FREUD AND BORGES: BEYOND THEISM?

Noah’s Ark, Edward Hicks, 1846

DARWIN, ONCE MEANT FOR THE CLERGY,
IMAGINES HIS SERMON ON NOAH

Too late, dear brethren, too late to believe
there never was a rainbow before the Flood –
or that the ark, three hundred cubits long,
could contain millions of species.
I won’t belabor the ark’s humble door
vis-à-vis a giraffe,
the whine of the two thousand
species of mosquito.

And the animals of the then-unknown
Australia and the New World?
Did they plunge into distant oceans,
two and two of all flesh,
and every thing that creepeth on the earth –
snails and slugs slithering for centuries.
As iron-dark clouds barred heaven,
did gorillas and polar bears parade
through a mud-brick Mesopotamian village?

And our fabled forefather, when the Lord
shut the door of the ark,
was six hundred years old.
The less believable it is,
the more enchanting it is.

Listen how tenderly it is said, But the dove
found no rest for the sole of her foot . . .
then he put forth his hand, and took her,
and pulled her in unto him into the ark –

The new theologians tell us the myth
is not even Hebrew, but primeval:
purification of the world by water.
Purification by science
is another Deluge.
Evolution is not crowned with a rainbow.

Brethren, I do not speak of Truth –
I offer evidence. I too carry
a heavy church in my heart.
The ship I sailed on for five years
was a kind of ark – I and Noah
on a long, crowded journey,
he with his salvaged animals,
I with my specimens in jars.

Brethren, behold the rainbow and rejoice
in the frail moment when the dove
alighted with a glistening olive leaf –
but how can we forget
the faces of the drowned –

Now the windows of heaven are shut;
all we have is stories.
Perhaps a future humanity will evolve
a kinder God, without wrath.
Today let us honor our father Noah,
drifting with the saved
seed of life toward Ararat.

~ Oriana © 2014

**

The problems with the traditional Judeo-Christian worldview did not begin with Darwin. As the Episcopalian Bishop Shelby Spong points out in his Why Christianity Must Change or Die, and as most educated people realize, the Copernican idea that the earth orbited the sun, combined with Galileo’s astronomical observations using the telescope (which showed, among many other wonders, that the moon had a crater-scarred landscape rather than being a perfectly smooth sphere -- oh no, an imperfection in a celestial body!), displaced the earth from the center of the universe. 

If the whole universe was created with us in mind, as the bible implied, so that we could worship the creator, then obviously the earth should not be just another planet orbiting the sun. Later astronomers created even more trouble, discovering that the sun was a rather average star in a provincial corner of our galaxy. And the cosmic distances were quite troubling. In modern times someone calculated that if Jesus moved with the speed of light (which is not possible, but let’s imagine), given the 2000 years since the Ascension, he still hasn’t left the galaxy.

(Sophisticated Reader, I realize that an answer to this is: let’s not be literal, only metaphorical. But the argument that in the past people used to read the bible in a metaphorical way and only in modern times we slid into weak-minded literalism doesn’t convince me. I just don’t see a medieval peasant grasping the Ascension as a metaphor for spiritual development, while we moderns devolved to the mentality of kindergarten.)

Galileo’s drawing of the moon

Darwin created a worse problem by far, and not only by making man a highly evolved animal with a more developed brain. Far more damaging was the very concept of evolution, soon adopted by other fields of knowledge. Thus, the earth evolved; the whole universe evolved and was still evolving. At the human level, cultures evolved and continues to evolve at an amazingly accelerated pace. Technology and knowledge have evolved. Art has evolved (some would say that starting with Impressionism, it devolved).

CHRIST TZAR

Religions too evolved and may now be dying -- or, if not, it will eventually be greatly transformed (into something more benign, we hope). The very concept of god evolved -- from a tribal warrior deity, the “Lord of Hosts” who fought against the enemies of his tiny chosen nation, to the sole and absolute ruler of the whole universe, the “king of kings” (absolute monarchy being dominant at the time; the sacred scriptures of humanity were written in the era of kings and emperors and warlords).

As Nietzsche observed, it’s not necessary to argue about the existence of god; it’s enough just to trace the evolution of the concept. 

Christ Tzar, a Russian icon, 1690

THE UNEMPLOYED GOD

Bishop Spong notes that the Christian churches resisted Darwin with vigor, but the pre-Reformation ecclesiastical power had already been broken, and the Church’s ability to threaten Darwin with execution as a heretic no longer existed. Besides, truth can never be deterred for long just because it is inconvenient. Spong observes that if man was an animal, then the concept of the soul and the afterlife, traditionally denied to animals, became questionable. Some have tried to cope with this by bestowing soul and afterlife on animals, especially dogs and cats, and maybe horses. Given their intelligence, maybe also elephants and dolphins. But where do we stop? Are frogs and fishes to be denied? (Milosz wanted even the insects to enjoy resurrection.)

Spong quotes Michael Goulder, an Episcopalian priest who renounced priesthood when he decided that the god of the past “no longer had any real work to do”:

The tasks assigned to this God by traditional wisdom, he suggested, have been slowly but surely stripped from the divine side. This God no longer fights wars and defeats enemies. This God no longer chooses a special people and works through them. This God no longer sends the storms, heals the sick, spares the dying, or even judges the sinner. This God no longer rewards goodness and punishes evil. Yet this virtually unemployed deity is still the primary object and substance of the Christian Church’s faith.

The theistic God has no work to do. The power once assigned to this God is now explained in countless other ways. The theistic God is all but unemployed.  . . . If there is no other possible understanding of God, then surely God has died.

Religion and personal and autobiographical. The theist deity always reflected the particular theologian, Spong maintains: “The fact is that the God of Thomas Aquinas looked and acted very much like Thomas Aquinas.” 

