Aside from the constant anxiety which beset me from all sides, the ride to boot camp was rather unremarkable. And I could recount in excruciating detail how the first couple days went, but to be honest nothing of worth happened in that period. Here is the synopsis: I was a whiny bitch who struggled to adapt to the first real adversity I experienced in life. So I will spare you the gory details, because I assume that nobody wants to read a story whose sole content consists in me saying how uncomfortable I am–myself least of all. You see, even I struggle to stomach how pathetic I am. No matter how much you cringe reading this account, please understand that I have it the worst. You at least get to observe me from some distance; in comparison, I have to observe myself. The sheer amount of self-pity and self-deprecation I recount through these writings twists my stomach into knots, and I often feel like crawling into a deep dark hole.
So, skipping forward to the events that are more or less relevant to the narrative at hand. On the third day of boot camp, while getting mercilessly soaked by a drill instructor’s hose, I came to a crystal-clear understanding of my own predicament–which is not to say my circumstance in boot camp, but rather the problem that had been hounding my entire life. You see, I have always been a miserable fellow (both then and now), and my cowardliness is in large part responsible for this. But at the same time my cowardliness has prevented me from doing anything it. Unyielding and incessant, life has slowly flayed me each moment of my every day; my own existence is a cruel and barbarous form of spiritual torture. It is as if God himself has chosen to pick on me. Thus logically I have always understood I should kill myself. But as I explained in the prior section, I have found myself too craven to do even that. Thus my predicament: I am hemmed in on all sides by the most excruciating pain, and I am too cowardly to do anything about it.
I am not quite sure how cognition of this problem never entered my mind until this point. It was as if I was a blind billiard ball bouncing back and forth between the walls, always following the natural law but never truly conscious of the underlying situation. But then all of the sudden I was born afresh with the eyes of a newborn child. I could suddenly discern and understand the eternal nature of my suffering, where hitherto I had merely been an unconscious victim to it. And thus as I was being sprayed down by that hose, I came to the realization that the only way out was through.
What I mean is I realized that the only way to escape my own existential nightmare of a existence was to somehow eliminate the basis of my own despair–namely, my cowardly nature. I had reached the realization that that was the only way to transcend my suffering, and therefore that I would have to strive for it whether it was impossible or not. Now at the time I truly did not believe it was possible, and my lack of belief prohibited me from finding my way to courage. As it stood, I lacked the courage to even attempt to find courage, and for the next four days I pondered this. Of course, even my dim awareness understood how the issue at hand was not intellectual, and thus my pondering did little but frustrate me to no end. Thinking of the problem simply was not a way to solve the problem. If you want to learn how to play the piano, you cannot just sit around thinking about how you will learn to play the piano. No, that would be quite foolish. If you want to find courage, you must begin building courage; you cannot accomplish such a feat through mere intellectual masturbation alone. But although I could understand this truth clearly, I could not for the life of me figure out how to get off of the ground.
And even worse, some of that hose water got shot up my nose.
…
On the seventh night of boot camp, I tossed and turned in my bunk all night, tormented by my own inability to solve this issue. And I cried, although I am somewhat ashamed to admit it. I cried like a little baby because of how frustrated I was with myself. I sobbed like a little bitch. You see, what made this so uniquely painful was that I finally made forward progress, but for the life of me I could not seem to carve that path I saw. Imagine your entire life you had been stuck in a traffic jam, and then one day all of the sudden everyone starts to move, and you think–by the Gods, this is my time! My life is finally changing, the gears of fate are moving me forward! Then only ten feet later everything comes to a standstill once again. Thus by that night I had wanted to tear my own hair out.
But as the next morning showed, my crying was the inciting event for the first teacher on my way. At breakfast I was eating some cold gruel when a tall lanky boy with soft brown eyes and full chipmunkish cheeks sat down next to me.
“Hullo,” he said, “I heard you crying in your bed last night, and I wanted to see if you were alright.”
