The Stars are Twinkling Out the 6 Billion Names of God Having Been Written Down

January 4, 2019


Our skin is a boundary. My flesh, your flesh they separate me from you. My flesh separates me from every other living person, just as your does. Endoderm? Mesoderm? Funny I remember these words from high school Biology I with Mr. Martyniak. Still, I don't remember what the real term for my outer skin is. Wait, epidermis that is it!

Why is it the flesh that keeps me intact as a whole being bars me from being anything but alone? From birth to death I live within this prison of cells, cartilage, fluids and bone.

A grey day today I think of boundaries. My mind keeps returning to an awareness of limitations. I am left wanting greater connection with the world. This sense of isolation is not an uncommon feeling for me. Of late this line of mental inquiry has challenged my thoughts of there existing a higher being. I wrestle with the question of the existence of a more sublimely divine spirit of love.

Fear strikes me as I write these words. Putting this though down on paper means that I am questioning a core element of my very personality. To look out into eternity and see only emptiness is one of the most frightening things a human being can do. Some people claim to feel exhilaration and a sense of great personal freedom. Me, I see anarchy and randomness.

When I was paying attention in physics class (i.e., when I wasn’t stoned and playing with the strobe lights in the dark room), I remember being struck by the notion of all things moving toward randomness, toward entropy. At 17 the mind experiment of Maxwell's demon was fascinating. At 62 it scares the living shit out of me, really.

I read Camus when I was young, probably too young. I remember a scene in the Plague when the main character stares up at the night sky. The plague of the title was ending in the walled city. Looking up the narrator mused on the infinite, a universe without divine purpose without punishment or reward.

Right now, right here, I feel like that character felt. The plague that sweeps around me is the turmoil of the modern world in the country where I live. But it doesn't matter. What will happen will happen undirected by any ultimate divine purpose. The stars that I see are not romantic; they are gas and dust. But in the dark sky they are better than emptiness.

If I sign on to this view of life, of eternity, how do I justify morality? How do I achieve a sense of good and evil and all the gradations of these terms? I have read treatises on ethics and morality but to this day without some absolutes, the absolutes that organized religion offers us it all seems to spiral into artifice and to the random atoms in Maxwell's Demon? It is hard not to flinch.

I was raised up in the Word with a capital W. I was washed with water and with the blood. But right now, I feel empty and lost. It is not that I am afraid of a random universe, but I feel a sense of sadness and loss.

A friend reminded me that Mother Teresa, seemingly one of the most holy of Christians, lived for decades in doubt. She believed that God was no longer talking to her after she arrived in Calcutta. Maybe there is something to be said for doing “good” amid doubt.

However, it does not resolve the underlying questions of existence and meaning. Perhaps I should simply keep my doubts to myself and not admit to any weakness of spirit. Still, to do so would not be honest and if my goal is to live with integrity it would render me even hollower.