Adrift
The crowd swelled around me, and I felt like a salmon swimming upstream. I drew their attention, their gazes lingering. I stared down at the sidewalk to hide my face. They parted around me, forming a bubble against those who didn’t dare draw near; New York certainly imbues its inhabitants with an inclination to keep to oneself, especially when the stranger is openly sobbing in the streets.
The throngs of people weren’t helping the feeling of suffocation closing in on me, even with the wide berth they were affording me. I desperately wanted to escape them—to be elsewhere, to escape my circumstances—but I was a ways from home, and my reality was inescapable. I settled for taking a seat on the steps of a nearby building to take a moment and compose myself.
People were openly staring, now. I disregarded them. I relinquished my efforts to restrain my emotions, and the tears flowed.
Eventually, I looked up, and through misty eyes, I saw a man watching me. He was standing still, letting the crowd flow around him, and unlike the others, his gaze didn’t waver when I made eye contact. Instead, he began to approach.
He had a peculiar style of dress. He was in all black and wearing a jacket despite the heat. He had a pair of cheap sunglasses and a trilby at a slight angle atop his bald head.
As he drew closer, I noticed that he surprisingly wore a clerical collar around his neck. At that, I sputtered a humorless sound of bemusement at the irony of his being here.
His face was deeply lined with wrinkles and folds, but he didn’t appear terribly old—merely weathered. He sat beside me on the steps and removed his sunglasses.
“Are you alright?” the man asked softly. I had to give him some credit for being the only one to stop and offer me any sympathy.
My voice caught in my throat, and I failed to muster a lie or to dismiss his concern. In response, he simply laid his hand on my shoulder and gave it a gentle rub while he glared at the passersby who gawked at the peculiar pair to spur them along.
I took a moment before I hoarsely answered, “My father. I just watched him die in a hospital bed.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said simply.
“He was a religious man, too, you know,” I said as I gestured vaguely at his collar. “Went to church every Sunday. Always volunteered. Donated to charity. Kindest man I’d ever met.”
The priest brought his hand down and clasped them between his knees. He stared off into the middle of the street, lost in thought.
“Brain cancer,” I finally spoke when he didn’t say anything. “By the time we caught it, it was already too late. We prayed for his recovery every morning and every night, and look at how he ended up. A life of piety cut short.”
My words were stained with emotion, a bitterness creeping past the sorrow in my voice. I wasn’t sure why I was telling him so much, or why I was foisting my anger on him, a kind priest who offered his sympathy. I had grown up my whole life talking to priests and trusting priests, so it felt comfortable—even if he didn’t look like any priest I had ever seen before. On a deeper level, I supposed I needed to vent and saw his position as a religious figure as an affront to my father’s injustice.
“Why?” I blurted. “How? How could a benevolent god let my father die?”
Finally, he straightened himself, rousing himself from his reverie and looked me in the eyes.
“Because he doesn’t care about us,” the priest said at last.
I blinked.
“What?”
“Your father’s death is evidence of that,” he said. His tone was gentle, but his words stung. I blinked back a new wave of tears that threatened to pour forth.
“I don’t understand. You think God doesn’t care?”
“People have debated for centuries over why an omnipotent god allows evil into this world.” he said slowly. “But have you looked at the world? If God exists, then surely he doesn’t care.”
His hands were white knuckled, a furrow creasing his brow.
He continued, “Nature is cruel. Have you heard of the ichneumon wasps? They paralyze their prey with their stingers and lay eggs beneath their skin so that their larva can eat the host alive from the inside. They’re so needlessly cruel, they even made Darwin question his own faith. Really, how could a benevolent god allow that?”
I turned over his words in my mind. They caught me off guard, especially from the mouth of someone wearing a clerical collar. I wondered if it was a fake.
“Evolution doesn’t care,” he said, shrugging. “It’s a system of death and chaos. Every day, millions upon millions of animals suffer completely outside the realm of human experience—dying of starvation, predators, you name it. What purpose do they serve if this world was made for us, and we’re really God’s children?”
“So you’re advocating for atheism,” I cut in.
He considered for a moment. “No, I’m saying that if any god indeed does exist, it’s not the sort of god that would concern itself with trivialities like humanity, nor would it be one that we would want to worship.”
“Trivialities? Life is special,” I argued. “Human even more so. We are intelligent creatures able to enjoy and wonder at his creation.”
“We live in a mind-numbingly massive universe. What conceivable reason would God have to create so much empty space, or so many planets we will never be able to visit? In every respect, Earth is perfectly average: an ordinary planet in an ordinary galaxy among billions. The development of life on its surface was pure chance.”
I tried to formulate an argument to defend the ideology I was raised with—one I grew my whole self around—but despite my outright rejection of his words, there was some merit to them that wormed itself into my mind, sowing doubt.
I watched as people walked along the sidewalk in front of us, busying themselves with their own lives. A cloud passed overhead, briefly shrouding us in darkness before it passed on.
My tears had stopped, but there remained an emptiness within me, ravaged by the injustice of my father’s death, and the conversation with the man had only made the hole widen.
“So then life is meaningless,” I said flatly. “Existence is an accident, and one day we’ll die, and that will be it, hm?”
“Yes and no. I take issue with the first part of your statement.” He turned to face me, and I noticed the wrinkles in his forehead had smoothed, and there were the beginnings of a smile playing at the sides of his mouth. “Life isn’t meaningless; it has whatever meaning we give it. The fact that there’s no god to create some fundamental principles of the universe to follow just means that we have the freedom to create our own. If this life is all we have, then the only meaningful point of life is life itself. Enjoy it.”
“Are you even a real priest?” I asked bluntly.
“I am.”
“Even when you don’t believe that there’s a god worth worshiping?”
“I used to have faith. It’s why I started down this path at all. I had a moment like you, though. I suppose it was disillusionment. It opened my eyes.”
His stare returned to the middle of the street, lost in thought.
“Why do you stick with it?” I tried to be as anodyne as possible, but his existence confused me. A walking contradiction.
“Because I still want to help people. This job attracts a lot of people in need of support, and I can offer it,” he said.
“Not going to lie,” I said bitterly, “I don’t feel particularly supported right now. My father just died, and your only advice is, oh, it’s meaningless anyway.”
“Not meaningless,” he corrected. “It has meaning to you. All I’m saying is it gets easier when you stop feeling betrayed. You’re the victim of unfortunate circumstance, nothing more.”
He stood, returning his sunglasses to his face.
“Don’t cast blame. Don’t ask why. Just move forward,” the priest said, and he continued down the street, disappearing into the throngs of people.
I sat there for a while, mulling over everything he had said. Eventually, the sun set, and the crowds thinned as everyone returned home from work for dinner. At last, I heaved myself to my feet and trudged home.