I believe with perfect faith that at this very moment millions of human beings are standing at crossroads and intersections, in jungles and deserts, showing each other where to turn, what the right way is, which direction. They explain exactly where to go, what is the quickest way to get there, when to stop and ask again. There, over there. The second turnoff, not the first, and from there left or right, near the white house, by the oak tree. They explain with excited voices, with a wave of the hand and a nod of the head: There, over there, not that there, the other there, as in some ancient rite. This too is a new religion. I believe with perfect faith, that at this very moment.
— Yehuda Amichai, from “I Wasn’t One of the Six Million: And What Is My Life Span? Open Closed Open” in “Open Closed Open: Poems.” Translated by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld. (Harcourt, 2000)
[…] Faith surrounded me, inspiring my poetry. But I wanted to participate: I wanted to believe in belief, the religious kind, the God kind, and find my own way into this sacred landscape. Mostly, though, I remained a stalker of other people’s devotion. The Bhutanese monks with whom I sat practicing lotus mudra 108 times, the Tamil pilgrims I followed who put skewers through their cheeks as an act of devotion to Lord Murugan. I was a religious voyeur, trying to feel a charge from other people’s worshiping currents. But faith? I didn’t have it. Faith requires no evidence, and I was still seeking. […]
I haven’t stopped believing… that the world’s sacred, nodal sites offer us flashes of transcendence. A moment for our souls to be attentive and still. But I know now that an encounter with the sublime can happen in the most ordinary of places.
I’ve come to understand as well why poets so frequently address the invisible in their poems, something or someone they do not know and cannot see. Call it God, fog, the future. It is our need for connection that makes us speak into the void. Not so much for a reply, but simply as an expression of belief that someone is there, and is listening, and may even stretch out a hand.
57° F. yesterday, Spring is in the air. I contemplate dragging out the outdoor furniture from the basement.
Then, this morning arrived. 20° F, feels like 3° F, winds up to 20 mph from the North. Brutal.
I walk, thinking about sitting on the outdoor furniture in the basement, reading a chapter or two — with a floor heater at my feet. Maybe the furniture goes out next month.
I walk. It’s been 1,762 consecutive (almost) days on this daybreak walk at Cove Island Park. Like in a Row.
The park, with its handful of regulars, has had a new entrant. Let’s call her Janet. Janet rolls into the park taking the same route each morning, skipping along the breakwall to the cliff, pausing for 5-10 minutes to belt out a tune at the top of her lungs, arms and hands clutching for the heavens. Unclear what she’s singing and why she needs to belt it out at earsplitting levels that can be heard at the far reaches of the Park.
So this morning, just another morning, here comes Janet. And there goes the Wildlife, DK and other park patrons quickly moving in the other direction.
Charlotte Wood: “The beauty of being here is largely the silence, after all.“
Sometime in 1993, as I walked along a street in my hometown, Carndonagh, County Donegal, Ireland, a car pulled up alongside me, triggering sudden dread. The window came down, and I was met by the dark, inquisitory eyes of my father.
“Why aren’t you at Mass?” he asked.
I see myself, fierce and lean in a Slayer T-shirt, bristling with the rage of the nihilist. I longed to escape the claustrophobic small town and the towering shadow of the Catholic Church. For once I was impelled to tell the truth. “Look,” I said, “I have no faith. I don’t believe in God anymore and can’t go on with the pretense.”
I was met with an imprisoning silence. But what my father said next astonished me. “OK,” he replied. “Just don’t tell your mother.”
But that young atheist soon recognized his error. Where there is human being, there is human spirit. The feeling of aliveness. The staggering complexity of personhood. The fundamental dignity that each person seeks in a cosmos that cannot know them. And where there is human spirit, there is the pursuit of meaning. If you live in a post-faith world, as many of us do, the question of our intrinsic meaning must be confronted. How are we to define our suffering? What might give our lives significance within an unresponsive universe? To begin this conversation, one must truly encounter the self. […]
The essential self is calling always for our attention, but its voice is stifled by the slam and tumult of modern life. Its voice cannot be heard amid the babel, and it is silenced entirely before the infinite scroll of the smartphone. I have been meditating for one-third of my life, and this essential self seems to me an aspect of mind that is somehow higher, wheeling soundlessly in a private sky. You must stop and look up in order to find it, although in times of crisis it has been known to swoop down and hoist you off your feet with its talons. […]
Today, life lived on the hamster wheel of distraction has created an absurdity within the grand absurdity of existence. Many people live with partial minds not even conscious of the problem of meaning. We are no longer alienated from the world, but alienated from ourselves. We should beware a culture that has exchanged meaning for information. When conversation with the essential self grows silent, pathology is invited in. We slouch about at a loss for something we cannot quite explain. A malaise sets in that is despair without the knowledge of despair. Some unseen, unaccountable pain must be assuaged and we grow consumed by anger and cast about for blame. The irrational erupts from within and seeks a target in society. The shadow of the irrational is now everywhere about us. […]
That which takes wing inside us must come to perch, but that which takes flight in fog and storm grows lost. Deep beneath the vast economic and political failings of our age there lies a spiritual crisis, a tectonic shift beginning to quake and tear at the bedrock of our ethical societies in the West. The modern age has created a religious problem that can no longer be answered by religion, nor can it be addressed by the current faith in techno-science. We live in an age that fears silence and does not contemplate the true cost of this fear.
