March 1999: A Statement of my Quaker Belief

What has come into being was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and darkness did not overcome it. (John 1.3b-5)

I believe there is a divine presence in all people, a shining Light. This Light is the true "I am" which hovers beyond observation or description. I am not my role in society, my name, my hobbies, and yet these external labels are the things that I cling to in my struggle to define myself in day-to-day life. The worldly superficial self obscures the Light. But still it remains as my guide, if I can only listen. It is this Light which raises us above being mere individuals and makes us people.

The divine is an internal living presence. I can't reach out and grab it; like the wind, it flows as it will. The most I can do is seek stillness and be open to its movements. Quaker silent meeting is a wonderful way to worship. We meet in silence and sit in chairs or pews arranged in a circle around empty space. Anyone who is moved to speak can stand and minister. I enter that silence and stillness and try to be open. Some days, if I need to nap, I will nap. If I need to work through personal issues, I'll deal with them. Or perhaps I'll relive moments from the past. Contemplation isn't the kind of goal I can sweat and struggle to achieve. I just try to temper my thoughts with my desire to be open; and when it wills, the Light floods into me and I feel the divine.

The Light is the divine love of unity, so I cannot bask in it alone. True worship involves recognizing and loving the Light in other people. This is the basis of the Peace Testimony, the Quaker refusal to participate in any form of violence.

God is more a verb than a noun because God is the wellspring of the divine promptings which show us how to bring unity and love to people. George Fox, a Quaker founder, urges "let your lives preach." Thus Quakerism is both world denying and world-affirming; I must deny the world to find the Light, but then I must return to the world to act on the Light.

The scriptures are not complete because the living God is constantly revealed in each of us. We can look to the scriptures for guidance, but what matters most is our experience of the divine. The difficulty, then, lies in discerning whether a prompting is an urging of God or of worldly desires. As George Fox says,

You will say, Christ saith this, the apostles say this; but what canst thou say? Art thou a child of Light, and hast thou walked in the Light, and what thou speakest, is it inward from God?

Quakerism is not Puritanical. Sensual pleasure, earthly beauty, and laughter are good because they give glory to being alive. And perfection is possible in this lifetime. Not eternal perfection, but the perfection of spending whole days living in God's presence.

Evil is banal because it is entirely of this world. It happens when we shut ourselves to the promptings of the Inner Light and become slaves to our superficial selves and worldly affairs. As Merton observes, Hell is what happens when we reject the divine and worship the superficial self because the superficial self is nothing, so we are worshiping a hollow nothing.

I have trouble respecting the philosopher who doesn't allow for an intuitive belief in the divine. "I think therefore I am" -- what nonsense! Let's just find glory in "I am" and "you are."

April 1999: Nervous

I have learned something, I'm not sure what. I don't know if I've learned anything at all, and it depresses me to write a credo or a statement about the truths I have uncovered when they are all revealed to be lies in mere days.

I started this term at Pendle Hill with all the vigor of the Swarthmore college student I had been. I applied myself to living a contemplative life and sorting myself out as if it were a job. I journaled, I read Pendle Hill pamphlets, I met amazing people, I felt positive about myself. I made Amazing Daily Insights. "Hey, at this rate I'll be positively glowing with Inner Light by March!" I gloated. I wrote an ecstatic description of my experience to explain to friends and family why I was at Pendle Hill:

I drank deeply from Swarthmore College's fountain of knowledge (an experience akin to taking a sip from a fire hydrant) and was still thirsty because I had not tasted the living water. Love, the future, and friendships were more intellectual pursuits than affairs of the heart. But I did not know the name of my thirst. I only felt a vague dissatisfaction with my life and the track it was following towards graduation, a computer job, gradual deterioration, and finally death. I'd heard rumors of a mecca called Pendle Hill, a place of healing that could fill my emptiness. So I jumped my life's track and entered this mecca not knowing what to expect. I knew it was a Quaker community of retreat and contemplation. I knew there were classes which were not graded; there was an art studio, a library, and lots of trees. But that was the limit of my knowledge.

I quickly discovered that Pendle Hill is not heaven, it's just a place. The people here are not saints. Most everyone arrives confused and lonely. But Pendle Hill is the hope of heaven because it provides a brief window of absolute freedom in which the community tries as best it can to nurture the hope that the Inner Light will shine in all of us.

