It is often said that this country was built
upon religion. America’s relationship
with God has contributed to both life and literature from the founding of
the country through to the present. Since
the birth of the constitution, American citizens have been guaranteed the
right to a separation between church and state.
Although this may seem to undermine the importance of religion in American
life, it really only makes the relationship more complicated, thoughtful,
subtle, and profound, as evidenced by the ideas about religion recorded in
American literature from the mid-1800’s to the 1990’s. Especially interesting is how the idea of salvation,
connected with the themes of forgiveness and truth of heart, has evolved over
the years. The Book of Mormon (1830), The Scarlet Letter(1850), Elmer Gantry (1927), Death Comes to the Archbishop(1927), Wiseblood(1949), Franny and Zooey(1961), Slaughterhouse
Five(1969), and Skinny Legs and All(1990) express the growth
and evolution of religion, and more specifically salvation, in America from
1830 to today.
The Book of Mormon
describes
the birth of a religion. The subject
of the book (whether it is a novel or not is debatable) is the story of how
Jesus Christ came to what is now the United States after his crucifixion.
It is the Gospel for people adhering to the beliefs of the Mormon Church. The book is the most simplistic of all that
I read, because it holds the most faith in God’s design. The key to salvation is very straightforward
and cannot be questioned: Follow the teachings of God. There are no loopholes. Jesus forgives everyone who repents, and nearly
everyone is pure of heart deep down. The
expectations and consequences are deliberate and literal. "Wherefore, this people shall keep my
commandments, saith the Lord of Hosts, or cursed be the land for their sakes."
In this way it is very simple. There are commandments which people must follow,
and if they don’t they will be punished. It, in many aspects, is a narrow
view of religion because it does take into account the situation of things
in a realistic way. It assumes that
everyone is dedicated to the Lord, and if they aren’t then they are bad people
and there is no need to bother with them. There are other leaps of faith in the book.
For example, it is much easier to obey God when you see Him sitting
in front of you telling you what to do.
"And being thus overcome with the Spirit, he was carried away in
a vision, even that he saw the heavens open, and he thought he saw God sitting
upon his throne, surrounded with numberless concourses of angels in the attitude
of singing and praising their God." (Nephi 1:6-16)
In addition to the actual text, literature from
the Mormon Church is somewhat black and white in a similar fashion. In the introduction to “The Testimony of the
Prophet Joseph Smith,” it is written,
“When Joseph Smith was 14 years old, he wanted to know which church he
should join, so he asked God in sincere prayer. In response to this prayer, God the Father and his Son, Jesus Christ,
appeared to Joseph and told him the true church of Jesus Christ was not on
the earth and they had chosen Joseph to restore it.” (pg. 2)
The Book
of Mormon leaves little room for error, and little room for original thought.
Rather, the necessities are laid out in front of the reader as the
structure of religious life. As a result of this simplification, there is
not the same kind of depth of reasoning about the true nature of God and of
salvation. Although religious texts
such as the Bible or the Book of Mormon are often regarded as containing
all the answers, in fact they are more of the foundation on which the basis
of religious thought was built. As
time and literature progressed, things became far more complicated.
Salvation becomes less rigid but more complex
in The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel
Hawthorne. Unlike The Book of Mormon, everything is not black and white in Hawthorne’s
story. It is acknowledged that sometimes
good people can do bad things, and Hawthorne extends forgiveness to Hester
Prynn, despite the fact that she is an adulteress. But this raises a complication. What role do good deeds play in salvation,
versus pureness of heart? If someone
can put up a convincing picture of piety, is it better or worse than someone
who actually believes in their heart, but still does wrong?
The
causes for “bad” deeds are explored. Hester
Prynn commits a sin, but she is still portrayed in a sympathetic light. The
book suggests that there is a gray area and good people can do the wrong thing
for all the right reasons. It allows
a more human face for religion, acknowledging that sometimes circumstance
gets the best of people. It also forgives
Hester by the end. It raises the suggestion that sometimes, in people’s individual
search, there are benefits to bending the rules.
