God in the Cloud?

It was 112 degrees and I was trying to cool off by floating in the Red Sea for an hour.  Because of high levels of evaporation, the Red Sea is one of the most saline bodies of water in the world.  Bad for the eyes, but good for buoyancy.  I had been in Yemen for about nine months and a heat rash was rampant on my body.  The salt levels irritated my rash, but the 80-degree water did cool me off a bit.  All in all, there was no way to be comfortable in Hodeidah, Yemen Arab Republic in the summer if you were a Peace Corps volunteer without access to air conditioning.  But I was trying.

I was floating on my back, bobbing in a small swell 100 feet off shore.  I had the strongest feeling that someone was watching me, but when I looked at the beach there was nobody there.  That was not surprising, since Hodeidis go inside for a siesta every summer day.  Between 12 and 4 in the afternoon it is just too stinkin’ hot to be up and active.  Shops close down, people move inside, and the city grows quiet.  The people who are out in the world move close to buildings, like furtive cats, trying to keep to the narrow bands of available shade.  Of course there was no one on the beach, watching me.

Yet I could not shake the idea that someone was staring at me.  And whoever it was was not just watching me, but scrutinizing me—drilling right down into my soul.  By this point in my life I was no longer a practicing Catholic, but I was not yet a practicing atheist.  In fact, it was at precisely this point that I became a practicing atheist.  I allowed myself to think that maybe it was God I was feeling staring at me.  And He wasn’t just watching from the outside; He was right there in my secret heart, watching from the inside and eavesdropping on my motives and wishes and fears as I felt them.  But in the next moment I allowed myself to take the next step and to consider that maybe it was really just me that was watching…that it had been just me all along…that God had never even noticed me.  Or, even more likely, that God did not even exist.

I was a bit breathless with the thought.  It felt quite transgressive to even think it.  I had gone to 13 years of Catholic school.  I had been an altar boy.  Christ, I had prayed for the stigmata.  What if God had heard my dismissal of His very being?

In the years since my reverse-baptism that day in the Red Sea, evolutionary and cognitive psychologists have started to tackle the question of just where religious belief comes from.  Jesse Bering, in his book The Belief Instinct, discusses some theories and concludes that the urge toward belief is a trick of our genes that has proven remarkably useful and stable.  For human society to function well it is helpful for members to have a strong sense of right and wrong.  If people can control their own basest instincts, society doesn’t have to expend a lot of resources policing itself.  The thought that someone is watching is adaptive.

Bering begins his book with a confession about breaking the prize faux-Faberge egg of a neighbor when he was a 7-year old.  He was fairly certain God saw him do it.  My illustrative confession would be of discovering where my dad kept the key to his fake Model-T coin bank and then breaking in every once in a while and stealing lots of quarters whenever I needed money.  I knew my father did not see me do it, but I knew just as certainly that my Father did see me.  As I kneeled up on the altar on Sundays I would bargain hard with God for forgiveness.  To this day I have not told my father about these thefts.

So here it is 25 years later and still I have the sense that someone is watching me.  Not just watching me, but judging me.  In spite of my devout atheism, it still feels like God sees me when I’m sleeping and when I am awake.  I have always assumed that everyone had this same sense built right in.  Reading Bering’s book has confirmed my feeling.  There is a lot of research that, taken together, supports the idea that humans as a species have an urge toward belief and that this urge is part of the glue that can hold people together in a society.  And a big part of this urge toward belief is that we have the feeling that someone is in our heads with us, watching and judging.  Nothing we do is truly secret.

NPR had a series on Morning Edition this past week that explored the shift away from organized religion in the United States—especially among people under 30.  While listening to the series I was reminded of my own declaration of faithlessness as I floated in the Red Sea all those years ago.  I had declared, in effect, my independence from God and the tyranny of his judgment.  Yet I still feel that seemingly-external gaze drilling down, assessing, weighing, and passing verdict.  To give just one somewhat embarrassing example: to this day when I want to fantasize about another woman, I have to first kill Erica off in my imagination.  Most often, I have her die in a tragic skydiving accident or I have her leave me for a young academic hotshot, leaving me free to be naked with another woman.  I engage in these crazy ethical gymnastics because a judge is watching.

