In God We Trust

The sun rises on the last morning of my vacation. I sit at the river with a steaming cup of java as the mist rises and the sky lightens. Pink, blue, grey, salmon, and worsted white are painted against the landscape. I sit alone wrapped in a gorgeous morning of deep solitude as the rest of the family slumbers. I feel as new as the day. Refreshed. Rested. Restored. My dreams last night were deep and inspiring. Even prophetic. This day, as with all good vacations, is a threshold. As I ponder my return home to the life we have crafted and love, I see with more clarity and resolve what lies ahead. I turn the page and another chapter begins.

A friend recently asked me about initiation, journeys, and vision quests. We are lost to much of this ancient wisdom in the culture of the west. We too easily dismiss or overlook these tremendously important rituals and ceremonies. There is an archetype of Thresholds. Though some of us try, much of this is irretrievably lost to modernity. The problem, I think, is that many of us don’t even try. We live without direction, without purpose, duped by a cultural malaise that knows not the wonder and the terror of deep silence. Deep silence, when all you hear is the emptiness, the void, the abyss, the whispering of your name. Your true name. It requires deep listening. Two ears, one mouth.

Peter Kingsley, in his wonderful tome, Catafalque: Carl Jung and the End of Humanity, revisits the true meaning of prayer, divine encounter, and ceremony. He posits, in my understanding, that we are so misguided when we see the gods as our supermarkets. We are shrouded in lostness when we see therapy or psychology as a customer satisfaction business. A place where we exchange our suffering, our longing, our emptiness for encounter, guidance, orientation. Even miracle. Religion or psychology, as its core is none of this. It is non-rational. It is, if anything, a portal to a deeper emptiness. What he says we miss with our invocations, our seeking, our questing, our logical analysis, is that in these places and spaces of emptiness we discover the font of the most important act we can render as human beings. Service. The gods need us. As Jung penned so profoundly in his book, my favourite, Answer to Job, the gods seek our faithfulness, our hospitality. Martin Heidegger and Friedrich Nietzsche, the false prophets of modernity, the evangelists of logic, have sold us snake oil. In our hubris, the true gods withdraw like the tide. Matthew Arnold, the great poet, articulated so painfully and beautifully, in Dover Beach, at the nihilistic turn toward modernity:

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

The soul, the human, humanity is, at its essence, religious. Religious in the full sense of the word. The etymology dictionary tells us that it is derived from Middle English (originally in the sense ‘life under monastic vows’): from Old French, or from Latin religio(n- ) ‘obligation, bond, reverence’, perhaps based on Latin religare ‘to bind’. To what do we bind ourselves? To whom do we serve? Because, my friends, make no mistake, “God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!” (Friedrich Nietzsche). In these dreary vast edges of the naked shingles of the world, we must examine what died in us when we killed the gods. Our capacity to sit in silence? Our capacity to feel the terror and the beauty of awe? Our capacity to visit the Land of the Dead? Our capacity to serve the gods? Our humanity?

Ah, now a loon calls out across the water. The long and haunting lament. Synchronistic to my musings.

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery…

Sit with this. Ponder this. Listen. Listen again.

The dregs in my coffee cup are cold. I hear life stir and awaken in the upper house. The sun has now risen over the tree tops. Bird song heralds the new day. Waves lap against the dock. Rhythmic. Eternal. Home beckons and a wonderful holiday comes closer to a close. This is my robe of glory as I cross the threshold from vacation back into commerce. We are here as humans to remember and serve the gods. This is it. That is IT. There is no escaping this. When we accept the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar as definitive, when we drink deeply of the kool-aid of logic:

The world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

A deeper truth beckons with the tide if we can listen. If we can enter the silence. Visit the Land of the Dead. Return to the Land of the Living. The longing is real. What it asks of me is to acknowledge who it is I serve.

What if we are, each of us, a gift? We surely know that we are incarnate spirit. What if our suffering, our emptiness, our longing is not to be filled by god, or even answered by the gods? Or psychology? Or logic? Rather, like Baucis and Philemon of old, we are to bring the gift of our lives into service when the gods come calling. They seek hospitality, in the human heart. Like all tides, The Sea of Faith may be turning. For me it has turned. The gods need me, and everything that I experience, live, discover, is meant to be a holy offering. The silence, the solitude, the emptiness, and the longing reveals Who I serve.

In God We Trust.