After four weeks of sitting in the garage, our bicycle tires had gone soft. I pressed my thumb against the treads and could feel the mushy inner tube flaccid against the wheel rim. I swung my leg over the crossbar and rolled a few feet down the driveway. It felt like riding through a shallow layer of sand.
It was the Saturday before Labor Day, the sun striking, hot, and delicious after our weeks of Irish rain and fog. The boys and I were desperate to make the most of what remained of summer. School started on Tuesday.
I tore apart the garage looking for the pump, but it was nowhere to be found. Whenever I returned from a trip, especially a long one, I got the eerie feeling that strange things had happened in the house while we were gone: an empty mug on the counter, a magazine fanned open on the coffee table. Could I have possibly missed these things on our way out the door, or did we have a ghost? Now the bike pump had grown legs and walked away.
The tires had a little pressure, and if we took it easy we could make it to the service station at the edge of our neighborhood. “Once we get some air, we’ll pick up the pace,” I said to the boys. They held their bikes by the seats. Their helmet straps dangled loose beside their ears. “Ride slowly until then, okay?”
They buckled the chin straps. “Okay.”
Galen straddled his mountain bike. We’d bought it a little big so he could grow into it, and now, three weeks after turning nine, he had. His twiggy legs appeared to lengthen with every turn of the pedals. Hayden was six and still stuck riding the hand-me-down Murray his brother had discarded two years earlier. His was the kind of bike found in Toys “R” Us instead of a bike store. It had come in a big four-color box, complete with training wheels, plastic streamers sprouting from the handlebars, and a sticker book. Scraped and bent and dotted with rust, the wheels were no longer true, and Hayden’s knees bumped against the handlebars. I’d put off buying him a new one because it had taken him until July to crack the mystery of riding on two wheels; a month from now, when the weather turned, I’d hang the bikes from the hooks in the garage. Right now, turning circles in the driveway, Hayden looked like a bear in a circus.
The service station bays were empty, the wrecker out of service in the parking lot. Two gray-haired, big-gutted men in striped gray shirts watched us from behind the smeared office window. I waved as I uncoiled the compressor hose, but instead of waving back the old guys looked at each other and laughed. I knelt on the pavement and pressed the nozzle into action. I didn’t have a pressure gauge, so I kept the air going until the tires turned hard. I’d filled bicycle tires this way for years.
We glided away from the station, leaving the codgers in our dust, our bikes suddenly zippy over the pavement. We glided down the tree-lined streets toward the park and past it, one block after another, weaving back and forth between the curbs, putting distance between ourselves and home. If all of summer was to be compressed into today, I didn’t want to miss even a second of it. After a month in Ireland’s pullulating greenery, its dense ferns and mosses and lichens, the grasses lining the highway so long they brushed against the windshield as we drove past, I felt intensely aware of the rest of the color spectrum, all the glories and heartaches of the impending autumn: leaves crackling orange as though about to burst into flame, the sapphire inflatable pool draining into the street. Winter in Wisconsin comes like an atonement, swift and severe. We’d see snow on the ground by Halloween, burying every lawn until April.
We were more than two miles from home when I heard what sounded like a gunshot. The bang was so loud it nearly knocked me from my bike. I skidded to a stop and began scanning the lawns for a body. Instead I found Hayden sinking into pools of quaggy rubber. His tires had blown out.
Though not yet schooled in the physics of tire inflation and air pressure, Hayden understood the basics of cause and effect. I’d inflated his bike tires at the service station; a few minutes later, his tires had exploded. Ergo: it was all my fault. His face bore the telltale look of betrayal—the pouty bottom lip, the eyes darting between my face and his ruined wheels. He intended to make sure I knew that he knew who was to blame for blowing up his bike. I told Galen to ride home and tell his mom what had happened, then slung the Murray over my shoulder and began the long, penitent walk home. I offered Hayden my hand as we crossed the busy street, but he refused.
That afternoon, in a stroke of luck, I found a kid’s mountain bike on Craigslist for only thirty bucks. Essentially another hand-me-down, except that this one had shiftable gears and hand brakes and, of supreme importance to a six-year-old, a kickstand. I lifted the bike from the hatchback and held it aloft for a moment so Hayden could revel in its secondhand splendor. I set it on the driveway with a ceremonial flourish. Welcome to the big time, kid. I’m sure I said something about the importance of wearing his helmet and staying on the sidewalk, but Hayden wasn’t listening. He settled himself onto the seat and pushed off, a little wobbly at first but not wobbly enough to put his foot down. A few cranks and he had it. He raced toward the bottom of the driveway, turned the corner, and raced down the block. I didn’t know if I was forgiven yet, but it felt close.