My daughter has grown up without an organized faith.  She has a sense that there is a God, but she has inherited enough parental skepticism to call herself an agnostic.  She has also grown up surrounded by Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, texting, and smartphones.  She is 13, so not yet a member of the Twenty-something generation featured in NPR’s series.  But listening to the interviews in the series and watching how she lives her life in the digital world have started me wondering:  has growing up digital had any effect on who it is we feel is inside our heads and hearts, eavesdropping on our deepest secrets? 

I always thought of that entity as God, (before I threw God out).  Even then, it still feels a lot like God to me.  Have digital denizens replaced God with the vast digital crowd of Friends and Followers?  Rather than assuming God is judging them for what they think and feel and say and do, (even when no one is watching), do they imagine how their Facebook friends and tangential digital acquaintances would comment on what they think and feel and say and do?  I grew up in the Church and went to Catholic schools until college.  This mass of experience shaped my theory about who that inner observer was.  Does growing up immersed in devices and apps that promote sharing every scrap of information about ourselves shape just who we think that inner observer is?  Have we replaced God with Facebook Friends and Twitter Followers?  And is that why it is so important for us to have hundreds of people “care” about us in this way?  And if so, how does that affect the things we do?

Southern Cross

I woke up at three in the morning, hurting and headachy and HUNGRY. The sand was
uncomfortably hot, but my body and my mind were so tired, I must have fallen asleep anyway…at least for a few hours. Now, my stomach was moaning and my muscles were demanding repayment for the energy I had wrung from them all day long. I remembered that I had some heavy Turkish soldiers’ bread (kudam) in the hood of my backpack. Kudam is, by far, the densest bread I have ever eaten. It is said to have nourished the Ottoman Turkish army in their massive conquests hundreds of years ago, and I can see why.


In the starlight of a Red Sea beach somewhere south of al Hudaydah I reached into my bag and let my hand root around like a famished rodent. My fingers quickly found the brick of bread they were feeling for and ripped off a chunk to direct mouthward.

In the dark, I crammed the wad of bread in and started chewing. As I did, it felt like shards of glass were stabbing my tongue and the inside of my lips. I had no idea what was going on, but my self-preservation instinct took over and I spit the bread out faster than I had shoved it in.

My mouth felt like it was on fire and I could not make the feeling go away. I reached around in my backpack and found a small flashlight, which I turned on and aimed at the bolus of bread on the ground. When I looked closely I could see ants in the wet wad of bread. I am not a myrmecologist, so I do not know specifically what kind of ants were chewing on the insides of my mouth, but I can tell you they packed one heckuva bite. My mouth REALLY hurt.

I took the bread out of my backpack and saw that it was indeed crawling with red ants. I threw the bread into the dark of the dunes and cursed.

My friends Nick and Tim and I had decided to take a three-day hike along the Red Sea from near a town called Bayt-al-Faqi north to my “hometown” al Hudaydah. This stretch of Yemen is in what is called the Tihama—the flat coastal plain that often hits 115 degrees in the summer. We had not carried enough water that first day and I had come close to suffering from heat stroke. We were dreadfully unprepared for how tough it was and that first night when I bit into the bread and then the ants bit into me, I wanted to just cry and be back home in my bed. (Not my “home” in al Hudaydah, but my real home back in Delaware with the Wonder Bread down in the bread drawer and the air conditioner set at a comfortable 72.)

Delaware was not an option there on the beach at three a.m. and crying wasn’t making anything better, so eventually I decided to lie back down and try to get back to sleep. The inside of my mouth had swelled up painfully wherever the ants had bitten, but my fears of anaphylaxis proved unfounded. Once I got used to the pain, it actually felt kind of cool in the same way your tongue exploring the soft pulpy gap where a tooth has just fallen out can feel kind of cool.

