The Believer, page 31
We have feelings for the same reason we have teeth: they support our survival. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio explains that when we have to make a decision, our brain’s emotional center prioritizes considerations for us. Self-awareness—knowing not just what we are feeling but why we are feeling it—is crucial for decision-making. The “why” is vital because, just as we cannot always believe what we think, we cannot always trust what we feel in the sense that our knee-jerk reactions—those that extravagantly shout their anger or fear—are warped by our earlier experiences of pain. We damage ourselves and others by trusting these too-loud feelings, these easy and awful repetitive reactions that reduce the world to a dark mirror in which we cannot see our own reflection.
Daniel Goleman, I want to call him a science writer but he is more than this, explains that “the wisdom of the emotions” is a phrase that refers to something that goes on at our depths, the base of our brain. “Our life wisdom on any topic is stored in the basal ganglia,” he says. “The basal ganglia is so primitive that it has zero connectivity to the verbal cortex. It can’t tell us what it knows in words. It tells us in feelings.” These gut feelings are the key not only to our ability to make effective decisions but to the moral quality of those decisions. The answer to the question of whether we are about to do the right thing does not come to us verbally, it comes to us through our nonverbal neural system. So the feedback system that keeps us alive is also a “moral rudder”; what keeps us coherent as individuals binds us together as a community. In order to bridge the distance between us, we must get closer, first of all, with ourselves. Truly see and truly stay.
There is a roar inside when we confront the intractabilities of being one among many on shifting ground where we are forced to do all our living and dying. It is an energy that cannot be decanted into the simple stories of anger or fear or blame; it refuses to be purified through the strainer of logic. It can only be felt, ridden like a wave or the wind until it passes, before rising again. Paradise, it turns out, might not be the total library; might just be the water, the air, one bright room in a dark house. More mundane than we could have believed, and there all along.
I chat with a teenage girl wearing glasses, a white puffy coat over her long dress. She speaks softly, seems younger than she is. Her mother is Rachel, the subject of so many prayers. She returns to the choir, twenty-six people now, most of whom will leave the city tonight.
“I think God knows whose shoulder to tap on,” Becky once explained about the often-stretched resources of their small community. “We’ve never been hungry and we never were homeless. But we didn’t always know where it was coming from before it came. That’s part of the excitement of a missionary journey. God doesn’t do miracles for people who don’t need them.”
While it would make more financial sense for the families of the Light of Truth Mennonite Church to return to Myerstown, economic efficiency is, of course, not the point. They are here to minister to those who they believe are in need of what their church can offer. But it might not be entirely accurate to call that outward-facing ministry the point of the mission. Perhaps they are ministering to themselves—these people who express their concept of a life well lived using the language of struggle. It’s very easy to just be comfortable in your life path . . . The Christian life isn’t just a bed of roses . . .
And this particular concept of struggle places great emphasis on high helplessness as the ultimate act of faith. Trust and obey. We never worry about anything because everything is in Your control.
I can see how the worldview of a lightly educated adult—one who has been taught from birth to see the hand of God in all things from the healing of an injured finger to the death by stoning of a thief’s family—may only ever have been a helpless worldview. And I can see, too, how this helplessness, this yielding of agency to an ever-intervening, only-good God, may feel as if it were a type of prayer. And sure, it’s hard to walk away from the opportunities for security that society has opened to you. But it is infinitely harder to walk away from opportunities you have had to fight for: opportunities deliberately withheld from communities of color as they have not been withheld from the residents of Myerstown, Pennsylvania.
So, the residents of the South Bronx might regard helplessness in a very different way. They might not feel, now or ever, the holy wisdom of disregarding the education system or the electoral process or medical insurance or housing courts. So it is probable that membership in the Light of Truth Church will remain extremely low and I admit, given their hateful stance on differences from the religious to the sexual, this feels to me to be for the best.
“Is there anyone who hasn’t handed out tracts that w ants to?” Anthony calls out, scanning the choir. Rachel, who has been resting in her van, is helped down the stairs. She sits with the choir in a camping chair, her pale face as white as the hood through which it peers as she sings along softly. More friends arrive. The choir swells. One of the new arrivals, a young blond woman singing “Gloria in Excelsis Deo” in the front row, smiles at me through the commuters streaming between us. And I smile back because, though I know now that these smiles function like a foot in the door, smiling back is mostly what one does. She walks over with some eagerness.
Though they have internal lives as unique as their fingerprints, these young blond women are mostly the same young blond woman. They wear the same type of dress made out of the same type of material, they have the same immaculate netted veil, the same sturdy sneakers and the same white puffy coats, but I am referring to the fact that they have the same look in their eyes when they speak to me. There is something in the wattage of the smile and the tensing of the features around it that makes their faces appear mask-like. Part of that something must be the twinge of discomfort anyone would feel in approaching a stranger in this, the strangest of cities, but the other part looks like a strain of discomfort close to desperation.
That desperation may be about the state of my unsaved soul. But it may also have something to do with the pressure of a constricted world where extemporization is allowed only within the song that has been chosen for them. This cannot be each of the young women’s first choice about how she would ideally distribute her time and energies but, having considered her options, it may very well be her best choice.
