Prayer (4 page)

I
n most churches I could have dozed through the Sunday-morning service and no one would have noticed. But Lakewood was an interactive sort of church, and the service was more like a Las Vegas show. It was loud and demanded lots of audience participation, singing or just bouncing with the joy of Jesus. When we’d first started going there, I liked that. But not lately. Personally, I couldn’t have felt less like bouncing if my feet had been nailed to the floor.

By contrast, Ruth was in a state of ecstasy. Her eyes were closed, a beatific smile illuminated her face, and her hands were raised in the air as if she were hoping to catch a few beams of God’s heavenly grace. She was putting her whole being into singing along with the choir and the twenty-piece rock orchestra—aka the Lakewood Church Worship Team—not to mention the huge and rapturous congregation that was also involved in this deafening act of modern worship. The words to all of the Lakewood worship songs—no one called them hymns, because you can’t sell hymns on a ten-dollar CD in the church shop—were streaming onto a giant screen above our heads, but Ruth hardly needed them. She knew the words the way I know a meaningful Miranda warning.

Of course, Ruth was hardly alone in her ecstasy. Near the front of the church, and just a couple of rows behind the pastor and the Barbie with a Bible who was his Alabama rose of a wife, it seemed that everyone was more than a little touched with the Holy Spirit. People were clapping their hands and touching their hearts and punching the air and shouting “Hallelujah!” as if they’d just won the Texas state lottery or sent a third man named Bush to the White House.

Everyone except me, that is. I sat down whenever I felt I could get away with it; and when I was standing, I was smiling a shit-eating grin every time one of my proclaiming neighbors met my shifty eyes. But it was Ruth’s eyes I most wanted to avoid. I sat down and bowed my head and hoped it might be mistaken for prayer.

Feeling an elbow dug in my side, I opened my eyes with a start and met Ruth’s penetrating stare; and satisfied that she now had my attention, she nodded at my crossed leg where the Velcro ankle holster carrying my baby Glock 26 was now fully exposed.

I shrugged sheepishly and placed my feet on the floor so the Glock was no longer in sight, but it was too late; Ruth was shaking her head. I had been judged and found wanting. Especially so on top of the even more inexcusable offense I had given the previous evening. While I was watching the Celtics on TV, Ruth had vacuumed my study and discovered my secret store of carefully arranged but forbidden books. Not a collection of choice pornography, but a small library of “new atheist” authors who argued that religion should not simply be tolerated, but actively exposed as a fraud by rational argument—guys such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Houston’s very own iconoclast, Philip Osborne. Ruth regarded these writers as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

“Honey,” she said, brandishing a copy of
God Is Not Great,
which I thought the best of all my atheist-porn books, “I can’t believe you’re reading this. I thought ours was a Christian home.”

“Ruth, it is. I see the tithe that leaves my bank account for Lakewood Church every month.”

“Not if you’re reading books by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.”

“Do you really think that reading a book by Christopher Hitchens makes you an atheist? Reading the Bible doesn’t make you a Christian. There are plenty of atheists who read the Bible.”

Reluctantly, I turned the sound off on the game to give her my full attention, which I didn’t want to do as the Boston Celtics were my team, but there was now no way of avoiding this discussion. Not any longer. We both knew it was long overdue.

Ruth sighed. “And what if Danny asks you about atheism? And about Charles Darwin. What are you going to tell him?”

“You want to tell him that creationism provides all the answers, then that’s fine by me, that’s exactly what we’ll tell him. I think a kid needs religion when he’s growing up. I mean, I know I did.”

“And when you’re an adult, what? You put away childish things?”

“Look, what I believe is of no real importance here compared with what I am prepared to pay lip service to, for the sake of family harmony.”

“What if I wasn’t here? If I had a car accident and I wasn’t around anymore. What would happen then?”

“In a situation like that, who can say how anyone will react?”

“Is this what you’re telling me?”