The attraction between a boy and his bike, to echo William Maxwell, can be taken for granted. Early the next morning, I felt a moist hand touch my cheek. When I opened my eyes, the light through the window was gray, and I could see only the shadow of a kid standing above me. The clock on the nightstand said 5:47. “Dad,” Hayden whispered. “I want to ride my bike.”
“It’s not even six yet.”
He leaned closer, his breath hot and ghastly. “Can I ride at six?”
“Let me sleep,” I said, rolling over. “You can ride later.”
“Later when?”
“After church,” I said, begrudgingly starting to wake up. I reached for my glasses.
“Ugh. Church.” He bared his baby teeth. “Why do we even have to go to church?”
I blinked in the wan half-light. I didn’t have an answer. I wasn’t, to be honest, particularly eager to go myself, even though I’d been a churchgoer, regularly if not continuously, for most of my life.
I was Catholic, baptized and catechized, until I was twelve, when my parents divorced. Religion had never been a point of contention between my mother and father, but when their marriage began to falter, it had no power to hold them together. In fact, some might say it hastened and intensified their disunion, since my dad met my stepmother during that time. He converted to her evangelicalism while my mother, whose Catholic foothold had been tenuous at best, became nothing. Yet eight months after the divorce was finalized and barely three months after my dad himself had remarried, a Methodist minister joined my mom and stepdad in matrimony. We attended the minister’s church for years afterward, most often when my stepdad’s son and daughter flew into town from Dallas. My mom hoped the six of us lined up in the pew in our blazers and hot-rolled hair would cut the image for all to see of an intact family unblemished by divorce.
When I visited my father and stepmom, the audience was far clearer. The money people dropped in the offertory baskets paid my stepmother’s salary. My dad, Devin, Stacie, and I sat in the front pew alongside the other pastoral families; after the service, we kids lingered on the plaza between the sanctuary and the fellowship hall while my father and stepmother kibitzed with the deacons and congregants. The summer I turned fifteen, my stepmother presented me with a Bible, my name embossed in gold foil on the cover, and my dad took me to a jewelry store to pick out a silver cross to wear around my neck, similar to the gold cross he wore around his own.
I resisted their pious overtures at first, but a few weeks into my sophomore year of high school, my closest friend, his brother, and their father were killed in a home invasion. Decades later, the crime remains unsolved.
In the immediate aftermath of the murders, my father and stepmother’s effusive and demonstrative faith came to feel like a life raft in a tempest. I reached for it and clung to it, and the next June, sitting beside a bonfire at Crescent Bay Beach, I used the words my stepmom had taught me and, as the ritual goes, asked Jesus into my heart. Almost immediately, I was driven into a world that revolved entirely around going to church. No longer confined to an hour-long Sunday morning gathering, some sort of church activity became the touchstone of every day of the week. Bible studies met on Monday and Thursday evenings, fellowship was on Tuesdays, Dad and my stepmom attended Bible Study Fellowship, part of a national organization larger than our one church, on Wednesdays. Even Saturday-morning surf sessions began with a prayer on the beach, our boards staked upright in the sand, and ended with a scripture devotional over eggs at Denny’s. I was so young, my initiation so swift and powerful, that several years would pass before I’d think to question it.
My dad and stepmom’s church wasn’t Pentecostal in the contemporary sense of the term. Services didn’t involve spasmodic shaking or the casting out of demons or invoking the Holy Spirit in the language of angels, but it did skirt the fringes of that ecstatic realm. More importantly, the idea of Pentecost—that after Christ’s ascension the Spirit of God descended to earth to abide in the Apostles, and that the Holy Spirit dwells in the heart of every true believer—was paramount. The enduring, ineradicable presence of the Holy Spirit was the message. Those mysteriously flaming words I uttered on the beach didn’t merely reenact the moment of Pentecost; they directly brought forth God’s spirit, as if unlocking the vault encasing the soul. Evangelicals are more restrained than Pentecostals, but not by much. For years I stood among the faithful, in some cases, thousands at a time, men and women singing with their eyes clamped shut and their hands in the air as if to gather in the spirit as it rained down from the rafters. I could never overcome my own self-consciousness enough to sing or pray this way, to allow myself to enter into their euphoria, so I almost never tried.