Smiling down into my face with incredible velocity, the young woman asks me how I am and I reply that I am well and return the question. She too is well. And then there is the type of silence which, professionally, I should let hang but that’s not who I am and so I tear a hole in it.
“Cold today,” I comment.
And her features remain static as she seizes upon the teachable moment to tell me cheerily that Jesus endured discomfort for our sake and so the least we can do is endure some for his. I wave back at Marie from the Kreiders’ place, who has just joined the choir, and the young woman is confused: does not know where to place me. When I explain that I am a writer who has been spending time with the mission families, her features rearrange themselves and I can see her actual face. She says it’s been nice talking but she better get back to the choir.
It strikes me that, in our time together, I have never seen that mask on Loisann or on Becky. They look at me with something that feels less aggressive, but also less hopeful; more akin to resignation or forbearance. There’s judgment there, too, but who am I, who finds them so exotic, to fault them for that? It is true that Loisann and Becky have more children than the hard-smiling young women, and maybe that has something to do with their stark prioritization of energy and emotion. Also, they’ve been in the city longer than the hard-smilers. Maybe they’ve internalized a perceptual shorthand for my masculine shirt and my career that tells them I’m a lost cause: that if they try to persuade me “to come to reality,” much learned noise will spew forth from my mouth for no gain whatsoever. So while they let me into their homes and make time that they do not have to walk me through the “Mennonite maze,” while all our hours together have been pleasant, while I would genuinely love to giggle and gab with Loisann and seek Becky’s earnest good counsel, I know that the look on their faces is a door to which I will never use the key. There’s nothing more that can be done. And this causes me more sadness than perhaps it should.
The choir launches into “Gloria” for a third time, and it is slightly less entrancing by this stage. At regular intervals, when a train has pulled in or is about to depart, a current of people swells and surges around the singers. Their bodies are tense and hurried. Mostly they avoid taking the tracts offered, which is unremarkable in this city where an offer reliably provokes a reflexive refusal. What is noteworthy is that in every rush there is always someone who willingly accepts, someone who slows to look again.
A young man in a leather jacket covered in bright patches stops on the stairs down to the 4 train and watches the choir for a moment, his hand on the rail. “They Jewish?” he asks me. Mennonite. Like Amish, but not. He nods and stands listening for a moment, his head at an angle. Then is gone.
It’s been three decades, but Pachelbel’s Canon has never lost its power over me. That song that starts like a heartbeat, ends by coming to rest as though buried in a blanket, and contains in between all the devastating tenderness that feeds a life. My favorite version was played by Wynton Marsalis when he was not yet out of his twenties. His sound is so simple and magisterial—so his own—that it is obvious not that he is headed for greatness, but that he has already arrived. I am talking, especially, about a single note he hits and holds right at the end. You can find it, please, I will wait. Baroque Music for Trumpets is the album. “Canon for Three Trumpets and Strings” by Johann Pachelbel—Wynton Marsalis, English Chamber Orchestra and Raymond Leppard. This particular note starts at 5:49. It is, literally, a clarion call and it reaches out, searching, insistently unattenuated and a beat too long as if to say: Though unanswered, I will go on asking for as long as breath can hold.
The choir is now thirty-five people strong. Crisply ironed men and boys standing behind a long line of women and girls whose skirts are sheeting down in flags of floral and gingham. And though this tableau is supremely awkward, it is impossible not to be moved by the sound it is making, which is also its message: Your voice would fit perfectly here.
The noise of the trains drowns out the choir completely but they do not stop singing, vocal cords silently straining against the walls of noise closing in on them. Beautiful in their insistence and their refusals, down in this damp crossroads, biding their time between kingdoms. Then the trains are gone and the dirty tiles are once again bouncing back the words being sung: Whatever my lot, you have taught me to say, it is well, it is well with my soul.
Six different stories, six different notes in the human song of longing for the unattainable. The years I spent writing this book showed me that in order to truly live—with ourselves and with each other—something has to die. Stage models of grief are not new; they were proposed by clinicians back in the 1940s, they are found in the mourning rituals of the world’s oldest religions. Kübler-Ross’s model is, perhaps, the best known. Five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. She originally applied these stages to those suffering from terminal illness, but found they were equally relevant to all deep personal losses: our loved ones, our relationships, our homes; our dreams and expectations and certainties. The stages are not linear, not discrete. Like cyclones, they collide. Like tides, they return. And acceptance is not the euphoric relief one finds on waking from a nightmare, but rather the solidity that comes from embracing the reality that there is much more to the world than wind and wave.
Grief is as individual as it is universal. In our efforts to avoid it, we fabricate bespoke delusions, tailor the terms of our personal negotiations with the intractable. But while we find ourselves washed up on shores so different they could be their own planets, the ground beneath our feet is always the same. I believe we are united in the emotions that drive us into the beliefs that separate us.
Later Becky will tell me she gave birth to her seventh child, a baby girl. I will learn on Facebook that Rachel has died of cancer. I will look at a photo of her with Eldon and their children, at the inscrutable set of her face and how, like me, she had the habit of clutching her thumbs in her fists like a bird on a perch.
