The Silence of God

In the silence an hour passed unnoticed. Time was nothing. Another hour of another day, but these days were different. It was for most of them the last days of their lives.

 

Henri had arrived only yesterday, and was processed so haphazardly that he still had half a cigar in his pocket, missed by the camp guards who were uncharacteristically harried. The past few trains skipped the delousing altogether, let alone the taking of their clothes, though they were dispossessed of their belongings. His blessing was that he was an old man who had never married, and who had no family. Henri had no one to mourn, and not so curiously, there was no one to mourn Henri.

 

Sebastian, however, was young, and had no idea where his wife and children were, nor what had happened to his parents and sister. Last he had seen his mother and father they were being forced to watch as the soldiers raped his sister, having beaten him senseless and barely conscious. He could feel his mother's sobs as his sister screamed. Even then a soldier had stood on his neck... Sebastian did not talk, but everyone knew his story. He was the book seller from Wroclaw, though some thought he was a Slovak. He was a grade school teacher too. Now it wasn't even clear he was mentally present. He was broken, unreachable. But he worked like the rest.

 

But Piotr, he had God. It was said Piotr was a rich man before the war, from Krosno. He and his wife, their daughter, were swept up as they travelled for Belgium to meet with fellow parishioners from his church after the Russians had burned the town. They were pulled out as Jews, though it was clear to everyone there they were not. "Our God was an all powerful, all loving God", he told everyone. He cried out to the soldiers, "I am no Jew!" but he and his family were taken anyway. The others in his group were shot where they stood. He prayed constantly, and gave freely of God's grace. He knew his wife and daughter were in the camp, for they had travelled together, and he thanked God daily for their being here near him. He was an annoyance, but harmless, reading and quoting salvation from his bible, which the guards threw back at him in processing, laughing, telling him to find his God in the camp, perhaps on a piece of bread, and beg Him to save them. Piotr praised God he had been given back his bible.

 

It was busy these past few days, the awful, foul smoke dense in the camp from the factory. But there were no more trains, and the rumor was that the senior camp officers had left this morning. The prisoners had been digging huge pits behind the camp under the guns of the guards. Being busy lead to the mercy of death for some of those who had been here too long. The soup was less with each passing day this past week, and now seemed mostly thin broth, if it had any flavor at all. It was not enough to sustain the sick, the old, and the weary. It was not enough to sustain the well or the young either.

 

Piotr had gathered after the meal with his fellow believers, some pagans who had no where else to turn for solace, some Jews, some Polish Christians, like him, labeled as Jews, and were praying, thanking God for their having survived another day. Except for Johannes, for whose soul they prayed. He collapsed this morning and the guards left him where he lay in the mud. Henri had lit his cigar, and had smoked it nearly to its end, which was good as it took his last match. He listened to the droning on of the prayers and hymns and was lulled. He barely noticed as Sebastian stepped over suddenly, took his cigar and buried it in Piotr's eye.

 

"Perhaps by morning God will regrow you an eye for you are surely righteous and I am damned!" Sebastian did not stop as the others ran to the howling Piotr. He opened the door and kept walking. He walked to the fence, and he began to climb. The wind slammed the door shut, almost covering the sound of a single shot.

 

In the morning Piotr was still blind in one eye. Sebastian hung where God had left him on the fence. And the pits they had dug, God filled them with bodies and ashes of those burned in the ovens. That night no one gathered to pray.

 

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Also sprach Zarathustra

The man had waited a long time. His question was a simple one, and he asked it simply.

 

"How do we save our world?"

 

She sat there before them on the dais, her bright green eyes unblinking, staring starkly into his soul, and said nothing. He waited, shifting uncomfortably, pulling at his robes as she did not break from her sojourn into him for some time. Her visage became one of deep, unabiding sadness.

 

"You free humanity from religion."

 

The collective silence at her whisper followed the gasp of all, and it was profound.