I’d been quietly edging away from the evangelicals long before I met Katherine, but it was only after we were together that I found the courage to face the exile that came with leaving the faith: the lost friendships, the pleading e-mails from people I hadn’t spoken to in years, the sadness in my stepmother’s eyes. Once all that was behind me, I realized I could do more than declare myself no longer an evangelical; I could give up the entire hocus-pocus of religion altogether. I could proclaim, like Nietzsche, that God was dead, or like Marx, that he’d never been. But in my most private moments, I still believed in a grand intelligence at the center of the universe, an enduring conviction that my friend’s murder would not remain forever unaccounted for, and an abiding conviction that I was part of something larger than myself. Whatever change had occurred in me that summer night on the beach when I was fifteen had been real, even if I no longer trusted the vocabulary used to describe it. The bathwater had been drained, but at the bottom of the tub remained the baby, pink and nascent and demanding to be held.
To believe in God is to believe in a story about God. Regardless of the faith or even the lack of one, belief is an assent to an account, whether mythological or empirical, of how we got here, how we should live, and where we might go next. Belief in a god who espouses only one’s individual tastes and values is belief in a small story, no larger than oneself. I continued to drag the boys to church on Sundays because I believed in the big story, the hoary and conflicted one—powerful enough to reorient Western civilization’s accounting of time and the unfortunate driving justification behind centuries of war and oppression, a litany of atrocities too numerous to count, but also, contradictorily, a story of mercy and charity and hope. It would have been dishonest for me to claim only the good parts of Christianity without also acknowledging the bad. Or to try to escape the pitfalls of the faith that, for better and worse, had defined my understanding of the divine, by taking up with another story, a different faith.
Katherine and I were married and the boys were baptized in Episcopalian parishes. When they grew old enough for Sunday school, we moved across the river to Congregationalists, far to the left of the evangelicals yet less liturgically formal than the Episcopalians. We weren’t as involved as I’d been during my teens, but we were still involved. I took a turn reading the scriptures during the service, and we helped teach Sunday school. Galen sang in the youth choir and performed in the spring pageant. We baked lasagnas for potlucks and ladled soup to the homeless who slept in the fellowship hall during the coldest months of the year.
Yet for all the hours I spent inside churches, I couldn’t recall a single Sunday, as a Catholic, an evangelical, or a mainline liberal Protestant, when I actually looked forward to it. Once uncomfortable among the jubilations of the evangelicals, I now found myself restless, struggling to concentrate, staring at my watch. Part of the problem was that church rarely offered much in the way of solemn reflection; a Sunday service was most often the conclusion to a morning of screaming for the boys to hurry up in the shower, a cup of coffee swigged at the kitchen sink as we were running out the door, a Super Mario Kart race across town to make it inside before the bells started ringing. By the time we squeezed ourselves into the pews, I was harried and exhausted, and I spent the service waiting for it to end.
Even before the boys came along, church rarely, if ever, yielded the sense of wonder or joy that is the hallmark of a spiritual experience, what theologian Rudolph Otto termed “the numinous” and Christians associate with the presence of the Holy Spirit. Most of my communions with the divine occurred away from church buildings, often away from buildings altogether: swimming in the ocean or hiking the fern trail around Rock Island State Park. Or my favorite: the late-night, profanity-infused walk Katherine and the boys and I took through central Galway after we missed our bus and had to two-foot it back to our hostel. It even happened once or twice while driving in the car. But never in church. Going to church was an obligation, that which I did not because I wanted to but because I felt I should, which predictably led to feeling, well, bored. When I looked over at the boys beside me that Sunday morning, drawing in the bulletin or fiddling with the buttons on my wristwatch, I saw they were bored, too. We were all biding our time.
