Before I knew anything about being saved from hell, I remember a beautiful sadness I experienced the previous summer when I was sixteen. My grandmother had died a few months before, and I was spending the summer with my grandfather. I was sad about losing my grandmother, of course, but I didn’t have a fear of hell at the time, so I wasn’t obsessing over my grandmother’s eternal fate. That summer in Los Angeles Steely Dan’s popular “Deacon Blues” was getting a lot of radio airtime. The song is so sad. It’s about this saxophone player who drinks scotch whiskey, has illicit affairs, lives as an outcast, is afflicted with depression, doesn’t sleep at night, but has a code to be true to himself. He is the “expanding man” and he is free because no matter how bad life gets, inside and out, he maintains his authentic self. The song became a sort of anthem for me that summer. “Deacon Blues” was like a religion in that the song for all its melancholy, stirred something hopeful and beautiful inside me. And this is from someone who doesn’t like alcohol.
A year later when I was afraid of hell and I was attending church, I had found a new religion and a new sadness, but there was no beauty in the new religion. I didn’t’ feel the connection to something higher in myself like when I listened to “Deacon Blues.” Rather, I felt caged-in, coerced into submission, and separated from myself. I was not the expanding man. I was the constricted man. I was a balled-up nervous wreck, the embodiment of repression.
Here’s a crazy memory I have about the loss of my old self. On my high school graduation day, a girl who had an inexplicable crush on me gave me a gag gift—a blue baseball cap with Mercury’s wings on it. The wings were bright yellow and contrasted with the light blue cap. I remember wearing the hat all day. I still wore the hat after school. It was after dinner, and I sat on the floor of my room while praying to God to understand how he could be the attainment of perfect love while sending people to hell. I remember my recently divorced mom and her friends coming into the room to congratulate me for graduating, and I lowered the bill of the cap over my eyes so they couldn’t see that I was crying.
I was supposed to be happy that I had graduated from high school, and I was supposed to be happy that I had been saved. Church members were so elated for my conversion and my quick study of the Bible, but I felt empty inside. I don’t think I could acknowledge it at the time, but deep down I must have known I had betrayed myself. My faith was supposed to bring me completion and fulfillment. Jesus talked about the abundant life and the pastors talked about the perfect unconditional love of God, but I found myself missing the guy who could sit and listen to the real sense of sadness from “Deacon Blues.”
When I was seventeen, I was watching Pat Robertson on television talk about the despair that afflicted secular society. He referred to a popular song at the time, “Dust in the Wind” by Kansas. Dust was the only thing secular society had to offer, the preacher said. Sad and befuddled, Robertson shook his jowls at the camera and asked rhetorically, “What is it with all this dust?”
To me, songs like “Dust in the Wind” and “Deacon Blues” were part of the poetic lamentations tradition of the Old Testament. It was good to unleash one’s despair in a song or a poem. Ecclesiastes was like that. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had a melancholy streak and music spoke to that more than Pat Robertson’s bleached fundamentalism. Sad music was about embracing one’s despair and confronting one’s despair was cathartic. Kierkegaard wrote, “Despair is not knowing it.” “Deacon Blues” made me know my despair so that as a contradiction I was no longer beholden to that despair.
Perhaps it’s my fault, but the way religion has filtered through my brain has been destructive and repressive. It’s pent up my despair and all these decades since hearing “Deacon Blues” on the radio I still long for what feels like the real religion I experienced before I knew anything about religion.
Sometimes when I talk to Christians and tell them I’m an agnostic, they tell me to pray about my doubts to Jesus, that he will have compassion on me, and answer my prayers. I’m usually touched by the compassion I hear in these Christians’ voices, but the painful part for me is that I find it difficult to tell these well-meaning people that I’ve been praying to Jesus about this pain and doubt for decades, but that the suffering has continued unabated. In fact, I find it even more difficult to say that I wonder if the Christian God as I experienced him has been an impediment to my growth as a human being and has been the very source of the pain I’ve been praying about.
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