The oddness of the phrase “believe in God” brings to my mind that first chapter of Feuerbach, which is really about the awkwardness of language, not about religion at all. Feuerbach doesn’t imagine the possibility of an existence beyond this one, by which I mean a reality embracing this one but exceeding it, the way, for example, this world embraces and exceeds Soapy’s understanding of it. Soapy might be a victim of ideological conflict right along with the rest of us, if things get out of hand. She would no doubt make some feline appraisal of the situation, which would have nothing to do with the Dictatorship of the Proletariat or the Manhattan Project. The inadequacy of her concepts would have nothing to do with the reality of the situation.
That’s a drastic way of putting it, and not a very precise one. I don’t wish to suggest a reality that is simply an enlarged or extrapolated version of this reality. If you think how a thing we call a stone differs from a thing we call a dream — the degrees of unlikeness within the reality we know are very extreme, and what I wish to suggest is a much more absolute unlikeness, with which we exist, though our human circumstance creates in us a radically limited and peculiar notion of what existence is. I gave a sermon on this once, the text being “Your thoughts are not our thoughts.” That was a good deal longer than two months ago. I believe it was last year. I thought at the time it might have puzzled a few people, but I was pleased with it. I even wished Edward could have heard it. I felt I’d clarified some things. I remember one lady did ask me, as she was going out the door, “Who is Feuerbach?” And that made me aware of that tendency of mine to live too much in my own thoughts. Your mother wanted to name the cat Feuerbach, but you insisted on Soapy.
It could be true that my interest in abstractions, which would have been forgiven first on grounds of youth and then on grounds of eccentricity, is now being forgiven on grounds of senility, which would mean people have stopped trying to see the sense in the things I say the way they once did. That would be by far the worst form of forgiveness. I used to have one of those books with humorous little sermon anecdotes in it somewhere. It was a gift, I remember, no name on it. How many years ago did I get that? I’ve probably been boring a lot of people for a long time. Strange to find comfort in the idea. There have always been things I felt I must tell them, even if no one listened or understood. And one of them is that many of the attacks on belief that have had such prestige for the last century or two are in fact meaningless. I must tell you this, because everything else I have told you, and them, loses almost all its meaning and its right to attention if this is not established. If I were to go through my old sermons, I might find some in which I deal with this subject. Since I am presumably somewhere near the end of my time and my strength, that might be the best way to make the case for you. I should have thought of this long ago.
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This afternoon we walked over to Boughton’s to return his magazine. You held my hand a fair part of the way. There were milkweed seeds drifting around which you had to try to catch, but you’d come back and take my hand again. It’s a hard thing to be patient with me, the way I creep along these days, but I’m trying not to get my heart in a state. There have been so many fine days this summer that I’ve begun to hear talk of a drought. Dust and grasshoppers are fine in their way, too, within limits. Whatever is coming, I’d be sorry to miss it. Boughton was on his porch, “listening to the breeze,” he said. “Feeling the breeze.” Glory brought out some lemonade for us and sat down with us, and we talked a little bit about television. Your mother has been looking at it, too. I don’t enjoy it myself. It’s not the last impression I want to have of this world. It turns out that when Glory found that article and asked her father if he still wanted me to see it, he asked her to read it over to him, and then he laughed and said, “Oh yes, yes, Reverend Ames will want to have a look at that.” He knows what will exasperate me, and he was laughing in anticipation as soon as I mentioned it.
We agreed it must have been fairly widely read in both our congregations, because on one page there’s a recipe for that molded salad of orange gelatin with stuffed green olives and shredded cabbage and anchovies that has dogged my ministerial life these last years, and which appears at his house whenever he so much as catches cold. There should be a law to prevent recipes for molded salad from appearing within twenty pages of any article having to do with religion. I ended up bringing the magazine back home because I thought I might want to use it in a sermon.
There are two insidious notions, from the point of view of Christianity in the modern world. (No doubt there are more than two, but the others will have to wait.) One is that religion
