On Super Tuesday, after a blast of last-minute organization, Rick Santorum won the North Dakota caucus. I spent a strange and happy chunk of my kid-hood in the city of Minot, barely an hour from the Canadian border, and I attended the St. Leo’s parish school downtown, just blocks south of the Souris River and the giant red neon sign of the Bridgeman Creamery. Because this was also a time when my parents happened to be grassroots crusaders in the anti-ERA, anti-secular humanism textbook battles of the late 1970s, I feel a sense of déja vu to see Santorum win in North Dakota.

This is another way of saying I watch him win and feel about ten years old.

The world is green, grass in full fall five o’clock shadow, and I stand in the middle of it. My hands cradle two pecans. There are more barely hidden in the verdant whiskers. Nearby, I may have a pile of them or a bowl full. Now, I have only the two—perfect brown ellipses flecked with black. The nuts warm quickly in my touch, the dust of their abandoned husks bitter and drying as alum. I hold the pecans. We are poetry, a song of praise. This is my first conscious memory.

I am two years old.

And I am sacred.

 

 

I descend from generations of Catholics, numerous as rosary beads. My grandparents are devout beyond the expectation of prayer and Sunday mass. The One True Church is chosen for me, and I sit in one of its domiciles surrounded by echoes and incense but anxious to go outside.

Beyond the cathedral steps is the largest, oldest living thing I’ve ever seen. Almost 500 years old, it is Magnificence and Beauty. The oak tree waits for me, for my hands on its bark, for my entranced orbit around its trunk. I will learn the words axis mundi decades later, and I will know exactly where that is.

For now, the tree holds the space between the cathedral and the school building where I attend catechism. In the classroom, I’m told of the indelibility of original sin, the importance of pleasing the Lord, and the stories of a great ark, burning bush, giant whale, and woman who turns to salt.

But before I’m called away, I stand on the fluorescent-lit sidewalk within a footstep of the darkness, a leap away through moonlight into a canopy of leaves. At the ancient oak’s roots is where I want to be.

I am a pagan.

 

 

Requisite catechism classes and first confession complete, I wear the white dress my grandmother made for this first communion. I walk down the aisle with the other children to the pews—boys sent left, girls sent right. The veil’s haze blurs my sight. I kneel. I mutter what I’ve learned by rote, and I feel I’m doing something wrong. I don’t belong here. I’ve told no one I don’t believe what I’ve been taught in catechism, by example, through osmosis. I push this feeling down, hard, and it stays. The wafer on my tongue transmutes into caulk.

I am a bad girl.

 

 

We move to another parish, with a modern building and no oak tree. The priests are younger, as well as the families. The circumstances are different, but the doctrine isn’t. I barely contain the danger of what I know, what I feel, but I can’t speak of it.

So I sit in the bright sanctuary where the acoustics are balanced and the pews are unworn, with the unacceptable thoughts I’ve formed on my own. I am only twelve, but I don’t believe birth control, sex before marriage, or homosexuality is wrong. I don’t believe in hell, purgatory, limbo, or heaven. I don’t believe Jesus was born of a virgin or resurrected from the dead. I don’t believe that Catholicism is theOneTrueChurch, that people of other religions—or none at all—are damned, or that the pope is infallible.

I am an apostate.

 

 

I meet with a confirmation counselor, a middle-aged woman who does most of the talking about the solemn sacrament. My feet dangle from the edge of the wingback chair. I sip the Coke she serves me. Knowing I can’t endure an act of hypocrisy, I tell the woman I’m not ready to do this yet. I don’t know her, or trust her, so I summon up the most neutral excuse I can imagine. “I need more time to think about this commitment,” I say. Perhaps I come across as mature, or at least respectful. Several weeks later, after much sulking and silence, after several red-faced insistences upon my obedience, I am allowed to quit.

I am a disappointment.

 

 

I’m not prepared for the difficult growth from the tendrils of doubt into the gripping vines of uncertainty. Our Father who art in Heaven has been imposed upon me, but I have no guide to take his place. I want to be an atheist—desperately—but all I can achieve is an embittered agnosticism. My rage at God, if God exists, is complicated. I don’t want to be this way, but I am, and if my will alone can’t make me a believer, then was I fearfully and wonderfully made not to be one?

At fourteen, I begin a search for answers beginning in philosophy, psychology, and natural science. In college, I learn of a time when God was a woman, or at least not only a man. I behold the Venus of Willendorf and the Minoan snake goddess, who seem familiar to me, like someone I’ve forgotten. I read the names of the dead goddesses and their myths, invoking the Feminine in the place where the rigid, judgmental Masculine banged his hairy white fist. I encounter Joseph Campbell, the venerable sage, who reveals the common motifs of mythology and religion from all over the world throughout time. He teaches me that human beings have always assigned stories to the Great Ineffable.

I am a scholar.

 

 

During the first years I practice yoga, I acknowledge the envy I have of my grandmothers. What is it like to believe as they do, to have trust in a faith, to have prayers and rituals that hold meaning? What does it feel like to have a relationship with the Divine that isn’t constantly in question? And if there’s doubt, how does one carry its weight, the pressure that perhaps there is, in fact, nothing after all but the spooky action of matter and energy?

As I enter Eastern territory—where Hinduism and Buddhism speak to me—I also return to the Earth. I read and think about the span of human wisdom, but it is only in stillness with Nature that I discover any truth. I ache for a return to something I think I once knew, something that belonged to me, something that was stolen and buried.

Then I find peace in my knowledge that the Divine force takes many forms. Each is a fragment of the whole, a glimpse through which the person perceives according to his or her understanding. My grandmother finds comfort in the Blessed Virgin Mary. My sister’s Hindu friend has a shrine to Ganesha, the remover of obstacles. My Buddhist friend sits in meditation, sometimes in the presence of Tara, the bodhisattva of compassion and action.

I reach for the ancient oak, a flower, the song of a bird. When I hold these things, I am connected to the Divine in the purest state I comprehend.

I am a seeker of what cannot be taught or found, but instead known and felt by my individual human soul.

 

My last year of college I dated a charming pixie from the august, tree-lined burgh known as Winchester, Massachusetts. She was sweet and funny and doing her damnedest to feel slightly less middle-class, if only briefly. I sported a beard, drank too much and wrote pithy little stories about eating the rich. We were determinedly hip and sophisticated, which in those days meant we had to bear our souls utterly, immediately: in the span of a few short weeks we revealed everything, from past lovers to surgery scars, favorite movies to worst deeds (she claimed to have once stolen a car, but not really: it was her friend’s dad’s car, and all she did was park it two streets over). It was actually the first night we kissed (hours before the kiss itself) that we discovered we’d both been raised ostensibly Catholic. “Oh, yeah,” I told her, “Sunday school, First Communion, all the way through Confirmation.”

“You must have been adorable in your little altar boy outfit,” she suggested.

I raised an eyebrow and said, “I was never an altar boy.”

“Of course you were,” she insisted. “You had to be.”

I shook my head. “Nope. Definitely not. I’m sure I’d remember something like that.”

She pursed her lips but was too polite to be incredulous. Sometime after one in the morning when she finally leaned in and said, “C’mere, you,” I suspect she still held in her mind the sweet, saintly image of long-ago me bashfully performing my duties at the priest’s side. Which was fine with me, I was picturing her naked.

A month later I took her home to meet the parents. We had a fine time basking in the warm glow of my childhood hovel, swapping stories about the old days for the girl’s entertainment. After dinner, my mother pulled out the photo album. I sat across the room, indulging the ooh’s and aah’s, the unchecked laughter at me in my purple bell-bottoms (why is that funny? it’s not like I bought them for myself, I was five). Then came the moment when the girl grew suddenly silent and serious. Her eyes narrowed before she looked up at me and said, “I thought you told me you were never an altar boy.”

“Beg pardon?” I asked.

She turned the album my way, and sure enough, there I stood, eyes appropriately downcast, hands folded in front of me, and dressed in the traditional white surplice over an ankle-length black cassock.

“That appears to be me,” I assented.

“Of course you were an altar boy,” my mother chirped. She turned to the girl, “He’s probably repressed the memory because he hated it so much.”

Sure, Mom. That was probably it.

The sex abuse cases that rocked the Catholic foundations were still vague whispers at that point, certainly in our quiet jerkwater. It was 1990, and we had no reason to expect we were witnessing anything more than the sad but limited dismantling of what had been a long-standing bad joke about priests and little boys. The girl thought it was odd that I didn’t remember, but I doubt she suspected anything sinister had happened. Of course, generally speaking, we all know better now, and I’d be both surprised and disappointed if in the years hence that girl hasn’t at least once recounted to a friend that she dated a guy in college who was . . . “Well,” she would say, “the thing is, he doesn’t remember being an altar boy!” And we all know what that means.

