The Playground Atheist Looks Back
It may be that every elementary school, across the whole South, has at least one self-appointed Playground Atheist. You know the type: when all the other kids are showing off their new “WWJD” bracelets and mooning about how cool the youth pastor is, there’s a sharp-eyed fellow, standing there by the slide, not believing any of it for a second. When the typical debates come up—for instance, do dogs go to heaven—it’s the Playground Atheist who explodes the whole conversation. “Heaven!” he’ll say. “Heaven?! What are you, a moron?” Yes, it’s this kind of gentle, persuasive approach that has endeared Playground Atheists to junior Christians through the Southland for time immemorial. And, at Bearden Elementary School, as the Reagan years came into full bloom, the Playground Atheist just happened to be me.
From time to time, the Tennessee State Legislature will cook up a wild idea. So it happened, when I was in fourth grade, that a reporter from the local NBC affiliate came to visit, with a camera-man in tow. The legislators in Nashville were considering whether to mandate prayer in school, and this reporter was on a mission to find out what the fourth-graders thought. To start off, she had us all bow our heads, our hands folded on our desks. Then, she opened it up for discussion. Well, what did we think? To absolutely no one’s surprise, it was Matthew who spoke first. Everyone in the zip code knew Matthew loved Jesus. Just adored him. Brought him up all the time. So, his eyes shining, Matthew accepted the chance to lay out his convictions. All around the room, heads were nodding. The reporter gave thanks, then asked if there were others. A girl in the back chimed in, to reinforce Matthew’s point: this was a world that stood ever in need of more prayer. Reporters are trained to fish for intrigue, for friction. So, as hands waved in the air, she wondered if anyone had a different opinion. The hands dropped. There was silence. A friend is someone who knows just what lapses in judgment you are prone to make, and will leap in to stop you. My lapses tend to be about talking at times when I shouldn’t. I recall the face of my good friend Jeff in those slow-motion seconds staring at me intently from across the room, shaking his head, and mouthing the word, “Don’t.” But there it was. I had raised my hand. The microphone dangled close. The camera drew near. The room emptied of air.
Later, I recalled having made mention of things I happened to know about the Constitution. I still believe it is possible I uttered the phrase, “church and state.” But none of these high-minded words and ideals appeared on the local news that evening at 6:00 and 11:00, and again on the early-morning show. No, instead, what the good people of East Tennessee saw was a chubby boy with thick glasses, announcing to the whole world that God didn’t exist.
As soon as the reporter departed, the whisper of scandal began threading its way through the entire fourth grade. And then the whole school. By the next morning, certain classmates were able to tell me just what their parents thought about a boy who’d say something like that on TV. My parents, I gather, also took in some feedback. What I had was not fame. It was outright infamy. Before, my atheism had been an occasional source of wonder, the kind of pride you take when a neighbor happens to own an exotic bird of bright plumage, to have some proximity to something so odd. The Christians even seemed to enjoy my earnest challenges, seeing it perhaps as a kind of a trial. But this time, it seemed, the Playground Atheist had taken it too far. To say something hateful about Jesus at recess was one thing. To broadcast it so everyone could hear it? Unacceptable.
The week ratcheted on, in the slow agony of exile. But then, Thursday afternoon, two hand-written letters arrived. Both from the Unitarian Universalist church. One was from my Sunday School teacher. The other, from the Minister of Religious Education. Without even opening the envelopes, I knew what to expect. And sure enough, there it was: they were proud. Not of my atheism, per se. But of the character they said they saw in what I’d done. Like ancient prophets our Sunday School class was studying that year, said one, I had stood my ground, and had said what I thought. The next day, the purgatory of exclusion continued. But somehow, I didn’t mind it as much—a cold shoulder was nothing beside what Jonah or Amos had faced. And by Monday, it seemed, all was back to normal.
