By Stillman Brown
For Christmas, one of my several thousand close friends gave me The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs. It’s about one man (an editor at Esquire) who attempts to live for a year by following the literal word of the Bible (8 months to the Old Testament and the remainder to the N.T.). It’s an entertaining, thoughtful exploration of spirituality that mixes a dash of politically-minded satire – i.e., Biblical literalists can be either hypocrites or frightening – with a good measure of silliness. One passage early on, however, caught my attention. As an agnostic, Jacobs doesn’t believe in God, which, as he points out, presents a problem.

The Bible commands you not only to believe in God but to love Him. It commands this over and over again. So how do I follow that? Can I turn on belief as if it flows out of a spiritual spigot?

A believer would probably answer with an enthusiastic “yes! Let ‘er rip!” but I understand his quandary. In seventh grade, I embarked on an exploratory mission to find God, so I asked my mom to take me to the churches in town that represented the major religions. After some debate, we decided to skip the mosque and synagogue because we felt we wouldn’t belong – too much context. We settled on two Catholic churches, one more liberal than the other, a Presbyterian church, a Methodist church and, living in a university town, a Unitarian church that rented the basement to some Wiccans. I was looking to turn on my spigot.
Faith, however, doesn’t work like a garden hose. I was not successful in finding God (in part because I was looking so damn hard), but something useful happened on my three-month quest. Each Sunday I sat in a different church and listened to a minister or pastor or Grand Poobah tell me what to believe. No exchange, no discussion, no inquiry, just facts. An example:
Minister/Pastor/Etc.: Jesus is your personal savior! God will guide you! Listen to me!
Me (to myself): Why? How? Huh?
Each spiritual leader had a different style of delivering top-down pronouncements of The Truth and each Sunday I went home and watched cartoons to numb the disappointment. By eighth grade I had decided organized religion, and Christianity wasn’t for me. To my mother’s dismay, I declared myself an “Athenostic.”
The literal, nose-the-the-grindstone way in which Jacobs approaches living Biblically reminds me of myself at 13-14. I wanted to know if living by the book, so to speak, was effective. Would it work? Was it a path to a personal connection with God? At 13, I certainly could have used an interventionist deity on my side, helping me to pass classes, make my french kiss less fish-like, and nail down some idea of who I was. He probably looked down at me from His cloud palace and thought, “what a mess.”
So, if anyone still owes you a Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa present, The Year of Living Biblically is a good read for the subway/airplane/pillow/fireside/hot tub. I appreciate Jacobs’ open voice and sense of discovery – it is how I try to approach my own practice. He writes (in deciding to pray three times a day for 10 minutes):

Here’s my plan: In college I … learned about the theory of cognitive dissonance. This says, in part, if you behave in a certain way, your beliefs will eventually change to conform to your behavior. So that’s what I’m trying to do. If I act like I’m faithful and God loving for several months, then maybe I’ll become faithful and God loving. If I pray every day, then maybe I’ll start to believe in the Being to whom I’m praying.

There’s plenty in this passage to be skeptical about. Jacobs’ point is intentionally obtuse and testing, but posture and the spiritual parts of the brain are certainly related. In fact, that sounds oddly familiar. Perhaps if I cross my legs like so, and set my hands on my thighs like so…