Over the next twenty years I took a perverse pleasure, whenever the opportunity presented itself, in telling people I don’t remember being an altar boy. You can’t always direct the conclusions to which people will jump, but this happens to be one of the topics with which you easily can. “Oh my god, really?” Me (grinning): Weird, right? “Yeah, um . . . Oh my god!”

I’ve only been trumped in my fun once, and I should’ve known better. I was sitting at the bar with my best pal Peaches, an inveterate smartass and steadfast match to my wit, especially after I’d faced him one evening while he was chatting up a young woman and turned to me for confirmation when he announced to her, “Well, I’m not completely full of shit,” to which I replied, “No, but it wouldn’t take much to top you off.” Yeah, I had it coming. So there I sat, telling my little joke for perhaps the two-hundredth time, when Peaches pulled out his smart-ish phone and asked, “What was your priest’s name?” I thought nothing of it, rattled off the name, and went back to my amusement. A few minutes later he handed me his phone and said, “Read ’em and weep, altar boy.”

And there it was, a real story in a real newspaper, Father X implicated in Catholic sex abuse scandal, multiple confirmed incidents.

He was a regular Jack the Diddler.

“Where’s your messiah now, funny guy?” Peaches asked.

What could I do? We got drunk and had many laughs, mostly at my expense.

But I thought a lot about Father X after that. He was a bald, obese, painfully myopic old priest: he had to use a staggeringly thick magnifying glass to read scripture. That’s about all I remember about him, except a vague recollection of his Elmer-Fudd voice. I can, however, say with absolute certainty he never touched me, not even appropriately. I don’t think he ever even looked at me. Believe me when I say, I don’t repress anything. I can tell you what I had for breakfast my first day of kindergarten: half a grapefruit, for some unimaginable reason (hell of a time to try out a new food on me, Mom). I can tell you the last time I peed the bed: I was nine and tried to blame it on the cat (volume gave me away). Nothing has ever hurt so badly or shamed me so deeply that I’ve dug a hole in my psyche and buried it there. That ain’t me.

Which leads to what I think is a rather obvious question, given what we know: why not me? I mean, I was cute. I had a near-perfect little boy body, thin and lean and mostly hairless. The pipe-cleaners hanging from my shoulder sockets made it abundantly clear I wasn’t strong enough to fight back. I wasn’t the incessant talker I am now, so I’m sure I didn’t give the impression that I’d tattle. So what was wrong with me? Why didn’t you pick me, Father X?

I believe in the value of reflection, particularly in light of new information. I don’t wish to pin everything on Father X, but give the devil his due. Here I sit, a man in his early forties who has experienced a long and satisfying sex life with some truly delightful women. I don’t scratch shallow troughs in my skin with a knife, don’t wake up crying in the middle of the night, don’t hate my body (although I kind of should). I’m a lot of this and a whole lot of that, but goddamn if I’m not pretty fucking normal. Rejection, whatever form it takes, always comes with some cost.

Perhaps I should just get over it, but I confess, it has been on my mind constantly, so much so that during a recent trip through the family photo album with another excellent girl, something caught my eye and inspired what I consider to be a damned solid theory. Stretched out side by side in my narrow bed, we flipped slowly through the 1970s. There I was again as an altar boy, there in my fuzzy footie pajamas, there in my purple bell-bottoms, and a page later, a picture I had neither seen nor thought about in decades (because it was my sister’s birthday party and thus I wasn’t the focal point): there I stood in a pair of Lee jeans, back-to this time, and immediately the words I’ve heard a thousand or so times in my adult life from the mouths of friends and loved ones rang out in my head like the bells of Notre Dame: “Pull up your pants.” At this mild admonishment I invariably shrug and halfheartedly hitch, meantime explaining somewhat apologetically that I have no ass (it’s true, I have none). It wasn’t until the moment I saw myself from behind in that random Polaroid from more than thirty-five years ago that it finally hit me: I have never had an ass. And clarity washed over me like a rape shower.

I understand you now, Father X, and I forgive you your failure to trespass against me.

You, sir, were an ass-man.

Lucky me.

Synanon came to life in the fifties. The ultimate temple of soul sacrifice. You laid yourself out to all comers, at Synanon, because this was the new school of drug rehab. But, unlike its twelve step brethren, Synanon did not mature very quickly, it didn’t really develop was until the 70’s.Scientology, itself often branded as a cult, had also become fruitful at the same time, and was selling its own drug program. And like Scientology, the fierce creatures of Synanon formed into a kind of cult. Musicians showed up, and Synanon put them to work, recording albums to promote the rehab. Ask yourself how many drug rehabs issue albums? Now, how many cults do?

Synanon’s self-popularization sang with such perfect pitch that hepcats near its Santa Monica, and Bay Area locations rang the bell, and joined up, before they even realized what they were getting into. Jazz and pop musicians- famed addict and sax man Art Pepper among them- came calling. What’s the plan? Don’t know, don’t care, it works, that’s all. Everyday Joes showed up, too. Synanon didn’t discriminate. They took you in, and gave you the rap. And the rap was tough love. To the extreme.

Synanon emerged, like an ex-pugilist with something to prove, straight out of founder Charles “Chuck” Dederich’s garage in Ocean Park, California. For a while, the program aligned itself closely to the twelve step groups that were gaining their own cult like status in the late 50’s and early 60’s. But only for a while. Eventually Dederich received tax-exempt status for Synanon. After that, the money rolled right in. The garage in Ocean Park gave way to a ranch in the foothills, then another. And then, there was the Santa Monica spot. Right smack dab on the beach.

So what happened? Synanon was built around one person. The group beat to his imperfect cadence. Members slipped out of reach because they were encouraged to relinquish past acquaintances and family members in favor of their new ‘family.’ Yeah, like Manson. Like the Children of God. Like a cult.

Some of the methods were outlandish for the time, but have become mainstream today. Rather than focus on the individual, Synanon sought to encourage group members to ‘test’ other group members, in regards to their sobriety, their faith, and their dedication. In essence, the group member became the therapist. These ‘test’ sessions sometimes turned into shouting matches, but in the end Dederich and the other ‘therapists’ sought to establish closure so the group as a whole, and the individuals therein, could move onward, upward to a new salvation. In some cases it made desperate junkie prostitutes able to see the light at the end of the tunnel, in others, it offered a major rush of egotistical power to people who had never experienced it, and they abused it. As Synanon moved beyond its gestation the twelve step tenets wore thin. Dederich began restructuring them, adding in new rules, new regulations, new regiments, making it up as he went along. One major theme Dederich stressed was that the patient needed to stay in the group, and not leave. To give back, to build a new community. Things got weird. Normally, a visit to the drunk farm ended with some sort of fresh start. Or not. Either way, there was a beginning, middle, and an end. Not so with Synanon. There, you stuck around in perpetuity, finding new ways to make yourself useful for years at a time. Synanon encouraged the beginning and the middle, but never the end. An end presented too difficult a task. Dederich had seen where other rehabs had failed. They all let their clients back out into the real world. And that was their great mistake. Success rates plummeted once addicts were set free. Synanon simply abolished that last act, instead electing to treat addicts over long periods, for seemingly endless terms. If you decided you were ready to leave, a group of your Synanon peers came round to remind you what it was like before you got there. They urged you to stick it out, to let Synanon keep working its magic. If that didn’t work, Chuck would send in the aptly named “punk squad,” which existed, in the words of ex-resident Charlotte (no last name) “for people who need to be tamed.”

Synanon family members began to get frightened when they couldn’t contact their loved ones. Critics of the Synanon ‘method’ arose. Some called it a cult. Most claimed it robbed them of relationships with their family members. All pointed their fingers at Dederich, who made no effort to give a public response.

In the very early part of the 1970’s, the Point Reyes Light, a teeny local paper in a small town north of San Francisco near a Synanon compound, started investigating rumors of staff abuse, and beatings. As the reports of negligence grew, the IRS took note, and began the process to revoke the group’s tax exempt status, saying it was no longer a medical rehabilitation facility, but something else, a way of life. Synanon, feeling like it was on the ropes, did what any cult-ish group would- under Dederich’s order the group declared itself a religion. Enter the church of Synanon.

Suspected of acting in and covering up the murder of a dissenter, the frayed group started to make headlines beyond the Point Reyes Light reach, though the small paper did capitalize on its coverage of the group, even receiving a Pulitzer Prize for its Synanon articles.

Time Magazine featured Synanon in an unfavorable light. The article portrayed Dederich as wife swapping messianic leader. Descriptions of the residents of Synanon referred to them as “smiling people” with “shiny, shaved heads,” who bowed in sync, and chanted like monks.

They listed assets, they mentioned Dederich’s 70’s era $100,000 salary, and quoted him, “A lot of guys could do this thing from an old Ford roadster and sit on an orange crate…I need a $17,000 Cadillac. We are in the people business just exactly as if we were building Chevrolet axles.”

