Prayer of Unbelief

(First published in Bali Advertiser, December 20, 2006)

Heaven is for the weak at heart
And those who never are as smart as me
But I would trade all that I believe
And keep no trick card up my sleeve
Just to know the angels hold you in their arms tonight.
-- Heaven, by alt-country band Freakwater, on the 1998 album Springtime

James Kim’s story is a sad, nasty reminder that sometimes it doesn’t matter how much you love your children, how much you try to keep them from harm, how much you strive to be brave and staunch in the face of cold death and starvation. Sometimes, you, or they, just die.

That’s what happened to Mr. Kim when he made a wrong turn in southern Oregon trying to get his family back to San Francisco from Seattle after Thanksgiving. The car got stuck in the snow on a road closed for the winter, and after a week of subsisting on the little food they had in the car, and with his wife breastfeeding their four-year-old and seven-month-old daughters, Mr. Kim struck out in snow and cold for help. Two days later searchers rescued his family, and two anxious days following that, they found Mr. Kim’s body floating in a creek only a mile from the car, although he had walked more than 10 trying to find help.

His efforts to save his wife and the two girls have been called ‘heroic’ and ‘superhuman,’ and they were. They were also unlucky. He walked away from and not toward an unoccupied hunting lodge a few miles from where the car was stuck. He tried to follow a creek bed down the mountain – an old standard wilderness survival technique – hoping to find housing and settlements; it was another wrong choice. Getting stuck in the first place was also poor luck. Already lost, but still on a main mountain road, the Kims turned down a road that should have been gated. Vandals had broken the lock and left the way open.

And in spite of James Kim’s bravery and desperate courage and love for his family, he died. Why do people think it can never happen to them, or their children? Why do people persist in thinking that their God, their religion, their positive attitude, their secret mantra, can spare them from the vagaries and accidents of life, from the mosquito bite that brings malaria and encephalitis, from the freak accident that maims or kills, from anything and everything that can go wrong and change life forever from one second to the next?

No choice, really, for some of us, in the interest of sanity and mental comfort.

My father, a Baptist minister from the age of sixteen and a missionary in Asia for 35 years, once told me he could not live without his belief in God, that he would commit suicide if he thought there wasn’t a God. Richard Dawkins, atheist and author of The God Delusion, would say my father is delusional. I would not completely disagree. My father is a Republican. He listens to Rush Limbaugh and Paul Harvey. He gets his news from FOX.

For all that, my father isn’t any more delusional than most, not even Mr. Dawkins himself. The major delusion of the God question is in believing certainty is possible in the answer, not in believing or hoping He is out there. Mr. Dawkins is as delusional as my father in that respect.

Contrary to what Mr. Dawkins believes, there is not a high probability in the non-existence of an all-knowing, all-seeing deity. After a certain degree of improbability, God is no more or no less likely than just the universe, just as it is. One or the other, in the end, just has to be, to halt an infinitely regressive search for a primary first cause. It’s a 50-50 bet. Either there is a God or there isn’t. Either the necessary a priori assumption is the universe or it is God.

My father, I am pretty sure, wasn’t talking about taking his life over the waste of sixty years in service of a delusion if he one day discovered definitively there was no God. He meant he didn’t think he could bear the thought of a chaotic world without God in control, that the world is not to be faced without at least the idea of God. As husband and father, but mostly as father, I, too, hold to the thought there is some ultimate plan. I grasp the skyhook that Somebody or Something is in charge amidst the everyday hatred of people who blow, burn, and shoot each other up, the dying of the fish in the seas, the poisoning of the air, the always threatening potential for immediate, unseen destruction by man or nature. And sometimes, facing these everyday frights, prayer to a possibly non-existent God is the only thing that makes me strong, steady, and able to face the possibility of an accidental world not in His hands.

Get that? Prayer to a possibly non-existent God helps me to deal with the possibility of His non-existence. And I hope that God – delusion or reality – was of some help to Mr. Kim as he was scrambling wet and cold along a freezing creek trying to save his family. He deserved it.

