Faith in gods and in God

An old religion professor of mine assigned us to read “Faith in gods and in God,” a chapter out of H. Richard Niebuhr's book “Radical Monotheism and Western Culture.” I tore it out of my course reader before recycling the rest. It lives in a folder in my room, folded in half, which I use to carry cards and friendship notes from apartment to apartment, city to city.

If anyone will convince me that it makes sense to believe in God, it is H. Richard Niebuhr. That man is an intellectual force. My professor called him and his brother Reinhold Neo-Catholics. I don't remember what that means; but if the brothers are representatives of the movement, it must be pretty hardcore.

Here's the gist:

It's difficult to tolerate the feeling that you lead a meaningless existence, right? Humans look for a sense of purpose, whether it's an ultimate purpose or a purpose for getting up in the morning (on low days, mine is coffee. Just coffee and a silent kitchen table).

So we bestow faith in these purposes. These are gods. At any given time, I might be living for my friends, for myself, for sex, for the thrill of exploration, for writing, for running, for money-- so on and so forth. A lot of people live for the church, for their spouses or children. In fact, we all devote ourselves to multiple purposes. In this way, we are polytheistic.

This can work for people. But eventually two of your purposes are going to be at cross purposes. Do you choose to stay home because you're exhausted and really need to take care of yourself (i.e., shower) or do you stick to your commitment and go to a show that your friend is dying to see but which you aren't interested in? Do you stay in a job you don't like because it supports your family and gives you money? Do you seek relationships, do you seek sex, or both, or do you ruin a relationship in a night of sex-worship without your partner?

Some gods easily trump other ones. But the problem is, no purpose is entirely un-trumpable, if not by another god, then by circumstance. Take the single father who lives for his children. But what if his children die in a freak car accident? Take the musician, who will carry the guitar to his grave. What if he goes deaf, or gets carpal tunnel, or suffers a massive breakup in which all of his beloved music reminds him of his beloved and he can't take solace in it anymore? So not only can one god be trumped by another god, but no god is permanent. It is transient. It can always die, fade away, go somewhere else, be otherwise.

What is that force that is powerful enough to take all of your pretties away from you? The nature of the universe. The void.

So if the void can trump every god, and every god eventually disappears into it, then in a way, the only thing you can really put faith in is the void itself. The void will keep trumping and the void will keep calling your gods away. In this way we are called to put faith in our greatest enemy, our god-killer, because there is nothing else as reliable or powerful.

This sounds dismal, but that's the great challenge of faith. Love the void. Make your enemy your friend, even though it can slay you. And then, H. promises, you might start to find the void familiar; your might see the void as God. God/void is where all of your gods come from and where they all return.

And this doesn't mean you should stop caring about your gods. It just affords a perspective that allows for benevolence for all the gods, in their measure, rather than pitting one against the other for primacy. H. calls it finding a new sacredness in the relative.

I feel like a polytheist all the time. Making hard judgement calls, choosing between commitments, asking myself, what do I really want? But sometimes, when I am writing, or deep in thought, or entranced by a massive desert canyon-scape-- a frame of mind that I would call meditative, out of body-- then I feel that the void is a full emptiness, maybe even God.