Helen this is a beautiful post. It actually gave me another way of thinking about an experience I had over the summer. I was at my grandmother’s funeral with just my 6-week-old (other child was ill, husband was with her). At one point, the only people in the church foyer were my mother, myself, my newborn, and my grandmother’s body. It felt like a moment of extreme clarity about two seemingly distinct/opposite things: that life is largely composed of immense suffering (my mom was torn apart by her months of caregiving and her mothers subsequent and sudden death), and that life is surely infinitely good (my newborn felt like a candle of truth in that environment). It was a kind of sublime experience where the two extremes of joy and grief brought each other out in maximally deep clarity. We suffer largely because life is so good (we suffer from love). And we keep making life in the face of all its terrors. So I feel like I’ve experienced both of these types of religious experiences, but I see them as magnifying one another. This is largely why Weil’s work resonates with me, I think. It seems to make sense of this idea.
A fascinating analysis. I decided some time ago that the universality and timelessness of religions and religious experience means either that humans are just wired that way -- perhaps connected to our love of stories -- or just maybe we're all perceiving, albeit through a dark glass, something ineffable that's really there. More likely the former, I suppose, but who knows?
Such a splendid piece. Thank you, Helen, also for that. Yesterday I had a long talk with my dad and at some point, I told him I sometimes would prefer to believe in God. He immediately replied by saying, "you would not, we are not the people that need that." I was left with his position in mind for a while. I cannot believe in God or religion; however fond I am of theology and some biblical stories. But your glimpse of eternity also took me to another place: that sort of Spinozist eternity (an excellent philosopher calls it "scalar eternity") in our mind. That grasp of God as a drop of a golden sun that only our reason delivers, as if by chance, but not at all by accident. A bad trip is, indeed, the exact opposite of that kind of joy, a gift, a grace. Toxic stuff helps the bad trips as well…As for evil, maybe Augustine replying to the Pelagianism was right, and that seems fine, because 1) we cannot access the original sin legend and 2) freedom is forever inside, in the first place. <3
Helen this is a beautiful post. It actually gave me another way of thinking about an experience I had over the summer. I was at my grandmother’s funeral with just my 6-week-old (other child was ill, husband was with her). At one point, the only people in the church foyer were my mother, myself, my newborn, and my grandmother’s body. It felt like a moment of extreme clarity about two seemingly distinct/opposite things: that life is largely composed of immense suffering (my mom was torn apart by her months of caregiving and her mothers subsequent and sudden death), and that life is surely infinitely good (my newborn felt like a candle of truth in that environment). It was a kind of sublime experience where the two extremes of joy and grief brought each other out in maximally deep clarity. We suffer largely because life is so good (we suffer from love). And we keep making life in the face of all its terrors. So I feel like I’ve experienced both of these types of religious experiences, but I see them as magnifying one another. This is largely why Weil’s work resonates with me, I think. It seems to make sense of this idea.
A fascinating analysis. I decided some time ago that the universality and timelessness of religions and religious experience means either that humans are just wired that way -- perhaps connected to our love of stories -- or just maybe we're all perceiving, albeit through a dark glass, something ineffable that's really there. More likely the former, I suppose, but who knows?
Such a splendid piece. Thank you, Helen, also for that. Yesterday I had a long talk with my dad and at some point, I told him I sometimes would prefer to believe in God. He immediately replied by saying, "you would not, we are not the people that need that." I was left with his position in mind for a while. I cannot believe in God or religion; however fond I am of theology and some biblical stories. But your glimpse of eternity also took me to another place: that sort of Spinozist eternity (an excellent philosopher calls it "scalar eternity") in our mind. That grasp of God as a drop of a golden sun that only our reason delivers, as if by chance, but not at all by accident. A bad trip is, indeed, the exact opposite of that kind of joy, a gift, a grace. Toxic stuff helps the bad trips as well…As for evil, maybe Augustine replying to the Pelagianism was right, and that seems fine, because 1) we cannot access the original sin legend and 2) freedom is forever inside, in the first place. <3