Wrestling with Religion

          Sometimes I feel a sinking helplessness and doom, like a melting ice cube on a sidewalk. The feeling is accurate, of course. I am melting, everybody is, but I usually I ignore it. When don't, the impulse is to raise my eyes and whisper to God. There's nobody else to whisper to. A cardiologist recently installed stents, giving me (with luck) more years of vitality, but that merely returns my cube to the expected melt rate before his diagnosis. Nobody I know is fifteen years my senior. There's only so much that a cardiologist (or any mortal) can do about the melting. My whispered call to God and the sinking impulse behind it suggest Friedrich Schleiermacher's definition of piety as "an immediate feeling of absolute dependence," consciousness of our finitude in relation to God ( Christian Faith §33), but it feels as much like carnal despair as piety. Anyway, the whole notion of verticality is absurd. Looking up is honorific, but how is God over ...

  Last night, I played an audio book on centering prayer . I was sitting fully relaxed, as instructed, when the narrator began the process of selecting a mantra and innocently suggested that I might start by calling up my image of God. I was fully relaxed, unguarded, open to impulse, and a shocking thing happened--an eruption of vague but nasty impressions. A scowling sin-smiting Prig-in-the-sky. The fearful One. Who'd want to get any closer than absolutely necessary to him ? I suffered what I already knew, emerging like projectile vomit, a disgust with a God-image that I'd learned as a child and can't forget, like PTSD from a trigger event. I know that the ugly, threatening face in my subconscious is not what the devout mean by the word--at least not any devout that I respect--certainly not what writers on centering prayer mean. Cynthia Bourgeault describes the object of such prayer as "that invisible but always present Origin of all that exists" (p. 6), certa...

From a ceramic by David Burnham Smith I wrote these some sixty years ago--these and more, yellow papers on a high bookshelf--but these persist in memory like childhood songs. The Incredulous Vrog The incredulous Vrog emerged from the mist, rubbed his belly and looked around. As was his prerog- ative, he had desist- ed from thoughts of the mist-covered ground. For he walked on firm fog (in his language earth) and the earth, in earth's terms, he called fog. When I said to the the Vrog, "Sir, you need a rebirth," "Up yours too!" said the petulant Vrog.          Night Journey I rode a ketchup bottle to the exosphere and met a madman sitting on a stone. I tipped the cap and queried him, "What are you doing here unsupported in an exospheric zone?" He closed his eyes and looked at me and said, "Good morning, Sam. I'm waiting for the freezing of the moon. The midnight bus to Birmingham should be through very soon." The earth was half a dream a...

  Echo hears the truth.           I live in a bubble bounded by walls and a moving horizon, limited within those bounds to what I've focused on and remembered. Besides whatever intuitions may be hard-wired in the human mind (and research doesn't allow dismissing that), I know nothing but what I have seen, heard, tasted. smelled and touched.                So how do I know that the earth circles the sun or that China exists? How did I acquire the furniture of my mental world? Most of it is a gift from authority. It comes from a parent, a teacher, an expert, a magazine, a book, a signpost, a television screen, a friend, or a website. Some of these I believe, some I doubt but don't wholly dismiss, and some I dismiss as disinformation. My Ph.D. may have conditioned me to think more critically than most people, but my information-sorting still runs on mostly on automatic. I annoy friends with detailed analysis, but I'd fal...