As I lay flat on my back in the still-too-hot sand, feeling the pain in my mouth slowly subside to an acceptable ache and listening to the small waves on the windless night as they made half-hearted attempts to reach us far up the incline of the beach, I noticed the stars for the first time. We were far from any source of light pollution and the stars were thicker and brighter than any I had ever seen. As I scanned the skies I noticed what could only be the Southern Cross.

And in an odd way, I place my coming of age as an adult at that exact moment. Twenty-two years old, eight thousand miles from home, on a beach in Yemen at three in the morning with some fresh ant bites in my mouth. The full ridiculousness of the situation dawned in me there in the starlight and I had to laugh out loud. My friend Tim asked with a groggy voice what I was laughing at and I just said, “Nothing…go back to sleep.” And that is just what both of us did.

Depends On How You Look At It...

Many years ago I was walking along a Red Sea beach with a good friend, scanning the sand for interesting and beautiful finds. I spent much of my childhood on the beaches of Delaware and Long Island, so I was only half-committed to the process, at best. My friend, on the other hand, spent her first 23 years in Missouri and Illinois. The beach, shells, and sea glass were all still new to her.
That particular day we were the only humans on a three mile stretch of beach known to the locals as Ra’s Kathib. We called it “The Spit” because it was a long spit of sand angling out into the Red Sea from just north of Hodeidah, in what was then North Yemen. The fact that we were the only ones on the beach may have had something to do with the air temperature of 115 degrees and the relative humidity of well over 80%. Anyone with any sense at all was parked in a shady spot, directly under a ceiling fan.
We were near the end of our two-year stint as teachers of English at the National Institute of Public Administration. Don’t let the name fool you; NIPA-Hodeidah was a slightly ramshackle school that offered Accounting, Small Business Management, and English classes to anyone capable of paying the $40.00 registration fee. As a result of the less-than-demanding admissions criteria, my friend and I lucked into one of the most open and diverse groupings of people in all of Yemen.
There were ten year-old boys, seventeen year-old daughters of Hodeidah’s upper crust, forty year-old cab drivers, and thirty-five year-old housewives. These people would never have met, let alone acknowledged each other’s existence in their real lives in Yemen’s gender- and income-segregated streets. They would not have been allowed. But there in my classroom they were free to converse.
Of course, most of their conversations came straight out of Longman’s Beginner English Workbook, (Level One), and contained the phrase “Excuse me, do you know the way to Camden Market?” But at least they could say something to each other.
Anyway, on this particular day I am remembering, my friend and I were stopped dead in our tracks by the most incredibly luminescent blue shell either of us had ever seen. It was spectacular. We both saw it in the same moment and we both froze. My friend bent down to snag the treasure before I could and then she promptly dropped it to the sand as quickly as she had snatched it up. As she dropped it, she let out a disgusted “Unnnhhh.”
Thinking she had gone crazy, I immediately reached out to grab the shell. If my friend didn’t want the treasure, that was her problem. As soon as I lifted it I could tell something was wrong. It didn’t feel right—it was far too light and too slick to be a shell. One look up close and I could see that it wasn’t a shell at all. It was a shell-shaped piece of plastic. I reacted just as my friend had—I opened my hand and let it fall right there where I stood.
Now here it is twenty years later and I find myself thinking of that moment on the beach quite often. It taught me something that I have had cause to learn over and over since. What it taught me is the importance of perspective. That concave clam-shell-shaped piece of plastic didn’t change one whit during our entire “interaction.” It was just itself the whole time. And yet, in a span of thirty seconds it went from being incredibly beautiful to both of us, to being beautiful to one and repulsive to the other, and then finally it ended up as an ugly piece of litter to both of us. All without any change in its actual state of being.