Many people reading this will have no idea what that means, but briefly, Bryn Athyn is a suburb of Philadelphia. It is (or was – I haven’t lived there in decades) very much a bubble, a pleasant Christian community centered around a church that is officially called The New Church but more colloquially the Swedenborgian Church. Many families in Bryn Athyn have lived there for generations.

I went to the Bryn Athyn Church Elementary School as it was called at the time, then the Bryn Athyn Boys School. I was valedictorian of my graduating class in eighth grade. I grew up singing in all kinds of Bryn Athyn choirs and ensembles, played trumpet in the Bryn Athyn orchestra, performed in dozens if not hundreds of church and community functions over the years. I believed in, and aspired to everything my neighbors would have associated with the label “good Bryn Athyn boy.”

Now, at 41, I almost never think about Bryn Athyn, or the church.

I moved away soon after graduating from high school, and I didn’t attend church at all for about two decades – really until I started dating a Catholic woman a few years ago. I’m married to her now, and for the last few years I’ve accompanied her to church on the high holidays and around certain special family occasions.

I’m certainly not the only person who grew up in the heart of a church community then left and never looked back, but I’ve been reflecting on my particular journey over the past few weeks, so I thought I’d write about it.

I didn’t shed my “New Churchness” immediately when I moved away. After Bryn Athyn, I lived in New York City, and my roommates were old Bryn Athyn friends. We didn’t attend church at that time, but it still felt very much a part of my DNA. I can’t speak for my roommates, but I think they felt the same way. I’m embarrassed to admit I was still a virgin, and my roommates were as well until they ultimately married each other. I was still very much intending to hold onto my virginity until… well, if not marriage then at least until I met the person I intended to marry.

At the same time, my horizon was rapidly broadening. Our circle of friends in New York was much wider – culturally speaking – than anything we could have cultivated in Bryn Athyn. I had gay friends for the first time in my life – that I was aware of anyway. I also had good friends who were Muslim, Jewish, Buddhists, atheists, pot smokers, political activists. Many of my friends were single and regularly set out to meet – and sleep with – people of the opposite sex (I know, amazing!). I knew many couples who were living together with no plans to marry, as well as couples who were divorced and still living together, and friends who were in uncomfortable (to me) open relationships. I laugh now to remember how new it was and how radical it all seemed at the time.

What I started to learn very quickly though, was that my friends’ “lifestyles” were not really defining principles per se, but merely details in the rich tapestries of their lives. Homosexuality wasn’t the single defining factor of my gay friends for example any more than the fact that they were white or Hispanic or parents or artists or cancer survivors. I didn’t choose (or reject) my friends because of their lifestyles. They were my friends because I admired and enjoyed them for their compassion, kindness, integrity, intellect, creativity, curiosity, humor, humility.

Maybe I felt some initial dissonance when I first considered things about them I ostensibly disagreed with alongside their objectively good qualities, but I don’t remember experiencing any such feeling. I didn’t imagine those friendships as having asterisks. There’s no denying my friends engaged in things I was told were wrong – or even evil. I had been taught that even some of the things they did alone or only with other consenting adults – which affected no one else in any measurable way – were harmful to their souls, and indeed the collective “soul” of any society that permits such things.

At the time I didn’t feel any dissonance between my friends’ supposed badness and their obvious goodness, but I feel it now as I look back, and I can pinpoint this as the time I really began to reject many of the things I’d been taught growing up.

I’d been taught that my friends’ behaviors were things that were corroding them from the inside, like a spiritual cancer. I was just supposed to believe this, even in the face of their many virtues. My New Church friends would have expected me to put asterisks on those friendships or end them entirely, on the basis of behaviors that don’t hurt anyone. It’s qualities like compassion, kindness, humility and integrity that truly make a difference in the world, and it was obvious to me that these qualities are totally disconnected from a person’s sexual orientation, virginity status, opinions about marijuana and so on.

It’s funny to write this now because it has seemed so self-evident to me for so long, and most of my friends would have trouble seeing it any other way. But many of my old New Church friends would totally disagree with the way I see things now.

Anyway, from New York I moved to Phoenix and eventually to Tucson, where there was a thriving New Church community. I didn’t participate though. I never even found myself in the neighborhood of the church until more than a year after I arrived, when another Bryn Athyn friend moved to Tucson with his wife. They were active in the church, and I attended once or twice with them.

I didn’t avoid the church out of any kind of principle. I had simply drifted away from it, and it hardly seemed relevant to my life anymore.

