Czeslaw Milosz, Thomas Merton, & God

Saw a book at Half-Price Books (for $1) called The Captive Mind and had to have a look at that. Read a few bits and decided I needed more, so I bought it. And as I read I bit more I got really interested in this Czeslaw Milosz fellow, so I looked him up to see what else he was holding. And turns out there was a book of letters he and Thomas Merton had exchanged entitled Striving Towards Being, and the library had a copy, so now I'm reading that. 

And this morning I ran across these lines, which I thought were pretty profound:

" . . . I think the glib clichés that are made about the will of God are enough to make anyone lose his faith . . . . For my part, I have given up my compulsive need to answer such questions neatly. It is safer and cleaner to remain inarticulate, and does more honor to God."

That's from Thomas Merton to Czeslaw Milosz, by the way.

It makes me think of the times when, after a tragedy (death of dad, death of mom, Jacqueline's diagnosis of autism, Joe's diagnosis of autism, sister's suicide, divorce one, divorce two . . . ) people . . . well intentioned people . . . have said things like "God never gives you more than you can handle," 1  "Everything happens for a reason," 2 and that kind of horseshit. It just trivializes your pain and suffering. It's really a "nice" way of saying, "What you're going through is no big deal." Well, like the starfish that was picked up off of the beach and put into a blender half full of battery acid, it was a big deal to that one.

And in a much larger, cosmological sense, the idea that God is sitting at a Taikyoku Shogi board, passing the time with dat Mean Ol' Debbil, is just offensive to me. I mean, don't we have enough of the Free Will Deck stacked against us with societal conditioning and biological imperatives to put The Will of God into play as well? Man, we wouldn't even be able to wipe our asses of our own volition with allathat on our backs. 

So, yeah, a little respect for The Mystery seems to be in order. Not as a deus ex machina (heh heh), but as an admission that we not only don't know much about the watchworks of this universe, but that our imaginations are too small to even postulate a higher level of reality. We're two dimensional beings watching a 3D ball fall through our plane of existence; we see . o o o o o O o o o o o . and start to write complicated explications of time considered as a helix of semi-precious stones.








1 Response: "This so-called God has seriously overestimated caryatid capacity."

2 Response: "What reason do you think God had for making you an idiot?"