Tell My Sons: A Father's Last Letters (19 page)

Until then, we were all convinced Buford’s recurrent abscesses were the result of surgical stitches that had not dissolved. But as I stood over a sink filled with stinky, thick, yellow and white goo, I smelled an odor that remained sharp in my memory from the year prior. Bile.

My surgeon, Dr. Tim Sielaff, was politely dismissive about my theory. “It can’t be bile … that would be crazy … 
craaazy
.” A fistula (a hole in the intestine) near the liver would have revealed itself long before now. Wouldn’t it?

Sielaff knew what I did not: intestinal fistulas following a Whipple procedure are incredibly complicated messes that can persist for years if they don’t heal in the first several months after surgery. He didn’t want it to be a fistula.

The abscess scene above played out four more times over the next three months. My flesh would always heal; the intestinal tissue would not; the bile would collect in the muscular wall and start digesting the newly healed flesh; and within a few days of searing and unbearable pain, it would burst.

Self-surgery and first-person post-op care became freakishly routine. Although my actions were arguably overly aggressive, I wasn’t exactly a medical novice by now. After all, I had nursed an open wound ten times this size, and I knew how to pack wounds as well. My doctors and nurses couldn’t condone what I had done, but telling me they wished all their patients were as knowledgeable and persistent was all the affirmation I needed.

Despite our collective understanding, my doctors shared our frustration as each of the experiments failed.

We all took the continued ups and downs in stride—Kristin, me, you boys, my colleagues at work. That’s when life threw us
another knuckle ball. Kristin’s mother was diagnosed with brain cancer. Prior to that point, we heard a frequent refrain from well-wishers: “God only gives you what you can handle.”

Until now.

*   *   *

“Appreciating the open mind of true wisdom” is something I didn’t begin to appreciate until college. But even as a kid, there was one subject that always itched but was never really scratched to my satisfaction.

Religion.

For twelve years—from age five to eighteen—I attended a Catholic school, weekly Mass, and Sunday school. Questions weren’t discouraged, but they didn’t need to be. God’s wrath and the burning fires of hell were the undercurrents of the instruction, which hardly encouraged open discussion.

None of my other school subjects came with such mystery or incomprehensible consequences for being wrong.

Seeing Jesus up on that cross and reading about his suffering made the entire story—from the virgin birth to his resurrection from the dead—plenty compelling. Christianity wasn’t that difficult to grasp as a young boy.

“Yes, Jesus loves me, ’cause the Bible tells me so,” went the song.

“Jesus died for all of mankind, so that all sin could be forgiven,” went the refrain.

“The price for salvation and everlasting life has been paid for on the cross. This is the redemptive power of Christ! (And no other religion has it, by the way.)”

It was easy to believe in such agreeable ideas. With respect and without mockery, my innocent young mind also had no trouble at all believing in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny.

I was taught that if I believed strongly enough and prayed hard enough, God would answer my prayers.

Sometimes this concept was explained as metaphor: prayer and reflection were but one part of our task, and God’s answer was the inspiration we needed to do the rest of the work ourselves.

Far more often, however, the concept was explained literally: prayer and reflection were our work, and God’s answer was direct intervention. There were words about the importance of personal responsibility, but those words were greatly overshadowed by the emphasis on God’s actions.

The idea of prayer-as-work naturally carried more appeal. “Dear God, just for this big game, help me keep the puck out of the net.” And the concept cut both ways. If I hurt myself, my mom half-jokingly said, “See, God is punishing you.” And I learned that, when praying, it was critical to add humble caveats: “If it’s your divine plan or will to do so.”

Sometimes it worked. Improbably, our hockey team won the playoff game. Grandma Garofalo survived her stroke. Much more often, it did not work. We lost the championship game. Grandma Weber died after her heart attack. The difference between the two was explained as a “mystery of faith.”

These contradictions spread to numerous other parts of my religious understanding in much more meaningful ways.