Aquinas by Carlo Crivelli, 1467

**

But what about the emotional need for a protective deity, a parent in the sky? Even if science shows that god is not necessary for the function of the universe, it can’t do away with people’s longing for “invisible support.” This is where Spong is at his most interesting. He quotes an ancient Hebrew prophet:

With what shall I come before the Lord and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will be Lord be pleased with thousands of rams; with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? Mica 6:6-7

From the historical point of view, this is an interesting window on what used to constitute worship. But from where we stand, isn’t this simply disgusting?

Could it be that some people still don’t realize how archaic the bible is -- like all “holy scriptures,” a product of its times? Maybe they realize, but still cling to religion in the hope of emotional security.

Dead ideas continue to slow down our development. Many are afraid that the light of reason would force them to drop their security blanket. In Act 2 of Ghosts, Ibsen wrote:

I almost think we’re all of us Ghosts. ... It's not only what we have invited from our father and mother that walks in us. It's all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we can’t get rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper, I seem to see Ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be Ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sand of the sea. And then we are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light.

FREUD’S “THE FUTURE OF AN ILLUSION”

In Judaism, god is “the Lord.” In Christianity he becomes “our father.” This  family analogy attracted the attention of Sigmund Freud, who duly noted the infantile character of much of the language of Christianity.

In his 1927 volume, The Future of an Illusion, Freud argued that humans were traumatized by the knowledge of their mortality. A psychological coping mechanism was needed. Spong writes:

Religion, Freud contended, was the coping mechanism, the human response to the trauma of self-consciousness, and it was designed above all to keep hysteria under control and to manage for these self-conscious creatures the shock of existence.

For Freud, the essence of an illusion is that it springs from a wish. We wish to be immortal the way a poor girl wishes to marry a prince. Man feels helpless, and thus wishes for an all-powerful protector(s). In Freud’s words: “The gods retain the threefold task: they must exorcise  the terrors of nature, they must reconcile men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and they must compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them.”

Nietzsche said that religion is “not wanting to know the truth.” And because religion is not a search for truth, but rather a part of a complex emotional defense system, it does not tolerate open debate and dissent. Its truths are “revealed” and thus can’t be questioned. And the hysteria that religion was meant to contain reveals itself in irrational hostility when dissent is encountered. I remember, a few months after I stopped going to church the priest who was shouting at me, sweating and red in the face, his black robe billowing in the spring wind; right in the middle of the sidewalk of one of the busiest streets in Warsaw, he was shouting at a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl. I now feel sorry for the man,  so threatened by a young girl’s disbelief.

Nevertheless, there are those who see the irrationality of religion as its greatest strength. Otherwise, the collective power of the human intellect would have disposed of it long ago. At his most optimistic, Freud maintained that the voice of the intellect is soft, but it will not rest until it’s been heard. 




RILKE: WE ARE BUILDING GOD

In 1900, when Rilke was twenty-five, he wrote in his diary:

There were times, earlier, when I believed: he [god] is in the wind, but for the most part I didn’t experience him as a unified personality at all. I knew only aspects of god. And many of those aspects were horrifying. For even death was only a component of his being. And he seemed to me unjust in the extreme. He tolerated unspeakable things, permitted cruelty and grief, and was massively indifferent . . .

I argued on his behalf. That his shortcomings, his injustice, and the deficiencies of his power were all matters of development. That he is not finished yet. When was there time for him to have become?

GOD IS NOT FINISHED YET. I can almost go along with it. 

God in the wind? It’s possible that Rilke refers to the Hebrew ruach, which literally means wind, but came to be interpreted as the breath (or spirit) of god. Originally, the same word meant wind and spirit, hinting at archaic animism: wind as a supernatural element, the breath of god. In Slavic languages the word for spirit is related to the word for breath, and inspire used to mean both “inhale” and “blow into” or “breathe into.”

The more interesting part is the positing of god’s incomplete consciousness, also pointed out by Jung in Answer to Job. By developing our consciousness, we are helping god become more conscious, more ethical. God is a projection of human ideals, but in some mysterious way a real being as well. Thanks to human progress, god is in a constant process of becoming. We are building god.

This is called Process Theology. (Are there any Process Theologians in the trenches?) 
An abandoned locomotive in a former Siberian gulag

WE ARE NOT BUILDING GOD; WE ARE BUILDING HUMANITY

It’s not god’s consciousness that needs fuller development; it’s the collective human psyche. We are coming closer and closer to realizing how amazing it is to be human. And we are beginning to acknowledge that we are interconnected with other humans, and with all of life.

In The Sirens of Titan, one of my favorite science-fiction novels, Kurt Vonnegut described the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent. But obviously we don’t want an indifferent god, even though logically that seems to be the only possible deity. Fortunately concern for us exists: we receive it from other human beings. It makes sense to be kind and cultivate friendships.

(Disappointed Reader: I hear you saying: “other human beings” -- is that all? Isn’t it time we came to hold human beings in higher esteem? Because, aside from dogs, that’s our only source of love and help.)

CAN WE REALLY IMAGINE A NON-THEIST GOD?

Spong and many others who want to salvage the divine have suggested that god is not a being; it (this seems the appropriate pronoun) is some transcendent force field, intelligent cosmic energy, or even the “Ground of Being.” Spong prefers the “Ground of Being.” We exist in god as fish live in water, but in a more mysterious way than can be expressed.

Alas, this is so abstract that it makes no sense to me. It seems like desperate  clinging to the concept of god when we don’t need this hypothesis. The universe simply IS. We ARE. We are a part of the universe, or, to make it sound more affectionate, we are the children of the universe. The universe itself is our “ground of being.” Isn’t that enough?

But what about the non-theistic religions of Buddhism and Taoism? They have become tremendously popular -- finally an alternative to a personal god, obviously created by man. Yet those who’ve traveled to East Asia claim that in practice Buddhism and Taoism are theistic and based in ritual and magic; only in pure doctrine can they be said not to be “pure” non-theism.

(I won’t get here into allegation of sex abuse in the Buddhist monasteries. But we do know that as soon as religion becomes institutionalized, it becomes corrupt.)

