The Believer, page 11
“Does that answer your question?” Katrina asks me. “What was it again?”
“It was how you became this strong,” I say.
“I’ve done a lot of therapy,” she smiles. Meditation, breath work for the “knots in the tummy,” retreats, journaling, a dream group with a Jungian analyst—weekly meetings for fifteen years.
“Had to deal with a bit of adversity too,” Peter adds, from his chair next to the couch. “Well, that’s how you get your strength. By not quitting, pushing through it.”
Peter is referring to her personal history, but she is still thinking about her work.
“I had a lot of wins,” Katrina nods. “Sometimes you don’t know they’re wins. I saw them over the years get better, have healthy relationships with their partners, just be able to sleep at night, have less trauma. That was very rewarding.”
Katrina’s father was a Christian Brother from the age of fifteen until the age of thirty-nine. Her mother, an opera singer with a master’s in music, was deeply religious; Katrina cries remembering the set of her “blank face.” But she is close with her siblings, still has the friendships she formed after being kicked out of home as a teenager for attending Satsang—a form of communal meditation and reflection.
If you continue to go to that and not to church, her parents said, you can’t live here. So she asked for a suitcase for her birthday and used it to move into a share house two kilometers away. Her mother never visited.
“Best thing I ever did,” she says, sitting up on the couch to take small sips of water and glycogen. “That’s one of the things that gave me the courage—meditation. So when I can’t sleep at night, I use my breath.”
She’s had three dreams in a row about death. “But anyway I woke up and I’m not dead,” she laughs, and Carol joins in, stroking the brown furry blanket as she re-tucks it around Katrina’s feet. Katrina is breathless. Closes her eyes; it hurts to turn them towards the periphery. She apologizes for not looking directly at me or at Annie.
“It’s not surprising that you’re dreaming about death,” Carol says. “Your psyche is processing stuff all the time now. There are aspects of yourself that are dying. You’re losing capacity to do things that you’ve done in the past. So your death dreams are probably about those things that are dying.”
Peter stares out the front window, his eyes like tunnels.
At this point, I thank Katrina for her time, turn my recorder off and close my notebook. She asks me to turn it back on. She wants to talk about another aspect of her life, wants it documented. It surprises me at first, what she wants to talk about.
She says: “I’m really proud of working with Victoria Police when they changed the family violence legislation to have a wider, broader context. I was still at South Eastern Center Against Sexual Assault, they gave me a secondment. So I helped change the definition of family violence. It was difficult being in that office, with all the men and that.”
She continues. She is also deeply proud of her role at the Australian Football League, working at the MCG sports stadium to implement cultural change around gender equality and raising awareness about violence against women and children. “It was very intimidating,” she explains, “but a very exciting place to be. I could see the place was changing . . .
“I was very proud of working at the MCG,” she says. “I knew I was going to die—I don’t know why, I just always knew—and I wanted the boys, every time they passed it on the train or went to a game there, to think of me and be proud of what I’d done.”
What surprises me about why Katrina wanted me to turn the recorder back on is not her pride in her professional roles—the worldly wins that we are told (women, especially) are “not what matters.” What surprises me is that Katrina’s rightful pride—her strong sense of self—is not in conflict with how reconciled she is to its imminent extinction.
It shows a dexterity that feels less like dissonance, more like dancing. It is probably the same dexterity that allowed her to steep herself in grief while remaining open enough to maintain thick, rich connections with herself and others. Doesn’t mean she’s not terrified. You can see that in the thoughts that ripple the muscles of her face like fish under water. But without fear there is no bravery.
“When I got those positions,” Katrina continues, “I was so proud of myself. That was all I’d talk about, because I was so proud of how I’d got there, I’d had a lot of failure, a lot of sadness.” For one minute the room lifts, is lighter.
“But it’s cost me.” She pauses.
This is when I feel it, the thought fluttering from her to me like a dark bird changing branches.
“Oh, this might’ve happened anyway . . .”
And what can someone whose work is also to listen, to collect stories; to remain authentic, to not look away; someone who has read hundreds of sexual assault cases; someone with her own sadness, her own knots in the tummy and memories of her own mother’s blank face; someone who does the therapy and the trauma counseling, the meditation and the breath work, who does the spin classes and eats right and loves her family and her friends; someone who is also proud of what she’s done, in spite of—
What, in the end, might someone do with that?
19
In the Beginning
Tim
“If evolution is real,” a woman is saying to her husband and young son, “why don’t mothers have five arms?” They laugh heartily as they pass by.
Cruising the exhibits inside the Ark Encounter, I am currently watching a man who is watching, with enormous concentration, an interactive screen demonstrating how “solid waste removal” from the ark may have worked. It’s taken an hour to make my way up from the bottom deck, through exhibits of animal cargo and the antediluvian world represented by detailed dioramas of people sinning extravagantly. Illustrated panels depicted man’s descent into darkness which involved: Violence, Music, Polygamy, Metalworking and Giants. The last panel, in which women drown as Noah sails off towards the horizon, asked: The pre-flood world was exceedingly wicked and deserved to be judged . . . Does our sin-filled world deserve any less?