In the liturgical calendar, the Easter Season spans the fifty days between Easter Sunday and the Day of Pentecost. After Pentecost comes Ordinary Time, which occurs in two cycles: from May to the start of Advent in December, and again from Christmas to the beginning of Lent. Thirty-three weeks of the year happen during Ordinary Time—a stretch similar in its divisions and appropriations to the academic calendar. My life, like every parent’s, was bound to the school calendar; it so happened that my job was bound to it as well. Over time I came to think of the summer, the time between school years, as another kind of Easter Season, a period of resurrection and wonder when striving gives way to being, when the flora and fauna burst forth and the lakes glimmer and the sun floats in the sky deep into the night. Such were the weeks when we rejoiced and were glad. Katherine weeded the garden in a tank top, and the boys moved through the back door without shoes or shirts. This Easter ended not with Pentecost but with Labor Day, after which we returned to school, the boys to their classes and I to mine, the recommencement of homework and sports and the color-coded schedule hanging on the refrigerator. All the obligations of Ordinary Time.
The temptation to skip church was sometimes so great that on many Sundays I could barely resist it. On many occasions, I didn’t, and opted instead for a second cup of coffee, an old movie, a long phone conversation with an old friend. If I could only give up believing, I often thought, I could quit churchgoing altogether and reclaim my Sundays for myself. We could be like one of those families in a TV commercial that hangs out all morning in a big white raft of a bed, the sheets and blankets pristine despite the coffee mugs on the nightstands and the dog curled up at the foot of the mattress. We’d yawn toward brunch around eleven, maybe take a leisurely stroll through an apple orchard while holding hands. But despite the nasty mess we’d make of that bed, my faith no longer belonged to me alone. As I watched the boys exit the sanctuary for Sunday school, I could only hope their time there, despite its inconveniences and discomforts and boredoms, would one day prove meaningful, even if they chose to believe in something altogether different. Even nothing at all.
Hayden jumped out of the car before I pulled into the garage. “Careful!” Katherine shouted, but he was already on his bike, without his helmet, still in his khakis and brogans. “Come inside and change your clothes,” I said.
“In a minute,” he shouted over his shoulder.
“I don’t want you to ruin your pants.”
“I won’t,” he said, though the warning itself distracted him and he nearly fell over. He had to put his foot down to avoid eating the pavement.
I let him ride while I made lunch. I set his sandwich on the table, opened the back door, and called for him to come in. “Hand it to me when I ride by,” he said.
“How about you come inside to eat, and then we’ll all go for a ride together?”
Usually a finicky eater, given to horsing around the kitchen during meals, Hayden sat down to his plate like a bomb expert before a ticking fuse. The sandwich disappeared in less than a minute, and his chips and apple were dispatched shortly thereafter. Five minutes after stepping inside the house, his plate was in the sink, he’d changed into his shorts, and he was standing on the driveway hollering, “Come on! Come on!”
“If we could harness this hurry-up,” Katherine said, tying her hair back into a ponytail, “school mornings would be much easier.”
“It’s a new year,” I said.
We rode past the post office and performing arts center, the appliance repair shop, our local congressional office until we reached the path that followed the river. The maples and oaks forking over the path were more golden than the day before and the leaves beneath our tires sounded like paper crinkling. The path crossed the railroad tracks and passed beneath our church, which sat atop a bluff, the sanctuary windows visible above the tree line. Silhouettes moved inside, a postservice meeting of some sort. I felt relieved to be on our side of the glass. I looked away from the church, toward the river, avocado green and passing beneath the trusses of a rusted railroad bridge, the college buildings across the water along the opposite bank. I glanced over at Hayden as he leaned forward on his bike and watched the change move across his face. He took in his surroundings with an awareness I’m still working to name. Numinous is too academic; Pentecost is the word I want to use—that holy, rapturous sense of wonder—but the word’s baggage makes it difficult to wield. Whatever name it goes by, Hayden seemed to glimpse, however briefly, his place among the hidden structures of the universe, and when he looked back at me I felt we shared an understanding, perhaps even the Big Understanding I’ve been grappling toward all my life. I wanted to tell him, That’s God you’re feeling, or at least the feeling I’ve always connected to God’s echo moving through me. But I didn’t want to name it for him. I wanted him to feel it first, to name it for himself.
The trail dropped fast and sharp through the trees, a hairpin turn at the bottom that followed the river’s bend. Lose control at the wrong time and you’ll end up in the drink. I could smell the algae blooming in the river, the leaves turning to broth. Galen bombed the hill like an old pro, followed by Hayden, his elbows out and his head crouched low over the handlebars, hollering the whole way down. Hayden zipped around the bend and out of sight. I listened for a crash, a splash, metal scraping over concrete. When I didn’t hear anything, I started after them, confident I’d find them on the other side.