Immediately I did not like him. First of all, I was obviously not alright: I was crying in my bed. What a stupid question! And then the nerve of him to assume that I wanted to speak about my ails, as if opening up could do me any good–and as if he was capable of transfiguring my pain where I alone could not. Thus I opened up my mouth to berate him for this misdeed, but meek as ever I only managed to stammer out, “N-n-no…”
“You know, you’re not alone,” he said, eyes shifting back and forth with some nervousness. “I haven’t told anyone else, but I silently wept my first few nights here too. It’s my first time away from home, and this place is hard for me. I have never been pushed so hard, and I find both my body and mind disturbed by the conditions here.”
I stared blankly at him.
“But you know the trials we undergo here are only preparation for the next life,” he said. I coughed and continued to stare at him blankly. “Everything that tortures your body and mind–it is only purification for your soul. Our souls are rough, tarnished things, and the suffering we encounter is like scrubbing it with sandpaper, or perhaps with steel wool. The harsh nature of this world cleanses us so that we may one day shine brilliant in God’s kingdom. God knows in his heart all things, and our suffering here is only so that we may be one day be glorious in His heavenly kingdom. This is the hope that keeps me going each night…”
Much to my dismay, he kept talking beyond this point for some time, but what he said about hope had intrigued me. So while he was still talking, I cut in. “This God fellow you mention–how does he enable your hope? And what is this heavenly kingdom you seem so fanatical about?”
He seemed shocked, not at my rude interruption but at the fact I said anything at all. Then he said to me, “You have never heard of God? What a peculiar thing indeed! What sort of parents did you have that enabled such a sacrilegious upbringing?”
“My parents were lawyers.”
He laughed. “You have a certain way with humor. What is your name? My name is Gabriel. It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance in this dastardly place.”
I thought that was an odd thing to say insofar as I had not been trying for humor. He stuck his hand out and I scrutinized it before extending mine in turn. “Jacob.”
Gabriel smiled at me. “Well Jacob, you certainly are a man of few words. Would you like me to tell you about God and his kingdom?” I said nothing, so he continued. “Well it all begins a long time ago…”
…
The remainder of the day Gabriel filled me in on this whole ‘God’ thing. He snuck in words during drills, at two other meals, and at the end of the day he climbed up to my bunk to finish his story. To be honest, I found him annoyingly eager, like a stray puppy who had been shown love for the first time. But I wanted to know if this ‘faith’ he spoke so highly of could uplift me from my cowardice, so I interrupted him once more. “There is one thing you must know about me Gabriel,” I said. “and that is that I am a coward through and through. I have always been a coward, and this has been the illness and bane of my existence since my inception. So what I want to know from you is whether or not faith in God’s kingdom can uplift me from my own cowardice.”
He looked at me thoughtfully for a minute. “The reason you have been unable to transfigure your own cowardliness, I think, is because you lack any sort of grand purpose.” He looked around to see if any of the other boys were listening. “If you found some ideal truly worth living for, then the flame in your heart may ignite where it has long been dormant.
“In many ways your cowardliness is not your fault–but rather, you are a victim of our times. The destruction of the church in centuries past has paved the way for the sort of decadence you represent. If you would not take offense! But your depressed and courageless nature is emblematic of the greatest problem our world faces today, which is to say a lack of purpose. You are not alone in your suffering. In fact, I have met many like you, and I have brought many of them closer to God, where they have found the redemption you crave. If you would begin trying to find God, then I believe you too could be uplifted from your own cowardly nature.
We sat there in the silent dark room on top of my bunk for some time. “Well then,” he said, “I’ll see you tomorrow.” And with that he slid off my bunk and into the darkness.
…
As it stands I did not see him the next day, and nor did I ever encounter him again. By the time I woke up he had mysteriously vanished, although none of the other boys seemed to take note. Thus for some time after I began to worry I had hallucinated the entire encounter, as if my subconscious had itself wanted me to take up the mantle of faith. But this proved not to be the case. I will explain what happened to him shortly when it again becomes relevant.
