AFTER LUNCH, I went for a walk in the curious mix of upscale suburban streets and scenic marshland that the Haisches were situated amid. (They’d bought the house before the dot-com boom, and were among a scattering of ordinary people mixed in with the start-up millionaires who’d mostly taken over the area.) If I squinted hard through the midday sun, I could see distant office buildings where, of course, I pictured scores of computer geeks staring at their screens, typing code.
Thinking about how much the concept of solidity—the question of what was genuinely real and solid, and what was airy and fleeting—had figured in our morning talk, and about the fact that Bernie was, above all else, a guy who studied stars, got me to thinking on another kind of star, and the curious relationship I’d had with this kind, during my years working at Guideposts, an inspirational magazine with a largely Christian readership, founded by Norman Vincent Peale in 1949.
Say the word “star” to the average American, and he or she will most likely think not of the celestial but of the human kind—the celebrities which our country has long led the world in being obsessed with.
Living in New York City, as I had for fifteen years, including the nine I’d spent at the magazine, makes you aware of how eager people—at least people on the two coasts—are to be famous. It would sometimes seem to me like the city was composed of two distinct varieties of people: the famous, and those who wanted to be famous.
A few years into the nine I spent at Guideposts, a decision was made to begin to place stars on the cover, rather than the ordinary folk who, up to then, had usually been featured.
Intrigued by this new turn of events, I decided to make an effort to try and interest some genuine stars in the magazine and organize some interviews with them.
I did this in large part out of curiosity. Basically, it seemed to me that the real reason so many people craved stardom was because they felt it would confer on them an expanded sensation of existence—of being real. In a world like ours, where belief in God was so weak in comparison to what it had been in centuries past, I felt that fame, stardom, was a kind of substitute for the feeling of genuinely existing in God’s eyes that had been so much more easily had in the days when faith was stronger.
In times past, this feeling of being real, of having a genuine, lasting spiritual identity in addition to one’s passing physical one, was considered a gift that God conferred on humans by creating them. Now, however, especially in centers of secularism like New York, it seemed like this feeling was not available without the benefit of the media, the Internet, and all the other modern technological crutches that now existed for creating an instant, if fleeting, sense of lastingness and genuine importance in the cosmos.
I have a friend who is related to a very famous actor. She once asked him, shortly after he had become a household name, what this felt like. Was there a real feeling of satisfaction that came with it?
His response was fascinating. He told her that being famous didn’t really hit that inner target that we all imagine it will. And yet, he told her, the thing about fame was that once you have some, it becomes like a drug. Though it doesn’t really satisfy you, you want more.
Thanks to Guideposts’ new star drive, I felt like I had a chance to investigate this phenomenon at close hand.
It all turned out to be a lot easier than I’d thought. Before long, a few judicious phone calls and a pitch about the magazine’s large circulation got me hooked up for interviews with genuine, bona fide stars.
The first one was with George Foreman. With his days of boxing behind him, Foreman was now a licensed minister, and ran a church deep in the Fifth Ward of Houston, the same rough neighborhood that he’d grown up in. This made him a good fit for Guideposts, which focused on how faith could help surmount life’s challenges.
After an hour of driving deeper and deeper into what was clearly a very impoverished part of the city (each house I passed seemed to have a pit bull on a chain in the yard), I found Foreman’s church. Along with the youth center he’d built just down the road for local kids to work out in, the church stood like a strange oasis in the midst of all the low-income houses around it.
Foreman himself, whom I interviewed in his church, was easygoing and, as I’d figured, extremely likable. But what truly took me by surprise was the way I felt once the interview was done. Foreman’s presence was so imposing, he was so clearly a person of intense substance, that for the rest of that day and the day after, I was nagged by a strange, and unpleasant, sense of my own flimsiness. Despite Foreman’s charm and courtesy, the sheer density of his celebrity left me feeling like a little of my own core, my own sense of self, had been depleted.
The same phenomenon, mostly to a lesser extent, occurred with the other celebrities I tracked down and interviewed for the magazine. Whether I was hanging out for the afternoon with a jovial Billy Ray Cyrus (while a then very young Miley played about at our feet) or conducting a deeply surreal one-on-one interview with Dolly Parton in a big empty office at Dollywood, I would return from these celebrity sojourns with my spiritual batteries consistently, and inexplicably, depleted.
None of this was the stars’ fault. All the ones I interviewed while at Guideposts were uniformly polite, uniformly genial. There was just something about the simple fact of their fame that left me weak and mildly depressed for several days after meeting them.
