The Making of a Philosopher

Today you were supposed to be getting the final chapters from my novel, but then I realized today is Halloween, which is, as you’ll see, the very best day to post this post. But fear not! The final chapters are just around the corner.

It was a difficult decision to pull Julian’s point of view chapters from the novel, but it had to happen. Too many of them were backstory or simply didn’t move things forward. But I loved his character. Without further ado…

JULIAN’S PARENTS BARELY SPOKE OF RELIGION, and he didn’t think about it much either until around middle school, when the question of God became almost an obsession.

One day he spotted an acquaintance wearing a W.W.J.D. bracelet at school. When he asked what the acronym meant (What Would Jesus Do?), this friend invited him to attend a youth group event. Julian leapt at the chance, though it did strike him as odd, a church service on Halloween night.

The ‘Haunted House’ took place in a rented office space on the other side of town. There would be hay rides, his friend had assured him, and a ‘really awesome’ live band. The latter amounted to three pimply dough boys fumbling through simple chord patterns on acoustic guitars. Julian barely noticed them, transfixed as he was on the strange images being projected onto a tarp-like backdrop, sound-less video clips depicting a reenactment of Jesus in the process of getting nailed to the cross. It was all quite cheaply done, really. The acting, or re-enacting, so to speak, was horrendous, as one would expect from what was presumably a low budget production. But he had to hand it to whomever was in charge of the special effects; there was something altogether realistic about the blood. Something about its viscosity, just the right water-to-ketchup ratio, perhaps. Whatever it was, it made his stomach churn (he might have averted his eyes, but he never did find it within his power to do so).

What he couldn’t understand were the reactions from the crowd. How could the kids in the room just stand there blandly singing, Nothing but the blood…while this horror show was playing on a giant screen right before their eyes? Perhaps they had grown numb from having seen it too many times. Even so, he would have expected some parental opposition to such violence being shown to their children. Particularly since it was, quite frankly, gratuitous.

The hay ride was unbearable. He had spent the entire time picking bits of straw off of his pants. He kept telling himself it was no matter. It was Halloween. Relax. Look at all the children in not-too-frightening costumes eating candy, drinking cider.

They arrived at a clearing and sat around a bonfire gazing thoughtfully into the flames as the teenaged leader of their group spoke of the glory of Jesus. Turn to Jesus in your despair, he had recited. InJesusnameamen.

Images from the low-budget horror movie played in Julian’s mind. He organized his candy in silence and tried to reconcile those images with the present reality. The campfire did not provide much light and made it difficult to see what he was doing.

He sensed his friend eyeing him and looked up at the boy, whose cheek took on the rectangular shape of a Jolly Rancher. The boy sucked in some saliva and the Jolly Rancher clicked against his teeth as it moved to the other cheek. “You having a good time?”

Julian scoffed. “Why should I be having a good time?” He hadn’t meant to sound quite so rude. Looking back down to his candy collection, he noticed a bite-sized chocolate bar hiding away in the pile of disgusting mystery chews, the kind old people give out to trick or treaters. “I wanted to learn about God. I didn’t come here to have a good time.”

“Who said you can’t do both?” His friend smiled and eyed the piles of candy on top of Julian’s flattened pillowcase with curiosity.

What Julian could not articulate at the time was that religion truly interested him, and that all this kiddy nonsense was not what he had hoped for; that they did not truly care because they were inherently good kids who didn’t need Jesus to be the happy creatures they were; that he really wanted to believe in God and Heaven because as it was, he stared up at the ceiling every night wondering if life had no meaning, or if there would be nothing waiting for him on the other side of death. He’d gladly go to hell just to continue existing. But why? Why would he rather go to hell and burn for all eternity? How could blinking out and feeling nothing be worse than that?

But it was.

They rode back late—way past their bedtimes, sometime past midnight, despite having to go to school the next day—and squirmed on the now loose and pokey haystacks while singing: Nothing but the blood King Jesus. Singing these lyrics on Halloween night seemed like sacrilege.

Julian’s friend’s mom waited for them by the entrance of the office building. “Did you have a good time?” she asked.

What did good have to do with time?

In those days Julian didn’t pay much attention to time. He did feel sleepy in that moment, but the moment didn’t last long. The friend moved in fast zombie motions towards the car, peeling off his plastic gun holster and other elements of his policeman costume in the parking lot. His friend went around to the other side of the car and disappeared. He didn’t seem to notice that a smiling middle-aged woman wearing a HELLO MY NAME IS: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ STARLA!!! ⭐️⭐️⭐️ name tag on her ample bosom had grabbed Julian by the elbow and had pulled him back into the office building.

“This is Starla,” his friend’s mother explained, suddenly appearing beside him, “and she just wants to have a talk with you real quick, but I’ll be waiting right here for you.”

He was marched down a flickering florescent hallway like a human sacrifice. But sacrificed to what?

He thought of his own mother. She would be angry with him if he came home late. What time was it? He wasn’t wearing a watch, and there were no clocks in the building. He hadn’t noticed that before. And yet he was strangely compliant and let himself be led into one of the offices, a stark room furnished with nothing but a stack of rusting folding chairs. 

