Book Beings

Love the song. Big hit by the American alternative rock band, REM, from their 1991 album, Out of Time. May seem strange coming from a man of faith, this love, someone who lost, then found his religion.

I don’t mean “religion,” as in being “religious” in the way assorted self-described “spiritual” folks interpret it (as being a stultifying, perfunctory, impersonal, shallow, superstitious, law-driven, misguided, self-serving, man-made approach to faith), but in the true original sense of the word religion, which is “belief in and worship of God” (from which the “spiritual” life emerges).

Who insists on playing around with words to gain an edge over someone or to hide himself “will never wholly kiss you” or anyone else, as E. E. Cummings pointed out. But if that is your game, you might want to consider that being “spiritual” without being “religious,” you could argue, is to exclude the “belief in and worship of God” part of faith, which would make you an atheist, yes?

We do so have to be careful with words, look into them, not through them, just like persons. Can’t jump to conclusions, can’t judge…    (just reminding myself)

When Michael Stipe sings

That’s me in the corner
That’s me in the spotlight
Losing my religion

we infer existential crisis, the absence of God, a slowly administered self-immolation.

But that’s not it, Stipe tells us. He is using the expression “losing my religion” in the way people in the South (of the USA) might use it, to mean something akin to being at the end of one’s rope. Stipe tells us the song is about a fellow suffering from a strong dose of unrequited love.

Well, that is a bad enough place to be. But we can enlarge the meaning of this song, and its impact, by pointing out that the regional expression “losing my religion” is undoubtedly rooted in some long-ago, poor soul’s cry of hopelessness that signaled the reversal or collapse of the fundamental belief that Goodness would come to him – the promise that he would be happy, that his life would come to have meaning and purpose.

All of which suggests we at least, for the moment, glance in the direction of God, who is Love, and as such, the source of all that is good and beautiful and true, which all together give meaning and purpose to our lives.

To lose your religion (whether you are a believer or not) is to become separated, is to lose all possibility of communion with others, is to lose all hope and to allow yourself to be pinned to a wall like an insect.

Stipe, unwittingly perhaps, is singing about the absence of not just a woman’s love, but of LOVE. When someone in Alabama tells you he is losing his religion, he may be complaining good-naturedly to you about his life’s difficult and annoying, but manageable, circumstances, OR he may be telling the world (or informing God) that he is losing all hope that Goodness and Happiness will dwell with him.

Certainly, losing or never having possessed or being rejected by a woman (or a man) can cause a type of trauma, but people have perennially emerged from traumas, often stronger than before and more capable of making sound decisions and acting with purpose and competence.

Broken hearts are living hearts, and living hearts always heal, even if they remain scarred. But losing God is losing yourself, going the Insect Route.

Listen to Prufrock for a moment -

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

- from The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock

T.S. Eliot’s 1917 poem is considerably more complex than Stipe’s “Losing My Religion,” but the similarities between the two men are noteworthy. Both are trapped in a state of anxious solitude and impotence. Both are oppressed by an intense self-consciousness that borders on paranoia.

Each is stuck in time, a grotesque prop, an object of imagined scrutiny (and ridicule?), incapable of engaging others in any meaningful, life-sharing and life-affirming way. Their focus is driven entirely inward, producing a state of being we might call Stuck On Self, or SOS for short.

When Paul McCartney, singing Eleanor Rigby, poses the question, All the lonely people, where do they all come from? he is not asking so much where they come from (what concert hall, village, planet), but how they’ve come to be SOS, gazing inward all the time and missing all the goodness, beauty and truth going around.

Some readers of Prufrock suggest Eliot was writing about man’s sense of isolation and unhappiness in the modern world. Not a stretch by any means. And it’s easy to understand why Stipe was convinced a whole lot of people would identify with the man in the corner. From the moment we are born, it really is all about us, about Me, out of necessity initially. But Life finally demands we turn our gaze outward, again out of necessity (i.e., for our own good).

John Lennon famously (though not the first to do so) proclaimed all you need is love. In fact, Love is all you need. But there is unrequited love, which can pack a vicious wallop and set you back a bit, and then there is God’s love, which is never unrequited, never limited, whimsical, manipulative, or conditional.

To know it requires turning yourself inside out, however, which isn’t that hard once you understand it all begins with a slow turn of the head, which even the most modest flower accomplishes when the sun comes calling.

Of course you can to your dying day deem God’s love the Sanctuary of Fools, and never come to know it.

Or you can step gingerly (or boldly, as either will do) out of your Self, seek His Goodness in others, accept your fool’s inheritance, grin your fool’s grin, and come to know Mercy and Goodness all the days of your life.