My occasional contact with that church and others, however, often left a bad taste. The pastors in their sermons, and my church acquaintences in conversations, would pronounce sweeping judgments against people based on the lifestyles I’d come to see as benign details of my friends’ private lives. They would also speak with utter certainty about things I’d come to see as fuzzy and unknowable.

As an aside, it’s fair to say I distrust certainty by default. Certainty without evidence or logic is dangerous. Without evidence or logic, “certainty” is really just ideology, and ideology has led humanity to dark dark places.

Also, one group’s ideology can so easily collide with another group’s, which is what the landscape of religion feels like to me. Every religion claims to be the one true religion, which means that almost everyone is wrong by definition. On top of that, most religions would reject or damn a lot of people I truly admire, based on details that don’t remotely define them as people.

On the other hand, I recognize that church communities do a lot of great things. A coworker of mine, for example, is involved with a group through his church that sponsors schools for autistic children in poor countries – where such children are otherwise abused and neglected. I’m a big fan of churches as a vehicle for this kind of enterprise, and churches are arguably the most effective possbile means of mobilizing people toward good deeds.

Of course, churches have historically engaged in these kinds of pursuits partly as a way to spread themselves, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I imagine much of this is motivated by a belief in their own righteousness and a genuine desire to “save” people who would otherwise go to hell. On the other hand, I imagine there is also a certain amount of pure profit motive there too.

My church was somewhat different in the sense that it didn’t work very hard to spread itself. We were taught that divine providence was at work everywhere, and that the “church” is really an internal thing within every individual. We were taught, of course, that our church alone held the whole story – that it was the one true religion – but also that it wasn’t necessary to know or even believe the whole story or belong to our church to be saved.

This is the essence of my response when religious people ask, “what if you’re wrong?” By this they mean, what if you – an atheist – are wrong in thinking that god does not exist. Most of these people think that people like me are bound for hell, but I believe that if I’m wrong and there is a god, then god is like the one I learned about in my church. This god doesn’t require me to belong to any particular church or subscribe to a particular set of beliefs; this god only requires that I do my best to act with compassion, kindness, integrity, humility…

These days I go to church a few times a year, and mostly it affirms my disinterest in the whole thing, for the reasons I’ve already stated, and also for its unrelenting mediocrity. To put it bluntly, most ministers and priests suck at preaching. They have large captive audiences week after week, and so often they drone through academic dissections of doctrine or trot out tired clichés. I don’t know which is worse, but it irks me to see such wasted opportunities.

In my church, there was always a lot of abstract discussion about what we called “correspondences” in the bible. References to “water” for example were really talking about “truth,” but it was the rare sermon that succeeded in connecting this abstract notion of “truth” to the real challenges and questions in our daily lives. What does “truth” really mean? What are some concrete examples? It’s sad how few ministers and priests are capable of telling a compelling story and making it stick.

I live in San Francisco now, and I’m as solid in my non-belief as ever. My experience continues to confirm that religion doesn’t have any kind of monopoly on goodness or principled living (and non-belief has no correlation to the contrary). Many of my non-religious friends work more tirelessly on behalf of their fellow man than anyone I knew growing up in my church community. And many people in our culture – religious and otherwise – go to work every day knowing on some level that their employers are complicit in various evils and abuses. In short, goodness and badness in all of us.

My Christian past feels like a dream of a former life. A mostly happy dream that opened my mind in certain ways (while keeping it closed in others). I’ve awakened from that dream, and I’ll never belong to a church again. Luckily my Catholic wife is OK with that. I’m happy in my non-belief, but I’m no less good for not believing.

I just finished watching the second season of Mad Men, and I’m left with a familiar bittersweet feeling. The same one you get when you finish a great book. I don’t often get this feeling from a TV show, so I’ve begun to reflect a little on what it is that makes the show so good. One thing, of course, is the place and time.

1960 in America

Setting a show in 1960 was a stroke of pure genius. America, having recovered from World War II hit it’s stride in the 1950s. The country was enjoying an unprecedented era of era of prosperity. The big companies that created the machinery of modern warfare reinvented themselves as purveyors of household magic. Plastic revolutionized packaging and changed the whole concept of disposable goods. Chemicals emerged to ensure everything from green lawns to wrinkle-free clothing. A proliferation of new gadgets promised to erase every inconvenience from our lives. This is when Modern America was born. We were seduced by technology, and we never looked back.

