.

  Ignoring a rebellious son is, coincidentally, a strategy recommended by a secular parenting book I read months ago. So I put him on the ground, turn my back to him, and cross my arms. I look like a model posing for the label on the Mr. Clean bottle.

  He starts to whimper.

  “Say you’re sorry, and we can go play,” I say.

  “No.”

  “No hitting people,” I say. I say it with decisiveness, confident that I have thousands of years of tradition behind me.

  I keep my back to him. He grabs my leg.

  “A. J.!” he says. “A. J.! A. J.!”

  There’s something ineffably heartbreaking about a two-year-old calling to his father, and the father not answering. And I am that father. It’s killing me. But Jasper is still too stubborn to say he’s sorry.

  The Bible talks about the importance of punishing your kids if you love them. And I think there’s something to that paradoxical advice. The best punishment should be a sacrifice—you sacrifice a pleasant afternoon, you sacrifice some in-the-moment affection, to give them a better future.

  Jasper stomps, he sulks, he mutters to himself. It’s the longest fight we’ve had. Finally, four hours later, he tracks me down in the living room and gives me a sad little downcast-eyes “Sorry.”

  “Great!” I say. “I’m so proud of you for apologizing. What should we play?”

  But Jasper would not be playing with me tonight. He would play alone. He goes to bed all mopey and martyrlike. It probably sounds like a minor skirmish, but for me the War of the Bowling Pin was an epic one. The next morning at about seven-fifteen, I hear Jasper screaming into the monitor: “A. J.! A. J.!” I open his door, stick my head in. I pick him up, he gives me a grudge-free hug around the neck. Yes, our relationship survived my dispensation of justice. It’s a good lesson for me. I still spare the rod, but I’m trying not to spoil the child.

  Month Ten: June

  Nor should there be obscenity, foolish talk or coarse joking, which are out of place…

  —EPHESIANS 5:4 (NIV)

  Day 277. “How was the birthday party?” I ask Julie.

  She and Jasper had just returned from a party at a preschool on the East Side.

  “OK. But they had this rabbit for the kids to pet, and there was rabbit shit everywhere.”

  “Huh.”

  I am shocked at her language. And then I am shocked that I am shocked. When I first met Julie, she rarely cursed, whereas I had no filter whatsoever. I chose a particularly adolescent curse word as my default computer password. I enjoyed watching TV with the closed captioning, because the captioners sometimes type in the dirty words that are bleeped out for the apparently more delicate hearing-unimpaired community.

  But for the last two months, inspired by Orthodox Jews and evangelical Christians, I haven’t used a single naughty word. And it startles me when others do.

  What is a biblically naughty word? Well, there are two genres: blasphemy and profanity. Blasphemy is the subject of the Third Commandment, which orders us not to take the Lord’s name in vain. What does it mean to take the Lord’s name in vain? Is it when you say the word God in any secular context? Or is it only when you invoke God’s name while lying under oath? Or is it uttering the word Yahweh, which might come close to the pronunciation of God’s holy name? All three theories have their supporters.

  If you want to be supremely safe, as I do, you should use the word God only when praying or talking about the Bible.

  As for profanity—the S-word and the F-word and regular old bodily-function-themed cussing—things are even less clear. In fact, as science writer Natalie Angier points out, the Bible itself uses some adult language. In 2 Kings 18:27 the men “eat their own dung and drink their own piss.”(KJV) In Ezekiel 23:20, you
can read some very salty language about the size of Egyptian men’s private parts.

  Still, there are sections, especially in the New Testament, that indicate such language should be avoided. Consider the passage from Ephesians I put at the top of this chapter: “Nor should there be any obscenity, foolish talk or coarse joking, which are out of place.” Or this one from Ephesians 4:29 (NIV): “Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths.”

  So to be totally protected, I’ve scrubbed up my vocabulary. My current curse words are: fudge, sugar, and shoot. When I say one of my new curse words, Julie usually responds with something like, “Hey, Opie! You going fishin’ this morning?” Or just whistling The Andy Griffith Show theme.

  She can mock me, but the weird thing is, I think my G-rated language is making me a less angry person. Because here’s the way it works:

  I’ll get to the subway platform just as the downtown train is pulling away, and I’ll start to say the F-word. I’ll remember to censor myself. So I’ll turn it into “fudge” at the last second. When I hear myself say “fudge” out loud, it sounds so folksy, so Jimmy Stewart-ish and amusingly dorky, that I can’t help but smile. My anger recedes. Once again, behavior shapes emotions.

  “Fudge” seems clearly within bounds, but what about words like “heck”? Those are more morally ambiguous, but probably should be avoided as well. In the 1600s “criminy” was considered a curse word for being too close to “Christ.” Same with “gosh” and “golly” in the 1700s, which were meant to evoke God and God’s body, respectively. Later, “Jiminy Cricket” and “Gee Willikers” were wicked code words for Jesus. “Tarnation” began as an offensive combination of “eternal” and “damnation.” And “heck” was an only slightly better alternative to “hell.”

  A minister’s daughter recently told me that when she was growing up, they used “Cheese and rice” instead of the name of her savior, which I imagine would also have been banned in the eighteenth century. Land mines lurk everywhere in the English language.