Free On God: An Uncommon Conversation by Norman Mailer, Michael Lennon Page B

that?
    Well, I can give you one story; it’s fascinated me for years. At a certain time in my life, I was feeling rocky. My third wife had decided she didn’t want to go on with our marriage at a time when I had been hoping, “Maybe this time I can start to build a life.” She was a very interesting woman but easily as difficult as myself. So when she broke it up, I didn’t know where I was. And I remember one night, wandering around Brooklyn through some semi-slums—not the hard slums but some of the tougher neighborhoods a mile or two out from my house in Brooklyn—not even knowing what I was looking for, but going out, drinking in a bar, sizing up the bar, going to another bar, looking…this is ironic, but in those days, you actually would go to a bar and look for a woman. I think you still can, but it’s been so long now since I did it that I can no longer speak with authority. Anyway, I found no woman. I went into an all-night diner—because I realized I was hungry, not only drunk but hungry—and ordered a doughnut and coffee, finished it. Then a voice spoke to me. I think it’s one of the very few times I felt God was speaking to me. Now, of course, one can be dead wrong. I go back to Kierkegaard—just when you think you’re being saintly, you’re being evil; when you think you’re being evil, you might be fulfilling or abetting God’s will at that point. In any event, this voice spoke to me and said, “Leave without paying.”
    It was a minor sum—twenty-five cents for coffee and a doughnut in those days. I was aghast, because I’d been brought up properly. One thing you didn’t do was steal. And never from strangers! How awful! I said, “I can’t do it.” And the voice—it was most amused—said, “Go ahead and do it,” quietly, firmly, laughing at me. So I got up, slipped out of the restaurant, and didn’t pay the quarter. And I thought about this endlessly. If it was God…as I said, this was the closest I ever came to trusting the authority of my senses. My senses told me this was a divine voice, not a diabolical one. It seemed to me that I was so locked into petty injunctions on how to behave, that on the one hand I wanted to be a wild man, yet I couldn’t even steal a cup of coffee. To this day, I think it was God’s amusement to say, “You little prig. Just walk out of there. Don’t pay for the coffee. They’ll survive, and this’ll be good for you.”
    Now, I’ve thought about this often because it’s a perfect example of how difficult it is for us to know at a given moment whether we’re near to God or to Satan, which is why Fundamentalists can drive you up the wall—their sense of certainty is the most misleading element in their lives. It demands, intellectually speaking, spiritually speaking, that one must remain at a fixed level of mediocrity. It’s a great irony, because many of them who are good Christians, or Orthodox Jews, are compassionate. I don’t know much about Islam, but I’m sure the same is true there. You can have fine people, wonderful people, Fundamentalists full of compassion…can say in passing, If God was ever going to mingle in our affairs, Christ is more than a metaphor. Compassion is probably the finest emotion we humans can have. When tears come to our eyes for the sorrow of someone else, that may be as close as we get to reaching the best element in ourselves. But, there again, it’s difficult to know how pure any moment of compassion is. And any false variety of it can be toxic. When it is manufactured by constant adjurations applied to the daily habits of Fundamentalists, compassion can become the opposite of itself, and turn into an instrument for power. “Follow me because I feel compassion for you.”
    Speaking crudely, if half the Fundamentalists in the world are truly compassionate, the