You believe there is something? she asks. I try to, yeah, Ivan answers. Some kind of order in the universe, at least. I do feel that sometimes. Listening to certain music, or looking at art. Even playing chess, although that might sound weird. It’s like the order is so deep, and it’s so beautiful, I feel there must be something underneath it all. And at other times, I think it’s just chaos, and there’s nothing. Maybe the whole idea of order just comes from some evolutionary advantage, whatever it is. We recognise patterns when there are no patterns. I don’t know. I’m not explaining myself very well. But when I experience that sense of beauty, it does make me believe in God. Like there’s a meaning behind everything.
— Sally Rooney, Intermezzo: A Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, September 24, 2024)
I wake up in a blue room and panic for a moment because I’ve forgotten where I am. Curtains with delicate floral patterns and tattered hems bend the shadows of iron bars. The adhan, the Muslim call to prayer, moans though the windows. I brush the curtains aside and the damp air and words of the salāt al-fajr, the dawn prayer, spill in. Islamabad spreads out below me as clumps of dark shapes, interrupted by dots of orange and green. A streetlight. A kitchen window. A barking dog. The soft, sticky sound of tires on wet pavement. Several blocks away, the minaret of a mosque pierces the sky, illuminated against the darkness, and the muezzin calls out from the too-loud, tinny speakers. I can’t understand the words, but I appreciate how they compel a quarter of the world to fall to their knees in prayer five times a day.
Photo: Morning Group Prayer. 5:40 a.m. 61° F. August 13, 2024. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. (I recognize this was not a Muslim prayer group, but was inspired by the moment and the book passage.) More photos from this morning’s walk here: (1) Daybreak & (2) Brody & Wally Play date.
Can you find the Canada Goose in the shot above? I’ll wait until you find it. Yes, there. The speck, bottom right. Hold that thought.
It’s Thursday, 1514 consecutive (almost) days on this morning daybreak walk at Cove Island Park. Like in a row.
I step into the park. It’s dark.
I walk.
I’ve had a flurry of chatter around me about Signs.
They see signs in the spotting of Cardinals, Blue Jays, Feathers, Hearts, Sparrows, Robins, and even Moths.
Don’t you see it DK? There!
I’ve grown up. (A little.) I stare quietly, body language not giving anything up, offering a look of contemplation. The thought process having evolved from “are you kidding me, you don’t really believe that, do you? aka George Carlin style: Religion: A Bullshit Story.
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.