That next day after breakfast we were sent to physical training, and for the first time I attempted to apply Gabriel’s teachings. And in fact, I found it surprisingly effective. Through mild hunger and sleep-deprivation I was able to hold the idea of God’s heavenly kingdom in my heart, and it actually gave me the motivation to persist through the gauntlet of exercises. For once I had courage that would not flicker! It was as if a bright flame was emboldening me with perseverance, or as if God Himself was shining light on me. But even still, the gauntlet was brutal, and my newfound faith only barely carried me over the finished line. Please note that this was a significant improvement over the past exercise sessions where I had wanted to kill myself the entire time.
After physical training we broke for lunch, and this was a much needed respite from the grueling workout. I really needed this break; it felt like any longer and my body would have failed me entirely. I was so ravenously hungry at that moment that I could have eaten anything laid before me. I really cannot stress enough how critical this meal was for my ability to persevere–because much to my horror, a mere three minutes into lunch the drill instructors started shouting at us to quit and get our packs ready for march.
After a mad scramble out of the dining hall and back to our bunks (with the instructors screaming at us to move faster the entire way), we were ready to march. So we set off on a terrible ten mile uphill hike with full packs and rifles, and it was a slaughterhouse from the start. I was not alone in my complete exhaustion, and in fact I was doing relatively well. I watched as boys in poorer shape than I began to vomit and collapse only a mile into the hike. As for myself, I was trapped in my own personal Hell. My legs screamed, my back screamed, and more than anything I felt the violent waves of cowardliness I knew so well surging back into my psyche. Just give up, it said to me. There’s no point anyways. I tried to hold the idea of the next life tight to my chest, but as the march went on I felt it slowly slipping away. I was being abandoned by the one thing that it seemed could save me.
For the first time in my life I fought intensely for something, namely to hold fast this newfound faith. But I was simply too weak and cowardly to do even that. By the fifth mile, the idea of a heavenly kingdom could help me no more, and I allowed myself to collapse into debility. I dropped and joined the growing herd of boys who had failed. And all of us who failed were sentenced to a week of extra duties around the base, but I didn’t care about the punishment we got for failing–because extra toilet duty was nothing in comparison to the loss of faith I had found. It seemed the idea of an afterlife could do nothing to transfigure me in the here and now.
As I simmered on this in the coming days, I began to feel as if God himself were responsible for this misdeed. Even to this day I do not know how this strange idea entered my mind, for it was obvious from the start that my own weakness was my responsibility. But perhaps as an attempt to deflect my shortcomings, if even for a moment, I began to reproach the idea of God. And I stewed in anger for some time, becoming increasingly indignant at the sense of alienation that I felt from him. For surely God had the power to come and uplift me, so why did I have the burden to find him? This line of thought let me into deeper and darker despair as I began to destroy the foundations on which my own faith could be built. I began to believe that either God did not exist, or that he was himself a demon! I tore apart any faith and shred of hope Gabriel had helped deliver to me. I let this malice gestate in my heart, and as I became more and more furious, I had the strange notion that I should go to the church on base and verbally berate God for his injustices.
So I kept myself awake until the late moments of this one night, when clouds covered the sky and naught even a star dared twinkle. It seemed at that time as if my wrath was manifest in the world, so powerful that it was. And when the night was as its stillest hour, I slowly crept out of my bunk and slipped out the door like a spectre–the consequences be damned! And I skulked my way towards the church, avoiding the well-lit avenues in favor of the gloomy back-ways. Not a soul was in sight, which was a boon, for surely I would have killed anyone that tried to stop me.
And so I arrived at the church, and with great might I pushed open the heavy stone doors. They groaned under my fury, and I slipped in once a wide enough berth had been found. Then I shut the doors behind me so nobody could hear my verbal abuse. And I walked towards the alter, passing by rows of pews in the murky darkness. But as I approached halfway there, something peculiar happened. The clouds must have parted a hair, for the soft glow of a full moon suddenly illuminated the front of the room, tricking in through the great stained-glass window behind me. And what the moonlight illuminated was somebody in the first row.