For several days, my mental state relative to "religious faith" has felt sort of...blasted. All confused. Sort of shut out from itself. Wanting to believe...something. Not believing...yet believing—despite a sense of loss of coherence among what I might call dogmatic propositions or "tenets of faith"—that nevertheless "all will be (or is) well." Maybe it's a feeling rather than a "belief." A sense of being all right, despite all.
For me, this seems to call into question the very idea of believing particular "religious propositions." As though I've attained, or ended up in, some sort of detachment—maybe indifference—to "religion."
It seems rather like the way I've come to feel about the novels of John Connolly. I recently read a couple of them and have become overfull with their mayhem and pervasive assumption of Evil. (If you haven't read Every Dead Thing or The Killing Kind, then believe me, the bad guys in Connolly's books are very, very bad.)
I mean, maybe I've "surfeited out" on religious stuff. My most recent read was Garry Wills's What Jesus Meant, and it ended up being a roller coaster ride. A short ride, because the book is barely 140 pages long, but a roller coaster ride nevertheless. The ride started with a steep ascent up the notion that Jesus was indeed a radical figure, much, much different from the nice guy generally portrayed, for example, in the Mormons' Jesus as Brad Pitt-lookalike. Jesus was, according to Wills, in many ways different from the usual conception. Not a bringer of peace, but of a sword, for example. Not a founder of a religion, but out and out anti-religious. Down with priests! Down with priestly functions!
But the ride straightened out. Jesus's essential message really was love. The only thing we have to do, brothers and sisters, is love the high and the low as though they are Jesus.
Then the concluding corkscrew turn around eschatological notions that seemed about as contrived as anything could be, leaving me dizzy and...blasted.
Maybe life's too short to spend one's time like this.
Peace Morris,
ReplyDeleteAnd what dear would you rather spend your time on? if anything for me, this is the stuff that makes life meaningful...
<smile>
ReplyDeleteI was thinking of reading Le Carré, for example (rather than Connelly), simply loving my neighbors and, as much as possible, being "sapienter si sincere" (wisely, if sincerely) toward my enemies—without, that is, roiling about in more and more pointless-seeming "theologizings." That's all I was feeling. I was feeling that continuing to ride rollercoasters and go around and around the track was...unproductive. Maybe, instead, I would "go subliminal" (nonverbal), say nothing (to borrow from Wittgenstein) whereof we may not speak (speak coherently, sensibly).
Oh, maybe now and then cry out in a poem. Praise, perhaps. Lyrics, pæans, strophes.
Blessed relief! Ah, the sun, the wind! Birdsong!