The Gospel According to Flowers

     One of my favorite fictional characters is Virgil Flowers. He's a lanky, plain-speaking cop who likes Leinenkugel beer, fishing, skinny-dipping with his girlfriend Frankie, and solving offbeat crimes in small Minnesota towns. Virgil also adheres to one other routine. At night, just before going to sleep, he talks to God about the ins and outs of human nature.
     Virgil is not a mystic or ersatz monk. He doesn't hear voices or see visions.  He talks to God the way you might talk to your bartender. Airing things out and chewing them over.
     In the latest story, one character faces an ethical dilemma. Virgil suggests that the man talk it over with God. No-can-do, the man says, because he doesn't hold with religion.
     Virgil responds, Don't get things all mixed up. God and religion are not the same thing.
     Virgil never says more, so we are left to speculate on the details of his theology. I like to imagine he'd say things this way:
     Jesus came along and said, Folks, you don't have a loving relationship with God by making up a bunch of rules and using them to play gotcha games on your neighbors. You have a loving relationship by having a loving relationship.  Your relationship with God is reflected in your relationship with your fellow human beings, and vice-versa.  And that's just about the nub of the thing.
     Well -- as Virgil might put it -- the echoes hadn't hardly faded before folks got right back to making up rules and playing gotcha.  And boy oh boy, have we moderns refined the game. We've got right-wing preachers of condemnation and exclusion. We've got feelgood mega-churches that enshrine greed and deliberately confuse worship with entertainment. We've got so-called religious leaders embracing politicians who have no moral core.
     And in one particularly telling sign of the times, we've got a Roman Catholic pope who has scandalized portions of his church and startled the world.
     How?
     By dwelling on themes of love, forgiveness and inclusion.
     Now, one thing about Virgil is this: Despite all the ugliness he sees, he just keeps on keepin' on. He knows that the good guys outnumber the bad ones. He knows this because it often happens that some of the good guys stick their necks out to help him catch the other sort. They do this because that's what good guys do in life. They stick their necks out for what's right.
     I don't know if Virgil is a reader. (Between chasing crooks and chasing Frankie, he may not have the time.) But I think he might find resonance in the climax of William Faulkner's Nobel Prize acceptance speech:
     "I believe that man ... is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion, sacrifice and endurance.  The poet's, the writer's duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. ... "
       I have an atheist friend who believes that his capacity for such as love and awe is a kind of biochemical emission. An emanation of his amino acids or his endocrine glands, perhaps. I think that on this point my friend is more than a little silly. To paraphrase an old saying, I am not able to believe that Handel's Messiah emerged from the molecular chemistry of meat.
     I think Virgil would agree. And I think that if he did read Faulkner, he might say something like, Yup, most folks are naturally wired to seek out the right, and the wiring's not accidental.
     So, when I get blue about fools, quacks and scoundrels strutting in the name of religion, I have two sources of relief.
     I can dig out my Faulkner.
     Or I can imagine sipping a couple of Leinies with Virgil.