“I was watching TV, remember? You’re the one who set this crazy debate into motion.”

“You think it’s crazy to talk about the moral welfare and education of our son?”

“It seems to me we’re having a fight that neither of us can win. After all, you can no more prove the existence of God than I can prove he doesn’t.”

For a moment Ruth looked as if she were trying to swallow something indigestible, and I felt sorry for her because I could see the dilemma she had—that we both had. Whereas before we had loved each other because of what we had in common, it was beginning to look as if we were going to have to love each other in spite of our differences. My own parents had managed this very well. Maybe that’s why I felt that this present difficulty was not at all insurmountable.

Ruth tossed Hitchens’s book onto the La-Z-Boy and went out of the TV room without another word. This suited me fine as the Boston Celtics were now back in front.

But then, right after Sunday-morning service, she started it all up again.

“Well, that was embarrassing,” she said.

“Sorry.”

“Actually, it wasn’t the gun I was referring to,” she said. “No, you looked like you were a million miles away. That’s what I’m talking about. We used to worship like a family, and I just had to look at you, Gil, to know that your heart was in it, too. But not anymore.”

She was right, of course. And I didn’t need to insult her intelligence by denying it. I sensed another argument was coming my way so it was fortunate Danny was already asleep. After 140 minutes of Lakewood, I could hardly blame him. I was looking forward to a Sunday-afternoon nap on a lounger at the Houstonian Club myself.

“Perhaps if we didn’t sit so close to the front, that might not be so obvious. I’d feel more comfortable if we sat at the back.”

“I like being close to the front,” she said. “It feels like I’m nearer to God.”

“I think God notices the cheap seats, too, don’t you?”

“Maybe we should speak to someone.”

“I don’t think holding hands with a Lakewood prayer partner is going to help, Ruth.”

“All right, then. Perhaps if we prayed together about this, Gil, just you and I. The way we used to pray.”

The last time Ruth and I prayed together had been when we were trying to have a child. Ruth’s idea, not mine. She’d suffered a miscarriage and took happy pills for a long time after that. She also experienced difficulty in becoming pregnant again, and she eventually thought the Lord might be of some assistance. This was what got us both going to Lakewood. We went to church and we prayed for another baby, although when I say we prayed for another baby we didn’t just do it in church, we prayed in bed, too. Whenever we made love, we would ask the Lord for his blessing, and there’s nothing quite as unerotic as that: the whole sex-prayer thing more or less killed our sex life. Having Jesus in bed with the two of us gave me a real problem and obliged me to take Viagra in secret, which is probably the only reason she got pregnant at all—but for Ruth, Danny was the miracle that proved God’s existence. Since then, we’ve been pretty regular at Lakewood. Which is more than I can say about our sex life.

“I’m certainly willing to give prayer a shot,” I said reluctantly.

Ruth sighed loudly. “What prompted you to read those books anyway?”

I shrugged and shook my head, although I knew perfectly well. I had started flirting with atheism more than a year ago, around the same time I had started an affair with a certain lovely Profiling Coordinator in Washington, D.C., where I had been given a temporary duty assignment. Ruth had chosen to remain behind with Danny. The Profiling Coordinator’s name was Nancy Graham, and she and I had met after a debate at Georgetown University—the subject of the debate was “There’s No Point in Praying,” and the two antagonists were the British journalist and antitheist Peter Ekman (for the motion) and the former archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Mocatta (against the motion). Ruth knew about the Profiling Coordinator because I had stupidly told her and, for that very same reason, I hardly wanted to bring up the subject of Washington and the TDA again.

Ruth never ever mentioned Nancy Graham. But I knew the affair had hurt her deeply, and instead of seeking out a divorce lawyer as another woman might have done, Ruth had taken refuge in her religious faith. The affair was over, and I was deeply sorry for what had happened, and Ruth said that she had forgiven me for it, but I knew that the pain of my having had an affair was never far from my wife’s thoughts.

