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?

The best food--EVER

Isabel asked me a little while ago: “What is the best food you have ever eaten?” The timing of her question was perfect, as it was about 92 degrees and the air was so thick you could sip it up with a straw.


Without hesitation my mind zipped through 22 years and thousands of miles back to a stretch of Red Sea coast just south of al Hodeidah in Yemen. It was spring, which in that part of the world meant high temperatures and high humidity. My friends Tim and Nick planned a three-day backpacking trip along the coast and they invited me to join them. Being a sucker for a dumb idea, I agreed.




There was nothing along the coast where we hiked except for two or three small fishing villages inhabited by Yemenis who turned out to be fairly suspicious of our motives for sleeping in the hot sand. I can’t say I blame them for being suspicious. Here were three “Amrikis” walking along a stretch of coast that never saw a tourist, taking pictures, speaking Arabic, and sleeping just outside the village at a time when the daily high temperatures were close to 110 degrees.

We were dreadfully underprepared for the conditions and on the first day I came as close to heat stroke as a person can get without actually succumbing. In the early afternoon we stopped in the meager shade of a few palm tress—some standing, some fallen—and had a nap. Though calling it a nap implies some sort of agency on my part. Really what happened was I took off my pack and the next thing I knew it was late afternoon, there was sand stuck to my face, and my muscles were all cramping up pretty bad. I had passed out next to the fallen palm where I had sat to get my pack off.

We had assumed we could get water—though now that I think about it I really don’t know what we were thinking. When we all got up that afternoon we scouted for the wells we had heard were present on that part of the coast. Eventually we found a pit in the sand with some stagnant water full of mosquito larvae twitching around in the heat. Even they seemed really uncomfortable. This was the well.

And, even though we were fairly dumb, we did understand that we needed water or things could get a lot worse. So, we used a tee shirt to strain water into our bottles. We managed to keep most of the visible wildlife out of our water containers and hiked on to a spot where we could sleep.

Yemen is not too far north of the equator and the sun sets fairly early there year-round. And even though we had probably burned several thousand calories hiking in the heat of the day, none of us felt hungry. We built a small fire from driftwood and bought a couple of fish from the fisherman next door. We tried to roast the fish on sticks with little success. We went to sleep by eight o’clock that night with semi-raw fish and who knows what all-else sloshing around in our guts.

The sand holds on to the heat of the sun far better than the air does, so that night was terribly uncomfortable. It was like trying to sleep on one of those heating pads people plug in and adhere to lizard enclosures to provide the cold-blooded creatures steady warm temperatures. The problem is, I am not cold-blooded and it is hard to sleep when you are being slow-roasted. Eventually exhaustion won and I fell asleep.

Hunger woke me at 4 am, and I laid still for a while, hoping it would just go away and let me drift back to sleep. It didn’t go away and when I opened my eyes I was rewarded with a sight I will not forget. The Southern Cross was there in the dark night sky, hanging out over my head like it had been hoping to get my attention, to catch my eye—just to say “hey.”

I was by then awake enough to have to actually do something about my hunger, so I reached into my backpack and grabbed some Turkish soldiers’ bread called kudam. I ripped off a chunk of the dense bread and crammed it in my mouth. And within a few seconds I spit it back out and my mouth felt like it was on fire.

Turns out some painful biting ants had crawled into bag and gotten into the bread and were not pleased with my efforts to reclaim the bread. I fell asleep full of resentment and more than a little hungry. When dawn came I just wanted to get the hell out of there.

The second day was better, in the same way that the second day of radiation therapy is probably better—not because anything is really improved but because the parameters of the pain have been set and you know what to expect a little bit better.

We hiked a few miles and set up camp late in the afternoon. Nick thought there might be a small town a mile or two inland and set out walking. I joined him. And he was right. In the village we bought some bottled water, had a bowl of bean stew at a shack, and then discovered the best food I have ever eaten. It was at a non-descript little market stall with a portable generator. The man who ran the stall had a big cooler full of homemade popsicles. We each bought one and ate it at brainfreeze pace. We then each bought another and ate those as we walked back to camp to tell Tim what we had found.



I made the roundtrip one more time with Tim and ate two more of the popsicles. They were made of Vimto and nothing has ever tasted better to me, before or since. After fortifying ourselves with popsicles we hitched a ride back to my apartment in Hodeidah, where Tim and Nick showered and caught the next bus out of the coastal plain and up into the mountains, where they lived in 7,000+ foot altitude of the capital, Sana’a.

So, I told Isabel about the backpacking trip and the near-heat stroke and seeing the Southern Cross and the ants biting my tongue and then the miraculous taste of the Vimto pops. And now, at least for a couple of days, I will remember that sometimes the simplest things really are the best.

Hey Everyone--Look at ME.

            Recently, an old friend of mine from my Peace Corps days sent me a message through Facebook.  It was a guy I had not thought of very many times since we last saw each other in 1989, but one I liked very much.  His message had a link to some YouTube video photo albums of Yemen and I have watched both videos many times since I got the links last week.

            I also got to wondering where all of the old pictures of my time in Yemen were.  Being a master of organization, Erica knew exactly where to look.  They were in a shoebox in the closet in the craft room.  I truly didn’t even know we still had them   But I was glad we did.  After looking through the pile I was overcome by the urge to digitize and post the pictures here on my blog.  But then I had second thoughts—isn’t it presumptuous to think anyone would even care to see them?

            Combined with sites like YouTube and Google’s Blogger, Facebook allows for any level of self-revelation a person is willing to engage in.  Facebook’s popularity seems like a natural outgrowth for the generation who grew up with Gerry Springer and The Real World.  People seem to have lost the distinction between what is public and what is private, between what is important to share and what is merely self-indulgent.

            I see this instinct toward over-sharing with the status updates of my “friends” on Facebook.  They range from once-in-a-blue-moon updates—(things like “… is in Naples”)-- to almost real-time changes—(“…is pulling into the parking lot at Stop and Shop.”)  There are the intriguing updates (“…is mending light”), and the nowhere-near-intriguing-enough (“…is having an attack of diverticulitis.”)

I tend toward the less frequent, less personally revealing status updates, since I am a somewhat private person.  (And yet, even as I type that last sentence I know on some level I am not a private person at all since I keep a blog and I update my Facebook status at least three or four times a week.)

            Anyway, I think all of this is really just me talking myself into believing it is alright to post some pictures from Yemen simply because I want to. I am FULLY aware that posting these pictures is self-indulgent.  So, ignore all of this and just look at the pictures, if you care to.

Men making a deal in the Hodeidah qat market.

The straw hat section of the local market.

A fishing village on the Tihama--(the Red Sea coastal plain)--not far from my city, Hodeidah.

Some Yemeni men with their not-phallic-at-all daggers, called "jambiya".

Two of my students, (with their jambiyas).

Gas for the truck, water for the camels.

Cactus blossoms in the mountains.

An old man and his mule, waiting to be hired to carry something-anything-anywhere.

Remains of the city of Old Marib--built 2800 years ago and home to the Queen of Sheeba from the Bible.

A young shepherdess high above the amazing terraced mountainsides of Yemen.

            

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.