If I'm a lost sheep, so are we all

A friend, frustrated by my refusals to "believe on the name of the Lord," finally just asked me:

What DO you believe in? Where does your Hope lie? And what do you believe is going to happen to your soul when you die?

I'm glad for the occasion to write about this here. As I told my friend:

In a nutshell, I trust to chance and cautious living. When we die physically, our personal identities (our consciousnesses—our "souls" if you will) go poof.

I notice now that she capitalized "Hope," and the phrasing of the question (Where does my Hope lie?) presupposes that there must be something (outside myself?) that I can trust (or hope) to fulfill my aspirations (my hopes). I don't think there is such a thing.
    My hopes are simple. I hope that I die before my wife and children. I hope that what time I have left before I "go poof" will be tolerable if not better than tolerable.
    My friend also, curiously, concluded by saying:

As far as I can tell, no one has come up with a cure for death.

While I can't be sure why she added that, it seems to suggest that her main hope might be that she will somehow survive death—since we don't have a cure for it and are, therefore, surely going to die. (I know that she trusts, as multitudes of terrified people do, in John 3:16, "...whosoever believeth in him [the only begotten Son of God] should not perish, but have everlasting life.")
    As another friend, Nortin M. Hadler, MD, writes in his indispensable book, Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America, "Even Methuselah died." By the way, he tells me that that will probably be the title of his next book; look for it from the University of North Carolina Press.
    It so happens that I've been reading another book as well (I'm rarely not reading at least two concurrently). The other book is Irvin D. Yalom, MD's latest, Staring at the Sun, whose subtitle is "Overcoming the Terror of Death." Dr. Yalom frankly acknowledges that a signal function of religion is to help people overcome that terror. It seems to serve that purpose for my friend.
    I hasten to add that I'm not reading Dr. Yalom's book as a prescription for my own terror, but because I tend to read whatever his latest is. I learned only recently that he has also published another novel, so now The Schopenhauer Cure is on my reading list. I hope to live long enough to read it.

My friend also asked me:

And where do you get that belief from [whatever I DO believe]? That is the real issue.

She didn't say why this is "the real issue," but I guess it's a reference to what is for her the obvious fact that the Bible is "the Word of God," so why am I not getting my beliefs from it?
    I replied:

Mainly I get [my] belief from having rejected all of the fantastical, wishful beliefs to the contrary.

It should be obvious what the wishful is in my friend's eschatological Christian beliefs. (I qualify the beliefs that way to exclude from this discussion the kernal moral teaching of Jesus Christ, to which I myself subscribe: have compassion for one another, you are no more deserving than the next person.)
    Actually, from observing my friend's life, I'd say that she gets something else from her religious beliefs, something not uncommon, something that I can even recognize from having experienced it myself through religious belief: something like a narcotic high. On another occasion, my friend referred to "the God that I love so much." She wrote, quoting the entire 104th Psalm, that "in the first verses you will see His Majesty and Power." My friend is clearly high on her idea of God. This is a real, present value for her.
    Karl Marx, of course, famously referred to religion as "the opium of the people," but as far as I have been able to make out he was referring to the hope of eternal life to make up for their miserable existence here on earth.
    No, this something else that religious belief can provide is a buoyant, trance-like feeling, maybe like a cocaine or a heroin high. As much as I might like to have experienced one of those highs in order to be a better witness for the simile, I have not experienced either, nor even a marijuana high. But the religion-related highs I have experienced were transporting and pleasant.
    So, why am I not swallowing any of it? Well, I haven't swallowed any cocaine or heroin either, and I didn't finish either of the two joints I was offered. I prefer what I regard as the truth to the various fantasies of resurrection, the separation of the sheep from the goats, eternal bliss, eternal fire.

A pertinent text for this preference came to hand this morning, from Maureen Dowd's November 8 op-ed piece in The New York Times. She quoted Emeric Pressburger, a co-director of the 1948 film classic, "The Red Shoes," who (says Dowd) wrote in a letter to Deborah Kerr in the early ’40s:

No artist believes in escapism. And we secretly believe that no audience does. We have proved, at any rate, that they will pay to see the truth, for no other reason than her nakedness.

I do not wish to fake an escape from the existential reality of our human condition. I prefer that reality's austere nakedness, however cold like an ancient marble statue of Venus it may be. Should I suffer inordinate physical pain in my final hours, I will more than likely be glad of offered painkillers, but I am confident that I will regard the impending poof as a blessing, nothing to be frightened of².
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1. The photograph of the "lost sheep" was taken by my son in the hills above Rila Monastery, south of Sofia. I've used only a small detail from the original:
   
   
2. The title of Julian Barnes's book that I was reading at this time last year—because it was his latest book.