Building a Mystery
On faith... or something like it
August came to a close by putting out as many little fires with the power of watery Pisces’ blue moon. She preferred drinking coffee from earthenware because it tasted closer to dirt.
Last September, I got baptized in the Jordan River. It wasn’t so much Jerusalem syndrome that drove me there, but the fact that I grew up reading Dan Brown and conspiratorial threads on Yahoo! Answers surrounding all of the modern-day interpretations of biblical rapture. I was raised paranoid. I mean protestant. I mean baptist. I mean almost-catholic? I was fortunate enough where my family never forced religion down my throat as a kid, and the aspect of going to church was more for social reasons—which equipped me with an open curiosity. That curiosity was mainly groomed by too many school nights watching History Channel episodes on gnostic gospels, banned books of the Bible and such. Now, I’d say I’m actually closer to a Taoist or a pantheist… like Sarah Maclachlan, I guess.
My trip started in the South of France, near the tiny village of Cévennes. Adrien and Grace lovingly invited me to stay with them in an 11th-century stone building built by the Cathars, which had been passed down to Adrien’s mother. The Cathars, who were Christian dualists with origins in Persia, believed in both a good God (of the spirit) portrayed in the New Testament, and an evil God (of the physical), portrayed in the Old Testament, and that humans were angels who were seduced by Satan and thus—waging a battle in the heavens, were forced to spend eternity reincarnating themselves in the material realm of the evil God. The only way to leave this eternity was to reject one’s material self and universe. I was amused enough to stumble on some internet theories between this and the mystery du jour of religious cosmology. Hebrew creation narrative starts in the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep.
Scientists and astronomers believe that roughly 80% of the universe is made of a force called dark matter. Dark matter produces no energy or light of its own, yet it reveals itself only by pulling on other surrounding matter—like God, love, or whatever, with its invisible hold on harmony. Theoretical physicists claim that, at the moment of the Big Bang, dark matter and dark energy both worked melodiously. But, sometime around 5 billion years ago, dark energy began accelerating against the rate of dark matter. Could dark matter = good God and dark energy = evil God? Who’s to say, it could very well be some fantastic fiction. Anyways.
For a month, my mise en scene looked like this, atop some medieval mountains where heaven touched earth and the sun had beaten a nice tan onto me. I watched bats mate at moonset eating baba au rhum. I went to bed with baby scorpions. I woke up to crepes with hot jam and angry hornets. We bathed in the cold ass river, drank too many Aperol spritzes to count (Adrien preferred Pimms) and sucked on French vapes under the Milky Way with dragonflies, black cats, and even more raging hornets. One night, we captured a spider, a hornet, and a grasshopper all under one glass jar and made them duel to their deaths (the grasshopper won). We ate leftover fish stew for days without poisoning ourselves and dined with nobles who Ubered from their castles in Italy, along with a member of the Menthon family (a childhood friend of Adrien), who told me he was the descendant of the Italian monk Saint Bernard, who the dog is named after. Woof.
And then, I kept thinking of the Cathars, craving spiritual food and mythical soil. Craving salvation for killing all of those poor little bugs and drinking and eating and living too well. I kept thinking of the Russian libertarian landlord I met on Tinder once, who had a theory about Sumerians originating from aliens and how “eretz” in Hebrew, means land which apparently for Sumers, means “home away from home.” I did not call him after that, but he did try to invite me to go to a gun range in West Virginia the next day.
I wanted to crack tales from the crypt and reject all my attachments to the material world (except for my JPG skirts and Gucci kitten heels). So I accepted an invitation to visit Israel with my then-boyfriend whose brother was living near Tel Aviv. When I left the airport, the first things I saw were all too familiar-looking highways and roadside trash, the universal homogeny of optimization. Was I back in the States? No, because here everyone seemed to be wearing Tevas, and there were just too many pretty floral bushes purging on the road.
I was now in the land of milk and honey, eating rugelach for breakfast and shamburak for lunch. In the evenings, we had our orange wine with fava beans. At 5 in the morning, we drove to the lowest elevation point on land in the world (400 meters below sea level) aka the Dead Sea, racing against sunrise before it got too hot to “swim”. The water is so buoyant and full of salt that you are basically forced to float. The Sea of Galilee is where The Dead Rise. Absolutely nothing lives in the water—no fish or vegetation. I learned about the four cities and their corresponding elements. Poria, land. Tzfat, air. Jerusalem, fire. Tiberias, water. I only made it to three out of four on this trip, because of the territorial unrest and conflict in some of the surrounding areas.
Even then, I sought to get baptized in the Jordan River by a pastor named Maurice who traveled from Nazareth to meet us later that week. Leading up to the day, I listened to Sarah McLachlan’s album “Surfacing” on repeat and convinced my then-boyfriend to get baptized with me (Protestant, because it seemed less evil than Catholic?). Despite Maurice’s blatant chauvinism, I felt safe enough in his presence to temporarily choke on the nastiest water in all of Israel.
“After today, you will be cleansed of all of your sins by this divine, living water—the very same water that Jesus, too, was baptized,” the pastor spat at us, bible in hand.
I later Googled the Jordan River only to discover that the water is heavily polluted with untreated sewage and groundwater seepage due to climate change, which, unfortunately, defied Maurice’s holy claims—making us maybe the uncleanest we’ve ever been. I didn’t really feel like a born-again Christian afterward, but it makes for a nice story to share.
Maybe heaven is just a middle-class concept. And real salvation is in morning walks, endless brioche, fig jam, and quelling each other’s fears anonymously on Quora threads, or the humility to try anything once for the sake of personal conviction, however misplaced. “Faith” as religious people call it, is that you’ll at least be saved from something like Legionnaires' disease, food poisoning, a bad sunburn, and even a few hornet stings, if not some mysterious, heavily-coded apocalyptic event.