Faith--a Vignette

Set after Aliens in a Spaceship, though perhaps with a flavor of Mummy in the Maze and Devil in the Details. Believe it or not, I began this long before Devil aired, and I was delighted at how well I seem to have anticipated.

Cross-posted on FF.net, with a couple minor errors fixed. And of course I don't own the characters, the script, or the show.

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Temperance Brennan had not been born--or even raised--an atheist. In fact, she had had a conventional, if somewhat lackluster, religious education, attending Sunday School with Russ and the occasional service with her parents.

Being who she was, she had learned everything set before her and knew all the usual Bible stories. Joseph and his coat. David and Goliath. Adam and Eve. Noah. The Nativity. The loaves and the fishes. The 10 lepers. She had even read through other parts of the Bible as she got older and discovered more interesting stories. Esther. Deborah. Tamar and Judah. The vivid imagery of Revelation. Even (and this would really shock Booth) Judith, Tobit, and the goriest parts of Maccabees. And she clearly remembered the day she realized what the composer of the Song of Songs had really meant. (And how ancient Hebrew erotic poetry had found its way into what so much of the world revered as a holy book remained beyond her comprehension, even years later) And she had had a child’s faith--simple, honest, unquestioning.

Of course, under all that normality, there was always a streak of nonconformity. Her father had delighted in showing them that faith could be developed anywhere, that God could be found in a flower as much as inside a building. Russ had liked that only so far as it got him out of going to church; but in the long run, he found he preferred the easy focus of a service. Tempe, on the other hand, had followed her father’s lead. Looking through his microscope at the school lab, she could only marvel how everything seemed to fit together. It was like a giant jigsaw created by a master.

But she had been going through a not uncommon period of teenage doubt when her parents disappeared. Her first foster parents had dragged her to their church willy-nilly, not bothering to ask if she wanted to go or even what church she normally attended. And this church had a hellfire-and-brimstone preacher.

His thundering voice, overwhelming presence, and tirades against non-believers and sinners had scared her; in her vulnerable state, she wondered if he wasn’t right. Maybe this was a punishment for daring to question the existence of God.

At night, she would lie in the narrow bed allotted her, praying. Praying for her parents or Russ to come back, praying for forgiveness, praying that her foster father wasn’t drunk and looking for a fight…

But none of those were actually answered so that she would notice--except for being taken from that house and sent to another. Those people were nicer, if preoccupied. Why she had had to leave them had never been fully explained, and she was off again.

The last time she remembered praying had been when she was 16 and locked in that car trunk for breaking a dish. She had screamed, both out loud and in her head, begged anyone in hearing for release, promised to do better, please, please, please…! But when release finally came, it was at the same hands that had stuck her in there in the first place. Nor did they get any gentler.

That night, nursing bruises and lacerations incurred in her efforts to free herself, she decided it was all a lie. She had believed, hadn’t she? Surely her belief had been greater than a mustard seed…yet no mountains had been moved. Therefore, logically, faith was worthless and there was no point to prayer since there was no God to reach out a saving hand--there was only herself; she was the only one she could rely on.

From then on, she stubbornly refused to attend any sort of services, even when she ended up with more bruises. The closest she got, outside of her anthropology courses, was a non-proselytizing class on Biblical history in college. It had been absolutely fascinating to see how the religious beliefs of a small tribe from the Middle East influenced well over three-quarters of the world.

And nothing had come along to change her mind. She had learned to be silent on that topic and treated all religious activities with respect (mostly for the participants’ sake, not for any intrinsic value).

Until Booth. He was so prickly on certain subjects it was fun to wind him up (she thought that was the correct metaphor). Certainly there was an element of retaliation involved--every time he jabbed at her or slipped under her guard, she poked back. Religion was simply one of the easiest ways to do so.

Jesus is not a zombie, Bones!

None of which really explained why she was currently sitting next to him, in a church, watching him pray.

