Over the years I have managed to collect pictures with most of the characters from my book. Here is the photo of Rajko Biševac and the excerpt from my book “It’s Really All About God.” He now lives in Chicago with his wife Paulina and is a nutrition and natural medicine wizard, poet, and a free-lance theologian. This pictures are from our army time, Sabbaths we spent with a wonderful local farming family. Pic 1 from the left (1. me, 5. The Bag); Pic 2 from the left (1. The Bag, 5. me)
I was eighteen, eight hundred miles from home, serving my fourteen-month obligatory term as a foot soldier of the Socialist Federalist Republic of Yugoslavia. One evening, hungry and with nothing to eat but a can of sardines, I needed some bread badly. Since no soldier in my unit had any, I went looking for Rajko Biševac, a nerdy-looking soldier with a big smile, known in the compound as “the Bag.” The Bag was a Christian, the sort who would go around telling people how sweet the love of God really is—in other words, in the minds of most of his comrades, a troubled person. Soldiers and officers alike believed that withholding simple human respect from the Bag would help him come to his senses. So that’s what they did. No perks, no promotions, and no approval of any kind for the Bag. Every once in a while, a zealous drunken captain who watched too many noir movies would take the Bag to his office for a smoke-shrouded night of pointless interrogation.
Moreover, the word was out that the Bag was not only a Christian but also a vegetarian, which somehow made him less of a man. To avoid the constant threat of being served food made with lard, he carried around a supply of what we all thought of as crappy food in a bag. Hence the nickname.
He didn’t have any bread that evening, but each of us had something the other needed. So I approached him again a couple of days later. And then again and again. And as we talked, I came to realize that people were right about him—he was a fool. He believed stuff that was downright insane, but I felt I had a chance to help him out. There was hope for him, I thought. He was a fool, yes, but he was definitely not stupid. He put me on his prayer list. I put him on my crazies list.
The Bag was curious and full of life, laughing off the mean soldiers and paranoid officers as well-meaning and terribly amusing. He believed that he could change the world. That I could change the world. That anyone could.
By seeing it differently.
The Bag and I looked for ways to work the system so that we would be placed on tasks where our day could intersect. Even if one of us had to buff hallways or clean toilets in his own unit, the other one would be able to come and hang around. The only thing that mattered was that we could talk. The evenings, when most of the officers went home, were the best of times. Free from the judgment of other soldiers and officers, we strolled around the army compound, talking into the night.
“Don’t you get tired of God?” I asked one evening.
He stayed quiet. Which prodded me on.
“Why do you always have to be thinking or talking about God? Why can’t you just enjoy a sunny day, for example? Walk into the day and let it be, let it wash over you, with its own beauty, without constantly ascribing everything to God. You can’t even enjoy a sunny day for what it is, can you?”
In reality, the Bag enjoyed life very much. I was the one trying to come to terms with what seemed to me to be “God’s oppressive presence.”
He answered, “When I walk into a sunny day, I walk into a gift.”
He implied that Someone actually thought about such a thing as a sunny day, that Someone “awared” it into existence.
Then he turned the question back on me. “When you walk into a sunny day, what do you walk into?”
I had no answer. In my mind, I thought of the ways a sunny day can be beautiful without attributing it to anyone, a product of a mysterious chaos from which we all sprang. But for weeks after our conversation, the idea that Someone gifted life to us would not leave me. The thought held me in its grip: Can reality be relational?
Later that month, I was working on something in the captain’s office with another soldier when the Bag walked in. He seemed to be able to read social situations with ease, but the passion that he carried within him would burst out unexpectedly. Animated, he interrupted our conversation and began to explain something to my friend, apparently continuing a conversation they had started the day before. Standing in the middle of the room, he held an apple in the palm of his outstretched hand and looked in the eyes of my friend, then into mine and said, “See this apple? This apple is from God.”
The other soldier looked at the Bag as if the poor fellow had lost his mind. The Bag bit the apple, and the crunching sound, followed by a fresh luscious scent, filled the room. With his mouth full, he continued, “Did you ever notice that an apple has a different texture and taste at every layer?”—all the while chewing, his lips wet with drops of sweet nectar. “Did you notice, for example, how the apple is harder and a little more sour closer to the skin and softer and sweeter closer to the seeds?”
As he spoke in wonderment, I watched the green and red colors on the apple’s skin waltzing together.
“This apple is a product of the love of Someone,” the Bag concluded pensively and went out the door.
“The Bag is losing it,” I said as I turned to my friend. My friend nodded in agreement.
But then I thought to myself, what if we are the ones losing something? What if we, not he, are maladjusted to the world? What if the world is not really made of mere random matter?
What if subatomic particles, atoms, physical forces, plant life, and brain chemistry are only letters? Letters that make words that make sentences that tell a love story about our world. An unbroken chain of the sacred lacing the ordinary.