As in the story of Pandora’s Box, there is always something good that
comes out of something “bad.” In “Themes,
Motifs and Symbols of The Scarlet Letter,”
it is written
“The Bible begins with the story of Adam and Eve, who were expelled from the Garden of Eden for eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. As a result of their knowledge, Adam and Eve are made aware of their humanness, that which separates them from the divine and from other creatures. Once expelled from the Garden of Eden, they are forced to toil and to procreate—two "labors" that seem to define the human condition. The experience of Hester and Dimmesdale recalls the story of Adam and Eve because, in both cases, sin results in expulsion and suffering. But it also results in knowledge—specifically, in knowledge of what it means to be human.” (pg. 3)
The Scarlet Letter reflects a time in American history when people were beginning to think, rather than just be told. It is the beginning of the struggle between piety and knowledge, and acknowledges that there is no right or wrong answer. It does not try to cast blame in the same way that strictly religious texts do. Rather than vilify Hester, she is allowed to be saved.
This
is where the debate over the façade versus actual spirituality arises. Is a person who prays doesn’t attend church
and curses and has premarital sex but loves God and contributes positively
to the world around them more worthy of heaven that someone who is in church
every Sunday to repent for murder and child abuse?
It is one of the most persistent questions that characterizes the quest
to find God, and a topic of fierce debate since the time of Martin Luther.
In The Scarlet Letter, it is suggested that
a person can be good and religious, and still sin.
Sinclair Lewis takes that even a step further
in Elmer Gantry by showing how religion
can be exploited by corrupt people who are on the other end of the façade
vs. pureness of heart issue. Elmer
Gantry is a preacher who becomes a religious sensation, while committing the
very sins he preaches against. He
realizes that he can use God to get fame, adulation, and wealth, and is entirely
willing to cash in. Really he is nothing
more than a naughty child, caught in the lime light, bathed in attention,
and terrified that one day he will be discovered as a fraud. The book reflects the growing skepticism about
organized religion’s true motives. It
suspects that behind the holy curtain, there is a man cheating on his wife,
drinking and swearing, and carrying on in a very unholy manner. Beyond acknowledging sinful behavior and forgiving
it, it questions the true motives behind it. It proposes that religion cannot save a person’s
face when it is their spirit that is damned.
Sinclair Lewis seems to embody
a growing disillusionment with American life in general, religion being a
big part of that life. He was somewhat
cynical in his life, growing more so with age as his literature was met with
less enthusiasm. He wrote Elmer Gantry towards the end of his career,
and later left for Rome. It seems
that he was perhaps becoming sick of the hypocrisy in American life that is
often closely tied with organized religion.
However, Roger Miller, of the Chicago Sun-Times does not see him in
so sympathetic a light.
“Blame it on Lewis himself.
The objects of his attacks were also objects of his desire. As a grown man,
during drunken revels with friends he could reel off verse after verse of
old hymns remembered from his youth.” (Miller, pg. 4)
As organized religion followed America into the 20th century,
the number of corrupt bureaucrats whose motives were similar to Gantry’s augmented.
With the lures of modern society more appealing than a life of sacrifice
and modesty, religion sometimes became a shield against judgement, rather
than something that came from within, as reflected by Gantry.
Eventually this led to the general degradation of religion in American
and the further disillusionment of, as Miller writes,
“…us
and the weakening grip that religious authority, if not religion itself, has
on our national life. The holy doctors are doubtless deflowering and defrauding
the faithful at a rate just as rabid as ever, but what we as a society don't
value we don't raise high, and what we don't raise high can't fall very far.”
(Miller, pg. 5)
The question now becomes, is religion in America even worth salvation?
Do we want to be saved by people who don’t practice what they preach?
Are they able to save anyone when they can’t even save themselves? What good is their forgiveness when it is all
a façade, and there is no pureness of heart? The conflict this matter causes is highly visible today with the
Catholic priest molestation scandal. It
was this kind of behavior that Lewis was attempting to expose. His message was that it did no good to go to
church if that church did not have a true relationship with God. An unholy messenger wasn’t getting into heaven,
regardless of the collar he might wear or the title he might hold.
Death Comes for the Archbishop, by Willa Cather, gives a much different view of religion,
and reflects that in America at the same time, different people can have very
different experiences with organized churches. More than telling a story, it seeks to show
the beauty of faith by giving an account of the Catholic Church in New Mexico.