I am selectively attracted to the Eastern wisdom. I see “being posthumous” as a state of bliss. To me, being posthumous means that my life has already happened -- or at least the essence of that life: writing and teaching -- poems, publications, jobs, anything else that typically goes on a resumé -- as well as great love, dancing with the Prince etc. Now I can enjoy simply being. I don't need to prove anything, achieve anything. Nor am I waiting for the Prince. All that anguish is over.

It’s pretty much the Eastern wisdom,  but with my own personal angle. Now I finally write for pleasure. Imagine! Writing for pleasure, without the torture of trying to publish. Until this stage, writing was a joy only when I was a beginner -- how amazing to have come full circle, though of course at a different level and even different kind of writing.

Actually someone upbraided me once: “You have a duty to publish! You have so much to say. The world needs to hear this. You can’t just write for your own pleasure!” -- not realizing that at the time I wasn’t writing for pleasure; I was writing to prove that I was not a failure, or at least not a TOTAL failure, even if I had little luck publishing.

Such ironies often happen in life: I gained an international audience (India! Saudi Arabia!) only  when I started writing for pleasure (here I remember another person chiming in, when I emailed her I was starting my blog e-dress, “As long as you enjoy doing it; pleasure is the only thing you’ll ever get out of it.”) And it has indeed been an avalanche of pleasure! Not just the pleasure of writing, but also the pleasure of having an audience and getting feedback, and the pleasure of publishing on my own terms.

Arabian sand cat

CLIMBING A VERTICAL MOUNTAIN

Once -- many years before my “posthumous” insight -- I had a dream in which I was climbing an almost vertical mountain. I had the right technique: I knew that if I never rested and if I kept climbing quickly enough, I would not fall off the sheer wall with practically no foothold. To my left was my grandmother Veronika. I didn’t see her face, but I recognized her leather slippers. She was climbing the impossible steepness in parallel with me.

At the same time I could see a beautiful wide road with a pine forest on one side and the sea on the other (my memories of the Baltic). People were walking down that road. I strongly suspected -- in fact I knew! -- that the road led to the same place as the virtually impossible climb up the mountain, but I did not dare stop my struggle. When I was at the top, on the large plateau, I saw that the easy and beautiful road did indeed lead to the same place, and that’s how other people arrived there. Some in fact drove in in large cars! I assumed they had to be Americans.

When I told the dream to a friend, she asked what my grandmother and I had in common. I answered, “A lot of hardship in life.” The dream was transparent in its message. Still, it took me more than a decade to accept the idea that taking the beautiful and easy road was the right choice, rather than persisting in an agonizing effort, akin perhaps to “dying with honor.”

Compounding the problem was having grown up with the Catholic cult of suffering. Suffering was good for you. It was the way to heaven. I am not sure if anyone stated this to me in so many words, or if it was just a conclusion I drew based on reading the lives of the saints. Fortunately I never tried self-flagellating (one of my cousins did). But enough digression!

The point seems to have been by Eastern sages many centuries ago: stop striving and just be. Let happiness happen. The root of “happiness” is “hap” -- luck, or chance, or whatever happens.

In The Idiot, Dostoyevski asks, through the mouth of Prince Myshkin, “Can anyone be unhappy, really?” To the Prince, as to Dostoyevski, just to be alive was miraculous. 

Cezanne Mt. Victoire

BORGES AND IMMORTALITY

Still, I’m quick to concede that Dostoyevski regarded the belief in immortality as a vital part of human culture. True, he was torn with doubt; on Tuesday morning he believed in god and the afterlife; by Wednesday he didn’t. But probably all would agree that the chief attraction of theistic religion is the promise of life everlasting.

Borges has an answer to this in what is perhaps his most extraordinary poem:

INSCRIPTION ON ANY TOMB

Let not the rash marble risk
garrulous breach of omnipotent oblivion,
in many words recalling
name, renown, events, birthplace.
All those glass beads are best left in the dark.
Let not the marble say what men may not.

The essentials of the dead man’s life --
the trembling hope,
the implacable miracle of pain,
the wonder of sensual delight --
will abide forever.

Blindly the willful soul asks for length of days
when its survival is assured by the lives of others.
You yourself are the embodied continuance
of those who did not live into your time
and others who will be (and are) your immortality on earth.

~ Jorge Luis Borges, tr. W.S. Merwin

 

Borges was such a “singular” man (I mean it in the sense of unusual, exceptional -- but the word insists on its most common meaning) that it’s striking how he doesn’t buy “individualism.” He does not insist on his “exceptionalism.” Simply because we are human, we are not isolated individuals; we are humanity. We pass as the water in the river passes, but the river remains.

This realization may have come to Borges in part from his life among books. He realized that his mind is a tapestry of the endless volumes he’s read, influences he’d absorbed. From there it’s only a step to seeing oneself as part of the larger human community across time, and of the human continuum.

His acceptance of the collective mind set Borges apart from those writers in his generation who insisted on the cult of the artist as completely separate and alienated. But Borges communed with great writers across time, and knew he was part of a continuum.

This is not to deny the uniqueness of each of us, something we bring to the universe only once. “There will never be another you.” In the Western culture in particular, everyone has had at least moments of feeling so different from others that loneliness threatens to overwhelm: no one really knows me, so how can they love the “real me.” Never mind that the “real me” is so elusive, so . . . unreal. Even our memories are not fully ours, but a collage of we absorbed in all kinds of ways, including books and movies.

If we were words, each person would be an oxymoron: a collective individual. A single individual has no meaning apart from his social context. As Christian Wiman said, “Experience means nothing if it does not mean beyond itself: we mean nothing unless and until our hard-won meanings are internalized and catalyzed within the lives of others.”

As Borges reminds us: others are and will be our immortality, here on earth.

THE IMMORTALITY OF INFLUENCE

Charles Sherman: "Cascading Continua"

Often I Am Permitted

to Return to a Meadow

in blue-green Carpathia, just to hear

a rooster crow –

then the echo – and reply – and far away,

as if hung in high blue air,

another pure return –

an echo for each meadow,

in a widening ring.

