Readings By Michael Dirda Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, March 28, 1999

Of course, the chanted Latin sounded gravely magical and the impenetrable Croatian – used for announcements at the early service – summoned up that vague Old Country I had heard about from chubby aunts wrapped in black coats and gaunt uncles in their cups. Theirs, I knew, was a peasant society where people lived on potatoes and cabbage, usually floating in melted butter and washed down with burning liquors. Vodka, slivovitz.

"Kneel straight," my mother would whisper to me whenever I allowed my bottom to rest against the wooden pew. Then I would arch my spine with military ardor – until my backside would slowly backslide toward my seat. Bored, I would study the pictures on the walls – the Stations of the Cross – or watch my mother devoutly praying her rosary. My father, when he deigned to come, would be wearing a tan suit, with a skinny tie garroting his throat, his fingers twitching and thrumming on the pew, forehead glistening with sweat. My sisters would usually be dressed like Shirley Temple, three scowling little princesses. Before long, the scented air would grow stuffy, soporific. In those days church lasted one hour and 10 minutes. And on some holy days of obligation, even longer. People fainted. Our parish priest would drone on, apparently unstoppable.

In desperation I took to reading the Sunday Missal – all of it. The wedding service, the burial of the dead. I studied the Latin, practiced its pronunciation. Dominus vobiscum. Et cum spiritu tuo. Still, the sing-song language felt dessicated and abstract. As a kid enthralled by the Justice League of America, the schemes of Fu Manchu and the exploits of Tarzan, I hungered for red-blooded adventure. And then one blessed morning, I grabbed our family Bible and carried it with me to Mass. Certainly, I insisted to my dubious parents, to study the Old Testament or the Gospels would be just as holy and reverent as skimming a missal. Hmmm. We'll see. I settled down and opened the heavy black book. And was amazed.

A few years later my father paid me a hundred dollars to read the Bible from cover to cover, doubtless the best investment of his life, at least as far as I was concerned. But my taste for scripture was born earlier, in church on those eternal Sundays. Jesus's parables about mustard seeds and lost sheep, the cynical wisdom of Ecclesiastes ("the days of darkness will be many"), the Song of Solomon with its panting talk of harts, ewes and the beloved's hills and valleys, the cinematic grandeur of the Apocalypse – all these I raptly absorbed, as the penitent genuflected around me and struck their breasts three times for having sinned most grievously in thought, word and deed.

There's obviously nothing like a good book to restore one's faith – in literature at least, as Matthew Arnold might point out. But in years to come I found myself repeatedly perplexed about the relationship between religion and language, religion and poetry. In the confessional, before granting absolution, the priest would insist that I promise to go and sin no more. "But, Father, you know I'll be back here next week. I hate to make promises I can't be expected to keep." No good. I had to promise or I would not be forgiven my trespasses. But wasn't vowing never to sin again a kind of lie? Religion grew increasingly problematic, even as my mind thrilled to the theological arguments I ran across in the fearless reading of my youth: the ontological proof, Pascal's wager, the leap of faith. Then, too, the visceral terrors of the sermon in Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" deeply frightened me, as did Jonathan Edwards's even scarier "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." In the end, however, they left me still spiritually restive, albeit with a lasting taste for over-the-top hellfire preaching.

As a '60s teenager I perused "The Communist Manifesto" with revolutionary zeal, argued during catechism class that Marxism was better for the world than Christianity, and found myself promptly banned from religious instruction for a month. No loss, as far as I was concerned. My daydreams of becoming a studious monk or crafty Jesuit were long behind me. I had read Frazer's "Golden Bough" and learned all about dying gods who sacrifice themselves for the community. Instead I preferred Thoreau's sensible last words; when asked about preparing his soul for the next world, the great naturalist replied: "One world at a time." The mortally ill Heine said he knew God would forgive him because that was his job.

Once, during a college summer program in France, I glimpsed an evangelist's truck bearing a roughly painted billboard: "The fool has said in his heart: There is no God." Was I a fool? After all, greater minds than mine had believed. I read Augustine's "Confessions": Make me chaste, he famously implored, but not yet. And so for a while I took to wearing a religious medal on a gold chain, mainly because it seemed sexy to girls, especially as it dangled down on their breasts while we embraced on couches in darkened corridors. More often I felt intellectually like the Laodiceans, whom Paul lambasted for being neither hot nor cold: Was I then an agnostic? By the time I reached graduate school, a would-be medievalist, I was studying patristic exegesis – the techniques by which Augustine, Jerome and the other Church fathers interpreted the two Testaments. Among other charming bits of trivia, I learned that according to Pope Gregory the Great anyone who commits one of the seven deadly sins makes himself into "a testicle of Antichrist." Clearly, religion could be good for a laugh, if not quite the heartless guffaw of the disdainful H.L. Mencken character of "Inherit the Wind."