It begins with the decision to send the young French priest, Father LaTour,
to New Mexico to convert the natives living there, and ends with the death
of the Archbishop. Rather than following
a more traditional format, the plot is serene and constant, telling about
the everyday life, and never reaching a true climax. The novel takes place in a different time period than in which it
was composed, right after the acquisition of New Mexico as part of the United
States, but though written later than the other books, gives a more pure and
good view of religion. The main drawing
point of it is its beautiful language and description, that is calm, serene
and sweeping, reflecting the feeling a child might get when attending church
and being filled with a holy spirit. Of
Santa Fé, Cather writes,
“As the wagons went forward and the sun sank lower, a sweep of red carnelian-coloured hills lying at the foot of the mountain came into view; they curved like two arms about a depression in the plain; and in that depression was Santa Fé, at last! A thin, wavering adobe town…a green plaza…at one end a church with two earthen towers that rose high above the flatness.” (Cather, pg. 23)
In the essay “Symbolism and
Imagery in Death Comes to the Archbishop,”
Cather’s grasp of language is described as,
“…so lyrical that it could almost be considered poetry.” (pg. 4) The
syntax and diction create a feeling of goodness, spirituality and earnestness
that is contradictory to the portrayed in Elmer
Gantry. Death Comes to the Archbishop depicts religion as generally uncorrupted,
the conversion effort benevolent and beneficial, and priests honest, good,
and driven by their faith, not ulterior motives (although some Spanish priests
are portrayed as corrupt). In “Symbolism and Imagery in Death Comes to the Archbishop” it goes
on to express,
“The central characters of Father Vaillant, and especially Father LaTour, represent the heroic ideal in that they are unmistakably viewed as enjoying a lofty status, yet they still feel genuine concern and understanding for the inhabitants they are seeking to help.” (pg. 7)
Even in regard to conflicts
within the church, such as the feud between Father LaTour and Father Taladrid,
there is no suggestion of a deeper problem.
“The schismatic church at least accomplished the rejuvenation of the two rebellious priests at its head, and far and wide revived men’s interest in them,---though they had always furnished their people with plenty to talk about. Ever since they were young men with adjoining parishes, they had been friends, cronies, rivals, sometimes bitter enemies. But their quarrels could never keep them apart for long.” (Cather, pg. 161)
Death Comes to the Archbishop is more like The
Book of Mormon than The Scarlet
Letter or Elmer Gantry. Although Elmer
Gantry and Death Comes to the Archbishop
were written during the same time period, their depictions of the church could
not be more different, reflected the diversity of experience with religion
in America. In Death Comes to the Archbishop,
religion is represented as a way of life, rather than just a part of it, as
in The Book of Mormon and
“The Testimony of the Prophet Joseph Smith.”
It is a return to the belief in the goodness of people, and to a large
degree, the simplicity of salvation. Forgiveness
is something that is generally not hard for pure hearted people, and those
who are of tainted hearts, for example, the corrupt Spanish priests, are dealt
with in much the same way as those in strictly religious texts. Although their influence is acknowledged here,
there is the implication that good people need not worry about bad people,
because God will take care of them.
Wiseblood, on the other hand, is a dark book with a much different style. It deals primarily with a certain character,
Hazel Motes, on a pilgrimage-type, wandering journey to nowhere in particular.
Haze is an odd man who originally wanted to be a preacher but instead starts
the Church without Christ. He is convinced
that religion is false and that Jesus was merely a con artist, and preaches
this message as the gospel of his church.
“ “Church of Christ!” Haze repeated. “Well I preach the Church Without Christ. I’m a member and preacher to that church where the blind don’t see, and the lame don’t walk and what’s dead stays that way…Nothing matters but that Jesus was a liar.”” (O’Conner, pg. 42)
The most interesting relationship in the book is that between Haze and a more conventional preacher, Hawks. Hawks claims to have blinded himself with lime to show his devotion to Jesus. Haze is originally fascinated by Hawks because he believes that Hawks was an “evil man” in his youth, on account of him having a bastard daughter, and that he was reformed. This gives hope that the same thing could be possible for Haze. Evidently, Haze truly does want to believe in Jesus, which he views as the right thing to do, but thinks that following Christ is “unclean” because people are not pure in their devotion. Eventually it becomes clear that Hawks is lying, and that he lost his nerve at the last moment and in fact can still see. He portrays himself as something that he is not, and he, like everyone else, is unclean. This untruth outrages Haze, and helps further cement his conviction that Jesus was untrue.
