Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash
As a child, my mother begged me to put down The Babysitters Club already and start reading the classics. At her behest, I slogged through Jane Eyre to acquaint myself with a new female protagonist to replace Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield, the blonde identical twins of Sweet Valley, whose disparate personalities delighted me so. I conceded to my mother that I appreciated Ms. Bronte’s exploration of gender roles, but added sagely that this theme wasn’t something I hadn’t already read about and pondered deeply. In Sweet Valley High #86: Jessica Against Bruce, for example, Jessica is infuriated when she is excluded from Bruce Patman’s boys-only “Club X,” and sets out to prove that girls are as tough as boys -- if not tougher!
I now understand that my mother viewed reading the classics as my mind’s only possible escape from the clutches of Bad Axe, Michigan, the now-overtly Christian nationalist farm town where, for reasons I’ll never understand, she and my father chose to raise me. In 1996, at the tender age of 18, I finally broke free and headed to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where I’d been given a scholarship intended for country bumpkins with promise.
Unsurprisingly, my mind was immediately blown by how much dope stuff there was to learn. At that point in my life, I was a devout Catholic, even low-key fantasizing about joining a group called the Medical Missionaries of Mary -- nuns with MDs who traveled the world healing bodies and souls alike. Eyes wide with hope and positivity, I signed up for a freshman seminar on the topic of “human suffering.” The first book we were assigned to read was Dostovevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.
It was at that point I was faced for the very first time with doubt as to the existence of God.
At risk not only of a bad grade on a paper but of spiritual collapse, I had to figure out a way to reconcile how there can possibly be a heaven, and also a world that allows babies to turn yellow with jaundice and die. To back up a little, because I was a college kid in the late 90s, I was listening to a lot of Dave Matthews. In particular, a DMB song called “Deed is Done” was on repeat in my Discman as I walked to and from the undergraduate library to work on my Brothers Karamazov paper. The song is one of Dave’s darker ones, in which he describes a baby dying of cancer in somewhat graphic detail, as a justification for why he has renounced religion and the existence of God -- though it is in fact God he is singing to:
I pray to you, and hear my request
I ask of you to save this baby
Oh, look at the girl
Awful inside, is cancer-eaten, is life-deprived,
And if so by who? Could it be you?
I see no need for a baby's wisdom for you
Oh, God, the girl, all yellow turned
Her cheeks are swollen, and soul is burned
Can you not see? Can you not hear?
You could change the way things are arranged
Oh, but the deed is done
And the girl is gone
Well, you may find your religion
You may find your attraction
You may go, for me the girl is gone
Oh, you may find your faithful
You may find out the reaction
But to me, the baby’s gone.
The song had ripened my mind to two things: the idea that God is apparently cool with the worst kinds of human suffering (can you really imagine telling the parent of a dead kid “everything happens for a reason”? Or, worse -- “God needed another angel”?), and second, that adult human beings are allowed to decide, on their own, that they aren’t cool with this. And they can just, like, stop going to mass. (This is exactly what my brother, at that point a sophomore at that same mind-blowing institution of higher learning, had done.)
I will admit, Fyodor Dostoevsky is an even better writer than Dave Matthews. There is a character in Karamazov who makes the boldest statement I can imagine, taking a stance most agnostics would not have thought to take. That is, he actively says to God not just “I don’t believe in you,” but “if this is the package you have to offer, I decline it.” Those weren’t his exact words, though. They were more like:
While there is still time, I hasten to protect myself, and so I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It’s not worth the tears of that one tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its stinking outhouse, with its unexpiated tears to ‘dear, kind God’! It’s not worth it, because those tears are unatoned for… Too high a price is asked for harmony; it’s beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that I am doing. It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket.
I wish I’d kept the printed copy of the 17-page paper I wrote, in which I described my formulation of how the afterlife happens, and God’s role in the process. But I didn’t, and it was written on NotePad, so trust me, it’s long gone. What I recall was that it boiled down to the idea that we live on in the hearts and thoughts of those we have positively affected during our time in the material world. It’s a decent reason to keep the good deeds coming, but not the actual reason; later JD Salinger would give me language to explain that. In Franny and Zooey, Franny suffers a nervous breakdown triggered by not being able to understand a key part of a monk’s book The Way of the Pilgrim, that is, what St. Paul could have meant when he told us all to “pray without cease.” How is it possible to pray without cease? What Franny learns is: do it for Seymour’s fat lady. It’s kind of a long story (actually it’s a short story, or maybe a novella?) but what it boils down to is: aim to serve your fellow humans, not in the spirit of serving God (like Christians racking up points for heaven, or Baha’is promising to please some Prophet), but to serve that of God within each and every one of us. We serve each other for each other.
For the love of God: read the classics, kids.
It was the Dave Matthews/Fyodor Dostyevsky message that popped into my head recently when someone in my spiritual affinity group shared a story about having visited a friend in Hospice care; other friends had been invited as well. It was sort of a holiday celebration, one in which each attendee shared stories about one particular person, how they knew her, and what she’d meant to them. He listened to stories woven together by people who knew this dying woman from having been introduced by this person or that, in a beautiful web with her at its center. The words Charles said that sent my hands to my heart were these: I sat there wondering -- how many years of friendship are in this room? What better measure can there be of one’s legacy?
After dismissing a morbid line of thought (musing how many years of love and friendship will be in the room when I, myself, spin toward my last breaths someday), I was once again struck by song lyrics. In a song called “Thank You,” a band called Bombadil ponders:
If I died tomorrow, would you say nice things?
Or will you tell the truth, even if it sounds a little mean,
so if I’m remembered,
I’m remembered realistically?
I’m reminded of another friend’s story about boarding a bus in Toronto many years ago. She’d tripped and accidentally spilled the contents of her suitcase on the street; she can still see the annoyed look on the bus driver’s face as he waited for her to gather them. Humiliated, she concocted a fantasy during the bus ride that her brave act of tripping and falling had saved the bus from crashing into a brilliant physicist who would someday make Nobel-Prizeworthy contributions to science. It’s nice to think about, she said. That even our missteps can make lasting contributions to the world, in ways we will never even know about.
My partner James is a word-lover, just like I am -- or shall I say, a logophile. Yesterday he texted me the definition of a new word he was excited to learn, “freudenfreude.” It’s best translated as “the bliss we feel when someone else succeeds, even if we weren’t directly involved.” This morning, as I watched him watch me scarf down my favorite donut from Dunkin’ Donuts (a creation filled with something called “cookie butter”), I realized he’d given me a word to describe the look on his face.
These days, I don’t spend much time thinking about whether or not God exists, or what my legacy will be. I spend my time experiencing the joy of cookie butter, and the look on my love’s face as he notices it smeared on my chin. That look won’t be the butterfly effect toward a Nobel Prize. But I am unlikely to ever forget it.
Lindsay-Rose Dykema, MD (she/her/hers) is a queer psychiatrist, prison/police abolitionist, and founder of Uncaged Minds, a mental health and wellness resource for low-resourced Detroiters with neurodivergent conditions and marginalized identities. Her work has been published in leftist and mental health journals, poetry anthologies, and Slate Magazine. She lives in Detroit.