In all the years since, my theology has evolved. I have taken communion, stopped in awe before mountains. I have prayed till tears come, and sat in meditation for long hours in a dark Buddhist Zendo. But, truth be told, it was as an atheist that I first came to see, in a way that was real and has not failed me since, how I am part of a love wider than my own life, and how that spacious embrace makes itself known to me, most often, through a community like the one that first told me, “You are not alone.”
A Confession
You’re wanting to know about the crucified squirrel. But first, here’s what happened to my Christmas lights.
I lived in Iowa City, in a second-floor walk-up over Iowa Ave. Without any warning, November was here. Late fall in the Midwest is like if the planet Venus ends up shoved to the back of the fridge with the celery and other things nobody wants until it gets soft and bruised, and then what do you do? You don’t want it. You can’t throw it away. The interminable winter had not yet arrived, but already people walked the streets with a look of surrender. The sun would sort of give up and sink around noon. Then, for hours, it would rain flecks of ice. I decided to take things into my own hands.
At a store in the mall, Christmas lights were on sale. I filled a basket. Brought home packing tape. Crawled through my window, out onto the roof of the porch. Did up the front of the house, at least the second and third floor. It took over an hour. By the end, everything was a-twinkle, you might say, if you happened to talk like a magical elf. Zig-zags. Curlicues. A milky radiance out into the gloom. At long last, the place seemed like somewhere a person could live.
What I had done was not only for me. It’s not like I should have received a peace prize. But when it came down to being a neighbor, there was the sense of having done what I could.
Then, one day, I come home. The Christmas lights are inside, ripped from the socket, tangled up on the floor. On the tangle, a note. Magic marker. Capital letters. Signed by a person I never had met. The husband of the woman I thought was my landlord. He seemed overcome by rhetorical questions. Hadn’t I realized the risk I had been taking? To go out on the roof? What about the liability? If Christmas lights were so important, why hadn’t I asked?
Look, I get all of this now. I pay on a mortgage. I’ve seen my children bleed. But, at the time, I was what? Twenty-four? All I knew was someone came into my home, and destroyed all I had in my life that would shine.
I checked out the roof. Then, came back, and turned over that same piece of paper. Scribbled out a rebuttal. While I’ve never been up on the law of the land, I was pretty sure a landlord should not just barge in. There should have been a phone call. Arrangements. He should have asked my permission. Who did he think he was, was the gist of my letter. I stuffed it in an envelope, and trudged over to the house, left it in their mailbox.
The next afternoon, I came home to a new note, slid under my door. Same handwriting. But it came out all different. He said he could see my point. He hoped I’d forgive him. I had to, he said, of all things, understand. He had worried. He’d let the worry turn into anger. He wanted me to know that his wife made excellent pumpkin pie. Wouldn’t I come over to enjoy some with them? Pie! The nerve. It was beyond comprehension.
So, the crucified squirrel. In October, walking home, I noticed a squirrel on the side of the road. Killed, almost flattened. Then, in the next block, another. I would not own a car until many years later, so, in those days, doing anything at all always sent me out walking. Which was how I saw these little casualties, splayed out horrifically, in plain view. Carnage, all over town. But try to mention it, and people would shrug, unimpressed, as if I were reciting the order of months: October, November, dead squirrels on the road. I wanted to be heard. To be known. Admired as a prophet. But people seemed to think I was just someone talking.
That’s when I decided on the crucifixion. A squirrel on a cross would make an impression. I’d bring it downtown, or to some public place. As a statement. An indictment of modern society. Or something like that. I wish I could tell you this was somebody else.
Collecting a squirrel took a shopping bag and a shovel. Back in my apartment, the smell of rot sent my project quickly out to the roof. With rubber kitchen gloves, I completed the task. Nailing two sticks together, and then securing the tiny paws to the sticks. I’d intended it all as a message for others. I saw myself squarely on the side of the squirrel, and, for that matter, of all the small creatures who live near the road. Putting forth the perspective of God. But try to crucify something and keep yourself clean. You can’t. Drive a nail through flesh, and you get implicated. I left the squirrel there on the roof, where the rain kept on falling.
