By Jacqueline Davies
Of Bookstores and Crabapple Trees:
Places Where I've Contemplated God
I was standing at the checkout counter of my local bookstore—a place where the booksellers know my name and chat comfortably with me about vacation plans and dogs—when a man walked in the door. Agitated, he seemed not sure of where to go, as we all are from time to time. He was carrying with him that strange energy of great forward momentum in the absence of any particular direction. I noted him out of the corner of my eye and continued talking to the store owner as she rang up my sale.
Within a minute he approached the counter and posed his question: “Where are the books written by Jesus?”
The store owner looked up from the book she held in her hand and asked, “Do you mean books about Jesus?”
“No!” he insisted. “I want the books written by him.”
Without missing a beat, the owner pointed to the Religion section and suggested he might find something he liked there. “I’ll be over to help in a minute,” she added, handing me the credit card slip for signature and bagging my purchases.
Many things went through my head as I signed my name. How readily the owner had been willing to meet the man where he was. How certain the man was that Jesus’ work was still collecting royalties. The wonder of independent bookstores and the miracle that they exist and even thrive.
I noticed on the slip that the owner had extended the store’s “local author discount” to me, for which I am always grateful. It’s a small thing, that discount, but it always feels to me that by giving the discount the store is saying, Thank you for doing the hard work of writing books, to which I always respond silently in my head, Thank you for recognizing how hard it is and for showing that you care and that it matters. Your appreciation fortifies me. It might be that the store is not expressing this sentiment at all, and that I’m having a two-sided conversation in my head that is complete fabrication. It happens a lot.
Which led me to think about the fact that I’m an author who constantly makes things up and occasionally manages to get them down on paper. Which further led me to think on the fact that Jesus was not an author. The owner knew it, and I knew it, and soon this agitated man would know it. While historians and theologians agree and disagree about many things related to the remarkable life led by Jesus, it can be agreed by all that he never wrote a book. The man was going to be disappointed to learn that. He was certain that Jesus was the author of many books. Perhaps he expected an entire section of the bookstore to be filled with his titles alone. I wondered if he would think that this particular bookstore simply didn’t carry any of Jesus’ books (shelf space being limited, after all), and if he would continue his quest at another, larger bookstore (perhaps a Barnes & Noble?).
I stepped outside and felt the sudden, surprising sun that had blessed this one February day in a month of gray and dreary days, and once again was overwhelmed with a feeling of gratefulness. Oh! Thank you! I lifted my face to the sun and felt both the sunshine and gratitude wash over me. There was nothing more to say. Oh!
As I drove home, I was still thinking about the man in search of Author Jesus—not Savior Jesus or Spiritual Guide Jesus or Son of God Jesus, but the man who had written books. (The Bible, of course, which contains many quotations attributed to Jesus, is thought to have been written largely by Paul the Apostle, and while it can be said that Jesus provided great material, it was Paul who faced the blank page on a daily basis and who, no doubt, experienced that all-too-familiar fear that paralyzes many an author: Am I up to this task?)
I was deep in thought—there was a lot to think about—and on streets so familiar I could have driven them in my sleep, when I suddenly realized I was fast approaching a parked police car, lying in wait on a side street. Oh, please, no! I thought. I was definitely going over the speed limit on this well-traveled residential street, and as I looked in my rear-view mirror, just before taking the turn I always take to go home, I saw the police car slowly pull out of the side street and begin to follow me. No! No! No! I said again as I slowly continued my usual route home. Another turn. One more. I checked my rear-view mirror again.
No police car.
Maybe the officer wasn’t trying to pull me over in the first place. Maybe I had cleverly evaded capture by driving my usual route at fifteen miles per hour. Whatever the reason, I didn’t get a ticket that day. And for the rest of my drive I home, I felt that special gratitude that is only felt when you realize that you’ve done something really stupid and somehow you’ve managed to walk away without paying the price. Think of all those times in your life, big and small, when you’ve been dumb lucky. Thank you, thank you, thank you, I whispered quietly all the way home.
In fact, I whispered, Thank you, God. As I had when I felt the sunshine on my face, and as I had even when receiving the local author discount. Thank you, God, for all the remarkable advantages that have allowed me to become an author, the only thing I ever wanted to be. Thank you, God, for sunshine, which never fails to astound and delight me. Thank you, God,for letting me get away with one—and, yes, I will try really hard to remember to drive more slowly next time.
I would guess that I thank God about five to ten times a day, every day. Which wouldn’t be so remarkable but for the fact that I’m an atheist. Not an agnostic, not a wandering spiritualist, not a faint checkmark in the box labeled “Other”—an atheist. I was raised an atheist by two atheists, and it’s what I believe. It’s what I’ve believed since my earliest consciousness. I didn’t choose it. It’s who I am.
