Everything I said at last night’s meeting was true. I said: “You can’t give up. No matter how often you pray for the experience—no matter how often you think you’re there, it’s finally, finally happening—only to discover that it was just a presage to transcendence and not the thing itself, you have to go on. You have to keep wanting it.”
[This post is an excerpt from Diary of a Heretic, the novel. Click here to read the first episode, or here to read the previous one.]
“Because,” I said, “there is no alternative. Other than to spend your life blotting out basic questions. Ordering yourself to shut up, don’t think! How are you going to suppress everything you wonder about? Everything you dream?”
“Either,” I said, turning off the mike, my voice big with inherent reverb, “you’re fiercely seeking a spiritual awareness that never comes, that almost comes, that fools you into believing it’s almost, almost here, and then, after a second, evaporates. Or, you’re floating aimlessly, eyes fixed on a monotonous white sky.
“What choice do you have?” I asked the crowd. “Are you who’ve suffered a thousand disappointments going to sink into a stuporous life, accumulating the most expensive junk you can find? A shiny machine, a glimmering stone, a nameplate? Your own true-life saga this week’s mini-series: You think that will make it all worth it? The same day you fulfil your desire, you discover it’s not enough. You’ve got to have more! And then if it turns out, the thing you wanted so badly for so long makes you miserable, you’re a step ahead. Because if it robs you of everything you’ve ever loved, at least you realize what a fool you were!
“But if, as also happens, the fame, money, power, knowledge, the beach house, just gets kind of old, kind of boring after a while, you’ll let down your guard, and all the questions you tamp down, blot out, hush up—will erupt. The minute you relax, the minute you shut your eyes or skip your medication, they’ll inundate you. All those silenced aspirations will deluge your mind.
“Ultimately, everyone prays to someone. In dire straits, we all ask, ‘What am I doing here? And, why?’ Don’t we?” I asked, spreading my arms. “Don’t we all?”
The gauzy white shirt I was wearing filled the air. I raised my arms and the material colored the room, draping us with a soothing collective coolness.
“Whether we know it or not,” I said, “we all beg for faith. Faced with mortal danger, atheists turn hopeful; fundamentalists doubt. In desperation, we all whisper, ‘Dear God, please, keep the plane up; pull us out of this nosedive.’ Of course, after the crisis, our flickering prayers disperse. We jump head first into the mainstream. ‘Who’s going to win the championship, the election, the lottery?’
“Oh, maybe a few saints, manic-depressives, people on the brink of death can sustain spiritual awareness. But the rest of us have to stick to the here and now. We can’t spend every second striving for what we can never, ever have. We have jobs to do.
“Right?” (Looking up I saw Stephanie and Maggie brandishing stacks of money.)
“Besides, it’s really not up to us. There’s no way we can earn a direct experience of God. There’s no way we deserve it. It either happens or it doesn’t. The best we can hope for, if we say the right words, if we kneel perfectly straight, is a shivery intuition. And even then, even then, we can only stand so much. Anything closer to the Divine than a gentle, invisible flutter, a welling in our chests, and we’d keel over and die.
“Right?” I said, spreading my arms. “Right?” And the air near my face shifted. My fingers tingled. My words went out to the audience and it was as if I touched each person in the room. My shirt billowed over their luminous, upturned faces. My words drew the people to me and I gathered their ravenous souls to my about-to-burst breast. I hugged them and cooed in their ears: “But that’s okay. It’s all right. For no matter how often the shiver, the bath of light, distant trumpet playing, the moment of levitation turn out to be just that and nothing more—turn out after a brief stab of ecstasy to be a chill, a glare, the odd reception from a passing radio and not signs from heaven—we will not give up. We will joyfully embrace every glancing, passing shadow that comes our way. No matter how futile it seems. Right?
“Right?”
And then—shit—I looked down!
(Click here to read the next episode)
