As a writer, I often find that religion is an integral part of my work. The pluralism of American society means that my very American characters are necessarily caught within the web of conflicting faiths. Sometimes that conflict is within the character. Mary Flanagan, the protagonist of Widow’s Walk had been raised a Catholic and had even wanted to enter the convent. But as she wrestles with the changes in her life and heart she comes into contact with Pat Michaels, a Protestant minister, and is face to face with a very different God from that of her traditions. This is a God who expects people to celebrate His creation and live in the glory of that feast. Meanwhile, Mary’s daughter, Kathleen, working in a Catholic hospice has to deal with Max, a fallen priest who insistes that God is a comedian.
"We are all alone," Max intones. "God ignores us. Don't look for Him anywhere. I looked, and what did I find? Gonorrhea. That's God's answer. You pray for something. What do you get? Syphilis. You live by all the rules and act the way you're supposed to. What is your reward? AIDS! It's all the same. It's all nothing. I know! God has a plan, He plans to make jokes. We're The Three Stooges, and He's laughing our heads off."
Religion offers the writer and reader a powerful source of internal conflicts, what shrinks call neuroses. Widow’s Walk is not a religious tract; it does not intend to proselytize. It is, however, a book about the role of religion as it torments us and forces us to fight within ourselves.
Memoirs From The Asylum, my second novel, also has a religious theme; but in Memoirs it is a minor part of the story. Caught in the web of madness that is the asylum, the characters have an opportunity to see religion as farce.
At Christmas there is a party put together by the recreation department. We are served overly sweet cookies, cupcakes and fruit punch. We are given presents gathered by well-meaning congregants of local churches – gifts of little use except to the conscience of the giver. Then there is the entertainment – the expression of our own talents. Invariably there is a dance of paretics – a syphilitic shuffle done by old men whose brains have long since been eaten away by their untreated sexual desires. They lurch from side to side – each out of time with his own music.
Jamul plays his air-guitar and sings: “Well, she’s walkin’ through the clouds with a circus mind that’s running wild. Butterflies and zebras and moonbeams and fairytales. That’s all she ever thinks about. Riding with the wind.” He wails and wha-whas. We stare and wait for more food. Will it be candy or popcorn? That is the question of moment. Once that batch of carbohydrates for our pudgy bodies is gone, the staff tries to lead some carols. Some of us sing. We don’t remember the words. We are as discordant, as off-key as the world in which we live. The night is not silent. Our nights are never silent. They are never holy. They are haunted.
Yet, it is also a farce that makes life seem normal. Religion can provide a patina under which, for the moment, pain can be concealed.
Stan loved Christmas. That our family was Jewish didn’t matter. “Chanukah just doesn’t have the panache of Christmas,” he would say.
Panache was one of his favorite words; he wanted to live in a world with panache.
He loved to sing carols. He knew the words in English, some in German, and even a few in Latin. He loved to find a group of carolers on a frosty Christmas Eve and slip and slide along the icy sidewalks with them. He would sing as lustily as any believer.
Stan loved the grip of winter: the snow, the ice, the steaming breath. What was he thinking going to California? Was that the first hint that he had stopped wanting to live? I wonder if he thought that riding his motorcycle into the path of a speeding truck had panache.
We would exchange gifts. As boys – Stan and I – we would exchange Christmas presents. They were small. Neither of us had the money for large. They had to do with thought more than price; and that gave them great value. I found jazz records and tropical fish for him; he found dog-related gifts for me.
I loved dogs. We didn’t have one. My mother considered them dirty, traife. She wouldn’t touch dogs or cats or other small domestic animals. In her idiosyncratic theology they were all traife. I obsessed about dogs. I read about them. I collected pictures of them. I fantasized them. I wanted them – kosher or traife, I wanted them. And, I was terrified of them.
There are writers who shy away from presenting religion in their novels. They worry, perhaps correctly, that readers will be offended. As a result, their characters do not wrestle with faith or God. My characters live in a world in which religion is very much a part of the human condition and struggle.
