The Last American Man by Elizabeth Gilbert Page A

problems with his father and about his feelings for his girlfriend, Lori. There was an earnestness to these two young men, a perfect absence
     of the cynicism, detachment, and coolness that defined their generation as a whole. Each was shamelessly open with the other.
    They weren’t even embarrassed to talk about God. Both had been raised in Southern Baptist households, where devotion and fundamentalism
     were the default mode. Eustace’s grandfather Chief Johnson had been a rock-solid Christian, a man of blindingly intense morals,
     and Eustace’s mother had tried to pass those convictions along to her firstborn. Eustace had excelled in church as a kid.
     He was the early star of Sunday school—sharp, inquisitive, attentive. He was always a big fan of Jesus Christ. Eustace had
     a powerful response to the idea of Jesus going into the temple of money lenders and “knocking all the fucking tables over,”
     and he particularly liked that bit where the Savior went deep into the wilderness to seek the big answers.
    But as he grew older, he became disillusioned with the congregation and leadership of his church. He smelled insincerity and
     deceit everywhere. He would sit between his parents every Sunday as they bowed their heads and took in the pious sermon. Sunday
     after Sunday, Eustace became sadly aware of what an act this was, and how grave was the contrast between this public image
     of familial sanctity and the reality of the familial discord—a savage discord that was packed away in a hidden container every
     Sabbath so as not to disturb the neighbors. Soon, he took to looking around at the other holy-seeming families in their pews,
     all nicely dressed, with their heads bowed, and he couldn’t help wondering what horrors were hidden behind their hymnals.
    Increasingly, too, he began to take issue with the Christian cycle of pray-sin-repent-pray-sin-repent-pray-sin-repent. It
     seemed obvious to him that this was nothing more than a moral cop-out, writ large. You sin; you are immediately forgiven;
     you go out and sin some more, armed with the understanding that you’ll be forgiven once again. He found it stupid, weak, and
     cheap. Why was there this assumption that people were destined to sin, anyhow? If people loved the Bible so much, Eustace
     wondered, why couldn’t they just obey the clear instructions it offers and quit lying, cheating, stealing, murdering, and
     whore-mongering? How many times you gotta read the friggin’ Ten Commandments before you get them right? Stop sinning! Live
     the way you’ve been taught to live! Then you won’t have to come to church every Sunday and kneel and weep and repent. And
     you’ll have a lot more time to spend outside in the forest, where, as Eustace believed, “there is only truth to be found—no
     lies, no shams, no illusions, no hypocrisy. Just a truthful place, where all beings are governed by a set of perfect laws
     that have never changed and never will.”
    Of course, given his disposition and his personal force, it wasn’t long before Eustace refused to go to church and started
     looking for his own answers. He spent his teen years studying every religion he could find, keeping the lessons of Christianity
     that he liked and adding to them some bits from other beliefs. He was inspired by the ecstatic love celebrations of the ancient
     Sufimystics, while his attentive inner perfectionist instinctively responded to the central tenet of Buddhism—namely, that
     one will achieve enlightenment only through constant mindfulness.
    He liked the Taoist notion that people should try to be like water, should flow around hard surfaces, altering form to fit
     the shapes of nature and patiently wearing away at stone. He liked the spiritual lessons of the Eastern martial arts, about
     bending before the aggression of others and letting them hurt themselves without harming you. He found something in almost
     every religion to keep, and would talk to anyone (Mormons,