You might think that Texans are violent. Not a bit of it. The high incidence of gun ownership gives people some useful pause for thought. Most Texans are friendly, well-adjusted folk, endlessly hospitable and always polite. By contrast, the Scots are preternaturally aggressive. Many would pick a fight with a brick wall, which happens more than you might think. Scotland is the most violent place I’ve ever been. There’s something in the air, perhaps, that makes Scotland one massive fight club. If gun ownership was as easy in Scotland as it is in Texas, the population would soon be decimated.

When my family left Scotland in 1990, the country was in one respect not much different from the Scotland of 1590 because it was divided by religion into two bellicose and bigoted camps—Protestant and Roman Catholic. In this ancient feud it always mattered more what you were than who you were and, at the sharp end of the divide, things were every bit as bitter as anything in Northern Ireland. But while religious hatred was as deep as in that other conflict, the violence in Scotland was usually limited to the fierce tribal rivalries that continue to exist between Scotland’s largest football teams—both of them based in Glasgow—Rangers and Celtic. At “Old Firm” matches between these two teams the strictly segregated fans now hurl insults at one another where once they hurled rocks and bottles. But God forbid that you should be a Rangers fan who finds himself astray in Celtic territory or vice versa; and in such circumstances murder is not uncommon. For many decades sectarian football violence has been Scotland’s dirty secret and few of the tourists visiting there ever have any idea of the horrors that lurk underneath my home country’s threadbare and bloody kilt. I exaggerate, of course, but only a little. Then again, I am completely and utterly biased. And now let me explain why.

My father, Robert, is an orthopedic surgeon and, until his retirement last year, was a professor of orthopedic surgery at Tufts Medical Center. Prior to this, he was a surgeon at Glasgow Royal Infirmary and perhaps the leading Scottish specialist in the field of sports injuries. In 1988, when I was twelve years old, my father—a fairly prominent Roman Catholic—treated a famous footballer named Peter Paisley for a chronic knee injury that threatened to end his career. Paisley, a Protestant, played for Rangers Football Club. Following several operations, Paisley returned to the team and helped Rangers win the Scottish Football League title for four years in a row; but not before my father had received death threats from aggrieved Celtic supporters, not to mention an explosive device that almost blew off his hand.

I didn’t find out about the bomb until we had left Scotland forever, but I remember coming out of our house one morning to find my father’s Jaguar covered in graffiti. Soon after that, my parents and I, and my three brothers and two sisters, went to live in Boston where my dad had wisely accepted the position at Tufts. He has never returned to Scotland and probably never will.

The move was something of a wrench for us all. And it was only later that I was able to see how being a Catholic had defined me in the eyes of my Scottish friends. Of course, none of this mattered in Boston, and my religion soon seemed less important as I learned to think of myself not as a Scot, or a Scottish-American, or even a Catholic, but as just an American; in the USA what seemed to matter more than where I was from or what religion I practiced was where in life I was going.

After we came to Boston, my father stopped being a Catholic altogether.

After graduating from Boston College and Harvard Law, I went to work as an intern with a firm of New York lawyers, DLB&B, but I was already coming to the conclusion that I was more interested in working in law enforcement than in becoming an attorney. Nine-eleven only underlined that. DLB&B’s offices were in the old WTC 7, which was badly damaged when the North Tower of the WTC collapsed; it caught fire and fell some six or seven hours later, by which time I was quite certain that I wanted to serve my country in some way. The following Monday I put in an application to join the FBI.

After Quantico, I had four years working in Counterterrorism in NYC. All we did was work to make America safe. I even learned to speak Arabic. I can speak the language reasonably well—although my Italian is better—but I found it hard to read and write, which is what the Bureau wanted most: agents who could read intelligence documents in the language, so that was that. The Bureau always figures it knows best where a man’s talents really lie. And in 2008 the Bureau sent me to Texas to work in Domestic Terrorism.