Starla closed the door and stood with her arms clasped behind her as if she were about to reveal a surprise. “Julian? Is that right?” He had refused to wear the name tag. How she’d come to learn his name, he didn’t know, but he found that degree of attention unnatural. “You’re new here, right?”

He nodded almost imperceptibly.

“That’s great!” she squealed. “Welcome!” She didn’t move away from the door she’d just closed. In fact, she seemed to be deliberately blocking the exit with her tall, stocky body. He was pretty sure he couldn’t knock her over, not even if he pushed with all his might. He could’ve sworn the woman was six feet tall. Or maybe it was her hair.

He glanced at the folding chairs leaning against the white wall. He meant nothing in this glance, he just needed an object other than her terrifying figure for his eyes to land on, and there were so few in the room to choose from. Starla pulled out two chairs and opened them simultaneously with a screeching snap and waved for him to sit down.

He sat, not understanding his obedience.

“Have you accepted Jesus unto your heart?” Starla had recently eaten a chocolate bar and a watermelon-flavored candy. The combination of these odors on her breath made him recoil.

“It’s late,” he said. “I should go home. My mom will be worried.”

“She’ll be more worried if your soul’s not saved. Have you been saved?”

“I don’t believe so.”

“Well it’s so simple! What if I told you that you could have everlasting life—everlasting life!—and all you have to do to get it is accept Jesus unto your heart? Because that’s the truth.”

Indistinct thoughts about the word unto fluttered through his mind as he rested his hands in his lap, folding them respectfully. He was finding Starla hard to take seriously—that horrendous church lady coiffure (how could she not know?), the Oompa Loompa foundation ending abruptly at the jawline, the overwhelming perfume or hairspray or whatever it was that smelled of chemicals—but she seemed to be the only one willing to answer the questions he had come here to ask.

“Would you?” She drew her chair closer. “Accept Jesus unto your heart?”

Unto my heart. So simple! He could picture it now, his heart slashed, blood gushing out in rhythmic spurts, splattering on these white walls, dripping from the popcorn ceiling. So simple! Jesus, a Gumby-like figurine, pulling aside a flap of heart tissue, bending down into its cavity as if entering a tent. Casually strolling into his slashed-open heart.

“If you were right,” he replied, finally, “well, I guess that would be good.” He brushed the tiniest fleck of straw off his thigh.

“I am right! And it is good! God is great! All you have to do is say these words: I accept Jesus unto my heart as my Lord and Savior. That’s it! Just those words and you will be saved from eternal damnation!”

“I can’t.”

“Oh sweetie, you can’t, but Jesus can! All things are possible through Jesus.”

“I mean, I can’t say those words.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t believe them.”

Starla’s smile morphed into a saccharine version of itself.

“I must confess,” he went on, “I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe in Heaven.”

At this, her expression softened into matronly sympathy. “Oh, sweetie, you’re too young to have such doubts. Where did you even hear of these things?”

This is it. A real conversation, finally! He sat up in his chair and forced himself to make eye contact. It was difficult, but he knew he had to do it. “It’s just something that I’ve been thinking about, that I’ve thought about a lot. I don’t understand why an infinitely powerful omniscient being who is supposed to be supremely good would make wicked people and then send his wicked people to hell. It just doesn’t make sense.”

“What doesn’t make sense is…” The same force lurking behind that saccharine smile he had noticed earlier now seemed to sweep over Starla’s entire being. “What doesn’t—it’s not that God made us wicked. God didn’t make us wicked…”

Julian half expected her to grab him by the face and pour poisoned Kool-Aid down his throat. He thought of his mother worrying about her missing son. But he forced himself to be brave. He had come here for answers. For this.

“…we make ourselves wicked!”

His mother would have said he was just a child, too young to know right from wrong; therefore he could not be wicked. It was as simple as that. Children are innocent and can never be wicked. 1+1=2. In a distant way he could understand the logic, or at least he could understand why his mother and anyone her age or thereabouts would see him that way. And yet something about that argument did not seem right.

Or relevant.

“I’m not wicked,” he whispered, embarrassed by the total lack of conviction in his voice. He was unable to stop himself from pulling away from Starla, whose face was now so close he could see each foundation-caked pore, each clump of mascara threatening to fall into her bloodshot eyes.

“We are all wicked, Julian, but if you accept Jesus you will be saved. All it takes…”

HELLO MY NAME IS: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ STARLA!!! ⭐️⭐️⭐️

“…is your willingness to open your heart to Jesus.”

He clasped the flimsy folding chair beneath him, wishing he could feel her supposedly simple truth as distinctly as the cold rusting metal in his palms.

“Just say the words.”

Just words. Sounds. Animal noise.

He shook his head, as if disappointed in himself.

People say things they don’t mean. Mean things they don’t say.

“Dear Lord…” Starla took his hands unto hers. “Lord, please come into this young man’s heart.”

Say the words and get the fuck out of here.