Tim Chaffey, “content manager” for the Ark Encounter, writes the copy for these exhibits. Tim—who describes himself as “a husband, father, author, apologist, and theologian”—is a tall man with a stellar smile and a bald head as pleasingly shiny as a peeled egg. He seems younger than his mid-forties on account of the still-packaged Hot Wheels displayed on his office bookshelf, the chill way he leans back at his desk and the fact that he’s the kind of guy comfortable using the phrase “pretty neat.”
As an author, Tim has a varied oeuvre, though his tone is fairly consistent. Aside from numerous blog posts, he has written articles (for Answers Magazine), “In-Depth” articles (for Answers in Depth), movie reviews (for the Answers in Genesis website) and book chapters (see, for example, Demolishing Supposed Bible Contradictions volume two). In addition, he has co-authored a graphic novel (Searching for Truth), a youth fiction series (“to teach young people how to defend the faith”), book-length nonfiction (a “comprehensive biblical, theological and scientific critique of old-earth creationism” with “Jason Lisle, PhD in Astrophysics”) and historical fiction (a trilogy that takes an “imaginative and respectful look” at the “perilous situations” Noah finds himself in before and after the flood, at least one of which involves confronting a T. rex in front of an audience). Tim is also a cancer survivor. He was diagnosed with leukemia in July 2006 and has been in full remission since September of that year.
In a building down the road from the Creation Museum, I follow Tim through a vast and sparsely populated open-plan office. It could be any open-plan office, except that the cartoons tacked to the partitions are less likely to be jokes about office politics and more likely to mock the idea that the behemoth wasn’t real. A very young woman walks past in a sweatshirt featuring a cross and the statement This is illegal in some countries. In his small windowless office, Tim’s computer screen is open to an online Bible.
Surviving the cancer that was diagnosed the summer he stopped being a high school science teacher and started being a Bible teacher strengthened Tim’s faith. “I’d already believed what this ministry teaches about why there is death and suffering and disease. And that’s because God created a perfect world, and yet man ruined it through sin.
“I remember when I was being wheeled into the ICU thinking, ‘Okay, I’ve told my students time and time again that when things are good we praise God, and when things are tough we praise Him, and the reason things like this happen is because we’re sinful. Can I walk the walk?’
“I spent a month in the hospital. I was in very bad shape by the time I checked in. Who thinks the reason you’re anemic is, ‘Oh, you’ve got leukemia when you’re thirty-two?’ That wasn’t on my mind.” He laughs with a shrug. “When I googled it, it was, ‘Oh, it might be a heat rash.’
“But anyways,” he continues, “going through that process not only reinforced what I already believed to be true, but I guess every day you don’t take for granted anymore. I’ve been given a second chance. Lately, I’ve been forgetting that. I need to remember it. You know, it’s silly, but we get so focused on ourselves and what we’re doing. I could be six feet under. And so let me be thankful.”
Something clinks inside me at this, no greater than ice in a glass but just as clear. Finally, a bridge over the distance. Common ground. From this place, I think to myself, I will surely understand.
So I ask him to explain how we can be truly confident about what is meant literally in the Bible and what is meant figuratively and, in the end, why should that matter?
“Sure,” he says. “Well, you’re a writer. So, if you were to write something poetic, you would use different verb tenses—you know, if you were describing something, a lot of times you may write in present tense, you’re going to use a lot of metaphors, you’re going to describe things in similes, you know, ‘this is like a flower’.
“And Hebrew poetry is similar—lines are repeated. It’s not based on rhyme like it is in English. So we can recognize, generally speaking, what is poetic in Hebrew and what is narrative.”
I consider, for a moment, a world where narrative is always the opposite of poetry. Where you can say something or you can sing something but never both. While I now know where such a world can be found, I do not agree it is the one on which Tim and I were born, perpetually turning in a brightness in the darkness.
The distinction matters, Tim continues, not only for accuracy but for what it says about God’s character. God wouldn’t have called millions of years of death “very good,” would he?
“So, God calls death and suffering and diseases like cancer—because we find cancer as a tumor in dinosaur bones— ‘very good’?” he asks. “When I’m on the hospital bed, not knowing if I’m going to get out of there, is God ‘very good’? Because the thing that’s killing me. He said it’s very good. He likes it? It’s just the way He made it? Or is death an enemy as the New Testament talks about? In First Corinthians 15:26, is God the God of life, and death is an intrusion into this world? Something that is a result of what we’ve done in our rebellion?”
In 1973, Hannah Arendt became the first woman to deliver the Gifford Lectures, a series established in 1888 to promote the study of a strain of natural theology that strives to integrate science, history, philosophy and the arts into a particular vision of the place of humanity in the universe. These lectures formed the basis for her book The Life of the Mind, in which she explored the powers and limitations of our cognitive function. One of Arendt’s most powerful insights is a warning against mistaking knowledge for thought, and truth for meaning.
