Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Yearning . . . .

A yearning for things lost

A tip of the hat to Andrew Sullivan for directing us to this lovely passage from a recent essay by Tony Woodlief at Image Journal:



We are god-obsessed because we have lost God or we are running from God or we are hopelessly seeking Him, and maybe all of these at once.

We are god-obsessed the way a child snatched from his mother will always have his heart and flesh tuned to her, even after he forgets her face. Cover the earth with orphans and you will find grown men fashioning images of mothers and worshipping strong women and crafting myths about mothers who have left or were taken or whose spirits dwell in the trees.

And at the edges of their tribal fires will stand the anthropologist and the philosopher, reasoning that all this mother-talk is simply proof that men are prone to invent stories about mothers, which is itself proof that no single story about a mother could be true, which is proof that the brain just evolved to work that way.

2 comments:

Gary Kelly said...

Interesting observation. I'm no academic by any stretch of the imagination but I suspect that fear of mortality created gods. Humans are the only animals that are conscious of mortality. It doesn't bother other living things. Ignorance is bliss. And animals don't have gods.

Richard said...

My dogs have a god. Me. :)