Chapter 2.2: lâ ilâha illâ allâh [There is no God but God]
The Miscarriage. Belief in God was never much of an issue. The Almighty for me, until that wailing hour, was historical. He existed in text and through imagined, over-glorified stories assimilated in a musty Methodist sunday school room with posters of biblical caricatures on the walls. That God was ancient. As if he hadnʼt taken a single breath in my lifetime. He was quiet, allusive and, at the very least, distant; divorced from man and lost custody of will in the process.
This paradigm resulted from semesters of undergraduate Philosophy courses; nursing the tenets of a dead doctrine. Hume, Kant, Plato and Aristotle; they were my clergy. Pre- Socratics with their appeal to a greater substance, were my faith. Logic the scriptures. A law of ethics (via epistemology) was what I judged the people of a broken world by. I was well-versed in deep thoughts.
Rigid in my hypocrisy, I conceived a world view of hopelessness. The creator created and left; washed his hands and abandoned us to confusion. A runaway father, delinquent on his child support, who showed up every couple millennia to go surfing or to a Aerosmith concert to remain ʻhipʼ and ʻrelevantʼ. God was an idea whose character we invented and myself ʻagnosticʼ, claimed by my own lips.
When I touched those bricks, giant as they were, they felt like pebbles in my hand. The God of ancient days, the God who lived in stones and storybooks, tablets of antiquity, dwindled into my palms as a riverbed stone. It wasnʼt big enough to hold my fancy, or to support my philosophical belief in the ʻGoodʼ. He was a little ʻgʼ god. Boring, contrived and useless. The theoretically non-personal God I had conceived had been terminated in a single coming of age moment. Mourning in a bout of confusion and bitterness, I was ignorant of what was being infused in the belly of my spirit.
Culminating into a beautiful letdown, that was the inciting event of a radical movement challenging my framework of the identity of God. As if I saw in Solomon’s bricks a mirror image of what my heart had become: hardened and dense with arrogance, merciless to feelings, and–much like a brick–finite. Very finite.
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Continued on 11/3/11
Continued from Chapter 2.1: lâ ilâha illâ allâh
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