And yet, when expressing gratitude—which I feel so greatly and continually and ever more as I age—it just feels right to express it to someone. Some thing. Some other. To say thank you into a void feels incomplete to me. And so, I follow the easy path, and just tack “God” onto the end of my gratitude. It seems to finish the thought for me.
To be clear, this well-thanked God of mine isn’t New Testament or even Old Testament. This God isn’t drawn from any of the major religions—Islam or Hinduism or Buddhism or Christianity or Judaism—all of which I’m embarrassingly ignorant of. (Remember, I was raised an atheist, so I missed Sunday school and its equivalents.) What I call God isn’t a god. It’s something much more complex: an awareness, a cohesion, a gathering spot, a center. A place or a feeling or an acknowledgement that there is great beauty and heartbreaking loss and an aching need for love and community and compassion and acceptance. That sometimes we are lucky, and sometimes we are smited. That people can be kind and people can be cruel, and kindness is always the better path.
My oldest sister (also a born-and-bred atheist) becomes really irritated with me when I use the word “blessed,” which I do occasionally in the broadest of ways. Perhaps it’s our different approach to words. She’s a lawyer, and sometimes the precise definition of a single word changes the meaning of an entire law. I’m a fiction writer, and I delight in the fungibility of words, the playful bending of them. For me, words like “blessed” and “sacred” can live comfortably in my atheistic world. They are beautiful words with beautiful meanings, and I choose not to exclude them from my vocabulary simply because I don’t believe in “God.” (I’ve never told my sister that I regularly thank God; she’d have a coronary, and I love her much too much for that.)
I’m reminded now of one of the earliest conversations I remember about religion. It didn’t take place in a church or around a dinner table, but rather in a crabapple tree. I was six, and my best friend and neighbor, Lynn, was five. We were sitting on our favorite branches when she said, “You’re going to hell.” I asked why. She said, “Because you weren’t baptized, and anyone who isn’t baptized goes to hell when they die.” Her older sister, Lori, was preparing for her first communion, so no doubt the sacraments were on Lynn’s mind. She wasn’t being mean when she told me I was going to hell. Rather she was stating a fact. Something she had worked out in her mind. (Still. Rough stuff to hear at the age of six!)
Now, I was positive this couldn’t be correct. If it were true, my parents would have told me, and they would have done whatever needed to be done to make sure I didn’t end up in a state of everlasting damnation. (Back then, I imagined hell as a desert. I had seen Lawrence of Arabia, and I figured hell was something like that. Endless. Hot. Sand in all the wrong places.)
But Lynn was so implacably certain. It got me flustered. I sputtered, “That isn’t true.”
“Yes, it is.”
“No, it’s not!”
“Yes, it is!”
“No, it’s not!” (This is the level of theological discourse that five- and six-year-olds are capable of.)
“Yes, it is!”
“Then prove it!” I said, knowing that science was on my side; my parents were on my side; my whole six years of lived experience were on my side.
“It says so,” replied Lynn coolly. “In a book.”
Gasp! She was right. And it was a BIG book. And an important one. In fact, the best-selling book of all time.
We revered books in my house. Classics and bestsellers. Things that were in books held special sway in my family. I had no come back. My six-year-old self couldn’t argue myself out of damnation.
I was so angry in that crabapple tree. Angry that I couldn’t beat her argument with one of my own. Angry that I’d been bested by someone who was a whole year younger than me. And angriest of all that my defeat was the result of a book.
I don’t have any grand conclusion to present here. I’m just pondering about a man who wants Jesus to be an author; and a little girl who argued that a book itself was as powerful as God, and a slightly older little girl who grew into an author and who needs to invent a new word that somehow encompasses the concept of a great, loving, multitudinous yet connected, bountiful, generous something that exists on some plane, in some form, deep within every microcosm and spread wide throughout the universe. It is the thing that inspires awe: a feeling of reverential respect mixed with fear and wonder and gratitude. That. I need a word for that. And of course, it has to go well with thank you.
Ms. Jacqueline Davies has eleven published children's books to her credit, including Where the Ground Meets the Sky (Cavendish, 2002), The Boy Who Drew Birds: A Story of John James Audubon (Houghton Mifflin, 2004, illustrated by Melissa Sweet), The Night Is Singing (Dial, 2006, illustrated by Kyrsten Brooker), The House Takes a Vacation (Cavendish, 2007, illustrated by Lee White), Tricking the Tallyman (Random House, 2009), Lost, and The Lemonade War series. Her most recent titles include Panda Pants (Random House, September 13, 2016) and Nothing But Trouble (HarperCollins, 2016). Her books have won numerous awards, including the NSTA Outstanding Science Trade Book for Students K-12, the John Burroughs List of Nature Books for Young Readers, The Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award, the New York Library’s Best Books List, the NCSS Notable Social Studies Trade Book for Young People, the IRA/CBC Children’s Award Notable Book for Fiction, the Bank Street College of Education’s Best Children’s Books, and the CCBC Choices Award. Learn more about her work at: http://www.jacquelinedavies.net
