No, I didn't make that up--rather, it was on a license plate holder in front of me on my commute to work this morning.

Now I'll be the first to admit that I'm in a sucky mood today. My sinuses are killing me, I still feel like potted ass, I didn't sleep well, I don't want to be here, and I'm just cranky. That being said, this particular license plate holder made me want to drag the women driving the Lexus it was connected to out of her car and beat her.

What the fuck is up with the scary religious threats? I don't see treating God like the bogeyman doing anyone any good with spreading the word. If anything, it only further alienates those of us who are not necessarily for or against the idea of God. I'm still thinking about it--I imagine I'll be still thinking about it ad infinitum, but that's another issue--but seeing stuff like that makes me not want to believe. I am not going to achieve faith by means of fucking threats.

Maybe I am completely overreacting. But I don't think so. The same car had a big Jesus fish eating a little Jesus fish on it. WTF?

There are a number of people around school today with ash smudged foreheads. As always, I'm struck by my jealousy of them. Maybe I don't believe in God (and maybe I do...I wish I'd figure that out), but I think I believe in religion. Or maybe not even religion, but ritual. I believe in ritual. I want to take part in these rituals, to feel their importance viscerally. Perhaps more than any other reason, I wish I could develop faith so that I could legitimately do that.

"How to be American, how to be a Christian"

Over and over and over this goes through my head. So it seems it is time to make another stab at church. Chance's Sunday-morning lessons are over, so I can have the car again, and I have no excuses not to embark once again on this ultra-scary journey.

So...here are the places I think I'll try:
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin
All Saint's Episcopal Church
Friends Meeting of Austin

If anyone has advice, other suggestions of places I should check out, etc., I'm all ears.

Caveat to the non sports-minded: In a volleyball game, there are two referrees and two line judges. The sole purpose of the line judges is to stand at opposite corners of the court and judge whether balls fall in or out of bounds.

The sermon today was about sports, competition, etc. The second element of it was about abdicatin of responsibility. Where people used to say "no harm, no foul," meaning that even if there was technically a foul, if it didn't harm the flow of play, it was not worth stopping for, they could now say "no foul, no harm." No foul, no harm. That would mean that unless a foul was called, i.e. unless you got CAUGHT breaking the rules, no harm was done. You see this in football, where linemen are taught to hold without getting called on it, for example.

The minister was making a point about how the competitive nature of sports leads us to shrug off personal responsibility for following the rules. We do not call fouls on ourselves. If you step out of bounds making a touchdown and nobody notices, you sure as hell don't argue with them. If a mistake is made, then, it is the responsibility of the official, for not seeing it, rather than the player for doing it.

The point was that putting what is right and what is wrong in someone else's hands allows us to break rules without culpability. Which got me to thinking, what I need in my life isn't a referree, it's a line judge. I don't want someone else to make the calls--I am rather fond of being in charge--but I want someone else to stand at the corners and tell me when something is in bounds and when it is out of bounds. Then when someone argues with a call I've made, I can simply point to the line judge. She did it.
The expert opinion given to me was that was out, so I called it out. It's like the president blaming a bad war on the CIA.

But I don't get a line judge. I have to figure out for myself if the balls I am lobbing back and forth are landing within bounds or not. And I just can't see the whole court, so there's a lot of guesswork involved. Sometimes, I make the wrong call. Often, even. And ultimately, it's nobody's responsibility but mine.

I am trying to write every day for Lent. Can't think of anything to say at the moment, though, so here's what I am listening to/thinking about:

"The Ballad of Mary Magdalene"
by Richard Shindell

My name is Mary Magdalene
I come from Palestine
Please excuse these rags I'm in
I've fallen on hard times
But long ago I had my work
When I was in my prime
But I gave it up
And all for love
It was his career or mine

He was always faithful
He was always kind
But he walked off with this heart of mine

In today's episode of my search for God, I found myself in sitting at a Quaker meeting. For over a hour, I sat in a room with thirty or forty other people, quietly, concentrating. Two men got up and spoke, each for no more than a couple of minutes, and I listened closely to what each of them had to say, then pondered what they said, looking for a message in it, looking for shades of something that I needed to hear. Before anyone spoke, I concentrated hard, first on the list of people I had brought with me that I wanted to pray for, and then on myself, praying for faith.

