Wrestling with Religion

Hugh Bentley     A voice speaks to Abraham with such authority that he feels obliged to kill his only son. Moses is called by a talking bush. Ezekiel sees a psychedelic vision of wheels within wheels. Amos is sheep herding when a phantom voice commands him to speak truth to power. Jacob wrestles with an angel. Elisha is recruited by Elijah and David by Samuel, who himself hears a disembodied voice. Jesus calls the disciples with irresistible authority to fish for folks. Jonah’s call is enforced by a great fish. Jeremiah can't sp eak until God touches his mouth. And Paul is struck blind.      This last looms largest in the Baptist tradition where I was raised and is the paradigm for “once saved, always saved.” I felt social pressure to “come on down,” and was dipped at age nine, and indeed I did "believe" at the time, which was all I was asked to do, but I never felt transformed. If I’d waited for an experience like Paul’s, I’d still be waiting. Men...

To an old friend of my lost youth (written about 1985) A cheap pleasure it seems now, Our old teenage repudiation Of certitude, before we both Became by many permutations The very neck-tied arbiters We doubted and still doubt— Cheap because it claimed its own Certitude, the last certitude Of denial, as if the undoubt We denied grew real in its denial Like Johnson’s stone, kicked, extant, Before we fell into the void Of selves, collective and alone. Then we knew what hypocrisy was.       To any sufficiently inquisitive person, there comes an age of realization that everything we "know" consists of (1) spotty constructions from sense data, (2) customary behavior of others, (3) and information from parents, teachers, and other authorities who pass it on more-or-less unquestioned as ideology or common belief. Much of this is necessary for survival--or, at least, prosperity--in the contexts into which youth  find themselves sum...

     My thespian identity is like a sexual orientation, something I discovered without choosing it. Maybe all children play make-believe, but I played American-rebel-and-British-officer with my English friend in a corner of the playground while the other boys played softball, a sport I never practiced voluntarily. In the third grade, I drew knobs on a shoebox, put it on the teacher's desk, and "entertained" the class by reading under the desk a radio program I had written. I don’t recall thunderous applause, but by senior year I directed, wrote, and starred in a show for a high school assembly. I also had a tape recorder (maybe the only kid in town) and gathered with friends to improvise “radio” programs. The first time I auditioned for a university play, I was cast in the lead as a bearded, wigged magician. The rest is history (see https://www.youtube.com/user/BanjoBillGreen for recent madness), and I have often puzzled over what that says about my personal sense ...

     During the Russian war in Afghanistan, Communists and Muslims both carried the AK-47 (or Kalashnikov rifle). Despite disagreements with the Soviets about God, costume, morality, and culture, despite religious mores from an era of edged weapons, Islamic fighters carried Soviet-style rifles, not swords and lances ( https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2019/10/kalashnikov-truth.html ). A Kalashnikov truth, such as the direction of gravity, is one recognized--at least within particular circumstances--by virtually everyone regardless of ideology. It is fact.      On the surface, religion is a Kalashnikov-free zone. One atheist meme claims that all religions share a common belief: that they’re right and all the others are wrong. This is true of many institutionalized religions. Institutions guard their turfs. Joseph Campbell, in Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor , sees this mutual denial as a failure to see religious teachings as metaphor...

Adi Shankara A song from my 1969 chapbook, Baton Rouge Blues : In the center Of the center, Center of the wheel, Lies the central Centric center, Center of the wheel. Days are falling, Nights are falling, Years are falling by, And behind each Why there lies A why and why and why. But the center Of the center, Center of the wheel, Rests unmoved, Gigantic, static. This alone is real. The wheel metaphor appears several times in the Upanishads —as the world of duality revolving around the unity that grounds it, an inconceivably small point that is the source of all. A centrifugal Big Bang. I can’t say if the Upanishads were my source fifty years ago. In any case, this astonishing vision has lain fallow in my decades of family life and career since Baton Rouge. Boethius develops the image in The Consolation of Philosophy (524), which describes the world as a set of concentric circles, wheels rotating around  God. Whatever is farthe...

     There’s a temptation to backdate proud insights and imagine I matured earlier than I did, so maybe I was eight or nine, but I think I was six when critical thinking clicked in. It wasn’t mathematical. It was intuitive and analogical. On Christmas Day we traveled the 250 miles from Auburn, Alabama, up to Lauderdale County where Tom Green, my Grandfather, was still in good health. In any case, as with most watershed events, I remember sitting by the left window on the back seat as little country houses whizzed by and performing a thought experiment. I visualized Santa Claus flying over to a roof, landing his sleigh, sliding down the chimney, distributing toys, climbing back up, and proceeding to the roof of the next house.       It soon became obvious that, at the speed houses were passing even on a two-lane Alabama highway, even if only a quarter of the houses had children, Santa couldn’t possibly service them all in one night. Besides, there...

       My first memories are of the dogtrot log house that was my great grandfather’s before the Civil War. My mother grew up there, and I was there when my father was off in Europe fighting Nazis and my little brain began storing memories. The house stood in the now-dead community of Abercrombie in Bibb County, a few miles before the road ends in the Talladega National Forest--so deep in the country that my grandmother used to wonder whose car was passing at the bottom of the hill. Now, it sits on another rise, reassembled log-by-log in Tannehill Historical State Park. Tourists rent it by the night. But in 1945 the house was all family, and we spent long horsefly-swatting vacations there until my grandparents’ health failed late in the 1950s.      A dogtrot house is a pair of matched log cabins with a a dogtrot (what we’d call a breezeway) between them. The kitchen was a separate building behind one side, and there was little lean-to room o...