Dinner With A Liberal

I ate dinner with a liberal last night.

He was a very caring, compassionate, and humanitarian individual, well traveled, well read, well spoken, and knowledgeable about art and food and the sort of things that make you wish you were more cultured. Unfortunately for him, he was the only known liberal at the table and the enlightened conservatives who allowed themselves a glass or 4 of wine were feeling rambunctious and asked him how he could not support the war. He tactfully evaded the question, and instead chose to make a general comment on the tragedy of war altogether. In an effort to save him from the impending inquisition, I asked about his travels and which place left the most impact. He thought for awhile, and surprisingly forfeited the chance to lighten the conversation by telling me that he will never forget the killing fields of Cambodia.

"You can still see people's teeth embedded in the ground." He looks at the other people at the table. "Most people don't get off the tour bus. All you really see from the bus is enough I suppose, that huge mausoleum sort of thing, and by the time you drive up you know what it is."

I don't know what it is. I've never heard of the killing fields. Some of the older folks grunt as if they do, but I ask anyways.

"It's glass pillar filled with human skulls, a sort of monument like the holocaust museums. I had to get out of the bus though, see it myself. It was just surreal. You walk up to this huge enormous thing, stepping on the uneven ground where the earth was moved to cover mass graves of women and children but the skulls... There are hundreds of them. Those were all people... with lives and stories and they were done in an instant. It's an incredible and terrible sickening feeling all at once, like your brain can't accept it. It makes you doubt the existence of god, just knowing things like that happen."

My girlfriend pipes in at this point, her liberal bleeding heart was quiet and confined until now, she thinks she will embarrass me by aligning herself with him. She is truly moved by the story. "It doesn't make me doubt God," she says, "it makes me mad that humans can do that to each other."

Brilliantly done. A unifying comment. Somewhere in America, the hairs on Barak Obama's neck are standing. I'm halfway glad she didn't jump down his throat on blaming God for human suffering. There has been far too much wine for that debate, we'll save that for another day.

But another day probably will never come, this man is a stranger made a friend through food and drink and just like those things he will be gone in a few hours. Halfway glad a half hour later became halfway guilty. Guilty because that was a window in the soul of someone who has compassion, someone who sees something wrong and feels it, and I covet that sometimes. I am more guilty though, because I smiled when he said he doubted the existence of God; smiled the way you smile when someone says something you know is wrong but have doubted just as much as they have when you are alone and watching the news about some child being raped.

What frustrates me is that this man was and is so close to seeing the existence of God, he just has one piece wrong, one piece he can't justify, and he turns away. He cannot accept the existence of God because the world is evil and terrible. He agrees with my girlfriend, and to him nothing she said contradicts anything he said. But at the same time, where they seem to agree is the fork in the road, where he goes a very opposite direction. They agree that god has nothing to do with suffering.

God is the antithesis of death.
God is the antithesis of suffering.
God is the antithesis of the world as we know it.

And that is why I couldn't sleep that night. Because we agree, but disagree. Because that is why I believe in God. That is why I need Him, why I need Him not only to exist but to exist in a way that is intricately connected to why I exist.

God is the antithesis of me, and I need that.

I need God to exist, and I need him to fix me. I see suffering and death as proof of Him, the way hunger proves the existence of fullness and satisfaction, the way thirst proves quenching. Hunger pangs the stomach because the stomach is supposed to be filled, thirst burns the throat because the throat was meant to satiated.

The dull and sickening pain when suffering is seen, when death is seen, are powerful because every fiber of our being is racked with the awareness that something is wrong, that this is not the way it is supposed to be. We can feel and almost palpate a vacancy, a vacuum, where something belongs. Something better. Something big, but bigger now that we sense its absence.

Hunger, thirst, disease, all fool us with a power derived by accentuating the absence of the thing that is truly powerful.

I wish I could sit down with that guy again, and explain this to him, but as usual it takes me a long time to chew on things in my head and it is easier to write it than to say it, especially off the cuff in front of other people and especially when I hardly understand it myself. But I would like to ask him if it's possible that death is sad because life was never supposed to end, that seeing a mass grave hurts because we were supposed to see the earth move and wonder what would grow, not what was buried beneath it, and that God does exist because there just has to be something else... something else that long ago ingrained in us something Good. Something that moves us when we see its opposite.

I wonder if he could believe that loneliness pangs the heart because the heart was meant to be knit to something.

To God.