My friends ask, "what do you do at Pendle Hill?" Well, what do you want to hear about? A catalog of my daily actions would make the place sound so frightfully boring and monastic, but I lack the words to describe my inward adventure. I work about 10 hours a week for the community. I help in the kitchen, clean bathrooms, and I'm part of a crew which is building a greenhouse out of materials found here at Pendle Hill. I'm taking classes on weaving, the gospel of John, and discerning our call. I read and write journal entries and short stories. But I also spend a lot of time on slow walks, I talk with the many people here and savor the flavors of their diverse lives, and I sit in silence. I'm solidifying yet breaking down my understanding of the divine. In short, I'm free to grow into my true self.

With a little bit of introspection, I figured out that my previous life -- the one I would return to after Pendle Hill -- had been off-balance, proud, and too fast. (This was not a difficult conclusion to reach; my brother could certainly tell you about my damnfool pride). I needed centering, patience, and humility. This was truer than I had any right to know; without realizing it, I rapidly knocked myself off-center in a proud decision that all I needed to fill the void in my life was more self-reflection.

The "Discerning our Calls" course revealed that I was a skilled pastor -- a person who knits people together and takes care of relationships. I realized I was a hard worker. And I realized that in the past months I'd been shell-shocked from too much personal conflict (intense college friendships gone awry, a breakup, problems with my job) and work as a stressed student. Once I drew a picture of my life, and I represented the past few months as an explosion and my current state as a hallow circle. After about a month of settling down at Pendle Hill, I submitted the following statement of how I felt led for my "Discerning our Calls" class:

I feel led to go nowhere. I mean that in the most positive and literal sense: I am LED to go NOWHERE. It's vital that I stay put and accept the difficult lesson of learning to live with myself when there is no clutter which drowns out the voices inside of me. And it's really hard to put aside the drive to create projects or work or social engagements, and just stop, listen, and improvise to the dimly heard music of my Light. I'm on the path to a kind of enlightenment which I vaguely grasp at and let go of. I feel like I'm flexing a weak spiritual muscle, but it needs time to develop strength. To make it grow stronger I have to learn to listen to myself and flex it whenever I feel myself drifting off-center. Already I feel far more focused and joyful than I've ever felt in my life.

The questions are, when does the listening stop? When is this process over? When do I move on?

I guess there are several answers. I know this is an issue I'll have to deal with all my life and there is no one answer or goal. But the day I can step into Swarthmore or the mall and know myself to be the same person on the inside and outside, I'll know that I've made real progress. And when I wake up every day thanking God for life instead of miserably tucking in the blankets and wishing for just another five minutes of sleep, I'll know that I've made a real step. Humility, focus, listening.

Translation: I only need to sort myself out, please go away.

Do you hear a desperate voice in this? It wants to believe what it's saying. But a voice which says "I refuse to listen to you" sows the seeds of it's own demise because you have no reason to listen to it. How could I talk about enlightenment and not talk about submitting to God; how could I not talk of seeking God in others around me? And how could a statement of being led ignore my best skills -- my empathy and my drive to work?

A few dazed weeks passed. My initial creative burst dried up. My friendships at Pendle Hill and at Swarthmore stagnated. Then I got sick with a cold-flu combination affectionately referred to as "the plague." I spent a few days in bed, and then sank into a depressed state which lasted for more than a week. I didn't have enthusiasm for anything. Life seemed pointless, my time at Pendle Hill a waste. I wrote a bitter statement of not being led:

If only I smoked, I'd have something to do with my fingers. I can't keep them still. When I stop walking, I idly scratch or bite my fingernails or rub my hands together.

I'm nervous. I thought that Pendle Hill would be relaxing, but the contemplative life seems destined to only make me see the lack of meaning along my path. I was worried that my life was headed nowhere so I simplified everything. I knew I was not called to do the work I was doing. I quit school, I broke off a relationship, I stripped away layers of ego to lay myself bare to the cosmos. I didn't come to Pendle Hill heeding a call, I came because everything I was doing seemed so petty and pointless. I came hoping there was a call out there for me, and that if I sat still I would have a flash of divine revelation and feel motivated.

"Now, God, lead me to fulfill my call!" I cried out.