 

She spoke with a reticence of the ages, for she had said these words time and again, for millennia upon millennia. "The shackles of religion, the fount of all evil, are forged with teaching of the young that they are unworthy, before they discover they are wondrous. In beautiful words they are taught shame for being human before learning the truth of their humanity, and that they must never lift their heads nor their minds except in piousness. They are taught that they deserve nothing including this life, and that only in worshipping an imagined all powerful being can they become deserving, can they find meaning, and that if they do not they will die suffering a thousand horrors."

 

She spoke in a soft voice that demanded attention, her eyes drilling down into his being, he having never left her piercing focus. "Then they are taught conflicting insights into their god to keep them unbalanced and forever uncertain, told that they have not yet become worthy enough to understand their gods vagaries when the parts do not make a whole. When their god fails it is declared a mystery, when he succeeds it is a sign of his unique love for the believer. They are taught that any who do not believe unquestioningly in their god are dangerous and must be destroyed by the followers of their all powerful, their all loving god. Their leaders are enriched with claims that in giving their all to those self appointed who speak for their god they will be given clearer vision into the mysteries, and move ahead towards worthiness. They will see the threat of others' gods not as challenging their own base notions, but as an evil creature that must be destroyed for no more reason than that it is not of their gods. When others among them are more inconveniently pious they will be stoned as zealots by the less dogmatic, for their god is one of convenience, his words variably interpreted to meet the need. They will see their dreams and desires as dangers that must be drowned in shame, while their prophets seem so unaffected. Things of beauty and things of knowledge will be cast as the fruit of a poisonous tree that must be burned down, and in these destructions of their character they lose their humanity. They allow themselves to be shackled by their gods, by the words of their holy elders, and these drive them to shackle others, for deeply buried within them they understand all too well that if they cast off their enslavement they are lost, their suffering and the suffering they brought upon others was for nothing, they would see that their gods live in a house of cards like all other gods long cast off. Since this can never be accepted, since they can never be forgiven for what they have wrought in the name of their one true god, they must believe that their god is THE righteous god, for to allow otherwise will show them for the fools they are. Shame again shackles them to their gods, driven by the words of their more worthy prophets. The struggle with the omnipresent cognitive dissonance is called faithlessness and those that explore it are identified as less than unworthy, unfit to live amongst them. They are taught not to question nor to seek discovery, but to believe unquestioningly only in their holy words, and that this, in and of itself, is the only grace. They must believe that theirs is the one true god, and to think otherwise is a desecration, an offense to their god."

 

She turned her enrapturing gaze to the others and he felt suddenly released, drained. Her voice remained unchanged, sad, weary, captivating, pulling in the light and the darkness. "Religion is evil incarnate, and it is a con as a holy good lead by the greatest of cons for the enslavement of people by all means. This alone destroys your world for it seeps in everywhere, into everything. It consumes leaving nothing. In time all religions fade as their gods eventually are seen for the powerless fantasies they are, but if the people can still be made to be afraid, another will rise in its place, as it has thousands of times before, the new gods' existence unrecognized as the further proof the other gods were just as false. Religion is the shackle of fear. If you seek to save your people, your world, free them from religion, from gods, so they need no longer be afraid, no longer be ashamed, no longer seek to destroy their sister and their brother under the guise of peace and love, which is the greatest of religion's betrayals. Teach them to see, to hear, to discover, to share, to wonder and to enlighten. Teach them to be joyous in their humanity, the humanity of the loving whole with no god to render them one against the other."

 

The human trembled a bit, and fell speechless back into his seat. She turned her gaze to him but he could not look at her, for he was praying with every element of his being to his own imagined god, deeply, profoundly afraid of what he could not control, that surely his god, the one almighty and righteous god Zeus, would.

 

"First, stop being afraid. Become enlightened in your glorious humanity. Then dismiss your gods with the same argument you use to dismiss all other possible gods and fantasies. To survive you must stand up, speak up, and free your sisters and your brothers, for to allow this source of all evil to continue is to to be bloodied by the deaths of the billions of beings to follow, for in your silence you commit untold atrocities for all the eons. Silence, religion, is the refuge of fools."

 

The people sat there, praying, unable to let go of their fear. In the eons that followed, billions upon billions died in the name of one god or another as they remained silent, unable to simply stop being afraid.