The echo of all

the roosters I heard

in those Carpathian summers still

travels from hill to hill –

by now it has reached Krakow,

bending around the blue-green

copper domes and tombs of kings,

where the Vistula embraces

the city like shining laughter,

like a gleaming wheel.

And the echo travels

as starlight can travel

for a thousand years –

and we wish on a dead star

that still guides us here.

So the echoes of us roll

in a widening ring –

of the song we sang,

and thought

that we were not heard.

~ Oriana © 2011

I am back from Los Angeles, where I attended an interfaith panel discussion on the afterlife. The most important thing I carried away from it was the concept of the "immortality of influence," a term used by Rabbi Steve. There was also Rabbi Amy, who moderated the discussion. Father Kidney and Reverend Betsy represented the progressive Christian outlook (these are not made-up names; this is how the panelists were addressed).

Father Kidney said, “We derive our belief in the afterlife from the fact [sic] that Jesus rose from the dead. Because of his resurrection, we know that there is no death.” Reverend Betsy seconded that. I thought the rabbis would roll their eyes, but they had perfect self-control. (A friend later remarked, “We have equally powerful evidence that frogs, when kissed, turn into princes.”)

The two rabbis made modern liberal Judaism sound much like secular humanism. Talk of the supernatural is avoided. The dying are not told that they are going to heaven. What counts is the earthly life, up to the last conscious moment. “We don’t know what happens later,” both rabbis agreed. Instead, the dying are told of the heritage of family love they are leaving in this world and any other gifts that they are bestowing – and of the "immortality of influence," i.e. we can’t even know all the ways in which we touched others. It might be a casual remark, a smile, a small action that, unknown to us, we performed just at the right time to have a deep impact on someone’s life.

The interfaith panel on the afterlife was fun in all kinds of ways. After Father Kidney said, “I can’t prove it to you scientifically or mathematically – that’s why we BELIEVE,” Rabbi Amy, in her high heels, back-split skirt and a stylish yarmulke, said, “When I was in training, my rabbi told me not to believe anything, only go by my personal experience. So if you ask me if God exists, I have to say I don’t know.” Honest, yes, but did she have to shock Father Kidney and Reverend Betsy this way? Rabbi Steve said he was certain there was something beyond the body, but wouldn’t commit himself any further.

Somehow not surprisingly, the debate ended with a member of the audience who stood up and said, “I am a physician and I don’t believe we’re going anywhere.”

The discussion took place in the pretty spectacular Corpus Christi church in Pacific Palisades, round like a UFO and gleaming with modernity(never mind the idea that a church is supposed to be built on the plan of the cross – after Vatican II, everything goes). The sign over a faucet that said “Holy water for home use” was discreetly hidden across the women’s restroom. Father Kidney complained that ten of the original stations of the cross (wooden carvings – this is rare) got stolen, or in any case “disappeared.” Also, this was actually the first time I learned that a candle is equivalent to prayer, and the candle you light is doing the praying (how did I miss that? It would have spared me all kinds of time in my childhood and early teens – I left the church at 14).

Overall, however, I am very glad to have attended this “interfaith panel.” One member of the audience objected that these were not three different religions but only different forms of one religion. Historically, that is essentially correct. In my view, however, the two humanistic rabbis stood apart from the Catholic priest and the Protestant minister. Rather than speak about heaven, the rabbis agreed that the important thing is the legacy we leave to the living. The meaning of life lies primarily in how touch the lives of others. Our influence will live on in ways we can’t even imagine. We can try to make sure that this influence –even if mostly anonymous – is positive.

This fits in well with my notion of contributing to the collective psyche. Since I am not a famous writer, I can’t expect my contribution to be more than a droplet in an ocean. But I do want my droplet to shine.

II. PARADISE NOW

Artist: John Shakur Radzikowski

I deeply believe that we choose eternity while in this world,
that is, it is here and now that we build and create eternity.
And that which we will find later is that which
we were capable of finding here and now.
If we have not found it here, then we will not be able to find it later.

~ Sophia Andresen, Portuguese poet and writer

**

Rilke did not believe in “belief.”

Belief! – there is no such thing, I almost said. There is only – love. The forcing of the heart to hold this and that for true, which we commonly call belief, makes no sense. First one has to find God somewhere, experience him as so infinitely, so utterly, so enormously present . . . But for belief, that compulsion to God, there is no room where one has begun with the discovery of God, in which there is then no stopping any more . . .

                                           ~ Selected Letters, 275-6

Thus, Rilke’s argument is basically the same as that of Rabbi Amy: don’t force yourself to believe anything; go by your own experience. Rilke’s wording, however, helped me realize that I am an atheist only in regard to the Judeo-Christian god – as creator and judge dealing out punishments and rewards, especially in the afterlife; as a “king of the world,” violating the laws of nature, subject to temper tantrums and malevolent moods, the “Old Blood Bath,” as a friend calls him, mostly cruel and archaic.

Michelangelo's god-image:
"I create good, I create evil; I am the Lord" 

Alas, for all its message of forgiveness, Christianity stinks of blood sacrifice, and just can’t break away from the original cruelty (though I admire the attempt). In practice, the cruel, angry, punitive god-the-father prevails over Christ’s mercy even in Christianity, though lately the liberal denominations have been making a frantic effort to dissociate themselves from the archaic, by emphasizing the “holy spirit.” Christ is supposed to return as the Judge who’ll divide the saved from those damned to eternal fire, but the third person of the Trinity is entirely devoid of any punitive streak. It is indeed “as harmless as a dove.”

(I need to acknowledge here the observation that the hell of unending torment is a Christian rather than a Judaic concept. Judaism always laid emphasis on earthly life.)

On the other hand, if god is defined as “that which you love most,” then I have no problem. Of course then there is the question if this term, corrupted and defiled by history and politics, is needed at all. Whether the term is used or not, “that which you love most” presents no problem at all in terms of leading a joyful, fulfilling life. So what if it must end. We can act out of love, or out of fear. I’m not going to drop what I love doing and start praying the rosary, which always ended in a bored stupor.

