Daring to doubt at a diner, for dinner

Denny’s. You need to go somewhere in the middle of the night that serves a steady supply of… Denny’s. You need to go somewhere in the middle of the night that serves a steady supply of caffeine and has just the right amount of distraction to get some writing done – in my hometown the only option is Denny’s.

So one night after I got off work at midnight, I headed on over. I noticed two things right away: I’d never seen a prettier Denny’s waitress, and the battery on my laptop was dead. I borrowed a pen from the waitress, found a piece of paper crumpled in my backpack and decided to jot down some ideas. Only I got distracted.

There’s a level of distraction that’s helpful and at times inspirational. The distraction that came from the ad hoc long table right next to mine was well beyond that point. There were about 12 people between 15 and 25, mostly men, discussing some sort of ultra-Christian camp they’d just finished. What so completely demanded my attention was the lead boy – who was I’d guess about 17- asking that very pretty waitress if he and his friends could pray for her.

I’d never before witnessed that kind of group prayer. They spoke aloud God’s words to a complete stranger, and they did it in a haven of grease. The lead boy held the waitress’s hand and claimed that he felt God stirring in him. He shared God’s message with this girl: God promised that there was more in her future than serving various Slams at Denny’s. God would lift her up and soon.

I waited for it. I knew he was going to go for the digits. I figured he was hiding behind the religious crap and really just fishing for a date. But I was wrong. He asked instead for her e-mail address and said he’d continue praying for her. I was surprised. Rarely has my cynicism failed me. So, on its behalf I felt obligated to introduce myself and investigate further.

Fifteen seconds after I said hi, there were three guys surrounding me. Two had hopped into the spaces remaining in the curved booth I occupied, and the other pulled a chair up, blocking my escape.

There was something utterly horrifying about the conversation we had. I couldn’t name it at the time. They were polite, if a tad too enthusiastic. They took my initial sarcasm well, and responded if not with intelligence and learning to all my questions, at least never with anger.

When I commented on just how lame their prayer for the waitress had been, one of them even smiled. He nearly conceded the point that anyone working at Denny’s in the middle of the night would be rather susceptible to a promise of improved fortune. The only time they showed any irritation was when I forbade them to pray for me in the same fashion they’d prayed for the waitress. They then left and even paid my bill without telling me.

The only flagrantly disturbing thing was an opinion they’d come up with themselves. After discussing various charitable activities they’d been part of, these deeply compassionate men decided that starving African children are better off than American kids in the foster system because they show more gratitude when receiving gifts. My Denny’s companions then built on the gratitude argument to say all Africans were better off because they could achieve spirituality more easily than Americans.

I don’t get offended when people make odd claims. I appreciate new angles – however skewed they may be æ and I’ll argue any point just to see where it takes me. So, I was surprised at how offensive I found that claim. It wasn’t the obvious hypocrisy of sitting in a Denny’s talking about how spiritually well off the starving are. It wasn’t even the thinly veiled indifference to physical trauma and psychological agony.

I didn’t figure it out for weeks. One evening I was reading something quite unrelated, and I suddenly understood the Denny’s incident. What bothered me about the whole conversation was their certainty.

The world is complicated. It’s too massive and too intertwined, too detailed and too subtle, too burdened by history and too blinded by the future for anyone to speak with complete certainty. We’re forced to generalize so that we’re able to make those daily decisions on which our survival depends, but those generalizations are only pieces of reality.

It’s awesomely difficult to force ourselves beyond the generalizations and judgments we’ve been handed by our parents, communities, schools, nation, culture and our very language. And, after overcoming those barriers, all we gain is the addition of color to the same chaos we’d been unable to decipher in black and white.

Those boys at Denny’s scare me. They have the certainty of martyrs, and they’re so clean-cut, all-American and honestly well-intentioned that half the nation would follow them to hell convinced that brimstone paves the path to heaven.

E-mail Zak at rzs8@pitt.edu.