Once again, faith didn't come. If God was present in that room, God did not make its presence known, at least not to me. I sat there, trying from the inside out to open my heart and make room for faith, but faith did not come. As I attempted to meditate on faith, I concentrated on the word--faith. I saw it in my mind like the screen saver on a computer screen, bright, swirling letters. And just as soon as I saw it, it turned from "faith" to "fake." As in, I am a fake for sitting here with my eyes closed, trying to pretend I am one of these people. These people feel God in this space. They feel community. I feel my ass against the chair, my feet on the floor. These people are somewhere inside themselves, pondering on the things that are important in their lives, talking to their gods. I am sneaking glances at the clock, looking around the room, counting the panes in the windows. God wants nothing to do with me.

So here I am. Again. Disappointed. Wondering if this search is worthwhile. Wondering if searching is even what I should be doing. After all, if God wanted to me to know it exists, why wouldn't it just TELL ME rather than sending me on this wild goose chase? What am I supposed to be learning here?

I've looked for God on my own in more ways and on more occasions than I can count. I've done rituals, I've prayed in song, in speech, in writing. I've looking for God in nature, in the faces of my friends and family, at the graves of those I have lost. And I haven't been able to find God alone. Thinking maybe that I just needed help, or structure, I've looked for God in a Lutheran church, a Universalist Unitarian church, and now at a Quaker meeting. And I've seen no inclination of God in any of those places either. What now? Should I try Episcopalian? Should I stop picking churches based on their social values and service work and just force myself to sit through services at the Baptist church down the street? What if God has been hiding there all along, only a few blocks away?

Lord, I Have Made You a Place in My Heart

Oh Lord, I have made you a place in my heart
among the rags and the bones and the dirt.
There's piles of lies,
the love gone from her eyes,
and old moving boxes full of hurt.
Pull up a chair by the trouble and care.
I got whiskey, you're welcome to some.
Oh Lord, I have made you a place in my heart,
but I don't reckon you're gonna come.

I've tried to fix up the place,
I know it's a disgrace,
you get used to it after a while -
with the flood and the drought and old pals hanging out
with their IOU's and their smiles.
Bare naked women keep coming in
and they dance like you wouldn't believe.
Oh Lord, I have made you a place in my heart,
so take a good look - and then leave.

Oh Lord, why does the Fall get colder each year?
Lord, why can't I learn to love?
Lord, if you made me, it's easy to see
that you all make mistakes up above.
But if I open the door, you will know I'm poor
and my secrets are all that I own.
Oh Lord, I have made you a place in my heart
and I hope that you leave it alone.

-Greg Brown

In her comment on this post, Emma Goldman asked me a very good question. Two of them, actually. Her questions were:

Why do you want there to be a deity? What will happen if you don't find one?

The second question is not of much interest to me, because I don't think anything will happen if I don't find God. I'll be pretty much in the same place I am now--no proof of existance, no faith, but no proof of inexistance either. Unless for some reason my seach sours me so much it gets me all the way to Atheism, but honestly I just don't see that happening. The first question, though, is really at the heart of what is going on here.

There are quite a number of reasons I want there to be a deity, some kind of greater power. One of them is because I don't want to feel like I'm in this alone--I want there to be someone bigger than me watching out for me. Another one is that I can't stand the idea of never again seeing the people I love who have died, and in order to believe that I am going to see them again, I sort of need to believe in a God, some conception of Heaven, something. One of the biggest ones is that I want a community to be part of, and the kinds of communities people I know seem to find in their churches seem so great. I want to be part of that, and I think becoming part of it would be a lot easier if I actually shared beliefs with said community.

There are a more shallow set of reasons as well. I like church, especially ritualistic church. It makes me feel centered, safe. I like the rountine of it, the symbolism, the quiet, sacred space. I want to have a legitimate share in that space and not feel like an imposter in it. I want to a person who knows the words to the hymns and the proper responses, who knows when to say "and also with you" and "Amen."

