The Noxubee Refuge, technically the Sam D. Hamilton Noxubee Refuge, is about fifteen or twenty minutes outside of town. The nearest town is Brooksville but I’ve always felt that it was within Mississippi State’s general orbit. Once you leave campus the entire road there is through the country, through woods, some roads paved others dirt, and a few houses and barns speckled in between. The immediate entrance to the Refuge is very pretty, the road winds through thick trees on both sides until you come around a bend, into the clear, and see Bluff Lake on your right. You follow the road winding around the body of water to the general parking area. There are picnic tables at the Refuge, open green space, opportunities to canoe on Bluff Lake, walking trails through the woods, and information centers; a typical national park. A cool thing about Noxubee is that there are often alligators that come out of the water and sunbathe by the side of the road. I remember being shocked at this the first time I came to Noxubee—a massive gator, a big momma gator, she looked about twelve feet long, just lying by the side of the road near the water with some baby gators crawling up nearby. The driver of the car, a Mississippian, was unfazed—yeah, gators. Cool, huh? he said, matter-of-factly.
My favorite thing to do is to walk out onto the observation boardwalks that hang over the different bodies of water at the Refuge; one, and don’t ask me the name or the body of water that it’s over, is it still Bluff Lake or is this just a swampy pond?, extends nearly a thousand feet, or so it seems, and the observation hut is well into the water, over the water, and affords the amazing feeling of immersion, of being completely wrapped into the surrounding eco-system—the water, the trees and grass, the humidity, the bugs and the plants and the spectacular view of all this put together—without actually being knee deep in mud.
Brent and I park and walk through the forest trails. A walk in the woods is always a nice thing but especially after eating an extra-large Bop’s. We talk the whole time. Who is the greatest musician of all time? What is the greatest century of all time, the best century to live in? What is the best Italian food? Who is the greatest artist of all time, any art? Brent and I have the latter question narrowed down to five people, a cornucopia of apples and oranges: Da Vinci, Mozart, Picasso, Shakespeare, and Homer. Homer? I ask Brent. Of course, he says. The Illiad and the Odyssey are sorely underappreciated, he says. Do you think one man really wrote these, I ask him? Yes, he says. And if they weren’t written by Homer then they were written by someone else with the same name. We both laugh. True, true.
Who is the greatest baseball player of all time, I ask? Babe Ruth, Brent says, easy. Hall of Fame pitcher even if he never picked up a bat; but he did. I disagree. It’s Ty Cobb, I claim. Cobb’s greatest quality was this intensity bordering on insanity. I recount a story about Cobb coming to watch a Georgia Tech football practice one day. The Georgia Tech team that beat another team 222-0. He was intrigued. Mind if I run a play, he asked the coach? You mean like go in there and just do it? Yeah. The coach agrees. This was way before modern contracts where professional athletes are forbidden to do almost everything outside of their sport for fear of a contract-voiding injury.
Cobb jumps in at tailback never having played football before. He gets a halfback toss and runs to the left, outruns two guys on the edge and stiff arms a would be tackler in the throat, basically grabs him by the Adam’s apple and throws him to the ground, and heads off for an 85-yard touchdown.
Who is the most important scientist of all time, I ask Brent? That’s easy, he says. It’s Copernicus. Why, I ask? Heliocentricism. In one fell swoop he undid all the Ptolemtaic and religious assumptions about geocentricism and set the stage for the whole scientific revolution, the work of Kepler, Galileo, and Newton. There wouldn’t be a Principia Mathematica without Copernicus, he argues. Brent asks me what I think of Descartes. One of the most revolutionary minds of all time, I say. The Father of modern relativity, I add. What?
Brent asks. He asks me to explain. Descartes’ cogito reversed Aquinian essentialism, I begin to explain, wishing Antoine was hear to help me answer this question—this is literally his bread and butter, man I wish he was here.