Stranger things were in store. More investigations arose from the constant news coverage. Local police began getting calls from estranged family members. As the scrutiny wore on, Synanon security tightened. The punk squad grew. Paranoia took over. Addicts usually become acclimated to reality if given something else to become addicted to. Synanon added to already compulsive behavior a regimented structure that offered an alternative future to needles plunged into arms, and sucking off johns behind bus stations. While many celebrities had given praise to Synanon in the past (Steve Allen promoted Synanon on TV) the celebrity endorsements dried up in the face of the bad press of the early 70’s.

Since Synanon claimed such definite success, it pointed to the past record of its achievement, to the (past) celebrity endorsements, to the sobriety of its members. Synanon embraced a hive mind, a boot camp philosophy. Somehow, the myth continued to grow. New members arrived daily.

Sci-Fi writer Philip K. Dick battled his own demons. During the 60’s he started using large amounts of speed, taking more and more of the amphetamine to accomplish more and more writing. And of course, addiction rooster tailed in the wake of all that drug taking. Eventually things spun wildly out of control for Dick, who began living with local addicts trading dugs, and comparing notes. As some of his pals began to overdose and die, others sought rehabilitation. Synanon had a campus in nearby Marin. Dick likely experienced some Synanon concepts first hand. He didn’t like what he found. New Path, the rehab in Dick’s loosely autobiographical novel “A Scanner Darkly” is based on Synanon. In another book, the group is actually identified as Synanon by a character, “It’s a fascist therapy that makes the person totally outer directed and dependent on the group.” Critics Rosa Lee Cole and Phil Ritter came under heavier fire than Dick. Ritter was beaten after he left the group. Fifteen-year-old Rosa Lee Cole disappeared from the Synanon foundation’s Oakland center never to be heard from again. A lawyer for another ex- Synanon member was bitten by a rattlesnake, which had been de-rattled, agitated, and stuffed in his mailbox. Somehow the man survived. Each of these stories were reported by the Point Reyes Light, and later investigated by local and federal authorities. Paul Morantz, the lawyer bitten by the snake dedicated his life to debunking Dederich’s myths, writing a book and operating a website condemning all things Syn-Syn-Synanon.

By the time an NBC expose ran, Synanon was claiming to Connie Chung that it was the victim of bad publicity. Very bad publicity. Mostly stemming from the disappearance of a Synanon patient, or member, however they were classifying them, back in the early part of the decade.

Dederich made no bones about the hi-jinks. He admitted wearing costumes, that he was ”big brother big daddy.” The icing on the cake, however, was a clandestinely obtained recording. On it, Synanon’s founder can be heard ranting about lawsuits waged by ex-members and other detractors. “These are real threats, they (lawyers) are draining life’s blood from us and expecting us to play by their silly rules. We will make the rules. I see nothing frightening about it… I am quite willing to break some lawyer’s legs and next break his wife’s legs and threaten to cut their child’s arm off. That is the end of that lawyer. That is a very satisfactory, humane way of transmitting information…. I really do want an ear in a glass of alcohol on my desk” A few months later, Dederich, the man who founded Synanon on the concept of complete abstinence from drugs and alcohol, broken by strain and or megalomania, or both, was found stewed to the gills, and arrested in relation to the attempted murders of Morantz, and Ritter. John Watson, the LA prosecutor assigned to the case described Dederich upon arrest as being, “in a stupor, staring straight ahead with an empty bottle of Chivas Regal.”

But there was something to Synanon, before their tough-love-confrontational-rehabilitation-methodology shifted into its late era thuggish free for all. The program changed lives. It kept irrefutably hopeless addicts clean, long as they stayed under the Synanon roof. Many who had been through the program paid no mind to the bad press. Synanon worked where nothing else would. To this day former members meet online and in person sharing stories of their time as members of Synanon the family. Still, after Dederich’s arrest, and subsequent downfall, it was next to impossible to keep tabs on success stories because Synanon success stories kept their mouths shut, unwilling to invite the odor of the group’s last days into their well fought for sobriety. Can you blame them? Some aspects of Synanon’s ‘no bones about it’ program can’t be argued with. Desperation’s wild horse needs a jockey, and in a lot of cases, that jockey was Synanon. But even the best jockey needs the oversight of a trainer and that was where Synanon failed.

Despite the mounting bad press, or likely, because of Synanon’s previous favored-son status during the mid 60’s media onslaught, other addiction specialists took note. New York’s Daytop Village, the name sometimes referred to as an acronym for Drug Addicts Yielding to Temptation, based their methods on that of Synanon’s primal group therapy model. Whatever. Daytop remained an incredible success in the treatment of hard-core addicts and alcoholics. One of Daytop’s founders spent time at Synanon in the early sixties before Dederich’s megalomaniacal model overwhelmed the rehabilitation process. And Mel Wasserman started his CEDU schools based on his own Synanon experiences, billing them as Therapeutic Boarding Schools. Like Synanon, they failed.

It’s not hard to see why many flocked to the Synanon model. It was damn seductive. A misappropriation on tough love, it looked like you were giving the addict a punch in the face to help them get better, and one time or another we have all wanted to punch the addicts in our lives square on the jaw. They looked like elegant marines as they ran across the beach in front of the Santa Monica headquarters, moving like chiseled gazelles, turning their bodies into temples once again. The group therapy was based on absolute interrogation and complete candor. No one was allowed to have any secrets. “You’re only as sick as your secrets” took on a whole new meaning at Synanon. Secrets were hunted down, and throttled, until even the secret keeper could no longer stomach the idea of dishonesty. But Dederich couldn’t seem to stop fiddling with the more controlling aspects of his therapeutic model. Women and men had to shave their heads. Most referred to Dederich as a kind of God. Vasectomies for men were encouraged. Then enforced. If a couple entered together, they wouldn’t last. Dederich pushed for and gotwife swapping. He sought a more lurid sort of enlightenment.

Dederich wasn’t jailed, but his reign at Synanon was over. The IRS confiscated Synanon’s property after the tax exemption revocation became official. The group ceased to exist, until the Internet.

Now a few pages dedicated to the group exist. Paul Morantz, the lawyer who received the rattlesnake in his mailbox operates one. Former Synanon members operate another- Synanon.com.

Gurus are a constant problem with twelve step programs. Touting guidance for the extreme cases, Gurus almost always end up using sex and money as their puppet strings, while often encouraging members to sever ties with friends and family in case any sense will be lodged into the group member’s mind.

As for Synanon’s physical presence in Santa Monica, the former hotel standing just steps from the Pacific Ocean has once again returned to the resort mentality- rates start at $395. About the same cost for a month stay back in ’78. And the name? In an article published in 1959 by R.D. Fox, Synanon stood for, Sins Anonymous.

I Sought Order

This do I teach:
The more you seek security, the more you are haunted by insecurity.
The more you desire surety, the more you are plagued by change.
The more you pretend to permanence, the more you invite suffering.
The more you do for control, the less you do for joy. -  Ecclesiastes 1: 15-18

It seems we have the whole of life backward.  We want what we cannot get, and we reject that which we have in abundance.  We want the world to fit into a neat and understandable package. What we get is a jumble of experiences from which we fashion a life.

We want life to fit our story about life; instead we find ourselves in a swirling soup of ever-changing events some of which seem to make no sense whatsoever.

So Solomon is correct: The more I crave security, the more I am haunted by its absence. The more I seek to maintain the status quo, no matter how hurtful or damaging to me and others, the more things slip through my fingers and change against my will. Indeed — and this is his main point — my will does not much matter. Things happen whether I will them to or not. Reality does not give a damn about what I want; it just does what it does.

Our task then is simply to be fully present to whatever is happening now. When we are fully present, we seem to know what to do. Doing become effortless, choiceless. We are not weighing options but simply taking up the task that the moment presents.

My friend Leon is Chaplin at a local hospital. We cover for each other when one of us is out town. Late one evening I got a call from his hospital about a family whose mother was dying. Leon was unavailable, and they asked me to drive to the hospital and help in any way I could.

When I arrived at the hospital, a woman had just died and the family was being ushered out of a room by an orderly. I asked the family if they had a chance to pray with her mother and say goodbye. They had not and the orderly was kind enough to let us back into the mother’s room to be with her for a while longer. I encouraged the family to gather around their mother and take turns speaking to her — telling her they loved her, that they would miss her and that though it was sad, it was okay, that it was her time to die. As they spoke to their mother, the dead woman’s eyes suddenly filled with blood and thick red tears began to stream down her cheeks. I have never seen this happen to anyone before, and neither had her family. They stop talking and just stared, their bodies tense.

