Whatever Gods There Be
When despair pulls you down, belief can be your lifeline. I believe in friendship. How about you?
When I was a teenage atheist, I boarded a bus with a couple dozen of my kind, toting our knapsacks and guitars. We had come from all over New England for the trek to western Massachusetts, there to join the seasonal conference of Liberal Religious Youth. The cool kids must have loaded up on condoms and nickel bags of dope. At my last LRY shindig, where the blackboard noted time for RECREATION, some wit drew a line through the first two letters and wrote in PRO.
LRY was the refuge of shit-disturbers, misfits and angel-headed teenage hipsters. The love child of Unitarianism and Universalism, it had the unheard-of freedom to govern itself, with grownups on the sidelines as advisors. I never met an LRYer who admitted to believing in God. LRYers believed in Bob Dylan, Timothy Leary and Martin Luther King (although some of us were drifting toward Stokely Carmichael).
LRY was supposed to be a place where I belonged, for faithkeeping without the inconvenience of God. Instead it was one more place to be alone.
Our bus had barely left Boston when the cool high-school senior behind me put the moves on my seatmate, a pigtailed 13-year-old who could have been Beth in Little Women, if Beth had worn a lumberjack shirt and had just arrived on the pilgrim fathers’ turf from wacky southern California. She described the foibles of erstwhile neighbors with tender bemusement that in my view they didn’t deserve. Mr. Cool had been eavesdropping on us, but it was open-hearted Beth, not cynical me, who caught his attention.
She had just suggested, ever so gently, that my intractable aloneness might have something to do with my attitude when Mr. Cool leaned over the seat and flashed a smile. He lost no time locking his lips on hers as if it were last call for kissing. Try as I did to scrunch into my seat like a crushed sliver of myself, I couldn’t dodge the pair’s bobbing heads or Mr. Cool’s elbow as his hand fumbled with Beth’s shirt buttons. Switching seats could have spared me hours of silent anguish. At 16, I saw no way out.
“Tell me, Rona. What is the purpose of life?” My father sat at the head of the table, his white hair standing up. Nobody else’s father had white hair, or walked with a brass-handled stick. Not even my mother knew about these nocturnal interrogations at the table. I was probably nine, shivering in my nightie.
“The purpose of life is to have a good time while you’re here.”
My father groaned like a dying man. He slammed the table with his fist. A clear liquid quivered in his glass. At last he spoke as if from a pulpit. “The purpose of life is to save your soul!”
My father’s parents, both many years dead, were Plymouth Brethren missionaries who scorned the pleasures of this world—music, dancing, all ways to spend Sunday but reading the Bible. For the sin of painting on the Lord’s day, my father lost his paintbox for a year. His mother, a fiery preacher, was denied a flock on account of her gender but terrorized her children with visions of hell. Both Maynard grandparents viewed the Brethren as the only true champions of Christ and all others as mere pretenders, especially the benighted Catholics.
My father stormed out of the Brethren and chose art as his faith. Every new idea his parents feared, he embraced. He craved more of it all, with vodka. He and my mother, who was Jewish, had their differences on the vodka. When it came to places of worship, they agreed: They only went for weddings and funerals.
That night at the dining room table, I longed for the comfort of my bed but my father wasn’t done with me. Hunched and sighing, he began to orate. A psalm, he told me. “As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God….”
What kind of god would let him suffer so? God was either just plain cruel or a fiction.
I once had a mentor who reminded me of my father. She had broken with her family’s Catholic faith to pursue creative and romantic adventures, drinking hard along the way. After losing a senior job at a glossy magazine in New York, she found sobriety in A.A. and a safe harbor at the little magazine in Toronto where I had been striving to prove myself. I would hover at her office door after hours, hoping for a one-on-one with the flame-haired, Western-booted pathfinder who held my future in her hands.
Keitha McLean used to speak of “whatever gods there be.” She had no use for any kind of doctrine, but projected battle-tested belief in something greater than herself, a force for good that pulled her up when she stumbled. On bad days, she yelled at trifles. She could slam a door so hard, the walls shook. Yet as she wrote in an editorial, addressing young women more or less my age (almost 30), “Yes, we acknowledge those backsliding times, the days, weeks or months even, when what seems sensible is to pull the covers over your head and order in pizza all weekend, or drink too much and pop pills when you know you shouldn’t.” In September, 1979, no other magazine talked to women like Keitha’s newly relaunched Flare.
Keitha had a spiritual guide, the Twelve Steps. She never proselytized. Only now, 45 years on, do I see her living the steps as best she could. Step 12 called her to follow the program in all her affairs, including her work as my boss. She challenged me to write as my one and only self, but also to cultivate courage, hope and personal responsibility. Like Beth on that long-ago LRY bus, she saw the burden of anger I carried. She also had the life experience to see the cause: the family secret of my father’s drinking. He had lately joined A.A. with the zeal of a convert, embracing the Higher Power as his parents had their God.
I wanted to rejoice in his attempted sobriety, but it pained me. What took him so long? Why did he let his drinking steal my childhood?
Keitha said, “You know, Rona, nobody ever wakes up in the morning and says, ‘Gee, I think I’ll become an alcoholic.’ In the beginning, booze solves a problem. It knocks off all the rough edges. And then it becomes the problem.”
