I wandered away for a bit. When I started to miss the fire of thought, I looked to two of my kindred bloggers, Allen Brill and Don Hynes, whose messages in my mailbox ended up being my way home from my meanderings.

Stuck in traffic last night, on my way to pick up my mother and a couple of others from their makeshift mosque at a church hall, I listened to Tom Friedman on The Connection. We're in the midst of World War III, he declared, adding that this time the totalitarianism that we are fighting is of the religious kind. This is a very important battle for us, he said, because it is with a culture that is antithetical to the liberal principles that we live by. It could be because I was starving and worried that my mother would be worried why I hadn't shown up at the appointed time but I couldn't take these faux-pearls of wisdom from His Pulitzer Prize Winnerness for too long. I was getting a headache trying to figure out how a Born-Again Christian fights religious totalitarianism by deposing a monstrous dictator with no religious leanings.

I had to switch to a jazz station and just let it all go. That's when I realized that I had strayed. The next chance I got, I checked out the link from one of the two unread messages in my mailbox, which led me to The Bright Stuff and the ensuing "bright" exchange. Squinting in all this brightness, I felt the fire warming me from within.

I'm a mere mortal with finite head-time, for which there is never a lull in claims. "Is there or isn't there a God" is a conundrum that I can ill-afford because I've found that that question only distracts from the essentialness of belief to the human condition. Once I realized that my mother's belief in an "anthropomorphic" divinity is what I'd call her inner strength and she realized that my actions and sensibilities were closer to her religion than those of many self-proclaimed believers, the spiritual-rational divide between us began melting away.

I realize, of course, that this warm and fuzzy picture does not represent the social and political reality in which we live. The battle whose ferocity has outlasted all our wars is the one we fight with the differences among us. Those who are not like us in some way are either wrong and often undesirable for that reason or really not very different from us. This doesn't strike me as particularly rational; don't different views construct a fuller picture than identical ones? My snide remarks about Bush's purported faith notwithstanding, it's not his religiosity that makes him dangerous. What is scary is that his righteousness is empty of the wisdom of the beliefs that he claims. Precisely the same can be said about the so called Islamists.

This brings me to the link in the second uread message in my mailbox. It led me to a poem called "Self-Portrait" by David Whyte. It starts...

It doesn't interest me if there is one God
or many gods.

It's nice to be home.

--aslam

11:28:22 PM