Part of me was horrified. I had performed this kind of service for people many times and this had never happened before. If I had thought about what to do, I suspect I would have left the room and called for a nurse. But I did not think about it. Instead, I sat on the bed, took the woman’s head in my arms, and wiped away the blood with a towel that had been hanging on the bed rail. I nodded to the family and encouraged them to continue speaking to her. I did all of this is if it was the most natural thing in the world. And at the time it was. After I left the hospital and returned my car however, I began shaking all over.

I still feel that I did the right thing and I learned something in the process. The lesson I learned was not simply what to do in this particular situation; rather, I learned the wisdom that comes when we are simply present. I did not have a set procedure to handle the situation we faced. In fact it was not a “situation” that needed handling. It was simply a family grieving, a mother bleeding, and a rabbi with an access to a towel.

This is what I mean by being present to the moment.  Nothing magical or extraordinary, just life as it is – often messy and rarely scripted. The more I empty myself of self and of the quest for surety, permanence, and control that defines the self, the more I am at home in the chaos of my life. The less we imagine what our lives ought to be, the more we can be present to what they really are. And in this, grace – an ease of doing – that we cannot imagine as long as we seek to control and manipulate things to our end.

Anyone who’s read even the first few pages of Genesis knows the Bible is riddled with contradictions and questionable behavior written about someone we assume to be an all-knowing and loving God. In the first two chapters alone, the authors can’t agree on what day plants were created, or if man arrived before or after the animals. Throughout the Old Testament, God assists in genocide, He burns people to death, and He orders severe punishments for seemingly innocuous crimes like wearing dissimilar clothing material or being careless with menstrual discharge.

Non-believers often seize upon the Bible’s apparent inaccuracies and atrocities when casting doubt upon God’s existence, and it’s difficult to argue with them. If these are the divinely inspired Words of God, why should there be any mistakes at all? Have such mistakes been placed there to test our faith? Is God’s mysterious behavior a conscious act on His part to separate His true followers from the pretenders? And if so, what would be the point of such a test? Surely God must know well ahead of the rest of us who will succeed and who will falter.

Questions of this nature have plagued man for as long as he could conceive of himself having been borne from supreme beings. Biological at the source, but philosophical in practice, nearly all of us carry doubts about the reasons for our existence. Are we here for some purpose? Is there order to the universe? Are we alone?

We do not want to be alone.

And so, in ways too numerous to count, we seek spiritual peace. Some of us read only the oldest, pre-Christian writings of the Tanakh. Others follow the iron will of the Catholic church, at least until one day some of them decide there is a way to be closer to God. Some of us move across the ocean, far from the original holy land, and find guidance in a reinvented Christianity with new holy lands much closer to home. We pay enormous sums of money to an organization founded by a pulp science fiction author and try to find the ancient alien inside each of us.

For most of my life, I was a lukewarm Catholic. My childhood attendance at Mass was reluctant, and once I left for college, I swore I’d never go again. But then I married a Catholic woman who gently encouraged me to return. Soon enough I’d fallen back into the routine and gradually became immersed in the community of my church, chairing fund raising events, playing basketball in the school gym, hitting the links with some of those same buddies. On Sundays, the Father would select a story from the Bible, usually the New Testament, and deliver a homily that challenged parishioners to be tolerant of their fellow man. Judging by the various conversations I either participated in or overheard among my friends there, most folks listened politely to the Father and agreed with him on principle because he was, after all, discussing the Word of God. I don’t know many who studied the Word with any level of detail, though. Being a member of the church was simply a fact of life, no different than a native Bostonian being a fan of the Red Sox.

My rejection of Christianity and organized religion in general coincided roughly with the election of Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI on this very day six years ago. Ratzinger’s positions on homosexuality and condom use caused me to reexamine my own, and coupled with America’s (too) slow acceptance of gay rights, I began to seriously doubt the authority of religious figures whose basis for morality was scripture I already knew contained many structural and moral ambiguities.

I became angry with the Church for what I perceived to be hypocrisy. The Vatican coddled ordained sex offenders but condemned a wide swath of humanity who chose to employ birth control or engage in consensual sex with adults of the same gender. But soon I realized these individual political positions were symptomatic of my larger problem within organized religion, which was to conceal prejudice behind the unassailable rules of a magical supreme being. And it wasn’t just Catholics. Or Christians. Or believers in various Abrahamic religions. It was anyone who brandished spiritual belief as a weapon, no matter the source material.

And once the curtain fell, all the absurdities I’d ignored for years mushroomed into unavoidable obstacles. How could adults in the 21st century, with so much information and contradictory evidence at their disposal, still believe in a magical man in the sky? When did we decide it was acceptable to merge pagan symbols like bunny rabbits and colored eggs with the rebirth of God’s zombie son? Why did Christian Americans, so proudly individual, so unworthy of charity and state support, advocate a spiritual belief system whose core message was eternal salvation? How on earth could capitalism and Christianity coexist? Even thrive?

I don’t know the answers to these questions. I doubt I ever will. But after a period of spiritual readjustment, I realized those answers were not important. The path to personal enlightenment and self-actualization was not to understand why others do the things they do or believe what they believe. And it was certainly not my place to judge others for what they believed.

What matters to me is what I believe. Nothing more.

Every one of you reading this has been blessed with the miracle of life, with consciousness; you are privileged to be a member of the only known animal species on earth capable of asking such questions. But with that privilege comes a curse, the knowledge of your own mortality, and the possibility that life is nothing more than a tiny, accidental mutation of cosmic evolution.

Navigating such a universe is not an easy task, and none of us should be blamed for the paths we choose to peace, as long as those paths don’t infringe upon the rights of others.

When I think of my own path, I think of Genesis 2 and 3, which introduce the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Adam and Eve disobeyed God and ate the fruit from this tree, which opened their eyes to their own nakedness. In return, God banished the two from the Garden of Eden and cursed them to a gritty, mortal existence. Their rebellious behavior constitutes our original fall from grace.

But to me, in these opening chapters, the Bible tells me everything I need to know about Christianity. Given the choice between nuanced knowledge and simple bliss, between rebellion and obedience, I’ll take the rebellious knowledge every time. In my estimation, humankind’s questions about the nature of itself, our rejection of the status quo, our ever-upward understanding of our tiny-yet-significant place in this beautiful universe, is the true miracle.

Grace isn’t something from which we’ve fallen. Grace is something to which we aspire, that we strive toward every day. If we ever manage to get there, ever so humbly, God will be waiting for us, a welcoming smile on his face.

Because in the end, God is us. He’s the best we have to offer.

That any of us have to offer.

You.

Me.

Anyone who aspires to grace.

When I was fourteen, I stood before the deacons of my church and lied.

The deacons sat in a half circle of red and gold armchairs that seemed incongruous with the church’s Puritan ancestry. A small group of my peers sat behind me, waiting for their turn to speak, truth or lie.   I told them all I believed in God, that I believed Jesus was the son of God, and that human beings were made in His image.  The head deacon knew I was a liar, but he liked me.  When I finished my statement of faith – required for confirmation – he threw me a few softball questions.  One deacon tried to catch me in the lie.  She asked me why I hadn’t talked about attending church, about the congregation, in my statement.

I told her, and the rest of the room, that I believed in the ability of the individual to navigate his or her own way through the complicated, conflicting, confusing world of faith and belief. For me, independent inquiry and intellectual and spiritual curiosity were more important than participation in a congregation.  I quickly added that I did acknowledge the value of a pastor’s leadership, and the ability of the congregation to infuse my own spiritual quest with needed energy and knowledge.  Lying again.  They let me in.

On confirmation day, the pastor grabbed my arm. “Listen to my sermon,” he said. “You’re its inspiration.”

The pastor, at the pulpit, told the congregation that one of its newest members had inspired him to grow as a Christian in a way he had never considered before.  He said that the independent spirit of this young person had moved him to preach that day about individual curiosity, introspection, and honesty.  Don’t say what you think is right to believe.  Say what you believe, listen to others, and you’ll grow.  I was beaming. I had fooled them all.

Then, we, the about-to-be confirmed, approached the front of the congregation and knelt in a half circle on the red carpet. We waited for the pastor and the deacons to walk to each of us, lay hands on our heads, and pray.  I was last in the half circle.

***

The pastor taught our year-long confirmation class himself. Congregationalists don’t like ritual and pomp, and they certainly don’t pay much attention to the Catholic obsession with saints. So it came as a surprise when the pastor told our class about his latest idea to make confirmation more exciting — each of us were to be assigned a saint, based on his assessment of our spiritual needs and personalities, and we were to research that saint and find a spiritual connection to their story. We each got a pendant in a white cardboard box, and the pastor explained to each of us his decisions.

Mine was Saint Anne, Grandmother of Jesus, the patron saint of housewives, women in labor, miners and poverty. The pastor said he saw Saint Anne as part of my nature, the part that made me exceptionally strong-willed.