Some years after I left that job, I decided to give Al-Anon a try. I couldn’t get past the third step: We “made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him.” I told Keitha this God stuff would never work. I was having none of the old patriarch in the sky.
Keitha heard me out with unjudging patience. Twenty-nine years after her death, I still miss that power she had to wrap me in the balm of her attention. Her reply that day was like water from a spring that had opened for me alone. “God can be whatever gets you out of bed in the morning. Whatever you hold onto when your plans fall apart and you’re thrown back to square one. Whatever is true and beautiful in your eyes.”
My doubt that God existed had a counterweight, my mentor’s doubt that atheists existed—and, if any did, that I was one.
A slim, pale man with diplomas on his wall once told me how to manage my relentless insomnia. Lie awake no more than 20 minutes, then read a soothing book until the yawning starts. I used to swear by The Autobiography of Alice. B. Toklas, in which Picasso is always about to arrive while strivers rub shoulders with sensations and Gertrude Stein contemplates her own genius.
This is no night for Gertrude Stein. Tonight I’m afraid for the world, not for my lucky self, still writing and kvetching and walking our chipper old dog well into my 70s, a decade many friends of mine didn’t live to see. My brain ricochets from fire to flood, the plight of the republic to the slaughter of innocents.
Four words come to me: “Deep calleth unto deep.” Which psalm is that? My phone sits on top of Gertrude Stein. Thank you, Google. Psalm 42, the King James version. My history with Psalm 42 goes back to my wild-haired and drunken father. It begins,
As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God.
2 My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God: when shall I come and appear before God?3 My tears have been my meat day and night, while they continually say unto me, Where is thy God?
My father read the psalm as a lamentation, and at first I did too. Loss and longing crash through the lines like waves over the prow of an imperiled ship. The speaker is cut off from his spiritual community, scorned by his enemies, drowning in grief: “Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterspouts: all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me.”
If my father and I could read the psalm now, both clear-headed, I’d call his attention to the speaker’s unquenchable hope. For all his desperation, he hasn’t lost faith. “Hope thou in God,” he says—twice. He projects the authority of one who’s been tested before and recovered his purpose.
At 16 I’d never been tested. Now that life has knocked me around, I find inspiration in his words. Veering between anguish and belief, he concludes on a note of affirmation: “Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted within me? hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him, who is the health of my countenance, and my God.”
My father praised God in his fashion. After my mother threw him out of their stately old house in New Hampshire, the billows of loss broke over his head. Then he returned to his creative roots in British Columbia and recommitted to landscape art that pulsed with lyricism. Collectors noticed Max Maynard for the first time in decades. The attraction was not originality but the joy he had salvaged from a lifetime of drinking. He credited the Higher Power and the support of his A.A. community.
After he died in 1982, I inherited the A.A. notebooks that record both his ongoing struggle with the Twelve Steps and contact details for the group that sustained him. My father had spent some 30 years as a professor of literature; many in his group had little formal education. They would hang on every word of the welcome speech in which he compared their recovery to Dante’s Divine Comedy, a climb from the pit of hell to the mountains of purgatory. He dignified their quest, and they loved him for it. More than anything he wrote himself, it’s their names and jottings that move me.
I picture my father at the page on which a fellow drunk has noted, in a childlike hand, that he owns a car—vital information to my elderly, arthritic father, who often needed rides to his medical appointments. This kind man then added, “Thanks for your friendship.”
No one but my father ever asked me the purpose of life. I’ve come to think the essence is a single word—love in all its forms, for the people we hold dear, the amazements of the world and the devotion of expressing them as our particular gifts allow. We sing, paint, bake and write. We nurture gardens and children. We share what we’ve learned about anything from poetry to yoga poses. We honor whatever gods there be.
Thank you for your friendship.
What keeps you going when the billows break over your head? Does your faith involve a place of worship or simply a place in your heart? How about the purpose of life? And I have to ask: Any former LRYers here? This is the place to share your thoughts and hard-won experience. I do my best to answer every comment.
If this post resonated with you, check out “A Melancholic’s Guide to Happiness.” For another story about my father (and an artist friend’s revealing portrait of him), see “How to Be a Friend.”
All my posts are free to read, yet some readers of heart and means are paying for subscriptions just because. What a feeling! Still, I can’t say it too many times: I’m here to meet a community of readers, not to pay the bills, and you are all among the great joys of my life. Feel free to share—you’ll be spreading the word about Amazement Seeker.
Ah yes. LRY, which eventually gave way to the aptly named YRUU, when the burden of teen pregnancies became too heavy, even for the open-minded Unitarian Universalists. My parents raised us UU, the only possible compromise for my Episcopalian mother and my cult-survivor, atheist father (he who was raised in the flat-earth, faith-healing theocracy at Zion, Illinois). My dad eventually returned to his religious roots and died a street corner preacher, felled by untreated cancer which he was certain he could cure by prayer. I've tried several times to write the Books of Zion; thank you for the inspiration to try again.
Rona,It's Sunday morning here, and after reading this I feel like I just "went to church, whatever church there be!" I'm thinking of my many years of ALANON, and the heartbreak of the alcoholics in my life, and how I had to just stop going when my daughter died recently. I'm struggling with it! Instead, or in place of, I'm writing about her. Just for me. Thanks for your words. I feel a little less lost because of them.