On Lacking Interest

Some scattered thoughts on religion, belief, and unanswered questions

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash, rendered black & white by me

When I was a kid, and things were good and easy and life was documented in Kodachrome, I’d go to church on Sundays with my folks and siblings. Back then, mom and dad were both serious about it. Mom still is. Dad grew out of it over time and I don’t remember seeing him go to mass or hearing that he went to mass in the last fifteen-twenty years of his life. When he passed, covid restrictions didn’t permit to have funerals but I don’t think he would have cared. 

Me, I could never pay any attention to what the priest said, I could never get interested. My friend Marcello used to say about me that no one could make me do something I’m not interested in. Not even if I have to for work, or at gunpoint. He was right, I’m like that (unfortunately or fortunately). I have to develop an interest first, then I dedicate myself. And if you’re an employee, if you’ve got a paycheck-based job, that’s a problem. Maybe this is why I was never really good at any job and got so many bad-ish reviews. I mean, I was okay only because every now and then a project would pop up that I’d be seriously interested in and I’d do such a spectacular job that it’d somehow offset all the instances where I sucked. And that’d be enough to float and get a decent pay, on my way to something truly captivating and rewarding and totally mine. Something that would finally come, one day. Maybe that’s also why I don’t have a big bank account.

And so I wasn’t interested in religion. It wasn’t my thing. At mass, I’d get distracted by any insignificant detail and get lost thinking about stuff to the point of forgetting to stand, or sit, when I was supposed to. And I’d silently laugh at my brother’s faces and get pierced by mom’s blistering gazes and be forever grounded. But I couldn’t help it. And that lasted as long as I had to go to church, as long as I was too little to stay home alone. After that, and up until, say, age sixteen or seventeen, the decision to go was left up to me, as in “you do whatever you deem right”. And of course I’d go, cause I’d feel guilty if I wouldn’t. Plus I didn’t want to disappoint mom. When I moved out to go to college I stopped, except for the occasional wedding or funeral.  

My lack of interest in going to (and what happened at) church didn’t keep me from wondering why all those people gathered there regularly. As a kid, I’d ask adults countless questions about God and the universe and the concept of infinity and what’s beyond infinity and how do we get to know all that. You know, the usual kid questions (that adults should ask too, but are afraid to). I was never satisfied with the answers. There must be much more to this; they are hiding something from me, I thought. And I’d ask other kids at school as well, hoping that maybe they’d been clued in on something, but they’d repeat verbatim what I was told at home, like “One day God decided to create the universe” and such. 

And why do we go to church? “To pray to God”, I’d be told. Can’t we pray to God at home? I’d respond. We can, but when we go to church we go to God’s house, so we go pay homage to Him right where He lives, they’d say. Whoa, the world is full of churches so God’s got so many houses. But then again, He’s God -- He can probably afford them. That’s the first thing I remember thinking, very specifically. 

Kids are capable of asking the most beautiful questions. They do because they approach life with fresh eyes and an open mind, unburdened by preconceived notions or societal expectations. When she was little, my daughter once asked me What’s the soul? She was probably six or seven. I must have scrambled something like it’s the part of us that never dies and flies away when our body stops functioning. Maybe I could have said something more philosophical like it’s what makes you be you or it’s what makes you feel. I could have said anything, really, because who the heck knows what the soul is. But I do remember that whatever I said wasn’t satisfying and prompted a flood of other terrifying questions. 

And so that day I asked more questions about God. Like, what does He look like? Have you seen Him? How come nobody has ever seen Him? How old is He? Why He and not She? Why when we go to God’s house He’s not there? How can we go to God’s house when He’s not there? If He’s not there, then where is He? Why do we pray to Him? How did He create the universe? Before creating the universe, what was He doing? Was He all by Himself in the middle of nothing, up in the sky? How could He be up in the sky if the universe hadn’t been created yet? And the more unanswerable the question, the surer the answer. Until it would just be: because. That was my first exposure to dogma. 

I’m not a religious person. Would I be one had I gotten convincing answers, at some point? Who knows. But then again, what’s a convincing answer? Or rather, does a convincing answer even exist? There was a time when I thought I’d believe without being religious. I decided that I believed in a higher power or spiritual reality, someone or something that I wouldn’t even call God. A Central Organizer that was there before the Big Bang happened, that made the Big Bang happen. The guy/thing that pushed the button at the beginning of it all, fourteen billion years ago. And I thought that I’d believe directly, without any intermediaries. Without some pre-packaged narrative, without a story. I’d believe in the Central Organizer, without caring particularly about the when or the why or the how. Without trying to fathom the unfathomable. Just believe, I said to myself. 

But then I thought okay, now that I believe, what do I do with this belief? What’s the point of believing in a Central Organizer without crafting a story about what they can do for me or my family or my friends or anyone in the world? Would they intervene if things are bad? Under what circumstances would they come rescue me? Would they do that if I showed them enough passion and gratitude and good behavior? Would they turn me into something else and send me somewhere beautiful when I die? Or would they let me live another life under a new identity? And soon enough it became pretty clear that if I tried to give answers to these questions -- answers that I liked and could build a story around and decided to believe in -- I'd have created a religion. 

Yesterday I stumbled upon a youtube video of an old interview with Michel Houellebecq, one of my favorite contemporary authors. And about reading, about immersing ourselves in books, at some point he says that “Humans generally have too complex a brain for the life they live, a large part of their brain capacity is not used. And one's life isn't enough. You need to have parallel lives or you can't resist. So reading really is a necessity. A vital necessity”. This made me think that, like reading, religion is a tool to create scenarios and stories and possibilities and parallel realities and fantasies. Maybe religion is part of what we need to fill that excess brain capacity. I personally can’t do that, but I have a tremendous amount of respect for those who can. 

Later in the same interview, he’s asked for his view on religion. "As I'm starting to get old, I've been to quite a few funerals already. And the truth is that religion remains the only thing able to produce a discourse that has some meaning, that has an impact in these circumstances. The circumstance being someone else's death. Its main use is to deny someone else's death, which is quite hard to accept.” And I thought that this, to me, is exactly the aim of religion, its mission: to create a discourse, a meaningful and credible narrative to make earthly circumstances bearable. Would I need that? Of course. Everyone does. Would this be enough to make me embrace a religion and become a devout even without fully believing the whole narrative? Maybe. But I probably wouldn’t feel comfortable. It’d be like faking, a little.

I’m not a religious person. And I don’t even know if I’m a believer anymore. Every morning we wake up to realities and occurrences that make believing harder and harder. But I like the idea of the Central Organizer. Who wouldn’t? And I like the idea of designing my own religion. A story of happiness and laughter and positiveness, where we’d go about life fearlessly and confidently, where there’d be no sinning and penitences and deliberate suffering, no terrifying images or dramas. A story without guilt.

When she was going to catechism to prepare for First Communion, my daughter one day came up to me asking whether it was true that she’s a sinner, that she was born a sinner. But I didn’t do anything, she said. 

Of course you didn’t, I know you didn’t, I responded.  

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