Belief and the Villian

 [Written around 2003]

Belief and the Villian

     A J R Reimer

A young man sitting behind me on a Winnipeg transit bus, on my way to the offices of James Justice, my newly acquired podiatrist on Marion in St. Boniface, spoke with an earnestness that I (double minor in philosophy and major in literature) found interesting enough to begin to attract and then keep my attention. His name—Abe Poetker; I heard two of them exchange names—informed me of his cultural inheritance. Southern Manitoba, his accent announced. Educated, his jargon added. Haughty, his youthful insistence proclaimed. Joyfully prudish, the absence of references to anything corporeal in his disquisition admitted. Diverted by his fervour and the additional fact of the similarity of our mutual cultural inculcation, I switched on my iPhone’s recording app and preserved the following interchange between himself and this other university student with whom he sat. 

     “I believe that we believe in something we don’t believe in. That is my answer to your best objection to me, A J R Ajar. If I believe that Mennonites are hypocrites and that their beliefs, as a community attempting to remain vibrant, is their greatest weakness, then I am not arguing from a position of privilege as if outside the world of their belief, but as if inside it and saying that I, too, belong to that group of people who are hypocrites. That is, that I, trained by them, raised on the turf of their habitus, determined in my youth by them, also believe what they believe and ergo ask questions about our common beliefs. I do not believe what I believe, in other words.”

     Nothing Abe argued moved me in the slightest to reexamine and adapt my current thinking. Of bigger concern to me at the moment was the pain and discomfort that my present orthotics gave me despite the fact that my previous podiatrist had just two months prior confidently argued that I would, from that point on, have no more trouble with my feet and be able to walk dozens of miles unimpeded. The savant behind me, I considered, should begin to walk the talk. My podiatrist of the past, however, needed to learn how to talk the walk. All I wished was to be able to walk and talk simultaneously without trouble to any part of my body or to anybody who happened to be in conversation with me. Selah.