The biggest reason, though, is simple curiousity. I want to know if there is a God or not, and I don't think factual evidence that I find believable is going to surface, or that it would be enough even if it did. I want to have some strong feeling about it, one way or the other. Agnosticism is fine when you don't care, but as I get older I do care, I want to have a theory of what is going to happen when I die that I actually believe and don't just find interesting. I want to be able to commit to a position of some sort, driven by something inside myself. I want to feel faith. I feel like I am missing out on some basic human experience by not having it in my life, and I am missing it.

I don't know if that's a sufficient answer, but it is what I have, for now. Thanks for asking.

My results:

1. Unitarian Universalism (100%)
2. Neo-Pagan (89%)
3. Liberal Quakers (87%)
4. Secular Humanism (78%)
5. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (76%)
6. New Age (70%)
7. Reform Judaism (68%)
8. Theravada Buddhism (66%)
9. Mahayana Buddhism (62%)
10. Taoism (48%)
11. Nontheist (46%)
12. New Thought (46%)
13. Orthodox Quaker (46%)
14. Sikhism (43%)
15. Scientology (39%)
16. Bahm'n Faith (34%)
17. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (28%)
18. Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (27%)
19. Jainism (26%)
20. Hinduism (25%)
21. Orthodox Judaism (24%)
22. Seventh Day Adventist (23%)
23. Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (20%)
24. Jehovah's Witness (20%)
25. Eastern Orthodox (16%)
26. Islam (16%)
27. Roman Catholic (16%)

To have your own beliefs quizzed and simplified to the point of ridiculousness, go here.

I have to recommend Shannon's Palm Sunday entry over at The-Blog-Formerly-Known-As-Waiting-For-Nat (Peter's Cross Station now, I think). It is brilliant, much better than I could have written about being in church this past Sunday, but very close to how I felt.

"Jesus Was a Capricorn"
by Kris Kristofferson

Jesus was a Capricorn, he ate organic foods.
He believed in love and peace and never wore no shoes.
Long hair, beard and sandals and a funky bunch of friends.
Reckon they'd just nail him up if He come down again.

Help yourself, brother.
Help yourself, Gentlemen.
Help yourself Reverend.

I have a big, fat, depths-of-my-soul post to make, but I'm not quite there with it yet, so in the meantime, I wanted to relate a story I heard last night:

S. and I went to the Sierra Club's Songs to Save the Seashore benefit concert last night. The show was great--Eliza Gilkyson, Carolyn Wonderland, and Ruthie Foster all played and are worth seeing. Dale Watson was there, and I am now in love (real country music! YES!). The story I want to tell, though, came from the set played by Sarah Lee Guthrie and Johnny Irion. Sarah Lee is, as the name indicates, Arlo's daughter, and this story is about him.

***************************

About 15 years ago, Arlo (and I think some other folks) bought the church made famous in Alice's Restuarant Massacre. Not long after they bought it, Arlo was hanging out there, sweeping up the floor. A local preacher came by and knocked on the door. Since the door was glass, Arlo couldn't pretend he wasn't there, so he answered the door.

"Arlo, what are you doing here?" asked the preacher.

"Well, I'm sweeping up the floor," Arlo replied.

"No," said the preacher, "I meant what kind of church is this going to be now?"

Arlo thought a bit about that. He hadn't really considered it. He had a lot of plans for the church, was going to do a lot of great things there, but he hadn't thought much about what kind of church it was going to be.

"Well," he replied, "I guess it's a bring your own God church."

************************

Indeed.

There are moments when I know that I may be confused, but I'm not really an agnostic. I just had one of them listening to this. k.d. lang's version, from Hymns of the 49th Parallel

Now I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music, do you?
It goes like this
The fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah
-Leonard Cohen

About that break from the Internet I was taking? Apparently I lied. Take away my venue and just see how much I have to say!

Today, as you no doubt are aware, is Shrove Tuesday, or Fat Tuesday. That makes tomorrow Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. Something inside me has drawn me to Lent this year even more than usual, and I have decided to observe it in a church, going to all of the Lent services. I am currently deciding which church to attend, but will likely choose the local liberal Episcopalian church. I had a long talk with Mark over the weekend about my striving to find faith, and I am now reenergized in that mission.

