Gospel & Universe 🪐 Preface
P. O.V. 3: Fault Lines
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Until about 1970, our family attended the United Church of Canada, one of the most liberal versions of institutional Christianity on planet Earth. At this point my older brother began his lifelong atheist campaign, demanding that our parents justify what he called “brainwashing.” This rebellion was quickly followed by my experience at a Christian summer camp. At the age of eleven, just when I was looking into the pros & cons of Christianity, I was abused by an evangelical counsellor.
My camp experience made me rebellious and distrustful of authority (I explore this in Campfires). Listening to Demons & Wizards, Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid,” and Queen’s “Great King Rat,” “Jesus,” and “Liar,” it became increasingly difficult for me to open my heart up to Jesus. As they say, the first cut is the deepest…
Nevertheless, when I got older and my sister became religious, I felt it necessary to alter my negative view of Christianity. My sister went from experimentation and a giant butterfly on her jean jacket to what I think of as God Consciousness, which has nothing to do with abusive camp counsellors. To me, whether she’s Christian or not, she’s still the same person, and she’s still the same influence in my life. Even after fifty years, she’s still playing with me in the yard, or looking up from her desk:
Perhaps there really is a mystical force or figure called Jesus, and perhaps this incarnation of God might set me free. Yet whenever I think about this possibility, I realize how indelibly I’ve been imprinted by my past, just as John Locke argued over 300 years ago. In thinking about Christian belief I find myself thinking more about my sister than about the Jesus she tells me about.
My inability to connect to Christianity has to do with my camp disaster and also with my vague and abstract religious sensibility. Perhaps my camp experience fashioned my sensibility into something vague, I’m not sure. And perhaps all my philosophizing just boils down to verbal psychotherapy, with concepts like love representing my sister and science representing my older brother, while my mom sits in the background talking to leprechauns and my dad rolls his eyes as if to say, Really?
Whatever the causes, the foundations of my philosophy are like the geographies of nations: cracked and varied; imperfect and aspirational; built up over time, and ultimately prey to time. I empathize with Tom Petty when he sings, “Down below / the man I know / might not be me / and I got a few of my own fault lines / runnin’ under my life.” As a result of these fault lines, that continue to fragment the solid belief of my prairie grandparents, I took a very different path from that of my sister.
In grade 12, the most difficult year of my life, I found a book lying around the house, The Texts of Taoism. I immediately gravitated to this vague and least doctrinaire of religions. Zhuangzi’s mix of belief in some humble mystic Force, and doubt about everything else, made me see religion in a new light. It opened the doors of all religions, since it combined 1. doubt, 2. a vague inkling of some sort of cosmic order or meaning, and 3. a specific formulation of culture & language, even though — or perhaps especially because — it was translated Chinese. Doubt, inkling, and specificity combined into one construct, one formulated yet ever-unformulating form of thinking. Perhaps The Texts of Taoism had such an impact on me because they were Chinese, and therefore almost entirely foreign; they weren’t tainted or obstructed with previous conceptions about religion or previous experiences of abuse & hypocrisy. They were something which I was entirely free to take or leave.
Daoism has been a great help to me ever since, for while I’ve had experiences that might be called cosmic or mystic, these never crystallize into a religious system, let alone into a religious figure like Krishna or Jesus. And once Daoism opened the realm of religious doubt, I couldn’t help applying this doubt to Daoism too.
From there it wasn’t a stretch to the most metamorphic and diverse of religions, Hinduism, with its endless points of view and its endless stories and sacred texts: Bhagavad-Gita, Upanishads, Vedas, Ramayana, Mahabharata, Puranas, Yoga Vasistha, Brahma Sutras, etc. From there, it was even less of a stretch back to writing that was more culturally familiar to me: the subtle explorations of Dickens, the idealistic poetry of Shelly, the subtle agnosticism of Keats and Byron, the cosmic visions of Whitman. From there my readings multiplied like rabbits. Poets like Khayyam, Kabir, and Attar began to fascinate me, especially when they crumbled the foundations of their stricter religion to the ground of love. The vaguer the religious claim, the more likely I was — and am — to entertain it. And the more the claim can be accommodated within the realms of history and science, the better.
Now even the most nebulous religious systems intrigue me, yet also makes me want to look out the window. Now even the most abstract notions of God make me want to look into their origins and then open the door and join Walt Whitman as he tramps his perpetual journey around town, wandering through the streets to the fields and forests, where he looks up to the stars. It's therefore not surprising that I wrote my Master's thesis on Walt Whitman, Laozi, & Zhuangzi (cf. thesis), and later wrote my Ph.D. (and a book) on cosmology, mythology, & mysticism in the early novels of Salman Rushdie (cf. Stranger Gods).
As an agnostic, I imagine that other people have had cosmic or mystic experiences, and that for them these experiences are adequately reflected in a specific philosophy or religion. For me, they never crystallize that way. I suspect that there’s more truth in religious systems than skeptics and positivists are willing to consider. And I do consider them, all of them, yet I inevitably drift toward the ones that end in infinity, ineffability, eternal change, and never-ending points of view.
I’m tempted to call myself a mystic or a poet, yet these words seem too grand. Perhaps my vague feelings of infinity merely come from my interest in geography and astronomy, and perhaps they merely point to my insignificance, my own vanishing point of view. Perhaps mystical annihilation is just plain old obliteration. Perhaps what Pascal calls an infinite abyss is in fact a finite fault. Perhaps at the bottom of the fault lies solid ground, just as the glittering spike of lightning doesn't come from a god, but from the facts of meteorology. For this reason I don’t call myself a mystic or a poet, but an agnostic.
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(For more on my personal background, see my photo-biography starting with 1960-80, as well as Seeing Double, Train of Memory, Exclusive Geographies & Beyond Whose Bourn.)
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Next: 🪐 A Positive-Sum Philosophy
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