A few times, when I am caught at the turnstile, the roar of the train pulling away from the platform beneath me, I will feel I can almost hear them singing. And when a plane flies low, I will think of Anthony looking up. Loisann’s students releasing a cloud of balloons into the sky; how they disperse, float away. I will think of the Kreiders driving on that long road pouring down into Mexico, two babies who could grow to be anyone dozing in sunlight. The sisters in prison. Ethan’s finger. The unreached. The bad spooks. The great teachers. The long-missing, the never-found. This brief phase. I will be orbiting, and you will be orbiting on top of me. I will think about distance, and how it might all be the work of the devil.
1. Dugin, a contemporary Russian fascist influenced by Hitler, is the populariser of a Putin-approved brand of ‘Eurasianism’—a mix of Russian culture, authoritarian government and worship of a strong leader.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
prologue
On the definition of psychological distance see Sergiu Baltatescu, ‘Psychological Distance’, Encyclopaedia of Quality of Life and Well-Being Research (2014), ed. Alex C. Michalos; Yaakov Trope and Nira Liberman, ‘Construal-level theory of psychological distance’, Psychological Review (2010) 117(2), 440.
See C. G. Jung, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self (1968).
part 1
chapter 8 in the beginning: georgia
. . . whose inner coherence defies all factual evidence, see Finn Bowring, ‘Hannah Arendt and the hierarchy of human activity’, Times Literary Supplement. See also Finn Bowring, Hannah Arendt: A Critical Introduction (2011).
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report of the Banality of Evil, revised and enlarged edition (1977).
Hannah Arendt, ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations: a Lecture’, Social Research 38 (1971).
James Baldwin, ‘Letter from a Region in my Mind’, New Yorker (November 10, 1962).
Donna M. Webster and Arie W. Kruglanski, ‘Individual differences in need for cognitive closure’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2014) 67(6), 1049.
chapter 10 the death doula: annie
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984).
chapter 13 the death doula: annie
Adam Gopnick, ‘Writing Nature: Charles Darwin, natural novelist’, New Yorker (October 16, 2006).
chapter 14 in the beginning: andrew
Geoff Manaugh, ‘We thought we lived on solid ground. California’s earthquakes changed that’, New York Times (July 8, 2019).
Yaakov Trope and Nira Liberman, ‘Construal-level theory of psychological distance’, Psychological Review (2010) 117(2), 440.
chapter 16 the death doula: annie & katrina
Martin Buber, I and Thou (1923).
Maurice Friedman, Encounter on the Narrow Ridge: A Life of Martin Buber (1991).
W. H. Auden, ‘The Hard Question’ (1933).
chapter 18 the death doula: annie & katrina
On ‘excruciating vulnerability’ see Brené Brown, The Power of Vulnerability, TEDxHouston (2010).
chapter 19 in the beginning: tim
Maria Popova, ‘The Life of the Mind: Hannah Arendt on Thinking vs Knowing and the Crucial Difference between Truth and Meaning’, Brainpickings.org (2014).
Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, vol. I (1978).
chapter 20 paranormal: vlad
Haruki Murakami, The Elephant Vanishes (1993).
David Antin, Radical Coherency (1981).
Jennifer A. Whitson and Adam D. Galinsky, ‘Lacking Control Increases Illusory Pattern Perception’, Science (2008) 322, 115.
chapter 21 the death doula: katrina
Andrew B. Newberg, Nancy A. Wintering, Donna Morgan and Mark R. Waldman, ‘The measurement of regional cerebral blood flow during glossolalia: A preliminary SPECT study’, Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging (2006) 148(1), 67.
chapter 22 in the beginning: georgia
Julia Kristeva, Interpreting Radical Evil (2016).
Joseph Brodsky, To Urania: Selected Poems, 1965–1988 (1992).
part 2
chapter 27 theories of flight: fred & rhonda
Muriel Rukeyser, Theory of Flight (1935).
The Valentich investigation file is accessible through the National Archives: VH-DSJ—Cape Otway to King Island 21 October 1978—Aircraft Missing [Valentich].
Two excellent audio documentaries on the disappearance of Frederick Valentich are: Tony Barrell, ‘Pilot Frederick Valentich Disappears over Bass Strait’, ABC Radio National (2011) and Patrick Stokes, ‘Last Light: the Valentich Mystery’, ABC Radio National (2019).
chapter 30 halfway home: lynn
‘The “robust scepticism that we can know anything or believe anything in these cases” . . .’ and ‘the impression of even odds . . .’ see Kimberly Kessler Ferzan, ‘#BelieveWomen and the Presumption of Innocence: Clarifying the Questions for Law and Life’, University of Virginia School of Law Public Law And Legal Theory Paper Series (May 2020). See also Lois Shephard, ‘The Danger of the “He said, She said” Expression’, The Hill (October 12, 2018).
chapter 32 theories of flight: fred & rhonda
James McGaha and Joe Nickell, ‘The Valentich Disappearance: Another UFO Cold Case Solved’, Skeptical Inquirer 37(6) (2013).
chapter 33 halfway home: lynn
Martin Luther King Jr, ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ (1963).