I thought, “Is this a joke? housewives, poverty, and labor? I’m going to be a doctor, a pathologist. I’ll be neither poor nor pregnant.”

On the pendant, Anne held a book. She wasn’t looking at the book. She was staring up to the sky, to God. This saint was meant for me somehow but the joke would be on the pastor. I decided Anne was studious, well-read, and wise. She was the grandmother of Jesus, the holder of precious knowledge beyond her time. I imagined Anne reading the Book her grandson would pass to the world two generations early. I thought of her as a happily silent prophet, who would treat those close to her with odd bits of information, and revel in their misunderstanding and confusion. Unlike tragically misunderstood Cassandra, Anne was content to be the only one who knew the full meaning behind her eccentricities. Like most artists, I thought, she’d be best understood once she was long dead and the rest of the world caught up.

St. Anne, praise her, helped me take pleasure in my secret knowledge.

***

Finally, the pastor and deacons reached me.  He had handpicked crosses for each of us to wear.  Most of the girls had large, silver crosses with embedded jewels.  Mine was plain, small, gold, with flared edges, more like what he gave to the boys.  The pastor and the deacons placed their hands on my head, and the pastor leaned in close and whispered in my ear:

“I know you have hardened your heart, and I pray to God that one day He’ll open it.”

They finished praying, and the newest members of the church stood up to lead the congregation in a hymn.

***

 

I had lost my faith about three years before this moment. I don’t remember when, exactly.  It was before I saw the pictures of the Mengele experiment victims, but after the death of my grandmother.

Nowadays, I ask other people to tell me how they found God, and they ask me to tell them a story, too. Have I lost mine? If so, where do I search for God? Testify. Fair’s fair, but there’s no story.  So, what do you say: truth or lie?

Picture a suburb of Cleveland. Even if you have never been to one, you probably have in mind something very much like Brooklyn, Ohio, a nondescript village of tidy lawns and aluminum siding. Living here, it would take a leap of faith to imagine yourself at the center of anything, much less of everything. Fortunately, leaps of faith are the forte of Gerardus Dingeman Bouw, the president of the Association for Biblical Astronomy and the country’s leading proponent of geocentrism.

In the field of Bible science, young earth creationism is the liberal position. A tiny but fiercely dedicated contingent of scholars holds the more conservative belief that a literal reading of the Bible reveals a universe in revolution around a fixed, central point: the earth. Bouw, who holds a Ph.D. in astronomy from Case Western Reserve, has dedicated his adult life to proving this proposition scripturally and scientifically.

The geocentrist movement is not as well known as the creationist movement, nor as well organized or funded. Bouw earns his living as a professor of computer science at a small liberal arts college. The Association for Biblical Astronomy, which exists almost entirely as a web site and a quarterly journal, is run out of a cluttered spare room in Bouw’s Brooklyn home.

In 1992, Bouw self-published a 400-page book titled Geocentricity (the ABA prefers this term, to distinguish its discipline from classical geocentrism, which postulated a patently absurd universe of concentric, independent spheres). Geocentricity lays out not only a defense of geocentrism, but a reminder the stakes. The Bible, Bouw writes, is replete with passages that describe, in plain language, an immobile earth encircled by the sun and stars; there are 26 verses that speak of the sun “going down” or “setting,” and 30 that describe it as “rising.” These are not mere figures of speech, warns Bouw. “If God can not be taken literally when he writes of the ‘rising of the sun,’ then how can he be taken literally in writing of the ‘rising of the Son?’”

Mainstream creationists (if I may be allowed the term) argue that the seemingly geocentric passages are merely God using the “language of appearance,” or divinely-inspired men speaking from a human perspective. This is the liberal tendency that makes geocentrists apoplectic. “Phenomenological or anthropocentric,” sniffs Bouw:

either God inerrently inspired the wording or He did not; either the Bible is trustworthy or it is not. There is no middle ground. There is no room for compromise. After all, both the anthropocentric theory of inspiration and the phenomenological-language theory are forms of accommodation where God is said to accommodate his wording to the understanding of the common man. Good though that may sound on the surface, accommodation still maintains that God goes along with the accepted story even though he really does not believe it.

It does not help when, for instance, the Answers in Genesis web site caps its dismissal of geocentrism with the observation that “the question of the earth’s physical position is less important than the spiritual reality of God’s love for his people” — precisely what Christians who accept evolution say about the physical creation of man. “It’s inconsistent,” Bouw told me. “you can’t say that one part of it is more credible than another part just simply because you feel uncomfortable with what it says there.”

Bouw is 65, a shambling professor with wire-rim glasses and a pen clipped into his shirt pocket. He speaks gently, with a hint of a Dutch accent, but his face reddens easily, a trait emphasized by his crown of white-gray hair. Bouw emigrated to the States, by way of Canada, as a teenager. He had been raised in the church, but while pursuing his science degrees at American universities, he decided that he was an atheist. He changed his mind again, however, shortly after earning his Ph.D., when a presentation on neutron stars at an American Association for the Advancement of Science convention persuaded him that life was inherent in the universe, which meant there must be a creator.

“I decided that if there was a God who was involved with his creation, then there should be a manual about running earth,” said Bouw. He began studying the great religious texts of the world and was halfway through Robert Heinlein’s science fiction novel Time Enough for Love, when he decided to try the Bible instead. “I started reading it from cover to cover, basically looking for any internal contradictions that were inconsistent with an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent God, and, basically, I couldn’t find any.” Bouw now says that God must have guided him to a King James Version, since it is the only accurate, contradiction-free translation.

Bouw did not recant his belief in evolution, however. That would come two years later when he picked up a tract from the Institute for Creation Research called Have You Been… Brainwashed? To his shock, Bouw realized that he… had. Now that he understood the limits of science, he went back to the Bible. “I found that the scriptures could help coordinate my scientific knowledge,” he said. “Some of it I would have to forget or unlearn, but quite often the result of what I unlearned was much more valuable and much more comprehensive” than the original knowledge. While reading the Bible, he made his mantra, “What must I forget next?”

The scriptural evidence for geocentrism goes beyond references to the rising and setting of the sun. There are also repeated allusions to the stability of the earth — Bouw’s favorite is Psalm 93:1: “[T]he world also is stablished, that it cannot be moved” — and passages about God’s heavenly throne, which, for arcane reasons that take up six pages of Geocentricity, strongly suggest a stationary earth.

The Geocentrists’ most treasured verses are ones in which the sun fails to move as expected. Job 9:7 says, God “commandeth the sun, and it riseth not.” This clearly can not be a case of the sun appearing not to rise, because it is the sun to which God addresses his command. It’s true that this line is spoken by Job, who, as a man, may be mistaken, but Bouw believes this passage is a prophetic reference to an incident known as Joshua’s long day, which constitutes his most compelling scriptural evidence. Joshua 10 recounts a day in which, according to God’s own words, “the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day.” An obvious rejoinder is that if God had said the earth stood still, no reader until 16^th century would have understood him. Bouw labels this the central heresy of the modern — that is, post-medieval — church. “Most Christian scholars over the centuries have been of the opinion that God needs them to make his truth known,” he writes, “that God is incapable of explaining certain matters to man without that help.”

Bouw also has no patience for the observation that much of the Bible is meant to be poetic. “Poetry is every wit as truthful as prose,” he insists. The real problem is not that science is overtaking the Bible, but that it has yet to catch up. “As man’s knowledge increases, the number of such ‘poetic’ passages in the Bible is steadily decreasing,” he claims. I tried probing Bouw’s philosophy for inconsistencies but found few. Most Christians since Augustine have held that God does not literally have body parts — hands, feet, a face, even wings — as described in the Bible; these are “figures of speech about God,” in the words of Answers in Genesis. Bouw disagrees. Of course God has hands, feet and wings — the Bible says so. Bouw explained that as far as he is concerned, the Bible only uses metaphors when “even Adam could have recognized them.” So trees don’t really have hands, because no one in history would ever have heard Isaiah 55:12 and taken it literally. But if Adam could have read a Bible passage describing the motion of the sun, he wouldn’t have known it was meant to be figurative, therefore it can not be.

In 1975, Bouw joined the Creation Research Society, one of the first organized institutions of contemporary creationism. While training himself to forget the teachings of “science falsely so called,” Bouw came across an article in the CRS journal about the diversity of opinion among creationists. In passing, the writer mentioned the extreme case of one Walter van der Kamp, an advocate of geocentrism. Recalled Bouw, “I fired off a letter to Walter asking, in effect, which scriptures?”

