[SB] Scrambling towards Zion: Olivia (Feb. 24)

[Molly Wolf]

Olivia

Let's call her Olivia, and let's think of her as a mature student (30-something) in human resources at the local college, and let's assume that she's interviewing me about my former career as a book editor.  Towards the end of the interview, I make it clear that I am mostly retired from the publishing biz.  What, she asks, do I do now? I write, I tell her. About what? she asks.  About God. About finding Godstuff in real life, I tell her, resigned to the inevitable.

The silence which then descends isn't exactly stony. More like weathered concrete, maybe with a bit of rusty rebar sticking out the pebbly end where a corner has broken off.

"Oh," she says. Mentally, I gather myself for a quick but (I hope) gracious leave-taking, but no; this is to be one of*those*  conversations.

The concrete seems to soften a little, the rebar to recede. She frowns, but without hostility. "I honestly don't understand," she says slowly, "how an intelligent adult can really believe in that --" she's about to say "shit" but she reconsiders -- "stuff."

She sounds genuinely puzzled instead of belligerent, and so I set my purse down again and resettle into my chair. "Why not?"

She tells me. Again, no hostility: just flat-out dismissal. Religion has oppressed people and caused more wars than any other cause. The old mysteries have yielded to science, and what science doesn't yet understand (this devolves into a discussion of subatomic particles; she's very bright and very well read) it will understand in time.  The human mind, that marvelously elegant object, functions on the basis of biochemical reactions (no argument there). There is no proof that God exists (no argument there, either). I could go on -- her peroration certainly did! -- but there's not much point. We've all heard what the rationalists have to say.

She is willing to consider Stephen Jay Gould's proposal that science and religion have independent magisteria, with non-overlapping spheres of of inquiry. But that doesn't mean that there's much of any importance in religion's magisterium, she believes.  Without being actually rude, she implies that religion's realm is full of boxes of discarded index cards, the odd heap of ashes where a witch was burned, faded curtains in avocado green icky polyester, discarded shackles, and the elderly vases of artificial flowers used as centerpieces at the parish monthly ladies' euchre game and dessert. Superstition. Outmoded beliefs, created by primitive people and held onto out of passivity or fear or the desire to control others. And boring -- very old hat and very, very stale.

I'm not going to quarrel with her, especially since I agree with much of what she has to say about churches. I mostly just listen. I refrain from the classic line "contempt prior to investigation." In fact, I don't make much of any response at all.  I know better than to argue. I do make some factual corrections -- the Bible isn't a single book, but a collection written in different times and circumstances; and in terms of bloodshed, totalitarianism has massacred far, far more than all the world religions put together and most of the perps were atheists or religious ignoramuses.

But I want to ask her about music.

I want to ask her why we sing when we could do a better job of communication by speaking, why a certain musical passage makes her weep or shiver or raises the fine hairs on her arms.  I want to ask her about her response to the brilliance of a night sky, or why sunsets remind us of splendour.  I want to ask her about beauty.  Yes, cultural standards of beauty vary, but why do we have them at all?

And what about love?  I know about the sorts of love needed for the species to flourish:  sexual passion, familial bonds, social ties, and (above all) the arse-over-teakettle self-abnegation that clobbers you cross-eyed when they put your new firstborn into your arms.  But what about the longing that seems to come out of nowhere, that longing for a love so deep and complete that it passes understanding?  Oh, it's there (I want to tell her); it's real.  So is the notion of Home, not just the surcease of suffering -- a velvety peaceful  darkness would do for that -- but the notion of a life in which tears are dried and we find both justice and mercy, fulfilment for those whose lives have been deprived, healing for all wounds, joy for all sorrows. Those in the harshest conditions have sung the sweetest songs about Home. And what of mystery, that sense of an extraordinary glory hidden from view and biding its own sweet time?

Of course these may all be delusions, things the mind makes up for comfort like a child's imaginary friend (or like Olivia, a figment of my imagination).  If so, there seem to be one hell of a lot of it around, throughout all ages and cultures.  But there is no conclusion evidence for or against God (unless you count the conversion of St. Paul and the convergence of a staggering number of physical constants needed to support life as we know it). Nothing for, nothing against. I tend to think it's an Occam's Razor sort of issue, but Olivia may disagree.

What I would say to this particular figment is: remember, you can't smell things that a dog can smell, nor hear what a bat hears, nor see as a falcon sees.  We have our sensory limits, and likely our processing limits as well. We don't know past the limits of what we don't know; we cannot think where thought won't go, at least not yet.  Times before this, we've *known* truths that we've had to discard. Our self-assured (arrogant?) belief in our own ultimate omnicompetence may be one of those.

At article I read on whales and other cetaceans meditated on how their world is unimaginably different from our own.  It's a frontier that we have not crossed, except in cruelty and raids, and it's there right under our noses, unexplored and perhaps incomprehensible.  We can't truly understand swarm intelligence either, or whether domestic cats can love; and quantum mechanics and relativity bang elbows when they talk about gravity or light.

Yes, press on towards the horizons of human understanding, if for no other reason than it's so much fun out there.  But sometimes, O my Olivias, stop and stand in real humility and whisper "We don't know. We really, really don't know."

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