“Truth” refers to fact knowable through scientific methods of reasoning and error-correction. Truth is the what. Meaning is the why, and the nature of its questions are that they are “all unanswerable by common sense and the refinement of it we call science.” Meaning, however, is no less important than truth and may be more so, given the immensity of what remains unknown to us.
“[T]o lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking and cease to ask unanswerable questions would [be to] lose not only the ability to produce those thought-things that we call works of art but also the capacity to ask all the answerable questions upon which every civilization is founded,” Arendt wrote. In other words, our social survival—even our physical survival—is bound up with our spiritual survival and it might rely, as a matter of first principles, more on the aspirations underlying our questions and our ability to tolerate uncertainty than on our proficiency at defending solutions just for the sake of having them.
There was a strangely silent line of toddlers and kindergartners in front of me the other day when I watched Georgia Purdom lecture, listened to her deliver—almost verbatim—the sermon Tim has just given me in lieu of conversation.
“We know the world is not the way it’s supposed to be, right?” she had said. “We know that it’s wrong.” The popularly accepted explanation of death is that it’s always been here and always will be, she said, because it’s integral to the process of evolution. “You can’t get progress over millions of years from some sort of single-celled organism to mankind today without millions of years of death, disease and suffering. There’s no such thing as ‘nice evolution.’ It’s a death-based mechanism, okay? Now here’s the problem for Christians in believing that God used evolution—the only conclusion you can draw from Scripture is that God saw death and suffering as ‘very good,’”
She allowed a triumphant silence to hang. “One time I asked an individual who is a Christian but believes that God used evolution and millions of years, I just point-blank asked him one day: ‘So what’s the punishment for sin? Just curious, because if you’ve got death before that, then what is the punishment for sin?’ And you know what his amazing answer was?
“‘I. Don’t. Know.’”
The solution to death and suffering and sin. Answers in Genesis. “Want more ANSWERS?” “Find More Answers . . .” “Get more Answers on Answers News.” Answers for Women. Answers Magazine. Answers Radio. Answers Research Journal. The Ultimate Answers Pack. Kids Answers Mini-Magazine.
I am ten, eleven. Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Memorial Day. We are sitting on the gray floor of the school gymnasium. That great room is dark, lit only by candles held by older students taking turns at a podium reading out the names of our dead. They will read names all day, though the list is so long that to read for a day is to not even make a start. I can tell you what the Luftwaffe is, what the Einsatzgruppen is, what the Kindertransport is. I can tell you where in my house I will hide when the war happens again, what I will take with me into that crawl space, how quiet I will be there. I have already considered which of my non-Jewish neighbors are most likely to hide my family. I have read The Diary of Anne Frank and, after her, I call my own diary Kitty. I write in it to keep a record of myself. In the flickering dark we watch grainy footage of a layer of bodies as white and thin as paper being bulldozed into a pit. I am looking in the mirror of their faces for my reflection, searching for a sign of the family my grandparents refuse to talk about, for a face like theirs, like mine, on the flesh being concertinaed into the hole in the earth. I could be related to any of those bodies, and so I feel myself related to each of them. We sing in Yiddish. We sing in Hebrew:
My God, My God
I pray that these things never end,
The sand and the sea, the wash of the waters,
The crash of the heavens,
The prayer of man.
For Hannah Szenes, the young poet and paratrooper who wrote these words before she, too, was killed by the Nazis, their atrocities were not inconsistent with the beauty of the world and a God ruling over all of it.
I have been mesmerized by this poem since I sat in that gym, thirty years now. Have tried to grasp the meaning of her words only to slide down the side of them with horror or cynicism. And here I am, returning to them again, still perplexed. Can I get closer, if only barely, to that astonishing tenderness which is the source of all fear and its only true antidote?
Szenes, too, kept a diary until she was executed. She wrote: I loved the warm sunlight. Refused a blindfold in front of the firing squad.
I was not a young father, feeling unreasonably exhausted, covertly typing my symptoms into Google after everyone had gone to bed. I will never be Tim. But I imagine that, while it would be excruciating to confront your own mortality at the age of thirty-two, it might be infinitely harder to think you were doing so for no good reason at all. That you had been abandoned—not just suddenly, but all along—by the loving protector you’d thought you knew. I can see how situating human terror and confusion and pain within a causal chain that is, somehow, the result of one’s own unworthiness would be deeply comforting. Because it would be explicable, and in that sense, controllable. I am not Tim. But I am intimately familiar with this logic.
There are no solutions to this problem of death and suffering and injustice. There is, after all, no problem. Only the knowledge in the bones that nothing is perfect: there are no unmixed blessings. What, after all, is the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil if not that? This can be the blade that we throw ourselves on, or the gravity that keeps us together. The universe doesn’t care. We decide, and we must keep deciding. And that is very good.
20
Paranormal
Vlad
Because of the snacks and the banter, I vastly underestimated how unsettling this would be. We are now sitting in darkness as thick as a mattress, silence on all sides. It is cold from the air leaking through the high, covered windows, and I am too aware of the void at my back and at the edges of my vision. My eyes don’t adjust to the dark, which is mitigated insufficiently by pinpricks of light on the various devices.