Van der Kamp, it so happened, was another Dutch-Canadian. “As a foreigner in Canada, you are not always accepted,” mused Bouw. “You can either let it defeat you, or you can decide, Why don’t you show them?, and I think that’s pretty much how Walter and I handled it.” Van der Kamp came to creationism relatively late in life and had not gotten far in his research when something began to trouble him: if Genesis 1 clearly states that God created the sun and the moon on the fourth day in order to rule an already existing day and night on an already existing earth, when did the earth begin to move, and how did we ever get the idea that it was the earth’s rotation toward and away from the sun that caused day and night, rather than the light that God so dramatically created in Genesis 1:3? Besides, would God really have created a planet, set it into orbit around nothing, then four days later placed a random minor star at the center of that orbit? Obviously, something didn’t add up.

“Having come this far in reading about the matter, I found myself in a quandary,” writes van der Kamp in his memoir, a work of irresistible Old World charm.

All books and everyone consulted warned me that it would be worse than preposterous to contradict and dismiss the results of three centuries of observations. On the other hand, it was equally difficult to swallow the view that Holy Scripture fobs us off with fictions presented as factual truths; and that it does so in a rather clear prosaic style. What is more, though sauce for the geocentric goose then ought to be no less a sauce for the creationist gander, I still refused to bend the knee to Darwin and his proselytes. Their tedious, inane prattle about something called “Nature” through endless ages evolving and adapting the stupendous variety of living creatures disgusted me. “Nature,” with a “somehow- intuitively-acquired” understanding of all physical sciences, “somehow” perfectly synchronizing the tiniest individual evolvements for stabilizing countless finely-tuned ecosystems? And this for the most divergent climatic conditions? No, never!

There was still the little matter of science, of course, but that proved less difficult to overcome than van der Kamp expected.

Whatever I read, whomever I asked, nowhere could I find a physically and logically sound refutation of the Bible’s Earth-centered picture. The textbooks took our annual revolution around the Sun to be so self-evident that no further verification was necessary. Anyone accosted about the matter assured me that, as everyone knows, Copernicus had settled the point long ago. “Proof?” The answer evoked by all my queries came down to: “Why should we have to prove something we know to be true?”

Van der Kamp wrote up his findings in a 1967 pamphlet called The Heart of the Matter, which he sold to friends for $2 and mailed free to leading creationists. For the most part, it was met with either scorn or silence, though van der Kamp did receive some encouragement from Harold Armstrong, a co-founder of the Creation Research Society, who confessed that he had secretly harbored geocentric sympathies for years. By 1971, van der Kamp had enough of a following to justify the founding of the Tychonian Society, named for Tycho Brahe, the brilliant 16^th century astronomer who briefly staved off Copernicanism. (The Tychonic System — in which the sun revolves around the earth and the rest of the planets revolve around the sun — was an elegant and nearly workable model that forms the basis for modern geocentrism.) The first Bulletins of the Tychonian Society were handwritten and mimeographed, but as they became more professional, or, at any rate, typed, they found a wider audience, and van der Kamp began earning invitations to major Bible science conferences.

It was around this time that Gerard Bouw got in touch with him. Eventually Bouw would succeed van der Kamp as president of the Society, and rename it the Association for Biblical Astronomy. (Van der Kamp died in 1998.) But the two men did not click well at first. Bouw believed in the hard evidence of scripture and astronomy, while van der Kamp’s approach was more philosophical. “I just don’t trust philosophy — never have,” Bouw told me. “They don’t know anything for sure.”

Bouw began his own investigation of the geocentrism. “I had a job at that time, a part time job, selling menswear,” he said. “And we had to keep busy, you know, we couldn’t stand still in that job; you have to keep walking the floor and rearranging the shelves or whatever all the time. And so that gave me some time to think about it. And as I thought about it, I wondered, you know, There really isn’t any objection against it. There is no scriptural objection against it, and there is no scientific objection against it, so why do I have problems accepting it?”

It is one thing for the philosophy-addled Walter van der Kamp to embrace geocentrism. But what does it mean for a man with degrees in astrophysics and astronomy to say that there is no scientific objection to it? The answer is found in something called Mach’s Principle, a hypothesis that was instrumental in Einsten’s development of general relativity. As understood by geocentrists, Mach’s Principle states that the motion of any object in the universe is never absolute, but exists only in relationship to the motion of all other objects in the universe. Predictions and measurements can be made using any chosen reference frame. “It matters little,” wrote Mach,

if we think of the earth as turning about on its axis, or if we view it at rest while the fixed stars revolve around it. Geometrically these are exactly the same case of a relative rotation of the earth and the fixed stars with respect to one another.

As geocentrists are fond of noting, Einstein himself wrote that all coordinate systems (CS) are equally valid: “The two sentences, ‘the sun is at rest and the earth moves,’ or ‘the sun moves and the earth is at rest’ would simply mean two different conventions concerning two different CS.” Although geocentrists reject relativity as an actual description of the physical laws of the universe, they accept it as a mathematical tool, and they wield it to show that a geocentric solar system — or martiocentric one, for that matter — is as valid as a heliocentric one.

In 2006, a Catholic geocentrist named Robert Sungenis published the first book in a planned two-volume set called Galileo was Wrong. At 1,147 pages it stands as the most comprehensive and sophisticated explanation to date of the science of modern geocentrism (volume two will discuss the geocentric teachings of scripture and the Church). As Sungenis explained it to me, geocentrists “are using modern science” to show that neither heliocentrism nor geocentrism can be proven. “So if there is no proof, then the whole thing is wide open for discussion, intellectual discussion. And then, if there is no way to prove through science — that is, relativity science — which one is correct, then we have to go to other places to find out which is correct.” Those other places being the Bible and, for Catholics, the Church fathers.

Having spent a considerable amount of time talking with creationists, I recognized fundamental similarities between their approach and that of the geocentrists: the emphasis on casting doubt on established theories rather than developing their own testable hypotheses; the claim that all they’re asking for is an open debate. And Sungenis also echoed creationists’ assertions that they don’t deny fossil evidence but merely interpret it in a different way. “We also have to backtrack on the experiments that were done that were interpreted in the heliocentric framework and ask if they can be interpreted in the geocentric framework,” he said. “And we find that that is the case. That is exactly the case. All the experiments have been done for us already, its just a matter now of showing the world that those very experiments don’t prove for modern science what they are said to prove.”

Another similarity between creationism and geocentrism is that when a typical scientific ignoramus — such as myself — encounters an expert in the field, he will quickly find himself drowning in a swamp of what sure sounds like science. At one point, Bouw sought to dismiss a common objection to geocentrism, which is that if the entire universe is revolving around the earth, the stars would have to be traveling faster than the speed of light in order to complete the rotations observed each day. “There are a couple of ways to object to that,” Bouw explained. “First of all, relativity does not deal with rotation, so rotation can be beyond the speed of light. But even if that’s not the case — even if you just strictly take the view that all you have is gravitational rotation — because E=mc², when you use the formula for gravity, you have to replace the m by E/c², and so then the centrifugal energy — the energy used as the centrifugal force, the kinetic energy there — and even the potential energy — are big enough that they increase the tension so much that the speed of light changes locally. The speed of light is dependent on the strength of the gravitational field: the stronger the field, the faster it goes. And so if the universe is being held together by gravity, out beyond even twenty billion light years or so, it’s still going to hang together. The gravitational tension is going to be huge, the speed of light is going to be tremendous — much larger, actually, than the speed of rotation — but the physics does work that way.”

Does it? You tell me.

Bouw got up from a worn living room chair and padded across the beige carpet to his home office. He returned a few minutes later with a contraption that looked like an even lower-tech version of something the kiddie-TV star Bibleman would use to fight atheists. The base was a wooden box, painted black, about two feet long. On top of that sat a metal cylinder topped by an intricate series of gears, platforms and industrial-grade rubber bands. In the center of this was a model of the earth. Jutting out to one side was the sun and, emerging from that on oddly-angled metal rods, Venus and Mars. “This is a geocentric orrery,” Bouw said. It illustrates the movement of the sun and planets around the earth.

Bouw plugged the orrery into a socket and flipped a switch. Nothing happened. He tried a few times, muttered a bit, made some adjustment, then flipped the switch again. There was a low hum and the sun began to circle the earth. Then Mars fell onto the floor.

“Oops.” Bouw stuck the Mars rod back into its hole. “All right, that’s the daily motion. Now let’s add the yearly motion.” He flipped another switch and the hum got louder. The sun continued on its course around the earth, now slowly rising as it moved. “There is the first day of summer,” Bouw pointed out. “You notice that the Northern hemisphere is getting the sunlight and the Southern hemisphere is not.” He hit the third switch and sun began to spin slowly, dragging Venus and Mars into their orbits. Then Venus collided with the metal arm holding the sun and got stuck.

Bouw scratched at his neck, then pulled both planets out of their holes and switched them. Now the orrery worked properly.

“Is this a one-of-a-kind?” I asked.

