Actually, it’s not the first time. In the summer of 2002, I got lost hiking in primitive backcountry in Canyonlands National Park and ran out of water on a typical 100-degree day. I did think I might have bought the farm, so to speak.
I ran through a “prayer” I would say at times the first year after I graduated from Lutheran seminary (no, I never entered the ministry), as I transitioned from some nebulous “religiosity” to at least a hard agnosticism. In this “prayer,” I called to Zeus, Allah, Yahweh, Buddha, Jesus, etc., in a rosary of world religions and mythologies.
But in Canyonlands, there was one big difference. At the end of saying this in the midst of 3 p.m. panic, I added the phrase “and myself” to the list. After doing that twice, I accepted that my own wits would be what saved me, or else the luck (in a non-mystical sense) of finding someone else hiking out there.
My wits remembered that some tinajas, or tanks, back down the trail a few miles, still had water in from the last rain of the monsoon. Already out of water, I paced my hiking, and hiking distances before hitting shelter, in the late afternoon heat. Obviously, I got there and drank my fill of water already teeming with tadpoles. I wound up having to spend a cold night on the canyon floor, but found my way out the next morning.
But, I actually have seriously faced death for the first time as an atheist. My father died May 7. And he was a an ultraconservative Lutheran pastor. He said he couldn’t read his devotional books the night before he died.
That may well be true – he had COPD from 55 years of smoking (See post immediately below, including a couple of philosophical observations there) and he may have been so oxygen-deprived as to be blurry-eyed.
Nonetheless, he knew I was an atheist and in fact had mailed me a book a month ago, called “I Don’t Have the Time to be an Atheist,” by Christian apologist Norman Geisler.
Was my dad getting his “pound of flesh” by asking me to read to him? Some people may consider that horrid, but other than not becoming a pastor myself after going to his alma mater undergrad and his alma mater seminary, our family had plenty of other dysfunctional water turning the grist wheels. Even if it was a genuine request on his part doesn’t rule out sidebar ulterior motives.
I felt sad for him, especially reading some of the more morbid, medieval-sounding prayers from an older Lutheran prayer and devotional book that was a confirmation gift to a cousin of his 60 years ago. The self-flagellation quotient was horrific.
“I am my father’s ghost, doomed for a time to stalk the night.”
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