The Intellectual Devotional

Because of my alcoholism, I’ve spent a lot of time over the last ten years or so among evangelical Christians. That’s because most recovery programs (the kind that don’t cost tens of thousands of dollars, anyway) rely heavily on faith rather than therapy, mostly Christianity. Say what you want about it—and there’s plenty to say—but that approach does work for some people. There are significant numbers of people out there who are searching desperately for something to believe in, something with the potential to change their lives.

Unfortunately, faith is something I’ve always struggled with. Maybe it’s because of my education or my intellectual curiosity, maybe it’s because of Star Trek and sci-fi in general, or maybe it’s because of my own stubbornness, but I’ve never been able to bring myself to wholly believe in something on faith alone, especially if it runs contrary to logic or reason. I may love my stories, my TV shows and movies, my comic books and novels, but I don’t believe in the literal reality of them. They’re metaphors, thought experiments, goals to strive for, but not actual reality. They’re something I need to reinforce every day, like someone devoted to their faith needs to reinforce their belief every day, but they’re not objective fact and they’re not always terribly well-written or conceived. (Some of them can be quite bad, in fact, and it’s important to be able to judge each individual story on its own merits, rejecting the bad ones and embracing the good ones.)

In Christian circles, daily devotionals are very popular. For those that don’t know, devotionals are typically small books containing individual entries for every day of the year. Each entry contains a brief passage from the Bible followed by a few paragraphs written by the author (usually a pastor) expanding on the day’s scripture and providing analysis. Devotionals are meant to be read one entry at a time, every day, and then prayed about by the reader with the goal of receiving true insight from God.

As someone who has never been able to fully embrace faith, I’ve never been crazy about devotionals and, when I’ve been asked questions about the day’s reading, I’ve always reflected on them from a more academic or historical perspective than a faith-based one. The Bible really does contain a great deal of historical fact, even if I do believe parts of it are embellished to a greater or lesser extent. That’s the nature of writings that have been around in one form or another for hundreds or thousands of years.

One day, in a large, chain bookstore, I came across a small book titled The Intellectual Devotional. In the upper corner of the cover, it boasted “365 DAILY LESSONS FROM THE SEVEN FIELDS OF KNOWLEDGE”. Intrigued, I picked it up and paged through it. I had never seen anything like it, but sure enough, it offered brief, daily lessons on topics like history, science, and the arts, one for every day of the year.

I ended up buying it that day, and I proceeded to read it every day just as faithfully as other people read their Christian devotionals. It was great, actually, to get a little bit of education every day and to feel like I was exercising my mind a little. I’ll admit that I also got a little bit of amusement out of reading about academic subjects that most of the other people I was with would have laughed at. I can be disagreeable like that sometimes.

But my point is that personal fulfillment comes in lots of different forms. Contrary to what some people who have you believe, there is no one, universal right answer for everyone. That’s why it’s so important to understand Who You Are, so you can then find what fulfills you and how that’s different from other people.

We can’t live anyone else’s truth. All we can do is live our own, but to do that, we have to first know what it is.

Writing Prompt #5: Do you prefer taking risks or having a safety net?

I have a set of rules. They’re rules for me, no one else. They started out as Gibbs’s rules from the television show NCIS, but over the years I’ve removed a lot of the ones that didn’t apply and I’ve added a lot that were more specific to me. This is one of them.

Rule #17: Risk is part of the game.

"Risk is part of the game [if] you want to sit in that chair."

It’s a quote from Star Trek: Generations, in which Captain James T. Kirk gently admonishes a young, rookie captain that if he wants to sit in the Big Chair, he needs to understand that his job is not to play it safe. A captain’s job is to risk.

That’s not to say that anyone should take undue risks. Kirk has often been known to advise caution, or to get his ship and his crew to safety, or to not make stupid decisions. Although often remembered as reckless, Kirk was never one to take unwarranted or unnecessary risks. He wasn’t a loose cannon. But when the situation called for risk, when lives were at stake or his ship was on the line, he wasn’t afraid to take risks in the name of a greater cause. He wasn’t afraid to take personal risks to achieve his goals or complete his mission. Jim Kirk was the epitome of taking measured, calculated risks, and that’s what he was trying to impress upon his younger counterpart.

In my life, I’ve often tended to play it safe. I don’t enjoy rejection or failure; no one really does. But I’ve often felt that I’ve been rejected or hurt or embarrassed so often in my life that I never wanted to experience that again. I especially wanted to play everything safe when my kids were little because they were the most important people in my life. I never wanted them to suffer for any risks I took.

The problem, I’ve only realized in the last few years, is that isn’t living. Life involves risk and failure. Life involves picking yourself up and trying again. Sometimes life involves taking a chance in the name of something that’s important. I’ve never been very good at that, but I’m trying. I’ve never been very good at going after what I want; I always prioritize other people or other needs or the rules or anything other than myself. Sometimes it’s really just an excuse to not put myself out there, to stay in my safe place and not to engage with the world on its terms. Sometimes I lie to myself.

I’m 47 years old; breaking out of that habit isn’t going to be easy, but I’m trying.

