Wrestling with Religion

       The most obvious meaning of eternity (if not the current pandemic) is one-damn-thing-after-another. I'll call this Eternity-1, one tick of an imperishable clock and then another ad infinitum. This makes sense in closeup, looking at moment such as death. But if we back off and keep on backing--and backing and backing up more and more--we begin to see why Aristotle doubted that actual infinities exist. Some concepts, of course, don't impose limits. The future, as far as we know, has no definite end-point, but time may not be endless. Infinite doesn't follow from indefinite .   Suppose we define A as the age of the universe in years--over 13 billion--and run a chain of calculations. Let the square of A equal B, the square of B equal C, and so forth. Keep calculating, using A' after you reach Z, A'' after you reach Z', and so forth. Fill a million libraries the size of the solar system with books of calculations (nearly all containing nothing...

     My wife noticed long ago that I get defensive in situations where “everybody else” knows the rules and I don’t. I have painful memories of being forced to play softball in school. Other boys’ fathers taught them how to swing and throw, but I struck out like clockwork and threw like a girl. As a naive, sheltered introvert, maybe with a whisper of Asperger’s (a syndrome one of my sons developed full-blown), I’ve often run into similar situations. This may explain my foredoomed continuing education program, a futile crusade to learn the Rules of Everything.      To rephrase Scarlet O’Hara, “As God is my witness, I’ll never be naive again.”      In the midst of writing the essay on shape-note hymns about Heaven, I read an essay by Bishop Steven Charleston as part of Education for Ministry, a light-weight equivalent of Episcopalian seminary, and hit another snag of not knowing the rules. I’d be slow to contradict a man with Charleston...

     When I moved to Bowling Green, Kentucky, and lost my Alabama music connections, I posted my phone number on a bulletin board in a music store. Years later, when the paper must have been yellowed, an old country fellow contacted me—an ironic twinkle in his eye at the door of my historic downtown house as if he recognized our mismatch but was determined to play the game out. It was less about economic class—he did own land—than culture and education. I was a town boy--from a university town at that--and he was pure country. I often visited grandparents deep in the country, so it’s in my bones, but my professorial dialect—whitewashed to standard American—belies it. The old boy proudly held the whip hand, auditioning me, and I foolishly sang an original on the theme of Faust, my accent reverting as it does when I sing country. Mention my soul to the devil. I might want to make an exchange. Mention my soul to the devil, But don’t tell him my name. I migh...

Albert Camus wrote "Neither Victims nor Executioners" in the aftermath of WWII, Europe was still in ruins and the Cold War had already emerged between the American and Soviet empires. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, atomic war seemed the only alternative to a humane peace. A year before, as a veteran of the Resistance against the Nazis, he had written, "We are in a world in which we must choose too be either victim or executioner--there is no other choice" (p. 257). In late 1946, he saw both alternatives as unacceptably destructive.  Implicit in his article is the Hegelian dialectic, the method of resolving contradictory opposites in a synthesis that preserves the essential aims of both. People in the 20th century, Camus wrote, had lost faith in the possibility of eliciting humane behavior by communicating with each other. Instead, inflexible ideologies on all sides justified cruelty for abstract good, real bloodshed for unreal expectations. The outcome was a ce...

Thirty years ago I visited the old Museum of Modern art in New York with my lifelong best friend, Robert Stacy, the one I lost my religion with some thirty years before. That afternoon in the cafe-basement of the MOMA, our talk drifted to religion. I'd been a Catholic for fifteen years even though the bulk of Christian mythology and theology remained implausible to me. I was in a state of befuddled openness, and he reminded me of the disappointed idealism of of our seventeenth year, our shifting of the burden of proof onto God.        A poem based on this conversation, "The Papa Sonnets," was so personal I never submitted it for publication (I've published over a hundred and submitted more), the sole copy buried in stacks of yellowing manuscripts. The speaker in the poem caricatures of my friend as a surrogate for myself, and the tone is satirical. I emailed a copy to him, and he, of course, recognized "the substitution or exchange of My Father who art in H...

The God of orthodox theology has signified since Augustine a transcendently empty signifier--not another being, but Being, even if personally accessible. He is ultimately inherently incomprehensible. The God-idea, transcending human understanding, is definable in terms of what He is not, such as weak, local, divided, or ignorant. So what does it mean to negate an incomprehensible negation?       Theologians allow God to be imagined in analogical terms, in metaphors and other figures. It was settled in the early centuries of Christian theology that the Father exists beyond limits of time and space, so anthropomorphic language—such as His walking in the Garden, becoming angry, sitting on a throne, taking pity, smelling sacrifices, or having gender—must all be analogical, referring to eternal, changeless traits such as absolute justice and power. The term God signs a signifier transcending all human confirmation or denial, a belief that insulates itself from all id...