At the same time, there was so much about America in 1960 that seems so quaint and primitive now. Often comically so. There’s a voyeuristic joy in watching kids play spacemen in front of their parents by putting plastic bags over their heads. Seatbelts didn’t even exist yet. Pregnant women smoked and drank. Everyone, for that matter, smoked and drank constantly – even at work. Every executive had “a girl” to take care of all the minutiae of meetings and phone calls (plus coffee, dry-cleaning and sometimes other “perks”). “Homos” were perverts, and “negroes” were only fit for household help and operating elevators.

Looking back on this era is to witness the fascinating disconnect between what Americans in 1960 believed about themselves – and their culture and their country – and what we now understand to be the reality. This makes for many gasp-producing, head-shaking moments. But I believe there’s also something much more personal going on. I suspect that in 2009 there is a similar disconnect at play in America.

1960 as a mirror

The Internet has resurrected our reverence for technology and our faith in technology’s ability to solve our problems (if it ever went away). We constantly crave the next new thing – then we adopt it, adapt to it, become disillusioned by it and discard it. This whole cycle can happen over a few months or even weeks.

Today, for example, everyone seems to be excited about Twitter’s third anniversary. At the same time they’re wondering if Facebook’s home page redesign is a harbinger of impending decline.

Women and minorities have come a long way of course. There are whole categories of things we consider unjust today that were acceptable in 1960, but there is still plenty of injustice in the world. And for the most part we still coast through our lives, blissfully untouched by it.

So partly, we love Mad Men for the same reason we love most great stories – because we recognize ourselves in the characters, and we see our world in the one they inhabit.

…faith tells [believers] they should read the Bible, but by reading the Bible they endanger their faith.

The SAB’s annotations flag things like

* Injustice
* Absurdity
* Cruelty and Violence
* Intolerance
* Contradictions
* Family Values
* Good Stuff
* Science and History
* Interpretation

One of the Bible stories that always bothered me is the story of God testing Abraham’s faith by asking him to sacrifice his only son Isaac. The SAB’s annotated version of this story points out various contradictions between the story and other passages in the bible and notes the violence, injustice and family values problems in the story with common sense assesments like this:

Abraham shows his willingness to kill his son for God. Only any evil God would ask a father to do that; only a bad father would be willing to do it.

Let God defend God.

I remember spotting Yann Martel’s “Life of Pi” when it first started to appear in book shops. Its cover illustration is one of the loveliest to grace a book in recent memory and probably deserves some credit for the book’s instant popularity.

It’s a sweet book – not a lightweight story, but not life-changing one either. It tells the tale of a sixteen-year-old boy named Pi (short for Piscene, as in fish-ish) Patel who becomes the solitary human survivor of the sunk cargo ship, Tsintsum, adrift in a lonely lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific. His companions on the boat are a hyena, a zebra (with a broken leg), a female orang-utan and a 450 pound (205 kg) Bengal tiger bearing the unlikely name, Richard Parker.

Pi’s father was a zookeper. A third of the way into the book, he decides to sell off the zoo’s assets (the animals) and move his family from their lifelong home of Madras, India to Winnipeg, Canada. Several of the animals are bound for North American zoos, and these embark with the Patel family on the Tsintsum.

In the first few days adrift, the hyena kills the zebra and the orang-utan, and the tiger kills the hyena. Left on the boat for the remaining 240-plus days, then, are Pi and Richard Parker.

To the amusement and occasional chagrin of his atheist father, Pi is a devout Christian, Muslim and Hindu. Yes, all three. He was born a Hindu. On a family holiday, he strikes up a sort of tutelage-cum-friendship with the local priest. Later, he wanders into a mosque in his home city and strikes up a similar relationship with the Imam there.

The merging and juxtaposition of oft-opposing faiths seems to be a theme of my trip to asia so far. It was central to the play, godeatgod we saw a couple of weeks ago, and it manifested itself as well in the recent holiday weekend here – (Hindu) Deepavali on Thursday and (Muslim) Hari Raya on Sunday. In all these manifestations, the faiths manage to coexist in harmony.

In a way, the recent reelection of president Bush is a thread in the same tapestry – representing the antithesis of harmonious coexistence. The world these days seems more polarised than I can ever remember it, and at the root of all the discord and violence is the inability of extremists of different faiths to tolerate the ideologies of those who do not believe in the same things – or even who do believe in the same things, but not to the same degree.

It was the fundamentalist Christians who decided the US election. In huge numbers they voted against their own foreign and domestic policy interests. It was more important to them in the end to elect someone who they knew would fight to outlaw same-sex marriage, abortion, stem cell research, someone who would fight for prayer in schools and equal time for the creationist science curriculum.

It was the fundamentalist muslims who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001, and it is the fundamentalist commercial barons who pushed most aggressively to “liberate” Iraq.

