Religious Experience in a Secular Age
Part 5, Thanks for This Day
After hitting the wall of theodicy, the mental ruminations she cannot get past, we come to the conclusion of Denise Levertov's poem "Human Being":
The human being, each night nevertheless
summoning—with a breath blown at a flame,
or hand’s touch
on the lamp-switch—darkness,
silently utters,
impelled as if by a need to cup the palms
and drink from a river,
the words, 'Thanks.
Thanks for this day, a day of my life.'
And wonders.
Pulls up the blankets, looking
into nowhere, always in doubt.
And takes strange pleasure
in having repeated once more the childish formula,
a pleasure in what is seemly.
And drifts to sleep, downstream
on murmuring currents of doubt and praise,
the wall shadowy, that tomorrow
will cast its own familiar, chill, clear-cut shadowinto the day’s brilliance.
We're back to the cross-pressured experience. To the one side, as described above and in the last post, there are the storm of questions we have about suffering. But to the other side is this profound desire to express thanks: "Thanks for this day, a day of my life."
In Hunting Magic Eels I make the provocative claim that you can't be grateful for your life and be an atheist, at least not emotionally. The Shape of Joy describes gratitude as an example of self-transcendence, which research is revealing to be the pathway to mental health. Levertov's poem illustrates why. Gratitude is our emotional response to receiving a gift. So when we express thanks for our life we step into an experience of grace. (Grace and gift are the same word in the New Testament.) True, as increasingly skeptical people we offer up this expression of thanks "into nowhere, always in doubt." Offering prayers of gratitude seems "childish," like believing in fairy tales. Regardless, expressing thanks is "seemly," proper, and right. Our heads can't believe, but our hearts do. We face the Mystery and offer of prayers of thanks.
This is religious experience in a secular age, living between "doubt and praise." We are trapped in our heads trying to solve theological puzzles, banging our heads against intellectual walls. Yet our hearts long to express thanks, thirsting to praise, to step into the light of grace.
I appreciate what Friend Beck offers here and elsewhere to struggling doubters and seekers of the secular age. However, my challenges have never been secularism or science.
Ever since childhood Jesus has been with me, and I have never doubted the reality of the Divine Wholeness that we “G-d.” Doubt entered my world in adolescence, when Lutheran catechetical classes introduced me the “epicycles within epicycles” of orthodox Christian theology.
I struggled for over a decade to convince myself that I believed what I was being taught. Yet every week before the invitation to join the Eucharist I squirmed with doubt—not doubt of God’s grace, but doubt about the elaborate Augustinian scholasticism that had buried Jesus.
My release came during my one term in seminary. I came out as a gay man, left the church, and took Jesus with me into the wilderness. The first century Aramaic-speaking Jew who returned his people to the heart of Torah rather than its text is also the one who teaches me daily.
And theodicy is not an issue. It is an artifact of our insistence on personifying “G-d” and then creating convoluted explanations for how such a loving person could cause or allow suffering.
Contrary to the traditional arguments, natural suffering is NOT evil. It is simply part of the mortality that we share with all living creatures. It is horrible, but it is not punishment for “the fall.” Grace does not free us from mortality; grace frees us from the fear of mortality.
What is evil is the vast, overwhelming neglect and cruelty of human societies and individuals towards other human beings and toward the whole living world. This is not something that the Divine Wholeness “allows.” It is what we do in our willful ignorance of that fact that what happens to one of us happens to all of us.
We don’t need elaborate theology to turn us from this sinfulness. All we need is to walk daily toward the imitation of Jesus the Anointed One.