Wrestling with Religion

  Ego (Greek for "I") refers in its broadest sense to all the predicates of I used by a given person. My ego includes all of the attributes of my body that I'm aware of. I might say I'm alive, tall , tired , human or hungry . Ego also includes my intentions, tastes, desires, and inclinations. I like oysters , for instance, or love my dog or need a nap. Ego includes all my past preserved in memory. I am, for instance, an actor, a retired professor, and an American who once ate a pizza in Rome and made comic videos in Kentucky. My ego includes all that I have consciously been, felt, thought, or intended--my entire conscious footprint in the phenomenological world--but excludes what I've done without conscious intent. If the wrong word slips out, I absolve ego by saying, " I didn't mean to say that."          Ego is a constructed identity that may (and usually does) differ from how I appear to others. I may deny that I'm lazy and co...

           Years ago, I was in the driveway of my parents' house in Auburn, Alabama, staring at the front tag of my father's old Pontiac when it spoke to me. Alabama issues only one tag, leaving the front bumper available for personal messages, and Daddy (like almost everybody in Auburn) was a football fan, so the tag had War Eagle in orange lettering on faded blue field. It was a very particular tag, the blue faded almost pastel and a lower corner bent--evolved since its exit from a factory.           What prepared me to hear the tag's message? I don't know, but the message was as clear as it was unfathomable. In all the vast flow of time, from the Big Bang until then, what were the odds of a faded, bent tag reading War Eagle (a team cheer of untraceable origins) at this exact point on earth and in this relation to all the rest of the planet, the galaxy, and the  universe around it? How did War Eagle find itself ...

        In the oldest strata of the Old Testament, YHWH is a tribal god, one of many, and the earliest form of Jewish monotheism was the obligation to worship only him among others that existed. The rule against worshipping idols and foreign gods, strong in Exodus, is contradicted in post-migration stories, such as David's escape from Saul by substituting a teraphim or "household god "for himself in bed, showing that he owned a man-size idol (1 Samuel 19). Such idols were still around to be prohibited in Josiah's reforms centuries later (2 Kings 23:24), but by the time of the Second Temple, there emerged the idea of YHWH as an almighty world-creator. Eventually, monotheism dominated in Judaism, the idea of one supreme God for all nations.         The change wasn't as radical as it sounds. Most ancient gods were simply persons with superpowers, and these persisted in traditional Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as angels and devils. Monotheism mer...

Somewhere in middle age, we suddenly notice that the folks with gray hair when we were little are dead. This part of my midlife crisis, facing the throngs vanished from the world, provoked some memorable poetry. Here is a favorite from the 1980s, recalling dinners on the grounds outside country churches, a dream or photograph of the dead gesturing through a window into eternity. Time Eaters At covered-dish suppers in Kodak twilight, we eat time. The old people-- institutions of my first years bankrupt suddenly to corpses boxed for burial--load paper plates, chew half smiling, blink a bovine wisdom I frighten myself to find growing in me like a cancer. I sit with them.           On slab benches outside a clapboard country church in coolness of oaks that do not move in the no wind, this evening as one living and dead lift Dixie plates mounded with plant and animal corpses and eat  time.   ...