This relationship also reveals
some of Haze’s true motives. The book
opens with Hazel searching for a home, a “place to be.” By aggressively rejecting Jesus, he is rejecting
a part of himself, as he was raised by preachers and always imagined that
he would grow up to be one. Dorothy
Tuck McFarland points out in her essay on Wiseblood,
“Given [Flannery O’Conner’s] conviction that God is the ground of one’s being, one’s spiritual “place to be,” as it were, it seems obvious that Haze’s literal homelessness is a metaphor for the spiritual homelessness that is a result of his denial of spiritual realities.” (McFarland, pg. 4)
Eventually Haze kills a preacher
who is trying to spread the same message as the Church Without Christ, whom
he views as his conscience, because he believes that that preacher does not
genuinely hold the same beliefs that Haze does. “Why do you get on a car and say you don’t believe in what you do
believe in for?” (O’Conner, pg. 82) Haze
asks him before running over him with his car. Haze desires a home, just like he desires to
embrace God, but he will not allow himself to find a home, because any destination
will be corrupt and false. Therefore,
he seeks to believe in nothing.
Thus enter the themes of salvation, forgiveness and pureness of heart. Haze believes that the only way to truly be saved is to be “clean” in your beliefs. This leads him to reject the various preachers who he views as phonies. It leads to the rejection of Jesus Christ himself, because, judging by his followers, he reasons that Jesus must have had some ulterior motive. Given the fact that everyone else is lying and misrepresenting themselves (particularly Hawks) when it comes to religion, it makes sense that Jesus himself was a liar who misrepresented himself. Haze proposes that the only way to get to heaven is to believe in nothing. The implication is that since no one is genuine in their faith (as demonstrated by Hawks) the only alternative is to have no faith at all. At first Haze endorses blasphemy, but then realizes that in order to do that you must believe in something to blaspheme. In his views, Haze inadvertently presents a paradox. The only way to get into heaven is to not believe it exists.
At the end of the book Haze
deliberately blinds himself with lime, as Hawks had previously claimed to
do. McFarland writes,
“What exactly it is that Haze is bent on achieving is not precisely specified. It is clear, however, that he had undergone a reversal. Earlier in the novel he had repeatedly asserted, “I AM clean,” and had felt that his “cleanness” (his freedom from guilt and sin) depended on the nonexistence of Jesus: “If Jesus existed, I wouldn’t be clean.” After his self-blinding he says to his mystified landlady, “I ain’t clean.”” (McFarland, pg. 8)
Apparently, he is no longer denying the existence of Jesus, in fact
emulating his suffering by putting rocks and glass in his shoes and tearing
his chest with barbed wire. It is
repeatedly suggested that in order to see something, it is necessary to blind
oneself to all else, thus implying that Haze is trying to see something (Jesus)
clearly for the first time. The book
ends with Haze’s death and the image of him “moving farther and farther away,
farther and farther into the darkness until he was the pin point of light.”
(O’Conner, pg. 120) In his death,
Haze achieves understanding, creating for himself a “place to be” and, in
his pure devotion, earning forgiveness. The
end of the book is not so much beautiful as just peaceful, which is in sharp
contrast to the rest of the novel. The
tone suggests that Haze’s grueling quest, in his death, has reached it's conclusion.
This book is a departure from
the gorgeous, vast images and tranquil language in Death Comes for the Archbishop. There
is nothing pretty about Wiseblood. The pictures formed by it are most often bleak
and grotesque. It, more than any book
I previously read for this project, showed the brutality of the inner struggle
to accept religion. Rather than have
a shallow, beautiful view of God, there was the urge to truly understand religion
within oneself, even if it meant pain, even if it meant figuratively mutilating
oneself in the process.
