God is rock and in that rock is God.
So, too, is He of the rock.
Made by the rock and for it.
Go and add that the rock is
God itself and so is rock entire.
Don’t get me started on river—
It’s easier to write about religion than to talk about it. That’s why we have so many good and gracious religious writers and so many crooked pastors. Or so that is my belief.
And my belief is so entirely my own that I fall, so often, into the trap of thinking my own view of things is the only view or the only right view, but if I didn’t ever feel that way — and by feeling that way, realize and deny it — I could not say I wrestle with religion at all. And if you do not wrestle, you do not strive and you do not fully believe. Again, another one of my beliefs.
Start here: I am Scottish Presbyterian. Always have been. Born and baptized into it.
“So, if you were born into the Jewish faith, would you continue being Jewish?”
“Yes, most probably.”
This answer really riles people. Both religious and non-religious. For entirely different reasons.
Religion itself, though, is the great agitation. Taking Christianity alone, Jesus was the great agitator. Flipping money tables and all that. Having no one but women at the end to watch his final moments, to bathe and bury his body in the tomb. It’s often forgotten that Jesus, too, went down to Hell before ever going up.
And so writing about religion is and always will be easier. You don’t see the looks on people’s faces when they read your work and catch you in a lie. Or worse, hypocrisy. Because those are bound to happen. I, and we, are human, and so many of my beliefs do not make sense at all.
“Do you believe in hell?”
“No, at least not in the tangible sense.”
“So you believe that Hitler is in Heaven? How can you believe that someone so wholly evil can be in heaven?”
“I’ve never seen Heaven. And so I don’t know if he is or not.”
It’s a cop out. And it’s also an honest answer. I don’t presume to know what I cannot know. It is the one unpredictable thing in this life with which I am comfortable: I will never know the physical manifestation of God, where we go in the end, what this all is for in the meantime. And yet the irony is that I believe in a structured religion that pretends to know all of these things. Maybe I just like candlelight and ritual.
Moreover, Christianity has informed so much of my own environmentalism. Panentheism. God in all and of all things. God as giving the command to lord over all things, lord as in to protect them. He knew full well what we are capable of. And so if God is in all things, and we kill those things, do we not ritualistically kill god over and over and —?
An Aside:
I thought I had a spiritual likeness in Paul Kingsnorth. His work, Savage Gods, is perhaps the most on-the-nose, line-by-line summarization of everything I believe about the farce of the global climate movement, in that it is roiled in its own material pursuits and is eating itself to death, tail to mouth, as it divorces itself from the overall mission through petty politics, semantics, performance.
Kingsnorth’s ideas in Savage Gods were written when he was practicing modern paganism. I find modern forms of paganism incredibly interesting and admirable. Hell, I wear a Brigid pendant every day. (For those who don’t know, she is the Celtic goddess of poetry and cows, amongst other things).
But it was when Kingsnorth converted to Greek Orthodoxy that our views diverged. Strange, that.
In came petty politics: in his newest work, Against the Machine, his rants against the Covid vaccine, transgender rights, and, of all things, women in the workforce (let’s perhaps take a gander first at the nature of the modern workforce before we pick at those whose livelihood depends upon it), clouds his initial call for environmental solidarity. I ended up returning the book half-read to the library, my heart bleeding out that he had engaged in the gravest of sins: hypocrisy.
And then, at that book drop, the realization that I, too, am a creature of hypocrisy. I believe in no Hell but believe in a God who walked its halls. Or, for a more concrete image, I decry those who overconsume but just yesterday I filled my tank, received two packages, ate factory-raised meat, and froze under the air conditioning.
And so I forgive Kingsnorth his anger. His sputtering and spitting against those who and that which he doesn’t understand or care to understand. Not that I am in a position to forgive. If only God can judge, only He can forgive. Another hypocrisy of mine.
But, hey, it’s all a lesson in temperance.
In the end, I still believe with a fervor that God lives within the rocks we walk on, the river that stretches, the heart that beats warm and red. And I forgive myself for arguments that I cannot win because they are impossible. I claim to understand nothing about God or myself or the world.
And so I could never be a preacher. What would I say?
I have this idea that I would lead the congregation out to the river and I would pick up rocks and explain the millennia that went into the creation of that particular strata, broken off and rolling down what used to be the greatest mountain chain in the world. Or maybe start with the river itself. We can explain it but can we fathom it?
And so, I’ll end this rambling – written late into the night when I couldn’t sleep for fear of the world and a strange desire to see it through – with a poem.
Χάρις: Charis: Grace
Were I a nun and had the time and the world
to ponder exhilarations, and prayer came easy
and the things I said would never come back
to haunt me and the love I had was overt
and if I thought anything good would come of it,
I would be patient with myself and write after mass,
something like this, but not exactly it:If I do have the word for it
the word is lambent
on the sea-spate of Heaven,
that which is the current,
that which is
the laying of rock at my door
after storm and tide and moon.If I do have a song for it
it is gannet and it is
the sound of fiction running
to its heated point
to what is meaning
and what is parable in every
offer of word, word, word.If I do have a dance for it
it is nothing but nothing,
the absolute stillness of nothing
but dust in the endless column
of sun that, through this window,
rises and descends to the feet,
the floor, the effort of being still.And then, if I do have an eye for it
then by all means pluck it
from me for if I keep
lapping it up with sight
from this tower in this room
atop this cliff, from this nowhere at
the edge of a great green world then
what will be left
for the sun to rise to, the light
going up on a thousand trudgers
taking gold to the house
of love and receiving nothing
a God conceiving none at all.Then I’d rise and thank the father,
so thanking son and holy ghost,
say amen, the end of it, say on with the day
where the rows will be hoed, and in it,
grace sowed.