Still, I kept running into believers. One summer I worked in a steel mill with a young guy hoping to become a fundamentalist minister. Deep in pits underground, shoveling the jagged scale broken off cooling ingots, we would argue for hours about election and damnation. Visiting Mexico another summer, I stood shaking my head as old women shuffled on bloodied knees across the cobblestoned courtyard and up the steps into the cathedral of Our Lady of Guadaloupe. Did the Church really encourage such fanatical devotion? Perhaps – even if Yeats insisted that body should not be bruised to pleasure soul. Even later, in grad school one afternoon, a friend and I were eating lunch when three youthful proselytizers sat down, hoping to convert us to their faith. Alas, they happened to mention Job, and I glanced at Mary with a sly smile. We had just finished a year's course on the Book of Job; there was absolutely nothing we didn't know about Job. An hour later, we got up from the table, leaving the broken young evangelists in tears. Blessed are the merciful.

As I grew into adulthood, I still yearned for "something more deeply interfused," admired teachers possessed of profound religious conviction, envied the anchor of faith in friends and neighbors. Once I attended evensong at Christ Church, Cambridge; the celebrant's melodious tenor voice might have been Gielgud's; he quoted T.S. Eliot's poetry; the Renaissance music was by Thomas Tallis. I nearly converted to Anglicanism on the spot. But didn't: Cradle Catholics almost never become Protestants. Soon thereafter matters grew even more complicated. Children were born. They couldn't be reared as pagans, suckled in a creed outworn, could they? Folklore has it that cultists are seeking the religion denied them in childhood. My beloved spouse chose a church with strong social convictions, whose minister delivered dazzling sermons, laced with jokes, as subtle and supple as a class in Modern Religious Thought.

But still my soul would not bend. I frequently read the Bible for its prose (sorry, Wystan), when in need of solace occasionally stopped in at a church – "a serious house on serious earth," to use Philip Larkin's phrase from "Church Going." If pressed, I would sometimes claim, only half-jokingly, that I worshipped Robert Graves's White Goddess – the source of all true poetry. I nibbled too at Tao and Zen, meditated on Buddhist texts, instantly recognizing their fundamental truth: Attachment to this transitory realm is the source of pain. But I wanted to live in this world, and would suffer if I had to. New Age spirituality – channeling, astrology and the like – struck me then (and now) as sheer tommyrot. Religious and ethnic conflict around the world reminded me that faith could be a license for barbarism.

And what of today? I am not quite at the age when mortality looks out at me from the mirror while I shave. But at work I can flip through my Rolodex and see that it has become, as my late colleague Reid Beddow once described it, a necropolis: Half the cards bear the names of the dead, a few glorious, most half-forgotten. "As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more." I wonder still about God, the purpose of life, religion. But wonder is all I do: I can't even regard myself as a pilgrim, actively seeking the way. At best, I can only hope that if the Lord were ever to call to me, as he did long ago to Adam, "Where art thou?" I would not hide but instead would answer, "Here am I." But, God knows, I don't ever expect to hear that call or to give that answer. Yet who can plumb the future? Who can say?

Michael Dirda's Internet address is dirdam@washpost.com.

Journeying Toward God: Ten Classics of Faith and Doubt

* "The Confessions of St. Augustine" – the model for all spiritual

autobiographies.

* "The Book of Common Prayer" – "In the midst of life we are in death."

* John Bunyan, "The Pilgrim's Progress" – "As I walked through

the wilderness of this world."

* George Herbert's poetry –

"Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back/ Guilty of dust and sin."

* Pascal's "Pensees" – "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me."

* Gerard Manley Hopkins's poetry – "Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee."

* Dostoevsky, "The Brothers Karamazov" – especially the "Grand Inquisitor" chapter in which Christ returns and is condemned to death by the Church.

* Tolstoy, "The Death of Ivan Ilych" – the last days of an ordinary man.

* T.S. Eliot, "Four Quartets" -- "At the still point of the turning world."

*"The Habit of Being: The Letters of Flannery O'Connor" – very funny, deeply devout, and inspiring.