by Alina Simone
I wrote these thoughts out for the Punk Monk and then went to sleep on the floor of a man who may or may not have been the sound guy at the Replay Lounge in Lawrence, Kansas. I couldn’t understand whether he was the real sound guy or just some guy replacing the sound guy who didn’t show up. In any case, I did understand that he had a room to spare and that I could sleep there. But of course, it turned out to be very cold on the floor and I didn’t sleep at all. Which meant I didn’t wake up in the morning, I simply arose from the sleep I didn’t have, from my seven-hour sprawl on the floor, feeling bludgeoned. And since there wasn’t any coffee on hand to reach for, I reached for my computer instead and found I had a reply from the Punk Monk.
“When you are not working on yourself,” the message read, “the world starts to work on you instead. People lose their identity and, then, integrity and start to live by two or more lives, none of them being worth to be lived. In this way, desperations are inevitable. You must acquire the skill to be yourself.”
Perhaps it was the deadening sensation in my head, but considering the source, I was starting to have trouble with these Deepak Chopra–y pronouncements. For one thing, it seemed to me like the path of punk rock and the path of priesthood were two distinctly separate paths, running in opposite directions. And if the Punk Monk himself was a living oxymoron, just another weird, muddled mess, like all the other weird, muddled messes I typically surrounded myself with, what good, really, was all this advice about path-finding and self-being? Again, the following day, in Denver, I had my reply.
“Some time ago,” the Punk Monk wrote, “I defined for myself a ‘right’ image of the Church as a church where Yanka could be a parishioner. There are all manner of churches in the world. The first thing is to establish your relationship with God, the next to find a church where you feel at home. Did you know that Yanka also converted before she died? She was baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church.”
I hadn’t known. But the next morning, as I drifted down I-70 west toward Salt Lake City, listening to Yanka, I found myself thinking about her conversion, wondering what it was that made her do it. It didn’t matter, I told myself. It didn’t save her. Religion was an insufficient guardrail. She ended up dead in the river, an apparent suicide, alone and rootless and looking for a comfort she’d never find. And yet … and yet, what to do with all this driving, driving, driving? Everything just going on and pointlessly on? The sky above northern Utah, too big. Idaho blurring by, a waste of gas. If I could convince myself that I was, indeed, on a path—a God-given path, not just some hideously circuitous highway mocking me with its metaphoric significance—then I could really get on with this hopeless to-ing and fro-ing. Once freed from logic, the singing to indifferent audiences, the failure to sleep on various floors, could all be undertaken with a renewed sense of purpose.
When I got home from touring, I was surprised to discover that I actually owned a Bible. Not some shoddy paperback cribbed from the nightstand of a Motel 6 either, but a handsome hardcover version that weighed as much as a full bottle of Jim Beam. How had I failed to notice it there on the shelf, right next to Jenna Jameson’s autobiography, for what must have been years? I remember I once tried to read the Old Testament and made it as far as Judges. It got off to a rousing start, I recall, with the slaughter of ten thousand men. But by the time Jael bent down and drove a nail into Sisera’s head, I was done. I knew I could never meet this God’s stringent requirements; I didn’t have the self-discipline. If He ever told me to follow Lot out of Brooklyn and never once look back, I would simply hand over my keys and my cell phone and prepare to become a condiment.
Now I decided I would give the New Testament a try; I had higher hopes for Jesus. But I quickly found that, like everyone, the Messiah had his good days and his bad days. He could be belligerent. He was maddeningly self-contradictory. Occasionally? He smote things. But I was also surprised to find that Jesus sometimes said things that I found comforting, that stayed with me.
“Do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself,” said Jesus in Matthew 6. “Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day.”
So true, I thought to myself. Don’t be greedy. There will always be more trouble tomorrow. I jotted the verse down on a notecard and taped it up next to my desk. Soon there were a lot of notecards taped up around my desk.
“How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye?”
Right again. Don’t be a hypocrite. With a two-by-four in your eye, you can’t do much of anything, let alone deal with somebody else’s speck.
“Salt is good; but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltness be restored?”
This last verse, from Luke 14, was a conundrum. But I liked that first declarative phrase, the rare glimpse into Jesus’ seasoning preferences. Jesus thought that salt was good. And now I could picture Jesus salting things. Maybe regretting the extra shake, worrying about his sodium intake. He came into focus for me then. Myself, I’d take wild mushroom risotto over a Hostess cupcake any day. Jesus and I may not have a lot in common, I thought to myself, but we could come together on salt.
It was something.
