Every time I move, my library goes into storage. It’s frustrating, but when I finally have a space, the Christmas-like experience of unpacking all of those books, some that I love, some that I love to hate, made it all worth it. The joy of pulling them out of the box and reliving, even if just for a moment, the best of them reminds me why I go through the backbreaking effort to haul the thousands of pounds of books every time I have to move.
There are certain books, though, that are in a category all alone. Books that are dangerous. Books that were like cliffs on ski hill. Once you point the tips over the edge, there is no going back. Many of these point-of-no-return books are out of print in our dry and dreary land. For some, the word got out that they were dangerous, so people began to hush them up. Sometimes we hush the dangerous books by moving them to the academic aisle of the book store. By printing them behind covers that make them sound old and smart. Sometimes we shut them up by pretending they never existed in the first place. Or we shut them up by making so many cheap imitations that we forget the glory of the original.
But as I unpack my library, the books that did the most to peel away the plastic that encases the soul of every modern are each marked out like victims of a mugging. Held together by packing tape, missing covers, broken down the middle. They have illegible spines, torn spines, and missing spines. My first copy of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, given to me when I was still writing in all capital letters (as is evidenced by my name scrawled on the inside cover) is well worn. I still remember all of the pictures. My first copy of Narnia, given to me by my now deceased father. It’s quite obvious to the naked eye which was my favorite. Reepicheep standing on the prow of the Dawn Treader is, to this day, the image I most want my life to reflect. I can still feel the struggle within Caspian as he realizes that he is going back to Narnia with the ship.
There are many others in a variety of categories, from the dystopian novels that taught me reality, to the stories of Middle Earth that taught me what I wanted to see reality transformed into. But the book that is in the worst shape because I literally read it to pieces, the book that I retaped several times is "A Walk Across America" by Peter Jenkins. There was no book that sparked desires so deep and lasting. Jenkins story of he and his dog's step by step journey across the breadth of my country still echoes in my soul. I used to put on my dad's neon orange Backpacker's Special and plan the route of my adventure.
The longing to leave behind what I knew to discover the real, to discover the true, is the longing that defined childhood innocence for me. The longing that I also found welling up in my soul as I cramped into my neighbor’s basement storage room with an old record player and an old 45 of John Denver's "Wild Montana Skies." There was a place where people found real connections to the world. The kind of simple connection that Janis Joplin made with Bobby Mcgee. The simplicity of "Come on Darling, put a pretty dress on, we're going to go out to tonight, to dance, dance, dance." Where things were not wispy and insubstantial. The belief that people could connect with one another.
It was what I lost to the beautiful despair of Paul Simon. When I was an atheist, I believed that everything was technically empty and meaningless. The only thing to do was embrace the thin shell of our heartless world that was all there was to this machine we call life.’
The longing of the Kingston Trio singing,
You can't jump a jet plane/ Like you can a freight train/ So I'd best be on my way/ In the early morning rain.
was just longing. Meaning was a jet plane, you couldn’t get to it unless it landed and made itself available to you. But the world didn’t do that.
I found in Paul Simon’s housewife’s emptiness, whose life is slip-sliding away, and the boxer finding refuge from the emptiness in the arms of a whore, a reflection of my own inability to hold the smoke of meaning in my hands. I lost the youthful ideal that there was something real in the world somewhere, if you were willing to give up everything but the clothes on your back to find it. The world, I had discovered, was a cold-fingered machine. Soul-less, heartless, spirit-starved, and empty as the depths of deepest darkest space.
Of course, at that point in my life, I hadn't heard of the music of the spheres, so when, I declared myself an atheist my sixth grade year, I didn't have enough education to know that the cosmological assumptions that I held were a novelty. I was still unaware that anything approaching proof for them was tenuous at best. But I entered seventh grade full of scientific hope that I had given up Reepicheep and the Round Table for something real and worthwhile. It wasn't long before I was knee deep in the empty angst of a cynic and a skeptic. I had been sure, all evidence to the contrary, that mankind was basically good, but when Lord of the Flies ripped even that from me, I was stuck with a decision to make.
And that was when I discovered Nirvana. Not the state of mind, the band. It could have come from my own gut. I was pulled to it and it shook my soul. I distinctly remember standing in the gymnasium of Sacajawea Middle School, at the final dance of the year when Smells Like Teen Spirit came on. The world shifted beneath my feet.
This was the soundtrack to the world that I believed in. This was the musical equivalent to the revolution going on in my head. If the cosmos was mostly empty, dark, and dead, then I was nothing but a complicated germ. A monkey, but less fun.
I test drove many different attempts at atheistic meaning before I began to question my atheism. But I also was not converted in a one off experience where I suddenly came to believe. I went back and forth between belief in atheism and belief in God. I would have questions, find answers and think that I had begun to believe in God, and then I would come across another argument, idea, or question and go back into skeptic mode.
One of the first things that I discovered was that there were Christians that were much more fluent in the questions than even I was. I was not greeted with suspicion, nor were my questions greeted with fear. In fact, many of the Christians I met had read more books by skeptics and atheists than I had. And that openness to questions, that living without fear of truth, was one of the most important first discoveries about God. He is not afraid of our questions, nor obliged to answer them all.
I was wrong, but if I would have, at that point come come into contact with the actual world, I probably would have thought that I had tipped into the looney bin.
When I would, years later, first read Pilgrims Regress by C.S. Lewis and watch layers of false reality be peeled into piles, I would remember Peter Jenkins and his dog at the basketball court, connecting with his black family, wearing a lime green suit and white platform shoes, and see the answer to my angst.
But I am ahead of myself. These are my confessions.
This is the story of my discovery that the world is not boring. I was never an excitingly immoral atheist, (none of my exciting immorality came until after I believed). I didn’t even do any drugs. But I wanted the truth. I hope that my reflections and confessions will help you as you search.