Someone pounded furiously on the door, but the voice that followed trembled, weak and apologetic. “Sorry to interrupt, but Julian, it’s time to go. It’s late.”

Don’t have to mean them.

He stared down through blurry, tear-filled eyes at Starla’s freakish manicure, her red nails so long they curled at the ends. Time was running out. What had he come here for?

“Just say the words. Jesus will do the rest.”

“No,” he heard himself saying.

He was not going to cry he was not going to cry he was not going to cry…

“Jesus, he’s just a little boy, so young and already such dark thoughts. Please help him. Please bring him into the light. All things are possible through our Savior.”

He wanted it to be true, so it could not be true. What senseless reasoning!

Maybe she knew something. Maybe God chose big-haired Starla precisely because she tested his sensibilities. Maybe…give her a chance. Wasn’t this what he had come here for? Was this not precisely what he had come here for? He grasped her office air-conditioned hands tighter and they squeezed back powerfully, pulling him into the abyss of himself.

Starla spoke in ways he didn’t understand and the words rose up to suffocate him, though he would not, could not, repeat them, not even with his head bowed as snot dropped onto the low-pile beige carpet like ominous drips from a blood spangled ceiling where he heard a swell of speechless chanting, an oceanic sound, a rising tide into which he would gladly become a dissolving speck of salt if it were true.

But it was nothing but the blood pulsing through the veins inside his head, just behind the ears.

Matronly arms swept in, took him around his back and under his knees, but struggled to scoop him off the floor. He reached up and clasped his arms around her. She took him out of the room still shivering with embarrassing sobs and floated him down the once brightly-lit hallway. He sensed that everyone had left, that the building was nearly closed up, that he was lucky he didn’t get left behind. He felt at any moment the arms could drop him and he would find himself alone in the dark. But he was not a baby anymore. He broke loose, gently placed his feet on the ground, and walked silently with her through the corridor in near total darkness.

I WROTE THIS TO GET INSIGHT into what made Julian turn to philosophy. I think it must be fairly common for philosophy students have some story like this, or if not a story, than a character trait or upbringing that makes sense of their attraction to a field of study so few in America find worthwhile. Let’s put it this way, if you major in business, no one thinks anything of it; if you major in philosophy, that’s something you have to explain. So that’s what I tried to do here. Religion is usually the key to unlocking that door. Here I was reimagining an event in my life, giving it a meaning it didn’t have for me.

The real event took place when I was in high school, not middle school. I had no internal conflict about refusing to accept Jesus as I was by then a cranky atheist, and the tears didn’t come until much later, sometime after 1AM when I found my mom standing in the driveway clutching a broom. Then the tears came. But let me back up a bit.

Seeing her brought to mind similar scenarios from my early childhood when I would lose track of time, not realizing my mother was at home going crazy with worry. When I’d finally return I’d see her standing out front with a chopstick, note the look on her face, burst into tears, rush past her into the house and dive into this little space behind the couch like a dog fleeing to the safety of its kennel. But that spot behind the couch was no safe space—it was a trap. You’d have to see the look on her face to know why I couldn’t think to hide in a better spot.

On this occasion, however, things were a bit different. Maybe being in high school and a bit older gave me a wee bit more command over my mental faculties, though the look on her face was as stupefyingly scary as ever before. Or maybe I knew my being late wasn’t entirely my fault that time, as I had just been stuck in a stark, ugly room with a creepy church lady who had tried her best to convert me, not knowing she was up against a philosopher in the making. But more likely I noticed that the chopstick from my earlier years had been upgraded to a decidedly more dangerous weapon and now was not the time to be stupid. Who knows. It was a long time ago. All I remember is seeing my mother’s face and bursting into tears, and in the back of my mind being somewhat astonished by my behavior, astonished that nothing had changed since I was five. I remember running through the house and shouting. I remember trying to make myself heard over my mother’s stream of Korean curses—Mom mom mom please put the broom down I can explain—and finally just giving up and dodging into my brother’s old bedroom, the only room in the house besides the bathroom that could be locked. We bawled at each other through the door until we had both calmed down. I’m not sure I really had to worry about getting beaten with a broom stick, but knowing what she could do with a chopstick, I wasn’t about to take any chances.

Let it be known that my mother would not have been considered an abusive parent, not back then, during my coming of age, and definitely not in Oklahoma; the principal at my elementary school had a wooden paddle hanging right next to his desk in plain sight. The paddle had holes in it. So no, I don’t think of any of those episodes as abuse. Anyway, I had put her through numerous hours of anguish whereas she only ever made me suffer a few minutes of, shall we say, stinging retribution. And that’s what it was. It wasn’t parenting. It was justice. Let it be known that 99.9% of the time my mother was a kind, reasonable, open-minded, thoughtful and generous woman…so generous she even made sure my friends had a bit of spending money in their pockets, as well as homemade egg rolls in their bellies. I won’t fault her for that 0.1%. I think we’re all entitled to lose our shit 0.1% of the time. Mothers get to be human too.

Happy Halloween!

—Tina