[Originally published on December 4, 2006.]
Last night I sliced open that one Fuyu persimmon from this year’s harvest [on Ironwood Place in Chapel Hill, North Carolina], preparing twenty or thirty thin slices for our dessert. (There was only the one fruit because, after last year’s Fuyu harvest of over 300, I apparently pruned the tree more severely than I should have. I won’t go into the theory of persimmon cultivation; anyway, my imperfect practice of it tends to disqualify me from stating it.)
The slices were delectable! “How can a persimmon get so sweet,” my wife asked in awe.
This morning, as I was walking our poodle Wally [then age 10] around our cul-de-sac, I remembered the Fuyu slices and felt a rush of gratitude that we had had them to enjoy. My natural impulse was to thank God [then already infinitely both old and young?]. But then I remembered: I don’t know that God exists. My next thought was that I don’t know, either, that God doesn’t exist. I believe neither that God exists nor that God does not exist, which is not equivalent to believing that God does not exist. The former is a statement of agnosticism, the latter of atheism.
But I realized that, when gratitude rushes over me so strongly that I want to express it, I prefer to say thank you to God who may or may not exist than to have the feeling stifled in what would amount to the solipsism of atheism.
At any rate, that’s how I feel this morning. This is how far my thinking has so far brought me.
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