This theme of self-inflicted
pain is continued in Franny and Zooey
by J.D. Salinger. Franny Glass,
the youngest member of an eclectic family of grown child geniuses, returns
home from college to have her nervous breakdown. Her collapse is aided by
a book called The Way of the Pilgrim,
which teaches how to make prayer like your heartbeat; incessant. She is joined by her older brother Zooey, who
gives this explanation for her current state of mind:
“…you’re way off when you start
railing at things and people instead
of yourself…It’s us. We’re freaks, that’s all. Those two bastards [their older brothers Buddy
and Seymour] got to us nice and early and made us into freaks with freakish
standards, that’s all.” (Salinger,
pg. 60)
Zooey is trying to explain
to Franny why they both have such a hard time getting along in life, and why
she is turning to the Jesus prayer to try and fill her emptiness. In Zooey’s eyes, it is because Buddy and Seymour
brought them up with all kinds of ideas and philosophies about life, religion,
salvation, and God, rather than letting them be normal children. They were introduced to the struggle of religion
too soon.
The issue of the Jesus prayer,
in addition to why Franny is attracted to it, are central to the ideas about
religion raised in the novel. The
principle of the Jesus prayer, and praying without ceasing is explained by
Franny in this way:
“…if you keep saying the prayer
[“Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me.”]—you only have to do it with just your
lips at first—then eventually what happens, the prayer becomes self-active.
Something happens after a while. I don’t know what, but something happens, and
the words get synchronized with the person’s heartbeats, and then you’re actually
praying without ceasing. Which really
has a tremendous, mystical effect on your whole outlook…You get to see God.”
(Salinger, pg. 31)
Franny is using the Jesus prayer
to combat the emptiness and isolation in her life. As suggested in The Book of Mormon, and Death
Comes to the Archbishop, she is attempting to use religion to make herself
feel whole again. But similarly to
Haze in Wiseblood, she can’t imagine
achieving spiritual purity without personal suffering, and her zeal for the
Jesus Prayer eventually leads to her own collapse. Another point Franny had in common with Haze is a powerful distaste
for anything she deems as fake.
“…he’s just a terribly sad
old self-satisfied phony with wild and wholly white hair,” Franny says of
one of her professors. “I think he
goes into the men’s room and musses it up before he comes to class---I honestly
do.” (Salinger, pg. 58)
The suggestion of someone misrepresenting
themselves for the sake of their ego is despicable in Franny’s eyes.
The Jesus prayer, in it’s simplicity, represents something real to
her, just as the Church Without Christ represented something real to Haze.
Everyone at some point has
faced what Franny faces: the search for something meaningful. People are taught that religion is the fix
when nothing seems to matter in life. It
is represented as the answer in Wiseblood,
but what Salinger suggests is that really, it is only the question. It doesn’t solve your problems, it merely sets
you down a path. This book shows the
analysis of religion. Seymour and
Buddy attempted to demystify it for their younger siblings, but it only created
problems, rather than solving any, because it was not personal. The desire to understand faith did not come
from within Franny and Zooey at that time, so it led to a fake embrace of
the concept, something that Franny, in particular, finds necessary to rebel
against in her adult life. The only way that the knowledge Franny acquired
as a child can help her is for her to go through the harsh process of self
discovery and interpret what Seymour and Buddy taught for herself. This is mentioned in the essay
“Overall Analysis and Themes of Franny
and Zooey.”
“Zooey
tells Franny that they have become "freaks" because their brothers
taught them too much too young. But what their brothers taught also helps
Franny out of her spiritual crisis. Through Seymour's lessons…Zooey channels
enough support to talk Franny out of her distress.” (pg. 1)
It is only after Franny has
fallen apart that she understand what Seymour was attempting to convey to
her, and use it to aid her situation.
It is the search that is really significant in Franny and Zooey, more so that finding the key, or accepting the correct idea. Franny’s nervous breakdown is evidence that grasping on to the first concept that appeals to one is not the key to salvation or authenticity of faith. The key is to always strive to understand and do it in a way that has personal meaning to the individual. In order to understand religion, it is necessary to understand oneself so that it can then be determined what religious theory means to the specific person. That is the only way to truly embrace religion and therefore, the only way to be saved.