“No, there’s probably three or four of these that were made. There’s one in a school in Michigan, one is in a seminary in New Jersey and I think there is one in the Midwest somewhere.”

“A school? People teach this in schools?”

“Oh, yes. Church schools.”

I wondered how in-depth these lessons were. I felt I had the basics of geocentrism down, but talking with Bouw and Sungenis about the details, and reading their publications, I easily became confused. First I had to learn the meaning of phrases such as Michelson-Morley, Lense-Thirring and the Airy function; and then I had to unlearn those meanings in favor of what geocentrists said their meanings were. Next was the matter of embracing long-discarded concepts whose very names sounded ancient. Luminiferous aether? Really? And finally, and most disconcertingly, were the alleged physics proofs that unabashedly incorporated Biblical terms such as the firmament and the third heaven.

Geocentrists are used to skepticism, of course, and impossible to shake in their confidence. As creationists have with evolution, they have offered rewards to anyone who can prove, to their satisfaction, that the earth revolves around the sun. “That may have been a risky thing on my part,” said Sungenis of his $1,000 prize, not because he feared losing his money, but “because some people look at it and say, Oh this is really turning into a circus.” He did not want to lose the respect of the scientific community.

Robert Sungenis understands why secular scientists fight so desperately against geocentrism, despite its obvious viability. “There are philosophical, theological, cultural, social, financial ramifications to all this, that go deep into the psyche of man,” he told me. “Because if it is postulated that the earth is in the center of the universe, and people can show credible evidence that this may indeed be the case — I have run across so many quotes from so many famous scientists that say, if that’s the case, they more or less throw up their hands and say, it’s all over. Because they know that this cannot occur unless someone with design put the earth in the center of the universe. It’s even more devastating than saying that there is no evolution. Because this to them — and they all admit it, everyone of them I have read admit it — if this is the case, modern science has to start from square one.”

Sungenis is a traditionalist Catholic. Unlike Mel Gibson’s father, Hutton — a fellow geocentrist with whom Sungenis has politely debated cosmology — Sungenis does not outright reject Vatican II and the modern papacy. He does his best, however, to hold the church to his highly conservative standards. Throughout the 1990s, following his conversion from evangelical Protestantism, Sungenis was a respected and admired apologist in some circles. But his embrace of geocentrism in 2002 was viewed as something of an embarrassment. Several of his associates distanced themselves from him, with a few adding that they were further troubled by his hostile attitude toward Jews. Sungenis dismissed them as “a renegade assortment of ‘Catholics’ who simply refuse to accept my ongoing warnings about the Jewish, Zionist and Neocon infiltration into the heart of the Catholic Church today.”

Like Bouw, Sungenis holds the rash abandonment of geocentrism in the 16^th century responsible for “all these problems in the world today.” Atheism, Marxism, Nazism, abortion, homosexuality — all of these can be laid at the feet of Copernicus. “People decided, Well, God told us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go — and they compromised,” moaned Bouw, “The Bible got weakened and weakened. Our faith in the Bible has weakened, the authority of the Bible has weakened.”

By the 19^th century, Bouw writes in Geocentricity, “the revolution of the sciences spilled over into the political realm,” with the French and American Revolutions, and Britain’s bloodless revolutions, being fought to make the world “safe for the ‘free thinking’ humanist.” He adds, “‘Free thinking,’ by the way, is a euphemism for foul-mouthed, bigoted, intolerant, narrow-minded, superstitious, name-calling railers who oppress all those who feel free to think about and conclude for the existence of God.” Bouw’s home page on his university web site — which is filled with diatribes against abortion, immigration, and Martin Luther King — leaves little doubt as to his opinion about the effects of Copernicanism in America. The United States, he writes, is a Marxist, Humanist dictatorship which has “officially declared that all Bible-believers are terrorists and enemies of the state.”

Given the capitulation to heliocentrism, said Bouw, the demise of special creation was inevitable. “By the time evolution comes around, well, you gave in on the geocentric thing: Scripture teaches how to go to heaven. Fine, evolution has nothing to do with how to go to heaven, so there’s no contradiction.” Geocentrists view their work as a necessary component of creationism. “You can’t play both sides of the fence,” said Sungenis. “Either you’re going to do it the whole way or don’t do it at all. If you believe scriptures that are against evolution, then you have to believe the scriptures that are against heliocentrism. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure that out. You can understand the plain meaning of scripture from the fourth grade onwards.”

It has been to the geocentrists’ great consternation, therefore, that mainstream creationists don’t see it that way. The broader movement’s initial openness to geocentrism, in the van der Kamp era, occurred at a time when both enterprises existed only on the fringes of society. But in the decades that followed, creationism, and then intelligent design, began to gain respectability — with the public if not with scientists — and the association with geocentrism became a liability.

“They are just afraid,” said Sungenis. “And they have admitted this. This is not something I am making up. They told us, We really don’t want to get into this issue, we want to downplay it as much as possible, because we don’t want to be embarrassed in front of the scientific world. If we come out saying that the earth is in the center of the universe and that man didn’t come from apes, that’s going to be enough to have them turn totally off to our arguments against evolution.” Sungenis and Bouw both claim that quite a few creationists are closet geocentrists — “including some bigwigs,” said Bouw.

It takes more than being considered too weird for young earth creationists to make geocentrists despair, however. “As long as people have some faith in Scripture, there’s a future for it,” said Bouw. “There are young people interested in it.”

I asked Bouw, “How many active geocentrists are there in the world, would you estimate?”

“Let’s see…” Bouw looked up at the ceiling, apparently doing some calculations in his head. “That I know of… about eight.”

“Eight? Eight what — hundred?”

“Eight people. Who promote geocentricity actively, who have the capability of fielding questions.”

“Oh. But as far as people who may not be experts, but who subscribe to the point of view…?”

“Thousands? I have no idea. Millions, maybe?” About 200 people, said Bouw, subscribe to his journal, The Biblical Astronomer.

I pointed out that half the country accepts special creation. Did it disturb him that more people didn’t believe in geocentrism?

“I think about half the country does accept geocentricity. Surveys keep being published indicating that. Maybe it’s down to 40 percent now, but it used to be above half believe that the sun goes around the earth once a day.”

I raised my eyebrows a bit. Who would do a survey on geocentrism?

“Well, the survey is about the state of science education. It’s usually presented as confirming the appalling ignorance of the public — that they don’t even know the earth goes around the sun.”

Now I realized that I had seen these surveys. The National Science Foundation compiles them every year. Later I looked up the most recent one. Almost a third of the population responded “incorrectly” to the question, “Does the earth go around the sun, or does the sun go around the earth?” That isn’t the near-majority that Bouw had thought, but when I reframed the statistic as counting not scientific illiterates but nascent geocentrists, it did give me some pause. It was beginning to seem that what separated the geocentrists from the creationists was not credibility but cultural sophistication. Who knows how far they could get with the same variety of edutainment — the museums, books and videos. I asked Bouw if he’d given any thought to livening up his approach.

Bouw said he could see incorporating geocentric exhibits into creation museums, perhaps a larger model of the orrery or a Foucault’s Pendulum, properly explained. “One of the things we’ve thought about doing is creating a video of interviews throughout history. You’re probably too young, but in the 1950’s Walter Cronkite hosted a series called The Twentieth Century, in which he conducted interviews with historical figures. [I am too young, but I suspect Bouw meant You Are There.] Well, we can do that kind of a thing.”

“Who are some of the figures that you might profile?”

“Oh, well Einstein for example. And he was womanizer, of course, so we could make some sort of a tongue in cheek stuff there.”

“How would that…”

“Oh Kepler!” Bouw interrupted. “You can make that funny or… what should I say? Because I think the evidence now is pointing to his actually having murdered Tycho Brahe. So, sinister, I guess.”

“What about something less elaborate in the meantime? A non-technical book for laypeople, or a school curriculum or lecture series?” Other than pity, I wasn’t sure why I was signing on as geocentrism’s publicity consultant.

“That takes time and an effort to do,” Bouw sighed. “And then of course I have my teaching responsibilities, and I don’t have enough money really to retire — well, until Social Security kicks in and just about doubles my retirement income. But that’s another year before I can do that, and at this point, I don’t know who I could delegate anything to.”

“Does it ever frustrate you that there are all these resources and vehicles for creationism and yet none for what you’re doing?”

“It did at first, but not anymore. What frustrates me more now is that people become interested in geocentricity, and they have talent, and then they decide to use those talents in promoting their own ideas, which are usually ineffective and not — well, they’re off the wall, let’s put it that way. They are not based on hard science.”

Bouw told me there are geocentrists in France who believe in a rotating earth and one in Scotland who has calculated the radius of the universe at a quarter of a million miles. There is even one geocentrist who believes the earth is hollow and we live on the inside. “I learned a long time ago that any kind of different idea draws intellectuals, and it also draws kooks,” he said. “For example, in the 1970s there was a freak organization — I would call them freaks, most people call them hippies — that believed in vortices. It bordered on occult metaphysics.”

