Image by Taka. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Life gave
what I took
for my own.
I learned
how to seize
with the hands,
how to tear
with the teeth.
I learned
what it felt like
to touch with the lips,
to press with the tongue,
to be surprised by how much
came out
when I broke the surface,
to be covered with sweetness
all over my body.
Now I know.
It’s complicated.
***
What I took
is mine.
I’m learning
how to build
with the hands,
how to hold nails
with the teeth.
Cleaning up
is never
as much fun
as messing up.
Construction
is never
as cathartic
as demolition.
Nails and wood
are not the same thing
as a tree.
They have no power
to give life.
I’m learning
what it feels like
to be covered with sweat
all over my body.
***
What I made
gave life.
It was an accident.
Nobody meant for it to happen
this way.
It just seemed like a good idea
at the time.
The hands that learned
to seize and build.
The teeth that learned
to tear and hold.
The facsimile of a tree.
I wasn’t expecting it
to be alive
when I broke the surface.
I was surprised by how much
came out
and covered me with blood
all over my body.
Time to sit up and pay attention. I’m asking YOU a question today, so I want to see lots of answers and comments down below!
This is a question that my philosophy students at Utica College are pondering and discussing this week and I thought it would be fun to put it before you.
I was having lunch at a cafe yesterday when someone walked up and handed me a religious pamphlet that asked whether I knew for sure that I was going to heaven when die. This is an interesting question.
It’s even more interesting that so many in the fundamentalist camp choose to start their evangelistic pitch with this question. If one’s faith is based on fear for the ego’s survival in an unknown afterlife, then it doesn’t seem to be qualitatively different from the dog-eat-dog drive for survival in this world.
I’m not trying to disparage eternal hope for anyone, but during Holy Week, Christians celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus. Jesus was willing to sacrifice himself. His vision and ultimate concern was much larger than his drive for egoic survival. He embraced death willingly and so became the primary model by which Christians measure their faith.
There is an extent to which I believe we Christians are called to do the same. Jesus said, “Take up your cross and follow me.” Christians like to remind each other that Christ died for us, but there is also a very real sense in which we are called to die with Christ. We are participants, not merely consumers, in the unfolding drama of eternity.
Friedrich Schleiermacher said it like this in On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (1799):
Religion is the outcome neither of the fear of death, nor of the fear of God. It answers a deep need in man. It is neither a metaphysic, nor a morality, but above all and essentially an intuition and a feeling. … Dogmas are not, properly speaking, part of religion: rather it is that they are derived from it. Religion is the miracle of direct relationship with the infinite; and dogmas are the reflection of this miracle. Similarly belief in God, and in personal immortality, are not necessarily a part of religion; one can conceive of a religion without God, and it would be pure contemplation of the universe; the desire for personal immortality seems rather to show a lack of religion, since religion assumes a desire to lose oneself in the infinite, rather than to preserve one’s own finite self.
The question I am putting before you, superfriends and blogofans, is taken from chapter 9 of William Rowe’s Philosophy of Religion: An Introduction.
How important to religion is the belief in personal survival after death? Do you think that religion must stand or fall with this belief? Can you imagine a viable religion which accepts the view that death ends everything? What would such a religion be like? Explain.
Hopping Hadrian's Wall 