Coming to Terms

I'm not an atheist.

When I went to the kitchen for a second cup of coffee this morning, I found a sink filled with spider plant and Christmas cactus. My wife, Barbara, had set them there to water. An African violet, blooming gorgeously all winter on the windowsill, was past prime but many bedraggled blossoms, dark and decadent, still clung to stems, and an orchid, next in line for a drink, drooped white, liquid petals on the counter nearby. Leaning against the sink, just beyond the steaming cup of coffee that I cradled in my hands, two upside-down wine glasses glinted in the morning light, and above them a formerly decapitated, but now repaired, clay bear modeled several years ago by my daughter, Alice, stood about an inch high, his head at a jaunty angle.

God, of course, was there too.

This is my watering hole, where I pause every morning. It is not always as composed and pretty as it is today, the last day of winter. Sometimes there are dishes here instead of plants and a storm in the window instead of a clear day. Once I found a line of ants snaking its way along the countertop and followed the thread of black back to its source—another weekend project. But every morning, or nearly every morning, I make my way here to grind beans and spill out old grounds and gaze into the woods. Invariably I feel the presence of God.

No, I'm not an atheist.

I'm not a heretic, either. It is hard to be one in our unorthodox world. In fact, I live in the north Georgia notch of the Bible Belt, the land of true believers, but most of my neighbors' views started as some heresy against a more conventional religion, so no one around here uses the word heretic. I'm not agnostic, either. Certainly not. I may be confused, but I'm not struggling with doubts. I am all but certain that the God most people worship doesn't exist, and, quite frankly, I don't worry about it very much. The burden of proof, I figure, falls to them. My Sunday spent at home and beginning, like the rest of my days, at God's windowsill bothers them more than it does me.

I'm not a skeptic. In fact, I'm easily seduced and enjoy suspending disbelief. When I read a novel, I think it is really happening, and I take comfort in the announcement that says "no animals were harmed in the making of this picture." Nor am I a nihilist. I smile more easily than I frown. I believe in belief. I love poetry—I love the poetry in poetry—and I get edgy when someone tries to reduce a poem to some sort of explanation, so I guess I can't be a materialist. Nor am I an infidel. I have faith, though I may not place it where others do, and as for being a Pyrrhonist—well, I just might be that, but who knows what it means or can remember how to spell it?

That is my via negativa, the solemn list of what I am not.

So what am I?

In Dakota: A Spiritual Geography Kathleen Norris says that the only way we can know what we are spiritually is to go home. Norris grew up in Hawaii and lived as a writer in New York City, but it wasn't until she returned to her family home in North Dakota that she found herself. She is skeptical of ersatz religious experience, especially the attempt to piece together a spiritual life out of bits and pieces from other religions—a recipe of Buddhism and Christianity, say, with a dash of Zoroastrianism—because that detaches the spirit from past and place, the best clue to what we are.

Going home gave her an answer. "I am," she writes, "a complete Protestant with a decidedly ecumenical bent...