Memoir, from just outside the box
Children of a Lesser God
October 2021
“Children of a Lesser God" is a 1986 American film, the screenplay written by Hesper Anderson and Mark Medoff and based on Medoff's 1979 play.
Leichner
Yesterday, I was searching for a prologue and an epilogue for one of my political screeds. What popped into my head was a movie title, "Children of a Lesser God.” I typed the title into the Google search bar, plucked the magic twanger, and what arrived was exactly the kind of food for thought I was looking for… from “Idylls of the King” by Alfred Lord Tennyson.
I found Him in the shining of the stars,
I marked Him in the flowering of His fields,
But in His ways with men I find Him not.
I waged His wars, and now I pass and die.
O me! for why is all around us here
As if some lesser god had made the world...
Once again, I am reading the first novel of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, "Justine" (1957), a book that I read 50 years ago.
"God neither created us nor wished us to be created. We are the work of an inferior deity who wrongly believes himself to be God."
While listening to a stand-up comic on YouTube, I heard him say... "There is nothing more Christian than letting someone else die for your sins."
My question is for all of us. We all started out in Sunday school, and we attended church on and off through high school. But in adulthood, any concerns about God and religion faded to zero. Why are we no longer in the thrall of God?
When I moved to Montana in 1976, what was once religion was resurrected as the spiritual life, animism. God became the-all-that-is and Jesus became my Tonto.
When I lived in Montana, landscape was my religion, and the priests were the animals of the wild. Landscape did all the driving then, and time/culture/ego sat in the back seat with the groceries and the laundry. I think of the priests who, when I last saw them, were taking communion. Just south of Dillon, under a late morning sky of utter blue, five eagles and a magpie devoured the body of Christ, who this time appeared in the form of a roadkill deer.
As I have stated earlier, when anyone asks about my relationship with God, I quote Robert Duvall, from the movie "Open Range.” "The Lord and I have an understanding."
Adams
I try to not hate anybody until I have a good reason.
I try not to hate others just because I have a disagreement with them.
I try not to kill people, even if I do hate them.
In general, I try to treat others the way I would like to be treated.
Was I brainwashed into this approach to life by the Evangelical and Reformed Church, or by my mother's behavioral admonitions, or by my own readings of philosophy and religion? Is church attendance the only source of obtaining a moral approach to one's decision-making?
When I was married, I attended Holy Family Catholic Church in the poorest parish in Columbus, Ohio, because there the paltry 20 bucks a week I tithed would do the most good. My wife wanted to go there because this church was allowed to present Mass in Latin. After my wife died, I continued to attend Mass for a year while I recovered from that loss.
I see religion as a net plus in the world. The stated goals of most religions comport nicely with good behavior. My opinion is that church attendance is most helpful for the young and for the old. Each group will likely learn, and then decades later re-learn, explanations for life's inevitabilities and finalities at a time when these issues are becoming newly relevant or, in the end, uncomfortably relevant, to one's own life. In between these two times of life, young and old, we are too arrogant to admit that we do not really know the answers to the ultimate questions.
Dougan
I find Jim-Bob’s response rather unexpected and refreshing, especially the disclosure that he attended mass with his wife and continued doing so for a period after her death. Confounding expectations is a good thing.
I have mulled your question, which assumes we have abandoned any attachment to organized religion. If anyone should ask about my thoughts on religion, organized or otherwise, I’d begin by saying… I am agnostic at best. I like this response because it permits a very wide range of thought on the subject. I am decidedly NOT anti-religion, though there are many variants among the organized bunch which I abhor.
My case history: Ma and Pa were Episcopal church-goers, their boy an every-week attender, altar boy, Sunday evenings with the youth group. For years thereafter, I lapsed until marrying a Roman Catholic, siring 3 sons and raising them Catholic… the whole works. I was somewhat attached to the early process, but later the family faded into non-worship in any formal sense.
These days, I will walk into an empty Episcopal church and sit awhile. My thoughts therein are vaguely spiritual. I would like to understand how a man whose brain tracks logically on so many issues finds a space in his life for Jesus Christ as our Savior. Surely we all know that we must have answers regarding our creation, and surely all know that we concoct these answers out of the thinnest air.
epilogue: "Three Quarks for Muster Mark"
Adams Dougan reminds us that "We must have answers," so we make up answers out of thin air. I remember more than one conversation in which someone said, "There has to be a Creator" in order to explain the vastness and complexity of life and the universe. In a similar way, the theoretical physicist Murray Gell-Mann postulated the existence of elementary particles and the existence of quarks to explain the mechanisms at work in the universe. Murray Gell-Mann took the word quark from James Joyce and "Finnegans Wake."
Leichner Theoretical physics is not my strong suit. I know what a peon is, having lived the life of a landless laborer, but pions, kaons, hyperons, eta mesons, hadrons and gluons boggle my mind. Your enlightening tutorial puts “astrophysics” in the same cathedral with “religious fervor.” I like the word quark because it is so close to the words quick, quack and quirk, all four of which could easily be used in the same sentence.
Dougan In a Divine stroke of irony and inventiveness, astrophysics... which should be the absolute opposite of religion... is made holy by its total acceptance of dark matter and dark energy being 98% of all mass in this universe. There was no Big Bang. There was no faster-than-the-speed-of-light creation and no infinite expansion of space and time. It seems that astrophysics and theology exist at the same level of “truthiness," both jury-rigged and displayed on a foundation of magical thinking.