At each Sunday service, we heard stories about a vengeful and egotistical God—one who flooded the earth and killed all but one family of mankind, and later loved one special group of humans so much that he personally aided them in brutally crushing their enemies.

In the next story, from the same Sunday service, we learned about a God who unconditionally loved all mankind so much that he sent his son to die for all of us.

Having sex outside of marriage was considered sinful and evil. I got that. But even thinking about it was considered the
same thing, and I resented the idea that I should feel perverted or shameful for experiencing a biological drive in puberty that was as powerful as hunger.

Suicide bought a ticket straight to the eternal fires of hell, and being a homosexual seemed to carry the same weight as violating one of the Ten Commandments.

Ultimately, if I didn’t believe getting into heaven was for Christians alone, I would be welcome to join non-Christians in “not being saved”—which of course meant going to hell.

All sorts of translations and explanations—from different priests and religious teachers on the same topics—were offered to help answer my cautious questions, but nothing satisfied me. A sixteen-year-old knows conditions and mind-spinning contradictions when he hears them.

This was the instruction, and it was often presented in a very matter-of-fact, nonnegotiable way. I learned to keep my mouth shut and abide by the guidance: “Contradictions and unanswered prayers are the mystery of God’s will and work on earth. The strength of your belief in this mystery is a reflection of the strength of your faith.”

When it came to prayer, I struggled with the Gregorian chants we had to recite at school and at church, and I found it frustrating talking with people who could only speak in Bible passages. So I distinctly remember the day I received “permission” to do it my way. I heard a reading from the Bible that advised against long, redundant prayers. Praying was meant to be done in private, not out in public to impress others with how well you thought you knew or loved God.
^†
I began to speak with God as if he were my dad: I was deferential, but entitled.

My recollection of these formative religious years is arguably incomplete, unfair, and superficial, but that is what happens when such a complex subject is introduced to a child.

None of this produced any doubt about my hope and faith in God. What I did begin to doubt was our collective ability to actually hear—or perhaps listen to—what God was saying to us.

I entered adulthood with the understanding that I could have an open mind about faith and religion as long as I stayed within established boundaries.

*   *   *

When I deployed to Saudi Arabia at age twenty-six, it was as if someone rolled a grenade into my storehouse of knowledge and understanding about everything in life.

The landscape is 830,000 square miles of stupefying desert, with temperatures routinely over 115 degrees. No rain, rivers, or lakes. Civilization didn’t seem to “fit” the landscape at all, an anomaly that became more pronounced as I encountered the culture.

Women not only had no rights, they had to cover themselves from head to toe at all times in public. Forget the right to vote; they didn’t even have the right to drive a vehicle.

Most of the nation’s labor—as well as its army—consisted of “third-country nationals” who were little more than slave labor and apparently content to be so.

Religion and the law were one, and the king employed a workforce known as the Mutawwa (pronounced “Moo
-tah
-wah”) to enforce every aspect of the religious rules. (I once met a man whose only job was to cut out or blacken any exposed flesh in the photos on magazine covers in the grocery store.)

The concept of punishment was redefined for me when I visited “Chop-Chop Square,” the Western term used to describe the massive public square where limbs and, on rare occasion, heads were severed from criminals’ bodies.

Surrounding the square was the largest
suq
(“sook”), or open-air
market, in Riyadh.
Hey, honey, let’s take in a public beheading and then get our shopping done while we’re there
.

My soldiers viewed this environment with skepticism and distrust. “Screw this madness, man. These people are crazy. I’m staying in the compound.”

But I couldn’t. Like an amateur anthropologist, I viewed all of it with wide-eyed and cautious interest. I spent a few nights a week engaging the shopkeepers in the Chop-Chop suq.

Two shopkeepers stood out from the rest. One was Shamsi Obaidi, an unmarried Indian, age twenty-one, with no family in Saudi Arabia. The other was Ahmed Shafik, a married Egyptian, age thirty-one, with one child.

What started as casual experiments in hard bargaining over occasional purchases quickly turned to tea, sweets, and spirited but whispered discussions about all manner of topics. In a country where distrust and anxiety are default emotions and a misstep can result in a closed shop and jail time, a visit from an interested and apparently trustworthy American was a welcome respite.

