(SuprNova has kicked the bucket. How am I going to watch The Daily Show NOW? Crap, and it was just last week that I noticed that they had four full seasons of the Trailer Park Boys up there and I didn't download them...)

Yesterday I bought and started reading For the Time Being by Annie Dillard. It's a personal narrative of her thoughts on spirituality and it's quite interesting. She's a beautiful writer; I think The Writing Life and Holy The Firm are two of the better books I've ever read, and I have reread them several times. Her writing is usually not fiction, it is more observational non-fiction, but it is not history or reporting... she focuses more on developing symbols and giving them depth and meaning so that the reader can find the beauty and horror that Dillard sees in everyday life. She says in the foreword, "By the third or fourth chapter the disparate scenes, true stories, facts, and ideas will be growing familiar. Together they make a complex picture of our world. Does God cause natural calamity? What might be the relationship of the Absolute to a lost schoolgirl in a plaid skirt? Given things as they are, how shall one individual live?" Some excerpts:

NUMBERS · I find the following three approaches to the mystery of human numbers hilarious. Ted Bundy, the serial killer, after his arrest, could not comprehend the fuss. What was the big deal? David von Drehle quotes an exasperated Bundy in Among the Lowest of the Dead: "I mean, there are so many people."

One R. Houwink, of Amsterdam, discovered this unnerving fact: The human population of earth, arranged perfectly tidily, would just fit into Lake Windermere, in England's Lake District.

Recently, in the Peruvian Amazon region, a man asked the writer Alex Shoumatoff, "Isn't it true that the whole population of the United States can be fitted into their cars?"

· · ·
"Are we only talking to ourselves in an empty universe?" a twentieth-century novelist asked. "The silence is often so emphatic. And we have prayed so much already."

(Since this book hails thinkers for their lights, and pays scant heed to their stripes, I should acknowledge here that Judaism and Christianity, like other great religions, have irreconcilable doctrinal differences, both within and without. Rabbi Pinhas: "The principal danger of man is religion.")

· · ·
The closer we grow to death, the more closely we follow the news. Year after year, without ever reckoning the hours I wasted last week or last year, I read the morning paper. I buy mass psychotherapy in the form of the lie that this is a banner year. Or is it, God save us from crazies, aromatherapy? I can smell the rat, but cannot walk away.

It is life's noise—the noise of the news—that sings "It's a Small World AFter All" again and again to lull you and cover the silence while your love boat slips off into the dark.

· · ·
SAND · September, 1923: They rode back into Peking. The mules carried 5,600 pounds of fossils and rocks in sixty wooden crates. The paleontologist Teilhard carried a notebook in which he had written, among other things, a morning prayer: "Be pleased yet once again to come down and breathe a soul into the newly formed, fragile film of matter with which this day the world is to be freshly clothed."

The realm of loose spirit never interested Teilhard. He did not believe in it. He never bought the view that the world was illusion and spirit alone was real. He had written in his notebook from a folding stool in the desert of the Ordos, "There are only beings, everywhere."

Matter he loved: people, landscapes, stones. Like most scientists, he was an Aristotelian, not a Platonist. When he was still in college, he published articles on the Eocene in Egypt and the minerals of Jersey. In his twenties he discovered a new species of fish, and a new owl. His major contributions to science came after this Ordos trip, when he dated Peking Man and revised the geology of all the Quaternary strata not only through China and Mongolia but also through Java, India, and Burma. He spent twenty-three years of his adult life far from home in China, almost always in rough conditions. Why knock yourself out describing a dream?

"If I should lose all faith in God," he wrote, "I think that I should continue to believe invincibly in the world."

· · ·
There are 1,198,500,000 people alive now in China. To get a feel for what this means, simply take yourself—in all your singularity, importance, complexity, and love—and multiply by 1,198,500,000. See? Nothing to it.

· · ·
What, here in the West, is the numerical limit to our working idea of "the individual"? As recently as 1894, bubonic plague killed 13 milion people in Asia—the same plague that killed twenty-five million Europeans five and a half centuries earlier. Have you even heard mention of this recent bubonic plague? Can our prizing of each human life weaken with the square of distance, as gravity does?