After a year or so of this, I eased myself off the star beat and went back to interviewing the farmers, firemen, and housewives who were the magazine’s staple fare. But the memory of my year or so of consistent star exposure stayed with me. There was, I felt, something to be learned from it, though it took me some time to figure out what that something was.
We call stars “stars” because of a very, very old human idea; one that dates back as far as ancient Egypt. In a nutshell, this idea is that the stars in the sky above represent the souls of individuals who have navigated the field of life and ascended into a higher world. They now look down on us and encourage us as we struggle along through our earthly journey.
“We are stardust, we are golden,” sing Crosby, Stills & Nash in the opening scenes of the film Woodstock, as the young people with their blankets and their sleeping bags all stumble toward what, at the time, they imagine to be a new society, free of all the rules and hypocrisies of the one they grew up in. This image of stars as humans who have navigated the obstacle course of life and ascended to heaven is ingrained even in our flag, where, according to some scholars, the stripes symbolize the “horizontal” world of earthly life, while the stars in the blue of the flag’s corner represent not just the states of the new republic, but the souls of those who have left the horizontal world of earthly life behind for the blue sky of the heavens above.
Stardom is so ingrained in the American sensibility that you could say it is, in a way, our American religion. But the stardom we crave is not the cheap kind, not the fleeting, supermarket checkout kind, but something far grander. Deep within us, we have a vision of life as a kind of obstacle course which we must successfully navigate in order to gain entrance, at life’s end, to heaven above.
We want to be stars because we want to rise, like the stars do each evening, above the struggle and pain of life on earth, and find our place in the sky above as true and lasting heavenly beings. “Look at me!” the growing child says to his or her mother and father, and on some level, many of us spend the rest of our lives repeating versions of this same demand. Though the one we are really addressing, in this desperate bid for attention, is, to state things straight out, God. Because we live in a culture that makes it harder and harder to see ourselves as existing in the hands of a benevolent creator who made us for a reason and has hopes and dreams for us, we have become a nation, and to some extent a world, of attention addicts.
What does this have to do with science, with what Bernie and I had been discussing that morning?
Everything. For the chief reason we are no longer able to feel ourselves as genuinely existing in the eyes of a God who created us for an eternal life with Him is . . . science. Or rather, what is presented to us as science, but which is all too often mere opinion masquerading as science.
This all made me think of that other great American love—sports. Back in my days at Potomac, I was miserable at sports, and deeply resented all the hours I was made to spend running about chasing balls of various kinds, when I would much rather have been at home reading or watching TV. Yet of all those bleak, after-school afternoons playing football, or soccer, or capture the flag, or whatever pointless exercise was foisted on me, one day stands out in my memory.
During a game of football, the other side kicked the ball and it magically made its way through the air right into my arms. I prepared for it to bounce off my chest and hit the ground, as it usually did, but this time, improbably, I found myself holding it.
Here, for all intents and purposes, was a new situation. A game was going on, the ball was in play, and I had it.
For a second or two, I did what was expected of me. I clowned about, blithely ignoring the screamed pleas of my teammates to pass the ball to them.
But then, out of the blue, a strange new impulse took over. I decided to head for the end zone.
This was greeted with more groans from my teammates. The decent thing to do, after all, would have been to quickly toss the ball to one of the more talented members of the team, who might have had a chance of making it some ways down the field. But, fueled perhaps by the absolute certainty of my teammates that I wouldn’t get anywhere, I set myself to running toward the distant end zone.
Members of the opposing team charged toward me. I ducked one, then another, then another. As the remaining players headed toward me, I picked up speed and, momentarily jettisoning all my smart-aleck disdain for sport in all its forms, charged like crazy for the end zone.
I made it. And in that one moment, I got a taste of something to do with sports that I’d never picked up on before. Moving down the field has something to be said for it.
Now, thinking about all these far-flung ideas, I realized why I was thinking about them. Though Bernie and I had spent our time that morning talking about substance in the cosmic sense—that is, what substance is, and whether it actually even exists in the universe—in the background there lurked another question that we had not yet broached.
What did all this talk of substance have to do with the question of human substance—of the deep and desperate need that all of us have for the knowledge that we really and truly exist? That we are real in a more than passing, here-today-gone-tomorrow kind of way?
I suddenly had an idea of what Bernie might have been hinting at when, at the end of our talk, I’d asked him what was real and he’d told me we’d get to that. I was now anxious to do just that.