Shore for the Godless

“It is not God you worship, but his music, his art, his people, his buildings, his stories, his culture in general. God is thanked, which is, it seems, a secondary act—a formality for the engenderer of what it is you actually love.”

“You misunderstand my worship of God; grossly misunderstand. Worship is not intentional, for me—but a groundswell of devotion, &, because of God’s position relative to mine, an exuberance, a dancing-love: that God, after everything, yet loves me. God’s music, art, and the like, which is human music, art, etc., are hints, reminders, mnemonics even, that retrieve that encounter; it is the re-living, re-vivifying, of that relationship—like the ring on the betrothed. I may not be mainstream in this, but I consider the Christian reality of being reborn a perpetual experience—perpetuating into eternity; it is, & I don’t mind sounding naïve, an eternally fresh waking-up, of being timeless with the infinite Creator at the heart of all creation—which, to my mind, is love.”

“Beautiful—what you say. I believe in the power of words, too.”

“Don’t be fooled by your own words, then. I mean more than words.”

“Who doesn’t in conversations like these?”

“Well, I venture to say: you.”

“I mean more than words, but let me prove it: let me prophesy, or rather, predict, if I may. Religion, spirituality, faith, or whatever the appellation, has been, I believe, a companion to mankind since mankind acquired imagination; it is powerful, because—powerful for the same reasons the human imagination is powerful. It flows from the core of that magical sense, & has given it breath—metaphors, poems, confessions, etc. But this religiousness, this transcendence, has had many faces, many gods. Now, & only recently, this magical sense has no face—no gods, no God. It is master-less; without a set of axioms, or narratives, or heroes, or lexicon—without a concordance. “Now what,” the newborn asks itself. There is one certainty, it thinks: its mortality. Mortality—mortality for what it is: my end; no more beginnings, no middles, no more ends, but the final one…”

“Is this your prediction?”

“No. Allow me my wordiness…” he paused; “Without the old language, the familiar tongue, that is, the religious tongue—without wanting to refer to it, since we feel it is too much associated with misleading lifestyles & images—we try to find our own descriptions of our magical sense, feeble perhaps—but ours. As the archaic beliefs die, their poetry dies; it does not die from lack of use, but of recognition; it perishes in secret, in its heart. Your light-towers are foreign; our home is far-off; its shore is all darkness. So far, some of us have attempted praise of the fact—that dream of homelessness. But even they look for our light-tower, furtively. So we search, perhaps without success; but, and I predict tendentiously, over time, over a long time, a span equivalent to the span of religion’s incubation, its monopoly on our history’s imagination, over an eon of futile stuttering, we may perhaps find our poetry, our shore—a shore for the godless. A meeting-place, our temple, for our hymns, & our love. There, I hope, human beings will see themselves, all at once, without additions, without falseness, & still speak lovingly. Someday, perhaps. I say to myself, ‘it is today.’ However, this is only what I say.”