Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

by R. Eric Thomas

How many times in life do we receive the message, implicit or explicit, that what we’ve experienced or what we feel isn’t noteworthy or remarkable?

Eric Thomas is an intentionally racially neutral name, as my parents didn’t want others to be able to see my name on a job application or résumé and discriminate against me. It was a beautiful and sort of heartbreaking gift. And, as far as I can tell, it has helped me in my life. I’ve had a lot of job interviews with racists.

I hadn’t wanted to go home, because I felt like a liability, a story that came with a warning label. As I rode the train home with Jay, I realized that my parents had replaced the flurry of activity that surrounded Kathleen’s arrival with a hug for Jay and an invitation to get to work as an offering of normalcy. The scrapbooks had stayed put away and my mother had instructed everyone to just be cool. They were expending the same amount of energy not to put on a show. As if to say, “This is home and you’re welcome here as you are.” I think it’s important to note that that takes work: family doesn’t just happen; welcome isn’t a neutral state. We have to tend to these things.

Meg Ryan, like many of the teachers at Genesis Baptist School, seemed to have found herself standing in front of a dark multipurpose room full of kindergartners as a result of her lifelong devotion to Christ. Most of the staff at Genesis were also members of the affiliated church and found themselves employed as an act of service. We knew this because teachers were constantly going on sabbatical to work on mission trips and because we prayed before everything. I hadn’t been in any school before—save for a brief period in which my mother tried to homeschool me and we decided we were better as friends—so I just took it as natural that all instructors were kindly white people who didn’t dance and had read the Bible cover to cover and would sometimes get teary-eyed when talking about “the situation in Africa.” All that being said, it was clear to us and to the gym teacher that instructing young Christians on the finer points of physical activity was not one of her spiritual gifts. She also played the guitar in chapel. Maybe that was more her speed. The evidence was inconclusive.

After church, the pastor pulled me aside. “You have to understand that people need time to come around to some ideas, son.” I nodded. I said nothing. I was not his son. My father was the man who puzzled through questions with me for hours, whose house had open doors and open arms inside, and who welcomed the doubt that is necessary for true belief.

The thing is, the promise of church is community, salvation, and a relationship with God. If the gay music minister and the person with AIDS cannot be part of the church, where do they find God?

Easter is about salvation, and salvation is free and available to everyone. Yet so many churches put barriers around it. If our religions aren’t about the business of achieving justice in our time, in this world, for everyone, what are they doing?

I call my senator, a lot. Just to chat. I write letters and commentary to stake a claim for the things I believe in. I vote. I march. I tap-dance for justice. And, in the end, I know that we are not at war with our terrible leaders. Instead, we are fighting against nihilism itself. We are fighting to care. What makes you happy or sad or brings you joy or makes you feel anything at all—it matters.

We may very well be living in the montage at the opening of some climatological disaster flick. I’m the one idiot holding up a sign that reads “Stay hydrated!” as the sea levels rise on the beachfront property I just bought. No one is interested in humor during the apocalypse, but I don’t let that stop me. It’s all I have to offer in this scenario. Because I am not end-of-the-world material. Listen. Here’s my living will, okay? I have no desire to survive the apocalypse. The minute the cable goes out, I’m gone. If I can’t watch rebooted versions of television shows I used to love, what even is the point? What even?! I do not understand the people in disaster movies who want to survive so that they can rebuild society. That sounds terrible. So boring, and yet so much work. Haven’t these

Any time I start to wonder, Am I dystopian? I laugh and remember that I’ll be dead before dystopia really starts to take hold. I exist in flashbacks only. I’m that guy in the soot-covered photograph that the ragtag band of resistance fighters stare at fondly in the flickering light of the gasoline fire. “He was funny on the internet,” they say. When it all goes south, I want to be remembered, not relied on. —