Curious as to if my results would differ from my last go at it, I decided to check out the Belief-O-Matic, all powerful as I know it must be. The results I got, fairly unsurprisingly, were that my beliefs best match up with:

Taking it a step further this time, though, I decided to also take the What Kind of Christian Are You? quiz, to further edify me. This one was tougher, as most of the questions didn't make much sense to me or were regarding things on which I really have no strong opinion. However, I answered as best I could, and it proclaimed me a "Bishop Spong Christian" aka a Biblical Revisionist. This apparently describes me:

You think the Bible is a powerful metaphorical narrative and believe that Jesus was a heroic figure similar to Gandhi. You believe in God as a loving creator and that She will forgive you for just about anything. You're willing to admit that you don't believe in the resurrection. You go to church for the sense of community and the music and because you like to hector your fellow Christians about their backward ways. You read Toni Morrison, Elaine Pagels, and Bishop Spong, the controversial Episcopalian prelate. You enjoyed the "The Da Vinci Code" as a thriller and found its ideas about Christian history thought-provoking, if not always historically accurate. Though you probably didn't see it, you're sure that "The Passion of the Christ" presented an utterly backward version of Christianity. You ardently support gay rights and feel guilty that you yourself are not gay. (If you are gay, you're in a loving, committed relationship). You live in a leafy university town, order Chai at the local coffee house (never Starbucks), and subscribe to The New Yorker. You watch TV so you can talk disdainfully about how bad TV is. You give to charity, preferring the local homeless shelter to those bureaucratic national charities. For you, the crux of Christianity is Jesus' revolutionary message of empowering "the least of these."

Could be worse...

Anyway, I am going to be documenting my feelings and thoughts as the Lent season progresses here, for my own edification and for that of anybody else who cares. If me talking about looking for faith turns you off, you don't have to read it. I'm sure I'll have plenty of mindless filler as well. After all, I still gotta be me.

I made my first itty bitty step today. I went to the Ash Wednesday evening service at a local liberal Episcopalian church. And it was good. I went through the whole service, saying the words and getting the ash on my forehead and even taking communion. I felt sort of weird about communion, but the rector specifically said that the church celebrates open communion and anyone whose heart is open to Jesus Christ is welcome to join. If he would have said anyone who believes is welcome, I'd have stayed in my seat, but my heart is open, so up I went.

I can't say honestly that I felt anything spiritual, but I did feel comfortable, and peaceful, and the sermon and readings gave me things to ponder, particularly the bit from Matthew, regarding not putting on a show of faith for others to see, but having private, personal faith. I also felt particularly drawn towards Matthew 6-13:

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and decay destroy, and thieves break in and steal. But store up treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor decay destroys, nor thieves break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there also will your heart be.

That was something good for me to hear and think about, I think. I plan to return to this church on Sunday, and every Sunday for the next weeks, culminating in Easter Sunday. In between Sundays, I plan to ponder both the messages I heard at church and the feelings that they brought to light. And I plan to keep trying to pray. Right now, I think that's all I can do, and I think it's enough.

*Genesis 3-19

I have returned to St. George's Episcopalian church these past two Sundays, and I like it more each time. Maybe like isn't the right word, exactly...I feel more each time, more in tune with myself, and in tune with something outside myself as well. I think I am growing more comfortable with the idea of God. I've really enjoyed the sermons, and I appreciate the type of Christian the priest seems to be instructing his congregation to be. For example, this past Sunday's sermon focused around the idea of the story of Abraham's aborted sacrifice of Issac as being not about demanding violence, but about stopping it. I can get behind that.

The problem is Jesus. While I can conceptualize God in a non-human form, in a very general way, I have the hardest time getting myself to even entertain the thought of everything from virgin birth through resurrection. It just seems...unlikely. And I've been told that it's OK to think of those stories as homilies, or as metaphorical, but I don't know if that's really true, given that Jesus the Savior is a pretty essential element to Christianity. So that's where I'm hung up right now.

And then again, it may be that the fact that I'm still insisting on considering all of this logically at all, rather than taking in on faith (there's that word again...) speaks to how little distance I've actually travelled. I dunno. Regardless, St. George's feels more and more comfortable to me, and I really do believe I am getting something out of the time I'm spending there, even if I'm not yet wholly sure what it is.

One of the phrases my non faith-inclined mind has long pondered is "God is everywhere." Change-ups of this phrase, such as "God is everything" or any of the various admonishments about carrying God around in your heart have similarly confused me. If I can't even find God in a church, who can find Him everywhere? Everywhere? Even in the bathroom?