Nothing happened. Now nothing can distract me from the fact that I don't feel led to go anywhere, and it's awful. I imagine that normal people faced with meaninglessness hide in school work or a job or a lousy relationship and at least pretend that life has meaning. Ironically, the luxury of Pendle Hill denies me that luxury. Each day I wake up knowing that I don't know why I'm here, and it's hard to escape from that. It's like the Pink Floyd lyrics say, "you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking."

It's sad, really. I have the freedom to do anything, anything at all, and I sink into depression because nothing I do has any significance. It's awfully hard to care about pleasing myself, and I feel bad because it's so self-centered and wasteful of my abilities. Moreover, I'm a true extravert; I draw energy from my interactions with other people, I can't suck energy from myself.

I can't dream the future today. It's hard to be hopeful for what I don't even know I want. If I jump back into the fast-paced life I'll never find my center, but I'm too restless to stay still in center. Dammed if I do, dammed if I don't, just dammed. Which is why I bite my nails in frustration.

I finally talked to my consultant about this depression. It was a kind of a breakthrough because I was finally open about it, and by talking about my thoughts I was able to see them more clearly for what they were. When I guiltily admitted that I wished I had work to do, work to do for other people, he burst out, "you should be dammed proud of wanting to work!" And that's when it dawned on me, I'm good at working, I don't mind work (in moderation), I'm good with people, I'm not all that good at contemplation. The feelings of frustration I'd been feeling stemmed from denying myself what I was good at as I pretended to be what I was not.

I still don't feel led to do any particular work, but I am led to work. Personal insights are important but they will come in their own time. So for my own happiness I feel like next term I must find more work to do for other people -- hopefully working for the maintenance crew -- and get more involved in my friendships.

I regret letting my friendships grow stagnant. Swarthmore is on Spring break, so I'm aware of the many friends I took for granted. And at Pendle Hill I rode too long on the assurance that I didn't need to work on my friendships. Today I had to confront that regret when I learned that my friend Will had suddenly decided to leave. Within 24 hours, with so little warning, he left my life -- probably forever. Will's departure is for the best. His mania had been slowly encroaching on his life and he was increasingly unstable and unable to cope with the stimulation of Pendle Hill. Over the past few weeks I turned away from Will because his illness scared me. It is the source of his brilliance, but he simply does not react to people in predictable ways and dealing with him drained me completely. I had made up my mind to connect with Will again, and just then I learned he was leaving us. His absence saddens me. I sit here in a dark room lit by a candle and the pale glow of a computer screen.

This moment, this sadness, has meaning. An ignored friendship, at the point of revival, slipped away; there is a lesson in that. My inward focus got me only so far, and no further. It's time to connect with what matters again, to find meaning in friendships and work and feelings and things outside myself. American life is always full. You're supposed to have full days, full weekends, and always be busy because a busy life is a productive life. It's like your life is a bucket and you spend all your time and focus on keeping it exactly full. At Swarthmore I knew this fullness was ultimately futile, so I came to Pendle Hill to drain my bucket and see what was at the bottom. And I was disappointed to find a empty bucket, and no more. No hidden surprise, just a whole lot of space to fill again.

But there's another option. To continue the metaphor, rather than worrying about keeping my bucket full or despairing that it's just a bucket when it's empty, I can fill it with just enough water, sling it over my shoulder, and take a walk to see what comes.

I've discerned nothing except that whenever I think I have an answer, I probably don't.

June 1999: Credo

I've written this credo countless times. Each time I lean back, look over my pleasant words, and catch myself dodging between ambiguities, hiding in trite phrases, or bending meanings to present a pious Chuck. I crumple up the credo and throw it out. I'm inclined to wax pedantic about things I know nothing about. I get downright boring and weave complicated nests of logic and theology I never really understood.

Let me tell you a story, because that's the only honest beginning I know.

Love at 17; The Mountain Experience

Do you remember love at 17? Messy, consuming desires that you do not know how to deal with. Never put down young love; never understate it; but don't romanticize it either. It's intense and often very stupid, but quite real.

I was in love with a girl named Cherie. She was possibly going out with a much older guy. My good friend Drew was also in love with Cherie. She was clueless or innocent or evil -- take your pick -- and she remained blissfully unaware of either Drew's or my affections. We went to a small high school and we could not avoid each other; each day was a trial of fire and ice for me. I was naive and sweet and it was horrible.