Growing up with no religious affiliation, I always figured that I had only two options if I wanted to get with God: the Judaism of my father’s side of the family or the Russian Orthodox Christianity of my mother’s side. But since everyone on both sides of my family was raised atheist, they didn’t leave me with much to go on. When I was five or six, I remember asking Mama what would happen to me after I died. We were eating lunch in a restaurant on Cape Cod with a group of my mother’s friends. I knew it probably wasn’t the best occasion to bring it up, but we’d driven past a graveyard earlier that afternoon and a panicked scribbling feeling had been rising in my chest ever since. I remember the conversation stopping after I asked my question, and Mama looking down at me from what seemed like a great height.
“They’ll put you in a box in the ground and you will rot there,” she said, raising the two black lines that had long since replaced her eyebrows. “And?”
Papa was Jewish, but only on paper. New Yorkers, thanks to alternate-side-parking suspension days, had a familiarity with holidays like Shavuot, Simchas Torah, and Shemini Atzereth that my father could only dream of. Nonetheless, this didn’t stop him from coming up with his own ideas. When I was maybe seven or eight years old, I asked Papa whether he believed in God. My father, the theoretical physicist, thought this over for a long time; he took philosophical questions, even those from young children, very seriously. (Later, when I was in college, he received a letter from a nine-year-old girl claiming to have discovered the secrets of the universe while watching the toilet bowl drain—she received a long and thoughtful handwritten reply.)
Finally, Papa said, “Well, it depends. Do you mean the kind of god people worship on Earth? Like Jesus, Allah, Vishnu? That kind of god?”
Even as a small child, I knew that something had gone terribly wrong. What other kind of god was there apart from the ones we knew on Earth? I confirmed for Papa, with some hesitation, that yes, I was only concerned with Earth. The planet we lived on.
“Ah, then I guess to answer your question I would have to say no, I don’t believe in that kind of god.”
It was obvious that Papa was holding out on me, so I went ahead and asked the question he’d been waiting for.
“So what kind of god do you believe in?”
“You see,” Papa began, “Earth is just one of an infinite number of planets in an ever-expanding universe. Chances are that ours isn’t the best planet. It’s probably, you know, just a really average planet. Average people, average ideas, average gods,” and here Papa paused, lighting up a little. “But of course that means that there are other planets out there that have the best of everything, and maybe one of these planets is inhabited by a being wiser and more enlightened than anyone we can imagine. Maybe this being is alr
eady guiding our actions here on Earth. Things that we think we are doing and deciding for ourselves might in fact be the invisible work of this ultimate being.” Papa’s eyes were far away. He seemed to have drifted off to a soft and happy place.
I blinked at him. This is what Papa believed?
“Are you talking about, like, a space alien from … outer space?” I asked.
“Yes, that’s exactly what I’m talking about!” Papa said excitedly.
I thanked him and went away.
In Massachusetts the winters are long and fierce and the houses, both new and old, are stubbornly drafty. Since they don’t hold heat, and heating them is expensive, people have gotten used to walking around wearing three turtlenecks and pretending this is normal. Mine was the only bedroom on the bottom floor of my family’s two-story house. It lay within a special microclimate whose damp, pervasive chill called to mind certain parts of northern Canada. The night that Papa offered me his God-as-space-alien theory, I remember lying in my narrow bed, watching my breath billow whitely in the air above me, trying to envision the being Papa had described. In my head, the space-alien God looked something like a giant praying mantis. He had massive green eyes the size of satellite dishes that trembled with a luminous, otherworldly understanding, and he was dressed a bit like Papa, who favored slacks from Banana Republic, long-sleeved linen shirts, and the occasional vest or blazer with suede elbow patches. He never said anything but only stared at me unblinkingly, his antennae quivering with wisdom and empathy. Over many months, I did my best to believe in the praying mantis, but in the end, his presence on the very best of planets in a faraway universe just didn’t offer much in the way of guidance or comfort to my earthbound self. That was when I realized that I would just have to settle for a mediocre god, somewhere closer to home.
Babushka was the only member of the family who had been baptized Russian Orthodox, and this was something I was always interested in discussing with her. The only problem was that Babushka pretended to be Jewish. She did this because absolutely every one of her friends—practically every Russian émigré of that era—was Jewish, and it was uncomfortable for her to go against the grain. She had married a Jew and this provided her with enough cover to pass. She kept a photograph of her grandparents’ traditional Orthodox wedding hidden deep in her underwear drawer and lived instead among the props: the menorah, the Hebrew calendar, some boxes of matzoh meal artfully scattered around the kitchen.
A couple of years ago at my mother’s annual Christmas party, Babushka put down her fork to make a sudden and portentous announcement.
“I am a conformist,” she said, looking around the table slowly and deliberately, making sure to give each of us the eye. “I am normal. What all people do, I do too.”