Yesterday, I witnessed something that brought these truisms to light a bit more.

I was at Target, browsing the clearance racks, trying to find some camisoles before they clear out for the winter. Two women and a pre-teen girl were browsing the rack next to mine. "Keep looking," one of the women told the girl. "He wouldn't have shown us that skirt if he hadn't meant for there to be a shirt to go with it."

Who was he, I wondered, looking around for their male companion. Could he come and find me some of those cute cropped pants in black and in a 16?

Then, eavesdropping further on their conversation, I realized it.

They weren't talking about him, they were talking about Him. They didn't have a male shopping companion--at least not one I could see. They were carrying their shopping coach around in their hearts.

And sure enough, one rack over, He found them a shirt to go with that skirt.

As I drove home (without having found what I was looking for, unsurprisingly), I pondered their faith-based shopping initiative. I make no claims to know what God wants. I don't even know who God is, or if God is, much less His internal desires. However, it seems to me that if I were a supreme being, I'd get a little bit irritated at being called upon to assist in trolling the clearance racks at Target. Or assist in winning a football game. Or assist in any of the millions of other details of people's lives that I was constantly being bugged about. When you are responsible for an entire world, seems like you'd have to focus on the big stuff.

This may well be just one more example of why I'm never going to understand faith. Weirder even than praising in a church, in my mind, is connecting a supreme being to everything I do and everywhere I am. I can't imagine it being anything more than an annoyance for both parties, creator and created. Then again, the folks I was listening in on went home with a bag full of clearance goodies and I didn't, so who knows?

It's unusual that I point my (vast, I'm sure) readership towards two new blogs in one week, but that's exactly what I'm doing. Over at Biblelicious, a friend of mine is reading the Bible and blogging about it. She's a liberal, lesbian, Democrat, Baptist-raised, Catholic-educated intellectual tech geek babe, with a lot of fairly interesting ideas about religion, and I'm really enjoying reading her periodic updates on the Bible reading and interpretation. She's still in Genesis, too, so you have time to catch up.

Day 2 of not shopping is going fine. I'm at work. I spent lunchtime at Ash Wednesday services at the campus Episcopalian church, and I think the service really helped to center me and get me thinking in the right direction about why it is so important for me to stop this reckless shopping. The bit from Matthew that is included in the Ash Wednesday service, warning against accumulating goods that can be moth-eaten or rust, but instead accumulating treasure in your heart, spoke to me today. It has before, I know, but given that I am starting this particular journey, it was especially loud today.

So it's the beginning of Lent. I am committed to not shopping until Easter. I am around $8,000 in debt and it is time for things to change.

Frog wrote something on her blog yesterday that really, really resonated with me. "Easter is about hope and renewal. It’s about believing in what you cannot see or touch but know in your heart to be true." You should go read it. I know I'll be reading it over and over for the next few days. As I've said before, I've never been very good at religiosity, and if it's about anything, Easter is about spring for me. I like that Frog can see both.

LilySea is TEARING IT UP today over at Peter's Cross Station with a post about her sexuality and her faith and how no, it's really no trouble to reconcile them. You should read it. In fact, I should read it again. Which I'm going to go do.

I was thinking, as I was getting ready this morning, about Lent. I'm not Catholic, never have been, doubt they'd have me. I've tried, at various times, to get into being either Lutheran or Episcopalian, but I've never been able to get past Jesus, so it's never lasted long. And yet, for years I have, in my own way, observed Lent. Mostly, I like that there is a time of year to focus on loosening your grip on the things and habits that slip into your life that are not necessarily what you want for yourself. Partially, I'm sure, I'm just masochistic enough to like the idea of self-denial, but there is something else, as well, more connected to strengthening yourself by giving something up, that appeals to me.

I was, I think, about 13 when I first observed Lent. I had recently started going to church, mainly because there was a "teen" group on Sunday nights and one of the members was a boy in whom I was interested (lovely curly hair and chocolate brown eyes). It wasn't, however, a church that observed Lent. In fact, the kind of rural fundamentalist church about which I am talking probably considers observation of the Catholic calendar sacrilegious. However, I had read something about Lent and decided that, in my new quest for spirituality, it would be a good idea for me to observe it. Since fasting was out (I was really skinny at the time and my mom would have had a conniption fit if I'd tried to stop eating), I decided I'd give something up. But it had to be something precious--I was serious about this (at 13, I was serious about everything).