Do we believe the individual is precious, or do we not? My children and your children and their children? Of course. The 250,000 Karen tribespeople who are now living in Europe? Your grandfather? The family of men, women, and children who live in central Asia as peoples called Ingush, Chechen, Buryats, and Bashliks? The people your address book tracks? Any other group you care to mention among the 5.9 billion persons now living, or perhaps among the 80 billion dead?

There are about a billion more people living now than there are years since our sun condensed from interstellar gas. I cannot make sense of this.

I think this is the most interesting thing about humans—that we ask such questions. What do these things mean? Why, when there is a bombing in Iraq, do we hear that x number of Americans were killed, as well as some Iraqis? Are the American individuals inherently more precious because someone drew some arbitrary lines on a map? Why does it bother me more that there is a Canadian prisoner in Guantanamo Bay, shouldn't all the prisoners there merit equal compassion?

Annie Dillard doesn't believe in God the way that I used to believe in God. In Holy the Firm, she said that every day is a God, with its own power and powerlessness. She says that the creator cut us loose, has no power over its creation any longer, nor (perhaps) any interest in it. She believes in God as a powerful symbol, something useful for approaching part of ourselves. I do not fully understand her approach, since it is so far from any I have tried. Her sense of wonder resonates with me, though.

My sense of God was more that of the fundamentalist evangelical Christian... a definite God who did not change based on my impression of Him, someone who was constant and real and could interact with me if He chose. Someone who was intensely interested in and involved with the creation. Someone more like a human, who might interact with me differently than with others, but who was still essentially the same. I think that Dillard's approach allows her to keep God even with all of the crap in the world, all of the deformed children that she examines in this book and others, all of the horrible accidents and floods and famines, all of the martyrs and murderers. My approach led me to a growing horror that this God was not good, that if He existed, I wanted nothing to do with Him. That if this being were in charge of the universe, I dreaded the future. Dillard doesn't need God to be good, he can be ruthless and indifferent and remain powerful. She does not need him to be interested in her, though she muses on his character and ways through all her books.

I don't know what to do with my continued interest in her writings. I want to know where her musing on spiritual matters takes her. Her writings do something for me. She makes me see the world differently, as something more precious and fleeting. I am also curious what Philip Yancey is pondering these days, and what Joseph Girzone is up to, and who else is having new beautiful thoughts on the Christian scene. How is Brennan Manning doing? Is there someone to replace Rich Mullins yet? How is Steve Taylor dealing with his bitterness and hard words and faith? Will the struggles in the lyrics of Caedmon's Call ever precipitate a deconversion? Where are the women thinkers? (Dillard doesn't count, she's far too liberal for most.)

Most importantly, I don't really see the value of liberal religion, of a set of useful and beautiful symbols which, in the end, are just symbols and not "real" at all. Like Teilhard, I believe in the world much more than in God. I don't know that I want to be a "spiritual" person, and I know that I don't want to be a "religious" person. Sometimes I fear that my atheism is a reaction to leaving my faith, a protective gesture to keep me from falling into religion again. At the same time, I know that it is more than that. I simply don't see any reason to speak of a god as something real; I don't know what a god could be. I don't know why Jesus or Allah or G-d are anymore plausible than Mithras or Athena or Zeus or Odin or Vishnu. As for liberal religion, I still have enough of the evangelical mindset to think that it's a bit of a cop-out—that if you're going to believe your religion at all, you should believe that it's RIGHT and therefore opposite statements are WRONG, that if Jesus is real and what he says is true, then when he says, "I am the only way to the Father," he's not just messing around. I guess my understanding of faith and religion still doesn't have any room for grey areas in the core elements.

Also, why are such writings restricted to religious writings? Why are there no godless writings (that I know of) that contemplate the meaning of life and such numbers and the many dead civilizations and their striving and individuality and loves, and our finiteness both in time and space? Why do these writings always resort to God to explain such things? Can we not be animals, with a "higher" consciousness perhaps, but just mammals in the end? Do we need the sense of a cosmic plan (and planner) in order to contemplate morality and purpose?

Okay, that's 1000 of my words, I'm going to stop here. :)