I start over and try to make it as simple as possible, especially for my own sake. Saint Thomas Aquinas argued that everything is contingent upon God, the unmoved mover. Imagine Aquinas arguing for a reverse cogito: I am therefore I think. The starting point is with “I am,” meaning I know that I exist because God created me—I am, I exist, therefore I can think. Descartes puts the point of reality’s origin within the human mind. The starting point is no longer God’s creation, the person no longer claims existence, “I am,” based on a God given existence but rather claims existence because he is capable of thinking. “I think,” becomes the starting point. I don’t know that I am or that I exist or if there is a God or not but I know that “I think.” I think therefore I am.
Okay, Brent says. But how is this revolutionary besides being scandalous to a religious framework of human existence? I return to “Father of modern relativity.” Descartes basically invented modern subjectivism, I say. If reality really begins in the human mind and a person can only be sure of their own existence, if all one can rely on is his own reason and nothing outside of it then, yes, my truth is my truth and yours is yours. Combine Cartesian rationalism with the Protestant Reformation, the same subjectivism here with a religious tint—it’s just me and my Bible and I’m guided by God so my interpretation is the right one—and you have the foundation for America; add in a general chafing under civil and ecclesiastical authority, a dash of deism and the French philosophes, and a taste for revolution and the courage to fight for revolutionary ideals… America.
Brent laughs. Wow, pretty sweeping, no? Some pretty heavy generalizations, wouldn’t you say? Yes, maybe, I admit. But isn’t there truth to what I’m saying, truth in those connections?
Brent nods. “That’s actually pretty cool.”
“Pretty cool?” I ask, “you mean you agree?”
“No. I didn’t say I agree. But I’ll admit I have never thought of Descartes like that.”
Brent and I have been walking in the woods for a while. It’s had to have been a few hours. We walk up the stairs of one of the lookout points over the water and sit down on a bench at the top. It is so beautiful here. The silence is piercing. It’s one of the few places I have been where you really can get back to nature. I don’t go to many national parks so I’m sure this feeling is in no way unique to Noxubee. But unique or not I am glad we have a place like this so close nearby.
“Who is the best looking woman of all time?” Brent asks.
Shannon, I almost say. Literally. A psychologist would have a field day with me, with free word association Freudian type analysis about repressed things, hidden things in the subconscious…oh, you see, Mr. Lawson, there is indeed something to this infatuation with your cousin. It runs deep. It is part of your very make-up and it surfaces unconsciously, immediately. Let’s take a deeper look into this, shall we?
I tell Brent practically everything. He is the same with me. But neither he, nor anyone, can ever know about my Shannon obsession. Another close call.
“That’s hard to say,” I finally say. I shrug, “Tyra Banks.” Naomi, the girl I was dating who suggested I read A workaholic New York Girl is Reborn under the Bhutanese Sun, looks a lot like Tyra Banks.
He laughs. “Really?”
I laugh. “Well, she is beautiful, right?”
Brent nods. “Of course. But best of all time?”
“What do you want me to say?” I ask, “Helen of Troy? Cleopatra? How do you answer that question? That’s a stupid question.”
“Audrey Hepburn,” Brent says, nodding. “Case closed.” Brent picks up a small rock from under his feet and heaves it into the water below.
“You were serious that day in the car, with David, about never having had sex? You’ve really never had sex before?” Brent asks.
“Yes,” I say, “why is that so hard to believe?”
&
nbsp; Brent shrugs. “It’s just so foreign to me. I don’t get it.”
“I’m waiting for marriage.”
“Marriage is bullshit.”
“You realize that’s your favorite word?”
“What?”
“Bullshit. This is bullshit. That is bullshit,” I say, trying to impersonate Brent’s voice, “bullshit, bullshit.”
“Well,” Brent says, clapping his hands together, “you believe a lot of bullshit. Your religion’s number one on the list.”
I smile sarcastically and nod, squint my eyes, and keep nodding.
“It doesn’t matter how many times I explain it to you, the sex thing” I say. “If you don’t get it then what can I do? It’s wrapped up in my faith, my morality, and for me plain common sense. But I can’t somehow force you to see it through my eyes.”
“You’ve always been a religious fanatic?” Brent asks.
I laugh, “I’m not a fanatic.”
“Oh-okay,” he says, throwing another rock in the water.