Remember the tangle of lights? And the note along with it? Seeing them, what came first was not anger. What came first was shame. The squirrel. The landlord had seen it! He must have. How to ever explain? But, scrambling out through the window and onto the roof, there was nothing. No squirrel. No cross. Only roof. Only rain. It meant the freedom to write the angry letter I wanted.
All that fall, it seemed like God had been folded, and stored until spring in a box up in somebody’s attic. To pray was to stand in another house, in the cellar, asking no one in particular where that box could have gone.
But what happened in that mess was a matter of grace. Not the squirrel being gone when the landlord arrived. A neighbor might have removed it. Or maybe some weather blew it down to the ground. The squirrel’s absence was only dumb luck.
Grace is more than dumb luck. It’s careless anger getting met by an invitation to sit down with pie. Despite what I’d done, and the words I had said, without even seeking it, I was forgiven. But a gift takes receiving. And this one I hadn’t yet learned to accept. It was asking too much. And so winter set in. The universe kept up its ponderous churn. And from wherever God had been hiding came a soft, tender sigh. The sound of one who’s been waiting.
The Lights of Diwali, and Also the Dark
Everyone has to make a living somehow. Some weekends, my job has me blessing unions in the name of the Holy. All kinds of people end up finding each other. Once, it was somebody raised in the Black church tradition marrying someone whose family had been Hindu since before time began. So out I went to the Hindu Community Center, for an evening cram session with one of the priests.
To get there, you take the last exit west of Knoxville before the highway divides (south to Chattanooga or west on to Nashville). You can’t miss the exit, and not only because it’s across from Cupid’s Outlet, a log-cabin where they sell discount marital aids. You can’t miss the exit because, at night, it is lit to the horizon with the radiance the sun will one day give off when it finally dies. Like when the flashbulb on a camera explodes in that blinding split-second, only this one stays on. The source of it all is a two-story white building. On the front, it says, “Fireworks” in ten-foot-tall letters, with dazzling red stars shooting out over top. It sparkles like a helicopter arrived, pouring fat sacks of glitter. Klieg lights, bright as any maximum security prison, wash out the landscape. Outsized American flags ring the lot, the largest—a piece of cloth about the size of Knox County—on a pole at the center. A blinking sign in large letters reads, “Open to the Public!” Lest someone might think this was meant to be private. The road behind it winds its way past a place that sells guns, a few sagging barns, then the fenced desperation they call a “golfing community,” before you reach the yellow building where the Hindus all meet.
The priest I was seeking had not yet arrived, but another priest beckoned me into a chair. His English was paltry. My Hindi was zilch. But all kinds of people end up finding each other. So, with smiles and shrugs, we attained a sweet, flickering connection as he tried to tell me about one time he went to Atlanta. For a time, an ocean of difference between us dissolved.
Of the world’s great traditions, Hinduism seems most to pull off the American dream of “E pluribus unum.” Out of many, comes one. This and that, all together. The priest and I, unified. Like how Shakti, the divine feminine power, contains nurture alongside destruction, light along with the dark. The Gospel of John says, “The light shines in the dark, and the darkness has not put it out.” Hindus would not disagree, not exactly. The holiday of Diwali, with its clay jars and fireworks, comes around to say light will win in the end. But no matter how bright the light, the priest might have told me (had I had any Hindi), darkness won’t be extinguished. In this old world, at all times, dark abides. Wherever you can be found–ancient India, maybe, or else only off an American highway where untold travelers, rapt with fear and desire, purchase sex toys and guns and the dream of new life in a golfing community—wherever it is, the dark will be welling up into the light, and the brightest of lighting will not put it out. Instead, light and dark in a life will at long last forge union. Everyone, in the end, makes a living somehow. And it’s my job to bless it in the name of the Holy.