And of course then god becomes “it.” If anyone prefers the capital letter to indicate reverence, that’s fine with me too: let it be the great It.

Let me quote again Rilke, on how death (especially when viewed without expectations of going to a “better place”) forces us to take life seriously, to take the risks worth taking.

Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love . . .  Life always says Yes and No simultaneously. Death . . . is the true Yea-sayer. It stands before eternity and says only: Yes.

III. AND NOW THOUSANDS OF NEW YORK INTELLECTUALS HAVE NOTHING TO BELIEVE IN.

The title of this section comes from something said to me at Yaddo (an art colony) in the early nineties. The fall of the Berlin Wall was still a relatively recent event, and I mentioned it at the table. A woman poet from New York became distressed and lamented, “Yes, and now thousands of New York intellectuals have nothing to believe in.”

I no longer remember what I replied – probably something at least a tad sarcastic. But deep down, for all the shallowness and ignorance of the New York Marxist intellectuals, I felt some empathy with the lament. I remember my own youthful desire to give myself to something UTTERLY. The death of god was a loss. It was sad to feel, at fourteen, that the church was the tomb of a dead god with nothing to give me anymore. (I specifically remember Confirmation as the beginning of the end: the grumpy old bishop conveyed no sense of the sacred; administering the supposed sacrament was just another irritating chore). 

The emotional flatness came before my intellect supplied reasons. It was as if the emotional brain matured first, before the intellect had a chance to whisper, “Look at the similarity of mythological motifs – isn’t this like believing in Zeus?”). (As for the evolution of religion, I recommend, over and over, Robert Wright’s brilliant The Evolution of God.)

Recently, reading a biography of Lenin, much to my surprise I found myself completely envious of pre-revolutionary Lenin, of his absolute dedication. I could feel his ecstasies, even if the only member of the sparse revolutionary group whose attendance at meetings could be counted on was the police informer. There is a superhuman energy that comes from such focus, an astonishing courage. His absolute faith in his mission was completely misguided, but his courage was breath-taking. I know I will be completely envious of young Trotsky (I’ve just ordered a biography that I know is hostile to him; it won’t matter one bit; Trotsky’s heroic dedication will shine through).

Of course I realize that these men became prisoners of the Idea and turned into monsters who assumed that the end justifies the means. I know they have blood on their hands – in fact past the elbows. I condemn their embrace of mass murder as allowable in the name of a noble future. But I also know that the hunger for ideals, for being able to believe in something, having something to live for, is a great human hunger, sometimes the greatest. In some of us, that hunger for being dedicated to something comes ahead of even the need to be loved or to love and nurture others (I point that out as a woman who is speaking from experience, since it’s been suggested that nothing is as important to a woman as erotic and maternal love; isn’t love “a woman’s whole existence”?).

But here lies a tragedy: every ideal, once an attempt is made to put it into practice, becomes corrupt and/or wrecked on the rocks of reality. Ideals are oversimplifications; reality is extremely complex. Even being a dedicated artist has those rocks of reality in it, the unintentional hurting of others simply because you love your art more. And what about being an intellectual? Is there anyone I loved more than I love books? (OK, my father, BEFORE I myself could read; he read to me at bedtime.)

Books, that virtual paradise … But maybe we shouldn’t be so “hung-up” on reality, life’s elusive shadow stumbling over itself. Indeed, what is truth? Once I had a humbling experience of going to a Jungian lecture on “Encountering the Ultimate Other” (the title was irresistible and drew a crowd of educated agnostics). Well, it turned out to be New Age fantasies of the astral world and how beautiful and wonderful it is (“the flowers here are nothing compared with the astral flowers”).

No evidence was presented for the existence of this paradise – the whole lecture was simply pure assertion. In spite of my embarrassment about even being present at the event, that night I slept wonderfully. My theory is that having heard so many positive statements had an effect on my neurochemistry, regardless of the fact that intellectually it was all a pile of doo-doo taller than any Gothic cathedral (even the Notre Dame of Amiens). And the audience, mostly PhD’s, walked out with blissful light in their faces, again showing that “truth value” has nothing to do with it . . . 

If I were to write a self-help book, it would be loaded with feel-good words. Content is basically irrelevant; you want to bliss out the reader (which reminds me: haven’t I once paid a ridiculous fee for a poetry conference during which I was told to “let go of the idea of content”?). I’m not planning to write any such meaningless but benevolent book, but once in a while a feel-good effect results from some words I use in a poem. It’s gratifying to see smiles blossom on the listeners’ faces, even if I never promise them astral flowers, only mountain meadows.  

Addendum, March 1, 2012

In the San Diego Reader of Feb 23, 2012, in the Sheep and Goats column there is an interview with Rabbi Yael Ridberg. She is asked, “Where do you go where you die?” She replies: “I believe a person’s soul goes into the lives with whom he or she came into contact.” 

 

This is a lovely answer, but it seems to me that it might contain a residue of seeing the soul as a thing, even if an immaterial thing. If the soul is a process, a verb rather than a noun, then the soul goes into other lives while we interact with a particular person. It’s not a dispersal that happens at the point of death.

Rabbi Steven said something along the same lines: at the point of death, we return all the love that’s been given to us. Love has to be recycled; it mustn't be lost. Again, that sounds lovely, but I think that happens throughout a person’s life. And unfortunately, the pain that we’ve received also gets “recycled,” until we become aware of the chain reaction and act so as to break the chain, i.e. do not return evil for evil, but in the highest case, return good for evil, possibly transforming another person and making it a better world, one small step at a time.

I suspect it’s inevitable that traditional beliefs will die, and we will come to see this life as our paradise – if we choose to make it so. Liberal Judaism and liberal Christianity are already difficult to tell from secular humanism – I see that as a wonderful development. If life right here on earth is already reasonably good, the longing for paradise in the hereafter inevitably grows less intense. Barring a sudden reversal to more hardship, we will eventually let go of expecting to go to a “better place.” We can then fully concentrate on creating a better place right here. Smile at someone; plant a tree; pick up a piece of litter. Small things accumulate, and their influence persists. And counselors who come to visit the dying will not be telling them about what’s to come, whether that’s phrased as “the astral world” or “heaven.” Instead, they’ll say, “Look at all the good things you have done. That goodness will live on.”