Fundamentalists are blind – whether acting in the name of God, Allah, mother earth or the almighty dollar – they’re all blind to shades of grey. They see the world in black and white. Specifically, they see themselves in white and everyone else in black.

Nonetheless, there is a value in black-white thinking. Those who see only grey tend to simply drift – like Pi in his lifeboat. They tolerate everything except intolerance in other people. They value freedom, and they exercise it aggressively. In that sense, grey-only thinking can be like a lifeboat would be with a sail – catching the wind and going wherever it goes.

As the poet Kahlil Gibran said:

Your reason and your passion are the
rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul.
If either your sail or your rudder be
broken, you can but toss and drift, or else
be held at a standstill in mid-seas.
For reason, ruling alone, is a force con-
fining; and passion, unattended, is a flame
that burns to its own destruction.

One of my favorite books, Mishima’s Runaway Horses, is a brilliant and beautiful meditation on this theme.

It tells the story of a young and passionate patriot named Isao, who organises a plot against the industrialists who he believes are threatening the integrity of the Japanese way of life. It also continues the story of Honda, a successful Japanese businessman who is simply trying to make his way happily and comfortably through life, as mainly an observer.

That these two ways of seeing could ever coexist in harmony would seem impossible. They are philosophically icompatible. They have been in conflict with each other since the beginning of mankind’s dance on this planet. The hyena will kill the zebra and orang-utan. The tiger will kill the hyena. And it will always be so.

On our first or second day here, Tracy handed me an eye-catching post card, and ever since then I’d been spotting them around town.

post cards for godeatgod

The cards quote a review from the sold-out 2002 run and describe the show as “a layered and moving exploration of power, sexuality, spirituality and survival in the post-traumatic world”. A review in the Straits Times summed up the play as “the perfect antidote to rambling or too-glib experimental theatre pieces disconnected from the flesh-and-blood of human suffering”.

As such, we thought it might also be the perfect antidote to the painful US election results.

The Necessary Stage was a pretty typical black box theatre, seating perhaps 150 people in tight rows. As we made our way to our seats, I saw the three principal actors sitting on metal chairs, mid-stage. I also noticed that at the back of the stage, a litany of headlines and “big” questions was crawling across a news ticker:

Is art a luxury?
Is there more openness now?
Why love?
Why God?

Once we we were seated and before the lights dimmed, the playwright, Haresh Sharma, walked onto the stage to thank the audience for coming. He spoke in a gentle voice about his motivation for the play and how he wanted, basically, to help perpetuate love and understanding in the world. He talked, too, about the importance of action and the problem of inaction. The three actors heckled him a bit while he spoke, and I got the sense that he had encouraged them to do so, to keep his monologue from drifting into sanctimony.

He also shared a letter he had written to the IRO – Inter Religious Organization – as part of his research for the play, and he read some of the responses he received – from Muslim, Catholic, Hindu and Buddhist leaders.

As he finished speaking, the lights dimmed, and a lively pop beat piped up. The three actors whipped out pairs of goofy novelty eyeglasses and began to sing, as opening credits – movie style – played on three video screens at the back of the stage.

After the “credits”, one of the actors stepped up into what turned out to be a witness stand. It became clear that he was supposed to be God, and he was on trial. He spoke very softly into a microphone as he was questioned by the counselor representing – I suppose – the human race, and there was little about the actual cross-examination to distinguish God from any cult leader:

I have done nothing wrong.

You have killed hundreds and thousands of people.

I have not killed a single soul.

Those who kill, kill in your name, under your control.

I have never told anyone to kill. If they use my name, what can I do?

A Japanese woman walked slowly onto the stage. In her expression were fatigue and grief. She talked about her husband. It seemed he was in a coma.

After she spoke, the actors took turns telling stories of heroes from their own countries. The filipino actor told the story of freedom fighter, Benigno Aquino, who was assassinated in Manilla airport as he tried to exit a plane. The Singaporean actor talked about the Tiananmen Square massacre and the courage of the young man who famously stood in front of 17 moving tanks. The Malay actress talked about the man named Amrozi, who planted the bomb in the Balinese nightclub that killed almost 200 people.

The show went on like this. The actors spoke to the audience as themselves, then to each other in various characters. The Japanese woman appeared from time to time to continue the story of her dying husband. There was a sort of discussion period in the middle where the playwright posed questions to his “panel” of actors.

It was not always clear what was scripted and what wasn’t, and I think that was ultimately the genius of the piece. My sense in the end was that nearly all of it was scripted, which made the seemingly improvised moments seem that much more clever in retrospect.