as a matter of fact, the wheels have stopped. what's good is bad, what's bad is good, you'll find out when you reach the top, you're on the bottom." (Dylan)
A few weeks ago when the killings occurred at the Amish school in PA, one of the elders was interviewed as saying that they celebrate a person's day of death more than their birthday, because when a person dies they go to heaven; the little girls were in heaven now and with God, and so they were better off. I remember thinking then how so many religions invert what is instinctively and traditionally “the good” of the experience of being human.
Life is good, but in religion, death is good. It is the myth of death to life, which can have some pretty serious repercussions. Baptism is made more important than physical birth because it represents an eternal life. The life of this world is denigrated to secondary importance. What really matters is the afterlife, immortality. The consequences of such a view render physical life to be rejected as inconsequential and I daresay, joyless. Suffering is trivialized because there is a greater plan for it in some eschatological scale of justice. In every world religion there are teachings that stem from dualism, the separation of the physical and spiritual life into two opposing realities. The body is perceived as an obstacle to the divine and must be renounced, ignored, suppressed.
Sex is experienced as good but is rendered an evil. And even within the societal constructs of marriage, for centuries sex was regarded as necessary not because it provided human connectedness and relationality and yes, pleasure, but because it was the only way to conceive babies.
Self-love and self-esteem become vanity; a sense of pleasure at our accomplishments becomes pride; enjoying the fruits of the earth becomes gluttony, rest and re-creation become sloth, etc. etc. How good are YOU at simply doing nothing, because it is good for you to do nothing sometimes?
The Seven Deadly Sins should only represent “sin” if one engages in excessive indulgence in the good. They should not lead us to a rejection of the good completely. And perhaps this was the original intention, but this is not what they have become. We are made to feel guilty for enjoying sex, for feeling proud of an accomplishment, for eating a piece of chocolate cake.
What if there IS no afterlife and heaven and hell represent constructions of a collective psyche that is merely a mythical confrontation with the fear of death? What if the Garden really was intended to be delightful and we have squandered joy? What if we have it backwards and upside down? What if the physical world is not an obstacle to the divine but is in reality its vehicle?
I, for one, will not reject this life. It may be all I have.
Now, where did I put that cake?
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