Copyright © 2006 Lee Roy LeRoi

Wait! You be the Canary

(First published in Bali Advertiser, December 6, 2006)

“No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation." – Abraham Lincoln

“Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself …” – Walt Whitman, ‘Song of Myself’

Wouldn’t you know it? Two weeks after boasting of my stamina and appetite for news, I go into full-blown information overload meltdown. I can’t muster interest in the Tom-Kat-Suri celebrity wedding of the year, the maneuverings of the newly victorious Democrats, or the P.T. Barnum bluster of the Murdoch-FOX media circus with its O.J. ‘confessional.’ The only news item that has stirred anxious excitement has been waiting to see if the Dallas Cowboys would defeat the undefeated Baltimore Colts this past November 19. (Contenders again!)

I’ve got a news hangover. I wake up irritable, the afterglow of the previous day’s red-carpet photos gone, no lift left from seeing Bush and Rove and Cheney humbled, no glimmer of glee from the fall of yesterday’s American Idols. Not even old standbys like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter have been able to jolt me back to my accustomed highs of outrage and hysteria. Outrage has passed to ennui. I patrol the Internet, getting no satisfaction, checking my in-boxes reflexively, feeling like a monkey with a cocaine habit. Not even the potential of U.S. President George Bush playing the fool in Singapore, Vietnam, and Indonesia raised my spirits.

Bush’s visit to the region should have stirred old instincts. In my reporting days, it would have been time to suit up in dress shirt and khakis, grab recorder, pens, notepads, extra batteries, laptop, and mobile phone, and join the press gaggle. Security agents wouldn’t have allowed my colleagues and I to waylay Bush like we used to manhandle oil officials and executives across Asia, but we could have tackled the minor officials and hangers-on for real quotes to go with the dry comments of the official press conferences. And there would have been plenty of man-in-the-street interviews, maybe with some Bogor bakso and drink vendors, who no doubt got bang-up business in November from all the extra policeman, soldiers, and protesters.

But Bush’s visit left me flat, without any wish-I-was-there wistfulness. More and more, I find myself watching all realms of officialdom, and thinking the Marx brothers, Danny Kaye, and Charlie Chaplin have all done the same show, only better and funnier. It all suddenly looks so slapstick to me, from the military juntas and the self-congratulating political strongmen of Asia, to the self-important bureaucrats of international development banks and the United Nations, to the masters of the non-apology apology ‘statesmen’ of Western democracies.

It makes me feel uncomfortably jaded, this cynicism. I’m half ready – God help me -- to take up Bubba’s six-pack and forgo the news to potter about pleasantly in the rice fields. But I can’t afford to be a cynic for long. Fathers (mothers, too) can’t be cynics. Fathers without hope – without some belief that this life or a next offers something better than what we see when we look at the world without the rosy-shaded filter of an off-the-rack, all’s well philosophy – give only despair to their children, and that’s a terrible thing to give a child of any age. Some belief has to leaven the cynicism. Complete unbelief and distrust is no more sophisticated than straight-down-the-line doctrinal adherence to any governmental or religious creed.

So I’m done being the canary down in the news mines, risking my sanity digging for the evidence that the whole beetling shebang is going to tumble down on our heads, risking the end of standing on a street corner mumbling to myself and shouting incoherent prophecies about the stock market collapsing if Angelina Jolie’s lips get any bigger. Christmas is just around the corner, and I welcome back my habit of thinking at this time of year that everything good and true is possible, that at the bottom of every pile of manure there has to be at least one pony, that even if my glass of eggnog is empty there is still a pitcher in the fridge and a bottle of rum in the cabinet.

Oh, I’ll come right about mid-January, revived by the resurrecting power of the New Year, the ritualistic washing away of the sins and excesses of 2006, able to face the dim hope of the warming, erratic, warring, irrational, bloody world with a bitter smile, a shouted laugh, and new appreciation of the absurd. They haven’t got me yet, and I’m already feeling better. Really.

I’ve got a new umbrella; only acorns fall on it. Not a thing to worry about. Hear me whistling? Chirping, even … I’m fine now … Was that a pussy cat?

Copyright © 2006 Lee Roy LeRoi