It was as though Babushka had just announced that she was gay. Her look said: This is something about me that is unchanging, something I am proud of, and you just have to accept if you really love me. But the truth was that, at eighty-nine years old, we were all just happy to have her wake up in the morning, slip on a leopard-print dress, and enjoy a few good reruns of Knots Landing. If Babushka had instead told us she’d decided to wear only a tutu and eat nothing but whipped cream for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I would have been on my way to Costco faster than you could say “Cool Whip.” As it was, we all reassured her that a conformist was a very fine thing to be and that she should go right ahead being one. Needless to say, this episode went a long way toward explaining how she felt about religion.
So I was on my own. Clearly the easiest choice, in the liberal suburb where I grew up, would have been just to become Jewish. It felt like a particularly civilized hobby I could mellow into, like joining a curling league. Maybe this was because the rabbi at the reformed synagogue in town, the one all of my Jewish friends attended, was an avowed atheist. This didn’t seem to stir up much controversy; on the contrary, there was an almost palpable sense of relief that without the messy and emotional business of God muddying the waters, the rabbi could finally focus on the more important issue of what it really meant to be a Jew. Jewish friends never mentioned God either, though they maintained an obsessive interest in their Jewish youth group and the overnight trips affording tantalizing make-out opportunities with the exotic Jews of neighboring Winchester. Only once did Papa make a visit to this synagogue, to recite the Mourner’s Kaddish when his father died. He described the experience like this:
“First there was a guy who played guitar. Then another guy came out and warned us not to support President Bush. Then finally this sort of fat, spiritual guy came out and read the Kaddish. That last part was okay. I guess.”
Josh had attended Hebrew School for eight years at this temple, and the only trace left of the whole experience was the perverse delight he took in playing a celebrity guessing game called Jew or Not Jew. (Jon Stewart? Jew! Conan O’Brien? Not Jew.)
Now I know that there are Jewish people somewhere in Crown Heights who would have been happy to introduce me to the rigors and joys of living life according to the Halakha, but these were not the people I knew. Based on my very limited perspective, becoming a Jew meant joining an organization that combined elements of Mensa, JDate, and the world’s most selective book club. But I guess the good thing about growing up without religion is that you can really dream big. I was never subjected to early morning sermons on things I didn’t care about. I was never forced to repeat the inane stuff my parents believed until I snapped one day and we ended up circling a deflated kiddie pool on the front lawn, screaming obscenities at one another while reality television cameras rolled. I didn’t grow up with a desperate fear of my own bodily functions, nor were there videos of me singing embarrassing songs about angels anywhere on YouTube.
So I figured there was no need for bottom-feeding now. Sure, embracing any religion involves compromise and the inevitable adjustment of expectations. But if choosing a religion was like finding a mate, I didn’t want to settle for the spiritual equivalent of a tubby guy named Earl, whose psoriasis of the scalp would keep me busy dusting seatbacks for the next forty years. I could afford to set the bar high, so I did. For example: no houses of worship in strip malls. How could I commune with the Holy Spirit with my thighs stuck to a metal folding chair and the smell of fried chicken still emanating from the stained acoustic tiles overhead? Similarly, I found prayer unlikely in one of those spiritual centers designed to make office workers comfortable, a place with headachy fluorescent lights, Muzak piped into the bathrooms, and an ATM in the lobby. I wanted to worship in a church that looked like it had been plucked out of a Hans Christian Andersen story, and didn’t think that was too much to ask. Unfortunately, the reformed synagogue in my town also didn’t meet this criterion; it was designed by a fancy architect, with a swooping roof and the kind of airy lobby reminiscent of Ivy League universities or cancer research institutes. This seemed like a good place to debate education reform with reasonable, well-meaning people, but to commune with God? Honestly, where was the mystery? The spontaneous healing? The speaking in tongues? The casting off of demons? Why endure the tedium and strictures of religion without any of the fun stuff? No, I decided, not for me. I was going to hold out. I knew exactly what I wanted. I wanted unreasonable people believing impossible things. I wanted unicorns.
Maybe this was because my family, like the white queen in Alice in Wonderland, had a penchant for believing impossible things. The notion that “certain people have powers” was something calmly and unquestioningly accepted by everyone but me. My grandmother still regretted a particular encounter my grandfather had with a Gypsy who laid a curse on them in 1957. They had just stepped off a train to stretch their legs, somewhere between Babushka’s native St. Petersburg, where they had been visiting relatives, and their home in Kharkov, when the Gypsy approached my grandfather.
“Dorogoy, dorogoy!” Dear one, dear one, she called out. “Silver my palm and I will read your fortune.”
“Thanks, but I don’t need a fortune,” my
grandfather said. “I don’t believe in them.” My grandfather was that kind of cleareyed thinker before he came to the States and discovered scratch lotto.