Our Junior class spent a weekend retreat in the Santa Cruz mountains. Drew and Cherie spent all their time together. Part of that was me sulking as a martyr away from them, indulging myself in hating them for playing games with my friendship and for being so cruelly stupid. My other friends were also real jerks on this retreat, so I was miserable.

But when I was at my lowest, all my friends came through and suggested that we all get together for a dawn hike up a nearby mountain. I was so glad that my friends wanted to see me and share a special experience -- it was a kind of redemption for a guy who was really hurting for friends and didn't feel loved by anyone.

So I got up early and shuffled in the pre-dawn darkness to our meeting spot. And I waited. I wandered around and the only people I saw were naughty students returning to their single-sex bunkhouses. I was still waiting a full half hour after the time when Drew, Cherie, and the others had agreed to meet me.

It crushed me. I angrily rejected them all. I don't reject friends lightly, but I had been jerked around by this girl for seven months and my friends had done nothing to help me. Self-righteous anger wrapped around a core of despair is the fire that fuels the failed young romantic. Since I was awake and cold and pissed off, I climbed the mountain alone. As my legs pumped and the mud slipped beneath my feet, I felt more and more ready to explode. I had been such a fool to trust that these people who had hurt me before. All my nagging suspicions, all my worst fears, had been justified. They would not hurt me again. Once more, I was alone.

I suddenly found myself on the top of a knoll. My anger had rocketed me up the mountain, and there was nowhere else to go. So I sat down, and angry thoughts circled in a torrent...

And the sun rose. I blinked and saw everything; every drop of dew, leaf, blade of grass, speck of dust. I heard the birds singing with absolute clarity. It was huge and awesome and beautiful. I detached and saw myself in the third person, a small figure playing small but vital role in the living dawn. And I saw how this poor deluded figure-me was clutching a fire that was burning him-me. He-I hated the pain but held onto it as if the despair was a talisman of power he-I could not do without. The detached observer told the figure-me to let go; then I snapped back into myself.

The anger was gone. I was fully living in the reality of the living sunrise, not a painful reality of my construction. Yes, people had hurt me. But I simply didn't care because the sun was so much larger than me.

That is the closest I've ever had to a divine encounter. It was the turning point of my adolescence; things steadily improved. And the fact that mountain-top mystic encounters are so hideously clichéd does nothing to deny that day's truth.

Meaning

I was lost in the chaos of events that hurt and confused me. I saw something in the sunrise -- a glimmer that I'd glimpsed before in good people, deep moments, or in meeting for worship. This is the feeling of absolute correctness and wholeness and belonging far beyond my normal perception. I caught a glimpse of beautiful unconditional meaning.

Faith means knowing beyond reason that there is meaning.

The Sparrow

"Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your father knowing it." (Matthew 10:24)

But the sparrow still falls.

I stand poised between grace and chaos. Grace is seeing a dead sparrow and accepting that there is meaning and high Truth in its death. But sometimes I see a dead sparrow and chastise my sentimental urges. I feel like a deluded ape who was fooled by folk tales told far too seriously. Better to bravely accept that life is chaos, a pointless farce, than to cower in the cave of ignorance.

Life's but a walking shadow. A poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Something in me nods along with this MacBeth fragment, but something else screams "no!" I intuitively know when I have done right or wrong, when I've not lived up to my measure. It matters that when I whisper, "I screwed that up," I eventually hear the forgiving response, "yes, you screwed that up. Everyone screws up. Make amends and get on with your life." Bad things happen, evil is done. These events truly signify nothing except in my heart; and I have an intuitive urge to give these events significance. And some days I think I'm supposed to find significance, that I'm not just fulfilling some latent psychological god-need.

So the struggle of my belief is the struggle to find meaning in the chaos, to believe some folk tales despite everything. It would be misleading to say I believe there is meaning: I want to believe there is a meaning, but the bedrock of this faith wears thin some days.

Blasphemy and Sin

I'm not going to give you a comparative theology about Jesus Christ. Jesus is a ghost, fading in and out of reality as his story and history fade in and out of significance for me. I'm not going to talk proudly as though He were at my side, when most days I don't even know if He is real, or I don't even care.

How horrible to admit that some days I don't even care if Jesus is there. Religious apathy is the true blasphemy. Sin is not about rejecting God as much as shoving God aside. It is about ignoring the inner voice to gratify oneself. But what if there is no shared inner voice? Sin and righteousness become consensual illusions; by shattering the illusion, we could raise ourselves to new heights -- or sink to utter depravity.

