If a child can be born naturally religious, I was born that
way. Perhaps all children are naturally religious – innately believing in a
mysterious, wider and invisible, world of which we are all a part, a realm that
has its own inscrutable but indubitable logic and order. This makes sense,
considering that for nine months we inhabit a tiny universe of our own, which
is familiar and yet not self-contained; does the child in the womb not hear
(even feel, perhaps smell?) the larger world of its mother’s body, the pounding
of her heart, the bellows of her lungs, the gurgle and grumble of her other
organs, the rocking, rolling, and ratcheting of her sitting, standing, and
lying down? And beyond that, a larger unseen universe full of noises and dimly
felt sensations. Thus it seems entirely reasonable to me that the unborn child
should be sensible of an unseen world of unsuspected complexity, and content
that it should be so, as the child has never known anything else.
Whether the unborn infant has any sensation of God is
another question, perhaps, but the very fact that there are worlds outside of
worlds would seem to imply a tacit intuition that there is Someone outside of
all worlds. Aristotle, when he arrived at his theory of the Prime Mover, or the
Uncaused Cause, was perhaps not making any great intellectual leap forward, but
simply articulating something that each person intuits from the months of his
gestation. At any rate, I know that as a young child, I implicitly believed that there was a mysterious order to the universe, and that it could be observed. I didn't yet question the way things were, because I had not yet noticed any disorder. So when my brother
told me that when pet turtles get out of their bowls, they always head east, I believed him without question.
 |
| Sams One, Two, and Three? |
We had a series of pet turtles, always named Sam, of the
sort which, in those days, before we all became aware of (and therefore afraid
of) the diseases that could be transmitted by these otherwise harmless
reptiles, one often saw at the back of dime stores, dozens climbing over each
other in a large glass tank at the end of the aisle, priced about fifteen
cents. Dime store turtles were, for my generation, what hamsters would become
to children later on – an early easy-to-care-for, easy to replace “starter”
pet. Usually these little turtles were about the size of a silver dollar when
you brought them home, and often by the time they had grown to the size of a
baseball they would crawl out of their bowls and wander through the house,
under the furniture or down into the floor registers, or out the screen door
when no one was looking, or they would simply die of mysterious causes. When
any of these things happened, it was easy and economical to replace them,
either with one of similar size (so that parent & child could pretend it
was the same animal, and thus avoid the question of mortality) or with another
tiny one which would, most likely, itself wander off as soon as it was big
enough to scramble out of its bowl. In this way, my brother and I acquired and
lost a series of turtles, all named Sam. (Much later it occurred to me to
wonder if my brother, who was older and enjoyed the perquisites of seniority,
had named them Sam because he had overheard adult discussions in which the
terms “turtles” and “salmonella” were associated.)
Sams One, Two, and Three each managed to scramble out of the
bowl in which they lived, with a little tap water to swim in and perhaps a
stick or some marbles to sit on when they felt like it, and get lost amongst
the furniture legs and floor rugs. My brother confidently told me that turtles,
when they get out of their bowls always headed east, and I never questioned this
truth. We would ask some adult in the household which way was east and then
work our way in that direction through the various rooms, calling for Sam. If
that did not discover a turtle, we would head down the back steps and into the
yard, and continue our search eastward, until we were forced to conclude that
the turtle had had too much of a head start and its instinctual pull eastward
had overcome the comfortable but limiting appointments of the turtle bowl. My
brother would head indoors to begin campaigning for the purchase of the next
Sam, and I would retire to the cool recesses of the nandina bush in the back
yard to meditate on the mysteries of turtle instinct.
 |
| My private thinkatorium |
Plato had his grove and I, at age three or four, had my
nandina bush, which stood in the center of our back yard and had a secret,
hollow center, the canes of the bush towering three or four feet high around an
interior space of smooth, cool dirt, as silky as talcum powder, which served as
my palace of meditation, my own private “thinkatorium.” There I would sit for
hours on end, idly moving the silky soil about with an old spoon and meditating
on the mysteries of turtles, lady bugs, and other creatures that preferred to
leave houses whenever they could and venture on their own. That my brother was
right in asserting that turtles head east I never doubted. His authority went
unquestioned; he was older and, therefore, wiser and he spoke with great
conviction. Only many years later did I wonder whether he truly believed what
he said (perhaps my father had jokingly assured him of this “truth”) or if he
had improvised this announcement, knowing that I was his adoring disciple and
would believe whatever he told me. Yet, once the truth had been taught me, my
brother lost interest in it, whereas my interest was just beginning. Into the
nandina bush I would crawl, and there in the cool shade, sitting cross-legged
in the dust like some Hindu sage, I would reflect on the aptness of his
insight.
Why would turtles go east? I asked myself. Perhaps it was
just where they felt drawn, toward the rising of the sun. Perhaps they smelled
water – just a block or two down the street there was a drainage ditch or a
domesticated creek and, a mile or two further east, the Red
River . I imagined the Sams, and other escapees, toiling
relentlessly on their tiny legs for days, at night finding a cool nook under
some rock or behind a garbage can where they could safely tuck their legs
and heads into their shells for the night and, then, when the first golden rays
of dawn broke the darkness, resume their trek eastward until they could quietly
and wearily slide, or perhaps with glee and renewed vigor leap, into the gently
flowing waters of the river, where so many other turtles already enjoyed a life
free of confinement. Turtles, I understood, knew where they belonged and they
naturally sought out that place.
Turtles have their rivers, birds have their nests, and I had
my home with my parents, grandmother, brothers. Only once did I try to light
out on my own – perhaps in a fit of pique after a parental “no” – but got no
farther than the curb on the opposite side of the street from our house before
I sat down and wailed in misery at being cut off from my home, a haven of
security. Later, this sense of security would begin to slip, and I would envy
the turtles their sense of direction, their instinct for where they belonged. At
age three or four, however, I sensed that all was right with the world, and I
had no doubts about the order of the universe.
