This morning, I didn’t feel much like going to yet another Palestine demo. Track work between here and the city—good enough excuse. Then that quiet voice: kids are dying, and you can’t be bothered? Excuse number two: I need to work on my next masterpiece. Right. Get off the arse, head for the station.
I arrived early. The usual crowd—the young lefties, the Middle Eastern families, the boomers making up for having missed the Vietnam demos back when they were too square for the street. Or maybe the rebel with a conscience doesn’t die; it just waits for another generation of children being bombed.
Drifting around, killing time before the speeches, I went looking for conversation the way some people look for food. A young Marxist, maybe, itching to spread the gospel of dialectics. Or someone who’d try to convert me to Islam. I’ve lost count of how many undergrad radicals I’ve spooked by bringing up Gramsci’s prison notebooks and Althusser’s autopsy of why the workers of the world never rose on schedule. Planet heating like a runaway boiler—how much time do they imagine they have for a global revolution anyway?
The Muslims were easier. All I had to do was walk past their stall, and one came running, pamphlet outstretched. Bingo. First debate in months.
My strategy is simple. Agree in principle, then raise the bar—slowly—until we cross over into the Zen zone, that space where belief scrapes up against the limits of language. He panicked at that edge and tried dragging me back to the dictionary, back to the safe ground where “God said” settles everything. Bible Belt certainty in a different script.
So I threw the hand grenade.
Whether someone “believes” in God matters about as much as whether fish believe in water. If God is, there’s no escape, and He doesn’t give a rat’s arse whether your forehead hits carpet or the Wailing Wall. Religion is the finger pointing at the moon; once you see the moon, you can drop the finger.
I told him my God is Spinoza’s—impossible to escape because existence itself is the proof. I told him how, as a kid on the street, I was rescued. A miracle. He asked how a boy survives that life. I said when you’re a good-looking kid, you do what you must, and criminals have ways of persuading you not to resist. A broken finger is a first warning. I told him Christ was like an older brother standing beside you at the Meat Rack—not floating above the clouds. Maybe He decided I’d had enough. Maybe the lesson was learned. I didn’t understand any of it until I stumbled into Zen forty years later.
Time to pull up the handbrake. We shook hands.
The demo itself was good. Two years of this and you start recognising faces. There’s a small solidarity in that—just a nod, a smile. A reminder that some people still show up.
But the best part of the day wasn’t the speeches or the march. It was later, waiting for the connecting train home. I grabbed a coffee and sat outside the station. Two little kids walked up—never seen me before in their lives—and handed an old stranger two Christmas cards they’d made themselves.
God speaks.