Shamsi came from a wealthy family in India and graduated early from college. His father had big plans for him in Europe but first bought a small storefront in Riyadh, where it was easier and less costly to experiment with a business. He left Shamsi to run and manage it all on his own. Shamsi hated it. In India, he had social circles that matched his age and energy; in Saudi Arabia, he was a virtual prisoner. He sat in that shop every day for ten hours, and no one ever took any interest in him outside of business.

If being with Shamsi was like watching a movie, being with Ahmed was like being
in
the movie. Married with a newborn daughter, he was clearly more mature and worldly-wise.

Conversations with Ahmed were about the same kinds of things I was experiencing in life—marriage, fatherhood, work, world views. But of all these, our discussions about religion were
the most riveting. Our conversations turned my military deployment into an intercultural sabbatical for religious study.

One of our most memorable discussions revolved around the matter of judgment in the afterlife. “The angels, one on the left shoulder and one on the right,” he said in his broken English, “they sit in judgment with the book of your life works in the pages. If the scale go one way, you go to the heaven. If the scale go the other way, then the serpent, he come from the ground, and he take you to the hell.”

“You really believe that?” I asked.

He smiled, took a sip of his tea, and replied in a nonverbal way that he was aware of my disbelief. Then he spoke up, “You believe that the Jesus was born without a father and he die and rise from the dead. How is it that my story is so hard to believe?”

I pressed him on the matter of the afterlife. Grinning, I began, “So, I am an infidel …” He burst out with nervous laughter. “What will happen to me?” I continued. He stopped laughing and rocked his head from side to side, as if unsure about how to answer, while he sipped his tea.

“Come on, tell me,” I said in a playful tone. We both knew how he would answer. Then he looked at me without smiling and said, “I am sorry, my friend, but you will go to the hell.”

“Well,” I said, “maybe we’ll see each other there and both be surprised.” That’s when he smiled again, and I was thankful to return to less serious topics.

On a later occasion, we addressed the issue of religious values and redemption. “What about the violence and warlike theme of the Koran?” I asked.

“Your Bible is not violent or warlike?” he politely responded.

“Well, we Christians focus on the New Testament, which follows the Old.”

“Really?” he said in a dismissive tone as he looked away. He tilted his head and smiled with thinly veiled contempt as he rattled off a quick history of Christian behavior since the time of
Christ. “The violent message is there for Christians to take as they like, too,” he said with confidence.

On the issue of redemption, I pointed out the stark difference between Islam and Christianity, namely that Islam has no redemption. He pressed me, “The Jesus, he die for your sins … so you are not judged when you die?” It was clear he was asking me a loaded question, but I wasn’t sure how or what.

“No, we will be judged,” I answered. “But the point is that Jesus died for our sins, so we can all be saved.”

“Yes, that is what I said,” Ahmed replied. “He die for your sin. You believe this is required for the heaven. Where and when the judgment?” After a few more minutes of confusing discussion, it dawned on me that he was referencing the Christian belief that salvation is about grace and not deeds. If true, what was it, exactly, that we would be judged upon or sent to hell for? Our words and thoughts about Christ’s teachings? I had no answer—for him or for me.

This wasn’t some high-handed twist of logic he was throwing at me. Nor was he arguing for Islam. It was what I said I believed, and it was the best explanation I could give after twenty years of what I thought was thoroughly examined religious conviction. It was the “God’s unconditional love with conditions and stunning contradictions” discussion of my youth all over again.

Because most adults I knew were unwilling or unable to have a discussion that didn’t begin and end with a literal and exclusive read of John 14:6—“I am the way, the truth, and the life; no man comes unto the Father except through me”—I was ill equipped for the discussion.

My frustration with Ahmed later turned to acceptance as I saw we were both exercising the same kind of faith with the same kinds of mystery, a conclusion I kept to myself after a family member scoffed at my comparison of Islam to Christianity.