I grew up poor and did not have a lot of nice things. However, that year my dad had given me a leather bomber jacket for Christmas. It was, I remember clearly, from Costco and cost $99. I'd seen it there and drooled over it without even considering it could be mine for months before it showed up under the tree. I loved that coat. It's soft buttery leather. It's silky polyester inner lining with imprints of old maps on it. The smell. How great it looked. I wore it non-stop from Christmas Day onwards.

So, of course, for Lent it had to go. Relegated to my closet, where I looked at it longingly but never wore it.

Except on Sundays, to church. For some reason, my understanding of Lent was that you give something up except for Sundays. So every Sunday I lovingly took it out and wore it to church, then returned it for the week, until Easter Sunday, when, in an act of symbolism that felt huge to me at the time, I left it home and wore something else to the church pageant.

Of course this all seems very silly now--both the church going (that church was really a pretty terrible place) and the value that coat held for me. But it's kind of impressive, too--my 13 year-old self had self-control for which my adult self strives every day.

I'm not giving anything up for Lent this year. Mostly this is because I've already given up the things I needed to remove from my life, more or less. I have been working since New Years on controlling my shopping and spending and paying down credit cards, and although there is a long way to go, I am doing well with it. Plus, I'm just too old at this point to find self-denial romantic anymore. Yeah, I could give up coffee for Lent, suffer the headaches, and probably feel better about being caffeine-free by the end of the season. But it wouldn't have the same magic giving up that jacket had at 13. That's the problem with me and religion these days--I still don't believe it, and it's not romantic anymore to go through the motions and pretend that I do.

"Jesus said, "I tell the truth, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life. I tell you the truth, a time is coming and has now come when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and those who hear will live."
John 5:24-25

I went to my coworker's funeral today. As part of the service, the pastor (rector? priest? not sure) read an essay my coworker had written on the verse above. Basically, the essay expressed his great joy and slight amazement in being saved, and in believing that because he knew God and believed in His son, Jesus, he did not have to fear death, but would live eternally. This isn't exactly a new concept to me--I may be ignorant of religion, but I'm not that ignorant. I get that believe=live eternally is a basic premise of many Christian denominations. But I'd never heard it put quite so clearly before. It was basically described as an unbelievably good deal.

Which, of course, it is. All you have to do is believe in God and that Jesus died for our sins and you get an eternal reward? Pretty sweet.

Except when you can't.

I tried to believe in God. I've been trying to find Him, to find a faith, for many years now. And I'm not closer than I was when I started--if anything, I'm farther away. I've visited churches of many denominations (most of the major Christian branches as well as Quakers), and I felt nothing. I have never felt God inside me. I think, sometimes, that I do, but upon examination, my feelings always come back to me, not to an outside higher power.

Do I get points for trying? If they're right, and their God does exist, and all you have to do to live eternally is believe, do I get points for wanting to believe? I don't think so. I think I'm damned with the rest of the unbelievers.

After the service today, another co-worker, who described himself as a "fellow Atheist" (which I don't think is quite true of me, but whatever), asked what I'd thought of it. I said that I've been to enough funerals at this point where the major gist was "believe as the deceased did or you'll never see him in heaven" not be bothered by it anymore. It wasn't true, though. In truth, the idea that my lack of belief points not to a lack of anything believable, but to a failure in me, terrifies me. It's not just that I'm afraid I'm going to Hell (or just dying without an afterlife), but I'm afraid that I'm wrong and I'm missing something basic and important in this life because of it.

A while back, I was in line at a store and when I asked the clerk how she was doing she replied, "I've been saved and He is with me! I am always doin' fine." Normally, a statement like that would give me an internal snort, but that day I took pause. She seemed honestly to say that her faith made her happy all the time. Of course nobody is happy all the time, but isn't there some evidence that believers are generally happier?