Debby:

The psychiatrist Irvin Yalom wrote a book called STARING AT THE SUN, about death anxiety. What your clergymen/women referred to as "The Immortality of Influence," he referred to as "the ripple effect." i.e., that everything we do while alive ripples out like a stone thrown in a pond and touches many other lives, including future generations, in ways we cannot know or appreciate while we are alive.

Oriana:

I love the “ripple effect.” It's actually a more accessible way of stating it. The power of the right image that becomes metaphor. And yes, it's marvelously consoling to think we do have that "ripple effect." And it's a moral challenge as well.

Funny, decades ago I was hoping I'd find some kind of congenial faith as I get older. Instead, I became a happy atheist. The ripple effect of everything we do has just made me even more happy. As for the mistakes we made, words we shouldn’t have said – we can correct that, usually.

   

Hyacinth:

Provocative. My first thought was that all the stories we learned and the sense of a higher being probably didn’t do us harm. We have a solid grounding in the literature and stories of the bible. And there is much wisdom there. My grandchildren were, many of them, raised with no concept of anything bigger than parents and themselves and I’m not sure that is all good. I doubted early on as well but never put it into words. As I said, I quit Sunday School at three! but attended services for years as my mother played the organ and we loved the music.

Oriana:

I too loved the organ music, the priests’ splendidly embroidered vestments, and the Latin liturgy. Still, to some extent I was harmed by the Catholic church. The fixation on sin and hell were the harmful part, and, after puberty and the experience of my first timid erotic fantasies and first love, the church’s obsession with sex as the main sin. That certainly didn’t help my mental health, especially since I was already an anxious, over-responsible child who felt “not OK” practically all the time. The church added to that torment and further lowered my already low self-esteem. Now there were also “impure thoughts” to worry about and bring up in confession.

On the positive side, it would be more difficult to understand some of literature without the background of Christianity. Dante would probably be of no interest.

My parents would have brought me up as an atheist except for my grandmother, who would have made their life impossible if they did. So it was her intimidation power that prevailed. I wonder what kind of person I would have turned out without the Catholic background (the concept and images of hellfire cannot be deleted; the priests know that and chortle with joy, thinking “Once a Catholic, always a Catholic”).

I think I would have still visited churches out of curiosity, and enjoyed them as architecture and meditative space. The time spent in church and on prayers at home – that would have been used differently. I think I would have grown up as a healthier and more self-confident child without Catholicism. My self-image would not have been that of a hopeless sinner who can’t go for much more than a week without committing a sin and thus falling out of the state of grace – which meant the likelihood of ending up in hell should I die a sudden death (the nun told us not to count on the availability of confession – after all a child could get run over by a truck, “and guess where your soul would go?”)

Now the church has gone very soft and tells children, "Remember that Jesus loves you." That was NEVER said to us. Not once. Children were not coddled by nuns and priests back then; they were emotionally terrorized. We were not treated as innocents, but as sinners. God was an invisible something/someone to fear and appease with confessions and masses and prayers, chest-beating and acts of contrition.

Virgin Mary (in Polish most often called Matka Boska, meaning Mother of God or Divine Mother; the emphasis was on “mother”) was more connected with affection, and I felt affection for her. I never assumed she cared for me, but I had a naive expectation that if I prayed to her, she might hear the prayer, since she was said to be pure mercy and unconditional love; words like judgment and punishment were never used about Mary. “Even if you are the worst of sinners, you can always pray to Mary.” She got the most prayers and candles. All the "miraculous icons" I remember were Mary’s icons.

I’ve met people who were brought up without religion, and they all struck me as decent, normal persons. They seemed neither more self-involved nor less happy than a typical church-goer, and acknowledged “something bigger,” be it nature or humanity or both. It’s hard to look at the ocean or the stars and not see something bigger than oneself, entirely without the benefit of religious education. In fact, in my Catholic years I was so busy adding up my sins that the beauty of the world did not register as intensely as it did later, without the burden of worrying about sin and hell.

Below is a poem of mine that touches on the hellfire part of old-style Catholicism, and on my sense of the sacred that is now more nature-related.

DYNGUS: EASTER MONDAY

Father always managed to splash me,

shouting, Shmingus-dyngus!

laughing as I’d run, shaking off

a trail of drops. The Church frowned

on the puddles of this springtime

baptism, taught me I was a sinner.

in the town where I was born,

a baroque naked angel

held golden scales to weigh

good deeds against sin.

Heaven was up, hell was down.

the soul huddled like a chilled bird.

My mother said, “There is no hell.

God wouldn’t be so cruel.”

At ten I was aghast at her heresy:

hell was where my mother was going.

*

At fourteen I said, “If God exists,

let him strike me with lightning.”

Waited, shaking in terror.

For five minutes I could hardly

breathe. Pigeons cooed, fragile sunlight

redeemed the rain-streaked masonry.

I began to walk fast, away

from that first-communion girl,

lilacs in her arms, moist and heavy,

veins crossing the silk of leaves.

*

Beyond an ocean of baroque clouds,

that country still exists. Other children

pick up yellow pebbles

on a Baltic beach, believing it’s amber.

Another girl walks down the black

soot-eaten factory streets in Łódź;

the giant rhythm of the looms

closes around the shuttle of her body.

Another child wakes on Easter Monday,

her father hidden in the kitchen,

the water in the basin

dancing with impatient sheen.

*

My cat wakes me up at dawn 

to the liturgy of clouds

rimmed with narrow gold.

I wade in the gathering

light of resurrection. 

In the yard, spires of lilacs.

I agree with a chittering bird:

it is only practical to be happy.

Again I will climb

the same mountain,

follow the bleached star

of dry yucca where the trail

sharply turns. I agree once more

to the mortal price of love.

At dusk I return to Mozart,

my one-candle vespers.

The notes shape a brief heaven.

