The Biggest Question of All: Part 1
Photo by Jules Bss
I was a person who had good, very smart, loving parents. I had just married my college sweetheart, who was also good, smart, kind and loving. I had just come out of four years of college where I had excelled on many fronts. I had very luckily landed a teaching position, when there were very few available in the new city my husband and I had moved to so that he could attend graduate school. There were so many things that were right for me. BUT…
I was homesick for my family and friends and my hometown. We were not making much money, so we needed to take a tiny apartment behind a barbershop that was for sale in a neighborhood that was safe, but not beautiful. I was in my second year of teaching, so things were better in my classes this year, but my first year had been an absolute nightmare for me as I adjusted to having to discipline the tenth graders in my English classes. Now, even though I knew how to keep a class under control, I still hated teaching, and I had to work while my husband finished his graduate work. My best friend on the teaching staff and I were struggling with eating disorders brought on by a diet we had undertaken the year before, but at the time, eating disorders were never talked about and certainly not understood. There was a teacher on the staff that was making it clear that he found me too interesting, and as I sat at the “best” teachers’ table in the lunchroom, the topics of conversation were often gossip sessions about how this person was dressed or how that person was failing as a human being.
There was a teacher whom I respected who sat down with us one day, and as the typical conversations swirled around the table, she finally spoke. “Haven’t you kitties had your milk today?” Her words cut me to the quick. The other teachers shrugged her words off, but I sat there ashamed. Suddenly, I knew I was failing to be the kind of person I had always hoped to be. I had always wanted to be a good person, but here I was gossiping, wondering about how to deal with a man who was trying to get my attention, alternating between starving myself and binging, and hating my job and wishing I had never moved to this horrible city. I was a mess! And I wanted to change!
During the next few weeks, I thought over the whole of my life. It seemed clear to me that my desire to be “good” just might not be a realistic goal. What if there was no real need to be good? What if, as my parents believed, both scientists with PhDs, there was nothing to be gained by being good except the pleasure of feeling that one was better than others because one followed the “rules.” My parents had a high personal standard of conduct that they held themselves to. I had always admired that in them, and until I was in high school, I had assumed that this came from a belief in the Christian God. It came as a surprise when one day in church I noticed that my mother was not saying the Apostles Creed with the rest of the congregation. I asked her why in a whisper, and she whispered back that my father, who was up singing in the choir right then, and she didn’t believe it. Lather she would finish telling me that my father rejected the miracles in the Bible, figuring that there were rational, scientific explanations for all of them if we only knew the real story behind each of those events. I had asked why they had always taken us to church then. She said it was because they wanted to give us a chance to decide such things as faith in God for ourselves, and since both her parents and my dad’s parents believed in God without question, they didn’t want my two brothers and me to grow up without exposure to the idea of faith. Baloney! Because I believed without question that my father was the smartest man alive, I threw out the idea of faith in God right then. But because my grandparents were also smart and good people, I left room for people to believe if they wanted to.
Now the question of goodness and truth became particularly important to me as I pondered the meaning behind my present life. Why, if there was no God, no future life to believe in, no true right and wrong way to look at things, would one worry about any code of conduct?? Why had my parents always taught me to be “good” if this was all that life was? If there was no future hope, if one just lived and then died and that was it, why would anyone worry about how to conduct oneself????
After thinking all of this through, it seemed clear to me. The biggest question of all boiled down to only one thing: IS THERE A GOD?
If there was an entity beyond this world who had created and now monitored this creation of his with all that that entailed, me included, then it might be a good idea for all of us to get that settled. If this entity, known as God existed, and it cared how we conducted ourselves, then it might matter if I gossiped or had trouble controlling my eating or, or, or… If there was no such entity, if the world had just happened through a Big Bang somewhere out in the cosmos, and life had just evolved, as my mother now suggested, then none of these things mattered. We were all just spinning around on a tiny planet in space without reason or plan. No one controlled my life but me, and I would live for a time and die, and it was all for nothing. I decided that I should pursue an answer to THE QUESTION.