“I could never stay angry long over anything. But I could never believe in anything, either, for very long.”
- Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying
Christianity has an oppressive grip on the world. The normalization of Christian symbols, praying, converting, shouting from rooftops about God’s grace is so normal we don’t even bat an eye when we see it. We’re comfortable with it. (For some perspective on how ingrained it is into the fabric of our mentality and country whether you’re a believer or not, Penny Lane has an amazing documentary called Hail Satan? about a not-so-long-ago religious movement/political campaign in the U.S.)
At this point in our Bookpacking journey, we’ve finished Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer and Ernest Gaines’ A Lesson Before Dying. Both our characters in their respective novels struggle with faith. Why is faith, if it’s so infallible, something that people struggle with so much?
“I had heard the same carols all my life, seen the same little play, with the same mistakes in grammar. The minister had offered the same prayer as always, Christmas or Sunday. The same people wore the same old clothes and sat in the same places. Next year it would be the same, and the year after that, the same again.”
- Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying
Do you even need faith?
When we visited the Katrina exhibit at The Presbytere, I left the Mardi Gras exhibit early to spend more time by myself downstairs in the exhibit to read and absorb. It’s all good and well to reside in academia where we analyze monotheistic religions with ‘God’ at the center, to scrutinize what we might categorize as people’s blind faith in this gracious daddy in the sky that gives the ‘Word of God’ to men alone and rules with his big, yet nonexistent phallus. But when we see natural disasters in the world, when we sit with them and reside in their aftermath, how can you expect to survive without the faith this country has been prescribing to its citizens for centuries? There is so much destruction and pain in disasters like these, there comes a point at which there’s nothing to do but find something, anything, to believe in, which by default becomes the white, Christian god.
I mean, you leave the Presbytere exhibit and immediately you’re faced with wrought iron gates protecting the pure white walls of the St. Louis Cathedral and its imposing and beautiful architecture. I’m not sure there’s a person who wouldn’t find comfort in a sight like that, even if they weren’t Christian. We go to Algiers, a quaint little town, and the largest building is the church with the clock tower, with room enough to fit the whole population of the town in it, tolling every hour with the time of day to remind people where all sources of knowledge and life come from.
But the cathedral, the churches we come across at every streetcorner, they’re old. The roots of the architecture, mentality, logic; they’re all archaic and unchanging.
Why leave things the way they are? Why try to keep up big, extravagant mansions that deteriorate naturally and are built from the money made off the backs of enslaved people? Why be so afraid of changing the image of a god that all of us struggle to identify with?
I don’t think that Binx ‘settled’ down with his faith at the end of The Moviegoer – and for what it’s worth, I don’t think any of the characters at the end of A Lesson Before Dying do either. Both Binx and Grant struggle throughout, their faith in the prototypical, Catholic vision of God is never completely unshakeable. But by the end of each of their character arcs, they find something, or a combination of things that let them feel peace with things, including their faiths.
“A myth is an old lie that people believe in. White people believe that they’re better than anyone else on this Earth – and that’s a myth. The last thing they ever want is to see a black man stand, and think, and show that common humanity that is in us all.”
- Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying
If the god you believe in is so personal, how can they not be a part of you? How can you ask someone to believe in a god that does not reflect them? How can a character like Grant find comfort in an image of a god that white men have identified with for centuries as a Black man? Your god can be anything – it doesn’t really matter. Because at the end of the day, it is and always has been a personal thing and it becomes about finding balance: taking what you want out of what you’ve been given to believe and finding out the rest for yourself. And like we’ve found with so many things on this trip, a balance is key. A reclaiming, but also an acceptance. A celebration, but mourning. Passion and excitement for life, but letting things happen and relaxing too.
At the end of the day, or at the end of your life, it seems it doesn’t really matter who you pray to. Like we saw in Grant and in Binx, they weren’t changed by some miraculous fulfillment of faith, but their awareness to the people around them. As offensive as it might be to say, God is imaginary. Oftentimes, it’s almost like a lie that helps people get through life, and it’s fine because it’s what’s needed. But sharing this trip with people I’ve come to love so dearly in such a short time, I think I’m more changed and affected by the sheer beauty of the souls of the people around me than the supposed unwavering faith we’ve all become accustomed to believe will us last a lifetime.
