believing off the paper

I said I would get back to this. Uh, about a month ago. Thanks for your patience; now here’s a foray into…

Magic

My first brush with believing involved little pieces of paper. I was six. I wrote one word on each piece, torn from my wide-ruled first grade notebook. Book, bike, doll, happy, sky—I don’t really remember what I asked God for. But I wanted God to prove to me he existed, by taking all my paper pieces away, up to heaven, while I slept. That night I laid them carefully across the lower half of my bed, on the bedspread. In the morning, they were gone.

I was thrilled. Amazed. Until I got up and saw the papers on the floor, where they had fallen while I flopped around during dreams.

I guess my skepticism about God started then. It continued in what I now think was a healthy fashion. I mean, there’s testing God’s existence from the standpoint of rational thought—like a scientist experimenting, maybe—and it’s a different thing from a challenge, where the jaw is set against God and the fists are clenched. I did that later.

Through my childhood I was seeking truth, in the lopsided, ungainly way of children, but I was honest about it, at least in my heart. I believed, but if I never found evidence of God, I wasn’t going to keep believing. The magic would have to be genuine, as if the little alien, E.T., were hiding in my closet, needing to phone home and asking me for food snatched from the fridge. I needed an organic magic.

Blank Page

The part of the movie Kung Fu Panda I didn’t like involved a piece of paper with nothing on it. If you’ve seen the movie you know, and if you haven’t, this might spoil it, so beware. I need to see it again to recall just what happened. But I know there was something important that the Panda’s father believed in, or at least that he wanted the Panda to believe, and yet it never really existed. The point the movie made, if I got it, was that learning to do this thing called believing would make something appear that didn’t exist before. It would somehow change reality, this extreme belief.

The good in that idea follows one thread of truth. We’re powerful creatures. We tend to be thwarted, or to thwart ourselves, our potential, and a shot of confidence can work wonders. But there’s a difference between believing I can make it across the street to mail my latest manuscript and live with the results, and believing I can step in front of a log truck tooling down that same street without suffering harm. It would be irrational to expect a log truck to evaporate or something because I believe strongly enough that it will. On the other hand, it might be rational to believe E.T. would lift my bike over the log truck, if he had been living in my closet, and I was helping him phone home.

Next installment (when I get to it—soon, I hope), I’ll switch my similes from pandas and aliens to an alien universe and one really old, Old Testament father.