Consider a place called Trinity, in New Mexico. Our wise men exploded the first atomic bomb there and the heat of the blast fused sand into green glass. Forget the tower of Babel as challenging God; this is playing with the building blocks of reality for the cause of what -- killing people and intimidating enemies? And why were the bombs built; for peace? I grew up knowing the post-war dream failed. I read the news and I beat my head against the wall and implored the world, "tell me again in crystal clear detail, why was Jesus crucified?" We have so much power that we are Gods, and perhaps we don't need God at all. But I think about Trinity, about the glass of our arrogance that means death, and I whisper, "God help us; God help me; please, oh God, be there."

That simple prayer is my confession, my forgiveness, my salvation. I admit the futility of human endeavors. The bedrock of my faith isn't a belief in God or meaning. It is the prayer for the hopeÊthat there is meaning, that all people have a glimmer of divine unity striving to be realized, that above the confusion there is a deep life of Truth and Meaning.

God

I do not know about God, that hypothesis that we speak about time after time. "God" is such a misused, defiled, desecrated word that lacks the radiance and glory beyond comprehension that it points to. The hypothesis of God is that there is meaning. God isn't the meaning itself, but the force that creates meaning. I pray there is meaning. My active prayer is to make meaning around me: to heal, to love, to fight when necessary, to act on what I hope is divine guidance. The God I can love and worship is a verb which means creating meaning for myself and others.

Jesus and the Bible

The Bible is a collection of really great stories and some not-so-great stories. I am challenged and enriched by Job screaming at God and God thundering back. I admire Jesus for calmly protecting an adulterous woman by encouraging her accusers to look inside themselves (John 7:53-8:11). I reject the terrible campaign of conquest and war to cleanse the land for God's people (Joshua and Judges).

The Bible is a holy text. But so is a great science fiction novel that chronicles the human search for meaning. People share stories and histories to find and give meaning; those that give the most meaning, comfort and instruction are holy because they are shared by many. They bring the divine closer to us and give us ways to talk about the divine.

The Christ story speaks to me. It clarifies the struggle to put aside futile earthly things and leap with only faith as my safety net to the land of living meaning. It tells me that there is a God who is meaning (John 1:1), and that this God wants us to realize a measure of glory in our lives. I need to stop being wrapped up in formalities and day-to-day clutter, and act with intention to do good. I believe this message.

But there are lots of other messages out there which come from the same source of the human heart trying to expresses what it has gone through and found. The Bible is not my rule book, the Bible is not complete, the Bible is not the only or most holy story there is.

Questions of Faith

Are there parts of the First and New Testaments that I struggle with?

Yes. I don't reject the meaning of difficult stories, but I don't take them to heart, either. I mull them over, and ultimately, those stories that don't speak to me simply don't affect my life.

Do I accept Jesus as my lord and savior?

Christ's path is the one I want to lead. But it's not just His path, many people before and after have pointed to the same path. I accept Jesus only if He and I can wrestle, and if accepting Him does not stop me from believing the many truths I will find in my life.

Am I a Christian?

I used to answer "I'm a Christian, but...;" always a qualifying "but;" but I'm a universalist; but I believe in Christ's message and the power of his story and don't care about the historical reality of the crucifixion; but my faith in God is not all that stable. If I have to qualify my categorization, can I really call myself a Christian? It's an issue of saying what I mean and dealing truthfully with the person asking the question. Sometimes I answer "yes," sometimes I answer "no," but I'm always annoyed when the question is merely a matter of categorization.

Am I a Quaker?

Yes, but I'm not a very good Quaker. I'm a Quaker because I like not having to swallow a credo. I'm a Quaker because not setting one person above another to minister is in keeping with our common search for meaning. I'm a Quaker because I like silence without pretense. But I don't quake, I'm not afraid of God. I either think of a happy and friendly God, or no God at all. To embrace God fully is to embrace fear. There will be meaning and divine action that will take place in the suffering I go through, and I will have to accept it and love God, the very God who will hurt me. And I cannot do this, not now.

