Everyone’s so sure these days about God and religion and spirituality. The religious fundamentalists know God, they know the name of God, they know the ways of God, they know the judgments of God, they know who the chosen people of God are and aren’t—self-appointed messengers, they are the voice of God. The atheist fundamentalists know God isn’t, they know the names of all that exists and does not exist, they know the ways of the universe, they know how to judge all—infallibly—in the light of reason, they know anyone who is religious is not a member of the chosen, the enlightened ones—self-appointed iconoclasts, they are the voice of Reason.
But if everybody’s talking (shouting really), who is listening? Listening to other people, to other theories of human existence, to reality itself? To listen requires humility. And that is what is lacking, the humility that recognizes one does not know, that instead of filling up the void with words, a hedge against anxiety, one must sit still and listen. Religious and atheistic fundamentalists, as well as many artists who specialize in ironic distancing, share the same disease: a feeling of absolute certainty about things that cannot be known, a feeling that makes them feel superior to all who do not see or hear or feel reality in the same way they do, whose limited view does not match their limited view exactly.
I have lost all patience with all this absolutism and misdirected chatter incessantly coming from all sides. People are hungry for meaning. They thirst for new ways to imagine and interpret their lives, ways that nourish them and sustain them as they search for ways to live good and meaningful lives. With all this noise and heat coming from the fundamentalists, where is the silence and the light that will show us the way to a new understanding of the complex and mysterious existence we have been born into, a reality that is—whatever you call it—multi-dimensional, at the very least both material and something more than material, something that goes beyond the merely physical?
Let’s stop all the shouting and mutual condemnation. Let’s stop wringing our hands in despair at the state of religious discourse today. Let’s stop taking the easy way out in irony, winks and witticisms that reveal how bored, how above it all, how past it all we are. Instead, let’s get busy and start making space for uncertainty and questions, a space where we befriend silence and practice listening.
Maybe if we can clear a space like that, a place of openness and opening, there will be room for food to grow and springs to burst forth that will nourish the hunger and slake the thirst of those of us who know we do not know and find our way in seeking.
So that’s what I want to do—declare a pox on both their houses, the religious and the anti-religious fundamentalists, and start clearing a space where we can breathe freely, open or eyes, our hearts, our minds in asking questions, genuine questions, about who we are why we’re here, what matter is, what “beyond matter” is, what people mean when they say “God,” what it can mean to say “God” or “spirit” in 2012.
I will try. And I will begin by clearing away some obstacles. I want to dispel certain notions of God that have been dead for centuries but act as if they are still viable. Call them zombie notions of God. Before we can even start listening, we have to rid the world of religious discourse of these zombie ideas and images that suck the life out of every conversation, stop them dead in their tracks.
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