I asked about a creationist named Marshall Hall. Hall made the news in 2007 when a couple of state legislators, one in Georgia and one in Texas, asked him to draft a memo on legal strategies for challenging evolution in public schools. The memo stirred up controversy with its claim that the Big Bang was really the creation myth of “the Pharisee Religion” — that is, Judaism. What drew considerably less attention was the name the web site Hall invited lawmakers to visit, fixedearth.com, on which he peddles his self-published book, The Earth is Not Moving.

“He’s a good popularizer,” Bouw said grudgingly. “I’m not too enamored of him. The best treatment he has is the involvement of Kepler with the occult, but he views everything as a conspiracy against the truth.”

“And you don’t?”

“No. I mean, yeah, the Devil’s got his hand in it, but a lot of it is man’s own fear of being ostracized.”

Most geocentrists are evangelical protestants, which leaves Sungenis even more isolated than Bouw. I asked Sungenis if Pope John Paul II’s 1992 apology to Galileo made his task more difficult.

“You know this was interesting, because I was under the impression, after hearing the commentaries about what John Paul II said, that he did apologize to Galileo. And I never read what John Paul II actually said. And when I actually read what he said, there was no apology there! What there was was a recognition of both sides of the issue. And the telltale comment was that he said, theology needs to keep up with science. And if that’s the case, well then, that means doors cannot be closed to scientific investigation. And if that is the case, then that means geocentric investigation is wide open. Let’s get these scientists and theologians to do what John Paul II told us to do: let’s look at the science again.”

“But shouldn’t the church apologize to Galileo? Because they didn’t just dispute his theories, they arrested him, they shut him down.”

“They were correct in making that judgment. They had some scientific evidence — they had Tycho Brahe’s model of cosmology — but they had the scripture, they had the fathers, and they had the previous papal statements. And so if they were going to be Catholic, they were more or less obliged to go by the tradition and the scripture.”

“I wasn’t talking about the argument against him as much as the principle of free inquiry,” I replied. “Letting him say his peace and debating it as opposed to preventing him from—”

“That was the point though! Galileo insisted not just in disseminating his ideas, he insisted that these were facts — and that’s when Bellarmine came down on him very hard, because he said, No they’re not facts. The most we’ll let you say is that this is a hypothesis. And the church was very willing to allow Galileo to say that it was a hypothesis. The church was always open to that idea. But when someone says it’s fact, that’s quite a different story.”

I thought it might help to bring the conversation into the 21^st century. “Obviously there are people today who will say that certain things are facts that you don’t agree with. Would you argue that they should not be permitted to state things as facts if you can show that they are not factual?”

“Yeah, if there is no proof that something is a fact, I would definitely say, No you can’t say that it’s a fact. That’s what the case is against evolution, for example. It’s a theory. And yet many of these scientists who know that it’s a theory, treat it as a fact, and that is where I’d put them down hard in that the same way that the church came down on Galileo.”

“Are you talking about literally preventing books from being published and so on?

“Well, I mean, I am not going to be the judge of what the extent of the criminal liabilities or civil liabilities would be. All I am saying is, I want to encourage a scientist, if he is going to be fair, not to call heliocentrism or evolution a fact. And if they did… If I was a church authority like Cardinal Bellarmine and Galileo was a parishioner of my church, and I had the right to censor him, I would have done that, yes.”

I had thought there was a limit to how far back anyone would want to turn the clock. Now I wasn’t sure. In Walter van der Kamp’s memoir there is a point when he asks himself if by clinging to geocentrism, he isn’t merely repeating the error of ancient Christians who believed the earth was flat. And then he seems to wonder if that even was an error.

One should not so quickly deride these old-time pillars of staunch orthodoxy who predicted and feared that accepting the heathenish Ptolemaic sphericity in the long run would lead to the negation of God’s message altogether. It was Jerusalem contra Athens, revelation against human reasoning. In A.D. 748, Saint Boniface, apostle to the Germans, complained that a certain abbot, Vergilius, held the heresy of the existence of antipodes; and many of us, had we been there, might well have sided with the former’s literalism against the latter’s liberalism.

Are there still flat-earthers? The Flat Earth Society, an organization whose name is synonymous with delusion, died in 2001 along with its final president Charles K. Johnson, although it has recently been revived with unclear earnestness. The society, founded in 1956, grew out of a movement that began in England in the mid-19^th century. Like geocentrism, flat-earthism was as much a religious belief as a scientific one. Members of the Flat Earth Society — there were reportedly a few hundred in 1980 — believed in the plain language of scripture. Didn’t God say he had “stretched out the earth” (Psalm 136:6) and could “take hold of the ends of the earth, that the wicked might be shaken out of it” (Job 38:13)? Even photographs of the planet from space — alleged photographs — could not sway them from God’s word.

For Sungenis, this was never an issue; the church Fathers had affirmed a spherical earth centuries ago. Bouw was more open-minded. “I investigated it, yes,” he said, when I asked him if the spherical earth was something he’d once thought he might be required to forget. “I don’t see that the scriptures teach a flat earth. But I have no problem defending a flat earth if I have to.”

“If scripture doesn’t teach it, why would you defend it?”

“Because it’s a theoretical construct. I can defend a spherical earth too. Just pick your geometry, that’s all.”

What does scripture teach? Entries on cosmology and cosmogony in seven different Bible encyclopedias and dictionaries are virtually unanimous in their judgment. The truth is, the authors of the Hebrew Bible never intended to describe their world in any scientific, or even proto-scientific, sense. They wrote of windows in the heavens that would open to allow the water beyond to fall onto the earth, even though they knew full well that rain fell from clouds and that water evaporated back into the sky. The language of the Bible “is frequently the expression of poetic and religious impressions of the world order,” says The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia. “It ought not to be understood rigidly, as if all biblical descriptions of heaven and earth and the lower parts of the earth could be harmonized into a single structural portrait of the universe.” Indeed, the ancient Hebrews would not have understood the concept of such a portrait; to them, the world was only a collection of parts, not a whole.

And if one still insisted on assembling a unified picture and understanding it rigidly? Then the flat-earthers are more correct than anyone else. Certainly the Bible is not heliocentric, but neither is it geocentric, in the way that Bouw and Sungenis would have it. “There is no word in biblical Hebrew corresponding to the notion of ‘universe’ or ‘cosmos,’” says The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible. The Bible can not describe the earth as the center of everything, because it does not recognize that everything even exists. If hammered against its will into a single cosmology, what the Bible describes is a universe virtually unrecognizable today: a flat disc, probably round, suspended on pillars sunk into a bottomless sea; stretched high above is a hard dome, also suspended on pillars; on the interior face of the dome are the lights of the sky, which travel from one end to the other each day and night; above the dome is more water, and above that, the dwelling place of God, who is shaking his head, one imagines, at the follies of the people below.

I found a scientist willing to read Robert Sungenis’s Galileo was Wrong. George Spagna is the chair of the physics department of Randolph-Macon College in Virginia and the director of the school’s observatory. Spagna agreed to give serious consideration to Sungenis’s research, a promise he found significantly harder to keep once he’d gotten about two-thirds of the way through the first chapter, by which point, he said, “I really wanted to be wearing rubber gloves.”

Spagna found numerous specific problems with Sungenis’s work — “His whole universe would flatten into a disc along its axis,” he noted, by way of example — and objected to the geocentrist’s “cherry-picking” of data and his use of quotes from scientists speaking to laypeople in an imprecise way as if they were scientific proofs. But his larger concern was with Sungenis’s central idea that since all reference frames are equally valid, you might as well accept the Bible as a tie-breaker. Such a priori assumptions are not allowed, Spagna said. “If we assume that this is a special place, then we can’t do science.”

But geocentrists, like creationists, don’t accept the agreed-upon definition of science. And if creationists have made headway in swaying the public on that point, why couldn’t geocentrists? “Am I crazy to imagine that 50 years from now, some school district in Kansas might be putting stickers on textbooks and demanding to teach the geocentrism-heliocentrism controversy?” I asked.

“Does it seem crazy that it could happen?” said Spagna. “No. It seems scary.”

Before I left Gerard Bouw’s home, he mentioned to me that his fiercest critics are his fellow Christians. “Non-Christians certainly don’t have a problem with the idea that the Bible is geocentric,” he said. “I am kind of amazed at atheists not taking the creationists to task about geocentricity.”

I studied Bouw’s face, but the comment seemed to be a general one, not directed at me personally. I continued as if the idea of using geocentrism to expose the foolishness of creationism had never occurred to me. “Why do you think they don’t?” I asked.

“I think they’re afraid to do it,” said Bouw. “Because they might lose even worse.”