“One of my favorite saints is Pier Giorgio Frassati,” I say, “you’d love him; super handsome, great athlete, a mountain climber, cosmopolitan, intelligent, all that. He died in 1925, from polio I think, and was about twenty-five years old; from Turin. Italy at that time, like Europe, had a lot of atheism and secularism in the culture—that, also fascism, fascism of course dominant, and also communism against the fascism, a lot of stuff challenging the stereotype of Italy as this monolithic Christian country. Pier Giorgio was on a bus one day and one of his friends, a secular friend, saw him praying the rosary.
‘Pier Giorgio, you’ve become a fanatic!’ he said. ‘No,’ Pier Giorgio replied, ‘I’ve remained a Christian.’ ”
Brent says nothing. He throws another rock in the water.
“I’m not a religious fanatic. Being a Christian means living your whole life for Christ, it means doing stuff daily, all the time. It looks fanatical to you because you’re an atheist but I don’t think I’m a fanatic. I’m just trying to remain a Christian.”
“Thanks for the sermon, Pastor Toolbox,” Brent says. “Aaaaah-mayyyyy zing grace, how-ow-wow sweeee-heeeet tha’ sound—
“Hilarious,” I say. “Why are you an atheist?”
“You know those people who grow up in a really religious household, who are full on believers when they’re kids and then slowly, or suddenly, lose their faith later on?” Brent asks.
“Yeah.”
“That’s not my story,” Brent says, “I’ve been an atheist since I was a little kid; long before I knew what the word meant. I remember, even when I was like four years old, seeing no difference between religion and Santa Claus or the Easter bunny. All myths, all nice stories and nothing else. Well, actually I shouldn’t say that. Santa Claus and the Easter bunny haven’t been responsible for ruining the world, and countless lives, a hundred times over.”
“So you think religion is always bad?”
“Yes. What is religion at its best? A bunch of lies that make people stop living in the hope of some fake afterlife. And at its worst? The Inquisition. The Salem Witch Trials. And when we’re not burning people at the stake let’s attack science. Young Earth Creationists, Darwin came from hell, the globe is a NASA conspiracy, the earth’s really flat…”
“The fact that many people ‘stop living in the hope of some fake afterlife,’ or rather give up everything ‘good’ in this world for the sake of the Gospel…isn’t that some hint that perhaps there is something worth giving everything up for? A pearl of great price worth waiting for, selling all for?”
“No,” Brent says, “that’s my point. They give up everything for a delusion. I’d feel sorry for them but they deserve it, choosing their own misery; bunch of idiots.”
“You do realize,” I say, “that all of modern learning came from religion, right? Who preserved all the ancient texts? The Greco-Roman culture? When Attila and his compadres and everyone following were busy burning Western Civilization to the ground it was Catholic monks, in the so called ‘Dark Ages,’ who preserved our connection to the Greeks and Romans by saving and transcribing countless texts. The Catholic Church founded the world’s first universities and hospitals. The Catholic Church, in arguing that the universe is knowable, made all of modern science possible. It made atheism possible. Imagine if people were relativists then: nothing can be known about anything; all is absurd; all is random and without reason. Science would never have been born! All science works on the assumption that there are immutable laws that govern existence and that man can, through trial and error, come to actually learn things. Where did the idea that there is purpose and design and that there are knowable entities come from? Your man Copernicus dedicated his book, Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres or Celestial Spheres something, the title’s something like that, to the pope. And it wasn’t just Christians. Some of the greatest medical and scientific advancements of the Middle Ages came from the Arab world, from Muslim scholars and scientists. From religious people.”
“Copernicus dedicated his book to the pope because if he didn’t the pope would have tortured him, cut off his nuts, and made him eat them,” Brent says.
“You’re a typical atheist, you know?” I say.
“How’s that?
“Your main argument against religion is that people have done all this bad stuff in the name of religion and so it must be false.”
“Well, haven’t they? Tell me I’m wrong.”