Falling

The girl I told you about -- Cherie -- it all came to a crux a week or two after the mountain experience. I had been purged of all anger, and saw that clinging to uncertainty had poisoned my heart. So I called her out of the blue and told her everything. All of it; my love, Drew's love, the anger and resentment and little things of seven months of unrequited passion. I did this simply because I had to; I wasn't expecting anything, I had nothing, and intuitively I knew I had to rip myself open and jump into a more meaningful way of living that may not actually be there.

That evening she and I started a deep relationship.

I keep coming back to this fall into meaning. When all else fails, when reason tells me that the universe failed me, can I take a step into the void?

Now is a good time to talk about Job. Job's story challenges me. Job was a righteous man who did nothing wrong, and God ruined his life. God killed Job's family, destroyed his property, and gave Job horrible diseases. Job did not reject God, but demanded justice; he screamed out to know why this had happened. God spoke out of the tempest, and sneered at Job, saying "Who is this who darkens counsel / speaking without knowledge?" The stories continues with an amazing narrative of God's greatness -- "have you ever commanded the day to break...?" "Can you tie cords to Pleiades / Or undo the chains of Orion?" and so on. Then Job simply replies that he accepts God, and will "recant and relent / being but ashes and dust."

What kind of an answer is that? Job, who so fiercely challenged God, capitulates when God says nothing to address Job's woes, and only heaps praise on Himself? But the key thing about this story is that God answered Job, and he said, "know that I am." And that was answer enough; the knowledge that there is some meaning, though it is beyond reason, was enough for Job to let himself fall into grace.

I want to retell the story of the Trinity test site. People in their arrogance blasted the desert into glass, in a sense blasting meaning out of the modern age by taking charge of divine powers for the basest of reasons. But now grass and cactus and mesquite have returned to this land and grow in the cracks in the glass. This is the message of the resurrection. We may kill God, but even in the death of God we can find a wellspring of meaning that shows us that God did not truly die. I cannot despair at the image of dead nuclear glass, I have to look closely at the glass and see that marvelous processes of repair and life are there, even there.

August 1999: Very simple

I wish I were a better man; I wish I lived a more sacred life, a more intentional life.

I jumped back into the "real world" of work and living in a city, and day-to-day needs have kept me from introspecting too deeply. That is good in a way; there is such a thing as too much introspection, and I was starving for reality towards the end of my time at Pendle Hill where things are too intentional. But I let myself get caught up too easily in a maelstrom of running around, and my center slips out from under me.

All is not lost, I think I'm just regaining my balance.

I read Bertrand Russel's "Why I'm Not a Christian," and I agree that fundamental Catholicism just doesn't make sense. But his rejection of all religions on secular rationist grounds (e.g. "huzzah for science which will dispel religious myths!") didn't settle well with me. He spends all his time emphasizing the consequences of people taking on religion like a yoke, enslaving themselves to tradition and silly rules. But Russel is incapible of explaining why (to take one example) the garden of Gethsemane (Mark 14.32-42) is such a poignant story, why it speaks so deeply to the human condition.

Jesus is utterly alone because even his followers fall asleep and will not help him, and he must accept the burden of his own death which will happen for reasons he does not understand ("...take this cup from me"). This is Jesus asking the human question of why we must endure hardships. His doubts and fears are not just another lesson expressed in fancy rhetoric, they are eternal and unanswerable. That's why his answer "yet not what I want, but what you want" is so unexpected. It simply doesn't make sense. Jesus is not accepting some external dogma of "obey God," he finds a personally empowering answer in setting aside his will for God's will.

This is the essential element of religion, the recognition that there is a deeper life that a person cannot simply carve out of the world around himself. When the head is bowed to God, when sacrifices are made or the ego is set aside or time is set aside for prayer, we can enter that space where we can stop carrying our self-imposed, wearying burden of making life make sense. Because I, alone, cannot endow life with meaning, and I wear myself out trying or -- even worse -- never trying at all.

So I guess I see religion at very least as a useful lie, a lie that breaks us out of our utterly futile pursuits to look for the deeper life.

I guess I no longer put as much faith in people as I used to, or in intuitive notions of goodness. People tend to be full of nonsense and our ideas of what is "good" is so deeply warped by our desires. I trust the sober person who can bow their head to not-knowing, who respects the world so much that they will not crush it in a mad struggle to impose their own meaning on it.

I don't make much sense and I know I'm trying to sound much wiser than I am. The point is:

• People are full of nonsense
• Religion may be a lie, but it can be a useful lie and we shouldn't just shove it aside.