Sometimes I have so many thoughts swimming in my head that one would think I have ADD. I don’t. On one side, my feeble brain is trying to solve the M Theory (the theory of everything in physics), on the other side it is trying to understand God better, on another side, it is trying to figure out how to survive with cancer another year, on the other side it is writing a novel, and on the other side, it is trying to figure out how to get the toilet paper dispenser to stay on the wall. But bear with me as I try to get some of them on paper… or at least on screen.

Yesterday we celebrated my granddaughter, Rozi’s first birthday. Besides the forty friends, most of my own family were there, including four of my five children. Because we drove to Seattle early to help with the preparations, and the party was long, there was the clean-up and the long drive home, it was a ten-hour day for us. Most multiple myeloma patients will tell you that the disease makes you incredibly fatigued, all the time. Despite my fatigue being “epic” yesterday, it was an incredibly wonderful day. There is nothing like having your kids together in one place, if only Bryan could have been there.

After an intense sleep, I woke up with this euphoric feeling of satisfaction. If thirty years ago I were to write a script for how my kids had turned out, who they would find to love, and who they would become, there is very little I would have changed.

A religious person might focus on the fact that none of them are “churched.” But that doesn’t bother me, as if I had my life to do over, I wouldn’t be churched either. The Apostle Paul gave the followers of Jesus one strong suggestion, and only one: get together to encourage one another. While I have had individuals in church, especially at my present church, encourage me (as I try to encourage them), the past seventy years in church have been a net loss for me, as most of my greatest confrontations, debasements, and discouragements have come within the walls of a church or at least from the lips of people I  have known through church. Religion is very competitive.

Speaking of church, I heard an interview an hour ago with the best-selling author, Bruce Feiler, who, in his new book, A Time to Gather: How Ritual Created the World–and How It Can Save Us, points out that the value of human rituals, including religious ones, is so important to our societies.

I have a deep respect for those Christians who love religious rituals, such as Sunday morning worship. However, I have to be honest: it does very little for me or for my understanding of God. A lecture on string theory does much more to provoke my sense of the creator’s mystery. No, I don’t see myself or my approach as superior to the typical ritual lovers… not at all. I only wish that they didn’t see my approach as inferior to theirs… which they do, and thus the impetus of the debasements.

Not all religious rituals fall on my deaf ears, though. My most meaningful experience in a church building was in 1981. I had been living as a homeless person (seriously) in Pakistan and then Europe for a month. I had started this trip with fifty dollars in my pocket, so yeah, I was homeless, bumming rides on airplanes, trains, and automobiles (also the title of my favorite comedy).

I was sleeping under newspapers on a bench directly in front of the Notre-Dame Cathedral of Paris, when it started to rain. With newspapers as a blanket, I knew I would get wet quickly and moved down to the underpass beneath the bridge that crossed the Seine, next to the cathedral. While it was dry, it smelled of urine, so I laid a piece of cardboard down beneath me. The next morning, a Saturday, I believe, I stumbled up to street level and saw well-dressed people (not tourists) entering the cathedral. I saw a sign that read, “Récital d’orgue à tuyaux.” While my French was limited to one high school course, after living the previous three months in an Arabic-speaking country (and my Arabic was very rustic then), followed by two weeks in an Urdu-speaking country, the French was easier to interpret than I thought it would be, “A Pipe Organ Recital.” So, I walked in.

The well-dressed person handing out programs turned his nose up at me. I was filthy, must have smelled of BO and urine, but he gave me a program, and I took a seat in the massive cathedral. I was soon moved to tears by the overwhelming presence of God, not by the religious implications of being in a church, as if it were holy ground, but by the incredible beauty of the building, the craftsmanship, and certainly the mind-blowing beauty of the classical organ pieces. In an atheistic cosmos, beauty, meaning, morals, and the mathematical order (and thus beauty) of the music make no sense and have no evolutionary basis. I was moved in the same way when I bummed my way into the Louver a few days later. I began to weep in the hall of the Dutch Realists. Many other things move me deeply, especially the complexities of math and nature, the screaming of a creator, and the revealing of that creator’s nature.

There are many reasons that I should not be so happy today. I still have cancer, and my treatments are sand-bagging the awful disease, barely.  As a realist, I know the cruel monster will wake up again and do its damnedest to torture me to death. I just got my labs back yesterday, and I know I have another month, but how many months, or possibly years, I don’t know. But I am happy, having traveled so close to death, as Icarus to the sun, that I appreciate this life so much more.

But being a fragile seventy years old now, there is so much I realize I will never have. I have become one of the fifteen percent of old men who do not have a single “close” friend, or what I call a level one friend. They define this as someone who you could ask for a few hundred dollars, and they would loan it without question. Or, if something bad happened to you, such as being arrested for murder, they would be the first to call you, because they believe in you. But I must blame myself for the failure to cultivate such friends.

I deeply miss all my old friends from college, graduate school, and the years before 2010, when I finally left evangelicalism. While I still respect them as much as I ever did, to them, I am now the devil.

I do cherish the dozens of level 2+ friends I have, such as some through my present church and the hiking group I’m involved with. I miss all my level 1 and 2+ friends I had through my work, which cancer robbed me of. But I am very happy that I consider my friendships with my five children and sisters to be level one. I am so grateful that despite major political differences with my sisters, we respect and love one another. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be estranged from any of my kids for any reason.

I also know, as much as I love writing, that I will never be a successful writer, in economic terms at least. Writing is like nuclear fusion, where “fusion ignition” is where you create more energy than you consume. My best book, The Stones of Yemen, briefly reached #2000 on Amazon’s best-seller list of 14 million books, which, as most writers will tell you, is good. Yet I came nowhere close to recouping half the money I spent on editors alone, let alone reaching “writing ignition.” While I appreciate those readers who bought my book, now with cancer, an ended career, and my wife retiring in a month, I don’t have the resources to invest in something that loses a lot of money.

While I’m sad that I will never succeed in writing in my lifetime, I am happy that I still love writing, almost more than breathing. There are still at least two books inside me wanting to get out.

Finally, I feel sad that I know that I will never have an impact on the practice of Christianity in America. Maybe at one juncture, I thought I could. Yet, all my whining, deconstructing of it, and the promoting of evidence-based truth, have only lost my friends and left me in the category of weirdos who think such outrageous things that the creator of the rational cosmos is—themselves—rational. Maybe if I had more talents, ways of communicating, and ways of making friends, I could have made more of an impact. Yet, I still hold those, even those who think I’m weird or the devil, in high regard, regardless of their thinking differently.

But my happiness is that when I started out in 1990 to find the honest truth, my studies have led me back to God, and far better than the forty years I spent as an evangelical. My concept of and relationship with this rational creator are profoundly better than the religious version I held for so many years. An insatiable happiness indeed.

But I will still write, because I love to write, and put down ideas, as I love to think, for my own edification at least. Maybe there are those who are about ready to give up on the religious concept of God, for whom my ideas would be helpful. I could not ask for more.

May you have a wonderful day as well,

Mike