Goines On: Needing to believe

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Goines found himself wondering, as he undertook his 30-minute walk – lengthened by 10 minutes recently on Mrs. Goines’ recommendation – whether Mrs. Goines thought about him as much as he thought about her – or thought as much of him as he did of her. But two people just couldn’t know such a thing. Moored inside their own heads, neither “had standing” – no place to stand – to make the comparison. Did that make the very notion of such a comparison meaningless, perhaps in the same way that talk of “God” was largely meaningless?
    What a vapid thought, Goines thought. If he had been typing it on a sheet of paper, he might have ripped it from his typewriter (if he still had one), crumpled it, and tried to sink a shot into the waste basket.
    And yet, he needed to believe that his wife’s regard for him was at least roughly the same as his for her. He thought it was. He didn’t think he could bear having reason to believe that either of them regarded the other disproportionately more or less than the other.
    Later, after his walk, Goines saw a mourning dove sitting proudly atop one of their bird-feeder stanchions. Proudly, Goines felt sure, because a mourning dove’s usual place around the feeders was on the ground below, pecking fallen seeds, and this dove didn’t look mournful, but exultant, surveying the ground below. Or maybe it was simply unsure whether it could keep its high footing, fearful it might tumble off? Goines suspected that he had less basis to believe that the dove felt exultant than he had to believe that Mrs. Goines felt more, or less, well-disposed toward him than he felt toward her. But both beliefs were important to Goines – he would say vitally important – and he thought he must believe them, even if he had to take them on faith.
    On faith? In a flash, Goines saw that those who placed their faith in the existence of God – “in God,” as they said – were doing no more than he was doing in believing he could empathize with a dove, or suffer with a dehydrated, over-heated turtle, or a desperate, wriggling worm. If Goines wanted someone who believed in God to respect his beliefs, mustn’t he respect the God-believer’s beliefs?
    His past need – he hoped it was now past – to ridicule God-belief was no doubt rooted in his own past as a teenaged seeker who thought for a time that he had “found God” but, after looking unsuccessfully for years for credible reasons for it, had come to condemn everyone who had pressed him to “fall for it.” Goines thought, for the first time in his adult life, that he recognized in himself that teenaged thinker he had been 60 years ago.

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