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Read Part
1
In 1966, when I was sixteen, Time Magazine had
asked on its cover: “Is God dead?”.
Newspapers and magazines provided the daily source
of information in my home. I received a lot of my
cultural education from reading. I learned about
my world: John-John Kennedy, the civil rights marchers,
the Beatles, Gandhi, Pope John the 23rd, and so
many other people and events that shaped my early
thinking. But it was the questioning of God’s
death that stopped me in my tracks.
God was already an uncertain identity in my home.
My father told me his most religious experience
came during his days as an infantry soldier fighting
the Nazi’s in World War 2. His experiences
of seeing death constantly around made him hope
there was a God. My mother was born in Italy. Seeing
first hand the ravages of war in Italy, she had
rejected the security of Catholicism for the support
of her comrades. From my Dad I received a great
appreciation of life and friendship; from my mother,
a commitment to causes. I absorbed from both of
them a love of knowledge and understanding…
but also a resentment against organized religion.
Other than catechism, my brother and I were given
no spiritual belief system or formal religious training
of any kind. And it was not just my family putting
forth this equation. In school the reigning divinity
was science; in society the Supreme Being was the
individual; in daily life automobiles and washing
machines were the sacred symbols of fulfillment
and value. On top of all that, the sixties were
upon us, and organized anything was being called
into question.
My life in the 1950’s and 1960’s was
based almost entirely on material values and family.
Slowly but surely Suburbia bred more and more isolation
from a sense of community and the shared rituals
that bring a sense of mythic proportion to life.
Age-old rites of passage such as birth, coming of
age, and death were no longer part of the fabric
of life as the original importance and meaning they
gave to our forefathers became lost with the passage
of time, and as we became relegated to “experts”
in hospitals and institutions. The same society
that revered the rational and the scientific held
the intuitive, the magical, the immeasurable, and
the wild in disdain. It seemed that every year the
natural world was shrinking, as huge housing developments
covered remaining tracts of wilderness.
My childhood predicament of not belonging to any
formal religious institution or distinct ethnic
group awakened in me an intense yearning to understand
the mysterious nature of life. I was given no explanations,
no answers to such basic questions as where do we
come from? And where do go when we die? In the absence
of any shared spiritual ritual, I had no model of
individuals searching together fulfilling their
own destinies while being in relationships and community.
With no prescribed beliefs, I set out at an early
age to create my own.
Madison New Jersey, where I was raised, is a curious
mix of Italian families and a good number of African
American families—people like my Family, only
they had decided to belong to something.
We were, for better or worse, none of the above.
At times I longed for conformity, and not for the
religious kind, but just some sense of belonging.
But I was stuck smack in the middle of conservativeness
and radical liberalism and both extremes seemed
so ridiculous and lacking in any true meaning for
me. This and other similar unfair acts made me covet
normality. I would sometimes long to have my family
pile into the station wagon, going to church, and
then coming home and sitting together in the family
room, watching The Ed Sullivan Show.
My best friend from school was from an Italian
Catholic family. They went to Mass at Saint Vincent’s
church every Sunday, to religious instructions on
Fridays, and, best of all, to High Mass at Christmas
and Easter and to the mysterious service on Ash
Wednesday. After his First Communion, to which he
wore the traditional white suit, he could kneel
at the main altar and eat the little wafer, the
body of Christ, and drink the wine, his blood, and
then tell his dark secrets to a priest behind a
black curtain. After my spiritual experience at
the age of 13, I wanted to belong to this religion.
For a while I went to mass with my friend’s
family, and once, risking the ridicule of my friend,
received the thumbprint of the priest on Ash Wednesday.
I loved the drama and ritual and the Latin words
and music that filled Saint Vincent’s. At
that point, much to the giggles of my family, I
fantasized becoming a priest, belonging to something
mysterious and grand.
In time I became disillusioned. The Catholic Church,
steeped in power and wealth, seemed a far cry from
the teachings of Jesus, who told a rich man who
wanted to follow him that it would be easier for
a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for
a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Perhaps
there was some other doorway for me. So I started
to look at other Christian Churches: Baptist, Episcopalian
any church that seemed closer to what I felt Jesus
had taught. But this was also not to be.
By the time I reached the age of fourteen I still
yearned for spiritual community but my disillusionment
with orthodox Christianity continue to grow. Therefore,
the public questioning of God’s existence
gave me a sense of great loss—God had apparently
died before making formal contact with me.
I personally never read the article. I was too
young to understand that it was describing an erosion
of values in Western culture that had been gathering
speed in America and in European cultures for centuries.
Nietzsche had written about the death of God in
1883, but God and been dying a slow death in the
Western world long before Nietzsche. The cultural
bias in favor of the material, the rational, and
the scientific was not new to the twentieth century.
Western culture had been leaning in this direction
for more than three hundred years.
When Descartes, in 1637, said, “I think,
therefore I am,” he provided the philosophical
basis for the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment
movements that would, of course, have started without
this famous adage. Yet that one small sentence summed
up a radical shift in human consciousness and behavior.
Where in the past humankind saw itself as part of
a larger, collective scheme, fundamentally linked
to their understanding and comprehension of creation
and the cosmos, we came out of the age of “I
believe” into the age of “I know”,
now each person was to be governed by his own intellect.
Now the individual’s aptitude and sense of
self would receive the kind of sanctification once
reserved for the gods, nature, and the community.
Almost thirty years after Time Magazine asked if
God was dead, it published another expose of American
culture. In 1993, one of its journalists wrote:
“The most significant thing in the last half-century
has been the dramatic expansion in personal freedom
and personal mobility, individual rights, the reorienting
of culture around individuals. We obviously value
that. But like all human gains, it has been purchased
with a price.”
Now, at the start of a new century, we are beginning
to understand what that price includes. The judging,
parental God died; the autonomous individual was
born. In the past, the rights and creativity of
the individual were sacrificed for the health and
protection of the community—be it a family
or a city. Now the latter is sacrificed for each
person’s quest for self-fulfillment. In the
swing from one extreme to the other, which has always
been our tendency, we have elevated personal progress
and materialism to a kind of religion. The emptiness
of these pursuits as a social value system has brought
on a mass yearning for a sense of the sacred in
our lives together.
Read Part
3
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