Dear Poet,
Why is it easier for some people to believe that an all-powerful, all-knowing entity called a god always existed and created the universe, than it is to just believe that the universe always existed?
Signed,
Perplexed
Dear Perplexed:
Even as I think you are really asking me why people would choose to believe in a benevolent deity at all, I’d like first to think about the question as your phrasing raises it, and try to consider why and whether it is easier for people who believe to believe.
If that’s the question, my answer is: I’m not sure it can be. Since belief is based on a kind of magic paradox, faith being “the evidence of things unseen,” it’s linked essentially with one’s inability to ever know. Knowing disqualifies you. It’s as if hide-and-seek only becomes the true hide-and-seek if no one comes for you. There you are in someone’s coat closet, trying not to breathe the family’s coat fibers, trying not to step on their rubbery boots, trying keep the poster board you’re hiding behind from creasing. And that no one comes for you, that there are no footsteps stopping outside the closet door, or voices occasionally punctuating the silence—that you have no concrete sign of presence— this faith is supposed to be the thing that keeps you going, that keeps you there, balanced and supported and calm. They have all gone home for dinner maybe. The game depends on you maintaining belief that they know of you and are seeking you, and will not ever show themselves. How long would I last in that closet, I wonder?
This must be what Auden meant in “The Worth of God in a Secular Age” when he quotes Simone Weil: “We have to believe in a God who is like the True God in everything except that he does not exist, for we have not reached the point where God exists.” That place when He does exist, I presume, is when one moves on to His Neighborhood in the sky. That’s probably why the speaker contemplating not going to church in Wallace Stevens’ beautiful “Sunday Morning” remarks that if there is no God, “The sky will be much friendlier then than now… /Not this dividing and indifferent blue.” She’s convinced that God’s existence is the reason for the sky’s unfriendliness, its division and indifference; if there is no God, sky is just pretty blue sky, for all. Belief has its own set of problems. In such a case, God would give me such an inferiority complex.
But if you are asking why some just won’t accept the idea that the universe has, simply, always existed, that brings the anxiety of an earth free-floating in air “unsponsored” (to quote Stevens again). It’s an old question, “solved” differently by each civilization’s imagination: Hindu myth saw four elephants grandly carrying the world, themselves standing on Akupara, a sweet turtle; the Greeks have Atlas holding the whole thing up; the Norse myth credits a large Ash tree. The Bible pitches in too, setting the earth upon “pillars” in Samuel 2:8 or, even more poetically, these lines from the Book of Job:
He stretches out the north over empty space;
He hangs the earth on nothing. (Job 26:7)
It feels not only odd to have nothing supporting our everything, but tenuous and exhausting to consider, as if the earth is one of those toy pipes I had as a child that I had to keep blowing into to keep the ball floating, above the current of breath. Yet if as the Bible says, God is keeping us afloat on pillars or “on nothing,” why did he choose such a violent design for survival as we float, the hawks killing squirrels and the whales feasting on seals? To say nothing of Malthus. The whole thing opens up the vault of my wonder and fear. Maybe that’s why that scoundrel Larkin, who was post-faith altogether, still dropped in on churches, albeit when they were empty of people. There is in that silence a moment in which we might find meaning—not in the stories we have told ourselves so that we may sleep at night, the ones which embody and provide an explanation, aetiology, or justification for our belief (which by the way is a paraphrase of the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of myth)—but in our shared desire for meaning, which bonds us in our related experience of fear and wonder, even in our paradox of unknowing. That doesn’t help me enough. But here is a poem that does:
How to take down an altar
by francine j. harris
First, remove your Mary. Take the chains from her neck.
Then smack out the candles with a pillow. Stack the books
under Paul in boxes. Lift up
the snakes. uncover the faces. Take
the incense dust in both hands and cross Barbara.
Unhinge Jesus carefully, at each panel. Move
the Angels by their buttocks, not their wings.
Unplug Magdalene. Take away the black gauze
from the face of Judas. Pull the river foam
below the roses, lay it under both Moses.
Wrap Adam and Eve
in light citrus and borax. Make a clay paste
to preserve the face of God. Bury the
cigarettes. the apple peels. the meat.
This poem originally appeared in play dead by francine j. harris, published by Alice James Books, 2017.