Who Are You?

My family never attended church. My father is a devout atheist and my mother is, at best, a non-practicing Catholic. The only times I remember being in a church before my thirties were weddings and funerals. Religion was an alien world to me, one that I felt little need to dip my toe in.

That’s not to say that I didn’t find ideas and philosophies that influenced me and continue to influence me to this day. They weren’t what anyone would call “books of faith” or anything like that, but they were important to me and gave me a lot to think about. They helped me find my way and establish something firm to stand on in a world where the people I knew all seemed to have conflicting beliefs and convictions, and where I had a hard time deciding who was right and who was wrong.

In 1989, I was eleven years old when I bought my first comic book and really discovered Spider-Man. Actually, if I’m being honest, my first comic book was an issue of a licensed Real Ghostbusters comic that I found at Stater Bros. while my mom was grocery shopping. I begged and pleaded for her to buy it for me, as only an eleven-year-old can, and she finally relented. I loved it, but there were only a few issues available on the spinner rack at the time, and once I finished those two or three comics I was hungry for more. Not knowing much about the other titles on display, I picked a character I at least recognized from Saturday morning cartoons. Outside of a children’s read-along book I had when I was younger, The Spectacular Spider-Man #150 was what I consider my first “real” comic book.

That started a lifelong fascination with superheroes. From Spider-Man, I learned that with great power comes great responsibility. For those who don’t know, Peter Parker at first squandered his powers trying to make a profit and looking out for himself until, one day, he refused to stop a mugger he could have easily apprehended, a mugger who shortly went on to murder his Uncle Ben. As Spider-Man, Peter vowed to never look the other way again. He realized that if it was within his ability to help, he had a responsibility to do so, especially when people couldn’t help themselves. For an eleven-year-old, that’s heavy stuff. It goes deeper than just watching people in colorful pajamas beating each other up. It’s a way of life writ large. From Spider-Man, I moved on to other comics: Thor, The Infinity Gauntlet, The Avengers, Captain America and others. I found myself mostly drawn to Marvel characters, but I also collected a lot of comics from the Denny O’Neil editorial run on the Batman titles. One of the things I learned from all those writers, artists, and characters was that the differences between us all as human beings, whether they be ethnicity, nationality, language, religion, or any number of other differences were inconsequential. What mattered was that all people are important, all people deserve the chance to live in peace, to live according to what makes them happy and what they believe, and to be protected. Most of what divides us as people is trivial in the grand scheme of things.

Then came 1990. Over the summer between 6^th and 7^th grades, I was at a family event at my aunt’s house. I’ve never been a hugely social person, so I wandered into a side room and turned on the TV. This was well before the age of hundreds of cable channels, so the channel-surfing options were limited, but it just so happened that one of the local stations was airing a rerun of the most recent Star Trek: The Next Generation episode. I had never seen it and I was barely aware of the show in general, but that afternoon I was hooked. There was something about this group of people who were very clearly an extended family and their determination to do the right thing, save their father-figure, and protect the innocent people on Earth that captured me. I spent the whole summer watching every rerun I could and awaiting the Fall premier that would wrap up the cliffhanger that ended the previous season. It was the Summer between parts one and two of “The Best of Both Worlds” and the start of my attachment to Star Trek in general. Those themes of progressiveness, inclusion, scientific curiosity, and duty have been a part of my life ever since.

A few years later, Babylon 5 premiered, and provided me with a five-year run in which the stories and themes resonated on a similar level while giving me even more to think about: media bias, faith, fascism, good and evil, order and chaos, whether we are bound to follow one of two divergent paths or whether we have the freedom and responsibility to forge a third path, our own. It was J. Michael Straczynski whose writing first taught me the two most important questions in anyone’s life. “Who are you?” and “What do you want?” It was through his work that I realized it matters what order you answer those questions. Deciding what you want is much easier than figuring out who you are, but if you decide what you want before you understand who you are you can end up going wildly off-course and finding yourself in places you never thought you would and where you never wanted to be. That’s something that happens all too often in our goal-oriented, materialistic society. Wants are much easier to define than identity.

In the years since, I’ve been exposed to a lot of religion, mostly in the form of evangelical Christianity. That’s an entirely different ball of yarn to unravel, but one thing I’ve heard over and over again is that you have to read your Bible every day, every single day, to feed your faith and maintain your identity. And they’re right. They’re absolutely right. But it’s a broader truth than even they realize. I struggle every time I stray from the things that shaped me, that I truly believe in, even if I don’t believe in the literal, factual truth of the stories. I don’t believe superheroes are literally real or that Star Trek or Babylon 5 represent our actual future. But those stories don’t have to be factual truth to have power or for the themes and ideas they represent to resonate. If I don’t constantly reinforce those ideas in myself, I start to wander and forget what shaped me. But eventually, I always come back. I always come full circle. And I’m starting to realize how important it is to stay with those ideas in some form, to keep reminding myself who I am. Because that’s the first, most important question of our existence: “Who are you?” Without that, it’s all too easy to get lost.