the poetrysheet
whimsy, subversion, bowling
Number 451, Jan. 9, 2004
Ievhen Pavlovych Hrebinka (1812-1848)
“"He put my sins in a
new perspective. Whereas they had been small and mean and nasty and best forgotten,
this minister gave them some size and bloom and dignity. I hadn’t been thinking
very well of myself for some years, but if my sins had this dimension there was
some pride left. I wasn’t a naughty child but a first rate sinner, and I was
going to catch it. I felt so revived in spirit that I put five dollars in the
plate, and afterward, in front of the church, shook hands warmly with the
minister and as many of the congregation as I could. It gave me a lovely sense
of evil-doing that lasted clear through till Tuesday.”
—John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley
in Search of America
By Rev. David DeChant
Remember in grade school when they told us that we,
the citizens of the United States, governed this country? That we were the government,
and the government was we? Now, as adults, we know there is only some truth to
this, as there are no absolutes.
Now, stick with me a minute. The oldest religion is
Shamanism in all its forms. Shamanism placed God everywhere—in the rivers, in the
wind, the rocks, the fire, the buffalo, etc. This worked for a long time and
still does somewhere, I’m sure. The Greeks formed myths about different gods
doing more anthropomorphized activities like raping women and drinking wine,
but then their great thinkers decided the universe was made up of spinning
spheres around the sun. The Greeks adapted to the new “discoveries” and their
culture fit them in. This idea stood for a couple thousand years.
Then, Ptolemy mapped the earth back in the center the
way Christians wanted it. Copernicus displaced earth to the left and put the
sun back in the middle. Galileo observed and confirmed this. Kepler used math
and discovered the planets orbited in an elliptical manner. Newton explained
the force that kept us from flying off a spinning globe and our planet from
flying out of our solar system.
Each step of this mental advancement made religion
swoon. People were killed and imprisoned in attempts to shift God from the
middle and subject to the mathematical precepts to which He had already
constrained the rest of His creation. These new ideas didn’t fit in with the
affected cultures, resulting in friction.
Einstein then removed the static nature of space and
in the process warped space and time and added/disproved some of Newton’s
physics. Lamaitre, Hoyle, and Hubble blew the universe apart, collapsed it, and
blew it up some more times. Hawking gave the universe matter-eating black holes
with single primordial atoms. The “Laws” of Physics became surreal and preposterous,
but mathematically justified.
Beckett told us not to wait for God. Alcoholics
Anonymous says rely on whatever power you need as God to overcome your human
weakness toward temptation. Darwin says we weren’t zapped into being but
evolved from more primitive forms: from monkeys, and they from insectivores,
and they from mice, and they from fish, from worms, from bacteria, all the way
down to amino acids.
Remember when I promised a point? Well, Science
doesn’t diminish God. Science is a religion of sorts, just one that lends
itself better towards the medium of language and math, proof, equation. One
must have as much faith for the Big Bang as one does for Adam and Eve.
God is what you need Him/Her/It to be. Religion is
what you need from your belief in God. We are the governing body of God—not
just the citizens of the US, but the earthlings that can conceive of such an
entity. Ask yourself how God is important to your culture, and accept that
there is not one culture. And God is still the rivers, the sun, the wind, the
trees.
The way you use God reflects on your fellow
earthlings, so please ask not what God can do for you, but what you can do for
God…and don’t let it bother the rest of us, because we are also using God the
way that works for us and our culture.
Because, like government, there is only some truth to
it all.
Rev. David DeChant
writes “The Deacon’s Beacon,” for The Cabbagetown Neighbor, and contributes a
monthly column to the poetrysheet. He is your humble servant at 404-822-4290.
Today’s poems:
(from a publisher’s catalogue)
contemporary issues
creation vs. evolution
critical thinking
education
fiction
freethought
golden age
great books in philosophy
great minds
health and well-being
salt
snowshovel scrape, crunch
tire whine
breath hung in streetlight
mumbles, sighs clipped to neon
citizens, salvagers, gleaners
inhaling night
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