Providence (17 page)

Another great supporter of
Ishmael
sent me a book called
Disappointment with God
and asked me what I thought of it. As the title suggests, it’s a study of people’s disappointment with God: Why did God let this terrible thing happen? Why didn’t God respond to my prayers? And so on. I found it puzzling that he’d want my opinion of it, but by the time I was finished I realized that the book had given me an insight into my own relationship to the universe: I am never disappointed with God (or as I prefer to say, the gods). This is because I never expect the gods to take my side against others. If I come down with the flu, I don’t expect the gods to take my side against the virus that is pursuing its life in my body. If I travel to Africa, I don’t expect the gods to strike dead a mosquito that is about to have lunch on my neck (and incidentally give me a case of malaria). If a wildcat attacks me in the hills of New Mexico, I don’t expect the gods to help me kill it. If I’m swimming in the ocean, I don’t expect the
gods to chase away the sharks. I have no illusion that the gods favor me (or any other human) over viruses, sharks, wildcats, mosquitos, or any other life form. And if they don’t favor me over a june bug or a mushroom, why would they favor me over another human being? If a friend of mine is killed in a random act of terrorist violence, I’m not going to blame the gods for this. To me, this would be nonsense. And I certainly don’t expect the gods to suspend the laws of physics to protect me from landslides, lightning bolts, or burning buildings.

Don’t misunderstand me. The fact that the gods don’t take our side against others doesn’t imply that we have to do the same. The horse doesn’t wait for the gods to intervene when it’s attacked by a puma; it uses all its strength and every weapon it possesses to save its life. We’re free to do the same—as free as any other creature. If a lion attacks us, the gods will not defend us, because they’re no more on our side than they are on the side of the lion, but we’re at liberty to defend ourselves with whatever weapon we can wield. Our best weapon of defense is of course our intelligence. If there’s a cancer growing inside of you, the gods aren’t on your side against it, but that doesn’t mean you have to throw up your hands and allow it to destroy your life; defend yourself against it with every resource you can bring to bear.

People have written to me to ask: “What can I do about the spiders that invade my house? May I kill them or do I just have to put up with them?” Such questions can always be safely referred to our neighbors in the community of life. A dog or a chimpanzee or a sparrow cannot
be mistaken in such matters; they cannot mislead themselves with false, convenient arguments. Ask your dog what he does with the fleas that invade his coat, and he’ll show you: He does his best to rid himself of them. You can do the same, without apology. The gods will not take your side against the rest of the world just because you’re human, but they will also not take the side of the rest of the world against you just because you’re human.

As you see, the so-called Problem of Evil doesn’t exist for me. As I explained in
Ishmael,
what the gods know about good and evil is this: Whatever they do is good for one but evil for another, and it can’t be otherwise. If the quail eats the grasshopper, then this is good for the quail but evil for the grasshopper. And if the fox eats the quail, then this is good for the fox but evil for the quail. The gods obviously can’t make a rule like “No quail may eat a grasshopper” or “Quails deserve to be protected from foxes.” Grasshopper, quail, and fox all live in the hands of the gods for a time, and not one of them has cause for complaint or disappointment. The same is true of us. As I said in
The Book of the Damned,
“Every life in the community is owed to the community—and is paid back to the community in death. The community is a web of life, and every strand of the web is a path to all the other strands. Nothing
is exempt. Nothing is special. Nothing lives on a strand by itself, unconnected to the rest.” This applies to us as well.

Most Takers are terrified of death. To die is considered a great tragedy among them. They’re terrified of it because they’ve worked so hard to distance themselves from it, to eliminate it from their lives. (To eliminate it as a firsthand experience, I mean; they love to experience it vicariously, sitting in front of their television sets.) When I say that they work hard to distance themselves from death, I don’t mean from their own mortality. They distance themselves from that too, of course, but that’s not what I’m talking about.

People who live in close contact with the community of life also live in close contact with death. To forestall your immediate first thought, I’m not saying that this makes them insensitive to it. Quite the opposite; they’re more sensitive to death than we are, because they see very clearly, every single day, that the life that flows through them is taken from the creatures around them; it comes from nowhere else. If they’re to live, others must die. This isn’t peculiar to them, this is true of every creature in the community of life (green plants excepted, of course). When we (who distance ourselves as far as possible from the general community of life) open up a frozen dinner and stick it in the microwave, we’re totally unconscious of the fact that the life we derive from this meal originally belonged to others. It’s quite different for the hunters who carry a deer back to camp. They knew this creature in life, and they know that they took its life so that they
and their families could live. They know very well that, in consuming the deer, they’re taking the life of the deer into themselves. In fact, in a very real sense, the deer hasn’t died at all; the deer has simply become them, and in the same sense they have become the deer. Long before we did, the ancient hunters knew that you are what you eat.

