Via Andrew Sullivan, comes this rather odd piece by Tony Woodlief. This extract caught my eye:
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.
Well, let’s just say that I’m not so sure about that ‘we’. I suspect that there are quite a few folk out there who are not in the slightest bit god-obsessed and, for that matter, that, sensibly enough, they are more than content to leave all that losing, running and hopeless seeking to others. I know I am.
And then there’s this:
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.
It’s the only narrative that fits the facts while affirming the skeptic’s presupposition that all this mother business is just leftover hokum from the dark ages.
Except that in a century, when the most famous of the skeptics is long forgotten, broken men will still be telling stories about what we have lost, and what we pray is still out there, coming even now to set all things right.
Good lord.
