"belief in one God is anything but ordinary . . .
. . .you may begin to realize (unless an excess of rational prejudice has you deaf and blind) how many phenomena in the world really support polytheism. Take our earth with its amazing variety of landscapes and climates; look at the immense realms of plants and animals, not to mention humanity. All of them undeniably ordered and interrelated, yet also startingly and awesomely dissimilar, and far from harmonious. Such observations open us to the inherent riddles of the universe. We discover that it is all really beyond us; really, it is all a bit much, everything seems charged with invisible energies.
THAT, if anything, is the most characteristic feature of polytheism: the stunning, irresistible omnipresence of the spiritual and the divine within our restless world (and in that sense not really above or beyond it). These invisible powers and influences are legion; it is characteristic of divinity to be multitudinous and to vary according to places and seasons. Yet always and everywhere it is part of human life -- often benign, sometimes playful or roguish or mischievous, sometimes appalling or truly mailcious, always enigmatic. It is almost palpable, too: a cross-fire of forces and processes: lunar, solar, astral, planetary, terrestrial, subterranean, pelagic, climatic, vegetable, animal, ethnic, dynastic, familial, social, political, you name it -- a measureless mix of influences, subject to nothing but the One-Inexorable-World-Order, stark blind, unknown, and unloved.
What does it mean to be religious in such a world? Most of all, you find yourself steeped in narratives about the unseen world and its denizens. Thanks to these, you live in an encompassing system of cultivated attitudes and relationships -- all of them incorporated in a web of traditional practices and observances in which awe, devotion, fear, subservience, and sometimes abject obsequiousness alternate with divination and playing the odds, with cunning, calculated reverence, and with desperate attempts at suborning the powers that be or buying them off, and even with recklessness, revolt, and hubris.
To have a dark intuition of the world's coherence and at the same time to experience its obvious disharmony on a daily basis is very perplexing. No wonder that the world of polytheism is characterized by division and tension. Each power, even the highest, controls only particular locales and seasons, so that jealousy governs the world. That is why mythologies are rife with rivalry. The unseen powers vie with each other; they are partial and rarely compassionate; often they will play games with particular regions and human communities, and they do not always play fair by a long shot. No wonder human life is unpredictable. No wonder human communities are apt to be rivals, not to say hereditary enemies. The simple fact is that all interests operate at cross-purposes; the nomad's death is the farmer's breath. So, if people want to create any order and stability at all, or at any rate within the circle of their own experience, they will do well to practice their own religion, sensibly and with moderation if possible. This means: take into account the invisible powers and forces and comply with their wishes, preferably out of piety, but at least out of self-interest. For only if you oblige the gods, the heroes, and the powers-that-be are they likely to be in your corner. Or at least you will have a chance of keeping their influence within limits. Of course, you must stay vigilant. For that reason, religiosity demands a fair amount of self-discipline. But that, too, has a real advantage: it keeps you modest, and conscious of your place in this overwhelming world. For along with everything and everybody else, you are at the mercy of the play of powers and forces. And in the end, you are no match for them.
But even that has a bright side: in the end no one is morally responsible. The great comfort of polytheism and mythology is the unburdened conscience. For in the last resort, life is a matter not of taking things in hand but of handing things over, not of giving of yourself but of giving in to what plays. So just play along in the ancient game, go along to get along, do what you have to do. Even do your worst! Isn't the bottom line that we really can't help it?"
From "One God and Other Revelations" by Father Frans Josef van Beeck, S.J., in Commonweal, March 22, 1996 Jim Chapin
Powered by hypermail