“You’re not wrong. Religious people have done awful things. But haven’t atheists? The worst atrocities of the 20th century, perhaps of all time, were committed by people who rejected God. Look at the U.S.S.R, a proudly militant atheist state: the brutal collectivization of the farms, the Holodomor in the Ukraine, Stalin’s many purges and terrors, the gulags. How many tens of millions murdered for the earthy utopia, for a paradise without God?”
“Fine. But these people didn’t claim some type of mystical higher power was guiding them. Religious people do and they’re just as bad as non-religious people.”
“Amen, brother,” I say, tilting back and clapping loudly. The echo goes out over the water and into the marshes beyond. “You’re now talking about the Christian doctrine of original sin.”
Brent rolls his eyes, “Holy shit.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I say. “You’re saying that all people, regardless of if they’re believers or not, do bad things, right?”
Brent nods affirmatively, not so much in agreement as, yes, right, ok. Make your point so we can move on. Holy shit.
“That’s a fundamental plank of Christianity. People are affected by original sin. People are drawn to sin. People are flawed. And this flaw affects all of us equally—from the pope to the pastor down the street to the atheist to the Buddhist to the third wave feminist to the sweet, three-year old child. But here’s something super important: Christ established a Church not so people could make some type of Heaven on earth—that’s what atheists do, chase utopias—but rather so they could make it through this life, struggle through his life under the weight of their own flawed selves, and make it to Heaven. That’s the sole point of the Catholic Church: salvation. The Sacraments, the Eucharist at the center, are conduits of God’s grace, divine help if you will, that bring us away from sin, restore us after we’ve fallen, and help us on the road to perfection. But people will never be perfect on earth. Perfection is not of this world. Christ promised us that the gates of hell would not prevail against the Church, that the Holy Spirit protects the Church, but perfect people and perfect leaders? No. Absolutely not. ”
“I don’t agree with that at all,” Brent says. “That’s the whole thing wrong with religion: ‘perfection is not of this world.’ Instead of people realizing that sin is fake, that there is no original sin, nothing holding them back, they wallow in some made up cosmic guilt and never get out of it. That’s why people are so depressed. This horrible, made up guilt.”
“Really?” I say, “I’ve found that the most
depressed people are those who deny sin, deny that there’s anything wrong with them, and then expect to be happy and perfect all the time. Then they realize, wow, I’m not happy at all. But since there is no sin, nothing holding me back like you say, something must be horribly wrong with me. This kind of self-esteem, this type of emancipated from religion self-confidence and self-reliance, is the real reason for all the depression in the world.”
“Well, that’s convenient,” Brent says. “Attack people for ‘self-esteem’ while you get to be happy that you’re all perfect in your little church community; we’re all scum but you’re this living saint. Isn’t that nice?”
“What?” I say, hands outstretched in front of me, “no! You’re missing the whole point of what I’m saying. I’m the furthest thing from perfect. I’m a horrible person. I objectify women all the time. I am the scummiest, worst, most disgusting lustful person ever. I can’t look at a woman without wanting to have sex with her. I have an absolutely horrible mouth. I swear all the time. All the time. I’m prideful, I judge people all the time, especially Protestants, and what kind of Christian am I? Thinking I’m better than others, more holy than others, closer to God than others. That I’m a Catholic makes it all the worse—I have full access to the Sacraments, the fullness of the faith, and what do I do with it? I’m pathetic. David, I guarantee you, lives the Gospel better than I do. He’s not judgmental, he’s kind, he treats others with much more respect than I—
“Whoa,” Brent says. “I think you have me confused with someone else. I know you spend every waking moment in that dark box and so you think I’m a priest but I’m not. I’m not interested in hearing you confess your imaginary sins.”
“What I’m saying is that I’m not happy because I think I am perfect,” I say. “I’m happy, or not depressed, precisely because I know that I’m not perfect. Because I know that I’m a sinner, that I’m flawed, I can accept my imperfections and keep going back to God for mercy and forgiveness. And because I know that while I’m a sinner I’m also made in the Image and likeness of God, and that God Himself died for my sins, I can live with some kind of balance. Aware that God is all good and He made me good but avoiding any fantasies about self-perfection because I know my own sinfulness.”
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