Fog erases the pine-dark hills.

**

Last year in Vermont, I told Adam Zagajewski the story of how I waited to be struck with lightning for my blasphemy, and he replied, in his expressionless way that worked very well in this situation, “Sometimes there is a delay.”

Nevertheless, back in that moment, at fourteen, I was willing to die and suffer in hell for eternity for daring to think on my own. I was willing to be sent into eternal torment rather than worship a cruel god who created hell. I still had lingering belief, and for the first minute or so I fully expected to be struck by lightning. I stood there, shaking, awaiting electrocution. I see this as the moment of the greatest courage in my life -- ironically, being literally willing to die for my beliefs, and furthermore, to be tortured forever for my beliefs. Shaking but unbowed, because this god more cruel than Hitler was not worthy of worship.

But after five minutes or so, the remnant belief was gone. I stopped shaking and walked on, a fierce little independent thinker and not a sinner. The world looked radiant around me: the trees in gold-green first leaf, the grass full of tiny daisies, the city I loved.

**

Hyacinth:

The church I was raised in was not fire and brimstone, but when I married we changed to Southern Baptist, and they are the worst. When my children were grown, I apologized to them for having brought them up with the idea of a cruel God. Also, the idea of blood sacrifice always bothered me.

Oriana:

The more liberal wing of Christianity has already pretty much ceased to mention hell; practically everyone goes to heaven (including Jews and Buddhists). But eventually, I predict, even heaven will no longer be mentioned, and the whole notion of the afterlife will be retired into polite silence. As in liberal Judaism, which does not strike as different from secular humanism except for the ethnic element, the emphasis will shift to how best to live our life on earth.

In Polish, as in many other languages, the word for heaven is the same as the word for sky, so it’s pretty impossible to imagine heaven as something other than the sky, always with picturesque clouds. Ultimately, this image becomes just too infantile to take seriously. Yet no other image has been proposed, except the New Age concept of the astral world where we need only think about something, and, as promised in The Secret,  our desire is fulfilled. Thus, in the astral world, if we think of a favorite opera, soon we are singing its arias better than any earthly singer. (God is usually not mentioned, only the instant fulfillment of desires.) This is extremely attractive, but no proof of the astral world is ever offered, unless the “visions of certain highly evolved mystics” (whose names are not disclosed).

But even as hell falls into disuse, Christianity has another obstacle to overcome, and that’s the founding dogma that Jesus died for our sins. This “blood ransom” is the price of our entrance to heaven (otherwise we’d all go to hell, where we belong because of our sinful human nature, also known as “total depravity”). The idea is archaic and morally repugnant. It has to go, or Christianity will look more and more archaic and irrelevant.

The Catholic mass evolved from the ancient Hebrew ritual animal sacrifice in the Jerusalem Temple. Few Catholics know about this, and those who know may say, yes, but isn’t it wonderful that now we don’t kill any animals at the altar, but have substituted a wafer and wine? Yes, but the doctrine of trans-substantiation requires Catholics to believe that the wafer and wine are LITERALLY transformed into flesh and blood. Wars were once waged over this, and thousands were slaughtered because they believed that the wafer and wine became actual flesh and blood, or else they believed that the transformation was only symbolic. Not counting the Crusades, those wars and massacres (and the earlier mass slaughter of the Gnostics) took place in Europe; that’s why the Europeans are more likely than Americans to say that religion has caused more harm than good.

True, the wars are in the past; no one is publically encouraged anymore to kill in the name of Christ. It could be argued that nowadays most people go to church or temple for social or sentimental reasons (weddings and funerals, and also childcare), and no longer pay attention to the beliefs are supposed to go with their official religion. Or they may mouth the doctrine that “Jesus died for our sins” without thinking. That is probably true of the “silent majority” of church members. But there is an annoying noisy minority who loudly insist on hellfire and the necessity of being rinsed in the “blood of the lamb.” Nothing short of a blood sacrifice of the highest order (his own son) could possibly appease their angry, vengeful deity. And no, being a good person doesn’t mean anything; unless you accept the doctrine that Jesus died for your sins, you become fodder for hellfire.

Tent revival meetings are still being held in the South. When I was a visiting poet in Arkansas, I read a leaflet advertising one such tent revival. Every sentence dripped with hate and threats of hell, all in the name of sweet Jesus. It may be several decades before this kind of toxic Christianity is finally gone from the face of the earth. I realize this statement is optimistic; the belief in a punitive deity is propagated by intimidation, starting in early childhood. This intimidation, often combined with religiously condoned physical abuse (“don’t spare the rod”), is hard (but not impossible) to overcome.

Nevertheless, there has been immense progress. Catholics and Protestants no longer massacre one another – not even in Northern Ireland. I can’t speak about Islam, but progressive Christianity has become more and more inclusive, even showing a desire for fusion with at least some elements of the Eastern tradition. Since every religion I’m familiar with has progressed by borrowing from other sources, I think the world may eventually become part secular and part religious – but I think the religions of the future are more likely to be benign. I agree with Robert Wright (The Evolution of God) that the overall progress has been in the right direction: less and less religious violence and more emphasis on kindness rather than blind faith. 

Scott:

As always, your posts are great reading to ponder over. Your mention of interfaith brings to mind that I would love to hear a panel discussion between a Sufi, Quaker and Zen adherent and see where things shake out! That is one of the huge attractions( one of so many) of  Moby Dick in that you had so many diverse beliefs melded on the Pequod; from the Quaker Starbuck to Quequeg’s pagan South Sea religion  and all in between, Melville probed them all in one fashion or another. Your experience with the Catholic church had obviously a profound impact on your life and I am curious if in your poetic circles you have come across Catholic poets who are quite happy and devout in their beliefs.

I came to poetry rather late in life and it has struck me many times how many prominent poets, who were not brought up in it, came to Catholicism and embraced it, like the New Zealand poet James K Baxter (educated in Quaker schools), G K Chesterton, the prolific English poet and apologist, as well as Roy Campbell, the South African born man of letters. Here in the U.S. Allen Tate and Robert Lowell too came to it late in life (I believe both abandoned it as well); of course there are many others but those five come to mind as poets whose work I particularly enjoy.