When the hunter takes the life of a deer, this is not a crime or an act of cruelty. That deer is on its way to becoming a human being. And if the hunter should fall prey to a lion, then that hunter is on his way to becoming a lion. The entire community is woven together in this way. Everything that lives has its life from others; there is no other way to get it (unless you happen to be a green plant, as I say). Everything that dies is life for some other—every single thing.

I should add that this is just as true for vegetarians as for anyone else. Vegetarians who feel morally superior because they never eat animals are exhibiting what might be called
kingdomism,
in effect assigning a greater sacredness to members of their own kingdom (the animal kingdom) than to the plant kingdom. As the animist sees the world, everything that lives is sacred, the carrot no less than the cow. If there is any single doctrine that might win universal agreement among animists, I think it would be this, that the gods love everything that lives and have no favorites. If the gods have as much care for me as they do for a dandelion or a dragonfly, I’m perfectly content.

Perhaps the best words I ever wrote outside of
Ishmael
were these in
The Book of Nahash:

What? Do I consider myself an animist? Yes, I suppose so, but what does this mean? I don’t go to an animist church or say animist prayers or vote the animist ticket or try to convert people to animism. All these things are foreign to the animist sensibility. No one can stand up and say (truthfully), “I am the Animist-in-Chief of the world, and only I am empowered to speak for it.” No ritual is needed to make you an animist if you wish to become one. There is no animist creed to which all animists subscribe, no animist theology that articulates the nature of the gods, no animist catechism that will supply answers to all questions. I suppose such things could be trumped up by somebody. If people can make money off shamanism, I’m sure they can figure out a way of making money off animism as well.

Animism isn’t a collection of practices and doctrines that are drawn upon for special occasions. It isn’t an aspect of life that can be separated out and isolated from all others. Animists are not so much people with a religion as people with a fundamentally religious way of looking at things. This is not at all to say that animists are uniformly saints—kindly, sweet, gentle, and so on; this is as great a distortion as to say that they’re uniformly savages—bloodthirsty, cruel, murderous, and so on. The Iroquois were animists, but (by most civilized standards) they were not nice folks. I recommend the film
Black Robe
to people who imagine that all Leavers are saints (or who imagine that I’m saying that all Leavers are saints). What I said in
Ishmael
stands: There is no One Right Way to live. What we find among Leaver peoples is that each has a way that works well for them. We may not like one particular way, we may think it atrocious and cruel, but it’s their way, not ours, and the most murderous culture in human history is hardly in a position to set itself up as the moral policeman of the world.

It may be that the hour I had at Gethsemani is the core religious experience of the animist life. What I mean is that this experience is sufficient to account for the existence of animism as a world religion. I’m not saying this well.… I’ll put it this way: Anyone who has this experience is an animist from that moment on. Anyone who has this experience knows that the world is ablaze with divine life, and that’s the center of the animist vision. I don’t imagine that the tree out there “has a spirit in it.”
What I know is that that tree is ablaze with divine life—which isn’t the same thing at all. I don’t need to see that fire again to know this. I’ve already seen it. An hour’s sight of it is enough for a lifetime.

Animism is the only world religion that doesn’t need to scurry to get aboard the environmentalist bandwagon. It was there long, long before the bandwagon started rolling among the Takers.…

Are the others scurrying? Oh, yes, I’d say so. A couple years ago, Carl Sagan produced an article for
Parade
magazine in which spokespersons for all the major religions (not including animism, of course) declared that they’d “always” been environmentalist in some sense or other. I’ll do the gentlemanly thing and suggest that perhaps they’re out of touch with their own historical roots. All the major world religions (always excluding animism, of course), are founded on these notions: that man and man alone was the desired object of creation, that man occupies a preeminent place in the order of creation, that man has a value in God’s eyes that is transcendently greater than that of all other creatures, that this world of matter is illusory, transitory, and worthless.

Of them all, Judaism is the least otherworldly. Its mystical tradition recognizes the need to “leave room”—for one’s spouse, for one’s children, and, by easy extension, for all living creatures. Of them all, Christianity is the
most insistently man-centered. God did not give his only-begotten son for anything in the world but the people in it. Christ very definitely did not come to save the whales.

John the evangelist summarizes the Christian view very succinctly: “Anyone who loves the world is a stranger to the Father’s love,” and of course, “The whole world lies in the power of the evil one.” I don’t doubt for a moment that there are many in this tradition who would say this is exactly what I experienced that day at Gethsemani: the power of the evil one.

The “majors” have no authentic message of their own concerning the degradation of our environment, the diminishment of biological diversity, the destruction of the creative processes that brought forth and sustain life on this planet, the end of speciation (which, to the mind of the animist, is creation itself), the extinction of species—even of our own species. These concepts are simply not in their theological vocabulary. Why should they be? From their very foundation, these religions were about making people holy, were about uniting mankind with a god unthinkably remote from the sordid moil and muddle of mere biological survival. They can rewrite their prophets’ lines to give them an environmentalist spin, but I frankly doubt that this will save them. Their irrelevance in the contemporary world is not one of appearance; it goes right down to the bone.

T
HIRTEEN