Slaughterhouse Five begins with “Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck
in time.” (Vonnegut, pg. 12) This
sets the scene for a very weird, outlandish, truthful, insightful books about
religion and salvation.
The connection to salvation
revolves around two main, opposing methods of thought:
That of Billy Pilgrim, a goofy kind of guy, who is passive through most of the book as the world is revealed to him through many improbable events: surviving the bombing and firestorms in Dresden during WWII (something that actually did happen to Vonnegut), being the sole survivor of the wreck of a charter plane filled with optometrists, and finally being kidnapped by aliens, taken to the planet Tralfamador and displayed naked in a zoo, and mated with a movie star named Montana. Before being enlightened, Billy regards the world in a typical earthling way, believing in free will and linear time
The other method of thought
is that of the Tralfamadorians, who teach something that seems incomprehensible
to humans, but is actually part of a deeper statement about life and, yes,
religion and salvation.
The book is recorded in splinters,
not going in any linear order. It
reflects how Billy is “unstuck.” He
bounces back and forth from his life to his death and all the space in between,
the past and the future (although the Tralfamadorians would disagree with
that last statement, but I’ll get to that later.) It is speculated that this was a way for Vonnegut
to tell an untellable story, the one of his experiences in Dresden, emerging
from a meat locker to find total and utter destruction and being forced to
dig up bodies to be burned and buried for days at a time. Marek Vit writes in his essay, “The Themes
of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five,”
“The phrase ‘So it goes’ recurs
one hundred and six times: it appears every time anybody dies in the novel,
and sustains the circular quality of the book…It must have been hard writing
a book about such and experience and it probably helped the author to look
upon death through the eyes of Tralfamadorians.” (Vit, pg. 2)
More than just a method of
healing or self help, the very way in which the book is written conveys the
message of the outer-space aliens.
While Billy is being held in the zoo on Tralfamador, at one point he is
asked what was the most valuable thing that he learned on Tralfamador was,
so far. He gives a long, and in his
eyes, very eloquent speech about how impressed he is to see a planet living
in peace. He talks about the senseless
slaughter on his planet, and how he is sure that humans will lead to the destruction
of the universe unless the Tralfamadorians will teach him their secret so
that he can carry it back to Earth with him.
The Tralfamadorians are shocked
at his stupidity. When Billy asks
how he misspoke, he is told
“We know how the Universe ends…and the Earth has nothing to do with it, except that it gets wiped out too…We blow it up, experimenting with new fuels for our flying saucers. A Tralfamadorian test pilot presses a starter button, and the whole Universe disappears…So it goes.” (Vonnegut, pg. 103)
Billy asks them, if they know
this, why don’t they prevent it?
“He has always pressed [the button], and he always will. We always let him and we always will let him. The moment is structured that way.” (Vonnegut, pg. 103)
This is the basis of the Tralfamadorian
method of thought. They say,
“Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim,
trapped in the amber of this moment…There is no why.” (Vonnegut, pg. 81)
All of time exists at all moments, and it is only where you choose to
look. The Tralfamadorians only look
at pleasant things. When someone dies,
it is merely time for them to be dead for a while and then they will be alive
for a while again. There is no point
in mourning someone’s death because they are still alive in the past, which
is also the present and the future.
This relates to the theme of
salvation. If all time exists simultaneously,
there is no need to worry about what happens to you when you die, because
you are always dead and also always alive. In that way, we are all saved and damned, because
we continuously live our triumphs and failures, are always in heaven and hell.
On the back of the book, a comment from Life
calls it “a sad book without tears.”
That is a very appropriate comment for this novel, because there is
something very sad about it that people don’t want to be sad about.
Essentially it is saying that nothing really is important, and that
we invented everything, time. religion, etc, to try and make ourselves feel
important. We want our lives to matter,
and so we tell ourselves that if we make them matter, by doing good things,
by believing that if we have faith in god, then we do matter, then we will
go to heaven and everything will be wonderful and important and we can look
back at all the difference we made on earth.
We want to be saved, or even to be damned, in order to validate ourselves. But in reality, according to that Tralfamadorians,
it all already happened, is happening, and has yet to happen.
If something is unpleasant, just don’t look at it.