More and more, I don't judge religious people. I envy them. And listening to the store of my coworker's spiritual journey today, in his own words, did, in a strange way, give me comfort. Even if I don't believe, and I am scared, his belief apparently helped him not to be scared. Even if ultimately the heaven to which he believed he was headed doesn't exist, there is definite value in living your life and facing your death believing there is something like that coming up next. I'm glad he had that. I'm glad his family, who shared his faith, have that. I just wish I did too.

*Post title with apologies to The Counting Crows

There's a man going around taking names
And he decides who to free and who to blame
Everybody won't be treated all the same
There'll be a golden ladder reaching down
When the Man comes around
-Johnny Cash

I know many of my readers don't believe in Hell. And neither do I, to be fair. But, for the sake of a thought experiment, pretend you do for a minute. Who gets in?

Say there is a God, a Johnny Cash-style all-knowing all-judging God. How are our lives measured, when we die, to decide who goes to Heaven and who burns? What are the criteria?

The reason this comes up is Robert McNamara. Upon hearing that he'd died, I said something to the effect of "if there is a Hell, he can see LBJ there." I was corrected, numerous times, by people who insisted that McNamara repented for his mistakes and would be forgiven.

Would he? How does one repent for a body count that size? Is being sorry enough, or do you have to save as many lives as you cost to even your balance sheet?

Repentance, as an idea, is interesting to me. It's the subject of some pretty great art and music and literature. It's something we've been obsessed with for centuries. Why? Is it really even possible to repent? And if it is, does that really just mean ask forgiveness/buy masses/do penitence, or is there more?

To add another pop culture reference to this already muddled train of thought, Joss Whedon's work is often about repentance, particularly in the character of Angel. For those who aren't in the Joss-know, Angel is a centuries old sadist vampire who is cursed with a soul so he is keenly aware of all the harm he's caused. In Joss' universe, he spends the majority of his time repenting (well, and brooding). His life is about repentance. This doesn't go too deep in Buffy, but once Joss made Angel's spin-off show, repentance was the overarching theme, not just for Angel, but for other characters as well. And the bottom line always seemed to be that it's never enough. That you have a responsibility to try to repent, but that you never really even your score, not even if you save the world. Pretty bleak, maybe, but ultimately true?

While I don't believe in Hell, or in a judgmental God who is up there keeping score, I do believe in trying to atone. Not to save a spot in Heaven, but to keep some sort of vague Karmic balance. It's not about paying off in the end, but more about getting back what you put out. And maybe that's what I really meant about Robert McNamara. He was personally responsible, more or less, for hundreds of thousands of deaths. Judging by the evidence he left, that weighed on him, and he did spend the rest of his life, after leaving Johnson's White House, trying to do good in the world. Is that atonement? Is there really anything he could have done to balance that kind of Karmic debt? Given that regular old dudes don't usually get the opportunity for Angel-sized world saving, I don't really think there is. He may be sorry, but, on a national level, if not a celestial one, he's not forgiven.

On Joan of Arcadia, God appears to Joan in the guise of regular people. The people aren't delusions--everyone else can see them as well. It's unclear (to me, at least) whether they are people who exist when God is not speaking through them, or whether they exist only when God needs them as mouthpieces. Either way, though, every conversation Joan has with God is one with another person. My personal favorite God is Goth God (left), followed by Joan's original and probably most common God, Cute Guy God (right). Some of the God are irritating (Old Lady God and Little Kid God both bug me), some you forget as soon as you see them (the episodes are full of one-off Gods as delivery people, cafeteria workers, substitute teachers, etc.). Often, Joan mistakes people who are not God for God, based on what they say to her.

Maybe I'm dense, but I like a metaphor that hits me upside the head. I'm not sure I believe in God (nor am I sure I don't), but it's difficult not to believe in other people, given that they are overtaking the planet like cockroaches. On the show, God mostly gives Joan assignments, most of which are difficult for her to complete. God gives vague advice, rarely answers questions, and is generally kind of a pain in the ass. The non-God people she's surrounded by--her family and her friends--are usually more helpful to her than God, at least in seeing the results of her wacky actions. Yet she gives them none of the acquiescence she gives her many Gods.

Maybe that's the point. Maybe instead of looking for a higher power in a Church or even inside ourselves, we should look around us. I'm going to try to do a better job of listening and watching and paying attention to what other people are telling me. You never know, there might be God in there.