At nineteen, I was practically Christian. No sex, no drugs, a lot of desperate hopes that didn’t seem so different from prayers: to be normal, to be smart—above all, to be good. I owned multiple translations of the Bible.
In reality, I wasn’t religious; I was just afraid. I’d seen friends get drunk or fall in love, and their altered states made me all the more careful about maintaining the stasis of my own. I skipped parties.
I did my homework. (The Bibles were assigned reading.) As soon as a boy I liked liked me back—never mind, no, I didn’t.
“Goodness” was a vague idea in my head—no one had ever told me precisely what it meant—so I made up the rules and granted myself the satisfaction of never breaking them. My devotion to routine worked. I always got the best grades, always got home safe.
People no longer bothered having crushes on me. But a changeless life is a small one, and, even as my fears shrank my sense of self, or perhaps precisely because they did, I was more aware than ever of the vast dimensions of the rest of the world. I chose to do without the expansive bliss of getting high or making out, yet still longed for that heady rush of understanding: there’s something out there bigger than you.
This, of course, is where the most important part of religion—God himself—might have come in handy. The catch was that no one I knew believed in him. They were all secular, intellectual, proudly lapsed, supposedly élite.
My great-grandfather had be.