The Portuguese poet you mentioned, Andresen, also was said to have remained a devout Catholic her whole life (would love to read her biography; her love of the sea and Greek myth mirror mine) and the French poet, Charles Peguy, has long fascinated me. A devout agnostic and socialist, he turned to a mystical Catholicism, though he never took the sacraments, oddly enough, and was shot in the head in battle during the first days of WWI; a great quote by him is the following

Homer is new and fresh this morning, and nothing, perhaps, so old and tired as this morning's newspaper.

Funny too that Peguy, Baxter and Andresen were all great admirers of Greek myth; it brings to mind Camoes fantastic blending of Christian symbolism and Greek myth in his epic, 'The Lusiads.' (have always wondered how that book got past the Catholic censors in the 16th century!) And back to 'Moby Dick' (as you know, for me all roads lead  back to the Pequod), the Cuban literary critic Jose Feo maintained that a Catholic could not have created a mad character like Ahab, rooted as he was in American Calvinism. Allen Tate asserted as well that the South could have won its independence had the region had one dominant faith like Catholicism instead of the diverse Protestant denominations that were the fabric of the old South( the “Christ-haunted South” as the Catholic writer Flannery O'Conner called it). I would be interested to read a study of Catholicism and poetry where the faith is discussed in detail on how it affected the poets craft and those cases too, like Lowell, who abandoned it and the impact it had.

Oriana:

One member of the audience said, “What we have here is not three religions, but one – each borrowing from the others.” In my written comments, I put down, “Next time, bring in a Buddhist and an atheist” (wouldn’t it have been fantastic to have had Hitchens present – he was too near death, of course, but imagine his kind of brilliance interacting with the considerable intelligence of the two rabbis; on further thought, those rabbis were not really theists in the conventional sense; I don’t think conventional religion attracts the best minds anymore; we’ll never have another Augustine or Thomas Aquinas; it’s a safe guess that if Hitchens happened to have been born during the Middle Ages, he’d have likely become a “doctor of the church”).

In my circle there are some Buddhists and eclectic New-Age believers (e.g. they believe in past lives and a “friendly universe” that’s responsive to their personal thoughts and desires; as one said, “If you are friendly toward the universe, it will be friendly to you”; another said, “I believe only those things that make me happy.”). I’ve come across only one Catholic poet. She converted in adulthood and seems to be getting some emotional nourishment from the church, though even she sees it as a dilapidated shell around the radiance. We are distant friends at best. I can’t feel close to anyone who feels s/he has THE answer; s/he is not helping me carry the burden of the questions. But that’s a theoretical statement, since such people generally don’t even come close to me, so there is no heart-to-heart conversation (in which perhaps their doubts and seeking rather than finding would come to the surface).

By the way, that poet (I’m not sure if she’d care to be labeled a “Catholic poet”) made the interesting observation that the badness of most religious poetry comes from the “poverty of the language of religion” (her phrasing). Good poems of those poets who are publically religious tend to praise the beauty of the earth. They love rivers and meadows, the birds and even the insects. Often it’s a lost childhood paradise. Milosz is a perfect example of that. Rilke shifted from his youthful mysticism of “we are building God” to love for the earth.

Most poets I know were raised in a religion that they left in adolescence or young adulthood. Catholicism definitely had an impact on me, and leaving the church meant losing some things I loved – the poetics of it, including the pillar-shaking organ music (I loved aggressive organists who really let go). As I say elsewhere in this post, that breaking away was my moment of greatest courage. Afterwards, when I stopped shaking with terror, I experienced a beautiful sense of freedom, like tossing off heavy and constraining winter clothes – springtime! A slight nostalgia came later, but it was never the intense, painful nostalgia that I felt for Poland. I cried over the loss of my homeland (the first two years are the hardest; I call them the “wet pillowcase years”); I never shed a tear over the loss of Catholicism. The gain of freedom outweighed any sense of loss.

An interesting observation about Captain Ahab being rooted in American Calvinism; that’s probably true. Would a Catholic South had won the Civil War? I doubt it. The South was united enough – not by religion, but by the supremely un-Christian belief that slavery was morally justified. (By the way, Nazi soldiers had Gott mit uns – “God is with us” on their belt buckles – maybe the saddest example of how religion can be perverted)

As for the blending of Christian elements with classical mythology in poets such as Dante and Milton, it seems that to them classical mythology was profoundly real. As an example of this, I strongly recommend Ciardi’s translation of the 26^th Canto of the Inferno, the Ulysses canto. Milton is another example of a poet who fuses Greek mythology with Christianity. Characters such as Hercules were seen as real people who lived long ago. Our modern concept of a myth was born only in the nineteenth century, when mythology became a field of scholarly study. That’s also when scholars started the quest for the “historical Jesus,” trying to separate myth from the probable reality (e.g. most likely Jesus was born in Nazareth and not in Bethlehem).

Charles:

“Immortality of influence” – this is especially true of rich art collectors. They leave their legacy as great collectors of fine art.

Oriana:

And it’s great art that is given a degree of immortality thanks to those rich collectors.  It always takes at least one other person – and usually many others – for great work to be accomplished and, later, preserved.  

Non omnis moriar – “not all of me will die.”  Not to die wholly, to leave behind something of great value, has always been the dream of creative people. But any life that is well lived is bound to leave a legacy that is rich beyond our knowing.

I was most terrified of death when I was young. Later, though I did not yet have the phrase “immortality of influence,” I came to realize that we are collective beings; we influence one another, and the echoes go on and on. We contribute to the collective psyche. It is our moral duty to contribute joy, goodness, enlightenment. Not that we need to be particularly conscious of this contribution. As long as we are not timid and reach for the best in life, the echoes start traveling. 

The City of Gold, Revelation 21:18

Would anyone actually want to live in the City of Gold (with the walls of jasper, and pearly gates)?  (Btw, it looks very modern . . .)