What you have is faith, baby… She studied Booth’s profile as Hodgins’ words replayed in her mind.

She didn’t have faith--not like Booth did. Even with everything that had happened in his life, the things he had done that she knew he regretted, he still held to the basic beliefs of his childhood. Believed in them and a god sincerely.

Perhaps there was more to faith than the religious aspect, she mused. Could she truly have faith in a person? What had she told Hodgins--Faith may be no more than an irrational belief in something that’s logically impossible? And she hadn’t lied when she had added that she knew what Booth could do. She hadn’t added the logical corollary, that she also had an idea of what he was willing to do, or even that she knew he would do it to the best of his abilities. She also trusted the evidence of her senses, the results of her tests--could that be considered faith?

A faith in science?

She played with those thoughts for a while, twisting faith and trust together. It seemed that they could simply be different aspects of the same thing, perhaps members of the same genus. While both were unfamiliar to her, she understood trust--at least a little better than she used to.

Booth finally sat back, crossing himself, and she refocused on him. She knew he was nervous about her being here, but she had already decided she was going to do her best to not upset him.

“What’s that smell?” she asked, even though she knew perfectly well what it was. This was his place, even more than the interrogation room, and he needed to display his dominance. She was willing to give him that, considering what they had gone through over the past few days.

“The candles,” he answered with a little nod in their direction. “And I said thanks. You should try it sometime.”

“If I were going to pray, I would have done it just before we set off the explosion.” She couldn’t help it; all her good intentions flew out the window at his words.

“And you didn’t?”

“No. See, if there was a god--which there isn’t--”

“Shhh… Do you see where we are?”

“--And if I were someone who believed he had a plan…”

“…which I do…” he interrupted.

“…then I’d be tempted to think he wanted me to go through something like I went through because it might make me more open to the whole…concept.”

“Hmmm. It obviously hasn’t.”

“I’m okay with you thanking god for saving me and Hodgins,” she offered, trying to convey that she wasn’t criticizing him or his beliefs.

“That’s not what I thanked him for. I thanked him for saving all of us. It was all of us, every single one. You take one of us away and you and Hodgins are in that hole forever. And I’m thankful for that.”

Oh. Maybe his faith wasn’t as simple as she had thought.

It only took her a minute of thought before she voiced what had become the first article of her faith.

“I knew you wouldn’t give up.”

I liked the part about her seeing the master's jigsaw through the microscope, and where she's twisting faith and truth together. If HH ever does tackle her issues with faith, for whatever reason, a situation as one of these will be his "in," of course, piggybacking it on Booth.

It was sad to see her scientific method/rationale used on a situation of abuse to lead her to decide that none of it was real.

It's all about the examples set. If neither parent was overly devout or religious, and her fosters didn't do any better...there was no solid belief engrained early on, I would say. Unlike Booth.

Too, Max may say she's a lot like her mother, but she's got quite a bit of him in her as well. And I do see him as quite the skeptic. Brennan obviously is, and even then she would have known of the scientific process. And if all of her data already pointed to the same thing, the trunk episode would have really just been the final straw (to mix my metaphors). And once you're not looking, you aren't going to see. I can understand how she would have made that leap--and that crack about mustard seeds is mine. I believe some might call it "testing God," which would be why some of what I tried didn't work!

Got this idea after watching Aliens and Mummy in a short timespan and had been working on it when Devil aired--wanted to show her groping towards what she said in the later two eps.

I really, really liked this, Dawn!!!

You've given her a very plausible faith history that really enriches that part of her back story. I can easily see her parents involving them in church activities if for no other reason than to appear "normal" and how sad but true that she could have experiened that in her foster family.

I can also easily see rational Brennan gathering whatever tangible evidence she could about God as it applied to her life and dismissing on those grounds. I'm very interested to see just how far along this faith path HH & Co take her. You could see with Booth that just her simple admissions in the diner meant a lot to him.

Thanks so much for this piece!
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