There are other writers who revel in religion and always include it in their work, but they present it as something of certainty rather than doubt and innter-conflict. There is a genre, Christian fiction, which is based on such faith and on the promise of a sure and certain resurrection. In Christian fiction if a character experiences neurotic pain over faith or moral judgment, it is because they have strayed form “what is true, what they should believe.” Redemption is through return to faith; it is not a result of self-discovery.
My characters do not live in a world of such certainty. They must wrestle to find their own faith and meaning. This doesn’t mean that they cannot hope for redemption, but their redemption is part of life. One of the vehicles of redemption in my books is love. Another is the recognition of personal purpose.
Towards the end of Memoirs From the Asylum, the unnamed narrator has left the hospital which has been his home for years and has started wandering westward. In this excerpt he has arrived in Phoenix, my current home.
The glare of the late afternoon had relieved.
Now a sliver moon floated above the lavender and apricot sunset. As the moon rose in the sky, the pastels of its birth gave way to a gasp of blood orange and then to darkness. Shadows of mountains stood menacing sentry against the eternal darkness of night as I stepped down from the semi that had picked me fresh from another hash house in Socorro to the sudden oppressive heat of Phoenix.
“Sorry,” the driver said with a shake of his droop-lid head, “far as I can take you.”
“’preciate it.” I clipped the words.
He nodded and let off the clutch. The semi moved on, leaving me in a cough of diesel.
Another city, another flea bag, another shit job. I shrugged, picked up the taped and tied suitcase, and walked towards the “ote” with its three remaining orange sticks of a sign.
“Phoenix,” I thought. “No new beginnings here. No redemption, But…” I stopped to scratch an itch that burned my balls. “But, no memories either.”
I walked up the two cement steps, opened the dirt-tinted door, and walked into the lobby. It was shabby, reminiscent of a hospital dayroom – yet clinging with tobacco smoke intensity to a past of leather chair gentility and six-gun solemnity.
“Another city, another hotel, another shit job – for another while.” I walked – not quite sure – towards the old front desk with its oak pigeon-holed case holding heavy keys and a few slips of paper.
The clerk’s stare took in my shabbiness, and I could see his distaste.
“I’d like a room,” I said even though I was still a few steps away. “Nothing too expensive, just a room, for the night.” I knew my voice sounded weak, still the inmate’s, still filled with pleading and dependency.
I moved closer and knew that he wanted to pull back. I took out my wallet. He saw it and relaxed ever so little. It wasn’t a welcome, but a reluctant acceptance of a paying customer.
The elevator worked its noisy way to the fourth floor. Marred, scarred, and smelling of poisoned souls, it was a dim foreshadowing of the room to come. The corridor into which it let me was an alleyway of chipped doors and flickering fixtures. The odors of food, sweat, and sex – especially sex – filled my head. I wished myself somewhere, anywhere; but here I am.
My room, as worn-out and exhausted as I, as dingy as my prospects, looks out through torn curtains and smoke slicked window onto a street, a small parking lot, a convenience store – in which I know I will find the strong coffee, pre-made ham and cheese sandwiches, and candy bar that have become the supper of my wanderings.
It is sad. I am depressed. Part of me wants to cry. I have escaped one asylum for another – another place of loneliness and failure.
Still, there is exaltation – the exaltation of freedom – the joy of choice.
Tomorrow will come: that shit job, possibly another even more run-down hotel, a lonely wandering of friendless streets, often a desperate six-pack of cheap coolers. Tomorrow will come and another after that - each ending in the ghostly shadows of impending defeat and yet each, too, containing the possibility of something better – of something however fragile rising from momentary glory, from a lavender and apricot moment of joy. And I will seek it. I will continue – westward, toward my unfinished business, my pilgrimage - and then, who could know? Towards the promise, the promise of lavender and apricot, to the promise of freedoms yet unknown.
Is that not, in the end, the goal, the final redemption – to find that which is beautiful, to experience our sense of freedom, to be however well or badly in the world? It is the search that gives meaning, and part of that search must include our concern with and appreciation of that which touches our souls.
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