Starting Over Toward Faith--This Time Without Religion

I was watching the movie of William Saroyan's "The Human Comedy" made during WWII when it was important that none of the multitudes dying died in vain or didn't somehow remain substantial and sanctified by memory. For the first time, it was hard for me to accept such sentimental solace for lives lost in war--or just lost for no reason, or anything reasonable. It is one of the burdens of losing your faith that things become inconceivable and inconsolable. Don't get me wrong. I have simply lost faith in the certainty that things become understandable or reasonable farther and later on. We have allowed our lives to be made destitute of any chance for meaning here and now; and faith that it will make sense seems like an insult to both life and faith because it excuses the inexcusable sufferance of a world so disincarnate and inscrutable. Only kindness practiced both individually and collectively provides a blatant and scrutable solace. The advancing mass of oil in the Gulf should loom and terrify us as much as if a colliding planet loomed unavoidably large in the sky. No, make that larger since this doom is man-made. That oil expands in a gulf of our own unconscionably meager understanding. No wonder it kicks the living day & light out of us.

I'm not saying there isn't heaven. I'm just saying it isn't as much reward as it is relief--a kind of spiritual fail-safe for the impossibility of reason (forget reasons) in the midst of the world we tolerate. I do not know what I have forfeited by my sufferance of this world. The loss is explicit in the loss of any idea or sureness of God as a function and result of daily contact with this world and its members. Atheism flourishes when we lose earth-born and borne membership. We seek to unearth what is inseparable from earth. God exists in manifestness and that manifestness, I think, must be daily and forceful--found on the surest ground of being that we have known.

Yesterday, BP dropped a container on the least dangerous of its three (known) oil spills. Supposedly, this container will enable siphoning of oil into ships and then, presumably, refinement of it. It's a good metaphor for the discomforts of religion, the inadequacy of the understanding it promotes about human affairs. If God and Man are one, and that oneness is proclaimed by the sacrifice of a son, then the resurrection of that son is sheer imbecility like making meaning of the deaths of sons and daughters in, or through, war. When Christ says that today we shall be with him in paradise he is a different Christ than the one who asks his father why he has forsaken him. The thought that even Christ can't make sense of his murder is, of course, unbearable; so we split him into two: the two cross-mate thieves, one of whom accepts his death and the other of whom doesn't. Then we betray the humanness of such ambivalence for a final miraculous consummation of full acceptance. That may be alright for people afflicted with conditions like cancer but not ones who die young and solely by dint of the human condition.

So we live with dust-to-dust despite assurances from Zen masters that there is no dust, nothing to be lost (except ignorance) or found (except ignorance). That unblemished mirror is, these masters say, unnecessary and non-existent. This Christ doesn't die on a cross, and refuses (better yet, he is unavailable) to accept a sentence to one. That Christ high tails it out of Jerusalem before his enemies can lay a glove on him or charge him with sedition. That Christ says the reader is always greater than the book that is thrown at him. That Christ says solace is the only scripture to be followed, which allows the Logos plenty of latitude among all things named.

What I mean is this: If we are all part of a greater incar-nation, then we must not merely render to Caesar what is Caesar's but make it so much less a portion of our daily rendering. Caesar's salad versus God's salud. In this way, we all earmark the major share of our apportioning for God. This God is not other-worldly or non-human. He must be manifest as ourselves, hence nearer and dearer than what Caesar gives us, reified as daily bread and the baking of that bread in our own actions. Only then can the wafers we make be the wafers we take in communion. Only then are we permitted belief in the blood and body because it is our own--and its preservation and sustenance is the most sacred measure of belief.

This is the best I can do today, except to type out a poem by Hayden Carruth about the brave, defiant inconsolability I feel daily ever since I ceased to be a Mormon/Sufi/believer:

NOT TRANSHISTORICAL DEATH, OR AT LEAST NOT QUITE

Jim Wright, who was a good poet and my friend, died two or three years ago.
I was told at the time that we did not lose him.
I was told that memories of him would keep him in the world.
I don't remember who told me this, just that it was in the air, like the usual fall-out from funerals.
I knew it was wrong.

Now I have begun to think how it was wrong.
I have begun to see that it was not only sentimental but simplistic.
I have examined Jim in my mind.
I remember him, but the memories are as dead as he is.
What is more important is how I see him now.
There, there in that extreme wide place, that emptiness.
He is near enough to be recognizable, but too far away to be reached by a cry or a gesture.
He is wearing a light-weight, brightly colored shirt.
His trousers belong to a suit, but the coat has been discarded.
His belt is narrow and sometimes stays straightly on his pot belly.
His shoes are thin and shiny.
I think he bought those shoes on his last journey to Europe.
He is walking away, slowly.
He is wandering, meandering.
Sometimes he makes a little circle.
Sometimes he pauses and looks to one side or the other.
Sometimes he looks down.
Occasionally he looks up.
He never looks back, at least not directly.
Although he recedes very gradually and becomes gradually smaller, I continue to see all the aspects of his face and figure clearly.
He is thinking about something and I know what.
It is not the place he now occupies in my life.
He cannot imagine that, only I can.
He is neither what he was (obviously), nor what he is (for I am quite sure I am inventing that).
Is he Jim Wright? Is he someone else?
Yes, he is Jim Wright. No, he is not someone else. Who else could he possibly be?
When I die, he will arrive at where he is going. And I will set out after him.

Hayden Carruth, Collected Shorter Poems 1946-1991, Copper Canyon Press, 1992, pages 349-50.