 

 

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The Meaning of Life

He was born with five toes on each foot, and five fingers on each hand, of which he had two. And in is head there was a brain, nascently frameworked by the genes his parents had given him, later engendered by life to have a character, personality.

 

These life experiences shaped him. Like a block of stone, what he brought was cut, hammered, drilled, chiseled and polished. Parts of him came into being, some were broken off (some of those parts he liked and would have rather kept), other parts emerged from beneath the rough stone to stay. Some cracks were polished over, others stayed. He became who he is in a gradual process, and who he is changed from time to time. He learned to like, to love and to dislike, to hate. He learned and discovered, he would forget, rediscover, and forget again. He would try, he would succeed, he would fail. To make it through his day he made assumptions, created stories that placed people and events into a context he could understand. Sometimes these stories he told himself were correct, but all of them guided him, which is why for most of his life, though he did not know it, he was lost. He learned to wonder, to fear, to discover and to hide. He learned pride, and he learned shame (a terrible thing). He created his secrets, he made his story amongst them, he cataloged his dreams, none nearly as accomplished as he might wish. He suffered, he caused suffering, he brought peace and he brought comfort. He won, and he lost, and he enjoyed his life such as it was. He loved, unrequited, and requited, and he had his heart broken, to heal again. He learned to never be vulnerable, and for this, no one really would ever know who he was. His crowning achievement was his children, who also had the good fortune to have been born with all their fingers and toes, and to have received a better compliment of genes than he had, thanks to their mother.

 

But his story was not this. His story was what he saw, what he felt and how uncomfortable he became when he went off script. But it was also the part he played in other's lives. He entered, he changed things, and he left, and these encounters changed him too. That part of his story was never available to him unless that person stayed, or came back, and that bothered him. His life wasn't wasn't written by him, but by those who came into his life, and the events that happened to him. Sure he made choices, but these too were limited by what was available to him (he could not chose what he did not know, and the wiring in his brain may from time to time betray him). Its in the fabric of trial and adventures that seemed at the time entirely not what he had planned. It was a pattern that was his story, a broad cloth of varying colors and textures, that recorded his life, but it was not the whole story. Like the movie, which tells less than the book, much of the meaning was lost. At times it was as if others existed only as they came into his space, and ceased to exist when they left, that his life only mattered when others were around. No matter how close, they were always separate: they were not him, they were not in his head. He wasn't even sure they existed at all, let alone when he saw or heard them. He spent his entire life trying to please others, and this hurt him, scarred him, deeply (second only to shame for the things that destroyed him while he lived). It made him leave most of himself behind. At times he felt like a pawn, or a pachinko ball in someone else's story, their lives defining his. Frequently he would acutely attain a consciousness that he existed and that moment of reality startled him. He would marvel at it. Other times it was as if he was looking back through the pages of a book, reading what had happened to a character that just happened to be him. He wasn't sure if it was a bad thing that he could not page ahead to see what would happen to him next. Nonetheless, it was a story, it was his story, and it was well that he lived it, because, well, it was his moment. His one and only moment. He was an actor in his own play, yet he did not write the scenes. He was what he thought he needed to be, he was not who he was. And that is how he wasted his one life.

 

In the end his body failed him, he died, and what he was returned to the part of the cosmos called earth. In time no one remembered him. But for the time he was, he mattered, he just never knew. It would take days, years, millions of years, eons, but eventually all that was him would exist again as specks of matter in millions of other things throughout time, pretty much just on this one earth. He was him only for those briefest of moments that those particles that were him came together in one place and stayed for a while. Now that those pieces fell apart he wasn't him. He simply wasn't anything at all.

 

And that, simply, is the meaning of life.

 

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Yes

Say yes.

No comes easy, requiring nothing but a breath.

Yes means work, thought, commitment, time, energy, compromise, sacrifice, change.

Yes also means compassion, empathy, making a difference, peace, progress,

easing another's burden, lifting another up.

It matters not one iota how easy or how difficult the question,

it is always this way.

Say yes.

Its the human thing to do.

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