Chasm: Thoughts on Christianity from the Baja (A Reflection featuring Newsboys)

Chasm

George

It's terrible when only the fakers can recognize the truth. Perhaps it is the fact that we become so cynical that we just assume everyone else is a masked cynic like ourselves. Either that, or they're the most ignorant of sorts, the kind that couldn't tell the difference between a bone and a biscuit if their lives depended on it. There are a few true believers out there, don't get me wrong. But they're so few and far between that only the fakers can recognize them. The ignoramuses just trust everyone blindly like a dead sheep.

Pete, he's one of the rarities. The few of the true, I call him. And what's great about the truth of him is that he doesn't care that I'm a faker. He can spot the fakers as well as the rest of us, but there's something in the game that keeps him playing. I don't share in that belief, but I can respect it. I told him this last night, when we were laying side-by-side in our sleeping bags looking up at the stars lighting up the Baja desert. We might not agree on how they got there, but we'd be a pair of idiots if we didn't think those stars were beautifully amazing.

I know he wants me to come back, pick up the game where I left off. But he's not pushy about it like the others are. They come up to me, waving the rules in their clenched fist, slamming my intellectual decision to quit as if it were a matter of mere hatred. They're very arrogant about their superiority. I find it laughable. But Pete, Pete's not like that. When I first told him that I didn't want to play anymore, that I thought the game was rather juvenile and uneducated, he didn't react at all as the others had. He listened. He still listens. And maybe that's why we still take the time to pause out here under the stars instead of battling anonymously on computer screens, as the players and the fakers tend to do.

Because, behind a screen, a faker can be honest. Or a faker can be a faker. The internet is populated almost exclusively by fakers, I think. Only half of them are brave enough to come out of their shells. They laud me because I've been brave enough to show my face. The fakers do. The players fight me, and I have no choice but to fight back. I don't want to. But I feel it's my duty to free them from their own shells. Or ignorance. If they're one of the rare ones, they actually respect my opinion on the game.

Peter's the only one I've met so far.

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Peter

Sometimes I wonder what he thinks of me. George. We've gotten to the point where we don't talk about it much. That comment about the stars was so out of the blue, I wasn't sure what to say. I mean, I had a thousand answers swimming in my head, but none of them would be any good. We'd been down this road a lot in the past five years, ever since he told me that this whole "believing" thing wasn't working out for him.

He told me once that he thinks I'm the only truth out there. As if this world is full of cardboard standees and we're the only two living, breathing souls out here. It's a very odd way of thinking, but as I've tried to understand it, I've come to figure out it's truer than I ever expected. And I have to agree that he's one of the few honest human beings I've ever met.

What's odd is that he makes a better believer than 95% of the actual believers. There's this curiosity about him – he's always trying to discover something new, something truer, something that will challenge his mind. He doesn't take the world at face value. And while that can be quite a cynical thing to do – and he does border on cynical at times – he knows better than to become a robot of the system. We've both seen what ugly things can happen to the robots of the system. In some ways I consider him lucky. He caught on to the manipulation of the liars light years before I did, and he got the heck out of Dodge rather than play their game. And that's something I respect in him.

I still believe that there was truth in the tales we were all spun. I don't think the others should have spun the tales as they did, so that the truth was tied directly to their game. It's taken a long time to untangle everything, and the closer I feel to finishing the job, the more knots I see ahead of me.

The difference with Georgie is that he saw the knots and thought it too much of a bother to disentangle the truth. All he could see in them was the corruption. And, to be honest, that's most of what I saw, too, when I finally did catch on. But I must've seen a glimmer of truth in there, because I've set to work untangling the lies, while he went to explore the twining of straighter ropes.

We've both broken the system, and there's this mutual camaraderie within that, even if we're standing on opposite ends of the camp. We're not too far that we can't meet up every so often and race motorbikes across the American outback, or split some immense monstrosity of a burger at a tourist-trap restaurant of Route 66. We can still be friends and make beautiful memories, and our differences, though vast, don't hang over us like the impending rain.

A lot of outsiders don't understand this, they think our differences would be too great, our divide too wide to bridge. But if you're willing to travel the whole length of the earth, you'll eventually be on the other side of that canyon. It takes guts and perseverance and a willingness to embark into the unknown, but it can be done.

What I've found is that there are few that are willing to travel that far. They'd just rather yell till their larynxes burst and, as their lifeblood poured out with their words, hope that all that yelling and screaming somehow made it across the chasm instead of becoming the inevitable echo that both sides knew it would be.

***********************************************************************************************Anonymacy

hi everyone! It's been such a long time since I posted something I wrote. If you're a Newsboys fan (and I expect you are if you're reading this), you probably know about George Perdikis. If not, he's a former member of the band who came out as an atheist in early 2015. I was intrigued by his journey away from faith, and as I read various interviews he did in the aftermath of the reveal, I made a few surprising connections. 

See, in 2012 or 2013, George played in Peter's backing band at Easterfest - the Creation/Lifest/KingdomBound/etc. of Australia. George was definitely an atheist at that point, but he and Peter must have still been great friends for him to play a show at an entire festival that was completely against his beliefs. The cover photo is actually from that week. 

Then in early 2016 I stumbled on a new interview from George, and in it he mentioned... Well, he's better at his words than I am. And these are the words that inspired this story.

"Well, Peter and I, we're still buddies. We're probably closer now than we've ever been. He knows exactly who I am and what I believe. He knows my heart. He thinks I'm more "Christian" than most Christians. He doesn't care. I've seen his views change as well. We talk a lot. We're going on a motorbike trip in about a month's time. We're gonna be camping out for a couple of weeks and we'll be having a lot of conversations under the stars. He's gonna be telling me where he stands in his beliefs, and he knows exactly where I stand. He knows he doesn't have the power to change my mind. [Laughs.] The power's within. I get to think for myself. I'm not going to give that power away to anyone. But I'm happy to hear your opinions and your viewpoints. We may not agree on them, but I'm happy to hear them. Feel free to express yourself anyway you want. Underneath that, we're both humans, and we both love each other. We're brothers."

excerpt from interview with Andrew J. Rausch, available at https://secularbynature.wordpress.com/2016/04/16/an-interview-with-former-newsboys-guitarist-george-perdikis/ (I definitely recommend reading the whole thing. It's an interesting view into his perspective.)

at the time all of this was happening, I was going through my own crisis of faith, and I could relate (and still do relate) with both of these thought processes. This story is actually about the battle in my own heart, the cynic played by George and the believer played by Peter. But it could just as easily be them, for real. Or you.

I hope this means something to someone that reads it, but if not, it was at least cathartic for me to write.