Spiritual connectedness

Riding with Bill yesterday to join Ralph for a walk at Johnston Mill, a couple of miles from where my wife and I lived for twenty-five years before moving to Mebane, I took the opportunity to try to find out whether Bill's term spiritual applies to me. I asked him how he would characterize it.
    "Connectedness."
    I instantly saw that indeed, in Bill's sense of the term, I am spiritual. I acknowledge, intellectually, that I am related to all other living creatures and to very "star stuff," as cosmologist Carl Sagan (1934-1996) termed the matter of the Universe. And I feel the connectedness, sometimes profoundly, but more often only latently, out of the neglect of taking for granted. And I mean to honor the connection by humility and compassion.

Ralph and his dog arrived at the entrance to the trail a minute after us. On the walk, we all three chatted about no fewer or less significant things than Ralph and I alone would have done. Bob Dylan. Yoga instruction. The logic of grammar. Growing old, losing one's memory. Julie Christie (from her 2006 movie, Away from Her, in which she played a woman being institutionalized because of Alzheimer's disease). Zen Buddhism. Philosophy scholarship (Ralph had discovered Peter Kingsley, a new name for me). Later, Bill told me that Ralph had demonstrated his own spirituality by picking up a piece of paper on the trail.
    And of course spirituality and religion came up. I told them about Mert's retort Friday to my statement that I didn't believe any of that about the Good Lord's working in mysterious ways. "And I don't believe that!" Mert had said.

    I mentioned that my wife and I had the night before watched a film about the child evangelist Marjoe Gortner on the tent revivalist circuit. I was surprised to learn that I had apparently never told Ralph that in my childhood my mother had taken me to the same sorts of church events at which Marjoe as a child and young man had preached.
    But it wasn't until this morning that it occurred to me that, since Marjoe was starting to preach in 1948 (at age four), precisely when my mother was beginning to take me to revivals, where I witnessed people apparently ecstatically "speaking in tongues," it is likely my mother had heard of him. Could it be that my mother's oft-spoken wish that I would "become a preacher" was influenced by reports of that fabulous child preacher?
    Perhaps Marjoe, with whom I only just became familiar from the movie's being mentioned in a book I'm reading by Daniel Dennett¹, influenced the very trajectory of my "religious life." I told Bill on the ride home that I've always thought I majored in philosophy because of my desperate "search for God" informed by those early church experiences. In fact, I likely chose to apply to Yale because of that interest, since it was Yale's catalog of undergraduate academic programs that most appealed to me because of its "Directed Studies" program, then centered around philosophy and the humanities.
    What a world.

Ralph had asked me how, then, I'd become an atheist. I guess I must not have told him before because I had depended on his reading the answer here on my blog—even though he's told me that he spends so much time on the Internet in his work at IBM that he doesn't spend much or any on it outside work. (Because I go onto the Internet both at work and at home, I must not have believed him.)
    So I summarized my Sudoku analogy for him. I had rejected theism as a "forced move" after eliminating the pertinent possibilities.
    Ralph recounted the Zen parable about the fish in water who reasoned logically that water didn't exist.
    I laughed. "Ralph, that's about the same as Mert's retort, isn't it? He didn't believe that I couldn't believe in water."
    Ralph said that Mert's retort was different; it sounded like a trick of the evangelical trade. Mert might have been trying to convert me. Ralph said I was free not to believe, and recommended Zen Buddhism. "Zen Buddhists don't believe in God," he said.
    On the ride home, Bill pointed out that Zen teaches letting go, detachment. "That's the very thing you do when you accept things as they are and laugh."
    I like it.
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1. From Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, pp. 167-168:

   Every good doctor knows that a few simple tricks of self-presentation that compose a good "bedside manner" can make a huge difference. It isn't really dishonest, is it? Every priest and minister, every imam and rabbi, every guru knows the same thing, and the same gradation from knowingness to innocence can be found today in the practices of revival preachers, as vividly revealed in Marjoe, the Oscar-winning 1972 documentary film that followed Marjoe Gortner, a charismatic young evangelical preacher who lost his faith but made a comeback as a preacher in order to reveal the tricks of the trade. In this disturbing and unforgettable film, he shows how he makes people faint when he does the laying on of hands, how he rouses them to passionate declarations of their love for Jesus, how he gets them to empty their wallets into the collection basket.