My Religion: Part 2

We talked in last week’s post about being at the depths of one’s Wilderness Passage and how, in that hyper-conscious psychic condition, one becomes sensitized to what is true and what is false in any writing or art that we might read or view or listen to.

I noted that for me, in such a period, the only works I could read were Homer, Shakespeare, and the King James Bible. 

Thinking more about this, I realize I’ve got far more questions than answers.

Why, when we’re in that raw, exposed-nerve place, do certain works (of books, music, movies, even food) seem so false and superficial, while others pour powerfully into our psyches and bring us comfort? 

What does “comfort” mean in a state like that? Myself, I certainly was not “healed” in any sense. My downward spiral kept rolling along for years. Did the relief and reassurance I felt reading the Iliad or Sonnet 64 “help” somehow on some deeper level? Did it pay off at some future interval?

And what about “content?” It seemed to me then that the actual subject matter of the piece that I read with such emotion meant very little. It wasn’t that Aphrodite had rescued Paris from the battlefield of Troy by enveloping him in a fog or that the breasts of King David’s beloved were like unto ripe pomegranates. It was something else. What? Beauty? Truth? The indefinable magic of verse and meter and rhythm?

Was it soul? Did the books and music my heart rejected at that time lack soul, while the ones that I embraced possessed it? What is soul anyway?

Do you remember the movie Network? There’s a scene where the actor Peter Finch, as the wigged-out news anchor Howard Beale, gets asked what it was that sent him over the edge. He answers, “I just ran out of bullshit.”

There’s a reason why Homer is Homer and Shakespeare is Shakespeare and Solomon of Ecclesiastes is Solomon of Ecclesiastes. There’s a reason why we’re still reading them thirty centuries after some of them were written.

I wish I could put my finger on it, but I can’t. A gift? Inspiration? Genius? 

And what exactly do they give us, except some once-in-ten-centuries elixir that enters our bloodstream like honey and, for a moment (or maybe more), gives us hope?

P.S. Here’s Sonnet 64:

When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defac’d

BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defac’d

The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;

When sometime lofty towers I see down-ras’d

And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;

When I have seen the hungry ocean gain

Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,

And the firm soil win of the wat’ry main,

Increasing store with loss and loss with store;

When I have seen such interchange of state,

Or state itself confounded to decay;

Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,

That Time will come and take my love away.

This thought is as a death, which cannot choose

But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

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