If someone is in pain, they also are not.
We place a high value on facing unpleasant things, and dealing with
them, but if they are always there, and always not there, there is really
no point in bothering with them. If
everything is there and not there simultaneously, then there is really no
point in bothering with anything except for our own amusement, and in that
case, we have always been amused, always will be amused, and always were not
amused. There is such a fascination with death because if something ends,
than it has to count while it lasts. When
things are continuous, they become insignificant. Just like no one worried about the clean water acts when we thought
that clean water was an unlimited resource, if our happiness and pain is unlimited
and constant, no one is worried about it. We are both saved and damned and nobody cares
and if God does exist. God does not matter.
The last book, Skinny Legs and All, is a book about journeys.
There are the literal journeys that the main character, Ellen Cherry
Charles makes to New York, the one her husband makes to the middle east, and
the pilgrimage of five inanimate to Jerusalem.
More importantly, there are the mental and spiritual journeys made
by the characters, culminating in The Dance of the Seven Veils, which is performed
by the belly dancer Salome, and reveals certain spiritual truths to its observers.
This book touches on similar
themes as Slaughterhouse Five but
makes a suggestion that the others have not.
It suggests the God and religion are very real, but we do not understand
the true nature of them. According
to Robbins, part of the story has been lost.
It is not so much our interpretation of The Old and New Testament that
is lacking, but our ignorance of other forms of spirituality that embrace
our more human qualities.
Skinny Legs and All tells the story of the ancient temple in Jerusalem. At one point it was devoted to the worship
of the Great Mother, the pagan Earth Goddess.
Her followers included priestesses, and the rules concerning proper
conduct were much looser than those of the God (Yahweh) described in the Old
Testament. By the time The Babylonians
laid siege to Jerusalem, the followers of the Goddess had either fled or were
dead, and it was easy for Yahweh to move in.
However this created an imbalance
that is reflected in many of the conflicts that exist in the world today,
particularly the Middle East’s state of perpetual war, which is addressed
in some detail in the book. With only
rigid laws and no respect for nature, for femininity, for mysticism, and other
things embodied by the Goddess, conflicts between narrow thought and egos
quickly become inflamed and translate into war.
Thus, Robbins is implying that
it is not so much the depth at which the religion is understood, but the very
narrowness of the religion itself that creates problems. In order to truly be saved and solve the problems
of the world, humans need to subscribe to a belief that embraces human nature,
rather than trying to suppress it. One
that subscribes to unity rather than dominance and tolerance of thought rather
than right and wrong. In essence,
he is saying that forgiveness and pureness of heart are the keys to salvation,
but the way to achieve those things is not what is generally thought.
Acts that are forbidden by Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are not
necessarily evil, do not necessarily make a person impure and do not necessarily
require repentance and forgiveness. In
order to be saved one does not have to follow the commandments, but rather
a philosophy that celebrates the human condition and does not condemn it.
“For the ethical, political
activism was seductive because it seemed to offer the possibility that one
could improve society, make things better, without going through the personal
ordeal of rearranging one’s perceptions and transforming one’s self. For the unconscionable, political activism
was seductive because it seemed to protect one’s holdings and legitimize one’s
greed. But both sides were gazing
through a kerchief of illusion.” (Robbins,
pg. 157)
According to Robbins, the key
to salvation is learning not to forgive and not hold oneself and others to
a standard of purity that does not reflect the very constitution of humanity.
Although America is a secular country, it is this very distinction that makes religion so prominent in our society. It is everywhere, and it had been a topic of fierce loyalties, debate, and theory and speculation since the country began, as evidenced by the ideas raised in the literature discussed in this paper. The influence religion has had is obvious in the writings and behavior of Mormons establishing their belief system in the 1830’s, in war stories about the destruction of Dresden written in the 1960’s, and today in popular culture, when the latest winner of “Survivor,” a self-professed “devout Christian” describes her acquisition of the million dollars as “God’s work.” Through the years the concepts relating to salvation and what it means to be truly saved have evolved and mutated, but the prevalence remains. Whether 1830, or 2002, to some large degree, every year in America is, as Tom Robbins puts it, “The year that Yahweh won the pennant.” (Robbins, pg. 204)
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