Key West The Newspaper

by Kirby Congdon…….

My readers are younger and want to be au currant. Heaven and hell are bribes or threats for them and they dismiss the two categories as uneducated and dishonest references. This still leaves us with “God” to relieve us of the inexplicable, the uncontrollable or the unbearable.

The term God is almost an expletive for joy, astonishment or grief. Like slang itself, it facilitates casual expression. We human beings do not expect references to God or to faith to apply to situations in a rational way. Our ability to reason works on another level of thought. We cope with the contemporary world through reason. We may respect the term God but we still want many questions answered with the rationale of words but the stability we seek is lost whenever we assert anything as absolute. The world we know, the culture we have, the life we live are always full of changes and interpretations.

Confirmations can be on several levels. It took aeons to make us physically and, being careful individuals, we find that it requires attention and experience to identify who this person is that bears the name we know as our own. That process is a realistic approach to almost every aspect of being alive. Yet what gives us pause is when we ask, simply, is that universe out there realistic? Its existence proves nothing but the sense of what’s real is in our own experience which, like the three dimensions, confirms our sense of depth. An umpire who is aware of this and runs it all is not an extraterrestial manager looking out for you and me; he is ourselves undergoing the experience of it all while we live.

The rest of it, somehow, continues, god knows, but, being alive, we miraculously do too. A poem may only suggest as much but that is still something. Isn’t it?