A Cathedral of Comfort for Nonbelievers

Last month’s atrocities left some of us distant onlookers in an awkward situation spiritually. I’m referring to people like me, who in the course of our lives wriggled out from under the burden of religion.

While believers flocked to churches, temples and mosques to seek solace for their astonished grief--where could we go? Stupendous tragedy and overwhelming villainy try religious belief, but not as sternly as they try non-belief.

After the mass murders, I eventually gravitated to the downtown Central Library, the only place in Los Angeles where I reliably find calm and comfort, especially when public or personal life seems to be wobbling out of orbit. The juxtaposition of its stately 1926-vintage old wing and its 8-year-old Tom Bradley wing, which rises four stories above ground level and plummets four stories down into a great light-filled, escalatored well, speaks of civility, continuity and promise.

When it comes to the library, I’m orthodox. I relish its quiet and contemplative spaces. Other of its precincts, however, vibrate with a noisy sense of mission--the cultivation of young people, the encouragement of community mindedness--much in keeping, as chief librarian Susan Kent puts it, with a young, teeming city’s need for “an energetic place of possibilities.”

While other institutions strain to accommodate the expanding populace of the city, the library has grown apace during what Kent calls “a wonderful period of expansion.” The Central Library and 67 branches now serve a more populous area than any other library system in the United States (New York City has three separate public library systems). Last year 12 million people visited, and borrowed more than 13 million items.

Every day, between 4,000 and 7,000 people visit the downtown library. Its shelves contain 2 million volumes, and more than a million issues of 15,000 periodicals ranging from “American Dry Cleaner” to “Solar Law Review.” The collection embraces about every variety of activity, folly and wisdom, both received and hard-won. It is a repository of all we know or think we do.

After the catastrophes, in a bit of a daze like everyone else, I found myself at a quiet table in the Central Library’s Social Science, Philosophy and Religion department, on subterranean Level 3 of the Bradley wing. Before me was a stack of books on Islam. I knew, of course, that the atavistic brand of the faith professed by Osama bin Laden and his ilk is an aberration in the Muslim world, but I had to admit I was fairly ignorant of the history and core tenets of Islam. With the subject on everyone’s lips, devoting the better part of a day to learning about it seemed an appropriate, even reverent, response to the terrible occurrences.

For the next many hours, my head filled with the stories of Muhammad’s intimacy with God, of Abu Bakr, Uthman, Ali and Umar, who succeeded the Prophet as leaders of the faith. Of Mu’awiyah and the ascendancy of the Damascus-based Umayyad clan, under whom occurred the great schism between Sunnis and Shiites. Of the eventual triumph of the Abassids who, ruling from Baghdad for half a millennium, oversaw Arab-Islamic culture’s greatest secular achievements. Of the rise of the Ottoman Turks, non-Arabs, to the pinnacle of Islamic power, and of the 20th century’s fundamentalist movement that seeks to restore the purity and simplicity of the religion’s early era.

I became lightly versed in Islam’s roots in and differences with Judaism and Christianity. In how a devout Muslim bases behavior on three pillars--the Koran, Hadiths (accounts of Muhammad’s life) and one or another version of Sharia (holy law extrapolated from the first two).

Five or six hours of reading hardly qualifies as a thorough examination of the subject, but certainly edified me. It also confirmed my skepticism about the nature of God as the various religions and their sub-sects construe him. Is he the compassionate God who consoles the families of last month’s innocent victims--that God? Or, the victorious God whose name conceivably was on the lips of the mass murderers the instant they steered their airliners into the buildings? Or, the vengeful God of our thirst for blood in retribution?

However it’s defined by the religions, I don’t find the concept all that useful. God, I think, is really a projection of all that human beings suspect we may be capable of becoming: all-wise, all-knowing, all-powerful, all-forgiving, all-merciful. We created him, and our species’ progress is a halting and often discouraging journey toward achieving in ourselves the ideals we invest in him.

As the hate-driven slaughter in New York and Washington proves, we have a long way to go.

We nonbelievers have to place all of our faith in understanding, in the notion that an individual’s acquiring even a jot more of it somehow advances humanity along the road. After my little tutorial, I ascended on the Bradley wing’s escalators in the lengthening late afternoon light that fell like a blessing on the polyglot congregation all around me. I felt a little more at peace, like a pilgrim departing a place that, in its way, is holy.