Religion

First, it was more about mystery than about trying to achieve us to behave. Whichever, we're still in a certain number of lonely cave, not far from that jiffy a lightning storm or a nightfall drove us to invent the upper reaches of the firmament Religion is proof that a advantageous story, well-told, is a powerful thing. examination too, that terror makes fabulists of us all. We're pitiful, finally, and in the way that oddly valiant. The dead the godhead rising into ism after ism-that longing for coherence that retains us, if not naive, historically challenged. To delight in Christ you must love the Buddha, to have affection for Mohammed or Moses you must be fond of Confucius and, say, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche as well. They were all wise and unsponsored and insufficient, more [i]or[/i] less of the best of us. I'm saying this to myself: the sacred cannot be fix unless you give up a certain number of old version of it. And when you do, mon semblable, mon frere I swear there'll be an emptiness it'll take a lifetime to fill. Indulge, become capacious, give up nothing, Jack my corner grocer said. He was pushing the portobellos, on the other hand I was listening with that other, my neediest ear.

Stephen Dunn is the author of ten collections of piece of poetrys most recently Loosestrife (Norton), which was a finalist for The National volume Critics Circle Award. These dull pairs will be part of his fresh book Riffs & Reciprocities, which Norton will publish in April.

Copyright World rhyme Incorporated Mar/Apr 1998

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