Coming Out ...

            Several days ago, I took a baby step toward outing myself as – no, that's not accurate – toward making it more widely known that I am ... an atheist. 

            Every few weeks a group of friends, mostly fellow playwrights, meets for breakfast in the coffee shop of a Best Western Hotel in Nyack.  We chit-chat, gossip, and we each, in turn, relate what's going on professionally and, sometimes, socially and familially. 

            The group, which I dubbed the "Breakfast Bunch," includes five or six playwrights, a couple of prose writers, and a painter.  Longtime friends are we. 

            A part of our informal get-togethers involves book swapping.  We bring with us books that we've read (or have no intention of reading), and give them away to each other.  It's a practice I initiated (not to mention founding the Breakfast Bunch to begin with some 15 years ago). 

            That morning, as I was bagging some books to take with me for giveaway, my eyes fell upon a copy of Christopher Hitchens's God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.  It's a book I'd read a couple of times for its intelligence and its razor-sharp satiric humor.  It gives elegant and persuasive voice to the conviction I've had most of my life – that there is no god or gods.  Since I possessed two copies of the Hitchens book (I must have picked up a duplicate at a library book sale or something), I decided to include one in my batch of books to go. 

            What did that augur?  Clearly, my friends could infer from my ownership of the book that I'd read it.  Further, it might be surmised that I am a non-believer.  Two of our group members are staunch Catholics.  How would they react? 

            I've never made any secret of my atheism.  Naturally, my wife knows.  Though raised as a Lutheran, she today professes some vague mystical pantheism which she has described but I've never understood.  Other than that, religion, or the lack of it, just never seems to come up. 

            I don't know what my parents or my brothers and their families know or do not know about my atheism.  Essentially, my family is Catholic in name.  I don't believe there are any regular churchgoers among us.  Religion seems to have little place in the Parra clan, except for baptisms, weddings, and funerals. 

            When I must attend a baptism, wedding, or funeral, or any other religiously encumbered life event, I usually situate myself off to the side or in the back of the church so that my unwillingness to mouth meaningless prayers – or to stand, kneel, sit, stand, kneel, sit, stand, kneel, sit – is not conspicuous.  I refuse to go through the motions; to do so is to tacitly endorse the absurd and insidious superstitions. 

            When I'm logistically unable to blend into the surroundings, I employ another tactic.  I unholster my smart phone and use it as a camera.  Moving around and taking pictures from all angles gives me something to occupy my mind, and camouflages my non-participation in the rites and rituals. 

            That morning at breakfast, pulling books out of my bag, each accompanied by a brief oral description, I eventually came to God is Not Great.  I held up the book for scrutiny.  It was clear that some of my friends knew of the book and its author.  Only one of the unfaltering Catholics was present that day (the spouse was traveling on business).  I said: "whether you're a believer or not, this is a book you ought to read."  No one took the book ... or the bait.  As I moved to return the book to the bag, one of the prose writers did ask to have a look at it.  I handed it to him, and he ended up taking it with him.  Out of my staunchly Catholic friend came nary a peep. 

            So my first – and rather meager and tentative – foray into public self-disclosure as a flaming atheist ended "not with a bang but a whimper."  Still – pardon my mixing allusions – "a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."